bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Problems of the Church Historian
Authors: Brooke C. N. L.
Published: March 2016

The members of some newly formed academic societies peer forward into the future with a nice mixture of enthusiasm and uncertainty: enthusiasm for a subject in which they are so fanatically interested that they have dared to found yet another society; uncertainty whether the world at large will admit that the subject exists, whether it will be accorded proper academic respectability. We share, I hope, this enthusiasm; but we have no grounds for uncertainty. It was the study of the Church’s history, from within, which did more than anything else to lay the foundations for the critical study of historical sources, most notably in the work of Mabillon and the Maurists. The study of the Church’s history, and most particularly the history of its founder, rocked the world in the nineteenth century, and played a large part in providing the intellectual grounds both for modern belief and for modern disbelief. The Church’s history has, in the past, provided the locus classicus of the problem of historical bias: is it possible, the question has been asked times out of number, for historians of different persuasions to agree in the study of the early Church, or of the Reformation? The question is a real one; we cannot confidently say more than that they can, without much difficulty, talk the same language; that true scholars nowadays will not think of not talking the same language. And this fact reveals the extraordinary power of reconciliation which the study of the Church’s history has had. It does not always reconcile; the common pursuit of truth did little to foster good relations between Coulton and Gasquet. But this spirit of reconciliation is clearly a feature of our age. It is part of a much larger movement, of which we are all witnesses. I have seen with my own eyes a Jesuit father give a public lecture in Winchester College; I have not seen, but millions of my fellow-countrymen have, Catholic and Anglican metropolitans sitting side by side in cosy amity in a television studio. We all know how limited, in terms of visible reunion, is the significance of these events; but the movement towards reunion among Protestant churches and towards better relations among all the sane branches of the Christian family is one of the striking historical phenomena of our age; and a movement (if I may strike a personal note) of hope and joy. Beyond doubt the study of the Church’s history and the dominance of the historical outlook over the last century and a half have much to do with this.
Arminianism and Laudianism in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Parker T. M.
Published: March 2016

It is, I suppose, an indication of the general bewilderment caused by the apparently abrupt appearance of a new and strangely named religious party in the England of James I, the Arminian, which makes one’s pupils occasionally describe the High Churchmen of those days as ‘Armenians’. It is a pardonable mistake. They are vaguely aware that many have regarded Arminianism as a theological heresy. They have no doubt also heard rumours that the Armenians are regarded by most of the rest of Christendom as heretical. Hence the natural confusion.
The Archbishopric of Lichfield
Authors: Godfrey C. J.
Published: March 2016

It must have been exceedingly galling to Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, greatest of eighth-century English rulers, one comparable in terms of personal ascendancy with Charlemagne, that his midland kingdom, though politically the master, was ecclesiastically the servant of Kent. The archbishop of Canterbury, he would be well aware, kept princely state and coined his own money, and with the decline of the Kentish kings held an increasing political power. A hostile archbishop could be a serious obstacle to the overlordship of the Mercian king in Kent, and indeed Jaenbert, archbishop during the greater part of Offa’s reign, was a supporter of the Kentish king, Egbert II, a ruler distinctly shaky in the matter of loyalty to Offa. It seems to have been about 765 that Offa’s overlordship was recognised in the south-eastern kingdom, and from this time onwards he would be increasingly restive under the commanding position of the archbishop of Canterbury. It seems clear that Offa decided to reduce this power, and this could best be done by the establishment of an archbishopric for Mercia, able to rival or even outdo Canterbury. A precedent had already been set in 735, when the bishop of York, Egbert, secured the pallium, and Offa doubtless thought that his dignity deserved what the much inferior kingdom of Northumbria had obtained. So much was possibly in his mind; all he wanted was a favourable opportunity to implement his plan.
The Letters of Pope Innocent III to Ireland
Authors: Dunning P.J.
Published: March 2016

The purpose of this short communication is to call attention to an attempt to establish a definitive calendar of Pope Innocent III’s letters to Ireland, and also to indicate very briefly the value of those letters. The two chief ways in which papal letters have been transmitted are through originals or through copies. Copies of letters have survived in a variety of ways: in monastic or episcopal cartularies, in the rolls of royal chancery, in collections of canon law, but for this period mainly in the official papal registers.

The dispersal of monastic archives during the Reformation period, together with the deliberate destruction of papal letters after 1536, partly explains why comparatively few original papal letters of medieval popes to the British Isles have survived. For Ireland, only five original letters of Innocent III are at present known to exist. Two of these are confirmations of property: one to the monastery of St Andrew of Stokes of its possessions in Ireland; and the other to the convent of Graney. The three remaining letters are connected with the peace settlement between Pope Innocent III and King John.
Mixed Marriages in Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century
Authors: Nicol D. M.
Published: March 2016

The Church always demanded that the two partners to a marriage should be not only of the Christian faith but also of the same creed and dogma. Marriage with infidels and Jews was declared illegal; but so also was marriage with heretics and, in Byzantine law, with ‘gentiles,’ or those not within the orbit of the Byzantine Church and Empire. The fourteenth canon of the Council of Chalcedon forbade an Orthodox Christian to contract ‘a marriage with a heretic woman’; the seventy-second canon of the Council in Trullo repeated this prohibition, adding that such a marriage, if contracted, should be dissolved; and in the twelfth century the Byzantine canonist Theodore Balsamon ruled that the female partners in such marriages should be excommunicated. These warnings were solemnly reiterated in the imperial legislation of Byzantium from the time of Justinian onwards.
Peter Gunning, 1613–84: Scholar, Churchman, Controversialist
Authors: Jukes H. A. Lloyd
Published: March 2016

The architects of the Restoration Church Settlement were, it is alleged, those divines whose loyalty and High Church opinions had driven them into long and bitter exile with their sovereign. Considerable attention has been focused upon these men by recent research. A number of the younger divines, however, did not go into exile, but laboured diligently in the cause of king and Church throughout the period of the Commonwealth. Their influence upon the eventual settlement of ecclesiastical affairs, if settlement it may be called, was considerable and merits further attention from historians. Among those who remained in this country throughout this period was Peter Gunning, whose consistent loyalty to the crown and devotion to the Church of England was rewarded after the king’s restoration by his appointment successively to the sees of Chichester and of Ely.
The Theology of Graduation: an Experiment in Training Colonial Clergy
Authors: Hinchliff Peter
Published: March 2016

Nowadays when ‘Executive Officers’ and ‘Councils for Evangelical Strategy’ plan a ‘Younger Church’ one of the things they worry about most is the training of an indigenous clergy. In the nineteenth century men were not so self-conscious about missions. You took the Gospel to the heathen. You relied upon clergy coming from ‘home.’ Even where there was a small population of white colonists, they did not often expect to have to produce their own clergymen. Of the fifty or sixty Anglican clergymen who served in South Africa between the second British occupation of the Cape and the appointment of the first bishop (1806-1848), only one was born in the colony—and he was a white man.
The Churchmanship of Samuel Wilberforce
Authors: Newsome D. H.
Published: March 2016

Do you remember the Very Reverend Dr Brownside in Newman’s Loss and Gain?

As a divine, he seemed never to have had any difficulty on any subject; he was so clear or so shallow that he saw to the bottom of all his thoughts. ... He was a popular preacher; that is, though he had few followers, he had numerous hearers.

We may grant that Newman did not intentionally malign his former friends and enemies. To hint as much would be, as he himself assured James Stephen, ‘to act the part of the good lady in the Spectator, who turned The Whole Duty of Man into a manual of personal slander’. And if the image of Samuel Wilberforce flashed through Newman’s mind as he drew this caricature—though it is mere surmise that it did—then undoubtedly he covered up the mischievous thought by endowing Dr Brown-side with a physical frame and a particular brand of theological ineptitude as far removed as possible from the actual appearance and acknowledged teaching of the celebrated bishop of Oxford.
F. D. Maurice and the Contemporary Religious World
Authors: Christensen Torben
Published: March 2016

In 1838 Frederick Denison Maurice introduced himself to the English public through his great work, The Kingdom of Christ; or, Hints on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitution of the Catholic Church. In this book he attempted to show that all men’s searchings, yearnings, and longings would be satisfied in the Church of England, by its ordinances, worship, and doctrinal standards. The Established Church represented the solution to all the enigmas of human existence.

In many ways The Kingdom of Christ was a difficult book to master. To all appearances there was an indistinctness in the argument and an obscurity of language. But it had the touch of originality. Above all, whether Maurice could be clearly understood or not, it was evident that he spoke with passion and authority, as a man entrusted with a message from God to the contemporary world. He was convinced that he had been given the task to call back to the truth the religious world, which had not grasped it.
Episcopacy and Reform in England in the Later Sixteenth Century
Authors: Collinson Patrick
Published: March 2016

On the second day of the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, King James I rebuked Dr John Reynolds of Oxford in words which are almost painfully familiar. A Scottish presbytery, pronounced the royal theologian, ‘as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil,’ and there followed what a Scot later remembered as ‘that unkoth motto,’‘no bishop, no king.’ The king’s bon mot so perfectly epitomises an important principle of Stuart policy that it may seem an act of pedantry to ask whether in fact the proposals which provoked it included the extirpation of bishops. But Dr Barlow, author of the Summe and substance of the conference, seems to have appreciated that Reynolds had spoken of no such thing. The king was ‘somewhat stirred,’ he explains, ‘thinking that they aymed at a Scotish presbytery.’
Erigena’s Conception of the Sacraments
Authors: Walker G. S. M.
Published: March 2016

This footnote to the eucharistic debate of the ninth century is perhaps worth attempting for two reasons. In the first place, Erigena the philosopher occupies a highly individual stand-point. As a layman, nullis ecclesiasticæ dignitatis gradibus insignitum, he avoided the influence of the Gallican liturgical tradition in which, as nowhere else at the time, Christ’s real presence was stressed together with an actual change in the consecrated elements. In the second place, the only adequate account of his ideas is that provided by Geiselmann; and even this suffers from a failure to apprehend the full significance of the philosophical background to Erigena’s thought.
Lollard Survival and the Textile Industry in the South-east of England
Authors: Davis J. F.
Published: March 2016

There is nothing new in the observation that cloth workers are frequently to be found in heterodox movements. The participation of weavers and other textile artisans in popular heresy on the continent has been amply demonstrated, extending from the popular response to Gregory VII’s denunciation of simony and married clergy, and the first stirrings of the heresy of the Free Spirit in the Rhineland, to Flagellants, Taborites, Storchites, and the militant Anabaptism of the sixteenth century. In England, Professor Dickens has noted the local Lollard tradition existing in the textile villages of south-west Kent where Edward III had settled John Kemp and his Flemish artisans in 1331, Cranbrook, Tenterden, and Benenden becoming notable centres of dyed broadcloth manufacture. In explaining the connection between textiles and the survival of Lollardy, Professor Dickens has stressed the mobility of the textile worker, while centres of rural industry had a relatively independent status in the medieval scene, which may well have led to relatively in dependent thinking. Regular mobility is best typified by the middleman who usually operated on a fairly local level, regional self-sufficiency in wool supply not really being broken down until the mid-sixteenth century.
The Notion of the Church in the Writings attributed to King James VI & I
Authors: Peters Robert
Published: March 2016

I preface this essay by saying that it owes the form of its title to an article by Dr D. H. Willson, of Minnesota, entitled ‘James I’s Literary Assistants,’ published in The Huntington Library Quarterly, VIII (1944–5), 35-57. In this article Dr Willson argues interestingly, though not entirely conclusively, that all but some six of the writings commonly attributed to James I are in whole or in part the work of his literary assistants. Impressive as Dr Willson’s arguments frequently are, they do not demolish the existence of at least a ‘Jacobean school of theology’ within which such men as Montague, Casaubon, Andrewes, and even du Moulin (in favour of whose authorship of A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings Dr Willson’s argument has much to commend it) do, in fact, reflect the views of the King himself. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Dr Willson has over-stated his case, and that the divines he lists as part authors, at least, were really scholarly research workers: royal servants producing evidence to support their master’s theories. On such an assumption we can continue to refer to what ‘James’ says.
Two Fragments of a lost Liturgy?
Authors: Cuming G. J.
Published: March 2016

When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1661, almost the last item to be added was the General Thanksgiving. ‘On Saturday, 14 December’ (only a week before the Book was signed), ‘between the hours of 8 and 10 a.m., the Reverend Father the Lord Bishop of Norwich [Edward Reynolds] introduced and delivered into the hands of the Lord President a form of a certain prayer conceived by him at another time concerning thanks to God for general mercies to be used publicly.’ So the Proceedings of the Upper House of Convocation, which then tail off with the tantalizing words: ‘After this prayer had been read aloud and some discussion held thereon, the Reverend Father, etc.’ The normal procedure in 1661 for additions to the Prayer Book, as opposed to alterations, was to entrust their compilation to a committee whose chairman duly introduced the new form, when completed, into the House of Bishops. There is, however, no trace of such a committee’s being appointed to devise a general thanksgiving. By 14 December the section of the manuscript text headed Thanksgivings was already written out in full, and no space was left for further additions. Reynolds would seem to have acted on his own initiative.
An Unpublished Diary of Archbishop William Wake
Authors: Bennett G. V.
Published: March 2016

It was naturally a matter of some concern to the pupils and friends of the late Dr Norman Sykes when it became known recently that the Lambeth Library had acquired a manuscript diary of William Wake for the years of his episcopate as bishop of Lincoln and for the first ten years of his tenure as archbishop of Canterbury. The diary was, of course, quite unknown to Dr Sykes, and it seems right that there should be some critical examination of it in relation to the magisterial two-volume biography of Wake, which was published in 1957.
The Cost of Establishment: Some Reflections on Church Building in Manchester
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

The problem of the balance between the Establishment and Dissent in the nineteenth century has not attracted much attention among historians, crucial as it was to much of church life and politics too. The mushroom growth of Dissent between 1790 and 1850 was plainly related to the social cataclysms of that period, though the precise nature of the relation is still far from clear; and by the time of the census of 1851 Dissent had attained a rough numerical parity with the Establishment. After 1850 the Church establishment was never (in spite of some gloomy prognostications) in real danger. Indeed, in two important respects the situation changed in her favour.
Episcopal Control in the Mediaeval Universities of Northern Europe
Authors: Cobban A. B.
Published: March 2016

Episcopal control proved to be a very mixed blessing for the mediaeval universities of northern Europe. When tempered with understanding and restraint, episcopal power was a most benevolent force which could serve to promote the best interests of nascent university structures. In so many instances, episcopal aid was a veritable sine qua non of university survival. For example, it is hard to imagine that the fifteenth-century Scottish universities could have survived at all without the sustained, enlightened treatment that they received at the hands of their episcopal sponsors. In this sense, the term ‘episcopal control’ bears misleading connotations. For the Scottish bishops had no thought of effecting a permanent episcopal stranglehold over the universities they had brought into being. On the contrary, they freely gave of their wealth and energies in the realization that adequate endowments and organizational maturity would inevitably bring full independent status to these university guilds. To this extent, the bishops who founded the universities of St Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451), and Aberdeen (1494–5) are truly representative of the magnanimous and liberal episcopal outlook which pervaded the university scene in northern Europe towards the close of the mediaeval period. This contrasts strikingly with earlier episcopal attitudes. For in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries episcopal authority had all too often been channelled in a direction aggressively antithetical to the growth of the corporate independence of the university guilds. The notorious efforts of the bishop of Paris and the chancellor of Notre Dame to stifle the independence of the Parisian masters is but an extreme example of the kind of complete divorce that could arise between the academic guild and the ecclesiastical authorities.
Another Cry of Heresy at Oxford: the Case of Dr John Holand, 1416
Authors: Logan F. D.
Published: March 2016

The legal historian can scarcely help but encounter the world of academic learning in his studies. He meets the university teachers among his auctores; he finds the mode of their writing often determined by university exercises; in court records and formulary books he encounters graduates holding offices in the courts; he even finds the occasional wayward student who because of his impecunious ways or his transgression of the peace has been cited to appear in court. It is from a formulary book that a case of more than passing interest has come to light concerning Oxford in the early fifteenth century.
The Literacy of the later Tudor Clergy in Yorkshire
Authors: Purvis J. S.
Published: March 2016

The level of literacy amongst the parochial clergy of the sixteenth century is a matter sometimes neglected and sometimes misunderstood, for the evidence is not wholly clear beyond dispute and still far from complete. Estimates of the general condition may have been affected greatly and unduly by the Tudor convention of overstatement. When Archbishop Lee declared to Cromwell in 1535, in referring to the clergy of his diocese, that no learned man would take the livings there because of the poverty of the livings, and that he did not know more than twelve secular priests in his diocese that could preach, it would be prudent to discover if possible whether this statement is due to overstatement or to some prejudice, or whether it is not far from a true appraisal of the situation. Yet definite evidence of the required nature, free from overstatement or bias, or where overstatement or bias may be detected on sure grounds, is not always easy to find, and beyond all this lies the need for appreciation soundly based of the general position of the clergy in relation both to the Church and to society, which must not be lost to view.
Some Arguments in favour of Plurality in the Elizabethan Church
Authors: Haines R. M.
Published: March 2016

Plurality is, of course, a subject with a long history. One Elizabethan apologist argued that the Old Testament prophets were not tied to any particular synagogue, while St Peter, the Apostle of the Jews, had the cure of the whole nation, and St Paul of the Gentiles, being encumbered with the care of all the churches, a greater plurality even than that of St Peter. Less tendentiously one may add that it engaged the attention of the fathers at Chalcedon in 451, was condemned by the third and fourth Lateran councils, the legatine assemblies of Otto and Ottobon—and many others besides.
Degory Wheare’s Contribution to the Study and Teaching of Ecclesiastical History in England in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Jukes H. A. Lloyd
Published: March 2016

The two great English universities did not consider the study of history to be of sufficient importance to warrant the foundation of specific lectureships until the early seventeenth century. The subject was not considered to be an academic discipline worthy of learned appreciation for its own sake. During the preceding centuries the study of history had been regarded as a most useful adjunct to the study of theology and philosophy. The writings of early historians had been read and, indeed, histories written. Much good work had been done, but on the whole, the study of history had been in the hands of scholars whose main interest lay elsewhere.
St Columban: monk or missionary?
Authors: Walker G. S. M.
Published: March 2016

My subject has been under discussion recently, for example by Ludwig Bieler in the 1966 Spoleto Settimane and at a more popular level by Brendan Lehane in his Quest of Three Abbots. But for me the question was raised fourteen years ago, when I was editing the Latin works of St Columban, and Aubrey Gwynn showed me much kindness in correspondence. He mentioned inter alia the comments of Bishop Galvin, then nearing the end of his long life as a missionary to China. Galvin first went out as a young priest in 1912 to serve a mission in Hanyang. Returning on furlough in 1918, he made a celebrated appeal to the members of Maynooth College for the conversion of the Chinese, as a result of which he was joined by Father John Blowick in founding the Irish Congregation of St Columban, popularly known as the Maynooth Mission to China. Soon appointed Vicar Apostolic, Galvin later became Bishop of Hanyang, and stayed in his diocese under a series of trials, persecution, and house arrest, until he was expelled from the country in 1952. He told a friend that he would never have survived his experiences had it not been for a constant memory of Columban’s example, and he felt that he had enjoyed the saint’s companionship for forty years. Though not an academic scholar, Bishop Galvin is entitled by the circumstances of his life to judge the spirituality of Columban, and he criticized my original statement that his patron was ‘a monk, not a missionary’.
The selection and training of missionaries in the early nineteenth century
Authors: Hinchliff Peter
Published: March 2016

Anyone who studies the techniques and strategy of early nineteenth-century missionaries and (even more) of early nineteenth-century missionary societies can hardly avoid gaining the impression that they suffered from a romantic casualness. It is as if zealous Christians of the period were so convinced that the Lord would guide and provide for the missionary that he really did not need much mundane preparation. Nineteenth-century missionaries often simply disappeared into bush, desert or jungle, stopped when they came to a site where there was food, water and heathen, and preached in whatever language happened to be available.
Some Aspects of Yorkshire Catholic Recusant History, 1558–1791
Authors: Aveling Hugh
Published: March 2016

This paper will be divided into two parts: in the first—and much the shorter—part, I want to discuss the place of Catholic recusant history in general, and that of Yorkshire in particular, in the whole field of English ecclesiastical history of the years 1558 to 1791. The second—and much the longer—part will be a statistical survey of Yorkshire Catholic recusancy.
The Study of the Origins of the Eucharist: Retrospect and Revaluation
Authors: Dugmore C. W.
Published: March 2016

Lest it should seem to some that this is a strange subject for a Presidential Address to an Ecclesiastical History Society, may I say at the outset that I propose to deal with it as an historical and not a theological problem, and, secondly, that in my view the history of the Christian Church must necessarily include the history of how Christians have worshipped God in every age. The Church is a living organism and not merely a human organisation with a hierarchy; general, provincial, and diocesan councils; canons and creeds; patrimony and patronage; social and economic responsibilities. All these aspects of her life, from the study of Church-State relations to the editing of episcopal registers and monastic constitutions are the proper concern of the Church historian, but so too is her inner life—spirituality, asceticism, and worship.
The Papacy as an Institution of Government in the Middle Ages
Authors: Ullmann Walter
Published: March 2016

After reading the title of my paper, you may well have wondered whether anything worth while or useful can still be said about the mediaeval papacy. Your apprehension would certainly be justified, if I were concerned merely with its history, but of recent years the institution has not been so much the subject of purely narrative treatment as of the underlying principles and aims. And here so great a variety of views has been set forth that an outsider might well feel somewhat perplexed by the contradictory views propounded. Why does the mediaeval papacy evoke such divergent interpretations?
A Note on the Great Persecution in the West
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2016

The Great Persecution in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire was relatively short and sharp. Eusebius in both his Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine contrasts the eight long years of repression suffered by the East, first under Diocletian and Galerius and then under Maximian, with the persecution of ‘scarcely two years’ duration’ endured by the Western Christians. In the West, indeed, the persecution of Valerian 257-60 seems to have been longer and perhaps more costly in human lives, and that of Decius more dangerous to the Church.
Cursus in the Roman Canon
Authors: Willis G. G.
Published: March 2016

Anyone reading the Solemn Prayers of Good Friday in the Roman rite is at once struck by the clear distinction which exists between the biddings and the collects of this ancient intercession both in language and in rhythm, and closer examination shows that whereas the biddings are almost destitute of rhythmic endings, showing only four in the nine biddings (two each in Biddings VI and VII), the collects abound in them, and not one of the nine collects is without at least one. This enables us to conclude that the biddings are earlier than the collects. For it is known that Roman liturgical composition, like the work of the papal chancery, conformed to the principles of the cursus from some time in the fourth century until the middle of the seventh. Presence of rhythmic endings is therefore useless for dating a document within this period, but in the case of writings before or after it, attention to the presence or absence of cursus can give a good indication of date. The cursus became the rule in the papal chancery from the time of Siricius (384-98), and disappeared after St Gregory the Great (604), and in the case of liturgical composition it prevailed roughly from 350 or a little later until about 650. The collects of the three ancient Roman sacramentarles abound in rhythmic endings. Dom Mocquereau collected about 1030 clausulae from the Leonine Sacramentary, of which only ten did not conform to the rules of the cursus. The Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentarles show a like adherence to this literary principle, and their prayers nearly all date from within the classic period of the cursus, from the fourth to the seventh centuries.
Bible Illustration and Gregorian Reform
Authors: Brieger P. H.
Published: March 2016

This paper wishes to draw attention to a phenomenon which is of equal importance to the historian of art as to the ecclesiastical historian. In correlating facts which are largely known, it tries to explain the emergence of a new type of illustrated bible at the end of the eleventh century, chiefly in France and in Italy. These giant bibles, usually in more than one volume, were obviously not made for an individual reader who studied the bible in private. Their large size, as well as the richness and content of their decoration, indicate that they were conceived as visual symbols of the authority, the history, and the structure of the Church as an institution, as revealed in the Old and the New Testament. The origin of this new type of illustrated bible is closely connected with the Reform of the eleventh century, and it appears first in the diocese of Rheims, though its example was followed rapidly throughout western Europe.
Archbishop Pecham and the Decrees of Boniface
Authors: Gray J. W.
Published: March 2016

At the Council of Lambeth in 1261, Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury promulgated canonical legislation which may fairly be described as a belated retort by the ecclesia Anglicana to the Constitutions of Clarendon. Almost a century before, Henry II at Clarendon had insisted on a formal and public recordatio vel recognitio of the limitations imposed on canonical jurisdiction by English law and custom, and after the murder of Becket he had achieved a concordat with the papacy which amounted to de facto recognition of most of them; now Boniface’s decrees denounced many of those limitations as intolerable, and prescribed in detail the severest canonical penalties for all those—whether clerk or lay—who connived at their maintenance. These decrees provided a constructive gloss on the vague promise in the Great Charter, quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit, et habeat sua iura integra, et libertates suas illaesas, and their promulgation marks the end of a period during which the episcopate had repeatedly tried and failed to get the agreement of the crown and the lay baronage to such a gloss. In short, they were the product of an ecclesiastical revolt which ran parallel to, but was quite independent of, the baronial revolt of 1258.
Dr Arnold and Bishop Stanley
Authors: Howes Graham
Published: March 2016

‘I rejoice,’ wrote an anonymous correspondent in the British Magazine for June 1845, ‘that he had no power to act mischieviously but died, happily for his fame, ruling over boys.’ Such a judgement on Arnold’s career, although delivered two years after his death was equally current during his lifetime, not merely among his enemies—or at least those of them who did not denounce his influence in every sphere—but also among his own friends and disciples. From 1833 and in certain cases earlier, the older and more influential members of this circle—Bunsen, Whately, Keble, J. K. Coleridge, Hawkins, and the Hares—faced with Arnold’s powerful, and for him often undistinguishable, compound of political and theological radicalism, embarrassed by the polemical extremism of the Oxford Malignants, and increasingly aware of his growing public unpopularity, while largely maintaining some contact with him, found themselves not only opposing or ignoring his opinions but also reflecting that it was neither possible nor desirable that he should occupy a more conspicuous position beyond his headmastership. ‘I love Dr Arnold,’ Crabb Robinson quoted Wordsworth as telling Mrs Arnold, ‘he was a good man and an admirable school master, but he would make a desperate bad Bishop’. Wordsworth, although a firm Tory, also spoke for the many liberals whose confident predictions that Arnold’s elevation to the bench was purely a matter of time had gradually evaporated.
Popular religious beliefs and the late Roman historians
Authors: Momigliano Arnaldo
Published: March 2016

Students of historiography have become increasingly gloomy in their evaluation of the Greek founding fathers of historiography. All the limits, the shortcomings, and the failures of conventional history writing – the histoire événementielle of French terminology – have been laid at the door of Thucydides. Herodotus has escaped obloquy, either because he offered a promise of variety, curiosity, humour and sensitiveness which Thucydides spoiled, or because (as Professor Seth Benardete says in a very recent book) ‘his foundations are not those of modern historiography’. Thucydides has become the great villain of historiography in so far as he identified history with political and military events. Professor Moses Finley and I may in the past have said some unkind words about Thucydides – so did the late Professor Collingwood. But we are now made to look like mild apologists of Thucydides by Hermann Strasburger. This most penetrating interpreter of ancient historians has treated Thucydides’s approach to history as the survival of a prehistoric mode of thinking, for which war was the most important event. According to Strasburger, Thucydides excluded das Humanum from history and therefore derived his scale of values from ‘prescientific and ultimately precivilised, prehistoric strata of thought’. Strasburger tries to show that some hellenistic historians, such as Agatharchides and Posidonius, showed more interest in the business of peaceful coexistence than Thucydides ever did, but he is under no illusion about their ultimate success. Thucydides’s historical approach prevailed: deviationists were silenced. The Romans inherited from the Greeks a type of historical writing for which war was the central theme. What Thucydides did not know was not history.
The making of a twelfth-century relic collection
Authors: Bethell Denis
Published: March 2016

The present communication derives from an attempt to make an edition of the list of relics of Reading Abbey to be found in one of the abbey’s cartularies, British Museum MS Egerton 3031, fols 6v–8r. This is a list of no less than 242 relics, a collection which must have been formed between the founding of the abbey in the 1120s and the writing of the cartulary in the 1190s. It can be supplemented by a much shorter list of 24 relics made by the Dissolution commissioner, Dr London, which however only adds one relic not present in the twelfth-century list, a bone of St Osmund of Salisbury, canonised in 1457. If we add the ‘head’ of the apostle Philip, given by king John, and added to the cartulary in a slightly later hand, we can be fairly safe in saying that the abbey acquired all but two of its relics in the first seventy years of its existence, and the list, which is very full and comparatively early as such lists go, has much to tell us of how such collections were made.
‘Wilde wittes and wilfulnes’: John Swetstock’s attack on those ‘poyswunmongeres’, the Lollards
Authors: Haines Roy M.
Published: March 2016

Until the pioneer work of Dr G. R. Owst in the 1920s and 1930s English sermon literature was a neglected field. Even today Owst’s two general studies remain largely isolated monuments, the starting-point of those who would pursue the sermon, but not, perhaps, so influential in related fields as their intrinsic worth and astonishing thoroughness would appear to merit.

As Owst pointed out, James Gairdner’s four-volume work on Lollardy failed to take account both of unpublished material in episcopal registers and of an extensive sermon literature in manuscript. It was by means of the sermon that Owst himself was able to recreate much of the social background of fourteenth and fifteenth-century England. A prominent element in that background was Lollardy.
Some thoughts on the development of a lay religious consciousness in pre-Civil-War England
Authors: Schwarz Marc L.
Published: March 2016

One of the most significant aspects of the religious literature written in England in the critical half-century before the Long Parliament was the considerable contribution made by lay writers. Whatever belief one chooses, Anglicanism, Puritanism, mysticism, skepticism, rationalism, deism, a lay representative can be found who espoused it. Whatever type of writing one selects, devotional books, spiritual biographies, polemics, ecclesiastical histories, legal studies, a search of the Short Title Catalogue would readily bring to light a layman who produced such works. From the pietist John Norden to the firebrand William Prynne, to the contemplative moderate Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, the age abounds with a rich variety of lay religious opinion.
The Social teaching of archbishop John Williams
Authors: Knox R. Buick
Published: March 2016

In English history the seventeenth-century upheavals were of great importance in leading to parliamentary government, religious toleration and autonomous science. In both popular belief and scholarly teaching the Puritans have been given much credit for these developments. However, the process was much more tentative and complex than has often been supposed. For example, Milton is remembered as a prophet of popular liberty but his experience in the practical affairs of government drove him to aim at government by a virtuous aristocracy which was most likely to arise from among those who had property and the consequent time to spare for political activity. The recent awakening of interest in the more extreme sectarian and revolutionary movements on the Continent and in England has brought into sharper focus the relative conservatism of many of the Puritans and has given the English Civil War and its aftermath the appearance of a rift within the landowning and propertied classes. Science owed much to the current questioning of tradition and of authority but it also owed not a little to the diligence of several royalist clergy and laity who in their years of unemployment during the interregnum devoted themselves to scientific observations and experiments; the genius of Sir Christopher Wren was maturing during these years. Families and individuals were often torn by conflicts of loyalties. There was the loyalty to the possibility of a better and more balanced society free from ecclesiastical impositions and from the exercise of power without responsibility; there was also the loyalty to the existing structure of society which, for all its faults, was a fence protecting the country from mob rule and communal chaos. Many changed from side to side in the years before, during and after the Civil War and they did so not simply out of a prudential desire to be on the winning side but because they were apprehensive of the revolutionary trends in the movement in which they had got involved.
Tradition and temerity: papal attitudes to deviants, 1159–1216
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

The fourth Lateran council of 1215 represented a watershed in the official attitude towards heresy. It marked the end of a period of considerable flexibility and real experiment in dealing with dissident movements. For nearly sixty years, the Church had been seeking possible solutions to the problems posed by the formation of new religious groups which not only deviated in various ways from orthodox belief but which also failed to conform to accepted social patterns within the Christian community. Tradition and temerity were two elements in papal policy at this time. The tentative developments of the pontificate of Alexander III were given positive direction by the energetic actions of Innocent III who examined some of these groups to find a way by which they might be contained within the Church and thus allowed to fulfil their vocation. But at the same time, the Church was becoming institutionalised and its framework more rigid. The freedom of manoeuvre of the pope was limited. The episcopate and the regular orders saw Innocent’s actions as inimical to the hierarchical structure of the Church and, therefore, brought the whole weight of traditional opinion and influence to bear against the continuation of such policies.
Some aspects of lollard book production
Authors: Hudson Anne
Published: March 2016

It has recently been observed that ‘the corpus of surviving lollard literature is regrettably small, and it is to be found in the volumes of Wyclif’s so-called English writings and a few other printed and manuscript works’. To one concerned to re-edit the vernacular lollard literature the position seems otherwise: the corpus is formidably large, the printed material inadequately represents the state of the texts so edited, and there are a large number of other works still in manuscript. The printed material, if grouped together, would extend to perhaps five bulky volumes, in all about 2400 pages; a rough estimate of the vernacular texts now known suggests that this is perhaps only a fifth of the evidence available. Moreover, the editors were ignorant of a large number of the manuscripts of the works they printed, and hence could not assess the circulation of the texts: to give an example, Arnold used only one manuscript of what I shall call the standard lollard sermon-cycle, with fitful reference to three others, whereas now thirty manuscripts are known, together with a further three containing a modified series based on the original set. It is also impossible from the existing printed editions to gain any picture of the views of the lollard authors: only extensive commentary will reveal the implications of remarks made and vocabulary used.
Thomas Rudborne, monk of Winchester, and the council of Florence
Authors: Greatrex Joan G.
Published: March 2016

One of the ways in which historians show their wisdom is by their reluctance to make general, definitive pronouncements. Is there anyone among us, for example, who can say with certainty that the spirit of ecumenism abroad today is deeper and more prevalent than in any preceding age? The history of ecumenical councils is the history of the Church’s constant striving to reconcile heretics and end schism. Furthermore, it is surely not true to say that concern for the unity of Christendom has been confined in the past only to the small group of council delegates who for spiritual, theological and often, unfortunately, political reasons were, so to speak, professionally involved. However, before I am anathematised for expounding on a negative generalisation let me hasten to draw your attention to the ecumenical interests of Thomas Rudborne, O.S.B.
Julius II and the schismatic cardinals
Authors: Ullmann Walter
Published: March 2016

It would seem that in the assessment of the forces prevalent on the eve of the Reformation too little attention has been paid to the determined steps which a number of cardinals initiated in 1511 when they took it upon themselves to convoke a general council at Pisa. The cardinals and the ensuing council have never had a good press. In fact there seems a unanimous condemnation of their initiative: they were labelled schismatics paradoxically because they tried to prevent a schism; they had proved themselves, so it was alleged, as mere instruments of French expansionist policy and had acted against the interests of papacy and Church prompted as they were by personal considerations and animosity against Julius II. It seems almost ‘heretical’ to question this general verdict.
Lincolnshire 1536: heresy, schism or religious discontent?
Authors: Bowker Margaret
Published: March 2016

The Pilgrimage of Grace has received much attention: besides the massive study of the Misses Dodds, both professor Knowles and professor Scarisbrick have devoted many detailed pages to it, and its importance as a challenge to the Henrician régime is not in question. What continues to perplex generations of scholars is why an outbreak of this kind should have occurred in the autumn of 1536, and whether the explanations for it should be primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) sought in the fields of administrative, economic, social or religious history. If religion is the key, is the Pilgrimage best understood as a rebellion by ‘conservative’ catholics who disliked the recent religious innovations, or of progressives who sought for further and more far-reaching reforms? Is it a heretical or schismatic movement or neither? The problem was clearly stated in a paper to this society by professor Dickens, and it has been the subject of local studies and detailed papers ever since. These studies have focused attention on the importance of regional differences in the Pilgrimage. They have shown clearly that our understanding of it will not be advanced further unless we are prepared to attend to these differences, and to the whole structure of local politics which accompanied them.
The Family of Love and the diocese of Ely
Authors: Heal Felicity
Published: March 2016

Few of the major heretical movements of continental Europe have found permanent homes in England. One of the periods when it seemed most likely that they might do so was the years between the Henrician reformation and the growth of native separatism towards the end of the sixteenth century. The persecution of continental anabaptists, sectaries and spiritualists in their native lands forced many of them into exile in England; an exile which they often used to continue their evangelistic work, as well as to maintain their own versions of the radical reformation. They found a ready reception for their beliefs among certain sections of the population of south-east England; notably, but not exclusively, the artisans. Devout but ill-disciplined study of the Bible, the lack of protestant preachers, and the social dislocation of Tudor England, all facilitated the missionary work of the radicals. A majority of the preachers were Netherlandish by origin, and continued to look to the Low Countries as the source of their inspiration; none more so than one of the most interesting of the spiritualist sects, the Family of Love.