bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy in the Thought of Pseudo-Dionysius
Authors: Gould Graham
Published: March 2016

The works of that late fifth- or early sixth-century writer whom we know as Pseudo-Dionysius are among the most difficult and yet also the most influential and compelling of all patristic writings. The whole Dionysian corpus and the many important historical and theological questions which it raises have been the subject of many studies, and it would certainly be untrue to suggest that the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the subject of this communication, has been wholly neglected; but the work has only recently been made accessible in English, and only one or two recent studies have given serious attention to the central place which the liturgy and its symbolism (the main subject of the work) occupy in Dionysius’s dieology as a whole. A short study of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy may therefore serve a useful purpose, perhaps at least that of encouraging the reading–now that an English translation is available–of what is probably the most accessible and immediately attractive of works which have been described (but who can tell whether such a description is ever accurate?) as ‘famous but seldom-read’.
Orders and Rank in the Cathedral of Old Sarum
Authors: Greenway Diana
Published: March 2016

It is a cliché of medieval ecclesiastical history that the clergy was a ‘hierarchy’. When we use this term, we may mean ‘priesdy rule’, but more often we are referring to the way in which the clergy was graded in successive ranks, one above another. Most obviously, the clergy was so arranged in the seven steps of holy orders: doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, priest. But simple stratification by orders was only part of a much more complex hierarchical system, in which the major differentiating factor was office. Both elements–orders and office–were the subjects of a considerable literature in the early Middle Ages: side by side with treatises on orders–belonging to the genre de officiis septem graduum–is a body of writings concerned to define the functions, relations and grades of ecclesiastical offices–the genre de ecclesiasticis officiis. Two related documents telling us of the customs at Old Sarum owe much to tracts of this kind: the Institutio, compiled by stages in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and the Consuetudinarium of Richard Poore, written c. 1215, which greatly expands the Institutio.
Priest, Deacon and Layman, from St Peter Damian to St Francis
Authors: Brooke Christopher N. L.
Published: March 2016

Few incidents in thirteenth-century history have been more often described than the story of the Christmas crib at Greccio. Not long before his death St Francis arranged with a noble layman called John of Greccio to prepare a crib for midnight mass at Christmas, with plenty of hay and real animals, ox and ass, in attendance. Crowds flocked to the place and ‘the whole night resounded with jubilation’. Mass was celebrated over the crib. But not by Francis, for he was not a priest but a deacon; and he put on the deacon’s vestments, sang the gospel and preached. Strange as it may seem, it is only from this story in the First Life by Thomas of Celano, confirmed by some shreds of other evidence, that we know that Francis was in deacon’s orders. No explanation is given, no contemporary commentary expounds the fact. Yet it is abundantly clear that his deacon’s orders had some profound significance related to his conception of his Order and its members, and their relations one to another. It is a curious puzzle to discover what it was.
Careers and Disappointments in the Late-Medieval Church: Some English Evidence
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

‘He looked up at the pleasant plate-glass in the windows of the house of his friend the dean, and told himself how, in their college days, he and the dean had been quite equal—quite equal, except that by the voices of all qualified judges in the university he, Mr. Crawley, had been acknowledged to be the riper scholar. And now the Mr. Arabin of those days was the Dean of Barchester … while he, Crawley, was the perpetual curate of Hogglestock.’ The Last Chronicle of Barset is the story of a model clergyman, ‘a hard-working conscientious pastor’ and ‘still a scholar’ long after he had left university, who had never gained lucrative preferment. Yet this novel, as all those in the Barchester sequence, abounds with clerics of modest intellect and minimal spirituality whose benefices afforded extremely comfortable livelihoods. In short, the novel reminds us forcibly that a career in the Church was, in the nineteenth century, a gamble; the greatest rewards did not always go to the most deserving, but to those with the right connections through which they obtained the most lucrative positions.
‘Eyn Mercklich Underscheyd’: Catholic Reactions to Luther’s Doctrine of the Priesthood of all Believers, 1520–25
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

After the great Reformation principles of ‘faith alone’ and ‘Scripture alone’, probably the most revolutionary doctrine commonly associated with Martin Luther is that of the priesthood of all believers. It is well known that, as it appears in his address ‘to the Christian nobility of the German nation’ of 1520, he intended this doctrine to bring down the walls of the new Jericho by striking at the heart of the distinction between clergy and laity on which the medieval Church was based. What is less well known is the reaction to this doctrine of Luther’s contemporaries, and in particular his critics. I propose to look at how they regarded the reformer’s conception of the universal priesthood, and what they thought its implications were, in the hope of shedding more light on its contemporary significance.
Richard Hooker on the Lawful Ministry of Bishops and Kings
Authors: McGrade Arthur Stephen
Published: March 2016

The part of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity most attractively relevant to the theme of this conference is Book V, the first spiritually constructive exposition of the religion of the Book of Common Prayer. Hooker’s edifying account of the public duties of religion in the first seventy-five chapters of Book V and of the ordained ministry in the concluding six chapters can readily be appreciated today on its merits, leaving aside the fact that the religion of the Prayer Book was legally prescribed for all English Christians when Hooker wrote. It is on this currently unattractive fact of legal prescription that I want to concentrate, however, for it sets the historical context for the public devotional theology of Book V. To understand Hooker’s justificatory account of this fact is to become clearer about an essential difference between what is going on today when people minister and are ministered to in accordance with Anglican religious forms and what Hooker, at least, held to be going on when these forms were used in the sixteenth century.
Petty Babylons, Godly Prophets, Petty Pastors and Little Churches: The Work of Healing Babel
Authors: Lamburn D.J.
Published: March 2016

On 14 February 1608, William Crashaw, who three years earlier had been vicar of St John’s Church in Beverley, preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cross. He took as his text a verse from Jeremiah—‘We would have cured Babel but she would not be healed; let us forsake her, and go every one to his own country.’ Yet Crashaw was no schismatic. His own career, beginning with his fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, had always been within the mainstream of the Established Church. In his will he set out the positions he had held as ‘the unworthy and unprofitable servant of God’. He had been ‘Preacher of God’s word first at Bridlington then at Beverley in Yorkshire. Afterwards at the Temple since then pastor of the Church at Agnes Burton in the diocese of York, now Pastor of that too great parish of White Chapel in the suburbs of London.’ There was much else besides; he had been one of the official editors of William Perkins, a writer of numerous works, whose sermons and catechisms were much sought after, one of the founders and shareholders in the New Virginia Company, with good connections at Court. At Paul’s Cross Crashaw condemned Brownists ‘who forsake our Church, and cut off themselves and separate themselves to a faction, and fashion, or as they call it, into a covenant or communion of their own devising’, just as much as those who ‘be such as refuse public places in the Church, and commonwealth, and retire themselves into private and discontented courses and will not be employed for the public’. In common with mainstream puritans he deeply disapproved of schismatics and was not above attacking them with the same vehemence he normally reserved for papists. It is ‘unthankful’ he wrote, to desert our Church. ‘There is indeed a true ministry of the word amongst us… We have the word truly preached.’ When Crashaw referred to the forsaking of Babel he had something very different in mind, for the solution this early seventeenth-century cleric offered concerned the Church’s ministry.
‘Not a Little Holy Club’: Lay and Clerical Leadership in Australian Anglican Evangelicalism 1788–1988
Authors: Piggin Stuart
Published: March 2016

Evangelicalism is a good branch of Christianity in which to study lay ministry. Australian evangelicalism is a good branch of evangelicalism for such a study. Sydney and Melbourne evangelicalism are good branches of Australian evangelicalism on which to make this study. And Anglican evangelicalism is a good branch of Sydney and Melbourne evangelicalism on which to focus the study.
Fishing for the Soul ‘Nor’ard of the Dogger’
Authors: Guy John R.
Published: March 2016

The waters of the North Sea are shallow, and the weather there can be severe. On and around the Dogger Bank sudden gales cause high and heavy seas. The smacksmen of the fishing fleets in the 80s and 90s of the last century were there throughout the year on voyages which could last eight weeks, and their 50–80 ton yawl-rigged smacks were entirely at the mercy of the weather. Their fishing grounds were too far from land for them to run for shelter. They were compelled to ride out the heaviest gales or founder. In 1881 it was estimated that the North Sea fishing population numbered upwards of 12,000, the ‘Short Blue’ fleet alone consisting of 220 smacks crewed by 1,500 men.
The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England (Presidential Address)
Authors: Dobson Barrie
Published: March 2016

In devoting its attention to the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the Ecclesiastical History Society has self-evidently addressed a theme as fundamental as it is often distressing to the practitioners of both religions. For many historians of the English Church, as for many of this Society’s members themselves, that relationship presents the additional irony that it would have been almost impossible actually to encounter a Jew in this country during those three centuries which tend to interest them most. As it is, Edward I’s expulsion of all his Jewish subjects from his realm on 18 July 1290 (‘without any hope of ever remaining there’) not only aborted a still inconclusive experiment in religious co-existence, but for centuries relegated the lives of the Jews and Jewesses of Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet England to the obscurity of the historically irrelevant. No longer in 1991 does that seem at all so obvious; and one supposes that nothing would have surprised Henry III and Edward I more than that their treatment of the Jewish minority within their realm should now often seem more ‘relevant’ to the churches of the modern world than any other feature of their respective reigns. For that reason, above all, there must be every prospect that the relationship between Jews and Christians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England will soon be subjected to more detailed analysis than ever before. Nor, for similar reasons, has it ever been quite so obvious as it is today that the study of medieval Anglo-Jewry is too important to remain the exclusive preserve of historians who are themselves Jews.
Alexander’s Apostasy: First Steps to Jerusalem
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: March 2016

The synagogue in Bevis Marks in the city of London, 1700-1, is the oldest in this country. The second is in Plymouth, in Catherine Street. It was built in 1762, and is the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world. It is noteworthy for its original furnishings, which are mainly austere—the deal benches, and plain turned balusters for the enclosures, with the eight brass candle-sticks, now electrified, round the bimah. The exception is the ornately carved wooden ark, towering almost to the ceiling, with large urns on the entablature, which is supported by Corinthian columns. It is mortifying to the Hebrew congregation that its existence is mostly known not for its historic and architectural importance, but in connection with the defection of one of its ministers, Michael Solomon Alexander, in 1825. A little more than sixteen years later, Alexander was consecrated for the newly constituted Jerusalem bishopric, on 7 December 1841, in Lambeth Palace Chapel. Archbishop Howley was joined in the laying on of hands by Blomfield of London, Murray of Rochester, and Selwyn of New Zealand, who had been consecrated in the same chapel three weeks before.
Adventists Discover the Seventh-Day Sabbath: How to Deal with the ‘Jewish Problem’
Authors: Francis Keith A.
Published: March 2016

In 1831 William Miller, a farmer from Low Hampton, New York, began to preach that the Second Advent would occur ‘about the year 1843’. From this rather inauspicious beginning the number of people who agreed with Miller’s prediction grew, so that by 1844 they probably numbered more than 50,000 according to some estimates. This phenomenon would be of little historical interest—except, perhaps, to historians studying nineteenth-century American religious history—had it not been for the fact that one legacy of Millerism is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has over six million members world-wide and can claim, for example, one of the largest educational systems run by a Protestant denomination.
The Faces of Janus: Free-Thinkers, Jews, and Christianity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Authors: Royle Edward
Published: March 2016

Nineteenth-Century Britain was a Christian country, in that its laws and institutions were based upon the Christian religion. Not to be a Christian was to be excluded from full citizenship, for Christianity was, in the eyes of the Common Law, ‘parcel of the laws of England’. Until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 Christianity was still for some purposes equated with Protestantism and, after this date, Jews and other ‘infidels’ continued unable to sit in Parliament or swear an oath as witnesses in courts of law. Conversely, those British Radicals of the nineteenth century who rejected the aristocratic politics of what they termed ‘Old Corruption’ frequently chose also to attack its religious base—Anglicanism or, in extreme cases, the entire Christian system under which they were required to live.
Organs and Organ Music in Victorian Synagogues: Christian Intrusions or Symbols of Cultural Assimilation?
Authors: Hillsman Walter
Published: March 2016

The rise and decline of organs in British synagogues from about 1850 to the present day is intrinsically linked to social, political, and religious developments. It therefore provides a fascinating focus for studying some of the complexities of change in Anglo-Jewry, the extent to which Victorian British Jews were affected by developments in Judaism elsewhere, and the adoption of, and reaction against, certain cultural phenomena perceived by Jews as Christian.
In the Shadow of the Millennium: American Fundamentalists and the Jewish People
Authors: Ariel Yaakov
Published: March 2016

In 1982 Menachem Begin, then Israel’s Prime Minister, presented Jerry Falwell, an evangelist and leader of the fundamentalist group ‘the Moral Majority’, with a medal of the Jabotinsky Order, an organization associated with Begin’s Likud Party. Observers both of American religion and Middle East politics could not help but notice the friendship that had developed between the Israeli government and conservative evangelical elements within American Protestantism. The special interest this segment of American Protestantism had in the fate of the Jewish people, and their support for a national Jewish home in the Land of Israel was evident from the early beginnings of the fundamentalist movement and was derived from their interpretation of biblical prophecy regarding the end of history—in which they see a prominent role for the Jewish people.
Luther and the Problem of Martyrdom
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

Kingsley Amis once had great fun imagining how the modern world might have turned out if Luther had successfully been bribed with the offer of a cardinalate. A much more likely miseen-scène is that suggested by Kierkegaard, who preferred to think how much better the world, or at least Danish Protestantism, would have been had Luther become a martyr. What makes the martyr’s crown a more plausible item of ecclesiastical headgear for Luther than a cardinal’s hat is that the idea of martyrdom was so important to him. Its importance was by no means restricted to the four years or so during which he daily expected to have to witness to the Gospel with his own blood: from his earliest lectures on the Psalms to his last lectures on Genesis, martyrdom and its implications for the Christian life were a central theme. In between Luther became not the first martyr of the Reformation, as he (no less than Kierkegaard) would have preferred, but its first martyrologist. In spite of this, Luther’s attitude to martyrdom has never, to my knowledge, been the subject of a full-scale study. In this paper I want to highlight some of the issues which would have to be explored further in any such study, and also to indicate the sense in which martyrdom became a problem for Luther.
The Scottish Reformation and the Theatre of Martyrdom
Authors: Dawson Jane E. A.
Published: March 2016

Poor John Knox felt a distinct sense of inferiority when he sat down to write the first book of his History of the Reformation in Scotland. Unlike his English friend John Foxe, he could not draw upon the stories of hundreds of martyrs and fit them into the complete history of the persecuted Church from its beginning until the present day. To make matters worse, Foxe would duplicate Knox’s labours by incorporating the stories of most of the Scottish martyrs into his 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments. In his ambition to be both the historian and the martyrologist of the Scottish Reformation, Knox thought he faced an immediate and apparently overwhelming problem: that of a distinct shortage of martyrs. Yet he was quickly reassured once he began assembling the details of those who had vigorously opposed the ‘manifest abuses, superstition and idolatry’, which characterized the Catholic Church in Scodand before the Reformation. Martyrs soon began to appear before his eyes, and Knox consoled himself, ‘Albeit there be no great number, yet are they more than the Collector would have looked for at the beginning.’
The Veneration of the Martyrs of Ikitsuki (1609-1645) by the Japanese ‘Hidden Christians’
Authors: Turnbull Stephen
Published: March 2016

Christianity came to Japan in 1549 in the person of the ‘Apostle to the Indies’, St Francis Xavier, yet in spite of initial progress both in making converts and in becoming part of the Japanese religious milieu, within a century it had virtually disappeared, harried to its demise by savage persecutions from a government convinced that Christianity was a threat to its survival. The suppression of Christianity produced many martyrs, of whom the best known are the ‘Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki’, crucified in 1597 and canonized in 1862. Of the thousands of others who perished, many are known neither by name nor date of martyrdom, but in one unique case the martyrs of a particular island are remembered and honoured by one of the world’s most secretive Christian groups, the Kakure Kirishitan, or ‘Hidden Christians’ of Japan.
The Making of an Anglican Martyr: Bishop John Coleridge Patteson of Melanesia
Authors: Hilliard David
Published: March 2016

Since the beginning of Anglican missionary activity in the southwest Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, fifteen European missionaries and at least seven Pacific Islanders have died violently in the course of their work. In that same region, comprising island Melanesia and New Guinea, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and the London Missionary Society [L.M.S.] have each had their honour roll of martyrs. Three of these have achieved a measure of fame outside the Pacific and their own denomination: John Williams of the L.M.S., killed at Erromanga in Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) in 1839; James Chalmers, also of the L.M.S., killed in New Guinea in 1901; and John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of Melanesia and head of the Melanesian Mission, killed in 1871. Patteson has been the subject of more than fifteen biographies (several of them in German and Dutch), in addition to essays in collections on English missionary heroes, scholarly articles, and pamphlets for popular consumption. In Anglican churches in England, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere he is commemorated as missionary hero in memorial tablets and stained-glass windows.
The First Protestant Martyr of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Significance of John Kensit (1853-1902)
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

On Thursday 25 September 1902 Liverpool’s endemic sectarian violence claimed perhaps its most notorious victim. John Kensit, founder of the Protestant Truth Society and instigator of the Kensit Crusade against ritualism in the Church of England, was attacked by a Roman Catholic crowd on his way from Birkenhead to Liverpool. An iron file was thrown, injuring the Protestant orator, and Kensit was taken to Liverpool Royal Infirmary. Although he began to recover, early in October septic pneumonia and meningitis developed, and on Wednesday 8 October, in the words of Kensit’s biographer, ‘his purified spirit, washed in the precious blood of the immaculate Lamb, was released from its earthly prison.’
The Martyr Cult of the First World War
Authors: White Gavin
Published: March 2016

It is certain that the unrest of Europe of the past twenty years will be dispelled. It is even likely that our whole civilisation will be advanced.’ So wrote A. E. Lawrie, Rector of Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, in October of 1914. He was spending a three-month leave of absence as chaplain to an army hospital behind the lines in France. He added that the death of a particular soldier ‘spoke so loudly of Another Cruel Death, that one could not but link the two together—the spirit of self-indulgence will be trodden underfoot and exchanged for the spirit of self-discipline.’
Vivian Redlich, 1905–1942: A Martyr in the Tradition
Authors: Moriarty Rachel
Published: March 2016

In early August 1942 an English Anglican missionary priest named Vivian Redlich met his death at the hands of the Japanese in Papua, then in the Anglican diocese of New Guinea. Redlich is one of a group of Papua New Guinea martyrs commemorated by the Anglican Church. I first heard his story when I joined the staff of his former theological college at Chichester, where he is remembered every year with a Eucharist at which an account of his martyrdom is liturgically read, and where he stands as a model of priestly dedication and sacrifice for those approaching ordination. I have prepared this paper to remember him on this fiftieth anniversary of his death, and in particular to set his story in the context of the earliest tradition of martyrology.
Women in the Writings of the Fathers: Language, Belief, and Reality
Authors: Gould Graham
Published: March 2016

The Church Fathers inherited from their social and intellectual environment a long tradition of debate about the physical, moral, and intellectual capacities of women. It would be an oversimplification to say that the uniform teaching of ancient philosophers and rhetoricians was that women were in every respect naturally inferior to men. Plato, for one, defended the view that moral goodness is the same for women as for men; the fact that they perform different tasks—the duties of a citizen in the case of a (free) man, and of a good wife, directing her household in obedience to her husband, in the case of a woman—does not mean that the same moral qualities of justice and temperance are not required of both. In his Republic, a radical programme for the restructuring of traditional society, Plato advocates equal access to education for women and an equality of opportunity for the intellectually able, regardless of sex, to rise to leading roles in the administration of the State. He continues to believe that most women will be inferior to most men at important tasks; but ‘it was something to have it said that sex is not relevant to natural ability and moral capacity’, and it is possible to detect the influence of subsequent philosophers who agreed with Plato in forming ‘an increasing belief in the competence and trustworthiness of women’ in financial and political affairs, even if the belief was to have little practical effect in changing socially-accepted roles.
God and Man in Dhuoda’sLiber manualis
Authors: Claussen M. A.
Published: March 2016

‘It is one thing for the mother of a family to teach the household by I word and example, but quite another for her, teaching certain useless things, to interfere with bishops or anyone in ecclesiastical orders, or even in a public synod.’ Thus theLibri Carolini, in the 790s, in its continuing attack on the Byzantine empress Irene, defined the proper role for the Frankish woman in doctrinal and educational matters. Dhuoda, wife of Bernard of Septimania, is by this definition an exemplar of Carolingian thought. She explicitly states that she wrote theLiber manualis, addressed to her son William, a hostage at the court of Charles the Bald, because she was unable to educate him in the godly life by her words and deeds. For his sake, then, she committed to writing, in the early 840s, what she would have taught him in person.
Women in the Ottonian Church: an Iconographic Perspective
Authors: McKitterick Rosamond
Published: March 2016

Although the principal relationship observable in an early medieval manuscript illustration is that between the artist and his or her text, the interests of the reader, and in many cases the first owner or commissioner of an illustrated book, could to some degree determine the extent and the elaboration of the illustrations, and, possibly, aspects of the iconography. The incidence of women in the illustrations of Christian books of the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, therefore, is a potentially fruitful source for examining the attitudes towards women’s role in the Church in the early Middle Ages. It may be possible to see, firstly, whether the prominence of women in the New Testament, and in the Gospels in particular, is enhanced and elaborated in ninth- and tenth-century visual interpretations of these Christian texts, or, secondly, whether there are any other innovations in Carolingian or Ottonian illustrations which shed light on the religious work of women within the Church. But to what extent is this potential realized? Are omissions as significant as inclusions? Can we conclude much from the relative dearth of pictures of women in Carolingian books, as opposed to the greater number of women portrayed in Ottonian books? It is the purpose of this paper to examine this phenomenon and its context and thereby to suggest some preliminary explanations.
The Common Woman in the Western Church in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: March 2016

Shortly after 1290 an anonymous Alsace Dominican set down in writing what he thought had changed since about 1200. The range and variety of the themes and details in his account of changes between 1200 and 1290 are extraordinary. One did not yet have iron-wheeled carts, he wrote, nor that sort of plaster which is called cementum. The buildings of Strasbourg and Basel were mean, small-windowed, with little light, and there was no bridge across the Rhine. Now, on the other hand, the masters of mechanical arts have achieved much. His changes include newly imported breeds of poultry, differences in clothes, and much emphasis on expansion: the little towns of today did not yet exist. There were as yet few merchants. Now, there are many, as well as many surgeons and physicians. The picture of learning and books of 1200 included a Paris which was already flourishing, and lots of law books, though they were difficult to buy, presumably because books were more expensive. Since then many books have been compiled—and he lists many of the major Dominican works, including the libri naturales of Albert the Great.
Aristocracy or Meritocracy? Office-holding Patterns in Late Medieval English Nunneries
Authors: Oliva Marilyn
Published: March 2016

The system by which medieval nuns and monks administered their monastic households has long been known to historians. Headed by a prioress, prior, abbess, or abbot, a group of officers executed the daily running of a monastery’s internal affairs by what is called the obedientiary system. But our evidence about the heads of the houses, their monastic officers, and their incumbent duties comes almost exclusively from the numerous accounts and studies of male houses. Knowledge about the officers and administration of female convents has been inferred largely from what we know about the male monasteries, and from a lone description of the officers and their duties found among the records of the convent of Barking Abbey.
A Priesthood of She-believers: Women and Congregations in Mid-seventeenth-century England
Authors: Laurence Anne
Published: March 2016

This paper considers women’s participation in the congregations of Civil War and Interregnum England. In particular it is concerned with the idea of whether women sectaries in the 1640s and 1650s had a different idea of church polity from their brethren, or whether, within the confines of the sects, they continued to play the role traditionally assigned to women in Christianity: that of the spiritually inspired, the example of holiness rather than the leader. In short, did women even in the sects remain outside the church polity?
Samuel Clarke and the ‘Lives’ of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Eales Jacqueline
Published: March 2016

When Samuel Clarke’s The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age was published posthumously in 1683, the ‘godly life’ was a well-established genre of Puritan literature. Clarke himself had contributed to its popularity with his various compilations of’lives’ of ministers and laity culled primarily from published funeral sermons and spiritual biographies by other authors. Today such editions would be regarded as blatant plagiarism, but in the mid-seventeenth century, before the advent of the copyright laws, they were widely appreciated, and in the Introduction to this, his last work, Clarke wrote,

I have been encouraged to make this collection, and now to publish it, finding that my former labours in this kind have been accepted with the Saints, and in the Church of Christ: which is apparent, for that they have been printed four times in a few years space, and yet never less than a thousand at a time.
Women in Victorian Church Music: Their Social, Liturgical, and Performing Roles in Anglicanism
Authors: Hillsman Walter
Published: March 2016

Musical outlets for English women in the medieval Church were generally restricted to convents, where they sang plain-song. Even female participation in liturgical plays like the Easter drama (with solo parts for the Marys at the Sepulchre) was normally not allowed. Singing in cathedral, collegiate, and major parish churches was limited to men and boys; in cathedral and collegiate foundations, only male singers could fulfil the statutory requirements of membership. The Henrician dissolution of religious houses thus put an effective musical damper on women in English church music for several years. (Abolition of chantry foundations in major parish churches, incidentally, caused the disbanding of most of the small parochial male choirs.)
Lay-Sisters and Good Mothers: Working-class Women in English Convents, 1840-1910
Authors: O’brien Susan
Published: March 2016

When convents were re-established in mid-nineteenrh-cenrury England, after a break of over two hundred years, they mirrored the developments in religious life pioneered on the Continent during the Catholic reformation and in response to the French Revolution. By 1850 new forms of active and apostolic vocation co-existed with the traditional enclosed and contemplative vocation. Yet even the most traditional convent was novel in early nineteenth-century England, and it is only with benefit of hindsight that we assume the willing response of Irish and English women to the call of a religious vocation. The reestablished Church might promote the virtue of vocation, particularly to the new apostolic congregations which were so useful to hard-pressed priests. But it was not inevitable that the religious life would take root in a culture deeply suspicious of conventual ‘secretiveness’ and, moreover, at a time when the ideology of hearth and home had such vitality. In the event, the active congregations multiplied rapidly and attracted women of all classes. As a result, by the end of the century the Roman Catholic Church in England had found employment for thousands of women as full-time, professional church workers. More than one-third and perhaps as many as half of these women were from working-class families, and it is with the working-class members that this paper is concerned.
The End of Victorian Values? Women, Religion, and the Death of Queen Victoria
Authors: Wolffe John
Published: March 2016

In the evening of Tuesday 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. At the other end of England, the Mothers’ Union branch at Embleton, on the coast of north Northumberland, was listening to a magic-lantern lecture about ‘Mothers in Many Lands’. The report of that meeting provides a touching cameo of that last hour of the Victorian age:
Make a Merry Noise! A Ninth-century Teacher Looks at Hymns
Authors: Harting-Corrêa Alice L.
Published: March 2016

Forty years after Charlemagne’s imperial coronation, Walahfrid Strabo, thirty-three-year-old abbot of the monastery of Reichenau, wrote a history of mid-ninth-century Frankish liturgy: Libellas de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum—A Little Book about the Origins and Development of Certain Aspects of the Liturgy. It was the first account of liturgical development, and the topics ranged widely over thirty-two chapters, from bells to baptism, language to litany. Most of the subjects were in a state of change or expansion. Where there was controversy—for example, should a priest celebrate the Eucharist more than once a day—the history of a practice would help to underline the essential elements and to demonstrate the Christian constants as opposed to cultural diversity. Where there was development, such as the increasing number of hymns available for the Liturgy of the Hours, the history of that practice was appropriate and timely.
Friars, Patrons, and Workshops at the Basilica del Santo, Padua
Authors: Bourdua Louise
Published: March 2016

Few incidents in the life of St Francis strike the art historian more than his demolition of the newly constructed chapter-hall in Assisi. As the date of a chapter at S. Maria della Portiuncula was fast approaching and there was no accommodation for the large number of friars expected, the people of Assisi built a house to shelter the incoming friars. Coming across this structure, Francis became so irritated that he climbed the roof and threw down tiles and rafters, and was only stopped when knights interfered and the municipality argued that the building belonged to them. Ironically, this same man had answered God’s call and had repaired the ruined churches of S. Damiano, St Peter, and S. Maria della Portiuncula in Assisi.
Patrons and Minders: the Intrusion of the Secular into Sacred Spaces in the Late Middle Ages
Authors: Martindale Andrew
Published: March 2016

From the twelfth century onwards it became common for sacred spaces—that is, churches—to be invaded by objects and imagery which are often surprising and bizarre and which, in their secular-ity, have little to do with the fundamental teachings of Christianity. Many of these objects are familiar, some less familiar; arid the topic seems appropriate for a ‘generalist’ audience of ecclesiastical history specialists. It should be said at once that this secularity seems to reach a peak around the middle of the fourteenth century, to be followed by a slow and somewhat irregular retreat; but since the entire sequence of events is accompanied by an almost complete silence in the written sources, the reasons for what was happening remain largely speculative. I shall return to this point.
Aristocratic and Popular Piety in the Patronage of Music in the Fifteenth-century Netherlands
Authors: Bowers Roger
Published: March 2016

It has always been recognized that during the fifteenth century the vigorous and affluent commercial towns of the Low Countries served as centres of artistic excellence, especially in respect of painting and of manuscript production and illumination. That the region was no less fertile a generator of practitioners and composers of music—especially of music for the Church—has also long been appreciated. If for present purposes the Low Countries be defined—rather generously, perhaps—as the region coterminous with the compact area covered by the six dioceses of Thérouanne, Arras, Cambrai, Tournai, Liège, and Utrecht (see map), then it was an area if not packed with great cathedrals, yet certainly thickly populated with great collegiate churches, which sustained skilled choirs and offered a good living and high esteem to musicians who composed; the area also sustained a catholic and generous patron and consumer of artistic enterprise of all sorts, sacred and secular music included, namely, the House of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and its Habsburg successors. From the end of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth, the region produced church musicians in such numbers that it became the principal area of recruitment for those princes of the south of Europe who were seeking the ablest men available to staff their household chapels. The Avignon popes of the 1380s and 1390s, the dukes of Rimini and Savoy, and the Roman popes of the mid-fifteenth century, and from the 1470s onwards the fiercely competitive dukes of Milan and Ferrara, the popes, cardinals, and bishops of the Curia, the king of Naples, the prominent families and churches of Florence and Venice, all alike recruited from the North; and though many of the ablest, like Ciconia, Dufay, Josquin, Isaac, and Tinctoris, were lured south to spend their lives in the sunshine, many more remained at home to maintain the Low Countries tradition.
The Bishops’ Bible Illustrations
Authors: Aston Margaret
Published: March 2016

The illustrations in the Bishops’ Bible have received more attention from art historians than from historians, though their story—which turns out to have been remarkably complicated—calls for the skills of both disciplines. The tale, which I can only outline here, throws interesting light on the state of the arts and art censorship in the early Elizabethan Church, at a time when there was much interrelationship between England and continental artists and craftsmen.
Holiness in Beauty? Roman Catholics, Arminians, and the Aesthetics of Religion in Early Caroline England
Authors: Newman Keith A.
Published: March 2016

This paper is more concerned with posing questions than attempting to provide answers. I am principally interested in trying to establish whether there was a connection between the English Arminians’ emphasis on ritual and the beautification of churches in the 1620S and 1630S and the perception at the time that Roman Catholicism was gaining ground, especially in London and at the court. It has long been known that Charles I’s court was considered by contemporaries to have been rife with Catholic activity. Likewise, the embassy chapels in London provided a focus for Protestant discontent as a result of their attracting considerable congregations of English Catholics. The 1620s also saw the Arminian faction within the Church of England grow in influence, acquiring the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham and of King Charles himself. As has been demonstrated by Nicholas Tyacke, for example, this faction was very much orientated towards the court, and gained power by working within this milieu under the leadership of Laud and Neile. However, I am not concerned here with the politics of the Arminian rise to control of the Church of England hierarchy, but rather with their interest in ceremonial worship, their endeavour to place liturgy rather than the sermon at the centre of services. Was a leading Arminian such as John Cosin, for instance, reacting to what amounted to a Roman initiative? Furthermore, one needs to ask what part aesthetics played in attracting and retaining the allegiance of Catholics to what was, after all, an illegal form of worship. Even if the no longer faced the likelihood of physical martyrdom, financial penalties were severe, and the threat of imprisonment remained for priests and laity alike. Yet some twenty per cent of the titular nobility and many ordinary folk remained loyal to Rome. May not the very nature of Catholic worship provide a clue to explain this phenomenon? Clearly this is an extremely wide subject, which the time and space available does not permit me to explore in depth on this occasion. Therefore, I propose to focus on two specific areas: what attracted crowds of Londoners to the Catholic worship offered by the embassy chapels; and on one aspect of the Arminian response, namely, the field of devotional literature. I shall examine John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions… Called the Hours of Prayer (1627) in the context of its being a reply to popular Catholic devotional books of the period, such as the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, commonly known as the Primer. Thus I shall address issues connected with both public and private devotions.
The Victorian Revival of Plainsong in English: its Usage under Tractarians and Ritualists
Authors: Hillsman Walter
Published: March 2016

The revival of plainsong in mid-nineteenth-century English parish churches constituted one of the most distinctive developments in church music of the period. Even a brief study of the subject affords valuable insights into church musical usage and its interweaving with changes in musical taste and churchmanship.
Honesty and Consecration: Paul Tillich’s Criteria for a Religious Architecture
Authors: Dudley Martin
Published: March 2016

In my early life [Paul Tillich told a conference of church architects in 1965], I wished to become an architect and only in my late teens the other desire, to become a philosophical theologian, was victorious. I decided to build in concepts and propositions instead of stone, iron, and glass. But building remains my passion, in clay and in thought, and as the relation of the medieval cathedrals to the scholastic systems shows, the two ways of building are not so far from each other. Both express an attitude to the meaning of life as a whole.
Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages
Authors: Meens Rob
Published: March 2016

The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.
The sacra infantia in Medieval Hagiography
Authors: Bejczy István P.
Published: March 2016

In his De civitate Dei, Augustine stated that anyone who wants to lead a good and Christian life must necessarily have lived in sin in his life up to then. It is quite conceivable that Augustine had his own course of life in mind when writing these words; he never made a secret of his own sinful youth, as is clear from the Confessiones. None the less, his statement is expressed in the form of a general rule.

Many medieval saints’ lives seem to accord with Augustine’s statement. The saint repents after a life of sin and henceforth leads a model Christian life until the day of his death. Thus the eventual victory of Christianity over the forces of evil was demonstrated.

However, there are also many vitae that follow a different pattern. The saint is sometimes supposed to have been perfect in every respect from childhood onward. He was born a saint rather than becoming one through a process of ‘spiritual maturation’. Stories about such precocious saints have not escaped notice in modern scholarship. Following E. R. Curtius, the phrase puer senex is sometimes used to denote the topos; in hagiography, expressions such as as quasi senex and cor gerens senile are used.
Children, the Liturgy, and the Reformation: the Evidence of the Lichfield Cathedral Choristers
Authors: Cooper T. N.
Published: March 2016

The great interest generated by the theme of this year’s conference reflects the central importance of children in the history of the Christian Church, yet at the same time their omission from much of historical writing. For all but the recent past this is largely the result of the difficulties with the source material itself, and this is certainly true for historians of the Church during the medieval and Reformation periods. The main concern of the administrative records of the Catholic Church was with adults and, in particular, ordained men. It is to the schools that we must look for the most useful references to children and, more specifically, to the choir schools for evidence of the role of boys in the liturgy.
‘From Fire and Water’: the Responsibilities of Godparents in Early Modern England
Authors: Coster William
Published: March 2016

Richard Hooker, in justifying the formula of the baptismal rite of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, objected to the Puritan preference for referring to godparents as witnesses ‘… as if they came but to see and to testify what is done’, adding,

It savoureth more of piety to give them their old accustomed name of Fathers and Mothers in God, whereby they are well put in mind what affection they ought to bear towards those innocents, for whose religious education the Church accepteth them as pledges.
Sunday-school Book Prizes for Children: Rewards and Socialization
Authors: Entwistle Dorothy
Published: March 2016

This paper considers the reward books given to children as Sunday-school prizes in the north-west of England between 1870 and 1914. From the titles presented and from the authors considered to be suitable, it was possible to select a number of books which were representative of these prizes. An examination of these stories showed that there were themes which were repeatedly stressed, and that those for boys and girls were noticeably different. In the light of what is already known about the organization and purposes of Sunday schools, the choice of a particular genre of books for prizes suggests that their contents were seen as one way of socializing children into appropriate attitudes and behaviour.