bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Victorian Feminism and Catholic Art: the Case of Mrs Jameson
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: March 2016

Now Church History’, wrote John Henry Newman in 1843, ‘is made up of these three elements—miracles, monkery, Popery’, so that anyone sympathetic to the subject must sympathize with these. Much the same, however, could be said of Christian art. The young Southey on a visit to Madrid stood incredulous before a series of paintings depicting the life of St Francis. ‘I do not remember ever to have been so gready astonished’, he recalled. ‘“Do they really believe all this, Sir?” said I to my companion. “Yes, and a great deal more of the same kind”, was. the reply.’ The paradox was that works of genius served the ends of a drivelling superstition, a dilemma resolved in the 1830s by the young Augustus Pugin, who decided that the creation of decent Christian architecture presupposed the profession of Catholic Christianity. The old Protestant hostility to graven images was in part a revulsion from that idolatrous popish veneration of the Virgin and saints which had inspired frescos, statues, and altar-pieces in churches and monasteries throughout Catholic Europe; but what on earth did a modern educated Protestant make of the endless Madonnas, monks, and miracles adorning the buildings which he was expected as a man of cultivation to admire? At the very least, he required a sympathetic instruction in the meaning of the iconography before his eyes, and some guidance about its relation to the rest of what he believed. The great intermediary in this process was Ruskin; but there was at least one odier interpreter of Catholic art celebrated in her day, Mrs Anna Brownell Jameson, whose most popular works, Sacred and Legendary Art, Legends of the Monastic Orders, and Legends of the Madonna, told the Englishman what he could safely think and feel amid the alien aesthetic allurements of Catholicism.
Henry Styleman le Strange: Tractarian, Artist, Squire
Authors: Jacob W. M.
Published: March 2016

The life of Henry Styleman le Strange illustrates a number of significant factors in the development of the Tractarian Movement and its relationship with the arts. He was a devout layman who wished to advance the practice of Tractarian worship and spirituality. He did this by encouraging Tractarian worship in the churches on his estates and by appointing Tractarian clergy to livings of which he was patron. He was himself a distinguished amateur artist and architect, who was modesdy influential in the nineteenth-century ideal for exploring the interrelationship between the self-dedication of the artist to moral and religious truth, and Christian art. This can be seen in his own artistic work, in the tower and nave roofs at Ely Cathedral, and his collaborations with other architects, notably Butterfield. As important as his own work is his influence as a patron, not merely in restoring churches on his estate or in the development of a seaside resort, but in the pattern that emerges of his friends and acquaintances also commissioning his favoured architect.
Church Art and Church Discipline round about 1939
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: March 2016

On 3 May 1939 Dr Francis Carolus Eeles, General Secretary of the Central Council of Churches, wrote to Dr John Victor Macmillan, second Bishop of the new diocese of Guildford. He began by praising the Guildford Advisory Committee, ‘one of the best in the country; its businesslike methods and its thoroughness leave nothing to be desired.’ It was not one of the six on which Eeles himself served. He went on to speak about Guildford St Nicolas’.
Suffering and Innocence in Latin Sermons for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, c. 400-800
Authors: Hayward Paul A.
Published: March 2016

It has long been recognized that medieval representations of the Holy Innocents are much concerned with the horrendous cruelty of their passion. They are often cited as evidence that the Church, putting a high priority on loving parenthood, attempted to raise the standard of Christian child-care, and it is indeed clear that their rhetoric depends upon a degree of sympathy for suffering children. This paper aims to suggest, however, that the history of this theme shows how the construction of their sanctity was influenced by the changing place of childhood in matters of theology and spirituality. It will show, I hope, that the emphasis on the Innocents’ suffering needs to be seen in the context of the Origenist controversy, that there was an erosion of this theme’s importance in later representations of the infants, and that this shift reflected a desire on the part of monastic authors to adapt the now established cult of the Innocents to new-found spiritual needs.
Oblation or Obligation? A Canonical Ambiguity
Authors: Doran John
Published: March 2016

The practice of oblation, the giving of children to a religious community to be brought up and educated, is as old as monasticism itself. Oblation was a means by which parents were able to dispose of unwanted offspring and be fairly confident that they would be cared for by others. However, there were never any clear guidelines laid down by the Church with respect to oblation, and the confusion over the status of an oblate was never to be satisfactorily settled. Even the great effort put into removing ambiguities in canon law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries failed to clarify the technicalities of oblation. This was because there was no agreement on the nature of oblation from the start.

The practice of the Eastern Church with respect to oblation is best summed up by St Basil the Great, in his Regulae Fusius Tractatae. He took oblation for granted, noting that a child was easily moulded to the religious life, and stipulated no minimum age at which a child should be received, but he did insist that those under the care of their parents were to be received before witnesses. More importantly, Basil was anxious that a child oblate should be questioned strictly when he reached the age of sixteen or seventeen as to whether he wished to be professed. He then had to demonstrate perseverance in the religious life and was only to be professed after much pleading. This final profession was irrevocable. Clearly the tradition of the Church was in favour of the oblation of children, but the giving of a child was not considered a definitive act. Certainly with St Basil we can see that the abbot of a community was to have the final say as to whether or not a child oblate should be professed when he came of age. This was very much in the spirit of early monasticism. The abbot was not to be forced to retain unsuitable monks in his monastery.
Friends of the Family: Some Miracles for Children by Italian Friars
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

At some time in the 1320s, the Sienese master Simone Martini painted an altar-piece celebrating the Hermit friar Agostino Novello. Agostino, who had died at the convent of San Leonardo al Lago, near Siena, in 1309, is shown surrounded by illustrations of four of his posthumous miracles (see plates 1 and 2, pp. 198 and 200, below). Of these, three were performed on behalf of children. The exception, at upper right, shows the deliverance of a knight who, riding in a desolate mountainous landscape, has fallen beneath his horse. Top left, we see the rescue of a child from mauling by what is presumably a wolf. Below, a child falls into the street from a wooden balcony when one of its slats gives way; not only does he suffer no injury from the fall, but Agostino seizes the falling slat in mid-air and prevents it from hurting him. Bottom right, an infant suffers head injuries when he falls from his cradle, but his aunt kneels to make a vow to Agostino, and in the lower register we see the fulfilment of the vow: robed as a little Augustinian friar and carrying a taper, the child is carried by his nurse to give thanks, followed by his mother and his aunt, who carries another taper.
Natalis Innocentum: the Holy Innocents in Liturgy and Drama
Authors: Dudley Martin R.
Published: March 2016

It has come to our knowledge, not without grievous amazement and displeasure of heart [Bishop Grandisson wrote to the clergy of Exeter Cathedral and of other collegiate churches in his diocese before Christmas 1360] that for these past years and some years preceding, at the most holy solemnities of Christ’s Nativity, and the feasts of St Stephen, St John the Apostle and Evangelist, and the Innocents, when all faithful Christians are bound to busy themselves the more devoutly and quietly in praise of God and in Church Services, certain Ministers of our aforesaid Church, together with the boys, not only at Matins and Vespers and other hours, but also (which is more detestable) during the solemnity of the Mass have rashly presumed, putting the fear of God behind them, after the pernicious example of certain Churches, to associate together within the Church itself and play certain foolish and noxious games, unbecoming to clerical honesty.
‘Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings’: Prophecy, Puritanism, and Childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk
Authors: Walsham Alexandra
Published: March 2016

In January 1581 a short black-letter tract in the tiny octavo format favoured by many Elizabethan publishers of sensational news appeared from the press of a London printing house based just outside the City in the Strand. Like other ‘three-halfpenny’ pamphlets of its ilk, this particular piece of ephemera was a pious tale of the prodigious and strange, but true. It described the ‘wonderfull worke of God shewed upon a chylde’ by the name of William Withers in the small Suffolk town of Walsham-le-Willows. On the previous Christmas Eve, the eleven-year-old boy had fallen into a deep trance for the space often days, ‘to the great admiration of the beholders, and the greefe of his parentes’. At the end of this time he regained consciousness and proceeded to deliver a series of vehement prophetic denunciations of contemporary sin and immorality, calling the people to ‘spedie repentance’—without which, he announced, the day of destruction was surely at hand. If amendment of life was not quickly forthcoming, the Lord would presently shake their houses on their heads and cause the earth to open up and swallow them alive.
‘Such perfecting of praise out of the mouth of a babe’: Sarah Wight as Child Prophet
Authors: Moore Susan Hardman
Published: March 2016

Recovering the voice of the child in the Church is hard. Christians must reckon with Jesus’ instruction to be like a child, yet the Church usually measures faith by mastery of an adult vocabulary of religious experience. The historian has to dig past adult prejudices and silences. Recent research has done much to rescue the children of early modern England from anonymity. We know, for example, about the ideal of an ‘ordered society’, in which children and youths took their place as ‘inferiors’, and yet were valued and loved. We also know that the vision of order was rarely achieved, in a country swarming with juveniles. Attempts to make the vision outward and visible can be seen in arrangements for seating in church, where the young sat apart from their elders, and in the all-pervasive discipline of catechizing, where the assumption that age instructs youth is inherent in the pattern of proceeding by question and answer. Most of the sources that tell us about childhood, however, are heavily prescriptive, or rush past youth after listing a few predictable sins.
The Eye of his Master: Children and Charity Schools
Authors: Jacob W. M.
Published: March 2016

The aim of this paper is to examine the evidence from a number of charity schools, for attitudes towards the childhood of the ‘poorer sort’ in the early eighteenth century. Conventionally it has been claimed that lack of affection, and even brutality, characterized the relationship between parents, especially fathers, and their children. Lawrence Stone, in particular, has promoted the view that, as a result of the very high mortality rate among children until the late eighteenth century, parents did not invest much affection in them in order to insulate themselves from the sorrow resulting from their likely deaths before reaching adulthood. This view was also taken by Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt. They pointed out the formality of address seen in letters between children and parents of the upper classes, and suggested that cruelty to children and flogging was commonplace at all levels of society. These views have been challenged by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that, when examined carefully, the evidence suggests that, from the sixteenth century at least, nearly all children seem to have been wanted, loved, and cared for. She claims that the majority of children were not subject to brutality, and that physical punishment was used relatively infrequently and as a last resort. Pollock suggests that from the eighteenth century onwards parents were much concerned with ‘training’ a child in order to ensure that he or she absorbed correct values and beliefs and would grow into a model citizen.
The Foundress and the Foundlings: the ‘Moral Panic’ of 1893 in the Orphanage of Mercy
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

Child abuse sometimes seems to be a discovery of the closing decades of the twentieth century. Academic attention was focused on the problem by a conference sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine, chaired by the Health Minister Dr David Owen, in 1976. Among the twenty-six contributors was a member of our society, Professor Gordon Dunstan, and Dom Benedict Webb. The publicity for the published proceedings claimed that ‘Child abuse and neglect provide some of the most important and difficult problems in Western Society.’
Past creeds and present formula at the Council of Chalcedon
Authors: Hall Stuart G.
Published: March 2016

The Formula by which the Council of Chalcedon in 451 defined the Person of Christ is a classic case of the deliberate adjustment and interpretation of the past to suit a present need. The assembled bishops at their fifth session gave their assent to a document which not merely prescribed a theological position in the face of the doctrines of Eutyches and Nestorius, but justified doing so in the face of historically-based objections to the enterprise.
Bringing the Holy Sepulchre to the west: S. Stefano, Bologna, from the fifth to the twentieth century
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2016

By virtue of its basic pattern of belief, the Church is committed to looking back as well as forward. In his introductory letter for the Conference which has produced this volume, Andrew Martindale reminded us that ‘doctrine, dogma, and revelation are all pinned to time and place’. Most of all are they rooted in Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre, the site of the death and Resurrection of the Lord. It is true that, in particular since the Reformation, the theology of the Passion and Resurrection have often been discussed without reference to their historical location. Other Christians in other times, confident that the Holy Sepulchre discovered under Constantine was indeed the authentic place of Christ’s Resurrection, desired to reach out to and to grasp its historical and geographical reality, for these embody the very time and place of their redemption.
A thirteenth-century genealogy of heresy
Authors: Bosworth Lucy
Published: March 2016

How did the medieval Church cope with the existence, both in its past and its present, of dissent and heresy within its own body? The churchmen who were engaged in writing anti-heretical treatises in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did not view the Church’s doctrinal history as a process of interplay between new, and possibly heterodox, ideas which defined and refined those ‘orthodox’ doctrines which became acceptable to the Church. Still less did they conceive of it in terms of Bauer’s ‘competing orthodoxies’, one of which eventually became dominant. For these polemicists, the Pauline injunction – Oportet et haereses esse in its Vulgate form (I Corinthians 11.9) – was interpreted as meaning that there must always be heresies among them. Heresy had existed as a separate entity from the inception of the Church; indeed, it was viewed almost as God-given, part of God’s scheme and the natural life of the Church, one of the four temptations sent to test and mould her. Moreover, although the heresies which had troubled the Church at various times sometimes seemed to be only distinctly related, polemicists held firmly to the conviction that all of these apparently distinct heresies were in fact offshoots of the one heresy. Their understanding of the Church’s doctrinal history, therefore, was of the intermittent manifestation, in a variety of guises, of this ‘heresy’ and its subsequent detection and repulsion by the Church. In looking back on this long history, polemicists were able to use past heresies to identify contemporary sects as heretical. At this level retrospection offered a means of combating the appeal of the ascetic and evangelical groups which were springing up during this period, many of which displayed an alarming potential to evade the control of the institutional Church. The retrospective example of the great heresies – the Arians and the Manicheans, for instance – thus provided a simple but effective method of warning the laity away from groups which the clerical and episcopal hierarchies found suspicious or threatening.
‘By this mark you shall know him’: clerical celibacy and Antichrist in English Reformation polemic
Authors: Parish Helen L.
Published: March 2016

‘Antichrist’, wrote William Tyndale in 1528, ‘is not an outward thyng, that is to say a man that should sode[n]ly appeare with wonders as our fathers talked of him. No, verely, for Antichrist is a spirituall thing. And this is as much to say as agaynst Christ, ye one that preacheth against Christ.’ Such a definition of Antichrist marked a departure from the traditional medieval legend, which was based upon the prophecy of a single future figure of evil. This new image of Antichrist as a permanent and spiritual presence in the world is a central feature of English Protestant polemic, informing interpretations of both biblical prophecies, and the history of the Church. It was not history which engendered right understanding of Scripture, but Scripture that offered the means of interpreting the past. The Bible offered paradigms for the understanding of history because it was the embodiment of divine truth, which was irreproachable and immutable. In the words of John Bale, ‘yet is the text a light to the chronicles, and not the chronicles to the text’.
The importance of dying earnestly: the metamorphosis of the account of James Bainham in ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’
Authors: Freeman Thomas S.
Published: March 2016

Readers of the second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or any of the subsequent editions of that massive history of the persecutions inflicted on the Church, popularly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, would have found a coherent, lucid description, filled with circumstantial and often dramatic details, of the ordeals of James Bainham. According to this account, James Bainham, a member of the Middle Temple and the son of a Gloucestershire knight, was accused of heresy in 1531, arrested, and transported to Lord Chancellor More’s house in Chelsea. There he was tied to a tree in More’s garden and whipped; subsequently he was taken to the Tower and racked in More’s presence. Eventually, after repeated interrogations and under the threat of burning, Bainham abjured and did penance at Paul’s Cross. Yet Bainham’s conscience tormented him and, a little over a month after his release, he prayed for God’s forgiveness before an evangelical congregation, meeting secretly in a warehouse in Bow Lane. A week later, Bainham stood up on his pew in St Austin’s church, clutching a vernacular New Testament and William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man to his chest and tearfully declared that he had denied God. He prayed for the congregation’s forgiveness and exhorted them to die rather than to submit as he had done. If this defiance was not sufficiently public, Bainham sent letters proclaiming his doctrinal convictions to the Bishop of London and others. Rearrested and re-examined, he was inevitably condemned to death as a relapsed heretic.
‘To let the memory of these men dye is injurious to posterity’: Edmund Calamy’s Account of the ejected ministers
Authors: Wykes David L.
Published: March 2016

Edmund Calamy is celebrated as the biographer of Restoration Nonconformity. His account of the sufferings of the ministers ejected from their livings following the Restoration religious settlement is well known to historians of Dissent. As a biographer he was responsible for rescuing many details and even the names of ejected ministers which would otherwise have been lost. His account remains therefore the pre-eminent source for the study of the early history of Nonconformity. In addition to the biographical details about individual ministers, he included much incidental information on the organization and structure of early Dissent. Nevertheless, the significance of his work went beyond the biographical accounts. Modern religious Dissent dates from the Restoration of Charles II and the passing of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which saw about 2,000 ministers, preachers, and teachers suffer the loss of their livelihoods for their refusal to conform. The Great Ejection was, however, more than just an historical event. As A. G. Matthews, the compiler of the outstanding revision of Calamy’s list of ejected ministers, wrote:
The Gender of the Church: the Female Image of Ecclesia in the Middle Ages
Authors: Spreadbury Jo
Published: March 2016

In a famous eucharistic vision, recorded in the Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen saw what she calls the ‘image of a woman’ (‘muliebris imago’) approaching the Cross so that she was sprinkled by the blood from Christ’s side. In the Eibingen miniature which accompanies this vision, the woman is shown not only sprinkled with Christ’s blood but catching it in a chalice. Below the Cross an altar bearing a chalice is shown and the same woman stands beside it, her arms outstretched in prayer. Hildegard says in the text that the woman ‘frequently approached’ the altar and there ‘devotedly offers her dowry, which is the body and blood of the Son of God’. The illustration shows nothing of the vested priest who is described in the text approaching the altar after the woman to celebrate the divine mysteries; but it appears that the woman herself is celebrating the mysteries of Christ’s passion which are recalled in the Eucharist and pictured around the altar. The interpretation of this vision says that the woman is Ecclesia, the Church, the Bride of Christ.
Gender Difference and Indifference in the Writings of Pope Innocent III
Authors: Rousseau Constance M.
Published: March 2016

Both R. Howard Bloch and Jean Leclercq have recently included the name of Pope Innocent HI (1198-1216) among the ranks of medieval misogynistic writers. Such an anti-feminist designation results from his treatise De miseria humanae conditionis (1195), which he authored whilst a cardinal deacon, as Lothario de Segni. However, the passages cited by Bloch and Leclercq only appear misogynistic when we consider them superficially. If we look at the entire corpus of Innocent’s writings and his actions, in their proper contexts, we discover that this Pope can not be so easily categorized. Rather, our analysis will show that there is much more diversity in his perspective on gender than originally thought.

The De miseria should be seen in its unique context when evaluating its attitude towards women. Books I and HI of the treatise belonged to the contemptus mundi tradition which emphasised the vileness and misery of human existence. Moreover, John C. Moore has recently proposed that Book II is a speculum curialis which reflected the questionable moral practices Innocent observed during his career in the Roman Curia.
The Life of St Margaret of Antioch in Late Medieval England: a Gendered Reading
Authors: Lewis Katherine J.
Published: March 2016

This paper explores the possibilities of a feminist reading of the Middle English life of St Margaret of Antioch, whose status as a virgin-martyr is sometimes held to have made her an unattainable role model, suitable only for virgins who had dedicated themselves to God. Using both written and painted English narratives of St Margaret’s life dating mainly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it shows that many elements of these could have been interpreted by all women as a validation of themselves and their experiences. The paper uncovers certain common themes and similarities of presentation, to see how far a general picture of Margaret emerges from them and what they say about the construction of femininity and the female. Although the narrative of the legend takes a variety of forms, both written and painted, it is sufficiently stable (largely ‘controlled’ by the Legenda Aurea) to allow different versions to be drawn on in this way.
From ‘The State of my Soul’ to ‘Exalted Piety’: Women’s Voices in the Arminian/Methodist Magazine, 1778–1821
Authors: Jones Margaret P.
Published: March 2016

John Wesley’s version of evangelical Christianity was distinguished by its insistence on the universal availability of salvation (‘Free Grace’), an insistence which rapidly led to the definition of Wesleyan theology as ‘Arminian’ in contradistinction to the Calvinist evangelicalism of Whitfield, Toplady, and others. Controversy was violent in the 1740s, and flared up again in the 1770s. It was against this background that John Wesley founded the Arminian Magazine in 1778. It was to function in defence of Arminianism, and to consist of ‘tracts on the universal love of God, wrote in this and the last century’, together with ‘Original Pieces’. This might seem an unlikely place for women to speak, or even to be spoken about, but Arminianism was not defended solely by means of tracts. By the year of Wesley’s death (1791), besides significant amounts of poetry and short anecdotes (the latter characterized by Wesley in 1781 as ‘bits and scraps’, with which he would scorn to fill up the Magazine), there are also fifteen letters written by women, and eleven accounts of women’s lives (slightly outnumbering both letters from and accounts of men). Later years show an even greater preponderance of women’s ‘Lives’. Leaving on one side the value of this source to the historian, this paper seeks only to analyse women’s opportunities to speak publicly in their own voice in the Arminian (later Methodist) Magazine under John Wesley’s editorship and later.
‘Women may preach but men must govern’: Gender Roles in the Growth and Development of the Bible Christian Denomination
Authors: Shorney David
Published: March 2016

When the Cornish lay evangelist, William O’Bryan, founded the first Bible Christian societies in the late autumn of 1815 he was responding, in the main, to female initiatives. This is not altogether surprising. For several decades before 1815 women had been playing a much larger role in English evangelical Christianity than they had done in the early years of the Evangelical Revival. The informal groupings which came into existence in its second phase, c. 1790-c. 1830, gave women opportunities to initiate, organize, and exhort on a much more extensive scale. As cottages and farmsteads became centres of worship, women were well placed to play a more important role as initiators and organizers, especially in those areas barely affected by John Wesley, George Whitefield, and their travelling preachers. The more articulate went even further and followed the example of some eighteenth-century Quaker women by speaking in their own localities and further afield. Before the eighteenth century came to an end a number had acquired the reputation of being gifted preachers and ‘holy women’, ‘owned by God’, and called to instruct others, both men and women, in the Christian faith. For a short while women were poised in Wesleyan, and later, Primitive Methodism to play a major role in evangelism and church-planting; but it was only amongst the Bible Christians that they, for a time, played perhaps an even more significant role as evangelists than their male colleagues. As such they were in no way inferior to men; but when the denomination acquired a governmental structure copied from Wesleyan Methodism the patriarchal ordering of contemporary society set limits to their Bible-based notions of sexual equality.
A Jamaica of the Mind: Gender, Colonialism, and the Missionary Venture
Authors: Hall Catherine
Published: March 2016

Mary Ann Middleditch, a young woman of twenty in 1833, living in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and working in a school, confided in her letters her passionate feelings about Jamaica and the emancipation of slaves. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she had grown up in the culture of dissent and antislavery and felt deeply identified with the slaves whose stories had become part of the books she read, the sermons she heard, the hymns she sang, the poems she quoted, and the missionary meetings she attended. In 1833, at the height of the antislavery agitation, Mary Ann followed the progress of William Knibb in Northamptonshire. Knibb, who was born in nearby Kettering, had gone to Jamaica as a Baptist missionary in 1824 and been radicalized by his encounter with slavery. In the aftermath of the slave rebellion of 1831, widely known as the Baptist War because of the associations between some of the slave leaders and the Baptist churches, the planters had organized against the missionaries, burnt their chapels and mission stations, persecuted and threatened those whom they saw as responsible. Faced with the realization that their mission could not coexist with slavery the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica sent William Knibb, their most eloquent spokesman, to England to present their case. Abandoning the established orthodoxy that missionaries must keep out of politics, Knibb openly declared his commitment to abolition. The effect was electric and his speeches, up and down the country, were vital to the effective organization of a powerful antislavery campaign which resulted in the Emancipation Act of 1833.
How Muscular was Victorian Christianity? Thomas Hughes and the Cult of Christian Manliness Reconsidered
Authors: Gill Sean
Published: March 2016

Despite the enduring popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1857, the reputation of its author, Thomas Hughes, has suffered from the general reaction against Victorian values which characterized the first part of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1965, out of sympathy both with Hughes’s Christian beliefs and with his moral didacticism, Kenneth Allsop could dismiss him as a writer ‘fluctuating between a facetious smugness and a creepy piety’. However, in recent years scholars such as George Worth and Norman Vance have provided us with a more sensitive and nuanced picture of his thought, and one which severely qualifies the traditional image of Hughes as an exponent of a muscular Christianity which exalted an anti-intellectual credo of schoolboy athleticism and adult male toughness perfectly attuned to the ethos of high Victorian imperialism. This paper examines some of the ambiguities which are to be found in Hughes’s attempts to encapsulate and transcend the ideals of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour within the specifically Christian context from which they arose, and in so doing cast some light on the way in which Victorian Christianity both contributed to, and was influenced by, the construction and maintenance of gender roles for both men and women.
‘Knights of God’: Ellice Hopkins and the White Cross Army, 1883–95
Authors: Morgan Sue
Published: March 2016

A historiographer of recent literature on masculinity might be forgiven for assuming that nineteenth-century definitions of Christian manliness were solely the domain of male commentators. The shifting and often conflicting emphases of the manly ideal proposed by critics such as Arnold, Kingsley, Hughes, and Carlyle exerted a prevailing influence upon the Victorian ruling classes – this much is beyond doubt. That codes of manliness were also subject to considerable attention by women, however, is suggested by this preliminary study of the prescriptive writings of the High Churchwoman and leading moral reformer Ellice Hopkins, whose discourse of social purity emerged as a force in the search for regulation of male sexuality during the 1880s and 1890s.
Anglican Worship in Late Nineteenth-Century Wales: a Montgomeryshire Case Study
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: March 2016

In 1910, the Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouth revealed that the Church of England was the largest religious body in Wales, and attracted over a quarter of all worshippers. This indicated a significant improvement in the Church’s fortunes in the previous half century, and a different picture from that which had emerged from the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, which had suggested that the established Church had the support of only twenty per cent of Welsh worshippers. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the Church’s improving fortunes between 1851 and 1910 by exploring the liturgical patterns which were evolving in a particular Welsh county, Montgomeryshire, in the late nineteenth century. Montgomeryshire is part of the large rural heart of mid-Wales, bordered by Radnor to the south, Cardigan and Merioneth to the west, Denbigh to the north, and Shropshire to the east. The paper considers the annual, monthly, and weekly liturgical cycles which were developing in the county, and how the co-existence of the Welsh and English languages was expressed in different styles of church music and worship.
‘Austere Ritual’: the Reformation of Worship in Inter-War English Congregationalism
Authors: Randall Ian M.
Published: March 2016

Writing in 196s, Horton Davies, in his magisterial examination of worship and theology in England, gave a glowing account of advances made in Free Churches over previous decades towards ‘a worship that is deeply reverent, sacramentally rich, ecumenically comprehensive, and theologically faithful’. This study examines the pressure for reformation in worship which emerged, particularly in the 1930s, within English Congregationalism. Pressure came from an exploration of the Reformed and Puritan roots of the denomination and from the influence of wider forms of corporate devotion. By 1943, Nathaniel Micklem (1888-1976), Principal from 1932 of Mansfield College, Oxford, and the most formative theologian espousing new versions of Reformed thought, could write Congregationalism and the Church Catholic, affirming that ‘by the faithful preaching of the Word, the believing celebration of the sacraments and the exercise of Gospel discipline, the Church is kept in the doctrine and fellowship of the apostles and stands in true succession’. The inter-war years, a period of marked Anglo-Catholic dominance, saw Anglican and Free Church leaders who had been shaped by evangelical theology re-examining their practices in the light of higher forms of worship. In Congregationalism, which with almost 300,000 members in England was the largest of the older Dissenting denominations, this process had distinctive features deriving from its own history.
‘The catechumenate for adults is to be restored’: Patristic Adaptation in the Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults
Authors: Yarnold Edward
Published: March 2016

At the end of the third session of the Second Vatican Council in 1963, the bishops were able to make a beginning to their legislative work by promulgating two documents which they fondly hoped would be uncontroversial: the unremarkable Decree on Mass Media, and the much more consequential Constitution on the Liturgy. Among the principles for the revision of the Roman Catholic Church’s sacraments contained in the second of these documents, instructions are given for the revision of the rites of initiation, including the following:

The catechumenate for adults is to be restored [instauretur] and broken up into several steps [gradibus], and put into practice at the discretion of the local ordinary. In this way the time of the catechumenate, which is intended for appropriate formation, can be sanctified through liturgical rites to be celebrated successively at different times. In mission territories, in addition to what is available in the Christian tradition, it should also be permitted to incorporate ceremonies [elementa] of initiation which are found to be customary in each society, provided they can be adapted to the Christian rite.
The Early Development of Church Architecture in Syria and Jordan c. 300-c. 750
Authors: Kennedy Hugh
Published: March 2016

The early church architecture of Syria remains comparatively little known in western academic circles, yet there is no area of the early Christian world where the remains of so many churches of different types have been preserved. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to this architecture; it also offers bibliography for those who may feel moved to find out more. Within Syria itself, there were marked regional variations which allow the area to be divided into three districts on the basis of geography, architectural style and building materials. The first of these to be treated here is northern Syria, essentially the late Roman provinces of Syria I and Syria II with their capitals at Apamea and Antioch. The paper then turns to southern Syria, that is most of the province of Arabia with its capital at Bostra, before moving to the final area, comprising Jordan, the southern part of Provincia Arabia and the eastern, transjordanian half of Palestine III.
The Role of the Holy Land for the Early Followers of Joachim of Fiore
Authors: Wessley Stephen
Published: March 2016

That Jerusalem, especially the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation, plays an important role in the writings of the famous apocalyptical thinker Joachim of Fiore is to be expected. What has not been looked at before is the elaborate role ascribed to the Holy Land and Jerusalem by Joachim’s immediate followers. The thesis of this paper is that the early followers of Joachim justified their very existence in terms of a distinctive apocalyptical role for the Holy Land.
Rebuilding Solomon’s Temple? The Architecture of Calvinism
Authors: Spicer Andrew
Published: March 2016

During the autumn of 1566 a series of Calvinist churches or temples were erected across the Southern Netherlands. These buildings attracted the attention and curiosity of contemporaries because of their unusual appearance and the speed with which they appeared. The polygonal ground plan of these buildings as well as the use of the term ‘temple’ led some observers to associate them with the Temple of Solomon. The English merchant Richard Clough commented that in Antwerp the Reformed had ‘layd the fondasyonss of syche tempelles more lyker the tempell of Salomon then hoder wysse’. Another observer also described these round churches as being built in the style of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. These comments suggest that Calvinists were perceived (at least by some) as linking their reformation of religion with an appropriation, possibly a recreation, of Jerusalem in the West. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention, setting the architecture against the tradition of medieval conceptions of the architecture of the Temple, and of Calvin’s and Calvinists’ ideas of the role and use of space in the Reformed religion.
Archbishop Lang’s Visit to the Holy Land in 1931
Authors: Turner Garth
Published: March 2016

The overthrow of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War opened a new chapter in the history of the Holy Land. New and particular local tensions arose, especially in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration between Jews and Arabs. In the post-war settlement, the British Mandate in Palestine gave rulership to a Christian power - and one with its own established Church - for the first time since the thirteenth century. Within the Christian community itself, the rise of an ecumenical movement also changed perspectives, challenging the rivalries which were particularly evident at that central shrine of Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre. The visit of Archbishop Lang of Canterbury to Palestine and Jerusalem in 1931 illustrates the primate’s own personal responses to the experience of the Holy Land, while also reflecting the need for tact and diplomacy in dealing with a particular set of circumstances in which the presence of the leader of the Anglican communion might be seen as intrusive, even threatening, to the religious modus vivendi already established there between Christians.
Palestinian Christians: Realities and Hopes
Authors: Sabella Bernard
Published: March 2016

As Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza has undergone political transformation from twenty-nine-year-long Israeli occupation to national authority rule, the fifty thousand Christians who make up two per cent of the total Palestinian population in these territories are also witness and party to this transformation. The Israeli-Palestinian accords which made possible this transformation came about, in part, because of the changes that have occurred in the attitudes of both Palestinians and Israelis since 1967 and 1948. But the present period is best characterized as one of transition. The peace process moves on slowly; the political system is in the creation stage; the economy and culture are evolving into new patterns; and society, as a consequence, is witnessing changes and developments in its structure and in its relationships. A transition period has its problems but also its challenges, promises, and hopes. The Palestinian Christians are not immune to the problems and yet they are hopeful, as are other Palestinians, that they will overcome the difficulties and problems. The distinction of religion for Palestinian Christians reflects itself in certain trends of thinking about and reacting to social, cultural, and political issues. A survey conducted in 1995 on a sample of all Palestinians, including a subsample of 340 Christians, shows that Palestinian Christians are in general agreement with other Palestinians on many of the issues of concern to all. Yet the responses given by the Christians point to a certain worldview: this is illustrated in the tables and comparisons presented here and which are all based on the results of the 1995 survey.
The Church and a Revaluation of Work in the Ninth Century?
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

My title poses what may seem an unpromising question. Even to consider the possibility of such fundamental change in ecclesiastical perceptions in the very midst of the Dark Ages may seem anachronistic. After all, were not Christian attitudes to work already well and truly fixed? There is, for instance, the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis 3.16-19, as displayed in words and pictures in the mid-ninth-century Moutier-Grandval Bible:

Unto the woman [the Lord] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…. And to Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife …. cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken.
Time and the Testator, 1370–1540
Authors: Middleton-Stewart Judith
Published: March 2016

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.
Organizing Time for Secular and Religious Purposes: The Contemplacion of Sinners (1499) and the Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women (1517) of Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester
Authors: Collett Barry
Published: March 2016

The career of Bishop Richard Fox was marked by his dedication to hard work and his obsession with the organized management of time. Fox was born about 1448 into a Lincolnshire yeoman family, was educated at local grammar schools and Oxford, was subsequently ordained, and later became a doctoral student at the University of Paris. In 1484 he joined the entourage of the exiled Henry Tudor, who recognized his ability and gave him considerable responsibility in negotiating with the French government and planning the 1485 invasion of England. After Bosworth, Fox became Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and a member of the royal council with particular responsibility for foreign affairs. He was appointed bishop successively of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham, and Winchester. In 1516, he founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford, retired from politics, and returned to Winchester, where he died in 1528.
Catholic and Quaker Attitudes to Work, Rest, and Play in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Mullett Michael A.
Published: March 2016

Since its publication in 1904–5, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has provided a paradigm for assessments of the attitudes to the profitable use of time among different branches of Christianity, emphasising the sanctification of work and thrifty care for time allegedly found in pronouncedly Protestant religious groups. This paper tests further assumptions made by Weber and his school by considering attitudes espoused within the two religious groups in early modern England which are often taken to epitomize the stereotypical extremes of Weberian hypotheses: on the one hand the Catholics, on the other the Quakers.