bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Parochial Structure and the Dissemination of Protestantism in Sixteenth Century England: A Tale of two Cities
Authors: Cross Claire
Published: March 2016

When, after the abrupt changes in religion in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, Elizabethan protestants set about consolidating the protestant reformation they looked upon towns as one of the chief agencies for the conversion of the countryside. From the first moment of his appointment as lord president of the council in the north in 1572 that enthusiastic layman, the third earl of Huntingdon, made this assumption a guiding principle of his governorship. ‘I do all I can to get good preachers planted in the market towns of this country’, he told William Chaderton, bishop of Chester in 1584, adding with a characteristic note of realism, ‘in which somewhat is already done, but much remaineth to be done.’ Huntingdon’s close associate and fellow worker in the north, archbishop Grindal, had earlier informed the queen in similar terms that ‘the continual preaching of God’s word in Halifax’ in the 1560s had been responsible for the town’s stalwart loyalty to the crown during the Rebellion of the Earls. Yet both Grindal and Huntingdon knew very well from personal experience that towns in general and northern towns in particular had not by any means all accorded an automatic or unqualified welcome to protestantism. A comparison between York and Hull demonstrates forcefully how two towns in close geographical proximity could differ very considerably in their initial acceptance of protestantism and in the readiness of their ruling élites to further the propagation of protestant doctrines among the townspeople at large.
When City Speaks for County: The Emergence of the Town as a Focus for Religious Activity in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Rogers Alan
Published: March 2016

The theme of this paper is an attempt to establish when the town emerged as a focal point for religious activity for a set district in the nineteenth century. I have some hesitations in setting about the task, for we are dealing here with attitudes, with what die French call l’histoire des mentalités, and it is not at all clear that all the evidence exists. I propose, however, to use three examples—circuit records from the Louth area of Lincolnshire, diaries (again from Lincolnshire), and a rather briefer case-study of Saint Mary’s church, Nottingham. Apart from the last, it may be agreed that these particular instances are not typical of Victorian England—that the towns are small and not industrialised, unlike Bradford or Bristol; and that the area is large and diversified unlike a county like Leicestershire where almost all roads lead to the county town. Nevertheless, both the enquiry and the range of evidence can be justified; and the conclusion—that the town emerged as a focal point for religious activities later than for other more secular functions—may be applicable to other areas.
Giovanni Dominici’s Opposition to Humanism
Authors: Denley Peter
Published: March 2016

Scholarly fashions have rightly reacted against the division of the renaissance into ‘two cultures’, the Christian and the pagan, and tend now to emphasise more the positive side of the relationship between religion and humanism. The early humanists themselves were at pains to defend their activities by stressing the contributions that poetry and classical studies could make, the divine origins of poetry and the moral value of many pagan writings. Yet these very defences were necessitated by a series of assaults, mostly by churchmen, on the activities of these early humanists. The old misgivings about the value and permissibility of the study of pagan authors inevitably came to the fore again with the revival of such studies. And the humanist stance was developed specifically in response to such criticisms. Mussato defended his profession against the pulpit denunciations of Giovannino of Mantua: Petrarch against the claims of a doctor of Avignon that medicine, not poetry, was the handmaid of philosophy: Salutati against successive strictures by Giuliano Zonarini, Pellegrino Zambeecari, Giovanni of Sanminiato and Giovanni Dominici.
Henry VII and Christian Renewal
Authors: Goodman Anthony
Published: March 2016

Henry VII, wrote Knowles, ‘was not personally interested in religion in its theological or devotional aspects, still less in its spiritual depth, but neither was he a critic or libertine. His actions and policies, as we see them, were earthbound’. However, Storey has written that ‘Henry’s piety must be emphasised . . . [his] devotions went far beyond those of his contemporaries’. The king’s most recent biographer, Chrimes, remarks on his meticulous religious observances, his contemporary reputation as a sound churchman, and his discriminating religious patronage. Chrimes’s verdict on Henry’s relations with papacy and church is that they were ‘in no way remarkable’, and on his patronage of learning that it is ‘far from clear’ whether ‘much in the way of humanistic influences were at work in his court’. Speculating on whether the king possessed ‘genuine religious feeling’ he inclines to Knowles’s steely verdict.
The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy
Authors: McNair Philip M. J.
Published: March 2016

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.
The Sects under Constantine
Authors: Hall Stuart G.
Published: March 2016

Looking back a hundred years after the death of Constantine the historian Sozomen wrote:

Under earlier emperors those who worshipped Christ, though they differed in their opinions, were considered the same by the Hellenizers and were similarly badly treated. They could not interfere with each other because of their common sufferings, and for this reason each group used to assemble without difficulty and form a church, and by keeping up continual mutual contact, even if they were few in number, they were not dispersed.

He contrasted this with Constantine’s success in repressing the sects. Sozomen is clearly right as far as he goes. Antiheresy laws gave powers to bishops they did not have before. He goes on:

But after this law they could neither assemble publicly, because they were prevented, nor in secret, because the bishops and clergy in every city kept them under observation.

We shall look more closely at this change.
Devotional Confraternities in Renaissance Venice
Authors: MacKenney Richard
Published: March 2016

Perhaps the most striking features of the history of Renaissance Venice are its highly commercialised economy and its precocious sense of secular state sovereignty. These characteristics owed much to the city’s independence of and isolation from rural and seigneurial influences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the high level of business activity and the confident awareness of statehood could also be related to the weakness of ecclesiastical influence in economic and political affairs. This was the case long before the spectacular conflict of 1606 when Venice was placed under the Interdict. The location of the Cathedral had always been a telling symbol of the place of the Church in Venetian life. It stood at San Pietro di Castello in an isolated area of the city. It is easy to overlook the fact that the centre of religious life, Saint Mark’s, was the Doge’s private chapel: a constant reminder of the intimate relationship between religious and political power, a material manifestation of the divine favour attached to Venice’s wealth and authority, both of which were unmistakably worldly.
From Church to Mission: An Examination of the Official Missionary Strategy of the Church Missionary Society on the Niger, 1887–93
Authors: Williams C. Peter
Published: March 2016

Crowther’s consecration in 1864 did not produce a church on the Niger which was entirely independent of the CMS. It remained financially dependent. Nonetheless, though technically still a mission, it had a very great deal of independence and, in some respects, it seemed to symbolize the Venn ideal - a self-governing native church. That the events of the nineties in the Niger represented a major disenchantment with Henry Venn’s vision of an independent church under African administration cannot be questioned. The curtailment of Bishop Crowther’s powers, the appointment of European missionaries on the Niger, the public criticism and dismissal of African ministers, and the replacement of Crowther by a European all made the point eloquently.
Building the “Catholic Ghetto”: Catholic Organisations 1870–1914
Authors: McLeod Hugh
Published: March 2016

It was a ghetto, undeniably,’ concluded the American political journalist, Garry Wills, when recalling from the safe distance of 1971 his ‘Catholic Boyhood’. ‘But not a bad ghetto to grow up in.’ Wills’s ghetto was defined by the great body of shared experiences, rituals, relationships, which gave Catholics a strongly felt common identity, and separated them from their Protestant and Jewish neighbours who knew none of these things. Wills talked about priests and nuns, incense and rosary beads, cards of saints and statues of the Virgin, but in this essay said very little about Catholic organisations (apart from a brief reference to the Legion of Decency). In many European countries, by contrast, any reference to the ‘ghetto’ from which many Catholics were seeking to escape in the 1960s and ’70s inevitably focused on the network of specifically Catholic organisations which was so characteristic of central and north-west European societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans even have a pair of words to describe this phenomenon,Vereins-orVerbandskatholizismus, which can be defined as the multiplication of organisations intended to champion the interests of Catholics as a body, and to meet the special needs, spiritual, economic or recreational, of every identifiable group within the Catholic population. So when in 1972 the Swiss historian Urs Altermatt wrote a book on the origins of the highly self-conscious and disciplined Swiss Catholic sub-culture, the result was an organisational history, as stolid and as soberly objective as Wills’s book was whimsical and partisan. Its purpose was to determine how it came about that so many a Catholic ‘was born in a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools (from kindergarten to university), read Catholic periodicals and newspapers, later voted for candidates of the Catholic Party and took part as an active member in numerous Catholic societies’, being also ‘insured against accident and illness with a Catholic benefit organisation, and placing his money in a Catholic savings bank’.
Parochial Ministry in Early Anglo-Saxon England: The Role of Monastic Communities
Authors: Foot Sarah
Published: March 2016

It was the example of some visiting parochial clergy that first inspired the young Wynfrith, later the missionary Boniface, to adopt the religious life. According to his hagiographer Willibald

when priests or clerics, travelling abroad, as is the custom in those parts, to preach to the people, came to the town and the house where his father dwelt the child would converse with them on spiritual matters.
John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests
Authors: Foss David B.
Published: March 2016

Little is known of John Mirk. When he wrote Instructions, he was, its colophon informs us, a canon regular of Lilleshall priory, Shropshire. Lilleshall was a house of Arroasian canons, a branch of the Augustinian order, so named because its first house was that of St Nicholas, Arras. Lilleshall was founded in 1144–8, and contained some ten canons in 1400.
A Layman’s Ministry in the Byzantine Church: The Life of Athanasios of the Great Meteoron
Authors: Nicol D. M.
Published: March 2016

The line between things spiritual and things temporal, between religious and secular, was never very precisely drawn in the Byzantine world. It was not unusual that a man of affairs should be an erudite theologian, that a priest should be a a married man with a family, that a holy man should remain unordained, or that a layman should be appointed as Patriarch of Constantinople. Thirteen of the 122 Byzantine patriarchs were elevated from the laity, four of them in the eighth and ninth centuries. Among them were the Patriarch Tarasios in 784 and his formidably learned nephew Photios in 858, Neither was a priest. Both were high-ranking civil servants and scholars. The popes disapproved of this practice and said so rather forcibly in the case of Photios; but the Byzantines saw nothing odd in it. They continued, from time to time, to appoint a layman rather than a priest to the highest office in their Church. The tenth canon of the Council of Sardica in 343 had recommended that laymen should not be made bishops until they had been ordained and moved up the various rungs of the hierarchical ladder to the top. This, according to the later Greek canonists, required a minimum of seven days on each rung. In later times, Gregory of Cyprus, an admirable lay scholar and theologian, was ordained and elevated to the patriarchal throne in 1283, though he claims in his autobiography that he was ‘pushed’ on to it against his will. John XIII Glykys, who was made patriarch in 1315, had been a distinguished civil servant with an academic turn of mind and a teacher of philology. The facts of his preferment are outlined by his learned friend Nikephoros Gregoras. Not only was John amarried man with sons and daughters; he also suffered from an ailment which, his doctors declared, required him to eat meat. He was therefore excused the customary tonsure as a monk before his ordination. A carnivorous monk would not do; a carnivorous patriarch was all right. John’s wife, in accordance with the canons, obligingly left him and entered a convent.
Calvin’s View of the Ministry of the Church
Authors: Yule George
Published: March 2016

Calvin’s view of the ministry is dependent on his view of the Church and his view of the Church is itself controlled by his Christological emphasis. This is not true of Scholastic Calvinism, which before the rise of liberal Protestantism dominated the Calvinist landscape, but is in fact a deviant son of Calvin. The shift was subtle and largely unconscious, so that those brought up in the atmosphere of Scholastic Calvinism felt some unease but could not clearly say why, like Thomas Boston the Scots Minister of Etherick who found he ‘had no liking for the conditionality of grace’ or Fraser of Brea who ‘perceived that our divinity was much altered from what it was in the primitive reformers times.’
Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England
Authors: Collinson Patrick
Published: March 2016

The categories of shepherd and hireling are conventional elements of what may be called biblical and ecclesiastical pastoral, the legacy of John’s Gospel chapter 10 and the basis of a perennial polemical dichotomy. Preaching at Manchester in 1582 on a text redolent of arable husbandry (Luke 10 v. 2—‘the harvest truly is great but the labourers are few’) the vicar of Warrington strayed out of the cornfield into this pastoral vein: ‘Wee must understand that our Savior speaketh not of false Hierlings but of true Pastoures, not of those which beare an ydle name and title of Pastoures.’ John 10 had inspired a literary motif running back to Chaucer and Langland which, in what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘the old rustic language’ of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), revived in the May eclogue. ‘Piers’, a good (and, according to Spenser’s commentator ‘E.K.’, protestant) pastor rebukes ‘Palinode’ (a papist, or at least a traditional clerical type) for condoning the Maytime sports of the country people, and in the person of Palinode all hirelings:
Well is it seene, theyr sheepe bene not their owne,That letten them runne at randon alone.But they bene hyred for little payOf other, that caren as little as they,What fallen the flocke, so they han the fleece,And get all the gayne, paying but a peece.
Pastoral Office and the General Priesthood in the Great Awakening
Authors: Ward W.R.
Published: March 2016

Whatever Luther may have said about the priesthood of all believers, it took more than a century and a half for the idea to receive full-scale treatment, and Spener, who achieved this during his time as Senior of Frankfurt (1660-86), approached the goal indirectly through editing Arndt’s sermons (1675). To catch the public eye he republished the introduction separately later in the year under the title Pia Desideria, or heartfelt desires for an improvement of the true evangelical church pleasing to God, with some Christian proposals to that end. With a dedication to all the overseers and pastors of the evangelical church it was now a deliberately programmatic writing. In this tract Spener castigated every class of society for their responsibility for the lamentable state of the Church, making suggestions for improved clerical training and preaching, which might have been made at any period of Church history. The real sting came in an explicit appeal to Luther on how best to realize the priesthood of all behevers. To spread the word of God more richly among the people there should be private gatherings under clerical leadership for the exchange of views and Bible study; more radically, there should be private gatherings for the exercise of the obligations of the general spritual priesthood. The faithful should teach, warn, convert, edify each other. These gatherings should be cells for the renewal of the Church. They would also enable Spener, the expert catechist, to drive home his conviction that Christianity was a way of life, learnt by doing.
Piety Among ‘The Society of People’: The Witness of Primitive Methodist Local Preachers in the North Midlands, 1812–1862
Authors: Johnson Wayne J.
Published: March 2016

The chief business of Primitive Methodism,’ wrote the editor of the denominational magazine, ‘is to cultivate personal religion, and to seek the salvation of souls.” Although statements at the national level seldom made their way unhampered down to the lay-dominated local circuit, nevertheless, this was one directive which was generally pursued by a substantial number of its local preachers. Indeed, this search for personal holiness, as well as the seeking of it in others seems to have been the two main strands tying Primitive Methodism together. A frustrated Primitive Methodist, however, wrote, ‘Have we shown to the poor and needy that the gospel… teaches us to regard their temporal as well as their spiritual wants?’ Just here lay the source of much of what has concerned historians interested in interpreting the nature and influence of Primitive Methodism. Indeed, when taken together, these two comments have, coincidentally, established the parameters of debate within which the study of Primitive Methodism has been conducted.
Principal When Pastor: P. T. Forsyth, 1876–1901
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

What marks a minister? Such a one, for example, as this, formed within Scottish Congregationalism but formative for and proved by English Congregationalism. Born 1848, died 1921. Born under Russell, died under Lloyd George. Or, from Palmerston to Asquith with Gladstone as the longest fact of political life. Born Aberdeen, died Hampstead. Born a postman’s son, died a college principal, lives a theologian. Formed educationally by Aberdeen, London and Göttingen and indirectly by Manchester and Cambridge. Culturally Pre-Raphaelite, a man for Rossetti and Holman Hunt and also G. F. Watts, for Ruskin and Giotto, for Wagner as for Hegel. Peter Taylor Forsyth, set apart by ordination in 1876; twenty-eight years, therefore, in preparation for ministry, twenty-five years in congregational ministry, twenty years in training Congregational ministers.
Ministry to All the People? the Anglican Church in Malaysia
Authors: Roxborogh W. John
Published: March 2016

Since Independence in 1957 the Anglican Church in Malaysia has disavowed any inclination towards Malay evangelism in concert with a general climate of Christian opinion which sees such efforts as not only legally difficult, if not actually illegal following enactments in a number of states, but also politically impossible and threatening to the stability of the nation. This is the background to the claim in a Singapore Anglican history written in 1963 that ‘In the Peninsular… no missionary work among the Muslim Malays was considered and their faith always has been respected.’
A Triumph of Patience and Purposiveness: Linton of Betong
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: March 2016

From 1869 until the founding of the diocese of Singapore in 1909, the missions and chaplaincies in Singapore and what is now West Malaysia were within the jurisdiction of the diocese of Labuan, which itself had been founded as a legal fiction in 1855 as the stock onto which the bishopric for Rajah James Brooke’s Sarawak could be grafted. Although the diocese and the bishopric were constitutionally distinct, as succeeding bishops were often reminded by the rajahs of Sarawak, the bishops looked at the whole area of their spiritual leadership, and regarded the staffing of it as one problem—or opportunity. G. F. Hose himself, bishop of Labuan 1881–1908, and of Sarawak 1882–1908, had served in the Straits Settlements from 1868, and had been archdeacon of Singapore for his predecessor, Bishop Chambers. For sixty-two years the St Andrew’s Church Mission in Singapore, the base for work among Asians, had as superintendent two priests, W. H. Gomes, 1872—1902, and Richard Richards, 1902–34. Both had previously worked in Borneo, for more than fourteen and twelve years respectively. In the opposite direction Bishop Hose transferred to Kuching in 1898 A. F. Sharp, who had worked for six years in Singapore.
Jews and Christians in the Byzantine Empire: Problems and Prospects
Authors: de Lange N. R. M.
Published: March 2016

Heartening as it is for someone like myself, for whom the study of relations between Christianity and Judaism is a central concern, to see the Ecclesiastical History Society devote its annual conference to this subject, it is proper to recall that it has not been wholly neglected in the past. The very first volume of Studies in Church History (1964) contains a contribution by James Parkes under the title of Jews and Christians in the Constantinian Empire’, which is a short but well-judged summary of the attitudes to Judaism emerging from a reading of the Christian authors, Roman laws, and conciliar canons of the fourth century. I should like to begin now by paying tribute to James Parkes, partly because he was my own mentor, someone who encouraged and influenced my study of our subject, and also because he occupies an important place as a pioneer in the study of Jewish-Christian relations as a whole, and specifically in the part of the subject that concerns me today, the Byzantine phase.
Jews and Christians in the Gregorian Decretals
Authors: Watt John A.
Published: March 2016

With the promulgation of the five books of the Decretals by Gregory IX in 1234, that part of the law of the Church which regulated the Christian—Jewish relationship was to all intents and purposes authoritatively finalized. Christendom thenceforward had its norms: for episcopal legislators in the diocesan and provincial councils which carried universal law into the localities; for academics to analyse, expound, and pass on in their teaching and writing to form the outlook of successive generations of ecclesiastical leaders; for lay governments to accept or reject in detailing their policies towards Jews. The papacy had defined its position. Basic principles and their application in practice had been made clear in official tones. The law of the Latin Church had come of age, and with that, medieval ecclesiastical Jewry law had received formulation at the highest level. There had been nothing previously to match the authority of the Gregorian codex.
Reflections on the Jewry Oath in the Middle Ages
Authors: Ziegler Joseph
Published: March 2016

The Jewry Oath (juramentum Judaeorum, Judeneid) was the judicial oath demanded from Jews involved in legal litigation when summoned to appear in a Christian court both as plaintiffs and defendants. The special formulae which were created for the Jews, who could not use the Christian formulae, usually included two parts: a ceremony and a verbal part. The ceremony could be long and elaborate, but was usually short and simple. The swearing Jew was asked to lay his right hand on a scroll of the Torah, the Pentateuch, or from the later thirteenth century, though more rarely, even on the Talmud. Sometimes more specific instructions were given, and the hand had to be laid on the page of the Ten Commandments, or even specifically on the commandment prohibiting the taking of the name of the Lord in vain (Exodus 20. 7). The verbal part included an invocation of God, a judicial declaration regarding the nature of the obligation corroborated by the oath, and a list of maledictions which would be inflicted in the case of perjury. The oath itself could be taken in a synagogue or at its gate, but usually it was conducted in the court itself on a Jewish holy book kept there specially for that purpose.
The Good of the Church, The Good of the State: The Popes and Jewish Money
Authors: Stow Kenneth R.
Published: March 2016

In the early thirteenth century the papal cardinal legate in France, Robert of Courson, painted the business of lending in wholly Utopian colours. Should the pope decree, he said, that lending must cease and all men must earn their sustenance by the sweat of their brow, ‘Thus would be removed all usurers, all factious men and all robbers; thus would charity flourish and the fabric of the churches again be builded; and thus would all be brought back again to its pristine state.’ The prospect that acting to eliminate lending would so smoothly result in social perfection, one might expect, should have propelled the Catholic Church, led by the popes, to have made a frontal assault on lending, especially that carried on by Jews. It did not. Only more than four centuries later, in 1682, did the papacy decide to end a policy of actually condoning Jewish lending, and only then did it irrevocably close down the Jewish loan banks in the Papal State.
The Jew that Shakespeare Drew
Authors: Usher Brett
Published: March 2016

How far is it legitimate for a director to correct Shakespeare’s antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice?

SO, begging a question or two, wrote the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale in a review of a recent London production of the play in which the Christians were portrayed as rabid Nazis. Almost fifty years after the Holocaust, it appears, it is still difficult for directors and critics alike to approach The Merchant without a feeling of unease. Current wisdom—or lingering guilt—insists that the play is, in a real and unacceptable sense, racist.
Conceptions of Judaism as a Religion in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic
Authors: Rooden Peter van
Published: March 2016

Once upon a time, probably in the first half of the seventeenth century, David Curiel, a prominent member of the Amsterdam Sephardi community, was attacked by a German robber. Although seriously wounded, Curiel managed to overcome his attacker with the help of his Christian neighbours. The robber was tried and sentenced. After his execution, the States of Holland sent Curiel a letter expressing their regret at the incident and inviting him to witness the medical lesson on the corpse of the robber in the anatomical theatre of Leiden University. This legend has been handed down in at least five different manuscripts, preserved in Jewish libraries. It was probably read at the feast of Purim, which, of course, commemorates an earlier attack on the Jews and the spectacular destruction of their enemy.
‘A Different Mode of Civility’:Lancelot Addison on the Jews of Barbary
Authors: Horowitz Elliott
Published: March 2016

In 1675 there appeared in London a rather interesting, if somewhat neglected, work entitled The Present State of the Jews: (More particularly relating to those in Barbary.) Wherein is contained an exact Account of their Customs, Secular and Religious. One of its more enigmatic features (to which we shall return) was its frontispiece, which featured an illustration not of a Barbary Jew, but of a muscular American Indian holding a spear, to which was attached a banner proclaiming the book’s short title. Its author, Lancelot Addison, was described on the title-page as ‘one of his Majesties Chaplains in Ordinary’, having received that designation in 1671, shortly after returning from eight years in the western part of what was then called Barbary, as chaplain to the British garrison in Tangier. It was largely, although, as we shall see, not exclusively, on the basis of his experiences there between 1662 and 1670 that Addison later wrote his book on The Present State of the Jews, with which we will here be primarily concerned.
Women, Death, and the Law during the Christian Persecutions
Authors: Jones Chris
Published: March 2016

Blessed, too, are the women who are there with you as partners in your glorious confession … by displaying valour above their sex, by their steadfastness they have set an example to the rest of womankind as well (Cyprian, Letter 6.iii.1).

Indeed there are virgins to be found in this company: to their yield of sixtyfold the reward of a hundredfold has now been added, and they have gone forward to receive their crowns thanks to this twofold glory of theirs (Cyprian, Letter 76.vi.1).
Martyr Devotion in the Alexandrian School: Origen to Athanasius
Authors: Mcguckin John Anthony
Published: March 2016

The Christian interpretation of fatal persecution was a complex one with distinct ecclesial themes merging with Jewish elements from apocalyptic and biblical literature, as well as Hellenistic motifs such as the constancy of the Socratic martyr. The New Testament understanding of the term ‘martyr’ is predominantly that of legal witness, although some specific senses of blood-witness are emerging already in the first century and have become common by the second. Varying reactions can be traced in the literature of different parts of the Church: for example, in Rome, Alexandria, Asia, Africa, or Palestine. This paper looks primarily at the Egyptian interpretation as a microcosm of the general development of the role of martyrs, and does so by reference to the writings of the theologians whose works cover the main phases of that process. It highlights the distinction that existed between the sophisticated literary interpretation of martyrdom, and the forms of popular devotion that flourished among the non-literate peasantry. The tension between the two approaches, witnessed in both Origen and Athanasius, is demonstrably resolved by the time of Cyril, who represents the harmonious synthesis of both traditions in the new conditions of Christian political ascendancy in fifth-century Byzantine Egypt. The peculiar circumstances of the Egyptian Church, in particular the unusually radical separation that existed there between town and country (and the class and cultural divisions reflected in that), as well as the specific challenge posed to Christianity by the enduring vitality of the old Egyptian religions in the countryside, both left their marks on the specific form of martyr devotion in Christian Egypt, but the most noteworthy aspect is arguably the subtext of the theological encomia of martyrdom that seems to have the definite concern of subjugating the popular devotion to martyrs, confessors, and ascetics to the interests of the Church hierarchies.
Martyrdom in Early Victorian Scotland: Disruption Fathers and the Making of the Free Church
Authors: Brown Stewart J.
Published: March 2016

‘Where is the Church of Scotland to be found?’ asked the leading Evangelical R. S. Candlish on 20 May 1843 at the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. ‘She will not be found basking under the smiles of the great, but she is to be recognised once more, as in days of old, by her sufferings and her tears.’ In 1843 the Disruption of the Church of Scotland brought the birth of a new church, the Free Church of Scotland, as nearly a third of the ministers and nearly half the lay membership left the national Church of Scotland. They went out in part over a long-standing dispute concerning church patronage, but, more fundamentally, they left in protest against what they perceived as the refusal of the State to recognize the Church’s independence in spiritual matters. The new Free Church claimed to be not merely a secession or schism, but rather the true national Church of Scotland, a claim its adherents based on their willingness to suffer for the principle of the headship of Christ in the Church. They were the Church of the martyrs of the Scottish Reformation and of the Covenants, willing to lay down their fortunes, even their lives, for ‘the Crown rights of the Redeemer’. The true Church of Scotland, asserted the Free Church minister James Mackenzie, in 1859, ‘began in 1843, when die old Church, the Church of Knox, of Melville, of Henderson, and of the martyrs, left its connexion with the State, and stood out before the world free, bearing the banner which our brave fathers bore.’
Martyrs for the Truth: Fundamentalists in Britain
Authors: Bebbington D. W.
Published: March 2016

The systematic study of religious Fundamentalism is now well under way. The first of six promised volumes under the auspices of the Fundamentalism Project of the University of Chicago, making a global examination of such movements in many religions, was published in 1991. Collections of papers evaluating specific aspects of Fundamentalism have been issued, and the theological method of the contemporary British movement has been scrutinized. Its American equivalent is the subject of one of the most illuminating of post-war works on the history of Christianity in the United States. Yet the history of the British movement has been allowed to remain in obscurity. Although, as will be seen, there are understandable reasons for the neglect, the growth of interest in world-wide Fundamentalism makes study of its British expression timely. More certainly than some of the other forms of defensively-minded traditional religion elsewhere that are now being labelled ‘Fundamentalist’, the British movement is entitled to the name invented by its counterpart in America. It arose at the same time, looking to some of the same men for leadership, and displayed similar traits. So an attempt is made here to present an overview of the Fundamentalists in Britain.
‘To Suffer Grief in All Kinds of Trials’: Persecution and Martyrdom in the African Church in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Killingray David
Published: March 2016

There is a good case for regarding the twentieth century as the century of Christian persecution and martyrdom. Both individual Christians, as well as the Church as a whole, have suffered severely at the hands of authoritarian regimes in Europe and Asia and also from institutional and state hostility in all but a few areas of the world. The Church has invariably been divided and split in its reactions to these pressures. This paper focuses upon the experience of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa where the Church has grown very rapidly in size and significance this century, most notably since the 1940s.
Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

It is a characteristic merit of Richard Southern—recently voted the historians’ historian in The Observer—that as long ago as 1970, in Western Society and the Church, he devoted some luminous pages to ‘the influence of women in religious life’. Though these pages nestle in a chapter called ‘Fringe orders and anti-orders’, twenty years ago such labels were not pejorative. Southern made women emblematic of what could be called a pendulum-swing theory of medieval religious history. First came a primitive, earlier medieval age of improvization and individual effort, of spiritual warriors and local initiatives; the central medieval period saw ‘a drive towards increasingly well-defined and universal forms of organization’ in an age of hierarchy and order; then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, back swung the pendulum towards complexity and confusion, individual experiment, and ‘small, humble, shadowy organizations’.
Phenomenal Religion in the Thirteenth Century and Its Image: Elisabeth of Spalbeek and the Passion Cult
Authors: Simons W. , Ziegler J. E.
Published: March 2016

In the spring of 1267 Abbot Philip of Clairvaux, visiting the Cistercian abbey of Herkenrode in the diocese of Liège, was informed of the exceptionally holy conduct of a woman living a few miles away, in the village of Spalbeek. Philip went to see her and was greatly impressed, for, as he wrote upon his return to Clairvaux,
Female Strategies for Success in a Male-ordered World: the Benedictine Convent of Le Murate in Florence in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries
Authors: Lowe K. J. P
Published: March 2016

This paper will centre on the relationships of women to men and women to women which form the backbone of the history of the Benedictine convent of Le Murate in Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Le Murate started in a quiet way with one pious woman deciding to live virtuously by herself, but under no rule, in a house on the Ponte Rubaconte in 1390, and expanded to become perhaps the largest female convent in Florence in 1515, situated on Via Ghibellina, with 200 enclosed women and their servants living under the Rule of St Benedict. I want to examine the relations between these nuns and the outside world and look at how the male government of the outside world, secular and ecclesiastical, both at an individual level and in a more collective, formal way, tried to restrain and weaken this group of females, even to the point of forbidding them to earn their own livelihood. I would like to posit that religious life on a large scale and in a large city offered opportunities for the exercise of power by women not available to those of the female sex who stayed within the structure of the family and who were, therefore, in direct competition with men at every stage. Daughters, sisters, wives, and widows were legally and socially subject to their male relatives, in varying degrees. Nuns were not, and were permitted a measure of self-government. Just how irksome, worrying, and unacceptable to men it was for women to take their own decisions will become clear later. Barred by their sex from an active life in the hierarchy of the Church, and barred by their Order from an active life in the community, nevertheless in the Renaissance these enclosed Benedictine nuns devised strategies for obtaining access to power and money unparalleled by their secular counterparts. Le Murate exerted a strong attraction on women, both the powerful and famous and the more ordinary. Due to the increasing politicization of Florentine society, it secured, in addition, the patronage of the two most important Florentine political families during the period, the Medici and the Soderini. It was this seeming capacity to mobilize support from every sector of the population, regardless of sex, social group, income, political hue, or place of origin, which enabled the convent to prosper.
On Ministering to ‘Certayne Devoute and Religiouse Women’: Bishop Fox and the Benedictine Nuns of Winchester Diocese on the Eve of the Dissolution
Authors: Greatrex Joan
Published: March 2016

It was not until after almost thirty years in the royal service and on the episcopal bench that Richard Fox retired to Winchester and turned his full attention to his pastoral office. There, at the age of sixty-eight and afflicted with failing eyesight, he set out to reform his flock. In a letter to Cardinal Wolsey he admitted that his mind had been ‘trowled nyght and daye with other mens enormites and vices’, and that he was anxious to ‘do soom satisfaccion for xxviij years negligence’. Ten years later there was a modest undertone of relief in his report to the Cardinal:
A ‘Messiah for Women’: Religious Commotion in the North-east of Switzerland, 1525-1526
Authors: Jelsma Auke
Published: March 2016

On 17 January 1526 the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli wrote a letter to the medical doctor Johannes Vadianus, congratulating him on his recent appointment as mayor of the Swiss city of St Gallen. He also asked him for more detailed information concerning the terrible events which were reputed to have taken place in the vicinity of St Gallen, especially in nearby Appenzell. The Anabaptists in that area were reported to have intercourse with each other’s women, with the approval of the women themselves. A woman of previously unimpeachable conduct was said to have taken to the streets naked, offering herself to all she met, with the words, ‘I have died in the flesh and live only in the spirit; everyone may now use me as he wishes’. And this was said to be but a sample of the incidents which demonstrated how severely the Anabaptists were guilty of misconduct.
‘Lights in Dark Places’: Women Evangelists in Early Victorian Britain, 1838-1857
Authors: Lewis Donald M.
Published: March 2016

Twenty years ago, Olive Anderson called for more detailed study of how the role of women changed in the nineteenth century, pointing out that only such careful investigations ‘can show how far the conventional stress upon feminism has been well judged’. She noted the contemporary strength of the churches as ‘the great arbiters of public attitudes toward social issues’ and argued that the beliefs and practices of popular religion (‘the religion of the unsophisticated laity in general’) were ‘full of change and diversity’.
Rewarding Devotion: Indulgences and the Promotion of Images
Authors: Lewis Flora
Published: March 2016

The indulgence is one of the Church’s mechanisms for encouraging pious practices which has generally had a bad press. This paper is concerned with its use in the veneration of three images: the Veronica, the arma Christi or instruments of the Passion, and the Man of Sorrows with the indulgence referring to the Mass of St Gregory. It addresses in particular the circumstances of the original grant of indulgence (whether real or spurious) and the role played by the indulgences in the transmission of these images in devotional manuscripts in England. The earliest of these indulgenced images, the Veronica, is also the most famous, and the one whose origin is most clearly attested. The Chronica maiora of Matthew Paris tells how the Veronica suddenly reversed itself while being carried in procession in 1216. Innocent III responded by composing a prayer in its honour, with an associated indulgence of ten days for each time the prayer was recited. It is noteworthy that although Innocent’s indulgence is commonly referred to as creating the new category of indulgenced image, the indulgence is attached to the prayer, and there is no suggestion that it was necessary to view the image. As is made clear in the Chronica, the addition of a representation of the image (plate 1) was prompted by the fervour of devotion: people did it for themselves. Thus two related, but not identical, impulses joined together to produce the indulgenced prayer to be said before the image, the model for all other indulgenced images. An early example of the prayer used as part of an exercise in devotional propaganda is found in the Revelations of Mechtild of Hackeborn. These normally followed the liturgical year, and on the day of the exposition of the relic she had a vision, aimed at arousing piety towards the image, in which she saw Christ in Majesty, with those who honoured the holy face with a special prayer approaching him,
Baroque in the Hymn-book
Authors: Davie Donald
Published: March 2016

‘Baroque’ is a word that has never yet been thoroughly acclimatized among us. To most English-speakers, I think, the word still smacks of something pretentious and affected—if not, indeed, of special pleading. At best it denotes a category that we may learn about and agree to trust so long as we are dutiful tourists in Italy or perhaps Poland, which we can thankfully discard when we get back to native soil.
Art and Science: or Bach as an Expositor of the Bible
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

For a long time before dramatic recent events it has been clear that the German Democratic Republic has been in die position, embarrassing to a Marxist system, of having nothing generally marketable left except (to use the jargon) ‘superstructure’. The Luther celebrations conveniendy bolstered the implicit claim of the GDR to embody Saxony’s long-delayed revenge upon Prussia; still more conveniendy, they paid handsomely. Even the Francke celebrations probably paid their way, ruinous though his Orphan House has been allowed to become. When I was in Halle, a hard-pressed government had removed the statue of Handel (originally paid for in part by English subscriptions) for head-to-foot embellishment in gold leaf, and a Handel Festival office in the town was manned throughout the year. Bach is still more crucial, both to the republic’s need to pay its way and to the competition with the Federal Republic for the possession of the national tradition. There is no counterpart in Britain to the strength of the Passion-music tradition in East Germany. The celebrations which reach their peak in Easter Week at St Thomas’s, Leipzig, are like a cross between Wembley and Wimbledon here, the difference being that the black market in tickets is organized by the State for its own benefit. If Bach research in East Germany, based either on musicology or the Church, has remained an industry of overwhelming amplitude and technical complexity, the State has had its own Bach-research collective located in Leipzig, dedicated among other things to establishing the relation between Bach and the Enlightenment, that first chapter in the Marxist history of human liberation. Now that a good proportion of the population of the GDR seems bent on liberation by leaving the republic or sinking it, the moment seems ripe to take note for non-specialist readers of some of what has been achieved there in recent years.