bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ockham’s vision of the primitive Church
Authors: Shogimen Takashi
Published: March 2016

Gordon Leff once suggested that a distinctive feature of late medieval ecclesiology was ‘a new critical historical attitude to the church’. He argued that the recognition of a disparity between the apostolic and the contemporary Church is discernible equally in the thought of various thinkers such as Dante, Marsilius, and Wyclif, and in the popular movements of the Franciscan Spirituals and the Waldensians. One of the important characteristics in this new criticism was historical interpretation of the Bible. Concomitant with this, biblical studies had been experiencing a shift: Holy Scripture was no longer perceived as a mystified unity of divine words but as a record of historical events written by human authors. And yet, Holy Scripture had been considered by the most learned men in the medieval world to be ‘the most difficult text to describe accurately and adequately’. Among the historical critics of the Church, too, could perhaps arise a concern with biblical hermeneutics: what is the most appropriate way to recover the truly historical vision of the apostolic Church as found in Scripture?
Conciliar authority in Reformation Scotland: the example of the Kennedy/Davidson debate, 1558–63
Authors: Dotterweich Martin Holt
Published: March 2016

‘For to the most parte of men, lawfull and godlie appeareth whatsoever antiquitie hath received’, complained John Knox in his 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women – and indeed for Knox and his fellow Protestants, the question of historical pedigree was troublesome. Catholic polemicists frequently posed some form of the question, ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’, and contrasted this problem with their own historical continuity, unbroken since the apostle Peter. Knox’s homeland of Scotland saw comparatively little sixteenth-century theological debate, but as in Reformation disputes on the continent, in Scotland historical superiority was claimed by Catholic and Protestant alike. A useful means of legitimation for either side, as Knox had said, was to demonstrate greater similarity to the primitive Church than one’s opponent. The appeal to superior historical precedent was particularly central to one Scottish debate, the printed theological exchange between Quintin Kennedy and John Davidson, and here it was slightly unusual in that these authors focused on the general council, rather than the papacy or episcopacy, as the means of historical legitimation.
Victorian Nonconformity and the memory of the ejected ministers: the impact of the bicentennial commemorations of 1862
Authors: Larsen Timothy
Published: March 2016

In the providence of God, St Bartholomew’s Day, 1862, fell on a Sunday, just as it had two hundred years before. On that earlier Sabbath, some 2,000 ministers were ejected from their livings because they could not conscientiously swear their ‘unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained and prescribed’ in the new Prayer Book, or meet some of the other requirements of the new Act of Uniformity. Rejected by the Established Church, many of these men continued to fulfil their callings outside her pale and thereby gave a major, new impetus to Dissent. As the bicentenary of ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’ approached, Victorian Nonconformists resolved to make the most of’the opportunity which God’s providence has brought round to them’. In this retrospective year, historical claims became powerful weapons in the struggle between Church and Dissent; and the past became contested territory which both sides sought to appropriate in order to add legitimacy to their present positions.
‘Playing the Man’ the Courage of Christian Martyrs, Translated and Transposed
Authors: Moriarty Rachel
Published: March 2016

The aged Bishop Polycarp was burnt to death in the arena at Smyrna in the afternoon of 23 February 155 (or 156), in front of a hostile crowd. The terrible story was lovingly recorded, copied and passed round the churches; it is probably the first non-biblical record of a martyrdom, and survives by itself and in Eusebius’ History. As Polycarp entered the arena Christian eyewitnesses heard a voice from heaven, saying in Greek, for all to understand, . The first word means ‘be strong’; the last shares a root with two other Greek words, which means courage, and which means a male person, a man. We shall consider later how Polycarp’s contemporaries understood this; centuries later, about the 1880s, an Anglican academic clergyman, Joseph Lightfoot, who was soon to be a bishop himself, translated Polycarp’s story into English. He found an apt English idiom: ‘Be strong, Polycarp,’ he wrote, ‘and play the man.’
‘God is more weary of woman than of man’: Reflections on a Text in the Golden Legend
Authors: Price Richard M.
Published: March 2016

The presence of a malodorous taint of misogyny in Christian literature, both ancient and medieval, is a familiar fact that feminist writers, more than male chauvinists, have been keen to push under our noses. What is its explanation? The inferiority of women is a standard theme in male-dominated cultures. Christian literature, for so long the virtual preserve of male celibates, inevitably reflected their anxieties and their need for reassurance. But was there also a genuine theological component, however misconceived, arising from basic Christian convictions about human nature and the moral law?
‘Women’s Speaking Justified’: Women and Discipline in the Early Quaker Movement, 1652–56
Authors: Peters Kate
Published: March 2016

In October 1655, two Quakers, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, imprisoned in Exeter gaol, published a warning to the priests and people of England. It was in many ways a typical Quaker tract, decrying the national Church of England, and urging people to turn to the inner light of Christ, rather than rely on the outward teachings of the national Church. But Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole also levelled the following bitter accusation against England’s ministry:
Martha’s Work and Mary’s Contemplation? The Women of the Mildmay Conference and the Keswick Convention 1856–1900
Authors: Bucknall Alison M.
Published: March 2016

For many Evangelical clergy and lay people, the ‘annual conference’ became a vital feature of Christian life during the second half of the nineteenth century. Dominant among these was the Mildmay Conference, only later rivalled by the convention held at Keswick. The small beginnings of ‘conference going’ were a group of friends who responded to the invitation of the Revd William Pennefather to meet together in his parish at Barnet in 1856. He had not intended to found an annual gathering, but the momentum of the movement he set off was such that after he left Barnet in 1856 for the parish of Mildmay in London’s northern suburbs, the Conference which followed him grew into a powerful organization which not only brought together some three thousand Evangelical clergy and lay people each year, but also involved itself in welfare work which extended beyond the parish boundaries into other areas of London, and supported a wider network of workers in Britain and overseas. The Convention which began to meet at Keswick in 1875 was far removed from the social concerns of Mildmay, and its commitment to a controversial teaching of’holiness’ kept it on the fringes of Evangelical respectability for the first decade of its existence; but by the 1890s the popularity of ‘Keswick teaching’ could no longer be denied. While other Evangelicals sought to attack or denounce the perceived evils which were creeping into both Victorian Church and society, these conference goers sought to renew Evangelicalism from within in a way that would enable them to speak to that changing world with a new, but still distinctively Evangelical, voice.
Gender in Sarawak: Mission and Reception
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: March 2016

The interaction of gender and religion affects a developing as much as a developed church. A missionary church raises appropriate issues not merely as they affect those spreading the message, but as they affect the receivers, both immediately and in a later period of establishment. This paper deals with such matters as they appear in the history of the Anglican Church in Sarawak, where the missionary activity began in 1848.
Gender Roles, Homosexuality, and the Anglican Church in Sydney
Authors: Hilliard David
Published: March 2016

In September 1992 a periodical published by a conservative evangelical campus ministry led by an Anglican clergyman based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney published an editorial under the heading ‘Is homosexuality next?’ It began with an imaginary dialogue:
The ‘Sample Week’ in the Medieval Latin Divine Office
Authors: Pfaff R. W.
Published: March 2016

One of the apparent pillars of consistency in the medieval Latin liturgy is the divine, alias daily, office. Although scholars convincingly postulate forms of the office that both antedate the specific provisions for it which bulk large in the Rule of Benedict and reflect an urban secular (the so-called cathedral office) rather than a monastic context, in terms of actual books out of which the office was performed, not a great deal survives until roughly the eleventh century. By that time, if not before, thought is clearly being given as to how to present the contents of the office - given that much of it consists in the recitation of psalms - in a way that, while clear, minimizes repetition. This can most readily be done in the long stretch of the weeks after Pentecost and the shorter stretch (sometimes very short indeed, depending on when Easter falls) of the weeks between the octave of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent or pre-Lent (that is, from Septuagesima on). Although the structure of the office in this, to use the current phrase, ‘ordinary time’, remains the same as in the more exciting seasons of Advent, Christmastide, Lent, and Eastertide (plus, of course, the individual feasts of the Proper of Saints), the content of the various services is not driven by a particular time or saint, and so there is a somewhat abstract quality about it quite lacking from the great seasons and occasions of the liturgical year.
‘One heart and one soul’: The Changing Nature of Public Worship in Augsburg, 1521-1548
Authors: Broadhead Philip
Published: March 2016

Demands for the reform of public worship followed rapidly upon the outbreak of religious disputes in Germany in 1517. This was scarcely surprising, since some of the most important aspects of late medieval worship and devotion, including the mass, had become the focus of criticism. The reform of worship presented many difficulties to both spiritual leaders and secular authorities. In many cases they found it easier to identify the failings of Catholic worship than to devise new services which would be acceptable to all. It was also apparent that worship had not only to reflect the ideals and aspirations of the Church but also those of the wider community, and therefore worship impinged upon social and political life. This paper will look at how one community, the city of Augsburg, dealt with these issues. In particular it will consider the forces which shaped evangelical liturgy, and the reception given to the new forms of worship.
Patristics and Reform: Thomas Rattray and The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem
Authors: Hall Stuart G.
Published: March 2016

In reforming Christian worship radical change often follows from the attempt to restore what was ancient. Nowhere is this more clear than among the liturgical scholars of the early seventeenth century, when advances in critical scholarship made it possible for some to believe they could restore the Church’s worship to that of apostolic times. This is well illustrated in the work of Thomas Rattray (1684-1743), a Scot of great learning, and among Scottish Episcopalians of lasting influence. Rattray was a Non-juror, one of those expelled or withdrawn from the churches of England and Scotland after 1689 for refusing obedience to the new regime. They pinned their hopes, and the survival of what they perceived as the true Catholic Faith, on the Roman Catholic House of Stuart in exile in France. Their hopes perished in blood on the field of Culloden in 1746. That was three years after Rattray’s death. The Episcopalians hold Rattray’s name in honour, both because of the part he played in fixing their Church’s constitution, and because of one book of learning and ingenuity, called The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem.
A Broad Churchman and the Prayer Book: the Reverend Charles Voysey
Authors: Turner Garth
Published: March 2016

If the heirs of the Tractarians were in Victorian Anglicanism most conspicuously dissatisfied with the Prayer Book, they were not alone: the Broad Church also had discontents, which focused largely upon the recitation of the Athanasian Creed:

Whoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.

Which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

This is the Catholic Faith: which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.
Reservation under Pressure: Ritual in the Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–1928
Authors: Machin Ian
Published: March 2016

The Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8 was not merely ‘the echo of dead themes’, as was alleged by A. J. P. Taylor. Disputes between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, which lay at the root of the crisis, were still at a height in the 1920s and 1930s. Anglo-Catholic confidence was shown in their vast Congresses, commencing in 1920 (and lasting until the 1960s), and in the celebrations and publications which marked the centenary of the Oxford Movement in 1933. Such confidence naturally caused Evangelicals and Broad Churchmen to look to their defences. Moreover, while in England anti-Romanism was less marked than before 1914, in Scotland it reached a high (if belated) peak in the 1920s in reaction to Irish Catholic immigration.
Reservation of the Sacrament at Winchester Cathedral, 1931–1935
Authors: Daykin T.E.
Published: March 2016

The Revised Prayer Book, though twice rejected by Parliament, was published in 1928 with the notice: ‘The publication of this Book does not directly or indirectly imply that it can be regarded as authorized for use in the churches.’ The bishops set out in July 1929 three principles by which they would guide parishes wishing to use the 1928 Book:

1. They would not regard as inconsistent with loyalty to the Church of England the use of the additions to or deviations from the 1662 Book contained in the 1928 Book. They would regard ‘any other deviations as inconsistent with Church Order’.

2. They would ‘endeavour to secure that the practices which are consistent neither with the Book of 1662 nor with the Book of 1928 shall cease’.

3. They would only permit 1928 usage if agreed to by the Parochial Church Councils and by the parties concerned at occasional offices.
Palestine in the Aftermath of the Arab Conquest: the Earliest Latin Account
Authors: O’Loughlin Thomas
Published: March 2016

Written, probably, in the early 680s on lona, Adomnán’s De locis sanctis has excited interest, and been used as a quarry for facts about the Holy Land, ever since. It purports to report the pilgrim experiences of a ‘bishop of the Gaulish race’ (prooemium, I), Arculf, who, when later on Iona, told of what he had seen in Palestine, Alexandria, and Constantinople. Realising his ‘scoop’, Adomnán set the details down in a permanent record. Within twenty years this formed the basis of a more concise account by Bede, who added a few details of his own about Arculf which have become standard elements of the latter’s biography: the pilgrim, returning home, was blown by a gale on to the western shores of Britain, and thence he travelled to Iona where he told his story. However, while Arculf - through either Adomnán’s or Bede’s account - is the focus of attention in scholarship using these works as evidence, Bede recognized the expertise of Adomnán in the work, and did not reduce him to the status of an amanuensis.
Memorials of the Holy Places and Blessings from the East: Devotion to Jerusalem before the Crusades
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2016

Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre and the liturgy of the Resurrection appear to be the origin of everything.’ Carol Heitz was emphatic about the significance of the Jerusalem ideal in shaping the liturgy and architecture of the Carolingian period. The question of how far this interest in Jerusalem lies behind the origin of the crusades has for a long time been the subject of discussion among historians. Their productivity on the subject has inevitably been increased by the occurrence of the ninth centenary of the preaching of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095. It is agreed by almost all that there was a devotion to Jerusalem in Western Europe in the preceding centuries, but there are profoundly different views about its effect on the decision of Urban II to proclaim the crusade and on the response to his preaching. This paper does not attempt to add to this voluminous debate. It is concerned rather to explore the reasons for the reverence for the Holy Land, the forms which it took, and the changes which took place from the Carolingian period to the beginning of the crusade movement.
History and Memory as Factors in Greek Orthodox Pilgrimage to the Holy Land under Crusader Rule
Authors: Jotischky Andrew
Published: March 2016

Western pilgrimage to the Holy Land can be explained through patterns of evolving spirituality. The development in the eleventh century of a penitential theology in which pilgrimage played a crucial role, coupled with the practical opportunities for travel occasioned by the success of the First Crusade, brought the Holy Land closer than ever. The survival of a strong textual tradition manifested in pilgrimage itineraries, many of which are autobiographical in tone, further contributes to our perception of pilgrimage as an example of medieval religion in practice.
Gregory IX, Frederick II, and the Liberation of the Holy Land, 1230-9
Authors: Weiler Björn
Published: March 2016

Gregory IX is rarely associated with the affairs of the Holy Land. In fact, he is most widely known for initiating the conflict between imperial and papal authority which was to occupy European society for most of the thirteenth century. After all, the conflict with Emperor Frederick II had been among the defining features of Gregory’s pontificate. In September 1227, barely six months into office, he excommunicated Frederick, and in 1241 he died after a failed attempt to try Frederick before a general council. Consequently, the period of concord between 1230, when peace was made with Frederick in the Treaty of San Germano, and March 1239, when the Emperor was excommunicated for a second time, has been described as an interlude, a breathing space, allowing both Frederick and Gregory to muster the means and arguments for their final show-down.
Crusading Proposals in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Authors: Leopold A. R.
Published: March 2016

One of the striking features of crusading in the aftermath of the fall of Acre (1291) was the sudden profusion of treatises written to offer advice on how the Holy Land could be recovered. In the years between 1290 and 1335, around thirty such proposals were written containing often detailed information about the Mamluks and practical recommendations on how they could be defeated and expelled from the holy places. This practicality distinguishes the ‘recovery treatises’ from other crusading literature. Prior to this period, non-descriptive writing on the crusades tended to be theological, dealing with the justification of crusading or the morals of participants. After the brief flurry of proposals written in the decades prior to 1335, similar works were rare until the treatises outlining plans for crusades against the Ottomans written in the mid-fifteenth century by such authors as John Torzelo and James Tedaldi. However, a few new proposals dealing with the crusade to the Holy Land were written during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This is striking, given the great obstacles posed to such a crusade by the twin scourges of war and plague in Europe, and the greater immediacy of the Ottoman threat. It is possible that these later works were influenced by recovery treatises written between 1290 and 1335, since some of the latter survive in copies made during the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries which were held in European libraries, notably that of the dukes of Burgundy. These copies, and the new treatises on the subject, illustrate that the idea of a crusade to recover Jerusalem continued to exert an appeal on later generations at certain times during the period.
The Holy Land in Old Russian Culture
Authors: Price Richard M.
Published: March 2016

After the Muslim conquest of Palestine there was a comparative lull in Holy Land pilgrimage until a revival in the more settled conditions of the tenth century. The first half of the eleventh century saw a marked increase in the number of pilgrims, most notably but not exclusively from the West, as well as the restoration of the Church of the Anastasis by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX. This context explains the enthusiasm with which in the same century the Christians of Russia, within decades of their adoption of the faith, took up Holy Land pilgrimage with all the enthusiasm of recent converts.
Transplanting the Holy Land: Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, and the New Israel
Authors: Capp Bernard
Published: March 2016

For some Christians in all ages, the biblical Holy Land has possessed far more than historical significance. It has also provided an ideal, a vision, and even a model of the future, a godly society that might be established in some other time and place. This paper looks at England in a period when these aspirations held greater urgency and plausibility than at any other - the English Revolution. It focuses on two strands within that Revolution, the Diggers and Fifth Monarchists, both inspired by the vision of the Holy Land, but in dramatically different ways. Or so it would seem. The two groups are rarely considered together, yet it is possible by doing so to identify unexpected elements of commonality as well as difference.
City on a Hill: American Exceptionalism and the Elect Nation
Authors: Oldfield J. R.
Published: March 2016

Some years ago I was invited to spend a day in an elementary school in Columbia, South Carolina. The day began, as I imagine every day began, with the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. The children then sang a song, a ditty really, which began as it ended with the simple refrain: ‘I am special’. Later I was shown some of the work the class had been doing. Across the back of the room were pinned up the children’s attempts to answer a question that had been exercising me, namely what was special about the United States. Some of the responses were fairly predictable. America was special, one seven-year-old wrote, because it was a democracy. Others singled out freedom or liberty as their country’s unique virtue. One brave soul boldly asserted that America was special because Americans were rich, while another thought the secret had something to do with happiness.
The Vatican, Palestinian Christians, Israel, and Jerusalem: Religion, Politics, Diplomacy, and Holy Places, 1945–1950
Authors: O’Mahony Anthony
Published: March 2016

The years 1945–9 were a time of profound political and social transformation for Palestine. Few other periods in its history match these changes, which left no community unaffected. The overwhelming Palestinian-Arab Christian and Muslim community was reduced from a majority to a minority, subject to the rule of a staunchly nationalistic Jewish and Zionist state. The events of 1948–9 were particularly devastating. A large number of Palestinians became refugees, including approximately fifty to seventy per cent of the Palestinian Christian population. Nearly half of the Christian community of Jerusalem had lived and had their businesses in the more modern and developed western sector of the city until Israeli occupation; their property was sequestered after they fled or were compelled to leave. Most of them were forced to seek refuge in the Old City, in monasteries and other Church buildings. Many others were forced to flee elsewhere, some leaving the former Mandate territory altogether.
Pseudo-Macarius and the Messalians: The Use of time for the Common Good
Authors: Burns Stuart K.
Published: March 2016

In the year AD 431 the Council of Ephesus anathematized the ‘Messalians’ (Syriac) or ‘Euchites’ (Greek) – both terms meaning ‘those who pray’ – referring to them as ‘impious’ and ‘contaminating’. A defining characteristic of this group was their emphasis on constant prayer. The Messalian phenomenon, which originated in Syria and Mesopotamia, spread to Armenia and Asia Minor during the late fourth century, causing concern amongst the ecclesiastical hierarchy of many areas. In condemning the movement in AD 431 the Council of Ephesus confirmed the judgement of the synods of Antioch (c. 380) and Side (c. 390) that the Messalians, who were also known as ‘enthusiasts’, were a dangerous and divisive group who rejected work and discipline for the sake of prayer and individual advancement. The Messalians could be considered negligent and wasteful in their use of time.
Work and Play in Sacred Music and its Social Context, c. 1050–1250
Authors: Boynton Susan
Published: March 2016

In the central and high Middle Ages, liturgical singing was a form of work, even if it is absent from the typology of ‘work’ as understood by modern historians. The notion of the ‘three orders’, dividing society into those who work, those who pray, and those who fight, does not acknowledge the laborious character of the medieval monastic horarium. On occasion, however, singers could also experience the liturgy in a lighter vein. Clerical celebrations during the Octave of Christmas transformed musical work into its mirror image, resulting in musical play that was structured in the image of work, as illustrated by cathedral ordinals and liturgical dramas. Indeed, the opposition between the strictly maintained daily liturgical structure and the release from routine was the central ludic element of the annual festivities – the crossing of the boundary between the use and the abuse of liturgical time. To demonstrate the significance of that boundary, this paper will analyse texts that show the perception of singing as work, and then turn to sources demonstrating the process by which liturgical material was subverted into play.
Fit to Preach and Pray: Considerations of Occupational Health in the Mendicant Orders
Authors: Montford Angela
Published: March 2016

Following their foundation in the thirteenth century, the mendicant Orders came to occupy an increasingly important role in the religious life of the medieval city. The mendicant spiritual mission and way of life was arduous, and the prayer and preaching which filled (or ought to have filled) a friar’s working and waking hours demanded both strength and stamina. As a result of these demands, the leaders of the Orders had to ensure that those men whom they admitted as their brothers were physically capable of undertaking their intended duties. This paper accordingly considers the idea of the ‘use and abuse of time’ by approaching some of the questions concerning health and fitness as requirements for the friars of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders.
Time for Prayer and Time for Work. Rule and Practice among Catholic Lay Sisters in the Dutch Republic
Authors: Spaans Joke
Published: March 2016

One shall rise at five in the morning and go to communal prayers at six. After prayer and meditation one shall read the first three canonical hours: matins, lauds and prime – but those who do not have the leisure can also do this over their work.

This is how the Rule of a community of seventeenth-century Dutch Catholic lay-sisters started. Theirs was a very flexible rule, designed to accommodate both wealthy sisters, who could spend much of their time in their devotions, and poorer ones, who had to work for their living. Their Rule provides a good illustration of attitudes towards the use of time among pious Christians in the seventeenth century.
‘A Friendly and Familiar Book for the Busy: William Arthur’s the Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

Sir Henry Lunn (1859-1939), former Wesleyan minister and missionary turned journalist, ecumenical pioneer, and successful entrepreneur, wrote several volumes of autobiography in the first third of the twentieth century. Reflecting some fifty years later on the strengths and weaknesses of the Methodism of his youth in Chapters from My Life (1918), he wrote:

Our pulpits in the ’70s …. had largely lost touch with the Catholic idea of poverty as one of the great virtues. Some years earlier a much-revered President of the Wesleyan Conference had written two widely different books. One was a powerful assertion of the need for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit in Christian work. The other was a glorification of a rich Methodist tradesman. Both books had a large circulation.

The ‘much-revered President’ was William Arthur (1819-1901), President of the Conference in 1866, and his ‘two widely different books’ were Tlie Tongue of Fire (1856) and The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett, late ofKingswoodHill (1852). The Tongue of Fire, hailed as a spiritual classic in the nineteenth century and much reprinted then and thereafter, examined the role and importance of the Holy Spirit in Christian life and work. The Successful Merchant, written four years earlier and equally successful in publishing terms, was more controversial in subject-matter and message. As will be seen, it attracted mixed reviews, and some contemporaries shared Henry Lunn’s disquiet at the portrayal of the central character. Arthur himself dedicated the book ‘to the young men of commerce’, and claimed that his purpose was to meet the need for a Christian ‘Commercial Biography’, thereby encouraging informed reflection on the relationship between faith and work. This paper seeks to place The Successful Merchant, described by its author as ‘a friendly, familiar book for the busy, in context in the genre of Methodist biographical literature, in the social and ecclesiastical setting of mid-nineteenth-century Wesleyanism, and in the debate on work and wealth which has been a strand in Methodist identity, history, and historiography since the days of the Wesleys. First, however, some attention must be given to the book itself, its author, and its hero.
From ‘God-Bearer’ to ‘Mother of God’ in the Later Fathers
Authors: Wright D.F.
Published: March 2016

The interest of this paper lies in the distinction between θεoτόкoς (‘Theotokos’), ‘God-bearer’, and words or phrases which are more precisely translated as ‘mother of God’, especially μήτηρ θεoυ̂ (‘mētēr theou’) and θεoμήτωρ (‘theomētōr’) in Greek andmater Deiin Latin. It concentrates on the usage of Greek and Latin Christian writers between the later fourth century and the eighth century. For those who believe that ‘mother of God’ is the only proper rendering in English of θεoτόкoς, it must seem a non-issue. Indeed, insofar as they have most of the tradition on their side, this enquiry may appear redundant, impertinent, or sectarian. To leave the matter there, however, would be to leave important questions unasked. Historical study is not best served by the indiscriminate translation of θεoτόкoς as ‘mother of God’, or at least by a translation that fails clearly to distinguish between θεoτόкoς and direct equivalents of ‘mother of God’.
Marian Piety and the Nestorian Controversy
Authors: Price Richard M.
Published: March 2016

Conventional wisdom on the Nestorian controversy has long held that the dispute was over Christ rather than Mary, that the attribution of the title Theotokos (or God-bearer) to the Virgin became a battlefield not because the status of Mary was a lively issue but because of its implications for the doctrine of the Incarnation. Associated developments in Marian piety have been seen as a consequence of the approval of the title at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) rather than its cause. The confidence with which this has been repeated reflects, one may suspect, both a prejudice that Christology was a more worthy subject for debate than Mariology and a presumption that theological debate among bishops must be more important than developments in popular piety where lay women played a leading role. We may therefore be grateful to a series of recent writers who have called the conventional wisdom into question and argued that the main cause of the controversy, as it developed in Constantinople, was a development in Marian devotion during the preceding quarter century.
The Virgin and the Devil: the Role of the Virgin Mary in the Theophilus Legend and its Spanish and Portuguese Variants
Authors: McCleery Iona
Published: March 2016

The story of Theophilus is one of the oldest and most widespread Marian miracles in Christian literature. Theophilus is said to have been a sixth-century priest of Adana in Cilicia, removed from office by a new bishop. Eager to regain his position, Theophilus went to a Jew known for diabolical practices and through him made a written pact with the Devil, sealed with a ring. Theophilus received back his lost status but then began to repent and, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, finally won the document from the Devil. Three days later he died.
Marian Devotion and Confessional Identity in Sixteenth-Century Germany
Authors: Heal Bridget
Published: March 2016

The Virgin Mary provided a powerful focal point for religious identity. During the early modern period Mary-worship marked out one Christian confession from another, rather than Christian from Jew, as in the Middle Ages, or Catholic from secularist, as in more modern times. Intra-Christian disputes over Mary’s status were particularly intense in Germany, the heartland of the Reformation, where Catholic and Protestant lived side by side. This paper will consider the fate of Marian imagery and devotion in three of Germany’s key free cities: Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Cologne. Each city had a different confessional structure: Nuremberg adopted the Lutheran faith in 1525; Augsburg’s council introduced wide-ranging and radical (Zwinglian-influenced) reforms in the 1530s but the city had religious parity imposed on it in 1548; Cologne remained Catholic, despite the presence of a considerable Protestant minority within its city walls and the attempts of two archbishops to introduce a synodal Reformation. These three cities therefore illustrate the spectrum of possible responses of traditional Marian veneration to the pressures of Protestant and Catholic reform. A comparison between them allows us to assess the impact of both doctrinal debate and local circumstance on the expression of Marian piety, and reveals the various ways in which Marian devotion might be used to create confessional consciousness and define religious allegiance.
Bérulle and Olier: Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary
Authors: Wright A.D.
Published: March 2016

After the disruption of French Catholicism during the Wars of Religion of the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholic revival of the seventeenth century famously involved a restoration of Marian piety. When the second monarch of the new Bourbon dynasty, Louis XIII, had dedicated the kingdom to the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1637, the long- and anxiously-looked-for male heir to the throne, the future Louis XIV, was finally born in 1638, easing a sense of crisis which was as much political and religious as purely familial. The widowed Queen Anne of Austria, regent for her son from 1643, subsequently ordered the building of the great Parisian shrine of Val-de-Grace. Yet the conspicuous Marian devotion of the French Catholic revival did not emerge in isolation, but rather in relation to a new and intense Christocentric piety. Central to the latter was the leading figure of the revival, Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), founder of the French Oratory, and subsequently cardinal. The nature of his piety also led to concentration on the priesthood, seen as an essentially male imitation of Christ. In that further context a second major figure must also be considered, Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57), who was certainly influenced by Berulle. But in one historic interpretation that influence was altered, in the direction of a Christian pessimism, by the process of transmission via a third figure, Charles de Condren (1588-1641). Yet the relations between these persons and their priestly and pastoral piety may be open to another interpretation, and one in which the place of a complementary Marian devotion has considerable implications for the much-debated history of seventeenth-century and subsequent French Catholicism.
Mary and Roman Catholicism in Mid Nineteenth-Century England: The Poetry of Edward Caswall
Authors: de Flon Nancy M.
Published: March 2016

In her article on the nineteenth-century Marian revival, Barbara Corrado Pope examines the significance of Mary in the Roman Catholic confrontation with modernity. ‘As nineteenth-century Catholics increasingly saw themselves in a state of siege against the modern world, they turned to those symbols that promised comfort’, she writes. Inevitably the chief symbol was Mary, whom the ‘patriarchal Catholic theology’ of the time held up as embodying the ‘good’ feminine qualities of chastity, humility, and maternal forgiveness. But there is another side to Mary that emerged as even more important and effective in the struggle against what many Catholics perceived as contemporary errors, and this was the militant figure embodied by the Immaculate Conception. The miraculous medal, an icon of Catherine Laboure’s vision of the Virgin treading on a snake, popularized this concept. The crushing of the snake not only had a connection to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; it also symbolized victory over sin, particularly the sins of the modern world. ‘Thus while the outstretched arms of the Immaculate Conception promised mercy to the faithful, the iconography of this most widely distributed of Marian images also projected a militant and defiant message that through Mary the Church would defeat its enemies’.
Marian Revivalism in Modern English Christianity: the Example of Walsingham
Authors: Gill Sean
Published: March 2016

On 19 August 1897, a newly carved image of Our Lady of Walsingham, sent from Rome by Pope Leo XIII, was solemnly installed in the Roman Catholic Church in Kings Lynn. Since no plan of the original medieval shrine survived, the chapel that contained the image was modelled upon the Holy House of Loreto. The following day a pilgrimage led by the parish priest and by Fr Philip Fletcher, one of the prime movers behind the Marian revival, went from Lynn to the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham. This was an important focus of worship since it was the only building to have survived substantially intact near the great pilgrimage site destroyed at the Reformation. In 1934 the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bourne, led the first annual Roman Catholic pilgrimage to the Slipper Chapel, in which a new image of Our Lady of Walsingham based upon that of the seal of the medieval Priory had been placed. In the intervening years, the Anglo-Catholic vicar of Little Walsingham, the Revd Arthur Hope Patten, had created a similar shrine in the Anglican parish church in 1922, and had gone on in 1931 to build a separate chapel with its own sanctuary of the Holy House of Nazareth.
Mary in Contemporary Ethiopian Orthodox Devotion
Authors: Wright Marta Camilla
Published: March 2016

IN a double monastery located near the important pilgrimage place of Lalibela, two nuns I had been interviewing suddenly asked me, ‘Why don’t you ask us about Mary?’ They wanted to tell me about how she cared for them, loved them, and answered their prayers. ‘Whatever we ask her she will give us’, they stated. Mary was important for the Ethiopian Orthodox believers I worked with; it became obvious that Mary has an exclusive place in Ethiopian devotion in general. Most of the time, Ethiopian Christians relate to Christ as a distant saviour and turn to Mary in dealing with their daily lives. Mary is pure in both body and soul, a human being without sin, so that Christ becomes the union of divinity and humanity.
Sancho Ramírez and the Roman Rite
Authors: Smith Damian J.
Published: March 2016

The problem could scarcely have been resolved more precisely. ‘Et tunc intravit lex romana in Sanctum Iohannem de la Penia XIo kalendas aprilis, secunda septimana quad-ragessimae, feria IIIa, hora prima et tertia fuit Tholetana, ora sexta fuit romana, anno Domini millesimo LXXIo et inde fuit servata lex romana.’
Continuity and Divergence in Tudor Religion
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

On a mild spring evening in late April 1537 a group of men from the Wiltshire villages of Mere and Bledney sat drinking ‘without the door’ of a neighbour, William Brownyng. It was St Mark’s Day, traditionally a holy-day on which labour was forbidden, but recently demoted by royal command. Thomas Poole had accordingly gone about his normal work that day, but was denounced by John Tutton as a heretic ‘because he wrought on St Mark’s day’. Poole defended himself by invoking the new law, tempers flared, and Tutton imprudently aired his opinion that the moving spirit behind the new reforms, Thomas Cromwell, was, like all his ‘witholders’ a ‘stark heretic’; ‘Shall I obey the King’s commandment and it be naught?’ he asked. ‘Marry I will not.’
Unity and Diversity as a Theme in Early Modern Dutch Religious History: an Interpretation
Authors: Spaans Joke
Published: March 2016

The Reformation in the Low Countries fascinates both church historians and general historians. Religious change and political revolution went hand in hand. The history of the Reformation is an integral part of the history of the birth of the Dutch nation. Although well-researched, its attraction is renewed with each successive historiographical fashion.
‘Friends have no cause to be ashamed of being by others thought non-evangelical’: Unity and Diversity of Belief among early Nineteenth-Century British Quakers
Authors: Bright Simon
Published: March 2016

One of the most remarkable features in the history of British Quakerism is its ability rapidly to change its theological orientation — changing in succession from an outward looking mass movement, to an inward-looking sect, to an evangelical ecumenically-minded denomination, to a theologically liberal association of like-minded individuals. This paper considers the third of these transitions, the move from sectarianism to evangelicalism. This period of transition provides a useful case study of how the beliefs of a pan-denominational movement (in this case evangelicalism) interact with the existing beliefs of a sect (in this case the corpus of traditional Quaker beliefs known as Quietism). In this case study, particular attention will be focused on Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847), the individual most closely associated with the rise of evangelicalism within British Quakerism.
Diversity and Strivings for Unity in the Early Swiss Réveil
Authors: Stunt Timothy C. F.
Published: March 2016

About thirty years ago, Dr John Walsh observed that ‘the comparative history of the many evangelical or pietistic revivals of the nineteenth century remains to be written” and on this particular front we can hardly claim today to have made very much progress. Any such study could well start with the French-speaking Swiss awakening or réveil, in the second decade of the century, which was soon to have a considerable impact on both French-speaking Protestants in general and, a little later, on British Evangelicals. Reacting against the conservative rationalism of the establishment many of the réveillés turned to a more romantic and experimental form of pietism which was liable to bring them into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities and sometimes caused them to hive off into secession. The young men whose aims and ideals led to these divisions had nevertheless some genuinely ecumenical aspirations and a real concern for some visible expression of the Church’s unity. The movement in French-speaking Switzerland is therefore a good field of enquiry in which the tensions between strivings for unity and separatist diversification can be explored.
The Reshaping of Christian Tradition: Western Denominational Identity in a Non-Western Context
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: March 2016

In August 1841 George Spencer, great-grandson of the third Duke of Marlborough and second Bishop of Madras, entertained two house guests in his residence at Kotagherry. Both were seeking admission into the Anglican ministry. One was an Indian, a former Roman Catholic priest who had begun to question the catholicity of the Roman communion, had joined himself for a while to the American Congregational mission in Madura, but had eventually reached the conclusion, in Spencer’s words, that ‘evangelical doctrine joined to Apostolic Government were only to be met with in indissoluble conjunction with the Church of England’. Bishop Spencer, while keen to employ the Indian as a catechist, felt it premature, ‘in a matter of such importance’, to receive him as a presbyter, even though the validity of his orders was unquestionable. The Indian is not named in the records, and it would appear that he never became an Anglican priest.
Anglican Recognition of Presbyterian Orders: James Cooper and the Precedent of 1610
Authors: Murray Douglas M.
Published: March 2016

One of the foremost advocates of union between the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches at the beginning of this century was James Cooper, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Glasgow from 1898 to 1922. Cooper was the best-known representative within the Church of Scotland of the Scoto-Catholic or high-church movement which was expressed in the formation of the Scottish Church Society in 1892. One of the ‘special objects’ of the Society was the ‘furtherance of Catholic unity in every way consistent with true loyalty to the Church of Scotland’. The realization of catholic unity led high churchmen to seek what Cooper termed a ‘United Church for the British Empire’ which would include the union of the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. This new unity would require a reconciliation of differences and the elimination of diversities: on the one hand an acceptance of bishops by the Scottish Presbyterians; on the other an acceptance of the validity of Presbyterian orders by Episcopalians and Anglicans.