bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Welsh revival of 1904–5: a critique
Authors: Hall Basil
Published: March 2016

In the Lancet for 26 November 1904, there was a brief and caustic account of ‘curious psychological phenomena...in connexion with the religious upheaval in progress’ in Wales, in which ‘the chief instigator of this tumult’ [that is, Evan Roberts] is quoted as saying to a journalist who interviewed him for the Western Mail: ‘When I go out to the garden I see the devil grinning at me but I am not afraid of him. I go into the house, and when I go out again to the back I see Jesus Christ smiling at me.’ The Lancet also cited a description of the young revivalist by the same journalist: ‘His restlessness is marvellous, he is walking about all day with the springiness of a man treading on wires, his arms swaying unceasingly’; and referred to accounts of the revivalist lying on the floor at meetings for long intervals ‘weeping and writhing in agony’. The Lancet commented that if among the friends of the preacher there were any medical practitioners it would be a kindness on their part to point out to him ‘ the peril which menaces his intellectual equilibrium’. This judgement was shrewd for towards the end of 1906 Evan Roberts had broken down, and he never sufficiently recovered from the intense and prolonged nervous excitement of the revival period, but lived in retirement as a near recluse in England from 1906 to 1925, and thereafter in South Wales until his death in 1951. It is a sad story of a young former miner and blacksmith from the background of deep piety in the Welsh calvinist methodist chapel at the village of Loughor in Glamorgan, who was preparing himself for the ministry at a denominational preparatory school prior to theological college training - a man sincere, sensitive and deeply religious, earnestly praying for a revival of religion in Wales - who was caught up by the wave of intense religious emotion which the revival released and who found himself shining before the world in excited newspaper reports throughout Britain and Europe in a blaze of glory, fanned by journalists and religious publicists, as brief as it was excessive.
Puritanicalism, sport, and race: a symbolic crusade of 1911
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

Race and recreation are two contemporary social problems which historically have had a close connection with religion. Religion has both sanctioned racial discrimination and provided the inspiration to overcome it. It has both opposed and encouraged particular forms of popular recreation. Sociologists and social historians are increasingly investigating the various combinations of these 3 Rs - religion, race, recreation. A great deal of work has been done on the relations between religion and race, quite a lot on race and recreation, especially in the form of sport, and a beginning has been made on religion and recreation. To my knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to bring these three elements together.
Heresy and schism in the later Roman empire
Authors: Greenslade S. L.
Published: March 2016

Few Paris theologians like Beda’s bitterness. How can you win if you drive those who disagree with Luther into his camp? Hatred like this made Arius a heresiarch, drove Tertullian out of the Church. This is the way to make heretics.’ So Erasmus, and elsewhere he reflects how he exposed himself to the charge of heresy by trying to be just to heretics. He was kinder than Tertullian who had no mercy for them. Heresy is the devil’s work, one of the manifold ways he attacks truth. It is evil, it is sin; it is worse than schism, it is blasphemy, a kind of adultery, close to idolatry. Heresy brings eternal death, while persecution at least gives birth to martyrs. Heretics are the ravening wolves who attack Christ’s flock. Humanly considered, heresy is a sin of the flesh for, as an act of choice, it is self-assertion against God, and so the heretic is self-condemned. More properly it is demonic, the spiritual wickednesses from which it comes were sent by the devil.
Attitudes to schism at the council of Nicaea
Authors: Ferguson Everett
Published: March 2016

The council of Nicaea in AD 325 had to deal with disciplinary matters related to three schisms or heresies in addition to Arianism. The persons involved were the clergy among the followers of Meletius, Novatian, and Paul of Samosata.

The interpretation given in the standard history of the councils by Hefele and Leclercq is that the fathers at Nicaea did not require a new ordination of Novatian and Meletian clergymen who returned to the catholic Church. Their previous ordinations were valid but irregular. When this irregularity was corrected, the persons involved could then function in the clergy of the great Church. Later theory about the indelibility of ordination appears to have influenced unduly this interpretation.
Heresy and learning in early cistercianism
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

In 1245 the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order gave reluctant approval to the establishment of a house of studies at Paris, and in so doing sanctioned a major breach with the traditions and practice of the Order. The new house grew rapidly. Accorded papal protection in 1246, it was already necessary to move to a more extensive site a year later. By 1250 student monks had been admitted to the new buildings of the Chardonnet, and, though its constitution continued to be the subject of capitular legislation, the new house was fully established, under the jurisdiction of the abbot of Clairvaux, but as a centre of studies for the whole Order. In January 1256, ten years after the decision of the General Chapter, Guy, abbot of l’Aumône, became the first cistercian to incept in theology and to receive the licence to teach.
Henry IV and the huguenot appeal for a return to Poissy
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

When the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, summoned protestant and catholic spokesmen to a conference at Poissy, in 1561, the religious situation in France was still remarkably fluid. Religious ideas of an innovative and reformist character had long had an appeal in French intellectual circles, but it was only recently that Protestantism in France had begun to take on the appearance of an organised religious movement. The persecution of Protestants had been severe at times, but neither systematic nor continuous, and the bulk of French Protestants was inclined to be conciliatory. Even the question of whether they could be considered heretics was still somewhat open, as the council of Trent had not yet concluded its sessions. Thus the time must have seemed propitious to the queen, then enjoying real political power in France for the first time, to attempt to reconcile the theological differences which were dividing her subjects, and to restore the religious unity of the realm.
Protest and schism in nineteenth-century German Catholicism: the Ronge–Czerski movement, 1844–5
Authors: Detzler Wayne
Published: March 2016

From the seclusion of Upper Silesia a suspended priest published his protest against the powerful bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi of Trier. The peasants’ poverty was compounded by exploitation. Virgins were robbed of their purity. The superstitions of the common folk were fanned into flames of fanaticism. Guilty alone for this massive oppression was bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi of Trier. As defender of the oppressed, the priest Johannes Ronge emerged, who had been exiled to the Silesian mining hamlet of Laurahuette a scant six months before.

The occasion of Ronge’s open letter was the display of Christ’s seamless robe at Trier in the autumn of 1844. Thrice previously the sacred garment had been shown for the edification of the faithful. In 1585 it was put on display to prompt giving toward the restoration of the churches of Trier. After the Thirty Years War, in 1651, the robe was again presented to the public eye. Having been returned to Trier from the safety of Augsburg following the Napoleonic threat, the tattered relic was again exposed to the view of Catholics in 1810.
Papal witchcraft: the charges against Benedict XIII
Authors: Harvey Margaret
Published: March 2016

The charges with which I shall deal in this paper were almost certainly a tissue of nonsense. Indeed a recent – hostile – account dismisses them as containing motifs presque folkloriques rappellant la legende de Sylvestre II. The folklore is itself interesting however, and so are the circumstances in which it could be delivered solemnly as fact to auditors at a general council by a powerful group including doctors of law and even a cardinal.

The circumstances in which the charges were brought were as follows: In 1409 popes Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were tried by the council of Pisa, with the intention of deposing them to end the schism. First, 37 charges were brought against them, giving a fairly detailed and damning account of the recent behaviour of both in failing to keep their oaths to end the schism. Some members of die council must have felt that these charges were not adequate, however, because on 17 May 1409 the council gave permission for new charges to be added if necessary. Ten new charges were indeed prepared and heard from May 27–30, so we have the full account of the evidence of the witnesses. Among these charges are accusations of witchcraft against each pope.
The fifteenth-century episcopate: careers and bequests
Authors: Rosenthal Joel T.
Published: March 2016

In this paper I wish to show a possible line of relationship between the careers of some fifteenth-century English bishops and their deathbed bequests. This attempt to correlate episcopal secularity, as revealed by the ‘careerism’ of the bishops, and episcopal sanctity, as revealed by their philanthropy, touches three major themes of historical inquiry. One of these is gift-giving. Anthropologists have taught us to see how the giving of gifts in pre-industrial societies can illuminate the role of symbolic relationships, of ties between lineages, of the bonds of social solidarity, status and hierarchy. Medieval historians know from their own work the importance of gift-giving in the economic sphere. I am also attempting to carry out a ‘group study’, one particular form of sociological history. The purpose of such endeavours is not, as Elton asserts, to reopen the quarrel as to whether history is or is not scientific. It is rather to ask questions about the past which the people of that day did not think to ask about themselves. As such I believe it to be a legitimate and proper form of historical inquiry. Lastly, I seek to shed some light on a particular aspect of medieval espiscopal activity. Anything we can learn about the ecclesiastical élite is that much more known about medieval people and medieval society.
Orthodoxy, rationalism and the world in eighteenth-century Holland
Authors: Van Den Berg J.
Published: March 2016

As far as the protestant countries are concerned the eighteenth century, the ‘age of reason’, might as well be called ‘the age of revival’. On the one hand, we meet with a strong desire to escape the snares of this world by concentrating upon the mysteries of salvation: the road to sanctity is a narrow road, to be trodden in fear and trembling. On the other hand there are those for whom this world is a world full of new and unexpected possibilities, a world to be explored and to be made instrumental to the fulfilment of the divine plan with regard to the development of humanity in its secular context. Naturally, also in the eighteenth century ‘sanctity’ and ‘secularity’ were not seen as in themselves mutually exclusive concepts. While many revivalists looked forward to the enlightenment of this world by the knowledge of God, many men of the enlightenment saw before them the prospect of the sanctification of the world by the combined influences of reason and revelation. Some of the fathers of the enlightenment - notably Locke and Leibniz - were essentially committed to the cause of Christianity, while on the other hand protagonists of the pietist and revival movements such as Francke and Edwards cannot in fairness be accused of an anti-rational attitude and of a lack of interest in the well-being of this world. Nevertheless, within the circle of eighteenth-century protestant Christianity there were conspicuous differences with regard to the evaluation of and the attitude towards the world in which the Christian community, while living in the expectation of the kingdom, still had to find its way and its place.
‘Holy worldliness’ in nineteenth-century England
Authors: Willmer Haddon
Published: March 2016

If it had ever been coined, the slogan ‘holy worldliness’ would have been welcomed in nineteenth-century England. So many of the longings, and half-formed visions of the period seemed to be pressing in that direction. And yet the fact that it never appeared, so far as I know, suggests that the thinking of the time was somehow deeply inhibited. In this paper, I wish to try to show how close theologians and popular religious thinkers came to framing the concept of ‘holy worldliness’, and how and why they were held back.

My reading has unfortunately been inadequate and this paper can be no more than a first impressionistic sketch. I have not taken the well trodden highroad of F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley and the like. This is not to deny their importance, but given a limited space, I want to explore some of the by-paths, if only to keep open the historian’s rights of way. Only as we walk them well shall we be able to understand die merits and demerits of the highroad. To speak plainly, figures like F. D. Maurice are studied too much in isolation from their context; even when this procedure does not lead to positive error, it cannot help but reduce claims for their special significance to mere assertions. To judge whether a man had a unique or seminal role involves comparing him with his competitors, and that means, doing equal justice to them all. By itself, the biographical method – the hero against a backcloth – gives no grounds for estimating the hero’s significance, since it has already been prejudged by the biographical form. But this reflection is no doubt an inaptly grandiose apology for the deficiencies of what I have to offer.
Ecclesiastical chronology: fasti 1066–1300
Authors: Greenway Diana
Published: March 2016

John le neve is alive and well and is living in the university of London. Indeed, letters are still addressed to him: he received one quite recently from his present publisher, the Athlone Press. It was in 1716 that this petulant, not to say paranoid, cleric confounded his enemies and his creditors by publishing his Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae. The volume represented years of tiresome research, and it could be argued that Le Neve made a better job with the materials at his disposal than did his nineteenth-century reviser and continuator, T. Duffus Hardy, whose edition appeared in three volumes in 1854.
A socio-linguistic approach to the latin middle ages
Authors: Richter Michael
Published: March 2016

There are two lights, a greater and a smaller one, that is to say, the wiser men and the less wise; the day signifies the wise men, and the night the uninformed. The greater light illuminates the day, for the wiser men instruct those who are more able. What is Augustine if not a sun in the Church? to whom does he speak if not to the wise? You, however, the priests, knowing less, are the smaller light, you illuminate the night, for you preside over the laity who do not know the Scripture and remain in the darkness of ignorance ... The other section of the clergy who do not preside over the people of God are the stars, because although they cannot shine by doctrine, do nevertheless shine by their work onto the earth, that is, the Church.

These sentences are taken from an anonymous sermon ‘On the Priesthood’, based on Genesis i, 16–20. The author of the sermon showed the priests their place in society: even though they did not belong to the intellectual elite, their profession and knowledge separated them clearly from the darkness of night in which the laity was imprisoned. In the course of the twelfth century, this passage from Genesis underwent an exegetical change and was used, from then onwards, to explain the political relationship between regnum and sacerdotium. What did remain was the notion of a fundamental difference between clergy and laity, and nowhere was this notion better expressed than in our sermon to the priests: quodcunque lumen estis, lumen estis tamen. In true medieval fashion, our author equated knowledge with the knowledge of the Word of God. He also stressed the fundamental difference between light and darkness, between the clergy and the laity. While theology emphasises that ordination makes the clergy by virtue of its office into the mediator between God and man, this was not the main concern of our author. Instead, he voiced the belief, widely shared by the clergy generally, that knowledge as such was the prerogative of the clergy. Such an attitude raises the question of how the clergy was able to achieve monopoly of knowledge, and how it reacted to attempts by the laity to challenge this monopoly. In what follows I propose to enquire into this phenomenon by looking at the linguistic scene in the medieval west.
Scissors and paste: Corpus Christi, Cambridge, MS 139 again
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

Amongst the manuscripts bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, by Matthew Parker in 1575 is one of the most important surviving collections of sources for the history of the north of England in the twelfth century. Manuscript 139, as it now is, contains, amongst other items, unique, or almost unique, copies of the so-called Historia Regum, which had been ascribed to Symeon of Durham before the end of the twelfth century, its continuation by John of Hexham, and the History of Richard of Hexham. It was a prime, and in part a unique, source of Twysden’s pioneering edition of 1652, and its value is in no way diminished today. This apart, the manuscript is of great interest as a manuscript, and the problems of its date, provenance and composition are still the subject of debate. The most recent and definitive account of the manuscript was given by Peter Hunter Blair in a fifty-five page article contributed to the volume of essays edited by Nora Chadwick under the title Celt and Saxon. His conclusions, which supersede all earlier views, were that the manuscript was compiled in the period c 1165–70 at the cistercian house of Sawley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the subsequent discovery of an erased Sawley ex libris, now visible only in ultra-violet light, and dated by Ker to the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, reinforced his view. Yet there still remain problems and uncertainties, and my purpose here is first to sketch in a little of the history of the manuscript in its present form, and secondly, by further examination of particular aspects of its to supplement and qualify Blair’s conclusions.
The sermon literature of pope Clement VI
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: March 2016

Maximus sermocinator verbi Dei is the description of pope Clement VI, formerly Pierre Roger, given by a fourteenth-century French chronicler. Others of the pope’s compatriots were equally fulsome in their adulation. An Italian chronicler, perhaps an ex-student at the university of Paris, where Pierre Roger had been a master in theology, records:

. . . gratissimus fuit sermocinator. Quum cathedram concionaturus aut disputaturus ascendebat, tota Parisiorum Civitas, ut eum audiret, accurrebat. Proh quam eleganter sermocinabatur!

In Prague, Clement’s ex-pupil, the emperor Charles IV, remembered the grace with which he had been infused through listening to one of his master’s sermons over twenty years before. Even the English joined this chorus of praise. Thomas Walsingham paid tribute to Clement as a man of singular culture, while Walter Burley lauded his teaching skill, his oratory, and his legendary memory. By the early fifteenth century Clement’s sermons were regarded as models. Several of them appear, abbreviated and anonymous, as part of a treatise on preaching by Paul Koëlner, canon of Ratisbon, written some time before 1420.
The Greek church under the Turks: problems of research
Authors: Runciman Steven
Published: March 2016

Historical research is full of surprises and shocks. It may produce the blessings of which professor Hill has so eloquently reminded us; but it can also leave the student thwarted and disappointed. We cannot know when we embark on a subject what uncharted reefs and contrary currents are going to impede our course. A few years ago I rashly set out to work on the subject that the late professor Iorga called Byzance après Byzance. I hoped to tell of the fate of the Greeks and their neighbours in the orthodox Christian world when they passed under the absolute rule of the infidel ottoman sultan, during the centuries when they were tended by the orthodox patriarchate of Constantinople: to which one could apply, far more accurately than to the papacy, Hobbes’s description of ‘the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the ruins thereof’ – but the ruins were miserably dilapidated and the crown did not fit. I decided not to attempt a full history of the social life of the Christian minorities nor a detailed discussion of theological developments but to concentrate my study on the central organisation of the patriarchate itself. Even so it proved to be a daunting task.
The recusant view of the English past
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

The English roman catholic, or recusant, community of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has proved to be of considerable interest to historians in recent years for political, economic, and social reasons. But the community was intellectually important, too, having produced theological and devotional works which had a considerable impact upon the reading public, protestant as well as roman catholic, in England and on the continent. The recusants, however, were not content to argue their case on the basis of theology and the scriptures, but turned, as cardinal Baronius and cardinal Bellarmine were doing during these years, to the evidence of history. It was by no means the least of their achievements - though it is one which has been little noted - that they developed a distinctive view of their nation’s past and helped to launch an intensive investigation of some of the most important problems in English ecclesiastical history.
Theology as a basis for policy in the elizabethan church
Authors: Keep David J.
Published: March 2016

The enigma of Elizabeth’s faith and personality continues to fascinate historians. Her actions are fully recorded: the rejection of her father’s title in favour of ‘Supreme Governor’, and the passing of the act of uniformity in 1559 which almost, but not quite, restored the form of religion authorised under her brother. Elizabeth had chosen between London and Rome, but at the same time she made gestures towards Spain and Germany. Her church was staffed partly by returned exiles, partly by scholars like Matthew Parker, who had remained at their desks under Mary. The archbishop had to build up the numbers and quality of the clergy, and create a new church. Henrican Catholicism was dead beyond recall. The work of Knox in Scotland was about to diminish the standing of the crown. The exiles had tasted independence in church government, though in a still corporate view of society this was to remain an anabaptist heresy. Parker had to use these men to establish a church as close as possible to the desires of his mistress, which were never made explicit. A study of contemporary theological works is a vital guide to the nature of this church.
Welsh church history: sources and problems
Authors: Yates Nigel
Published: March 2016

When one considers how intimately the ecclesiastical history of Wales has been bound up with that of England from at least the twelfth century until the disestablishment of the Welsh church in 1920, it is perhaps surprising that the subject should present as many problems as it does to those approaching it for the first time, especially to those familiar with the sources of English ecclesiastical history. It will not, of course, be possible in a paper of this length to consider fully all the problems involved, and I wish therefore to confine myself to four which seem to me to be absolutely basic. They are the shortage of primary source material; the lack of competent monographs on many topics; the language barrier which faces those unfamiliar with Welsh; and the dangers inherent in what may be called the ‘Welsh Nationalist’ approach to Welsh ecclesiastical history.
Nineteenth-century parochial sources
Authors: Dunning Robert
Published: March 2016

Ecclesiastical history of the nineteenth century, and of other periods where records are plentiful, can be written on three main levels. It can and has been studied at national level in broad movements and through the activities of prominent churchmen. It can and has been studied, though less often and less successfully, at diocesan level, in an analysis of visitation returns, in the activities of diocesan bishops and in the work of lesser churchmen. And it can and should more often be written from parochial sources, since it is from them that the effects of national movements can be traced and their success or failure assessed. The task may seem, on the face of it, to be daunting, but the survival of useful material has, in fact, been poor in every diocese, and the total task becomes therefore much more manageable.
The papal scandal (presidential address)
Authors: Nicol Donald M.
Published: March 2016

The Greek word skandalon means a stumbling-block, an offence. As such it is used frequently in the Septuagint and the new testament. In Byzantine texts at least from the eleventh century the word is employed as a collective noun to denote the many obstacles that stood in the way of union between the Greek and Latin churches. In the thirteenth century, however, it is often qualified by the phrase ‘relating to or concerning the pope’—τò κατά τòν πάπαν σκάνδαλον. It was as if the pope or the papacy had come to be identified as the cause or agent of the stumbling-block that lay in the path of understanding. This is the ‘papal scandal’ that I have in mind.
Bonaventura, the two mendicant orders, and the Greeks at the council of Lyons (1274)
Authors: Geanakoplos Deno J.
Published: March 2016

For centuries it has been believed that at the famous council of Lyons, held in 1274 to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, the leading role defending Latin theological views in the debates that presumably took place was played by the great Franciscan theologian, Bonaventura. Recently, however, this view has been seriously called into question, and a re-evaluation of his role and that of other leading protagonists would seem to be in order. Far from being the ‘soul of the union,’ and the man who ‘crushed the Greeks in theological debate,’ as has been generally believed, Bonaventura’s part in the union seems to have been very limited. It is the purpose of this paper not only to put in clearer light and in its true context the work of Bonaventura with regard to the Greeks at the council, but also to indicate, if only rather briefly, the parts taken by other mendicants, the Franciscans John Parastron and Jerome of Ascoli, and the Dominicans, Albertus Magnus, William of Moerbeke, and their minister general, Peter of Tarentaise. Our aim, then, is to ascertain the relative importance of their respective roles in the preparations for, and the proclamation of, religious union.
The Rumanian Orthodox church and the west
Authors: Tappe Eric
Published: March 2016

The title of this paper raises a problem at the very outset. What is meant by ‘the Rumanian Orthodox church’ when one is talking of a period before the notion of ‘Rumania’ had been conceived? In this paper it will be taken to mean the Orthodox church as it existed in the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania from the fourteenth century and has continued in those territories to the present day.

A few words first about the prehistory of the Rumanian Orthodox church as thus defined. The Roman province of Dacia had been created by Trajan in AD 106, and the administration had been withdrawn south of the Danube by Aurelian in 271, after which the territories in question were controlled first by the Goths and then by a succession of other invaders for about ten centuries. During this millenium they remain for us in a darkness lit by very few rays. It is therefore not surprising that there is little evidence for church organisation north of the Danube during this period, especially when we remember that the Dacian lands ceased to belong to the empire half a century before Christianity became a tolerated religion. The first church building so far discovered in the lands north of the lower Danube is at Sucidava, a bridgehead held by the Romans after their withdrawal, destroyed by the Huns in 447, and refounded by Justinian in his first years as emperor. This basilica is apparently from Justinian’s time, and being in a bridgehead, may be presumed to have depended on a church organisation south of the Danube.
The significance of the Russian Orthodox diaspora and its effect on the Christian west
Authors: Zernov Nicolas
Published: March 2016

The enforced emigrations caused by political or religious conflicts have often been an enriching and stimulating factor in the cultural history of mankind.

Lenin’s dictatorship based on red terror forced more than a million Russians to flee from their own country and settle down in various parts of the world. The Russian diaspora included a great variety of people, among them many well-known men. It will suffice to mention a few names: Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), Dimitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) in literature; Sergy Rachmaninov (1873–1943) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in music; Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) in painting; Fedor Chaliapin (1873–1938) and Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) in the theatre; Mikhail Rostovtsev (1870–1952) and Georgy Vernadsky (1887–1973) in history; Igor Sikorsky (1889–1972) in aviation; Nikolay Menschokov (b. 1900) in geology. All these people made a substantial contribution to the contemporary world of art and learning.
Vera lux illa est quae illuminat: the Christian humanism of Augustine
Authors: Bonner Gerald
Published: March 2016

In 427, three years before his death, Augustine of Hippo compiled the Retractations, a kind of critical bibliography in which he passed in chronological review his writings as a catholic Christian, clarifying, defending and, where necessary, correcting passages which the course of events or his own theological development had called in question. In a very human way Augustine tended, in practice, to defend his previously-expressed views to a rather greater degree and to criticise them less than had been his original intention; but this means that where he declares a change of opinion, this statement may fairly be regarded as his final and definitive view. Two such statements are relevant to our purposes here: in his review of his earliest Christian work, Against the Academics, which appeared in 386, Augustine expresses his displeasure at the praise he there bestowed on the Platonist and Academic philosophers; while in his discussion of the two books On Order, which were written at the end of the same year, he regrets that he attributed too much to those liberal studies, of which many of the saints had been ignorant and many of their most enthusiastic disciples lacking in sanctity. Such views would seem, on first reading, to be exactly what we should expect of Augustine in the last years of his life, the result of an increased rigorism brought about by many years of controversy, which had left little of the humanism which had marked his first years as a Christian.
Paupertas Christi: old wealth and new poverty in the twelfth century
Authors: Bolton Brenda M.
Published: March 2016

The consequential implications for those who adopted a life of apostolic poverty in the twelfth century can in turn raise many complex questions. This paper makes little attempt to resolve the questions raised. Rather it is hoped that in discussing them suggestions will be forthcoming which will help either to achieve some degree of clarification or raise further and perhaps more searching questions in the minds of others.
Alan of Lille as a renaissance figure
Authors: Walsh P. G.
Published: March 2016

The Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille was composed in 1183 when its author was in his sixties and when the greater part of his writing must have lain behind him. That writing, as D’Alverny has most recently demonstrated, overwhelmingly consists of treatises of theological and devotional learning. Whilst it would be oversimplification to suggest that these religious works offer little evidence germane to Alan as a renaissance figure, there is no doubt that the Anticlaudianus offers the deepest insights into the secular influences upon Alan’s modes of thought. In this paper I should like to examine the essential nature and purpose of the Anticlaudianus against the liberating twelfth-century influences which directed the author towards its composition, against the extraordinary range of secular authors which he deploys, and finally and most importantly against the attempted synthesis between secular and sacred, between the insights of classical humanism and doctrinal Christianity, which is such a feature of the intellectual thought of the century. Alan is far from being a pioneer in this direction, but his vision of the synthesis illumines the whole intellectual tradition within which he wrote.
Concern for renewal in the root and branch debates of 1641
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2016

The root and branch bill was debated in the house of commons between 27 May and 27 July 1641. The original bill introduced by Sir Edward Dering was short, simply abolishing bishops, deans and chapters with all their dependents. But after the house had wrestled for two months with the business of replacing episcopacy with a new form of church government the bill had grown to more than forty pages. No complete copy of it, as it stood when it was dropped in August, has survived, but its main provisions can be reconstructed from the commons journals and parliamentary diaries. A new system of government was to be set up in two stages: its final form would be determined by a synod of divines, which it was intended should meet in the autumn of 1641 and work fast enough for the new jurisdiction to be established by 1 March 1642; in the meanwhile parliament would take all ecclesiastical jurisdiction into its own hands and proceed with the redistribution of the church’s financial resources. This paper is concerned with the first of these two stages, the commons’s interim programme of action to fill the vacuum left by root and branch. The speeches of MPs on three topics that dominated the June and July debates—church courts, ordination and deans and chapters— strikingly reveal their concern to use a period of temporary control over the church for reform and renewal.
Primitive Christianity revived: religious renewal in Augustan England
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

The restoration of Charles II seemed to the men of the church of England the miraculous inauguration of a golden age—‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.’ The clerical beneficiaries of the settlement of 1662 had much to rejoice them; the act of uniformity symbolised the secure replanting of the Laudian ideal, an ideal which, as R. S. Bosher has shown, had stiffened and intensified in the years of adversity. The restored church was more certain of itself, more intransigent in its jure divino episcopal claims, than the church of the 1630s. This new assurance was nourished by the flowering of anglican patristic learning which is so striking a feature of the later seventeenth century. The magisterial works of Ussher and Pearson on the Ignatian epistles, of Pearson and Fell on Cyprian, and of Bull on the ante-Nicene fathers, each contributed to a deepening sense of the continuity of the church of England with the catholic church of the first centuries. More and more the appeal to antiquity became the criterion of orthodoxy, and in that antiquity anglicanism found not merely its origins, but, occasionally and increasingly, a mirror image of itself. William Beveridge told his hearers at St Peter’s Cornhill.

there are [some] who blame our Reformation as defective, as if the Church were not reformed, not purged enough from the errors it had before contracted; but if such would but lay aside all prejudices and impartially consider the constitution of our church, as it is now reformed, they might clearly see that as there is nothing defective so neither is there anything superflous in it, but that it exactly answers the pattern of the Primitive and Apostolical Church itself, as near as it is possible for a national church to do it.
A late nineteenth century nonconformist renaissance
Authors: Kent John
Published: March 2016

Let us start from the propositions that we need a new model of late nineteenth-century English nonconformist history, and that one might be found by making some use of the idea of ‘renaissance’, especially if one uses ‘renaissance’ to point to the emergence at a particular time of humanist attitudes. This new model needs to be both less anglican and less nonconformist than its predecessors. The anglican model of nineteenth-century nonconformity is obsessed with anglicanism, and the nonconformist model is equally obsessed with the behaviour of an earlier, largely unrelated evangelical protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both, in other words, are affected by shallow ideas of historical continuity. The individual nineteenth-century anglican often thought of nonconformity as the shadow cast by anglicanism; individual nonconformists believed that seventeenth-century independency had founded English political freedom, or that eighteenth-century non-anglicans had saved evangelical protestant truth from total disappearance. These were myths, however.
The German protestant church and the Nazi party in the period of the seizure of power 1932–3
Authors: Wright Jonathan R. C.
Published: March 2016

It was clear to the German people who lived through the Nazi seizure of power that they were witnessing a process of profound political and social change. It seemed natural to those who were active Christians to ask what was the spiritual nature of this change? Did it offer hope of Christian renaissance and renewal? In retrospect it seems obvious that it did not and even surprising that Christians should have entertained hopes that it might. But, at the time, this was not at all obvious to millions of German protestants. The very volume of their publications centred on the year 1933 is eloquent testimony to the urgent need they felt to understand, explain and interpret what was going on around them. This paper is about the questions they asked and the reasons why the answers were not clear to them.
Saint Augustine’s Views on the ‘Just War’
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2016

A long and very respectable tradition of thinking about the morality of warfare has accustomed us to looking at Augustine’s views on the ‘just war’ through the wrong end of a telescope. By common consent, Augustine is the fountain-head of a tradition almost ubiquitous in medieval thought, and still to be discovered lurking, as recently as last April, in a leading article in The Times. In reading Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, Vittoria or Cardinal Bellarmine, one is constantly reminded that, as the author of the most recent study of the just war in the Middle Ages put it, ‘the influence of Augustine was all pervasive.’ The best of modern studies are, indeed, informed by a sense of the ambiguity of Augustine’s legacy to medieval thought; but even so, and unavoidably, they reinforce the tendency which leads us to think of Augustine as the father of this tradition of thinking. There is no need to question this consensus—indeed it seems to me to be very largely correct—to be conscious that there is nothing that can obscure the true nature of an original thought as radically as the tradition to which it gives rise. What, therefore, I am trying to do in this paper is, for once, to turn the telescope the right way round and to look at Augustine’s thinking not in the long perspective of the tradition which his ideas inaugurated, but in the immediate context of his own intellectual biography.
The Church, Warfare and Military Obligation in Norman Italy
Authors: Loud G. A.
Published: March 2016

One of the most important intellectual problems which the Church faced in the Middle Ages was to reconcile warfare with the Christian message. But the presence of, and the necessity for, war affected not merely the intellectual attitudes and social message of medieval ecclesiastics. The institutional Church faced obvious practical problems when confronted with external warfare or civil disturbance. On the one hand the ruler might well, indeed usually did, require churches with extensive property and wealth to contribute to the burden of defending the community. On the other hand churches might well, especially if the ruler’s authority was weak, face the need to defend themselves against the aggression of their neighbours. Churches therefore needed a military potential, whether or not the state laid this obligation upon them. Even the Church’s attempts to control warfare, the Peace and Truce of God movements, tended to embroil it in military activity, since exhortation and spiritual sanction often needed the backing of force to convince a recalcitrant laity of the virtues of bridling its internal violence.
Ideas and Reality: Some Attempts to Control and Defuse War in the Twelfth Century
Authors: Holdsworth Christopher J.
Published: March 2016

The track to be explored in this paper was laid down when I realised how relatively unexamined the actual working out of Christian ideas about war within the medieval period is. Recent years have seen appear a notable book about the development of ideas on the Just War, and a great deal of work on the role of the military aristocracy and on its ideals, but upon the coming together of Christianity and actual events there seemed to me very little, at least in the period which interests me most. The one series of events which has attracted attention within what one can call loosely the twelfth century is, of course, the Crusades, but I decided to put them rather at the edge of my focus since they raised special questions, and to invite a scholar who has devoted much time to their elucidation to give a paper upon a crusading theme later in the conference. Yet when one turns for guidance for the history of western Europe there is only one book which stands out, La Guerre au Moyen Age by Philippe Contamine which appeared in the Nouvelle Clio series as recently as 1980, and it, as one would expect from its author’s earlier achievement, is strongest when it deals with the period of the Hundred Years War. Nonetheless it is a remarkable achievement, and one to which I am deeply indebted. But given the fact that the subject is still so unmapped, only two approaches seemed feasible to me, one where I would try to look at a series of specific wars and see what the Church did about them, or one where I would look at a source or group of sources, and see what it, or they, had to say about war and the Church.
Cities of God: The Italian Communes at War
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

To believe that a political community might justly go to war in defence of its legitimate interests was a necessity of daily life to the city states of northern and central Italy from the twelfth century onwards. This belief as such was of course hardly confined to them among medieval European societies, but there are certain features of the Italian experience of war which, taken with the character of the cities themselves, contributed significantly to the emergence and formulation of those secular attitudes to political life which are so often regarded as typical of renaissance culture. The Italian cities lived close to the papacy, which claimed the authority to identify the enemies of the Church and to declare on them wars which were not merely just but holy. Insofar as the enemies of the Church proved to be Italians, or to be operating on Italian soil, those cities which allied themselves with the papacy could acquire the tincture of holiness for wars that were essentially fought in pursuance of local interests. There could be little doubt, for example, that the immediate cause of the great battle of Montaperti, fought on 4 September 1260 between the guelfs of Tuscany, headed by the Florentines, and the Sienese, aided by Florentine ghibelline exiles and by German troops of Manfred of Sicily, was the territorial rivalry of Florence and Siena in southern Tuscany, and most immediately of all the struggle for control of the little town of Montalcino. Manfred and his allies, like Lewis of Bavaria and his ally the Lucchese tyrant Castruccio Castracani, another local enemy of Florence, two generations later, were however the enemies of the Church, and thus Florence’s war-effort was sanctified.
An English Archbishop and the Cerberus of War
Authors: Haines Roy M.
Published: March 2016

For much of his political life John Stratford was to be actively engaged either in unleashing or in muzzling the dogs of war. On occasion he seemed to be endeavouring to combine these disparate functions. Here I propose briefly to examine his involvement in and his attitude to the three-headed monster represented by the perennial Anglo-Scottish conflict, civil strife within England, and the initial phase of the Hundred Years’ War. I am, of course, appreciative of the fact that in the fourteenth century it is difficult to determine the originators of particular policies and equally hard to discern the attitude of prominent men to such policies when formed. Much is known about the course and outcome of diplomatic negotiations; remarkably little about the thinking of those at the heart of policy making.
The ‘Weakness of Conscience’ in the Reformed Movement in the Netherlands: The Attitude of the Dutch Reformation to the use of Violence Between 1562 and 1574
Authors: Jelsma Auke
Published: March 2016

The most important cause of the French civil war, starting in 1562, was religion. Of course, there were other motives too, especially the resistance of nobles to the centralization of power in Paris, but it was the struggle for freedom of religion which gave this war such a destructive character. The young Calvinist churches provided their warriors with all the mental and spiritual support they needed. In their opinion it was a struggle for the sake of God; it was a just war. Asmagistratus inferioresthe nobles had the right, even the duty, to control and eventually to oppose the higher authority of the king. With arguments borrowed from the old testament and natural law they even defended the right of violent resistance to the government. Theological support came also from Geneva, especially from Theodore Beza. Without the Calvinist reformation there would not have been such a violent civil war, such a revolt, at that moment in the history of France.