bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Eirenical Anglicans at the Synod of Dort
Authors: Platt John
Published: February 2016

On Tuesday, 6 November 1618, at a crowded gathering of the states general in The Hague at which the prince of Orange, and count William of Nassau were present, George Carleton, bishop of Llandaff and leader of the Anglican delegation to the forthcoming synod of Dort, opened his address thus, ‘Our Lord and King, Christ Jesus, being about to go to his Father, and being desirous to leave his followers whom he loved, the greatest good that is to be found in this life, bequeathed them Peace. Neither could men desire a better gift from Heaven, nor the Angels declare better tidings from thence, than glory to God in the Highest and on earth peace. This band, by which Heaven is united to Earth and Earth to Heaven has bound the heart of the most illustrious King of Great Britain, in such a manner from Heaven, that in consequence of the great care with which he is obliged to protect and defend the true Religion (as also to promote Peace and Unity among Christian Princes through the whole world; and particularly, most illustrious Lords, the tranquility of your Republic, to which he looks upon his kingdom to be allied by very ancient; and consequently the stricter ties) he has deputed us hither, to the end that we should labour to the utmost of our power for your welfare, and for the peace of your church.’
St Anselm and Those Outside the Church
Authors: Abulafia Anna S.
Published: February 2016

We know from Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi that Anselm would eat little when he sat down to meals with his monks. Instead of having one of his monks read from an appropriate book at mealtimes, Anselm would instruct the community himself. Indeed, Anselm talked so much that, according to his biographer, it would take a separate book to record all that he said. In fact, Anselm’s sayings were collected, and it is to one of these that I wish to pay particular attention.
Le Mouvement hussite devant les problèmes nationaux
Authors: Bylina Stanisław
Published: February 2016

Le médiéviste tchèque connu František Šmahel a développé récemment la thèse précédemment déjà formulée sur ‘les anomalies historiques’ du hussitisme dans lequel il voit ‘une réforme avant les réformes et une révolution avant les révolutions des Temps modernes’. Dans la perspective comparative de l’Europe centrale et occidentale, était également selon lui une ‘anomalie’ la maturité précoce, la grande extension et le sentiment ailleurs inconnu de communauté ethnique en Bohême. Il serait difficile de préjuger dès maintenant la stabilité des ‘anomalies tchèques’ dans les recherches ultérieures sur le hussitisme et l’époque hussite. Il est toutefois certain que les conclusions de F. Šmahel ont présenté dans un nouvel éclairage tout ce que l’on a coutume d’appeler aspects nationaux du mouvement hussite.
The Sense of National Identity among the Marian Exiles (1553–1558)
Authors: Loades David M.
Published: February 2016

Dr Cox and others with him came to Frankfort out of England, who began to break that order that was agreed upon; first in answering aloud after the minister, contrary to the church’s determination; and being admonished thereof by the Seniors of the congregation, he, with the rest that came with him made answer, That they would do as they had done in England; and that they would have the face of an English church….

Thanks to the Brieff Discours, a partisan account published for polemical purposes almost twenty years later, the ‘Troubles’ which began with this gesture form one of the best-known aspects of the Marian exile. However, because of the context within which the compilers of that work were operating, it is usually seen simply as a liturgical conflict between the protagonists of the 1552 Prayer Book, and those of the Geneva rite, which had been printed in English as far back as 1550. In fact, the issues which it raised were far wider, embracing the whole conduct of ecclesiastical affairs, and the nature of the English church.
A Variety of Religious Architecture in Poland
Authors: Chrzanowski Tadeusz
Published: February 2016

Before I attempt a brief survey of the numerous and varied examples of religious architecture in Poland let me mention a few well-known facts. Poland, having grown out of a tribal community, and having early developed a national character, after the Union with Lithuania (first a personal union in 1386 and then a State union in 1569) began expanding rapidly. At the turn of the fifteenth century a new model of parliamentary monarchy was established, a model functioning in an already multinational, federal state, which ceased to be the ‘Republic of Two Nations’ and became instead the ‘Republic of Many Nations’. I do not intend to analyse here all the achievements, changes, and mistakes of Poland, but I would like to stress that between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth century the Poles were in a minority. This minority, however, decided the country’s fate, as it was Polish noblemen (szlachta) who set the political and cultural pace. It has never been accurately assessed what percentage of the whole society the noblemen were, but it must have been high, probably the highest in Europe. According to some sources, the Poles who felt themselves free and regarded Poland as their commonwealth formed ten per cent of the whole population. We should also note that at that time the process of Polonization took place mainly among the nobility, and that the Poles who were in a minority in the Polish-Lithuanian State were at the same time a majority among those who ruled that State. I am not saying that as a Polish nationalist, but as an historian who has a deep respect and friendly feeling for all the nations and denominations which once inhabited this large and unique country. The Union of Lublin put the final touches to this distinctive commonwealth, which appeared too early in the Europe of nationalism and absolutism to survive.
John Wesley and the Community of Goods
Authors: Walsh John
Published: February 2016

And all that believed were together, and had all things common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.

Acts 2. 44–5.

Among the strangest of the rumours circulating about early Methodism was the charge that it promoted the notion of Christian communism—‘the community of goods’. In the early summer of 1739 Lord Egmonc, one of the Georgia Trustees, got wind of the story and after hearing Whiteficld preach at Blackheath pressed him whether, among other eccentricities, he held that ‘all things should be in common’. The same year two anti-Methodist pamphlets raised the same issue, and in 1740 it surfaced again in the papers when another former Oxford Methodist, Benjamin Ingham, was accused by his local vicar of helping to foment a violent riot of Dewsbury cloth workers by ‘preaching up … a community of goods, as was practised by the Primitive Christians’. Ingham was said to urge a sharing of wealth so drastic that his brother had remarked in disgust, ‘if I mind our Ben, he would preach me out of all I have’.
Methodism and Providence: a Study in Secularization
Authors: Richey Russell E.
Published: February 2016

In 1884, the American Historical Association was founded. Four years later, in 1888, the American Society of Church History came into being. The two events, the founding of the ASCH as well as of the AHA, belong to the larger saga of late nineteenth century professional formation. In field after field, amateur and patrician endeavours fell before what seemed a common strategy to consolidate, standardize, resource, institutionalize, and professionalize. The relation of the ASCH to the AHA is instructive. The two organizations shared much. Both drew significantly upon the idiom and structures of German historical scholarship. The guiding spirit of the AHA, Herbert Baxter Adams, plied his German training in a research seminar at Johns Hopkins whose methods and graduates swept historical efforts across the nation into the AHA orbit. His counterpart, Philip Schaff, conceived the ASCH in comparable instrumental and imperialistic terms. German-born, trained by Ferdinand Christian Baur and Johann A. W. Neander, Schaff put an indelible mark on the field of church history. The scholarship attests the leadership and legacy: a 13-volume American Church History Series (1893-7), his own 6-volume History of the Christian Church (1882-92), a 3-volumc Religious Encyclopaedia (1882-4), adapted from that of J.J. Hcrzog, the 3-volumc Creeds of Christendom (1877), and the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, the two series of which ran to 28 and 14 volumes (1886-9, 1890–1900).
Catholic Revival in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: February 2016

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.
‘We Claim our Part in the Great Inheritance’: the Message of Four Congregational Buildings
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: February 2016

It is religious Nonconformity’s fate to be misknown. Where it truly non-conforms the historian of the mainstream must find it an irritant, a tiresomely indispensable footnote to his thesis. For other historians it is its eccentricities which appeal—its Muggletonians and Southcottians, its Ranters too. What is less appealing is its most insistent theme and its chief continuity, the constant fight for due recognition (which means parity) in constant tension with the natural urge to conform. For who is to say when Nonconformity has served its purpose or when conformity is indeed reconcilable with that higher conformity to which each Nonconformist witnesses?
Papal Courts and Courtiers in the Renaissance
Authors: Hay Denys
Published: February 2016

The cultural influence of Rome and the papacy during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries has recently attracted much attention. At the same time, courts and courtiers have come under the scrutiny of a number of scholars anxious to define their function in the cultural sphere. This brief essay is an attempt to lean on such work collectively, so to speak, and it can make no claim to originality of source material or personal research. I should perhaps give the tone and indicate the level of my approach by explaining that the gist of what follows formed a lecture given in December 1986 to the Scottish branch of the Renaissance Society at a meeting in Glasgow. I should like to regard it as well as part of this tribute to James Cameron, also as an expression of my thanks to the late Judith Hook for her work for the Society; she herself wrote an important essay bearing on the topic, albeit at a later period, the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623-44), to which I shall refer later.
The Importance of the Imperial City of Nuremberg in the Reformation
Authors: Seebass Gottfried
Published: February 2016

The question of how a certain historical situation or event arises is doubtless one of the classical questions for any historian. It is true, however, that there can never be a final and exhaustive answer, because any question about origins can only be asked within a specific framework, and can therefore represent only a small section, and never the fulness of all the interwoven factors. Historical events are always based on much more than what we are able to get access to by analysis. Within this complex picture it is even more difficult to assess and determine the weight of individual factors in comparison with each other: only rarely can we produce or, indeed, find comparable situations without the factor in question. The question of the importance of one particular event or phenomenon can therefore only be answered in history by identifying the impulses coming from it.
Calvin’s Latin Preface to his Proposed French Edition of Chrysostom’s Homilies: Translation and Commentary
Authors: Hazlett W. Ian P.
Published: February 2016

One of the traditional puzzles in Calvin studies has been Calvin’s proposed and supposedly French edition of the sermons of the Greek Church Father, John Chrysostom. The date, circumstances, and precise scope of this project have always been uncertain, chiefly because the only evidence for the plan is a substantial fragment of a prefatory introduction in Calvin’s own hand. As yet, no mention of or allusion to it has been found in any other contemporary source. The fact that all we have is a preface, or the first draft of one, suggests that the scheme was abortive. At any rate, no such work was published by Calvin, though that does not prove that he never actually got round to translating the Homilies. It is just as conceivable that no publisher would take it on. But it is likely that the combination of Calvin’s other extensive literary commitments and the heavy demands and vexations of what was a pioneering local and cosmopolitan ministry simply hindered him from realizing his intention.
A Disputed Letter: Relations Between the Church of Scotland and the Reformed Church in the Province of Zeeland in the Year of the Solemn League and Covenant
Authors: Nijenhuis Willbm
Published: February 2016

In the year 1643 the Dutch revolt against Spain was dragging gradually to an end. Repeated attempts by Stadtholder Frederick Henry to take Antwerp had failed. Since 1640 only minor military operations had been undertaken. The demand for peace was growing, but this, at the same time, led to divisions of opinion. During this period of domestic tension the United Provinces became involved in events in England leading to the Civil War.
The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants
Authors: Kirk James
Published: February 2016

In Scotland as elsewhere, Protestant reform began as a clerical revolt within the Established Church. Without exception, the earliest leaders of reform in Scotland were disenchanted ecclesiastics, men whose backgrounds were essentially academic and clerical, men who possessed sufficient technical training and expertise to appreciate, before the sloganizing began, the significance (if not all the implications) of Luther’s academic revolt in 1517, and the relevance of his challenging ideas on salvation and his attack on the ‘treasury of merit’: not even the saints, he believed, had sufficient merit to save themselves. Luther, after all, was an Augustinian friar, priest, university teacher (as, for that matter, were Wyclif and Hus), and doctor of theology before his break with Rome. His thinking merited scrutiny, appraisal, and debate, even if only for refutation; and if nothing else, scholastic methodology had fostered theological speculation and critical discussion within an accepted framework of debate. Besides, Erasmus’s initial reaction to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses was conciliatory: he considered Luther’s beliefs would be approved by all men, apart from a few points on purgatory; and he was later to observe, in 1519, that Luther’s detractors were intent on ‘condemning passages in the writings of Luther which are deemed orthodox when they occur in the writings of Augustine and Bernard’.
‘Not Bishops’ Bailiffs but Lords of the Earth’: Charles the Bald and the Problem of Sovereignty
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: February 2016

The Christian Church’s institutional autonomy, and wealth, were firmly grounded in the law and authority of the Later Roman Empire. The sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code was an ecclesiastical Magna Carta. The great popes of the fifth and sixth centuries knew that the Church existed within the Empire, dependent like all other privileged bodies on imperial government for its sustenance.
‘The Site of King-Making and Consecration’: Westminster Abbey and the Crown in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Authors: Mason Emma
Published: February 2016

‘From the era of its first foundation, this has been the venue for the royal consecration, the burial place of kings, and the repository of the royal insignia, and deservedly named from ancient times as the (spiritual) head of England and the diadem of the realm.’ This claim, made on behalf of Westminster Abbey by the fifteenth-century monk John Flete, is examined here with reference to its history between the reign of Edward the Confessor and that of John.
The Election of Innocent III
Authors: Taylor Maria L.
Published: February 2016

The English chronicler, Roger of Howden, gives a particularly interesting contemporary insight into events in Rome in the last months of the pontificate of the sick and ailing nonagenarian Celestine III (1191-8). If he is to be believed, we have a description of the attempt by a wily old pope to extend his influence beyond the grave. The man he wanted to succeed him was John of S. Paolo, Cardinal Priest of S. Prisca whom ‘he loved for his wisdom, sanctity and justice beyond all the other cardinals.’ As proof of this love and respect, he had already allowed him to act in his own place, undertaking every duty save that of consecrating bishops. In an extraordinary offer, according to Roger of Howden, Celestine even went so far as to express his willingness to abdicate so that the cardinals could appoint John of S. Paolo before his death. All the cardinals, however, ‘with one voice, made answer that they would not be willing to elect him on such conditions and alleged that it was a thing unheard of for the Supreme Pontiff to abdicate.’ In attempting this, Celestine was making a far-reaching claim for papal sovereignty, prefiguring the later suggestion of Augustinus Triumphus, in the early fourteenth century, that the pope had a right to choose his own successor. It was unthinkable that the College of Cardinals in the last years of the twelfth century would so relinquish their right to vote. Any such designation by Celestine would have represented a direct challenge to the position of the cardinals as electors of the pope.
The Byzantine view of Papal Sovereignty
Authors: Nicol Donald M.
Published: February 2016

THE idea of papal sovereignty was foreign to the Byzantines. They had trouble enough trying to understand the Western interpretation of papal primacy. Papal ‘sovereignty’ was beyond them, unintelligible, unreasonable, and unhistorical. It is true that the East Roman Christians, whom for convenience we call Byzantines, did not all live in one generation. Their cultural and political roots were in Constantinople, the ancient Byzantium; and their empire endured in one form or another for 1,100 years, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. In so long a span their ideas naturally evolved and changed, as did their society. But their concept of the order of the Christian world remained stable. It was based upon the formula devised by the first Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, in the fourth century. The formula was an amalgam of pre-Christian, Hellenistic notions of monarchy, with Old and New Testament elements. The Christian Roman Emperor was the elect of God and, as God’s vice-gerent on earth, he ruled over what was the terrestrial reflection, albeit a poor copy, of the Kingdom of Heaven. His patriarchs or supreme bishops of the Christian Empire, especially the Patriarch of Constantinople, his capital city, were the spiritual heads of the Christian world, acting in harmony with him. Church and State were therefore one, indissoluble and interdependent.
A State Like Any Other? The Fourteenth-Century Papal Patrimony Through The Eyes of Roman Law Jurists
Authors: Canning Joseph
Published: February 2016

In the fourteenth century, and notably under Cardinal Albornoz, the papal patrimony began its uneven development into a form of early modern state. As Paolo Prodi has pointed out, these early stages, although interrupted by retrogression caused by the Great Schism, served as the foundations for the construction of the state of the Renaissance papacy. In reality, the popes exercised sovereignty in a state whose origin and nature were essentially temporal: to this extent their regnum was no different from those of secular monarchs. There was, however, a problem impeding the perception of the true nature of the growth of papal state power: a certain ambiguity hung over the papal lands in that the papacy justified its rule both by hierocratic arguments and by reference to grants of jurisdiction from emperors and kings. The spiritual office of the popes could obscure the fact of the kind of state of which they were the sovereign. In the works of the fourteenth-century Commentators on the Roman law, however, there gradually emerged a clear recognition of the direction which the papacy was taking: that the Patrimony of St Peter was no more and no less than a state created by human institution.
Paridis de Puteo: A Fifteenth-Century Civilian’s Concept of Papal Sovereignty
Authors: Perry Diana
Published: February 2016

Sovereignty—suprema potestas—in the later Middle Ages was not blessed with Austinian simplicity: it was a complex and contradictory thing. Held by the ecclesiastical and lay powers, held by pope, emperor, king, and city-state, few populi were subjected to one authority alone. Not only did there exist a hierarchy of sovereign powers in the Western community, de iure and de facto, but the suprema potestas was in itself limited. It was the extent of this limitation and the degree of sovereignty possessed by the various governments which exercised, to a very large extent, the minds of later medieval and Renaissance jurists. A major reordering of the relationship between the spiritual and secular authorities was occasioned with the propounding of the via media by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Thomistic doctrine did much to promote and enhance the importance of civil government at the expense of hierocratic theories, but, as Michael Wilks observes in his fundamental study of medieval sovereignty, it proved to be almost as dangerous to the concept of the societas humana as to that of the societas christiana. Quite simply, as long as moral standards were applied to earthly government, political evaluation was forced into the theological sphere, and so, to some degree, into the realm of papal determination. And to Thomistic influences, as Michael Wilks again remarks, the civilians nearly all succumbed. Laying their claims very largely upon the bases of Roman law and Aristotle, legists expounded a profoundly secular philosophy; but the seemingly logical conclusion—logical, that is, to the modern mind—that secular man was freed from the theological order was not reached. The pope retained both a unique degree of dignitas and a superior degree of authority; he was head of the populus christiana, and this awesome position bestowed upon him certain ultimate rights and responsibilities in the affairs of secular corpora, even though these corpora were sovereign entities. In other words, papal sovereignty, although increasingly restricted and relegated to the realm of theory as the early modern State evolved, none the less remained a potent force; indeed, as it will be seen, in a particular aspect it fulfilled for the jurist a critical need of the young State.
The Cathars and Christian Perfection
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: February 2016

The Church’s Founder enjoined the life of perfection on all his followers, but the Cathars were unique in describing themselves as perfect or as ‘good men’. In all other forms of Christianity it is an observable fact that the more devout church members are, the more they are conscious of their imperfections and lack of goodness. This suggests that Cathar spirituality was very different from that of the mainline Christian churches, and it is this which I want to investigate here.
Fellows and Helpers: The Religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif
Authors: Catto Jeremy
Published: February 2016

[The] persecuted Church though it hath bene of longe season trodden under foote by enemies, neglected in the world, nor regarded in histories, & almost scarce visible or knowne to worldly eyes, yet hathe it bene the true Church onely to God … continually stirring up from time to time faithfull Ministers, by whome alwayes hath bene kept some sparkes of his true doctrine and religion.
The Monastic Orders in Late Medieval Cambridge
Authors: Dobson Barrie
Published: February 2016

Towards the end of his long career Abbot John Whethamstede, for many years the most celebrated Benedictine monk in England, took the opportunity of a letter he was writing to the prior of Tynemouth to engage in rhetorical but equally eulogistic praise of the ‘extraordinary melodies in praise of the Muses’ to be found not only at ‘the Cabalinian font which gushes forth in the midst of Oxford’ but also from ‘the Cirrean stream which runs near the suburbs of Cambridge’. Few historians of England’s two medieval universities have found it altogether easy to share the undiscriminating enthusiasm of the venerable abbot of St Albans for both Oxford and Cambridge. Gordon Leff — not of course at all alone in this — has done much to elucidate the intellectual and institutional life of the university of Oxford only to find the medieval history of his own university of Cambridge so much less rewarding that it rarely figures in his published work at all. Quite why, for at least the first two centuries of their existence, the Cambridge schools should have always remained less numerically significant and academically influential than their Oxford counterparts is still perhaps a more difficult question to answer than is usually assumed. Even more difficult to explain are the changing patterns of recruitment, patronage, endowment and intellectual activity which during the course of the mid and later fifteenth century at long last eradicated Cambridge’s inferior academic status and established an approximate degree of parity and prestige between the two universities. Without much doubt it was only then, during the century or so before the Reformation, that the historian encounters what Mr Malcolm Underwood has recently diagnosed as perhaps the most remarkable and influential of all ‘Cambridge phenomena’. Indeed if one had to choose a particular point in time when that ‘phenomenon’ must at last have become obvious to all contemporaries, even at Oxford, one might do worse than choose the years between 1505 and 1508, when Lady Margaret Beaufort’s transformation of God’s House into Christ’s College ‘took place against the background of an unprecedented number of royal visits’.* It was on one of those occasions, almost certainly on 22 April 1506, that Henry VII rode towards Cambridge, where ‘within a quarter of a mylle, there stode, first of all the four Ordres of Freres, and after odir Religious, and the King on Horsbacke kyssed the Crosse of everyche of the Religious, and then there stode all along, all the Graduatts, aftir their Degrees, in all their Habbitts, and at the end of them was the Unyversyte Cross’.
The Origins and University Connections of Yorkshire Religious, 1480–1540
Authors: Cross Claire
Published: February 2016

In his discussion of the composition of monasteries in the diocese of Lincoln in the early sixteenth century Dom David Knowles wrote ‘that recruits came, so to say, in response to advertisement’, and then went on to add ‘it would seem clear that in the majority of the houses almost all the recruits were local.’ With its profusion of abbeys, priories, nunneries, and friaries Yorkshire provides a great deal of evidence for testing his hypothesis. Fairly confident conclusions can be reached about the geographical recruitment of the Cistercians as they continued to adopt toponymies, while the very considerable number of placenames used as surnames by members of other orders may at the very least intimate their origins in the relatively recent past. The social antecedents of the religious pose a more difficult problem but more random sources, particularly wills, give an indication of the levels of society from which they came. To counteract an impression of excessive localism which undue concentration upon this material might produce, details of their university attendance, degrees, and book ownership have also been included. These northerners belonged to a nation as well as to a region, and the intellectual horizons of a sizeable number of Yorkshire monks, canons, and friars, if not perhaps of many nuns, extended well beyond the limits of their county in the last fifty years before the dissolution.
Holy War, Roman Popes, And Christian Soldiers: Some Early Modern Views On
Medieval Christendom
Authors: Tyerman Christopher
Published: February 2016

Some time in 1608, there arrived at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge a distinguished foreign visitor who, through the good offices of the Chancellor of the University, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, and of Merlin Higden, a Fellow of Corpus, had been given permission to examine a manuscript in the college library. The visiting scholar had secured access to the library through a network of contacts that included his friend, a naturalized Frenchman and diplomat working for Cecil, Sir Stephen Lesieur, and a Chiswick clergyman, William Walter. What makes this apparently unremarkable (and hitherto unremarked) incident of more than trivial interest is that the industrious researcher was Jacques Bongars, veteran roving French ambassador in Germany and staunch Calvinist, and that his text was William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolymitana.
Met on the Via Moderna
Authors: Bossy John
Published: February 2016

Somewhere about 1970 Gordon Leff changed his mind about William of Ockham. Earlier, in the article The fourteenth century and the decline of scholasticism’ and the survey Medieval Thought, Ockham had appeared in the conventional role of demolisher of the scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation; apologist of pure will in God and man; lock-picker of the Pandora’s box of moral and theological bugs in which the teaching of his successors consisted. Sceptic and/or fideist, he might be credited with clearing the way for natural science, and indeed for Renaissance and Reformation; but in himself he was an apostle of negation, carrying a whiff of the diabolic. Leff made public his change of heart in the massive exposition of Ockham of 1975 and the essay, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook, which came out the following year. Ockham was still the author of a ‘metamorphosis of scholastic discourse’ because he had excluded all but empirical knowledge of individual things and had refused to accept that rational proof could be found for more than marginal items of revealed truth. But he had, it seems, believed that ‘nature’ and ‘right reason’ were terms which might be properly used of the physical and moral worlds; random incursions of God’s potentia absoluta (what God might do) into the system of salvation constructed by his potentia ordinata (what God had actually done) were no longer to be anticipated; and Ockham was not responsible for the aberrations of some followers.
William of Newburgh and the Cathar Mission to England
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: February 2016

Born at Bridlington in 1136, William of Newburgh was educated at Newburgh, an Augustinian priory a few miles north of York, where he became a canon. William probably lived at Newburgh for the rest of his life, for the only instance of him travelling outside Yorkshire is one visit he paid to Fínchale. He died between summer 1199 and autumn 1201, leaving three extant writings. This outline of his life is based on John Gorman’s introduction to the only writing by William which has received a modern critical edition, his commentary on the Song of Songs. William’s other writings are sermons, and theHistoria rerum Anglicarum(hereafterHistory). Yorkshire Cistercian patronage envelopes two of the works. The commentary on the Song of Songs is dedicated to Roger, Abbot of Byland, while theHistoryis prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Ernald, Abbot of Rievaulx (1189-99), which states that Ernald had requested the work.
An Archbishop in the Pulpit: Tobie Matthew’s Preaching Diary 1606-1622
Authors: Sheils W. J.
Published: February 2016

It had always been a central duty of the episcopate to preach, and other spiritual functions such as confirmation and visitation, not to mention secular responsibilities at the opening of Parliament and at court, provided ample opportunity to extend the normal pastoral range. Distinguished preachers such as Stephen Langton and John Fisher were regarded as among the finest ornaments of the medieval Church, so that, at one level, Tobie Matthew’s commitment to preaching was part of a long tradition expressed in the careers of distinguished forebears and enjoined in the Scriptures and the Fathers. At another level, the Reformation both shifted the emphasis which bishops were to place on preaching, and changed the context in which it took place.
‘Pure Folkes’ and The Parish: Thomas Larkham in Cockermouth and Tavistock
Authors: Moore Susan Hardman
Published: February 2016

IN the dark days of 1662, ‘one of the yeares of the captivity of the Churches, and of the passion of the ministers of Christ’, Cocker-mouth Congregational Church set down an account of its beginnings during the Interregnum, so that people would know ‘in after times, that somewhat hath been a doing in this corner of the earth in a church way’:
‘Hunting for Souls’: The Missionary Pilgrimage of George Sherwood Eddy
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: February 2016

As I look back upon life it seems one glorious adventure. From early boyhood days of camping in what we loved to think of as the ‘wild West’, to shooting elephant and tiger in the jungles of my own mission station in India, and on into that bigger and greater hunt for men, life has seemed one long adventure.
Women in the Irish Protestant Foreign Missions c. 1873-1914: Representations and Motivations
Authors: Hill Myrtle
Published: February 2016

The importance of women’s contribution to foreign missionary work has now been well established, with a range of studies, particularly from Canada, America, and Britain, exploring the topic from both religious and feminist perspectives. The role of Irishwomen, however, has neither been researched in any depth nor recorded outside denominational histories in which they are discussed, if at all, only marginally, and only in relation to their supportive contribution to the wider mission of the Church. The motivations, aspirations, experiences, and achievements of the hundreds of women who left Ireland to do God’s work in India, China, Africa, or Egypt are yet to be explored. My intention in this paper is to discuss their work and the ways in which they have been represented in the context of socio-economic developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, to determine how the interaction of class, gender, and religion helped shape their missionary endeavours.
The contents and affiliation of the scientific manuscripts written at, or brought to, Chartres in the time of John of Salisbury
Authors: Burnett Charles
Published: February 2016

In the debate over the state of cathedral schools and their displacement as centres of learning by the rising universities, the case of Chartres has, for nearly a century, excited the most attention. Much has been written on, first, whether the activity of several prominent intellectuals of the twelfth century such as Thierry, William of Conches and Gilbert of Poitiers was primarily at Chartres or at Paris; and, secondly, whether the thought of ‘Chartrian’ masters is old-fashioned or open to the profound changes which effected twelfth-century scientific learning. These changes resulted largely from the introduction of works translated from Greek and Arabic during that century. In this paper I try to clarify the situation at Chartres itself by summing up the evidence from the manuscripts known to have been in the cathedral library in the twelfth century of the degree to which this ‘new science’ was received there, and how it was assimilated.
John of Salisbury and Boethius on Arithmetic
Authors: Evans Gillian R.
Published: February 2016

The Cornificians, says John of Salisbury in the Metalogicon, find new laws for every subject of study in the schools; grammar is revised, dialectic altered, rhetoric despised, and ‘abandoning the rules of former masters’, they put forward ‘new ways’ for all the subjects of the quadrivium. In fact, they despise the real quadrivium, and prefer a quasi quadrivium in which the four ‘ways’ are ways of making money or influencing events: by entering the clerical or the medical profession, or seeking a position at Court, or becoming a merchant.
John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket
Authors: Duggan Anne
Published: February 2016

Johannes Sarebiriensis, quondam clericus beati Thomae martiris, diuina dignatione et meritis beati Thomae martiris, Carnotensis ecclesiae minister humilis’. This protocol from the last known letter to come from John of Salisbury’s hand attests his continuing devotion to the memory of the blessed martyr of Canterbury and his pride in having once belonged to his household. John had made an important contribution to the beginning of the cult of Saint Thomas the Martyr.
New evidence for the Becket correspondence and John of Salisbury’s letters
Authors: Piper Alan
Published: February 2016

No single manuscript containing both the major collections of John of Salisbury’s letters is known to survive, but it seems possible to establish that such a manuscript once existed from the evidence of a fourteenth-century tabula found in Durham Cathedral Library MS A.IV.8 fols 53-9. There is no indication of when or how this tabula came to Durham; the composite manuscript of which it forms part was not assembled in its present form until after 1500, when the last section was still separate. The tabula contains some four hundred quotations arranged under 235 subject headings running in alphabetical order from Absencia to Penitencia; the remainder is missing. Almost every entry consists of a quotation, a number in arabic numerals, a name or personal title in the dative case or with ad and the accusative, and a brief indication of position; so for example under the heading Exulare the one entry runs bis exulat qui domi exulat 387 archidiacono exon prope finem. The quotations are from letters in John of Salisbury’s collections or from the other Becket correspondence.
Liudprand of Cremona, Preacher and Homilist
Authors: Leyser Karl
Published: February 2016

In the history of medieval Bible studies the tenth century in Beryl Smalley’s own words brought a sudden interruption, a dramatic pause, and any reader of her magnum opus must come away with the strong impression of a hiatus between the Carolingian commentators and the great teachers of the eleventh century, Fulbert of Chartres, Berengar of Tours, Drogo of Paris, and Lanfranc. Strangely enough she did not mention Atto of Vercelli’s elaborate and weighty Expositio in Epistolas S. Pauli, written not long after 940, which at least continued and used the massive labours of the ninth-century scholars.
Biblisches Und Hagiographisches Kolorit in Den Gesta Herwardi
Authors: Schmidt Paul Gerhard
Published: February 2016

Herewards Kämpfe gegen Wilhelm den Eroberer haben ihn zu einem der ‘Folk Heroes of Britain’ gemacht. Zu seinen historisch gut bezeugten Taten, der Plünderung von Peterborough im Juni 1070 und dem bis 1071 von Ely aus gegen die Normannen geführten Partisanenkrieg, treten farbige Erzählungen über seine Jugend, die er als Verbannter in der Fremde verbracht haben soil, über seine Kämpfe gegen Untiere und Berserker, seine Werbung um die schöne Turfrida und seine Kundschaftergänge und Handstreiche, zu denen er sich bald als Töpfer, bald als Fischer verkleidete.
Les Interprétations Juives dans les Commentaires du Pentateuque de Pierre le Chantre
Authors: Dahan Gilbert
Published: February 2016

Parmi les apports majeurs de Beryl Smalley à notre connaissance des études bibliques au moyen âge ne figurent pas seulement la redécouverte d’André de Saint-Victor et la mise au jour de son influence considérable dans la seconde moitié du Xlle siècle et au début du XIIIe; c’est aussi par elle qu’a été révélée l’importance de l’oeuvre exégétique de Pierre le Chantre.
John Wyclif and the Cult of the Eucharist
Authors: Catto J. I.
Published: February 2016

The storm centre of John Wyclif’s quarrel with the Church was his doctrine of the Eucharist. The critic of clerical dominion over secular things and of the authority of the pope had passed through ecclesiastical censure almost unscathed; but the proponent of a revisionist theology of the eucharistic sacrament would at once lose the countenance of academic colleagues and public opinion alike, and would suffer the consequences. The crisis of Wyclif’s career came with striking rapidity after he broadcast, in his Confessio or public statement in the Oxford schools on 10 May 1381, his opinion that the presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist was figurative, ‘sacramental’, or in some sense, to anyone not acquainted with the terms of his own mental world, less than real.
Wyclif’s Logic and Wyclif’s Exegesis: The Context
Authors: Evans G.R.
Published: February 2016

Wyclif found certain scholars of his time ‘in full cry against the unlogical, imprecise language of the Bible and the liturgy’. No commentaries written in that spirit survive, but traces are abundant in contemporary writings of aggressive talk in the schools and disputatious questioning along these lines. The challenge was not in its essence a new one. It is an episode in a series of encounters which had taken place between secular learning and Christian learning from the beginning; and more recently between grammar and logic and the difficulties presented by the Bible’s language. But it was perhaps new in degree. These critics of Wyclif’s day, it seems, said that the Bible was not logical and found in that a reason to question its truth, rather than to look to their logic for faults, as had been the traditional way.
An Archival Network: The Teutonic Knights between the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century
Authors: Bombi Barbara
Published: February 2016

At the end of the twelfth century a group of German pilgrims founded in Jerusalem the Order of the Teutonic Knights, which soon became the third major military order together with the Templars and the Hospitallers. In the mid thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights were already an international order and they had houses both in the Levant, in Europe and in the Baltic regions. In order to achieve such a result the Teutonic Order created an efficient administrative network, which was based on communication between local administrative centres and the central houses of the order.
A Glocal Knitwork: Sewing Circles in the Church of Sweden as a Global Women’s Network
Authors: Wejryd Cecilia
Published: February 2016

The Swedish branch of the missionary movement and sewing circles in the Church of Sweden are two sides of the same coin. They started at about the same time, in the 1830s and in the 1840s, and they depended on, and still depend on, each other. Over the years, thousands of Church of Sweden sewing circles have had foreign mission as their purpose. The sewing circles’ money raising and knowledge were and are of great significance for Swedish foreign mission.
Global Visions and Patriotic Sentiments: The Rise and Fall of Ecumenical Reputations, 1890–1922
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: February 2016

Two names stand out in the wealth of young talent which forged the networks which came together in what has come to be called the ecumenical movement, John R. Mott (1865–1955) and his contemporary Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931). For his fellow American Robert Schneider, Mott was ‘undoubtedly the most famous Protestant ecumenist of the early twentieth century’. To his fellow Swede Bengt Sundkler, Söderblom provided the spark of innovation in 1919–20 which was ‘the beginnings in embryo of what later became the ecumenical movement in its modern form’. The purpose of this paper is to consider their contributions in the period from 1890 to 1922, and the overlap and divergences of their roles in the movements contributing to ecumenical thinking and action. Amongst those disparate though sometimes overlapping strands were the concerns of foreign missions, students and peace. A subsidiary theme is that of mischief-making, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes by design of the press.
The International Horizon and the National Crisis: Hal Koch’s International Intellectual Network, Experience and Influences during the 1930s
Authors: Reeh Tine
Published: February 2016

The professor of theology Hal Koch played a role of considerable prominence and influence in Denmark during the years of the German occupation. His famous lectures on N. F. S. Grundtvig in the autumn of 1940 immediately made the young professor a public person of great influence, not only as a professor of church history but also as an opinion-former with close connection to the political circles. As chairman of Dansk Ungdomssamvirke (an umbrella body for Danish youth organizations), he played an important role in the intellectual formation of the younger generation and in formulating conceptions of secularization and democracy in Denmark.
The Nordic Network Shows its Weakness as the Cold War sets in: The Visit of the Rev. A. Cotter to the Nordic Lutheran Churches of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, 1946
Authors: Pajunen Mika K. T.
Published: February 2016

The Second World War afforded a major test of the strength of international ecclesial networks in war-ridden Europe. Most of the existing links between hostile countries and their churches were cut during the war and had to be rebuilt after the hostilities had ceased. Among the most complicated tasks was the re-establishing of relations with the German churches, whose position was further complicated with the onset of the Cold War. This essay discusses the British attempt to re-establish official relations between the German and Nordic Lutheran churches in 1946.