bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Establishment and Dissent in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: An Exploration of some Correspondence and Connections Between Religious and Medical Belief-Systems in Early Industrial England
Authors: Pickstone John V.
Published: March 2016

I know the historical sociology of religion only as an outsider; as an historian of medicine helped by that literature to a better understanding of early industrial society and perhaps to a clearer vision of what the social history of medicine ought to be. To read a recent review of the social history of religion, such as A. D. Gilbert’s Religion and Society in Industrial England, Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914, is to recognise how underdeveloped by comparison is the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine have the equivalent of church histories, of histories of theology and, of course, biographies of divines, but we lack the quantitative and comprehensive surveys of the chronological and geographical patterns in lay attendance and membership, and in professional recruitment and modes of work. For as long as medicine was generally only a transaction between an individual and his medical attendant, few statistics were produced and there is little national data. Yet there are very few local studies of how diseases were handled and how the various kinds of practitioner interacted with each other and with their various publics, so it will be some time before we shall be able to generalise on such matters.
Social Catholicism and Health: Dr. and Mrs Thomas Low Nichols in Britain
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: March 2016

In 1886, Judge Wallis, summing up in the ‘Pimlico Case’, castigated the writings of a witness, the Catholic doctor, Thomas Low Nichols, as shocking and as tending to ‘unsex’ women. For Nichols’ Esoteric Anthropology had been found in the home of Mrs. Adelaide Bartlett, a French Catholic, accused of murdering her husband with the assistance of the Reverend George Dyson, a Wesleyan minister of Putney. Even though he had written in the preface that ‘this is no book for the centre table, the library shelf or the counter of a bookseller’, Nichols was outraged by what he considered the judge’s libel upon him and his work. In the event Mrs. Bartlett was acquitted amid the most tumultuous applause ever heard in the Old Bailey and retired to a Belgian convent. It was but one more colourful episode in the extraordinary career of the Catholic health reformer, Dr. Nichols.
‘The Heavy Artillery of the Missionary Army’: The Domestic Importance of the Nineteenth-Century Medical Missionary
Authors: Walls A. F.
Published: March 2016

The history of medical missions is an epiphenomenon of the history of the medical profession. On the one hand they can be seen as a late growth in the missionary movement, and throughout the nineteenth century they required explanation and apology; on the other, they can be seen as present from the movement’s earliest days. After all, when William Carey sailed for India in 1793 his only colleague was a medical man; and a ‘surgeon’ was specifically included amongst the first party sent by the London Missionary Society to the Pacific in 1796. Indeed, generations of missionaries carried out a form of pillbox ministry, gravely administering draughts, lancing excrescences and proceeding by trial and error (‘We soon discovered the unfitness of calomel for African fevers’, observed the Rev. Hope Waddell of Calabar, ‘by its prostrating effect upon ourselves’), Some, like David Livingstone, studied medicine as part of their missionary training, without thereby becoming any special sort of missionary, or one whit less the minister of the Gospel that the ordinary missionary was assumed to be. The difference between this and the developed medical missions which were all but universal by the First World War was created less by developments in missionary thought than by developments in the medical profession.
Medical Science and Pentecost: The Dilemma of Anglicanism in Africa
Authors: Ranger Terence
Published: March 2016

I begin this paper with some broad generalisations about the history of anglicanism in relation to healing. I shall contend that in East and Central Africa over the last hundred years there were simultaneously present and interacting with each other a number of tendencies which in Europe had developed over a much longer period. Thus in some ways the religious history of colonial Africa is an intensification and telescoping of the religious history of Europe.

I am assuming, then, that in England by the end of the 17th century anglicanism had come to repudiate ‘enthusiasm’ and the visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit, partly for reasons of social control. I am assuming that this more or less closed the door on spiritual healing within 18th century anglicanism and produced the characteristically ‘cool’ anglican tone. Wesley brought back into the Church of England a universe of spirits and spiritual healings and exorcisms but all this went off into early methodism and out of the 19th-century Anglican church. In this 19th-century church, before it reached out into Central African mission, a number of superficially contradictory developments took place. There was an interaction of church and medical ‘establishments’ which led to anglican involvement in public health programmes and to an intellectual commitment to the ‘divine’ origins of modern medical science. At the same time there was a revival, particularly in the countryside, of communal rituals designed to create feelings of solidarity despite the realities of class division.
Jansenism and politics in the eighteenth century
Authors: McManners John
Published: March 2016

‘All the gold in the world and all the promises of heaven’ could not persuade Sainte-Beuve to carry on his study of jansenism into the eighteenth century. The spirit of Port-Royal was not there, ‘or at least it was only found in traces, dried up like a branch of a river that has turned aside into the sands and lost itself among the rocks...It is found even less in the entirely political Jansenism which was, or which appeared so considerable for a moment in the eighteenth century, and which allowed many to be of the party, without being of the dogma, or indeed, of religion at all’. The story of Jansenism after the death of Louis XIV is indeed a story of the war of the parlements against the crown – remonstrances, exiles. writs, denunciations, pamphlets; of the rising discontent of the lower clergy, demanding economic justice and a share in the government of the church; of the convulsionist movement, a strange spiritual underworld of masochism and miracles. Upon this barbarous scene of political and social strife and crude illiterate spirituality Sainte-Beuve turned his back, and those who have walked with him through the magic world of Port-Royal will understand his bitterness. The journée du guichet when Angélique Arnauld renounced human affections, the night of fire of 23 November when Pascal wept tears of joy, the cold ethereal beauty of the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne, the intellectual adventure of the alliance with cartesianism, the grammar, the logic, the translation of the new testament, the plays of Racine and the Pensées of Pascal – the eighteenth century can offer nothing like this.
A colonial concordat: two views of christianity and civilisation
Authors: Walls A. F.
Published: March 2016

Sierra leone began as an explicitly christian colony, and as an overwhelmingly african one. The 1100 immigrants of african descent who effectively took over Granville Sharp’s ‘Province of Freedom’ were as much children of the evangelical revival as the Clapham philanthropists who planned and financed the settlement. They brought other transatlantic imports to Africa besides evangelical religion; a material culture based on that of the plantation states where most of them had once lived (so they built their houses in the ‘colonial’ style, wore european clothes and spoke english) and radical political reflexes which came to be hardened and sharpened by the settled sense of grievance, first in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone.
Church and state in Borneo: the anglican bishopric
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: March 2016

When James Brooke became rajah of Sarawak in 1841, his enterprise – the acquiring of territorial sovereign rule by a private British citizen– was regarded with doubt and hesitation in official circles in London, and all three white rajahs were always very sensitive about their status. But when James Brooke visited England in 1847-8 there was no doubt about his personal standing as a romantic figure. Moreover, he added to the strength of the British presence in south-east Asia, which was needed to discourage Dutch assertiveness, and so he was lionised, and knighted, and among other things given an honorary doctorate by the university of Oxford. While he was there, about £500 was collected by members of the university, who considered that a mission to Borneo ‘ought to go forth under the superintendence of a Bishop from the very first’. This was sound doctrinal theory, but unlikely to be put into practice then or indeed since. But the idea was there, and the money was funded, and the church in Borneo did not have to wait as long as many places for episcopal ministrations, or for an episcopate of its own. Plans for a mission to Sarawak had already been made, and the first two missionaries sailed with their families at the end of 1847, and landed in Sarawak on 29 June 1848.
Gladstone and the nonconformists: a religious affinity in politics
Authors: Bebbington D. W.
Published: March 2016

Nonconformists had an attitude of veneration for Gladstone. They admired his political skills; they were grateful for the legislative benefits he had brought them like the abolition of compulsory church rates and the opening of higher degrees at the ancient universities; and they were roused by his displays of oratorical power. Yet their respect for Gladstone went far beyond what was due to the able leader of a political party. There was amongst nonconformists by 1890 what a correspondent of The Times called a ‘fascination, amounting to fetishism, of the great name and personality of Mr Gladstone.’ This was not primarily a result of sympathy in political policy, despite a general concurrence of nonconformists with Gladstone in the principles of peace, retrenchment and reform. In many other areas of policy there was disagreement. The overriding aim of political dissent, the aim of religious equality, was not shared by Gladstone; he was usually absent from parliamentary debates on the contagious diseases acts against which nonconformist feeling was high; and as temperance political pressure gathered momentum among nonconformists in the later years of his life, Gladstone stood aside. Nonconformists were always more wholeheartedly behind Gladstone in opposition, when he was denouncing the wrongs of conservative administrations, than behind Gladstone in office, when he was ignoring the wishes of nonconformist electors. Yet, despite policy differences, from at least 1868 until Gladstone’s death thirty years later nonconformists as a whole were enthusiastic Gladstonians, supporters of the man. The explanation lies in the fact that undergirding the political relationship was a religious affinity. At a meeting of ten leading nonconformist ministers in 1889, according to the diary of the baptist John Clifford, when the prospects of the liberal party were under discussion, ‘the conversation turned chiefly on the religious fibre of the prospective leaders. Suppose Gladstone gone, what have we to look to? The outlook was thought to be very unpromising.’ It was the ‘religious fibre’ of Gladstone that brought him esteem. It was primarily religion that bound the nonconformists in personal loyalty to Gladstone.
Church and politics: Dorothy Buxton and the German church struggle
Authors: Robbins Keith
Published: March 2016

The German church struggle in the nineteen thirties inevitably involved christians in Germany in a reconsideration of their attitudes towards politics, but its significance was not confined to Germany. The fate of Martin Niemöller, in particular, was a matter of lively concern in Britain. Conway contends that ‘the English-speaking public was all the more disposed to give every credit to the “Bekennende Kirche” because all the books published in English before the war were wholeheartedly on their side.’ English-speaking authors, he adds, unanimously, if one-sidedly, saw the struggle as one of church versus state, good versus evil, and confessing church versus nazi storm-troopers. A brief study of the activities of one of the writers mentioned by Conway, Mrs Dorothy Buxton, reveals that the ‘English-speaking public’ was not quite as unanimous in its interpretation of church and politics in Germany as the contemporary literary works might suggest.
Country Bishops in Byzantine Africa (Presidential Address)
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2016

Town and countryside are contrasting, even opposed ideas: one of those doublets which have dominated European thought since antiquity. Our vocabulary of ‘politics’ and ‘civilization’ bears ample testimony to the deep hold that the prejudices of the townsmen of antiquity have established over our language and our thinking. Sometimes, even in antiquity, those prejudices would be turned on their head: the town, the exclusive milieu of culture, refinement and rational human behaviour, could become, as for instance in the eyes of a Jewish rabbi of the third century the seat of iniquity, set up to extort and to oppress. Whatever the attitude one took to the town, the dichotomy of town and countryside became almost a category in the Kantian sense in terms of which modern Europeans have come to perceive the world around them. With Max Weber it became a fundamental category of sociological understanding, with Rostovtzeff of historical analysis, especially of the ancient world in its decline; and in the hands of William Frend—the Rostovtzeff of ecclesiastical history—it showed its power to illuminate, even to transform, the study of ancient heresy and schism. ‘The church in town and countryside’ might be thought to extend the franchise of a notion which has already had too wide and at times, as some would have it, perhaps even a baleful, influence. But both the value of the notion of town and country as an interpretative tool for the ecclesiastical historian, and its limitations, its liability to obscure and to distort, will, I hope, become clearer in the course of discussion.
Early Merovingian Devotion in Town and Country
Authors: Wood I. N.
Published: March 2016

Although Merovingian cities were not prepossessing they were important. Physically they straggled outside the Roman walls of the third century and divided increasingly into suburbs dependant on the great basilicas. Dijon, technically a castrum, was thought to be worthy of higher status, but its aspect was one of walls, fields, streams and mills. To be fair, urban centres throughout the middle ages possessed equally bucolic attributes. More important, the civitates were secular and ecclesiastical centres. The greatest of them could boast strong associations with the royal court, but even those with no such cachet were distinguished by the presence of a bishop. This last figure has attained considerable eminence in the eyes of historians and perhaps his authority has been exaggerated, nevertheless if his position was weaker than we have been taught, it was because of the strength and vigour of urban society; the reputation of the cities is not diminished. Not surprisingly they provided the backcloth for many of the dramas of sanctity and martyrdom recorded by the hagiographers.
The Church in Anglo-Saxon Towns
Authors: Campbell J.
Published: March 2016

To begin, as is natural, by considering the sedes episcopales of early England is to realise how little we know of its significant places—even to use the word ‘town’ is to beg a question. It is certain that some sedes were established at major centres of authority. Bede used metropolis to describe London and Canterbury and by that he meant the capital of a kingdom. Gregory the Great was probably wise in selecting London as the seat of an archbishop, an intention in which he seems to have persisted even after he was informed of English conditions. Not only was it the capital of a kingdom but it had geographical advantages which Canterbury could not rival. Even though Canterbury was established as the archbishops’ sedes there are indications that already from the seventh century they were using London as a meeting place, and perhaps as a dwelling place, at least on occasion. No major council of the early English church was held at or near Canterbury. York’s position in the north probably resembled that of London in the south. Our view of it has been transformed by Phillips’s excavations, which have shown that the great headquarters building of the legionary fortress was maintained and used, at least in part, until well after the conversion period.
A Medieval Urban Church: The Case of the Crusader States
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

Although the great majority of first-generation western settlers in the crusader states must have come from rural areas, most of them lived in towns when they reached the levant. This presented no problem: there was plenty of space in the towns of Outremer, for the Franks either slaughtered their Moslem inhabitants or, more commonly, expelled them. Initially, therefore, the towns of Frankish Syria were inhabited only by Franks and native Christians. The crusaders did not pursue a similar policy in the countryside because they were conscious of the need to keep an adequate labour-force. Native Christian peasants presented no problem in any case, while the Moslem peasants, who were probably the more numerous, were left undisturbed by their new rulers.
A Truth Universally Acknowledged
Authors: Mason Emma
Published: March 2016

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the practice of religion will be influenced by the social conditions prevailing in any given locality.’ The debate on this statement is largely concentrated for present purposes into a consideration of activities between c1100 and c1250 in two distinctive societies: Westminster abbey and its environs and, in contrast, the city and diocese of Worcester. The essential function of Westminster abbey was, of course, intercessory, and while this role was shared with Worcester cathedral, the latter church had also a wide-ranging pastoral responsibility. In this sense, no exact equation can be made, yet the richness of the records which both churches accumulated presents adequate material for a valid comparison in other respects. It is not intended, and is, indeed, impossible to make an arbitrary definition of Westminster as town and Worcester as countryside. Elements of both were contained in Westminster and Worcester alike.
Church and Chapelry in Sixteenth-Century England
Authors: Kitching Christopher
Published: March 2016

The church has always experienced great difficulty in ministering to those dwelling in the remotest parts of its parishes. In this paper I shall look briefly at how the sixteenth century church coped with the problem, and attempt to answer two questions: what facilities for worship were available in outlying districts, and what was the impact of the reformation changes upon them?

Chapels abounded in England on the eve of the reformation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that wherever he lived a parishioner could, without an unreasonably arduous journey, reach a place where mass was sung or said. Quite apart from matters of spiritual and moral discipline, it was important for very practical reasons that he should be able to get quickly to church. Disaster could take hold in villages and townships if the entire population had set off on a long hike to a remote parish church and was unlikely to return for some hours. Moreover, the length of the hike determined the extent of the diversion of labour from other pursuits, notably in the fields at harvest time: indeed, this was to influence government rulings on the number of saints’ days to be observed by the laity.
Thomas Fuller as Royalist Country Parson During the Interregnum
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

Although Thomas Fuller, the church historian, spent the first year of the civil war in London, where he articulated from the pulpit a political point of view consonant with that of the parliamentary peace party, there can be little doubt that his allegiance was with the king in that struggle. In the late summer of 1643 Fuller left London for the royalist capital at Oxford and before the end of the year entered the service of Lord Hopton as a chaplain in the royal army. During the latter stages of the civil war he resided in Exeter, where he served as chaplain to the infant princess Henrietta Anne, and where he enjoyed close relations with members of the court circle there. Fuller left the royalist community in Exeter only when the city itself surrendered in 1646, two months before the fall of Oxford. Because of these activities and because of a series of plainspoken books and pamphlets during the years of religious and political conflict, Fuller was widely known as an adherent of the royalist cause, albeit never as militant or as uncritical a partisan as many others in the king’s camp.
‘A Practice of a Very Hurtful Tendency’
Authors: Jacob W. M.
Published: March 2016

The church of England in the eighteenth century has been bitterly criticised by succeeding generations for what the high Victorian church of England regarded as two cardinal sins, firstly non-residence of the clergy on their cures and secondly, and consequently, lack of pastoral care. However, generalisations are misleading and especially these generalisations which are largely based on the evidence of opponents of the established church in the early nineteenth century and on standards of pastoral care of one man to one parish, however small the parish, that were only achieved for a period of sixty or seventy years during the later nineteenth century. How misleading these generalisations are becomes apparent when the evidence for non residence and for standards of pastoral care is examined more closely. The object of this paper is to demonstrate that from the evidence of one particular county a clear pattern of clerical residence emerges that is not entirely incompatible with contemporary expectations of pastoral care.
The Victorian Town Parish: Rural Vision and Urban Mission
Authors: Mole David E. H.
Published: March 2016

When leading churchmen and statesmen cast around for ways of restoring the health of English society at the end of the eighteenth century, the theme to which they constantly returned was the renewal of the parish. The parish was the basic social unit in church and state, small enough to be conceived in terms of personal relationships. On the principle that, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves, it seemed obvious that if you could make the parish a healthy harmonious unit, then die life of the nation as a whole would become healthy and harmonious. Ideally the parish was a large family, with the squire as its father and the incumbent as its spiritual father. Southey wrote in the Quarterly Review in 1820:

Every parish being in itself a little commonwealth, it is easy to conceive that before manufactures were introduced, or where they do not exist, a parish, where the minister and the parochial officers did their duty with activity and zeal, might be almost as well ordered as a private family.
Urban Church Attendance and the use of Statistical Evidence, 1850–1900
Authors: Yates Nigel
Published: March 2016

Over the last two decades historians of the Victorian church have been paying an increasing amount of attention to the various forms of statistical evidence which are available for the period. There are in fact three major categories of such evidence. Firstly there are the membership figures and other statistics published by churches and meant for external consumption; many of these have now been brought together in a useful compendium. Then there are the returns of the first (and last) national religious census, held in 1851, and of various local censuses, especially those taken for several large and medium-sized towns in 1881; these were also made public either in summary or detail depending on the nature of the census. Finally there are the statistics compiled by churches at various levels purely for their own use, but now open to public inspection in record offices: Anglican visitation returns and service registers, those records of nonconformist churches that yield such valuable information about membership and communicant figures and the numbers of Sunday scholars. Not all of these statistics have been used with an equal degree of enthusiasm, and very few studies have made effective use of all three. The aim of this paper is to look in some detail at the uses to which they have been put so far and to indicate some other uses to which they might be put in the future.
Scholarship, Religion and the Church (Presidential Address)
Authors: Hay Denys
Published: March 2016

In choosing this subject (on which many speakers have touched in talking to this Society) I started by intending to be more precise in my topic, as well as to introduce the question of church reform. The scholarship I had in mind was classical scholarship and all that went with it in eloquence, enjoyment and understanding of ancient authors. Against this I wished to pit those proponents of a religious life who rejected antiquity and all it stood for. Not of course all of either kind, but some representative examples drawn from the later Middle Ages. In the event the task I had chosen proved much more intricate that I had supposed it would be, the emerging picture more blurred. This, as we all know, is a fairly familiar phenomenon. And as for reform it figures, I am afraid, rather incidentally in what follows.
Narrative Illustration and Theological Exposition in Medieval Art
Authors: Henderson George D. S.
Published: March 2016

This paper deals with a particular narrow aspect of biblical learning, as it appears to have impinged on art some considerable time before 1500. If the material which I have proposed as my subject has relevance to the theme of Religion and Humanism it may be, in the first place, by reminding us that we owe the preservation of many of these works of art to the scholars and clerics of the reformed establishment, men like archbishop Matthew Parker in the late sixteenth century, and even to thoroughly post-medieval practical scientists like Dr William Hunter. They found respectable homes in college or university bookcases for the disjecta membra of the old monastic and cathedral libraries.
Reginald of Durham and Saint Godric of Finchale: Learning and Religion on a Personal Level
Authors: Tudor Victoria
Published: March 2016

In terms of their achievements in the field of learning, Reginald of Durham and saint Godric of Finchale present an enormous contrast. Reginald was a monk of the powerful and wealthy community of Durham and also, naturally enough in the second half of the twelfth century, a priest. As such he was the product of a formal monastic education. He was especially favoured, in addition, because the house which moulded him was at that time passing through a phase when letters flourished to a greater extent than at any other period in its history. Godric, on the other hand, was never anything but a layman. He earned a living as a pedlar and merchant first of all and only later decided to abandon the world and lead the eremitic life. His contacts with learning were thus tenuous at best. Both Reginald and Godric were trying, however, to achieve the same ideal: to live the religious life, and for some years in the third decade of the twelfth century circumstances led them to follow their vocations in close contact with one another. Students of this period are fortunate in having some insight into the relationship that developed between them. In particular one can isolate the part played in the relationship by learning or, more precisely, by Reginald’s substantial education and the hermit’s lack of it.
‘Arabick to the People’
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

When I accepted, a year ago, Professor Hay’s invitation to join ‘his team of main speakers, and contribute a paper to this volume it was not without hesitation and trepidation. Religion, in some of its aspects, I knew a little about: of Humanism virtually nothing. Like many another historian I use the term in discussion of twelfth-century renaissance, but hardly in any articulated fashion, or with any precise meaning, and from time to time I have paid a passing acknowledgement to Renaissance humanism—a nodding acquaintance at best. I was, however, reassured by the prospect of a sabbatical term, and by the proximity of Professor Hay himself: at leisure and with proper guidance all would be made clear in time for this first paper of the new decade. In fact, otium has been replaced by negotium, and however much the fifteenth-century humanist might approve the change, the whole glory of man lying in activity, as Vittorino de Feltre observed, I find myself in little better state now than I was a year ago—like Auden’s ‘Artistic souls that lie out in the weed and pollen belt the need for sympathy is felt’.
A Soldier’s Devotions
Authors: Hill R. M. T.
Published: March 2016

Whatever criticism may justly be levelled against the church in the later Middle Ages there is no doubt that it succeeded in stirring up, in the minds of many lay people, a deep and vivid sense of the real presence of God in the context of ordinary affairs. Church congregations behaved, according to our standards, with considerable freedom and restlessness, but only the heretical and the excessively careless stayed away, and even those who were fairly uneducated could be connoisseurs of popular preaching. Drama was religious drama with a strong topical flavour—the soldiers who crucified Christ were real ‘ribalds’ such as you might have feared to meet in the course of the Hundred Years’ War, and the Angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin as ‘turtle’ in much the same way as a modern postman might call her ‘love’. Julian of Norwich, a great mystic whose communion with God passed, as she says, the limit of human expression, was yet concerned by the love which she felt towards her fellow-Christians to try to explain in the simplest terms the truth which came to her in her revelations. She saw, as she says, the whole of creation in the form of ‘a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut’ which, but for the sustaining love of its Creator, would have perished ‘for sheer littleness’.
Jonn Colet and the Hierarchies of the PS-Dionysius
Authors: Trapp J. B.
Published: March 2016

John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s from 1504 or 1505 until his death at the age of 52 in 1519 was a man, according to the brief biography of him written a couple of years after his death by his friend Erasmus—it remains the best sketch of his character—whom neither the smiles of fortune (he was born well-to-do, and was early on the path of ecclesiastical preferment) nor the impulse of a far different natural bent (he was high-tempered, self-confessedly prone to incontinence and luxuriousness, to indulgence in sleep, to jests and raillery, was not even free from the taint of avarice) could divert from the pursuit of a gospel life. His defects he counteracted by philosophy and sacred studies, watching, fasting and prayer, in a life that was both chaste and charitable. His large patrimony went, in the first decade of the sixteenth century, to the foundation of St Paul’s School, ‘specially to increase knowledge and worshipping of god and our lorde Crist Jesu and good Cristen lyff and maners’. There a limited number were to be taught by a High Master and a Sur-Master, with a chaplain, who were to devote their whole time to the school. Delighting in the purity and simplicity of children, Colet saw that ‘a nation’s chief hope lay in having the rising generation trained in good principles.
Late Mediaeval Piety, Humanism and Luther’s Theology
Authors: Yule George
Published: March 2016

In his essay The origins of the French Reformation, Lucien Febvre exposes a number of weaknesses in common interpretations of the Reformation—that it had been brought about because of abuses in the church and especially because of Luther’s anger at these abuses. But what, asked Febvre, does one then make of those independently of Luther, who like Briconnet, bishop of Meaux, worked for reforms, often of a different kind to those advocated by Luther, or more especially of Lefèvre d’Étaples a mystical catholic whose biblical studies says Febvre ‘contained some very bold things’. So Febvre asked could this many sided movement ‘spring from nothing more than a revolt of healthy and honest minds and consciences against the nasty people and wicked spectacles around them?’ Why could not the ‘many pious Christians often supported by their princes and the officers of the princes put an end to the excesses which everyone deplored? No one noticed that if the Reformation in France had originated with Lefèvre and not with Luther the abuses theory would no longer be valid ... for Lefèvre had never campaigned against the morals of the clergy’. Febvre then went on to point out the evidence for the deep and increasing piety of the early sixteenth century in northern Europe—the many new churches and oratories, the deep sentiment attached to the Christ of the Passion and the Virgin of the Rosary.
Giovanni Ferrerio, Humanist: His Influence in Sixteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Durkan John
Published: March 2016

Most scholars, one imagines, of sixteenth-century Scotland will think that Giovanni Ferrerio was a fairly marginal figure at the remote edge of Scottish life, his interest confined to his brief sojourn as tutor to the Cistercian monks at Kinloss and his work as continuator of Hector Boece’s history covering the reign of James III. Whether he might have had any say in Scottish ecclesiastical or educational policies or any wider contact with the court or leading Scots of the time and whether indeed he may have acted as a vehicle for the entry of Italian ideas, are questions that so far have scarcely been broached.
Valentine Greatrakes, The Irish Stroker; Miracle, Science, and Orthodoxy in Restoration England
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

The Spacious Firmament on high
And all the blue aetherial sky
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great original proclaim.
Th’ unwearied sun from day to day
Doth his Creator’s power display
And publishes to ev’ry land
The work of an Almighty hand.
What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball;
What though no real voice nor sound
Mid all their radiant orbs be found:
In reason’s ear they all rejoice
And utter forth a glorious voice
For ever singing as they shine
‘The hand that made us is Divine’.

Despite its pre-Copernican cosmology, Addison’s well-known paraphrase of the nineteenth psalm perfectly expresses a whole religious world picture, the essence of that rational apologetic for Christianity which was evolved in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. For this school of thought the beauty, elegance and order of the universe were the chief evidences of the existence, wisdom and benevolence of God. Behind that serene conviction, however, lay a great unease. The world of law which Newton so wonderfully displayed to an admiring age was purchased at the cost of an increasingly remote deity.
Orthodoxy, Enlightenment and Religious Revival
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

Everyone has his favourite squibs to illuminate the animosity of the devotees of the Christian application of modern knowledge towards the partisans of religious revival. R. B. Aspland, the unitarian, summed them all up succinctly in the early nineteenth century in his case against Wesleyanism. ‘Wine’, he declared, ‘is the beverage of the gentleman, spirits of the herd. So with religion’. Something of this edge had been there from the beginning, long before attitudes had been struck and the French Revolution had become a divider of spirits everywhere. Much of the fascination of the Turretini correspondence is provided by the conscious sense of intellectual superiority of the Swiss fathers of rational orthodoxy. ‘We are here much occupied with the scandalous affairs of Toggenburg’, writes Jean Gaspard Escher with an almost audible turn of the nose. ‘These are mountain people rather like Vaudois, Miquelets or Camisards’, and their murderous politics were of the Ulster variety. Neither the Toggenburgers, nor the Vaudois or Camisards were part of the history of religious revival, but they were very like Protestant minorities from Central Europe who were; the Salzburgers, for example. ‘The majority of these men’, writes Escher of the latter, ‘can neither read nor write; their fundamental doctrine is that worship is due to God alone and that salvation is by Jesus Christ. This doctrine fills them with a horror of popery: . . . they are ill-instructed in the other articles of religion. They know by heart some fine passages of scripture and some Lutheran hymns to which they hold’. Pastorally, if not confessionally, the mountain men were a different cup of tea from the practitioners of polite learning; but as late as 1800 it was possible to turn American methodists and baptists out in droves to vote for the deist Jefferson, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the fate of the revivalist and that of the men of enlightenment was more closely linked at an early stage than the text-book categories usually suggest.
Immanuel Kant’s Humanism
Authors: Loades Ann
Published: March 2016

Kant went up to the Albertina at the age of sixteen in 1740, and his career as student there, tutor to three families (the last being that of the Keyserlings) and back to the Albertina as a teacher, spanned the reigns of three kings in and of Prussia, through the near disasters and triumphs of Frederick the Great, and including the predatory partitions of Poland, but narrowly escaping the near collapse of Prussia in the Napoleonic wars. He had been saturated in the pietist tradition at home, at the Collegium Fridericianum, and in his student days. It has been alleged that pietism lingered on in Königsberg longer than elsewhere, not least because of the presence of Franz Albert Schultz, pupil of Francke and Wolff, army chaplain, pastor, school reformer and founder, settler of immigrants and university teacher, and of Martin Knutzen, a young and brilliant natural philosopher, and one of Kant’s most influential teachers at the Albertina. Kant never lost his respect for pietists at their best, characterised by serenity and cheerfulness, neither discontented by persecution, nor stirred to enmity by controversy.
Learning Against Religion, Learning as Religion: Mark Pattison and the ‘Victorian Crisis of Faith’
Authors: Nimmo Duncan
Published: March 2016

In the drama of English church history in the nineteenth century, the reverend Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1861 to 1884, has hitherto been accorded a minor and somewhat transient role. He has appeared in two guises: first, as an Oxford Tractarian who, compelled by Newman’s secession in 1845 to choose between the Church of England and of Rome, opted for the former, but found his faith so unsettled by the process that he eventually lost it altogether; and secondly, as one of the contributors to that landmark—and landmine—of Anglican theology, Essays and Reviews. The argument of this paper is that his role was in fact both more constant and more considerable: an exploration of conflict between learning and religion, reason and faith; a conflict which in one way or another spanned his life, and in which reason did not merely criticise and challenge religion, but also aspired to replace it. In these two forms the conflict of learning and belief was, it need hardly be said, a key element in the so-called ‘Victorian crisis of faith’; insofar as Pattison’s career embodied it, he becomes a representative figure of the experience of his time, and so takes his stand, if not at the centre, then certainly in the foreground of the ecclesiastical stage.
“The Best Thinking of the Best Heathen”: Humane Learning and the Missionary Movement
Authors: Walls A. F.
Published: March 2016

It is now a common-place that the typical early 19th century missionary—visualized by David Livingstone as ‘a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm’—was a fairly homespun character, from the forge or the shop (if he were English), or from the croft, the farm or the factory (if he were Scots). His formal education was not high, and, if an Anglican his social and educational attainments were not such as would have brought him ordination to the home ministry. It is almost equally accepted that by the end of the 19th century the situation had changed; not only were the numbers of missionaries immensely swollen; but the universities and the public schools could now supply a quota, for Africa as well as for the lands of the ancient Eastern civilizations. The evangelization of the world in one generation was to be accomplished essentially by the international student community. The typical missionary was now a conventionally educated man, and if that did not imply conspicuous intellectual attainment, nor did entrance to the home ministry.
Confraternities and the Church in Late Medieval Florence
Authors: Henderson John
Published: March 2016

The confraternities of late-medieval Europe have been seen as associations which were in some ways almost independent of the Church, and drew their special dynamism from the fact that the parish was supposedly in decline and had ceased to provide an adequate religious service to the lay community. However true this may have been north of the Alps, the problem when this proposition is applied to southern Europe, and particularly Italy, is that very little is known about the late-medieval parish to ascertain whether confraternities were really syphoning off the adherence of the local inhabitants. So often our impressions about the state of the Italian church derive from the sporadic visitations of local bishops or the ribald stories of a Boccaccio or Franco Sacchetti, later repeated and taken almost at face value by such influential writers as Burkhardt. But we may also be in danger of seeing late-medieval religion filtered through sixteenth-century eyes and taking for granted the correctness of the criticisms of the Council of Trent or for that matter following Luther’s gripes that confraternities had become no more than beer-drinking clubs.
The ‘Godly Community’ in the Theory and Practice of the European Reformation
Authors: Cameron Euan
Published: March 2016

It is now a truism to say that the European Reformation of the sixteenth century brought into being a religion of the word. It arose in literate and learned debate; it was fomented by the printing of written propaganda; it defined itself according to written formulae, including creeds, confessions, and catechisms. It is perhaps almost as generally accepted, and certainly as true, that the ‘Word’ as envisaged by the Reformers was a doctrine based on reasoning and logic, logically expressed, and meant to be understood in an intellectually coherent way. This trait in the aims of the Reformers emerged most obviously when they set about writing catechisms and pieces of pastoral instruction. In his Formula Missae seu Communìonis of 1523, Luther required that

Let [the pastor] not admit the applicants unless they can give a reason for their faith and can answer questions about what the Lord’s Supper is, what its benefits are, and what they expect to derive from it.
‘A Gracelesse, and Audacious Companie’? the Family of Love in the parish of Balsham, 1550–1630
Authors: Marsh Christopher
Published: March 2016

The doctrine and membership of the Family of Love in England remain something of a mystery, despite extensive recent work. Why should such an apparently small group have been the specific subject of a royal proclamation? Between June 1575 and November 1580 the sect was referred to a dozen times in Privy Council correspondence, and was clearly the object of considerable anxiety. The Bishops of London, Norwich, Exeter, Ely, Winchester, Lincoln, Salisbury and Worcester were all instructed to conduct investigations. Puritan writers like John Rogers and William Wilkinson published books attacking the sect. The reasons for such sustained persecution over so short a period are hard to establish. One fact which must have contributed to the panic was that there were Familists in the Queen’s guard, close to the centre of the political nation. Moreover, reports of the sect in each of the dioceses listed above had presumably been received. It is likely that the Family of Love was much larger than the surviving evidence reveals. Familism, as the proclamation suggests, was also thought to involve the threat of social revolution. In a series of letters which Rogers later published, one Familist writer stated that

I had rather heare an honest poore mans report truly spoken, than a rich credible mans that is a Iyer

and quoted Scripture to emphasize the point: ‘The Lorde preferueth the simple.’ Views like this were dangerously disrespectful, and implied social insubordination.
The Genesis of a Godly Community: Two York Parishes, 1590–1640
Authors: Cross Claire
Published: March 2016

The inside cover of the Elizabethan register of St John’s, Ousebridge, York contains the following entry:

Memorandum that John Stoddart, clerk, began to serve in this parish of St John’s at Ousebridge end in August 1591 and doth still serve the same, who also did rule this same parchment book in such form and sort as it is, of his own proper cost, after that it was bought by James Cristalson, being churchwarden, in the year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth etc. 41, anno domini 1599 … price vii s.

The corresponding register of the adjoining parish of All Saints, North Street, where Stoddart became the pluralist rector in March 1594, begins very similarly. These (at least for York) uniquely full registers, supplemented by a set of churchwardens’ accounts from St John’s and the eighty or so wills which can now be traced for the two parishes make it possible to chart the development of a loosely associated group of committed protestants in an area of central York which the arrival of a resident minister stimulated in both a positive and, less predictably, negative way. The story of voluntary religion which emerges is not one of high drama, faction-fighting, or even separation between the godly and the rest, but rather of a sustained and ultimately triumphant attempt of a minority to enrich the spiritual life of their parishes.’
The Evangelical Alliance in the 1840s: An Attempt to Institutionalise Christian Unity
Authors: Wolffe John
Published: March 2016

in 1844 Baptist Wriothesley Noel, minister of the Anglican proprietary chapel of St. John’s Bedford Row since 1827, published a book of verse, with a piece on ‘Schism’ containing the following stanzas:
For man-made discipline let bigots fightCanons and rules old fathers have approved;By us may those whose faith and life are right,Be owned as brothers and as brothers loved.

All true believers are the ransomed church,Children of God by Jesus owned and loved;And in the day when God the heart shall searchWill they who part them be schismatics proved.

In the 1820s Noel had been an enthusiastic sympathiser with the pan-evangelicalism then prevalent in London and had remained loyal to these views during the period of stormier relations between Church and Dissent in the 1830s. In the slightly calmer waters of the 1840s Noel’s sentiments again came to represent the views of a small number of Anglican Evangelicals and a rather larger proportion of moderate Dissenters whose efforts to promote Christian unity were to culminate in the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846.