bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘God Wills It’: Signs of Divine Approval in the Crusade Movement
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

Robert the Monk, who was present at the Council of Clermont in 1095 and heard Urban II preach the crusade sermon, reports that when he had finished speaking all who were there shouted: ‘God wills it. God wills it’. The pope, Robert tells us, saw in this unanimity a sign of divine inspiration: ‘I tell you that God has drawn this response from you to express the feeling which he has inspired in your hearts’. Yet although Urban’s arguments and eloquence convinced his audience at Clermont, reactions to the crusade were more ambivalent among some people in the West, even among some of those who took the cross. This was a legacy of the ambiguous attitude of Western churchmen towards violence and warfare. Western society in the early medieval centuries was very violent, and, as Guy Halsall has rightly pointed out, the Church helped to determine the norms of violence which Christian society found acceptable. No doubt churchmen viewed their intervention primarily as a limitation exercise. From the later ninth century onwards, as the Carolingian Empire declined, the popes intermittently called on the warriors of the West to come to their aid. Indeed, in some ways the campaign of the Garigliano, conducted by a league of Byzantine and Lombard forces organized by Pope John X, who himself took part in the fighting, and which achieved its objective of ridding the Papal States of bands of Muslim raiders who had settled there, was like a rehearsal for the First Crusade. The Church further tried to influence the behaviour of Christian fighting men by encouraging the Truce and Peace of God movements in the early eleventh century, and in some areas the liturgical blessing of swords was introduced. Consequently, by 1095 the fighting men in Western Europe were accustomed to the Church hierarchy’s calling on them for help.
Stigmata on the First Crusade
Authors: Purkis William J.
Published: March 2016

In his eyewitness account of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres described the shipwreck and drowning of a boatload of crusaders who were bound for the Holy Land in 1097. After the bodies of the dead were recovered, he explained how ‘they discovered crosses evidently marked on the flesh above the shoulders’. Fulcher supposed this incident to be a miracle, ‘divinely revealed’, and that the marking was a ‘token of faith’ (pignusfidei) bestowed by God upon his servants. It was a sign to the surviving crusaders that God favoured them and would fulfil the promise he had made that ‘the just, though they shall be taken prematurely by death, shall be in peace’ (Wisd. 4, 7).
Monastic Miracles in Southern Italy, c.1040–1140
Authors: Loud G. A.
Published: March 2016

Almighty God sometimes shows his miracles not only in great things but also in minor matters, so that the faith of believers shall be more and more increased and thus it causes all creatures to break out in praise of their Creator, since he is seen to have a care with fatherly piety in all those things that are granted to human endeavour.
Miraculous Crucifixes in Late Medieval Italy
Authors: Jansen Katherine L.
Published: March 2016

In the year 1206, as Saint Francis was walking near the church of San Damiano, just outside the walls of Assisi, he was suddenly overcome by an urge to enter the dilapidated sanctuary. Upon entering, in the words of his first hagiographer,

he fell down before the crucifix in devout and humble supplication; and smitten by unusual visitations, he found himself other than he had been when he entered. While he was thus affected, something unheard of before happened to him: the painted image of Christ crucified moved its lips and spoke. Calling him by name it said: ‘Francis, go repair my house, which as you see, is falling completely to ruin’.
Miracles and Visions inDevotio ModernaBiographies
Authors: Van Dijk Mathilde
Published: March 2016

Sister Liesbeth of Heenvliet (d. 1450) was a scion of a high ranking noble family in the county of Holland. Her parents had named her after Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, from whom they were descended. Liesbeth was born blind. Her mother did not dare to inform the child’s father, Johan of Heenvliet. Instead, she appealed to God and His Mother. Contrary to what she should have done, she did not vow her daughter to God’s service. Despite her mother’s laxity, Liesbeth’s eyes healed completely. She grew into a beautiful and most intelligent girl – a further sign that God and the Virgin had extended their mercy to her.
Reclaiming Ghosts in 1690s England
Authors: Handley Sasha
Published: March 2016

On Wednesday 1 June 1692, a young man, about fifteen years of age, went to his bed. He had no sooner lain down than he heard ‘a Hand sweeping on the wall’. Then it came ‘with a rushing noise on his beds-head’ and ‘stroaked him over the face twice very gently’. Opening his eyes he saw before him ‘an apparition of a woman cloathed in black apparel’. Following this eerie encounter, other members of the family claimed to have seen the apparition ‘in the same room with a lighted candle’. Perplexed by these unexplained visits the mistress of this ‘Civiliz’d Family’ wrote to the editors of the bi-weekly periodical the Athenian Mercury desiring to know ‘what should be the occasion of the disturbance’ and ‘whether it be advisable to ask the question of the apparition’. Samuel Wesley (father of John), Church of England minister and co-editor of the Athenian Mercury, advised the woman to have a chat with the ghost, to find out its purpose and to discover how it might be satisfied.
Acts of God, Acts of Men: Providence in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England and France
Authors: Deconinck-Brossard Françoise
Published: March 2016

A Headline in the Daily Telegraph once read: ‘Vicar is “act of God” victim’. The article explained:

A vicar has become a victim of an ‘act of God’ after a thunderbolt wrecked his car during a storm. Dennis Ackroyd, vicar of St Luke’s … in Cleckheaton, near Bradford … now faces problems claiming compensation from his insurance company.
Pay Back Time? Tithes and Tithing in Late Medieval England
Authors: Swanson R. N.
Published: March 2016

In seeking aspects of the pre-Reformation Church which might be expected automatically to invoke connections with God’s bounty, tithes and tithing are obvious candidates. In an essentially agricultural society, where the overwhelming majority of the population worked on the land, God’s bounty in providing crops and food animals, and tithing as the response to the moral and theological imperative to acknowledge that bounty, surely ought to be almost a commonplace. Tithes had biblical origins as a divine precept, and an obligation which Christians were deemed to have inherited from the Jews.
Devotional Landscapes: God, Saints and the Natural World in Early Modern Ireland
Authors: Gillespie Raymond
Published: March 2016

Reconstructing the relationship of the inhabitants of early modern Ireland with the natural world and its Creator is both a difficult and a straightforward task. At one level those who lived in Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, had much in common with other contemporary Europeans, and they shared similar ideas about the existence of God, his actions in creating the world and how that world worked. At another level the relationship between the inhabitants of early modern Ireland and the natural world is rather different from that observable in other places. In terms of pilgrimage, the inhabitants of Ireland before the Reformation in the early sixteenth century had litde interest in visiting corporeal relics, and body parts of saints were in short supply in Ireland by comparison with other European countries. Rather, the devout preferred to visit places in the natural world that had reputed associations with a saint, such as a well created by a saint or a cave where he had lived. Why this should be so is difficult to explain, but it certainly created an experience of the natural world which, though not unique to Ireland, was certainly more intense there. In turn, this affected local religious experiences as they were reshaped through the process of religious change in the early modern period, giving a particular hue to the local forms of religious devotion practised by both Catholics and Protestants. This essay aims to reveal something of the distinctive traits of local religion that formed as a result of the conscious interaction of the inhabitants of Ireland with God’s creation.
Nature’s Scourges: The Natural World and Special Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings, 1541–1866
Authors: Raffe Alasdair
Published: March 2016

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, special prayers, fasts and thanksgivings were an important means by which the Established Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland responded to natural occurrences. Although war prompted the largest number of special religious observances in this period, environmental calamities – instances of plague, famine, drought, earthquakes and storms — led civil and ecclesiastical authorities to order prayers, or to call national fast days, requiring subjects to cease work and attend worship on a specific day. Natural blessings, such as seasonable rain, successful harvests and the abatement of plague, were also marked by prayers, and sometimes by days of national thanksgiving. In Reformation England, the appointment of special observances can be traced back to 1541, when Henry VIII ordered Archbishop Cranmer to organize prayers in response to drought. Henry’s successors developed the practice of ordering special prayers and days in response to natural events and man-made calamities. In Scotland, national fasts were observed at the appointment of the church courts from 1566; they were not regularly under the control of the Crown until the Restoration period.
‘The Miraculous Mathematics of the World’: Proving the Existence of God in Cardinal Péter Pázmány’sKalauz
Authors: Hannracháin Tadhg Ó
Published: March 2016

This paper offers a brief examination of Cardinal Péter Pázmány’s meditation on the role of the beauty and wonder of the natural world in leading to the true knowledge of God, which is placed at the beginning of his most important work, theGuide to the Divine Truth (Isteni Igazsàgra Vezérlô Kalauz). Pázmány’s treatment of this subject offers an insight into the Catholic intellectual milieu which ultimately rejected the Copernican cosmology championed by Galileo in favour of a geocentric and geostatic universe. In this regard, the confidence with which Pázmány asserts the harmony and compatibility between secular knowledge and apprehension of nature and the conviction of the existence of a creator God is of particular importance. An analysis of this section of his work also points up a surprising contrast with Calvin’s treatment of the same subject in theInstitutes of the Christian Religion.’ Pázmány was raised within the Reformed tradition until his teenage years and as a Catholic polemicist he devoted great attention to Calvin’s writings. Indeed, to some extent it can be suggested that theInstitutesserved as both target and model for his own great work. Yet his handling of the topic of nature as a proof of the existence of God, an area where relatively little difference might have been expected in view of its non-salience as a polemical issue, not only offers a revealing insight into the confident intellectual perspective of seventeenth-century Catholicism, but also suggests some additional ramifications of the greatsola scripturadebate which split European Christianity in the early modern period.
‘God Hath Put such Secretes in Nature’: The Reformed Kirk, Church-Building and the Religious Landscape in Early Modern Scotland
Authors: Spicer Andrew
Published: March 2016

Although the Reformed tradition advocated the primacy of the Word of God, the writings of Calvin and other theologians also emphasized the importance of the natural world for revealing the glory of God. As early as 1534, Calvin argued that God had

raised everywhere, in all places and in all things, his ensigns and emblems, under blazons so clear and intelligible that no one can pretend ignorance in not knowing such a sovereign Lord, who has so amply exalted his magnificence; who has in all parts of the world, in heaven and on earth, written and as it were engraved the glory of his power, goodness, wisdom and eternity …
Methodism, Science and the Natural World: Some Tensions in the Thought of Herbert Butterfield
Authors: Bentley Michael
Published: March 2016

It is no longer a name that everyone knows. At the height of his fame as historian and broadcaster, Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) reached into homes and schools through his varied activities and established a public reputation far beyond Cambridge University, where he spent the entirety of his working life from 1923 to his retirement in 1968, and among people who knew nothing of his small and idiosyncratic college, Peterhouse, to which he had arrived as an undergraduate in 1919 and with which he would be associated for the rest of his career. The Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, which he held from 1944 to 1963, and the Regius Chair to which he was relocated for the remaining five years of his professional life, offered major platforms for one determined to communicate to a wider audience. His tenure of the Mastership of his college after 1955 offered another by lending him the possibility of hosting individuals and colloquia. Through less than a dozen major works of history — The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and Christianity and History (1949) come at once to mind as the best-regarded — Butterfield established a persona considerably more influential than a fairly modest literary production might imply. Only when one stands back from that oeuvre and examines its internal consistencies does it become clear that it engenders in the reader a certain discomfort. For if his thought does not often become mired in outright contradiction, it frequently displays moments of inner tension.
Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: March 2016

In 1971 Peter Brown published his justly famous article, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’. It is no exaggeration to say that this article — and the host of articles and books that succeeded it — have transformed the way we think about saints and their cult in late antiquity. This change is part of a wider transformation of the study of the world of early Christianity, a change that has much to do with the changing, not to say declining, place of Christianity in Western society. The very words Peter Brown used in the title of his article are emblematic of this changed perspective: holy, man, late antiquity. Others have noted the change of words from what one might have expected, or from what one would have expected a few decades, even years, earlier. Averil Cameron spoke of Peter Brown ‘rightly avoiding the term “saint”, for in this early period there were no formal processes of sanctification, and no official bestowal of sainthood’. Put like that, it seems obvious why Brown talked about the ‘holy man’. I want to suggest that the nature of the change involved is much less easy to track down, and furthermore that awareness of the specific suggestions implicit in Brown’s choice of words will enable us to contemplate the world of late antiquity from the perspective Brown was largely inaugurating, while not losing the other perspectives that were implicit in the language and concepts laid aside.
The Monk as Christian Saint and Exemplar in St John Chrysostom’s Writings
Authors: Lai Pak-Wah
Published: March 2016

By the time Augustine read the Life of Antony in 386, the biography had already become an international best seller in the Roman Empire. Translated twice into Latin and read in places as far off as Milan and Syrian Antioch, the Egyptian Life also proved to be a significant influence upon hagiographical writing in the late fourth century, the most notable example being the Lives of St Jerome. Consequently, scholars have often taken it to represent the dominant paradigm for sainthood in fourth-century Christianity and the centuries that followed. But is this assumption tenable? The Life of Antony would in all likelihood be read only by the educated elite or by ascetic circles in the Church, and was hardly accessible to the ordinary Christian. More importantly, hagiographical discourse in the fourth century was not restricted to biographies, but pervaded all sorts of Christian literature. This is certainly the case with the writings of St John Chrysostom (c. 349—407), who often presents the Christian monk as a saintly figure in his monastic treatises and his voluminous homilies. Indeed, what emerges from his writings is a paradigmatic saint who is significantly different from that portrayed in the biographies, and yet equally influential among his lay and ascetic audiences. To be sure, Chrysostom’s monastic portraits share some common features with that provided by Athanasius’s Life. Nevertheless, there are also stark differences between the two, and these are the focus of this paper.
San Luigi Gonzaga: Princeling-Jesuit and Model for Catholic Youth
Authors: Logan Oliver
Published: March 2016

Luigi (Alvise) Gonzaga (1568–91), heir to the principality of Castiglione delle Stiviere, renounced his succession in 1585 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, in the course of which he died of plague, evidently contracted while ministering to the sick. He was beatified with extraordinary rapidity in 1605, four years before Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. Admittedly the figure of the ‘angelic youth’ Luigi, as presented in the life written by the promoter of the cause for his canonization, Virgilio Cepari, and finally published in 1606, was more conventional and more calculated to seize the popular imagination than the uncharismatic Loyola, who enjoyed a very limited cult initially and was slow to deliver miracles. But, more significantly, the beatification was a matter of dynastic politics: it was promoted not only by the Jesuits but also, and more insistently, by the Gonzaga dynasty, supported by the Holy Roman Emperor and by allied dynasties. A phase of bureaucratization of canonization processes, already under way, was intensified shortly after Luigi’s beatification. Moreover, the criteria for sainthood would seem to have shifted somewhat in the first half of the seventeenth century. Luigi was not canonized until 1726, under Benedict XIII. In 1729 the same pope pronounced him the patron of students in Jesuit educational institutions and apparently also of students more generally. This provided the basis for the cult of Luigi in the nineteenth century as the patron of ‘Catholic youth’, that is both adolescents and young adults. This development was linked to a novel understanding of adolescence as a specific age group and also to the Church’s battle against secularism. Thus the cult acquired a new relevance long after the princely world that had pressured for Luigi’s canonization had passed away. The legal history of canonization processes substantially explains the delay in Luigi’s canonization, but this delay is also partly explicable by the very complexity and ambiguity of Luigi’s image as both child and man, which served in the long term to give ever new life to his cult.
‘A Saint if ever there was One’: Henry Robert Reynolds (1825–96)
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

A ‘saint if ever there was one, but who might have been a little more effective had there been in his nature some slight traces of the old Adam’. Thus William Hardy Harwood (1856—1924) reflecting on a past member of Sub Rosa, a long-established essay club for Congregational ministers in Greater London. Harwood could only have known this particular saint for four years and perhaps his recollection is best seen as a businesslike minister’s snapshot of an other-worldliness outside the normal run of Nonconformist experience. It betrays a degree of affectionate irritation. It is almost a dismissal. Free Churchmen don’t do saints.
Anglicanism and Sanctity: The Diocese of Perth and the Making of a ‘Local Saint’ in 1984
Authors: Strong Rowan
Published: March 2016

On 23 February 1984, the bishops of the Anglican Province of Western Australia signed and sealed a document promulgating the Venerable John Ramsden Wollaston a local saint and hero of the Anglican Communion in accordance with Resolutions 77–80 of the Lambeth Conference 1958. These four resolutions had allowed national or provincial Anglican Churches to add to the Calendar of the Saints to permit ‘supplementary commemorations for local use’ according to the following principles where they were extra-scriptural persons. They had to be individuals ‘whose historical character and devotion are beyond doubt’; ‘revisions should be few and without controversy’; and such additions ‘should normally result from a wide-spread desire expressed in the region concerned over a reasonable period of time’.
‘A Saint for all Australians’?
Authors: Laffin Josephine
Published: March 2016

On 17 October 2010 Mary MacKillop became the first Australian citizen to be officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. This event generated a similar outpouring of patriotic enthusiasm to that which greeted Mary’s beatification in 1995. The title of this paper is borrowed from a newspaper article of 1985 by the poet, publisher and self-described ‘implacable agnostic’, Max Harris, a fervent supporter of Mary’s canonization. Saints are the only relatives that you can choose, commented Bishop Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century, and taking this ancient aphorism rather more literally than St Ambrose intended, Dame Edna Everage has claimed descent from a branch of the MacKillop family tree. As Dame Edna’s creator, comedian and satirist Barry Humphries, is a shrewd observer of Australian culture, Mary MacKillop’s triumph as a saint for all Australians seems assured — but what does this reveal about the meaning of sainthood in contemporary Australian society? This paper will trace some important stages in devotion to saints in Australian history before returning to Mary Helen MacKillop, her status as a national icon, and the threads of change and continuity which can be discerned in her cult.
Seeking Meaning Behind Epistolary Clichés: Intercessory Prayer Clauses in Christian Letters
Authors: Choy Renie
Published: March 2016

The letter, as the format of twenty-one of the twenty-seven documents in the canonical New Testament, is arguably the literary form which has played the most significant role in the history of Christianity. But scholars have often been troubled by how to treat the conventions framing Christian letters: since little of Christian literature from its earliest time to the medieval period escapes the influence of classical traditions of rhetoric, can constant epistolary formulas be taken as expressions of genuine sentiment? In fact, it is precisely because the lines between classical influence and Christian innovation are so difficult to make out that E. R. Curtius was able to argue that the humility formula of medieval charters, for so long assumed to have originated in Paul, was in fact a pagan Hellenistic prototype like scores of other rhetorical conventions. His study of the formula serves, Curtius writes, to ‘furnish a warning against making the Middle Ages more Christian or more pious than it was’, and to demonstrate that ‘a constant literary formula must not be regarded as the expression of spontaneous sentiment’. So the entrenchment of rhetoric in letter-writing is often set in opposition to genuine Christian feeling, commonplace utterance against living expression, empty verbiage against religious sincerity.
Gregory the Great: Reader, Writer and Read
Authors: Anlezark Daniel
Published: March 2016

An episode unique to the late ninth-centuryLifeof Gregory the Great by John the Deacon reports a famine that occurred in the year of Gregory’s death; a hostile party blamed the lavish generosity of the late pope for Rome’s suffering. The fury of the people was roused and they set out to burn Gregory’s books. However, the deacon Peter, Gregory’sfamiliarissimus, intervened to dissuade them, telling the people that Gregory’s works were directly inspired by God. As proof he asked God to take his life, and promptly dropped dead. This episode is not found in the earlier accounts of Gregory’s life: the brief account in the mid seventh-centuryLiber pontificalis, the early eighth-centuryLifeby an anonymous monk of Whitby, and the mid eighth-century account by Paul the Deacon. Doubtful as John the Deacon’s account of the exchange between Peter and the mob may be, it does tell us something about the status of Gregory and his works in the mid 870s, when Pope John VIII commissioned the new hagiography. Gregory the Great became one of the most widely read authors of the Middle Ages, and even in his lifetime some of his works were eagerly sought after. With his popularity and influence Gregory not only added to the body of Christian literature, but also made a lasting contribution to the debate over what kinds of works it was appropriate for Christians to read. This essay will survey his works and discuss his ideas on reading and literature, and on the establishment of a Christian literary canon. The influence of Gregory’s works and ideas will be examined in relation to one particular medieval nation - Anglo-Saxon England. As the instigator of the Anglo-Saxon mission, Gregory enjoyed a great reputation as an author in Anglo-Saxon England, where his ideas on literature and society had a lasting impact.
‘Y Ganrif Fawr’? Piety, Literature and Patronage in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Wales
Authors: Olson Katharine K.
Published: March 2016

This essay offers a reconsideration of the idea of ‘The Great Century’ of Welsh literature (1435–1535) and related assumptions of periodization for understanding the development of lay piety and literature in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Wales. It focuses on the origins of these ideas in (and their debt to) modern Welsh nationalist and Protestant and Catholic confessional thought, and their significance for the interpretation of Welsh literature and history. In addition, it questions their accuracy and usefulness in the light of contemporary patterns of manuscript production, patronage and devotional content of Welsh books of poetry and prose produced by the laity during and after this ‘golden age’ of literature. Despite the existence of over a hundred printed works in Welsh by 1660, the vernacular manuscript tradition remained robust; indeed, ‘native culture for the most part continued to be transmitted as it had been transmitted for centuries, orally or in manuscript’ until the eighteenth century. Bardic poetry’s value as a fundamental source for the history of medieval Ireland and Wales has been rightly acknowledged. However, more generally, Welsh manuscripts of both poetry and prose must be seen as a crucial historical source. They tell us much about contemporary views, interests and priorities, and offer a significant window onto the devotional world of medieval and early modern Welsh men and women. Drawing on recent work on Welsh literature, this paper explores the production and patronage of such books and the dynamics of cultural and religious change. Utilizing National Library of Wales Llanstephan MS 117D as a case study, it also examines their significance and implications for broader trends in lay piety and the nature of religious change in Wales.
Thomas More’s Confutation: A Literary Failure?
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

Between June 1529 and December 1533 Thomas More published no fewer than seven books comprising more than a million words against the Reformation. The young More had achieved European fame as the author of Utopia, and the friend and defender of the greatest scholar, satirist and literary innovator of the age, Desiderius Erasmus. Utopia remains one of the handful of books which would have to be included in any representative library of Western civilization. More himself, however, came to place a far higher value on the remarkable stream of English works which gushed from his pen in the four years leading up to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, which, however, are nowadays read, if at all, mainly as evidence that More was losing his grip. They form a remarkable series: the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Supplication of Souls, in June and September 1529 respectively; the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (Part I, the Preface and Books I–III, published in January 1532, and Part II, Books IV–VIII, more than a year later, after his resignation as Chancellor). That same year, 1533, saw the last four in this astonishing polemical outpouring, the Apology of Sir Thomas More, the Debellation of Salem and Byzance, the Answer to a Poisoned Book and the Letter Against Frith. Though these books were directed against a variety of authors, Mores main target, implicit even in writings ostensibly directed against others, was the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale. More viewed Tyndale as the most important conduit for Lutheran ideas into England, and he saw in Tyndale’s version of the New Testament the fountainhead from which lesser heresiarchs drew lethal draughts of error with which to poison the souls of unsuspecting English men and women.
Disraeli’s Novels: Religion and Identity
Authors: Brooks David
Published: March 2016

“Dizzy’s attachment to moderate Oxfordism is something like Bonaparte’s to moderate Mahomedanism’, observed George Smythe in 1842. ‘Could I only satisfy myself, wrote his fellow Young Englander, Lord John Manners, a year later, ‘that d’Israeli believed all that he said, I should be more happy: his historical views are quite mine, but does he believe them?’ As a politician, Disraeli was and remains a man of mystery, an identity which he took some care to cultivate. His protean career in public life found a counterpart in his literary works, in which likewise over the years he appeared to assume a range of different positions. His religious allegiance is similarly elusive. He had attended a Unitarian school, and his theological position, with little sense of the divinity of Jesus, reflected that branch of Christianity most akin to Judaism. On the other hand, he was fascinated by the rituals of Roman Catholicism and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and it was perhaps natural that he should find his spiritual home in the Church of England, that house of many mansions which to his mind reflected the rich diversity of national life. How far there was an underlying principle in Disraeli’s life and art is a question that has intrigued numerous historians, and it will be the chief concern also of this essay in respect of two key issues: religion and national identity.
‘Pulp Methodism’ Revisited: The Literature and Significance of Silas and Joseph Hocking
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

Writing pseudonymously in the New Age in February 1909, Arnold Bennett, acerbic chronicler of Edwardian chapel culture, deplored the lack of proper bookshops in English provincial towns. A substantial manufacturing community, he claimed, might be served only by a stationers shop, offering ‘Tennyson in gilt. Volumes of the Temple Classics or Everyman. Hymn books, Bibles. The latest cheap Shakespeare. Of new books no example, except the brothers Hocking.’ Bennett’s lament was an unintended compliment to the ubiquity of the novels of Silas and Joseph Hocking, brothers whose literary careers spanned more than half a century, generating almost two hundred novels and innumerable serials and short stories. Silas Hocking (1850–1935), whose first book was published in 1878 and last in 1934, has been described as the most popular novelist of the late nineteenth century. By 1900 his sales already exceeded one million volumes. The career of Joseph Hocking (1860–1937) was slightly shorter, stretching from 1887 to 1936, but his output was equally impressive. The Hockings’ works have attracted interest principally among scholars of Cornish life and culture. It will be argued here, however, that they have significance for the history of late Victorian and Edwardian Nonconformity, both reflecting and reinforcing the attitudes, beliefs and prejudices of their large and appreciative readership.
Jesuit Pulp Fiction: The Serial Novels of Antonio Bresciani in La Civilta Cattolica
Authors: Logan Oliver
Published: March 2016

The successful and highly authoritative Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica was founded in 1850 to assert Catholic values in the face of ‘the Revolution’, an allegedly nefarious process that had begun with the Revolution of 1789 and was seen by the Jesuit writers as continuing with the 1848 revolution in Italy and the ongoing Risorgimento movement; this called the temporal power of the papacy into question and also entailed wider issues of secularization. For these writers, the periodical press was a dangerous new force and the only way to combat it effectively was on its own ground. The serial novels which ran in the fortnightly journal from 1850 until 1927 were evidendy written in the belief that the devil should not be left with all the most gripping yarns. The dangers to morality posed by romantic novels were constantly emphasized in the journal’s own fiction. The dominant tone of this fiction was polemical. The villains represented the forces of Jacobinism, the secret societies of the early Risorgimento, and Freemasonry. Conspiracy was a constant theme. Indeed, the leitmotifs of anti-Jesuit polemic depicting the Society of Jesus as an occult conspiratorial organization were in turn deployed by the Jesuit writers against Freemasonry. In the present study, however, the emphasis will be primarily on what the works of Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), the pioneer Jesuit novelist between 1850 and 1861, had to say about Christian life and values. This, in fact, has most relevance to the genre of the romantic novel.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chamberlain and the Censorship of the Theatre, 1909–49
Authors: Webster Peter
Published: March 2016

It was ever the lot of the archbishops of Canterbury to be involved in seemingly incongruous affairs. The position of the archbishop at the heart of the Establishment engendered requests to be patron, advocate or opponent of almost every conceivable development in national life. One such entanglement was his role as unofficial advisor to the Lord Chamberlain in the matter of the licensing of stage plays.
Piety and Polemic in Evangelical Prophecy Fiction, 1995–2000
Authors: Gribben Crawford
Published: March 2016

No one studying the impact of Evangelicalism’s most successful cultural products could doubt their mass-market appeal both within and beyond the ‘conservative revolution’ of contemporary America. With concerns to fashion the spirituality of their readers, the Left Behind novels (1995–2007) represent the ‘first outlines of a fully commercialised, fully mediatised Christian blockbuster culture’. The series dramatizes the end-time expectations of a popular evangelical system of eschatological thinking, known as dispensational pre-millennialism. This system maintains that Christ could return imminently to ‘rapture’ true believers to heaven; that this rapture will be followed by a catastrophic seven-year period known as the ‘Great Tribulation’, in which the Antichrist will rise to power to persecute those who, despite being ‘left behind’, have converted to evangelical faith; and that the tribulation will end with the ‘glorious appearing’ of Christ, the last judgement and the inauguration of a thousand-year reign of peace known as the millennium. Despite the complexity of its theology, the series has sold over sixty-five million copies since the publication of their eponymous debut novel in 1995, and has been identified as the best-selling fiction series in American literary history. After 1998, successive instalments in the series topped the New York Times best-seller lists. The seventh novel in the series, The Indwelling (2000), topped the best-seller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
The College of Cardinals Under Honorius III: A Nepotistic Household?
Authors: Smith Thomas W.
Published: March 2016

The College of Cardinals constituted the innermost circle of the medieval papal household – arguably one of the most important households in Christendom – whose influence was sought by envoys pursuing diplomatic affairs and petitioners looking to secure grace and justice. The relationships between the pope and the cardinals of his household, and of the household with those outside the papal curia, were integral to the operation of papal government. The college consulted with the pope on matters of politics and everyday church administration, and its specific roles included the election of new popes, the concession of privileges, auditing legal cases heard at the papal curia, deployment of its members as legatesa latere, and the administration of important curial departments. Although the pope could not dismiss existing cardinals, it was the personal prerogative of the reigning pope to select clergy for appointment to this elite household, although his decisions seem to have been subject to ratification by the existing members of the college, whose exact level of involvement in appointments remains unclear.
The Spiritual Home of W. E. Gladstone: Anne Gladstone’s Bible
Authors: Bebbington David
Published: March 2016

‘Popery is the religion of Cathedrals’, wrote J.W. Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow in his novel The Velvet Cushion (1815), ‘– Protestantism of houses’. It is a commonplace in the secondary literature that the household was the citadel of the evangelical version of Protestantism in nineteenth-century England. ‘Evangelicalism’, according to a representative comment by Ian Bradley, ‘was above all else the religion of the home.’ The head of the household conducting family prayers was the embodiment of the evangelical spirit. It is not the purpose of this essay to question that received image, but it does suggest that a clearer picture of the religious atmosphere of the evangelical home can be obtained from sources other than the manuals published for the paterfamilias to read to the assembled household. The books of family prayers tell us what was prescribed; but alternative sources show us what was practised. Spiritual journals, reflective meditations and candid correspondence can often be more revealing. Nowhere, however, is the kernel of household piety more evident than in the Bibles that some zealous believers annotated for their own benefit. The study of the Bible, as Edward Bickersteth, a leading evangelical divine, put it in his book A Scripture Help (1816), was ‘a great and important duty’. When members of evangelical families retired to the privacy of their own rooms, they might spend time in devotional reading of the Scriptures and leave a record of their reflections in the margins. Such Bibles, one of which is to be examined here, are treasuries of authentic domestic spirituality. They show something of the heartbeat of evangelical religion.
Who is Living at the Vicarage? an Analysis of the 1881 Census Returns for Clerical Households in Lincolnshire
Authors: Tomlinson John W. B.
Published: March 2016

The 1881 census took place on the evening of Sunday 3 April and provides a snapshot of the composition of virtually every household in the UK, including details of age, occupation and birthplace. In Lincolnshire the census returns for 647 ecclesiastical parishes and districts provide a valuable source of information about the households of the clergy. The range of this record, from remote rural villages to urban communities, although limited to one region of the country, can be considered as largely representative of typical clerical households in England in the late nineteenth century.
Christian Family, Christian Nation: Raymond Johnston and the Nationwide Festival of Light in Defence of the Family
Authors: Atherstone Andrew
Published: March 2016

‘We reject that morality – death to the family!’ So interjected a young female heckler during the inaugural rally of the Nationwide Festival of Light (NFOL) in Westminster Central Hall on 9 September 1971. Although press coverage of the event focused upon more dramatic interventions, such as the attempt by a group of bogus nuns to storm the platform, it was this stark proclamation of ‘death to the family’ which revealed the primary ideological battleground in the NFOL’s morality campaigns of the 1970s. Six months later, Bishop Maurice Wood of Norwich told the follow-up ‘Land Aflame’ rally in March 1972 that ‘in this day of synthetic substitutes there is no substitute for the family’. NFOL was sometimes accused of fighting simultaneously on too many fronts, ranging from pornography and blasphemy to religious education and Sunday trading, but Eddy Stride (rector of Christ Church, Spitalfields, and chairman of the NFOL executive committee) summarized the movement’s purpose as being ‘to actively promote the values of human dignity expressed in the Biblical view of family life’.
Has Ecclesiastical History Lost the Plot?
Authors: Foot Sarah
Published: March 2016

The Ecclesiastical History Society’s fiftieth anniversary conference provides an opportunity both to celebrate the achievements of the society and to reflect on the current state of the discipline. In asking whether church historians have lost the plot, I do not mean to question colleagues’ reason and sanity, but to wonder whether those of us who work in this field might have forgotten some of the objectives and principles that once distinguished our endeavour. Has ecclesiastical history lost its sense of purpose, its place at the heart of historical enterprise, to the extent that it has become not just marginalized and peripheral, but essentially irrelevant both to academic study and wider society?
Biblical History and the end of Times: Seventh-Century Christian Accounts of the Rise of Islam
Authors: Ehinger Jessica Lee
Published: March 2016

By the time of the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, Christian writers had already developed a complex methodology of historical writing, one that was not merely concerned with preserving the history of past events, but which viewed contemporary and past events through the lens of the biblical narrative of history, from creation to the ultimate end as prophesied in the eschatological books of the Bible. In this model, the history of the world could be traced from creation to follow the story of God’s revelation of himself to humankind through the prophets, through inspired Scripture and, most importantly, through Christ.
An Anglican View of the Crusades: Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

This essay is concerned with the ways in which the English Reformation changed the understanding of the crusade movement from that held in the Middle Ages. The papally inspired crusade movement was not an attractive subject to sixteenth-century Protestant scholars. As Christopher Tyerman has remarked in his study, England and the Crusades, it was not until 1639 that ‘Thomas Fuller published his Historie of the Holy Warre, the first, and one of the more interesting histories of the crusades written by an Englishman’. The only earlier post-Reformation English work which had touched on this subject was Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turks (1603). Its first book was entitled ‘The Generall Historie of the Turks before the Rising of the Ottoman Familie’, and inevitably contained some account of crusading activity, though that was incidental to its main theme. Knolles’ book proved popular and a second edition was published in 1610, showing that there was a public for works of this kind.
Using the Past against the Papacy: Luther’s appeal to Church History in his Anti-Papal Writings
Authors: Methuen Charlotte
Published: March 2016

It is well known that Martin Luther found ultimate authority sola scriptura. The evangelical endeavour which he initiated and exemplified focused on the return to the gospel and the rediscovery of a church modelled according to scriptural lines. For the Reformers, the truly catholic church was that church which adhered most closely to the church established by Scripture. The early church, being chronologically closest to that established in Scripture, was more authentic, not yet affected by innovation. But how were the details of that church to be discovered? Scripture was not always informative on practical questions of church life and ecclesiastical order, and for these an appeal to church history was necessary. Drawing particularly on Scott Hendrix’s study of Luther’s attitude towards the papacy, and the studies by John Headley and others of Luther’s view of, and appeal to, church history, this essay explores the ways in which Luther used his knowledge of church history to define and support his developing critique of the papacy. It focuses on his early writings to 1521, but will also consider the later work Von den Consiliis und Kirchen (1539), a testimony to Luther’s growing interest in the history of the church.
Gilbert Burnet: An Ecclesiastical Historian and the Invention of the English Restoration Era
Authors: Claydon Tony
Published: March 2016

On the eve of the 1689 Revolution in England, Gilbert Burnet was best known as an ecclesiastical historian. Although he had had a noteworthy career as a Whigleaning cleric, who had gone into exile at the start of James II’s reign and had entered the household of William of Orange in the Hague, Burnet’s reputation had been based on his magisterial History of the Reformation. This had appeared in its first two volumes in 1678 and 1683, and had rapidly become the standard work on the religious changes of the Tudor age. Soon after the Revolution, Burnet also became notable as the chief propagandist of the new regime. He produced a steady stream of works justifying William’s usurpation of James’s throne, and played a major part in organizing such pro-Orange events as the fast days marking William’s war with Louis XIV. This essay explores a key intersection of these two roles. It suggests that Burnet’s explicitly pro-Williamite understanding of church history gave rise to a new division of the past, and effectively invented the Restoration era as a distinct period of British history, running from 1660 to 1689.
Memorializing 1662: Hampshire Congregationalists and the 250th Anniversary of the Great Ejection
Authors: Johnson Rosalind , Ottewill Roger
Published: March 2016

Edwardian Congregationalists regarded 1662 as theirannus mirabilis, to be venerated and celebrated in equal measure. For them it was the year when all that they revered, such as the enthronement of conscience, had been thrown into sharp relief by the Great Ejection. This event, which helped to shape the identity of historically minded Congregationalists, had acquired a mythical quality and become part of the denomination’s folk lore. The Ejection involved the removal of ‘some 2,000 ministers … from their livings because they could not swear their “unfeigned assent and consent to … everything contained and prescribed” in the new Prayer Book, or meet some of the other requirements of the new Act of Uniformity’. Many ejected ministers attracted followers, who became the founding members of Dissenting congregations which later evolved into self-governing Congregational churches.