bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bishop Alexander and the Jews of Jerusalem
Authors: Irwin Patrick
Published: March 2016

The Devastation reached Palestine on 20 January 1842. She brought with her Michael Solomon Alexander, first Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. The bishop was originally to have been transported to Palestine in HMS Infernal. At this his Lordship demurred and the Admiralty obligingly thought again. So it was that HMS Devastation was the carrier of the bishop to the Holy Land. The Admiralty’s assistance was supplemented by Mr Arthur Guinness, who in the first of his firm’s timely benefactions to the Anglican church had provided without charge a supply of stout.
Tolerant bishops in an intolerant Church: the Puseyite threat in Ulster
Authors: Kerr S. Peter
Published: March 2016

It is surely ironic that while the ‘spoiliation’ of the Irish Church in 1833 provided the initial rallying cry for the Oxford Movement, neither Tractarian spirituality, theology nor its later liturgical innovations ever really took any serious hold on that Church. It is perhaps even more paradoxical to note that though Alexander Knox, one of the forerunners of the movement was a lay member of the Church of Ireland, other sons of that Church, notably Robert Dolling, the notorious ritualist slum-priest; Dowden, the high-church bishop of Edinburgh; and Tyrell, the Catholic modernist, all made their careers outside Ireland. As Bishop Alexander was to comment, perhaps with the more colourful ritualists like Dolling in mind, the Church of Ireland had never to bear the cost of discovering that the liturgy had ‘lips of fire’; though perhaps that is not quite accurate, for, as I hope to show, fear of the heat from those ‘lips of fire’ was to be a major disruptive influence in the life of the Established, and disestablished Church in Ulster.
Toleration and Persecution in colonial Natal
Authors: Brain J. B.
Published: March 2016

Natal was the second acquisition of the British Empire in Southern Africa. While the Cape Colony was acquired permanently in 1814, and the Orange River Sovereignty temporarily in 1848 only to be abandoned in 1854, Natal was annexed reluctantly but permanently, for mixed strategic and philanthropic reasons, in 1844. The White population at this time was a few thousand, the Black about eighty thousand. The only missionary work that had taken place up to this time was that of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had established two stations in Zululand in 1835, and the Church Missionary Society. In the period before the annexation they had had little success among the Zulus in Natal, and none at all in Zululand because of Dingane’s attitude to them. All left Zululand in 1838 and the missions were not reopened until the 1860s.
The persecution of George Jackson: a British Fundamentalist Controversy
Authors: Bebbington D. W.
Published: March 2016

The debate surrounding the appointment of George Jackson to a chair at Didsbury College in 1913 has been the chief theological controversy of the twentieth century in British Methodism. It forms an instance of an effort to extinguish alleged theological error, an attempt at persecution within rather than outside the church. It was, as contemporaries complained, a heresy hunt, comparable in some respects to the suppression of Modernism in the Roman Catholic Church in the previous decade and in other respects to the outcry over the appointment of Hensley Henson to the Anglican episcopate four years later. The issue was, in fact, most similar to controversies over the legitimacy of biblical criticism that took place in Scotland in the later nineteenth century and in America over a much longer period. Fundamentalists argued that Jackson was unsuitable for the appointment because he was prepared to doubt the historical accuracy of the Bible. The debate and its aftermath raised questions about the limits of toleration, revealed the balance of forces on the propriety of doctrinal discipline and contributed to shaping the destiny of evangelical Protestantism.
Religion and Social Control in the Soviet Union 1945–1964
Authors: White Gavin
Published: March 2016

Why have churches in the U.S.S.R. been harassed in recent years? It has been supposed by many that if Stalin stopped most persecution during the Second World War, then things under Khrushchev could only improve. Instead they deteriorated, and all liberties of Soviet citizens received more respect except the religious.

A common answer has been that the Soviet authorities were horrified by the continued hold of religion which they considered to be a threat to Marxism. Such a view is quite popular in the west where a clash of ideologies, with Christianity triumphing over Marxism, consoles churchmen who cannot find such a triumph in their own society. But this assumes that the Soviet rulers consider Christianity to be a religion based on certain tenets, and as Marxists they cannot be expected to do so. For them religion is primarily an instrument of social control.
Christian Asceticism and the Early School of Alexandria
Authors: McGuckin J. A.
Published: March 2016

This paper offers three considerations: a) the Jewish ascetical tradition in the life of Jesus and the primitive Gospel tradition; b) the Alexandrian system offered by Clement and Origen, which through developing monasticism did so much to set the tone of ascetical doctrine throughout the ancient Christian world; and c) what relation, if any, survived between Jesus and his great Alexandrian disciples in this matter, after the lapse of a century and a half. It is thus a study in continuity and discontinuity.
Romuald – Model Hermit: Eremitical Theory in Saint Peter Damian’s Vita Beati Romualdi, chapters 16–27
Authors: Phipps Colin
Published: March 2016

Saint Peter Damian stands among the most important exponents of the revitalised eremitism which played so prominent a role in the religious reforms of eleventh-century Italy. Afterwards cardinal-bishop of Ostia, papal legate and doctor of the church, he was from 1043 prior of the eremitical community of Fonte Avellana, which he had first entered in 1036/7 and for whose constitutions he was so largely responsible that he can be counted virtually as its refounder. Fonte Avellana, however, owed its origins, probably in the 990s, to Saint Romuald of Ravenna. The community derived the general tenor of its spirituality from his, and it is clear that the image of the saint which Damian was able to build up impressed him deeply. The Life of the saint, which he wrote not later than 1042, was the first major work in what was to grow into his considerable corpus, and far exceeds in length any of his later hagiographical products. His image of Romuald became his own model. In the process, the image seems to have become imbued for its part with the colouration of Damian’s own concerns. The whole Life took on a shape and a structure determined not by Damian’s hard knowledge of the man but by his schematisation, his programme, of Romuald’s spiritual growth. The Life is the vehicle of a kind of argument.
Monastic Friendship and Toleration in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Life
Authors: McGuire Brian Patrick
Published: March 2016

Friendship is a commonplace of monastic life. What more congenial environment could be found for the formation and cultivation of friendships than the protective recesses of monastic cloisters? Here existed the time, charity and mutual concern so painfully absent in the outside world. In the cloister men could get to know each other and to experience each other in the fellowship of Christ. Under a mild and understanding abbot, they could discover, as Ailred of Rievaulx did in the twelfth century, that God is friendship.
The Rule of Saint Paul, the First Hermit, in late medieval England
Authors: Davis Virginia
Published: March 2016

Throughout Europe in the late middle ages there was a perceptible interest in the way of life and ideals believed to have been followed in the early centuries of Christianity. There was little that was new in this interest; reform movements within the Church from the eleventh century onwards had frequently followed such a path. Accompanying this interest however was a desire by laymen to live in a pious and holy fashion; not to enter the coenobitic life rejecting the world as they might have done in earlier centuries but to live a religious life while remaining attached to the outside world. Perhaps the best known manifestation of this spirit was in the emergence of the Brethren of the Common Life in Northern Europe in the fifteenth century; another manifestation of the same kind can be found in the lower echelons of English society in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the widespread appearance of men who vowed to adopt the lifestyle of the desert fathers while performing labouring functions useful to society – as hermits, following the rule of Saint Paul the first hermit.
‘Prayers fit for the time’: fasting and prayer in response to national crises in the reign of Elizabeth I
Authors: Kitching C.J.
Published: March 2016

Special prayers, and masses and processions with a special intention, were well established in English tradition before the Reformation as weapons against adversity, and appear to have been increasingly encouraged under Cranmer’s influence until the Edwardian Articles and Injunctions put paid to processions and sounded a note of caution also about fasting. The English Litany, conceived as a procession in 1544, became a static observance from 1547 but in either mode was (and is) a treasury of supplications against most conceivable adversities. The successive Books of Common Prayer went further than the pre-Reformation service books in furnishing prayers for use in times of dearth and famine, war and tumult, plague and sickness and for a time obviated further special prayers and ceremonies. But scarcely were the 1559 Prayer Book and Act of Uniformity promulgated than the staple ingredients of the former and the minimum requirements of the latter for church attendance on Sundays and feast days came to be seen as inadequate to meet spiritual needs in a crisis. Church and state authorities began regularly to print and distribute special prayers to supplement the Prayer Book, tailored to each emergency: both prayers of supplication while a crisis lasted and prayers of thanksgiving when it was over.
Voltaire and the Monks
Authors: McManners J.
Published: March 2016

‘You can never cross the Pont Neuf without seeing a monk, a white horse and a whore’, ran the proverb – which was hard luck on the two ladies who stood there and saw the first two but could not find the third: ‘Pour la catin, vous et moi nous n’en sommes pas en peines’. Members of the religious Orders in their costumes of black, white, brown and grey were a feature of the scene in the streets of every town, and everyone had a monk or nun among their relatives. Voltaire’s sardonic examples of the characteristic features of the civilisation of his day included them: ‘man will always be what he is now; this does not mean to say, however, that there will always be fine cities, cannons firing a shot of 24 lbs weight, comic operas and convents of nuns’. Routine gossip slipped naturally into analogies drawn from the cloister – she is as fat as a monk; they were like children at a window crying out when they first see a Capucin friar; you are like a novice who climbs the walls looking for a lover, while the nuns in the chapel pray for her. Voltaire uses monastic titles in jocular descriptions of himself and his friends. He is the ‘old hermit’, the ‘lay brother’, the ‘solitary’, ‘brother Voltaire, dead to the world and in love with his cell and his convent’, and once, when his play Octave et le jeune Pompée was a flop, he decided to be, for a while, ‘the little ex-Jesuit’, ‘le petit défroqué’. He hopes ‘brother’ Helvétius will be elected to the Academy: ‘these are the most ardent prayers of the monk Voltairius, who from his lonely cell unites himself in spirit with his brethren’. The badinage of monastic seclusion hinted at protest at his long exile from Paris; it also served to mask the social distinctions, which, in spite of familiarity and, even, friendship, were never forgotten between the court grandees and the intellectuals. It was easier for Choiseul to write to him as ‘mon cher solitaire’, just as Voltaire avoided routine sycophancy by writing, with exaggerated deference, to Richelieu as ‘mon héros’.
William John Butler and the revival of the Ascetic Tradition
Authors: Frances Ann
Published: March 2016

William John Butler, sometime vicar of Wantage in Berkshire and founder of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, gave a concrete and contemporary expression to an aspect of the ascetic idea current among followers of the Oxford Movement, which was revealed in their desire to restore monastic life in the Church in England. The Community founded by Butler was one of the earliest of the indigenous Anglican communities for women. In no way could the desert ideal or the later pre-Reformation models of religious life be reconstructed, nor would they have been appropriate in the climate of the time. However Butler believed, as had Newman, Pusey and others, that the basic principles of monastic life remained valid and they could and should find their place in the contemporary Church of England. It was believed that the Church had the grace and the resources of devotion within itself to give birth to the religious life anew, to continue its nurture and promote its development. Certainly the enhanced spirituality resulting from the example of deep devotion of the Tractarians themselves and that of their followers engendered a religious atmosphere in which new spiritual adventures were made possible.
Archbishop Davidson, Bishop Gore and Abbot Carlyle: Benedictine monks in the Anglican Church
Authors: Kollar Rene M.
Published: March 2016

Aelred Carlyle (1874–1955) believed that his vocation was to re-establish Benedictine monasticism in the Anglican Church. His early attempts in London and Gloucestershire failed, but in 1902 the future suddenly looked promising. During that year, he attracted the attention of Lord Halifax, who invited the small group of Anglican monks to settle at his estate in Yorkshire. Here, Carlyle’s foundation thrived: the membership grew; he enjoyed the support of influential Anglo-Catholics throughout Britain; and after he obtained the approval of the archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, for his revival of Benedictine life, Carlyle was ordained a priest in America. In 1906, the Anglican Benedictines moved to Caldey Island, where Carlyle planned to orchestrate the growth and spread of a grand congregation of Anglican monks.
A Saint and his Money: Perceptions of Urban Wealth in the Lives of Italian Saints
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

In the year 1033, the Bishop of the city of Arezzo in Tuscany awarded to the hermits of Camaldoli all the tithes of buying and selling by citizens of Arezzo, urban and suburban, and by all merchants and dealers in the diocese. In so doing he gave classic expression to the hierarchy’s view of money-making. ‘I wish you to know what a great sin it is not to give God tithes of the profits of your business dealings, which you can rarely or never conduct without grave danger of fraud or crime.’ The poorest peasant, he went on, did not presume to avoid paying tithe on the fruits of the just labours of his hands. The merchant, indeed, had urgent need to give generous alms over and above the tithe for the remission of his sins.
The High Cost of Dying: an Analysis ofpro animaBequests in Medieval Dublin
Authors: Murphy Margaret
Published: March 2016

This examination of the bequests made by medieval Dubliners for the health of their souls is based almost exclusively on evidence drawn from wills of the period. The medieval ecclesiastical sources of Dublin are by no means abundant, and wills in particular have survived badly. Only one register of wills remains, covering the period 1457 to 1483 and containing seventy-four testaments. To this may be added a further twenty-four wills, found in a variety of ecclesiastical and municipal sources, ranging in date from 1270 to 1500, giving a total of ninety-eight wills in all.
Ecclesiastics and Economics: Poor Priests, Prosperous Laymen, and Proud Prelates in the Reign of Richard II
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

It is a truth widely recognized, though perhaps insufficiently emphasized, that late-medieval England contained large numbers of unbeneficed clergy. The difficulty of studying such men lies in their elusiveness; they made little impact on the obvious source for a study of the English Church during this period, the bishops’ registers (apart from their appearances in the ordinations lists), for these are essentially concerned with benefices and benefice-holders. There is, however, one class of material which tells us much about the unbeneficed, namely the assessments made in connection with clerical poll-taxes. Levied in the years 1377, 1379, 1380, and 1381, these poll-taxes demanded what was virtually a clerical census on each occasion. The resulting returns are a boon to church historians and provide an unparalleled amount of information about the unbeneficed clergy, described in these documents as ‘chaplains’ and ‘clerks’. If we are to have a realistic picture of the late-medieval Church, the unbeneficed should receive more attention. Moreover, it is suggested that an examination of this class can throw light on the relationship between the Church and wealth during this period.
The Benefice as Property: an Aspect of Anglo-papal Relations during the Pontificate of Martin V, 1417–31
Authors: Harvey Margaret
Published: March 2016

In the reign of Pope Martin V relations between the papacy and the English Crown were dominated by the struggle of the papacy to obtain the repeal of the Statutes against Provisors. The outlines of the story are well known, and recently Dr Davies has filled in the political details, particularly concerning bishoprics: Martin V, having tried from the outset of his pontificate to persuade the Crown to repeal die Statutes, finally lost patience and, in 1427, suspended the Archbishop of Canterbury as legatus natus until Chichele pleaded the papal case before Council and Parliament.
Gold and Images
Authors: Aston Margaret
Published: March 2016

In a letter of December 1523 describing his troubles with Julius II in the previous decade, Michelangelo related how the Pope had commissioned him to paint the twelve Apostles in the lunettes of the Sistine Chapel. Soon after starting his design the artist became convinced that the project was off to a bad start. ‘I told the pope that if the Apostles alone were put there it seemed to me that it would turn out a poor affair. He asked me why. I said, “because they themselves were poor”.’
Broken Angels: the Response of English Parishes to the Turkish Threat to Christendom, 1543–4
Authors: Kitching Christopher
Published: March 2016

After several years’ prevarication, for diplomatic and matrimonial reasons, Henry VIII finally promised the Queen of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands, in July 1543 (just two days before his marriage to Catherine Parr) that he would send 40,000 ducats to assist the Emperor in his fight against the Turks. It was a drop in the ocean as far as Charles V was concerned; his yearly revenue was averaging about 2¼ million ducats at this time. But that was insufficient to meet his expenses, and another 40,000 ducats was by no means to be spurned. In truth, it was modest enough too on the part of the English King as a contribution to so high a cause as the defence of Christendom, being equivalent to £10,000 sterling. But it was £10,000 which Henry could ill afford given his other commitments particularly on fortifications and military expenditure, and it seems to have been intended only as a loan, to be financed, when the logistics had been worked out, by bills drawn on London bankers and on the merchants of the staple at Calais.
‘The Right of the Church’; the Clergy, Tithe, and the Courts at York, 1540–1640
Authors: Sheils W. J.
Published: March 2016

ACertificate From Northamptonshire, published anonymously in 1641, proclaimed that the current attacks being made on the bishops had a secret purpose behind them: the abolition of the requirement to pay tithe, whether to cleric or layman. ‘If the bishops and their courts were overthrown’, so the author claimed, the people would be freed from paying tithes, ‘which is the secret thing which our common free holders and grand jury-men do so much aim at’. The writer’s claims concerning the motives which led men to demand the abolition of episcopacy may have had some truth in them, but he was to be proved wrong about the consequences of such abolition; as, indeed, a better informed observer pondering the extent of lay involvement in the ownership of tithes might have been able to predict. Despite several close calls and a variety of imaginative proposals for abolition or reform, tithes remained and survived the demise of bishops, deans, and ecclesiastical courts, standing alongside glebe as one of the twin pillars of the maintenance of the parochial ministry.
The Wild and Woolly West: Early Irish Christianity and Latin Orthodoxy
Authors: Bradshaw Brendan
Published: March 2016

In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.
Tristernagh Priory: The Establishment of a Colonial Monastic House in the Lordship of Meath (c 1200)
Authors: Eagar Brian
Published: March 2016

This paper is concerned with the establishment of a monastic house in a recently colonized area by the lord responsible for the settlement of the land. The importance of the priory to the local economy will be examined in the forty years after its foundation, when settlement in the area was stabilizing and the initial flow of settlers appears to have stopped. The role of the monastery in the process of colonization will be studied and the priory considered as an instrument of colonization. The paper will also attempt to establish the nature of the relationship between the founder of the house and the priory in the latter’s early years of existence.
Fifteenth-Century Irish Provincial Legislation and Pastoral Care
Authors: Burrows Michael A. J.
Published: March 2016

It is rewarding, if usually fairly difficult, to discover to what extent the views of medieval bishops on matters of devotion and church discipline impinged upon the spiritual lives of ordinary lay people. In the case of Ireland, provincial legislation probably provides the best available means by which to attempt this. Although the most important pastoral relationship within the Church was always that of priest and people in the parish, both parties were under the guiding hand and oversight of the bishop. It is to this ancient episcopal role as overseer, in die pastoral context, that the surviving sources direct us most.
From ‘Victims’ of the Melk Reform to Apostles of the Counter-Reformation: The Irish Regular Clergy in the Habsburg Dominions
Authors: Walsh Katherine
Published: March 2016

In a lengthy and favourable review of Pádraig A. Breathnach’s edition and analysis of the legendary account of the foundation of the Irish monastery at Regensburg, Libellus defundacione ecclesie consecrati Petri, Daniel Binchy remarked of the history of the Schottenklöster that, whatever interest it might have for German medievalists, it ‘is a mere footnote—or perhaps rather a postscript—to the remarkable story of the early Irish missions to Europe’. However, Binchy greatly over-estimated the interest of German-speaking medievalists in the case of that particular Schottenkloster which is central to the present paper, namely that in Vienna. Since the well-documented but overtly apologetic study by Patrick Barry, which appeared in 1927, the Viennese Schottenklster has been studied mainly by members of its own monastic community, and by scholars pursuing the sort of questions with which local and economic historians generally turn to the archives of formerly rich and powerful monastic landlords. The raison d’être, aspirations and fears, triumphs and failures of adherents to a particular monastic tradition are of marginal interest to students of land tenure and administration.
Irish Monks in Germany in the Late Middle Ages
Authors: Fiaich Tomás Ó
Published: March 2016

Everyone has some acquaintance with the Irish missionaries and scholars who from the sixth until the ninth century abandoned their homeland to go on a peregrinata pro Christi nomine and left a lasting imprint on the history of many countries in Western Europe. They included St Columba of Iona, Apostle of Scotland († 597), St Aidan of Lindisfarne, Aposde of Northern England († 651), St Columbanus of Luxeuil and Bobbio († 615), St Gall, after whom Sankt Gallen in Switzerland is named († c. 630), St Fursey († 650) and St Fiachra († 670) of northeast France, St Feuillen († 652) of Belgium, St Kilian and his companions of Würzburg († 689), St Fergal or Virgilius of Salzburg († 784), whose twelfth centenary was celebrated four years ago, and several others.
Geoffrey Keating’s Eochair Sgiath An Aifrinn and the Catholic Reformation in Ireland
Authors: Cunningham Bernadette
Published: March 2016

The name of Geoffrey Keating is familiar to generations of students of Irish language and literature. His prose works are fine examples of seventeenth-century Irish writing. He was credited by scholars of Irish with having saved from oblivion many stories of the Gaelic heroes of old in his magnum opus, the Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, a compendium of knowledge on the history of Ireland. Writing in the early part of the seventeenth century, when the native Irish system of learning and patronage of scholars was disintegrating, Keating synopsized many manuscript sources for the history of Ireland into a flowing text full of stories and curiosities. His writings were frequently transcribed and are preserved in countless manuscript copies.

Kearing’s literary stature has meant that his tracts were more read for their language and style than studied for their content and it may appear curious at first sight to discover that this father figure of early Irish history and the preserver of the Irish language also wrote two theological tracts, on a continental Catholic Reformation model. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Kearing’s background. Although subsequently hailed as a champion of Gaelic Ireland, Keating was not a product of that society. In fact he was of Anglo-Norman (Old English) descent. He was ordained as a secular priest and was educated at two of the continental colleges set up to train Irishmen for the priesthood, Bordeaux and Rheims, where he came under English Jesuit influence. The precise dates of his sojourn on the continent are not known, but pre-date 1619. It is thought he was born about 1570 and died about 1644, spending most of his life as a priest working in Munster.
The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600-1641
Authors: Gaffney Declan
Published: March 2016

The name controversy, I confess, is the name of a disease; but necessary … to be known first, to make a readier way for the cure; and he that cares not which way disputes about religion go, brands himself with the palpable neglect of his faith and religion. Not as though all were equally interested in the study of controversies, but that everyone may be ready to give an answer to every man that asks him a reason of the hope that is in him.
Gideon Ouseley: Rural Revivalist, 1791-1839
Authors: Hempton David
Published: March 2016

Gideon Ouseley was born in the year of John Wesley’s second visit to County Galway, was ‘converted’ in the year of Wesley’s death, and died on the one hundredth anniversary of Wesley’s introduction to field preaching. A Methodist rural revivalist could have no better pedigree. I first encountered him, not in a dream as many Methodist contemporaries seem to have done, but in the correspondence of Joseph Butterworth, MP, to whom Ouseley sent graphic details of the nature of Irish Catholicism for his controversial speeches against Roman Catholic emancipation, and in the records of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, in which Ouseley stands out as the most flamboyant missionary of his generation. In terms of published works Ouseley’s career can also be traced through his prolific anti-Catholic pamphleteering and in the pages of William Arthur’s unexceptional Victorian biography. But by far the most revealing record of his life and work is to be found in the manuscripts collected by John Ouseley Bonsall, a Dublin businessman who hero-worshipped his missionary uncle.
Evangelical Cross-Currents in the Church of Ireland, 1820-1833
Authors: Stunt T. C. F.
Published: March 2016

It is a commonplace to observe that the life of the Anglo-Irish community was profoundly altered by the Act of Union in 1800, but this was particularly true in its ecclesiastical effects. Whereas in the eighteenth century the antipathy between Protestant and Roman Catholic had diminished and even as late as 1824 the possibility of a union of the Church of Ireland with the Roman Church was seriously being discussed by older churchmen, the effect of the Act of Union was to isolate the Anglo-Irish. Reluctantly they had accepted the Act and now, dependent upon it for their survival, many of them took refuge in a ‘garrison mentality’ which invested their ascendancy with almost sacred connotations by which their community was transformed into a ‘faithful remnant’ with a mission to bring light and truth to Ireland.
England, Ireland, and Rome, 1847-1848
Authors: Kerr Donal A.
Published: March 2016

In the spring of 1848 a number of respected English vicars-general, William Bernard Ullathorne of the Western District, John Briggs of the Northern District, and Thomas Brown of Wales decided that one of them, together with Fr Luigi Gentili, the Rosminian missioner, should proceed immediately to Rome. Their object would be to support, by personal intervention with Pius IX, a memorial drawn up by Briggs, signed by twenty Irish and three or four bishops in Great Britain, which was solemnly presented to the Pope by Thomas Grant, President of the English College in Rome. This memorial ran:

we most... solemnly declare to Your Holiness that British Diplomacy has everywhere been exerted to the injury of our Holy Religion. We read in the public Papers that Lord Minto is friendly received... by Your Holiness At this very time, however,... the first Minister of the British Government, the Son in Law of Lord Minto is publicly manifesting in England, together with his fellow Ministers, his marked opposition to the Catholic Religion and the Catholic Church. Another cause of our serious alarm is the very general hostile and calumnious outcry now made in both houses of our Parliament and throughout Protestant England against the Catholic Priests of Ireland, falsely charging them with being the abettors of the horrible crime of murder whilst as true Pastors they are striving t o . . . console their... perishing people and like good shepherds are in the midst of pestilence giving their lives for their flocks.
‘Too Peculiarly Anglican’: The Role of the Established Church in Ireland as A Negative Model in the Development of the Church Missionary Society’s Commitment to Independent Native Churches, 1856-1872
Authors: Williams C. Peter
Published: March 2016

Henry Venn, the CMS honorary secretary between 1841 and 1872, is rightly regarded as the great exponent of self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing churches. I have argued elsehwere that his principles took many years to assume their final shape and that, when they did, they contained what was regarded as an ecclesiological anomaly—that there should be separate bishops for different races in the same geographical area. Between about 1856 and 1872 Venn became increasingly daring in his proposals, abandoned his support for the idea of a single European bishop wherever there were European settlers and was instrumental, not only in having Samuel Crowther appointed as the first black bishop in West Africa or in responding positively to suggestions of an Indian bishop for South India, but also in proposing, both in India and in China, that the needs of a truly culturally integrated independent ‘native’ church demanded that its structures should be separated from those of the imported European church.
Popular Piety in the Lodèvois in the Early Twelfth Century: The Case of Pons De Léras
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

In 1854 the Congregation of Rites suppressed the feast and cult of the ‘blessed’ Pons de Léras. At its suppression the cult of ‘Saint’ Pons had been formally part of the liturgy of the diocese of Lodève for a little over a century: there are no records of any earlier popular devotions. The inclusion of Pons in the liturgy of the diocese was the work of Mgr Jean-Georges de Souillac (1732–50), the penultimate pre-revolutionary bishop of Lodève, and the composition of a liturgical office for the feast of the blessed Pons de Léras (18 September) was the work of Souillac’s successor Mgr Jean-Félix-Henri de Fumel (1750–90). It is difficult to see a pre-eminent piety at work in this distinguished patronage. Even the most assiduous of recent local historians of the Lodèvois, who makes it plain that he would be glad to see the cult re-instated, is quite clear that the eighteenth-century proclamation of the ‘blessed’ Pons was une affaire d’État et non pas d’Église, owing nothing to papal approval, which was never sought, and confined solely to Lodève.
Poverty and Politics: The Motivation of Fourteenth Century Franciscan Reform in Italy
Authors: Nimmo Duncan
Published: March 2016

After the undoubted achievements of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth is usually considered a period of spiritual recession for the major institutions of the western church. The regular orders, on the whole, suffered along with the rest, and apparently none more so than the family of Saint Francis. Like its fellows, it experienced the general decay of discipline known as conventualism. In part, however, this was but the symptom of a more fundamental malaise, a diffuse but widespread disenchantment with the ideal which, in the previous century, the order had made peculiarly and gloriously its own, that of absolute evangelical poverty; and this in turn, it goes without saying, followed from the catastrophic double conflict on poverty which filled the first quarter of the fourteenth century: the ‘practical’ conflict over observance between the spirituals and community, which led many spirituals into heresy and revolt against the church; and the ‘theoretical’ conflict which embroiled pope John XXII with all shades of opinion in the order, and came likewise to a heretical and schismatic end. No wonder, then, if the fourteenth century seems, for the Franciscans, an epoch peculiarly bleak.
The Problems of Luther’s ‘Tower-Experience’ and its Place in his Intellectual Development
Authors: Thompson W. D. J. Cargill
Published: March 2016

The problem of the date and significance of Luther’s so-called ‘tower-experience’ (Turmerlebnis)—the moment of illumination at which he came to his new understanding of Romans 1:17—is one of the longstanding cruces of modern Luther-scholarship. Since the problem was first raised in its modern form by German scholars at the beginning of the present century probably no aspect of Luther’s biography has attracted so much attention or has been the subject of so much controversy: and even to-day, although the nature of the debate has changed considerably in recent years as new arguments and new solutions have been put forward, it still remains one of the central issues in all discussions of Luther’s early intellectual development, not only because it presents the irresistible fascination of an unresolved conundrum but also because in traditional historiography it has always been closely identified with the complex question of when and how Luther arrived at his reformation theology.
The Peregrinations of Marco Antonio De Dominis, 1616–24
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

On 6 December 1616, Marco Antonio De Dominis, the Roman catholic archbishop of Spalato, on the Dalmatian coast, arrived in England. According to Arthur Wilson, he was ‘old and corpulent, unfit for Travel, being almost at his journies end by Nature’, yet he soon began to speak out vigorously against the faith and practices of Rome. Finding himself warmly welcomed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, he accepted several appointments in the church of England—including those of dean of Windsor and master of the Savoy—and became a prominent anti-Roman controversialist. Then, after five and a half years in England, De Dominis, like a wandering star in the Ptolemaic system, ‘went Retrograde, placing himself again in the Roman Calendar.’ What moved De Dominis to undertake so arduous a physical and spiritual journey as that which led him to England, and why, having found an honoured place among ideological allies, did he leave it to go to the very citadel of the ecclesiastical power he had attacked?
Assessing Nineteenth-Century Missionary Motivation: Some Considerations of Theory and Method
Authors: Piggin Stuart
Published: March 2016

‘It is possible that no breed of men and women can be so safely assessed as the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. No other breed, certainly, left more voluminous accounts of themselves to posterity.’ If the volume of documentation is a guarantee of safe assessment then Moorhouse’s bold assertion is particularly applicable to the subject of missionary motivation in Britain in die nineteenth century. Statements of motive, explicitly requested by directors of missionary societies, prayerfully considered and copiously detailed by candidates, and lovingly preserved by missionary-society archivists, might comprise the most voluminous extant documentation on religious motivation (Moorhouse’s boldness is infectious). Furthermore, this vast corpus of primary source material has been thoroughly ransacked by postgraduate students of history and sociology, so that the motives of English and Scottish missionaries for the whole of the nineteenth century have now been explored.
Late Nineteenth-Century Anglican Missionary Expansion: A Consideration of some Non-Anglican Sources of Inspiration
Authors: Porter Andrew
Published: March 2016

More than a decade ago, Max Warren suggested that the nature of protestant missionary expansion in the last quarter of the nineteenth century presented ‘some of the most perplexing features in the history of the modern missionary movement’; but the extensive ‘painstaking research’ which he called for into the metropolitan roots of that movement has hardly yet been forthcoming. Historians have more usually preferred to direct their attention to the impact of western missions outside Europe, and to consider their contribution to the modernisation of the non-European world. This growing body of published research unquestionably aids the would-be historian of metropolitan motives, but—for reasons requiring too much space for elucidation here—also makes his own work the more necessary if the expansive forces within western society are to be clearly understood and placed in perspective.
Dr Henry Cooke: The Athanasius of Irish Presbyterianism
Authors: Holmes R. F. G.
Published: March 2016

Dr Henry Cooke, the Athanasius of Irish presbyterianism, who might fairly be described as the archetypal Ulster unionist political parson, is an obvious subject for a study in religious motivation. Emerging in the 1820s as a vigorous champion of trinitarian orthodoxy, he led a relentless campaign against Arianism in the Belfast Institution, the college in which at that time the majority of Irish presbyterian ordinands were educated, and in his church, until the Arians had withdrawn from the synod of Ulster and, ultimately, the link had been broken between his church and the college. During the campaign he made clear his opposition, not only to theological liberalism, but also to the political radicalism which had characterised the outlook of many Ulster presbyterians in the eighteenth century.
The Failures of Success: Working Class Evangelists in Early Victorian Birmingham
Authors: Robson Geoffrey
Published: March 2016

Autobiography and statistics appear at first sight to be incompatible sources in any study of religious motivation. The former rarely hint at the sociological factors governing religious commitment. The latter are difficult to interpret in terms of individual conviction. Yet the evangelical revival produced an abundance of both. John Wesley in the Arminian Magazine set a fashion which was followed by evangelicals of every brand who published spiritual autobiographies to edify the faithful. Wesleyan methodism also kept careful membership statistics on which scholars like A. D. Gilbert can base a sociological explanation of the rise and fall of denominational religion. Placed side by side the inward and outward evidence gave the impression that statistical success, in terms of ever increasing membership, depended on intense individual conviction in preacher and convert. The Liverpool minutes of 1820 are but the Wesleyan example of a general pattern. Nevertheless this recipe did not guarantee success. It would seem that the challenge to the individual conscience needed to be combined with a strong appeal to a sense of group or class solidarity for any lasting impression to be made. Unfortunately the places where evangelical religion was successful do not always coincide with available autobiographical sources.
The Religious Revival of 1857–8 in The United States
Authors: Carwardine Richard
Published: March 2016

In August 1858 an American minister described the current revival in that country as a ‘Fourth Great Awakening’ to be likened to pentecost, the sixteenth-century reformation and the eighteenth-century awakening in colonial America. His historical judgment was weak, but his euphoria typified the mood of American evangelicals after a year of mass conversions. Particularly through denominational ‘protracted meetings’ and inter-denominational or ‘union’ prayer meetings, all the protestant churches throughout the country shared in the excitement. Even many of the more cautious episcopalians, Unitarians and universalists showed sympathy for a wave of revivals which seemed remarkably well-ordered and free of the ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘human machinery’ of earlier ‘ingatherings’. By the end of annus mirabilis each of the evangelical denominations could report huge accessions: of the largest bodies, the presbyterians (old and new schools) added almost thirty thousand members by examination, the major baptist churches baptised almost one hundred thousand new members, while the two main branches of methodism reported a staggering net increase of nearly one hundred and eighty thousand, a growth of sixteen per cent over the previous year. What had moved Americans to flock to revival meetings and ‘get religion‘ in these numbers?
Otto Dibelius: A Missing Piece in the Puzzle of Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Authors: Willmer Haddon
Published: March 2016

Otto Dibelius is missing in our interpretations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s development in the sense that though well-known, the Berlin general superintendent has been little thought of in this role. Eberhard Bethge in his life of Bonhoeffer and in the collected writings gives enough evidence of their social and ecclesiastical connections throughout Bonhoeffer’s career to provoke enquiry. That Bethge and others have not pursued the enquiry is due in part to the fluctuations of Dibelius’s reputation, especially in the tradition of the Berlin theologians who were young around 1930. Bonhoeffer’s life was written in the shadows of the last period of Dibelius’s life, when he was a prince of the restored evangelical church, the ‘NATO-bishop’ taking a different line in the cold war from many who were finding their prophet in Bonhoerfer.
The Church, Leprosy and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Authors: Palmer Richard
Published: March 2016

In this paper I would like to explore theories of disease and practices of healing in late medieval and early modern Europe, and to focus on two diseases, leprosy and plague. Much of the discussion will be based on Italian evidence since in this period, and especially in the sixteenth century, Italy was in the forefront of European medicine. Physicians were more numerous in Italy than in most European countries, and available not only in cities, but in small towns and rural communities. But disease and healing were not the exclusive concern of the medical profession. The church had not forgotten that healing had theological overtones. Equally there were the governments of the Italian states deeply committed to legislation for public health and to the control of epidemics.
Religion, Social Change, and Psychological Healing in England, 1600–1800
Authors: MacDonald Michael
Published: March 2016

Robert Burton was being as trite as Polonius when he advised his readers that the general causes of melancholy ‘are either supernatural or natural’. Apart from a small and notorious band of sceptics, all of Burton’s contemporaries agreed that mental diseases might be caused by natural accidents or supernatural forces. They attributed misery and madness to a myriad of particular misfortunes and afflictions. Sudden frights and insupportable griefs drove men mad; physical illnesses polluted their bodies and crazed their minds; horrible sins fed festering guilt and exposed them to God’s wrathful judgements; evil spirits and witches tormented them with awful temptations, suicidal desperation, stark insanity, and demonic possession. The defences against the material and immaterial enemies of human happiness were as varied as the sources of misery themselves. Mentally disturbed people were treated with drugs and therapeutic regimens to restore the balance of their humours, with religious counsel and prayer to ease their spiritual afflictions, and with amulets, charms, and exorcisms to protect them against the malignancy of demons and witches.