bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The latin Polemic of the Marian Exiles
Authors: Pettegree Andrew
Published: February 2016

In a recent number of the English Historical Review Dr Jennifer Loach argued for a more positive view of the relationship between the government of Mary Tudor and the printing-press. Against a historical tradition which has been persistently critical of the regime’s failure to understand the importance of printing, Dr Loach has argued that Mary’s government in fact had a very real understanding of the value of printed propaganda, and took positive measures to promote abroad a favourable view of the restoration of Catholic worship in England. The key events of the reign, the Queen’s accession and marriage and the ending of the schism, were all marked by the publication abroad of pamphlets in Latin or foreign vernacular languages promoting the government’s viewpoint. The speed with which such accounts appeared suggest an official version of events, usually in Latin, was sometimes deliberately circulated to sympathetic printers to ensure wide publicity.
Erecting the Discipline in Provincial England: the Order of Northampton, 1571
Authors: Sheils W. J.
Published: February 2016

As that no Commonwealth can flourish or long indure without good lawes and sharpe execution of the same, so neither can the Kirk of God be brought to purity neither yet be retained in the same without the order of Ecclesiastical Discipline… drunkenesse, excesse be it in apparel, or be it in eating and drinking, fornication, oppressing of the poore by exactions, deceiving of them in buying and selling by wrong met and measure, wanton words and licentious living tending to slander, doe openly appertaine to the Kirk of God to punish them, as God’s word commands.

Such a declaration of the central role of discipline within the Reformed tradition is a commonplace to all historians of the Reformation and will be familiar to the editor of The First Book of Discipline, from which the above quotation comes.1 The head, the seventh and entitled 'Of Ecclesiastical Discipline', conformed in its procedure to the practice of estabUshed Calvinist congregations on the Continent in its austere attitude to the unrepentant sinner as in its care for the repentant individual who, on an appointed day before the whole kirk.
Alexander Myln, Bishop George Brown, and the Chapter of Dunkeld
Authors: Macqueen John
Published: February 2016

It might seem reasonable to assume that Alexander Myln’s Vitae episcoporum Dunkeldensium was a humanist document. He begins with a paragraph called by Hannay a dedication to Bishop Gavin Douglas and to the canons of Dunkeld who were promoted in the time of Bishop George Brown. If anyone in early sixteenth-century Scotland deserves the name humanist, Douglas is the man, and one would expect a work dedicated to him to adopt a corresponding style. The book, however, does not wholly live up to expectations. Myln was a lawyer devoted to documents, and his normal style is that of the early records which he consulted. The dedication is no more than a formal greeting to the Bishop and Myln’s other colleagues on the residentiary Dunkeld chapter.
‘The Face of Ane Perfyt Reformed Kyrk’: St Andrews and the Early Scottish Reformation
Authors: Dawson Jane E. A.
Published: February 2016

With supreme self-confidence the St Andrews kirk-session declared on 31 May 1564:

Seing it hes pleased the gudnes of the Eternall, our God, of his meir mercy, to deliver and reduce us furth of the bondage and yok of Antecrist, to the lycht of the Ewangell of Jesus Crist be plenteows prechyng of the same; so that the face of ane perfyt reformed kyrk hes beyn seyn wythin this cite be the space of fyve yearis, the sacramentis deuly ministrat, all thingis done in the kyrk be comly ordor establesched, disciplyn used and resavit wythowtyn contempt or ony plane contradiccione of ony person’.
Introduction: ‘Straight Answers to the Problem of Sovereignty’?
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: February 2016

Michael Wilks’s best-known contribution to historical scholarship is The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1963). This is an exploration of the political ideas of Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona (c. 1270-1328) and his contemporary publicists on the nature of sovereignty—or supreme authority—and its location within society. Like most medieval thinkers Augustinus saw society as the universal Church, the body of Christ, a single corporate entity which embraced all Christians, and within which all were united in pursuit of the common aim of salvation. Most thinkers would have agreed, too, that in theory society itself was the possessor of sovereignty. The ‘problem’ arose in trying to decide how and by whom sovereignty should be wielded in practice. There were various solutions. At one extreme the pope, as the vicar of Christ, was thought to represent Christ’s mystical body, the Church, on earth. He thus became the physical embodiment of sovereignty, and, as such, the sole source of power within society.
Sovereignty and Tabu: Evolution of the Sanction against Communication with Excommunicates. Part 1: Gregory VII
Authors: Vodola Elisabeth
Published: February 2016

Gregory VII’s pontificate is acknowledged as the starting-point for, as Professor Wilks has termed it, ‘the vigorous expression and application of hierocratic principles’, the foundation stone of the medieval papal monarchy and its sovereignty. Gregory revived once and for all, as earlier leaders had succeeded in doing only temporarily, the imperial concept of sovereign legislative authority. Though deeply aware of the limitations imposed by tradition, Gregory raised the pope’s power of lawmaking to a unique sovereign act: ‘He alone can compose new laws to meet the needs of the times’, as it was expressed in the Dictatuspapae, the twenty-seven declarations on papal power that were entered into the papal register in March 1075.
The Case of Bernard of Osma: Royal Influence and Papal Authority in the Diocese of Osma
Authors: Duggan Charles
Published: February 2016

The election of Bishop Bernard of Osma, former prior of Osma, took place not later than 15 February 1174. But the validity of his election was subsequently challenged on grounds of simony, and he was deposed sometime after mid-July 1176. A decretal of Alexander III to Archbishop Cerebruno of Toledo, Consuluit nos, dealt in its opening section with the question of appeals where manifest crimes were involved, or frustratory tactics employed, and in its second part with the charges raised against the election of Bernard, quondam bishop of Osma. The letter was received into the canonical collections from 1179 onwards, and ultimately into the official Decretales of 1234. There is no ambiguity about the provenance of this letter.
The Pope and the Cities: Anticlericalism and Heresy in Innocent Hi’s Italy
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: February 2016

At the moment of Innocent Ill’s accession, the papacy faced both problems and opportunities in Italy, many of them the result of the unexpected death of the Emperor Henry VI in 1197 and the subsequent abeyance of imperial rule. The new pope at once showed his determination to realize the projects of his predecessors and to secure the position of the Holy See by establishing a papal governmental structure in central Italy and, in due course, by obtaining the election of an obedient and faithful emperor. These policies had repercussions on city-state regimes which had for many years now shown their own determination to achieve the most extensive authority possible, both within their walls and in their surrounding territories. Their quest for autonomy was often accompanied by measures hostile to the property and jurisdiction of the Church; it was sometimes also accompanied by the more or less overt toleration of heresy, even within the ranks of a city’s rulers. Attacks on clerical immunities, however, came to the papacy’s notice more frequently than instances of outright heresy, and Innocent at least was well aware how both anticlericalism and heresy proper were fuelled by the manifest inadequacies of the clergy.
The Dominican Political Theory of John of Paris in its Context
Authors: Coleman Janet
Published: February 2016

The Dominican John of Paris (d. 1306) wrote a tract De potestate regia et papali which would later influence fifteenth-century conciliarists and seventeenth-century republicans. But the manuscript tradition shows no widespread diffusion of the work in its own times, and, according to Leclercq, the Depotestate does not figure amongst the works attributed to John of Paris in ancient Dominican catalogues of Dominican authors. It has long been thought that it should be dated c. 13023 as a contribution to the debate between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair of France. John has been judged a major advocate of the royal position and his treatise has been taken to be a principal literary weapon in Philip’s arsenal against the Pope. It has also been judged by many to be a single-issue treatise of great coherence.
The Pope’s Right to Elect his Successor: The Criterion of Sovereignty?
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: February 2016

One of the ‘Problems of Sovereignty’ addressed by Michael Wilks in his magisterial study is whether the pope can appoint his own successor.’ It was, of course, a particularly pressing problem for any prince who had no natural heir, either because of his own deliberate celibacy, or, if he had children, because there was no established rule of hereditary succession. In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes saw the right to appoint a successor, and thus to perpetuate what he calls the ‘artificial eternity’ of the commonwealth, as an essential attribute of sovereignty: There is no perfect form of government, where the disposing of the succession is not in the present sovereign. For if it be in any other particular man or private assembly, it is in a person subject, and may be assumed by the sovereign at his pleasure; and consequently the right is in himself.’ He also pinpointed the problems which would arise without this attribute: ‘If it be known who have the power to give the sovereignty after his [the ruler’s] death it is known also that the sovereignty was in them before; for none have right to give that which they have not right to possess, and keep to themselves, if they think good.’ Moreover, if the sovereign cannot appoint his successor ‘then is the commonwealth dissolved; and the right is in him that can get it.’
Somersaulting Sovereignty: A Note on Reciprocal Lordship and Servitude in Wyclif
Authors: McGrade Arthur Stephen
Published: February 2016

IN his treatise on civil lordship, written a few years before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Wyclif raises, incidentally, but in a particularly challenging way, the central problem of political philosophy. The problem is to work out a consistent idea of authority and subordination as reciprocal—in the biblically extreme terms of WycliPs formulation, a consistent idea of reciprocal lordship and servitude or mastery and slavery. It is unclear what part, if any, his brief discussion of reciprocity plays in the rest of Wyclif s thought. There are echoes, but nothing like the elaboration the idea might seem to deserve, and authoritative recent studies raise doubts even about the echoes. Still, if we are willing to interpret Wycliffian reciprocity for ourselves, the idea may prove a fruitful one.
The King and Erring Clergy: A Wycliffite Contribution
Authors: Hudson Anne
Published: February 2016

One of the questions that appeared in the theologians’ list of questions to be asked of suspected Lollards was ‘An reges et domini temporales existentes in peccato mortali eo ipso cadunt ab omni iure et titulo ad illa regna vel dominia.’ This question appears between one that enquires whether anyone may preach without authority from the pope or a bishop, and another that seeks to know whether the suspect considers that the laity may freely ad suum arbitrium correct and judge delinquent lords. At the same position in the longer list put together by a jurist appears a somewhat different question: ‘an domini temporales possunt ad arbitrium suum auferre bona temporalia ab ecclesia et a viris ecclesiasticis.’ Wyclif’s followers would have returned a positive answer to both questions, though the enthusiasm of their reply would have been the more audible for the second. Throughout the history of the movement Lollards were notable for the stridency of their objections to clerical prerogatives, and, especially in the view of their opponents, for their sympathy towards the secular rulers. Individual heretics and isolated texts applied Wyclif’s views of dominion to kings and secular lords, but the theory was undoubtedly primarily used against ecclesiastics. Academic debate of Wyclif’s theory of dominion was early, and the issue formed the heart of Gregory XI’s condemnation in 1377. But the question does not seem to have figured largely in the disputations that followed Wyclif’s departure from Oxford in 1381.
The Problem of Subjection: The University of Toulouse, Royalism, and Papalism in The France of Charles VI
Authors: Swanson R.N.
Published: February 2016

In the early years of the fifteenth century, the European universities achieved what was probably the height of their influence within the Western Church, an influence accorded final sanction by their independent representation at the two general councils of Pisa (1409) and Constance (1414-18). Both of these assemblies had been summoned in the hope of terminating the Great Schism, the division of the Latin Church which had erupted with the rival elections of Urban VI and Clement VII as popes in 1378. During the course of the subsequent debates seeking a resolution to the dispute, the universities and their members had taken a prime role in formulating theories intended to find a way out of the dilemma of having two popes, each supposedly legitimate. Their scope for concrete, independent action was, however, limited: whatever their aspirations for a role on the wider stage of the medieval Church, the universities had to exist within the narrower confines of individual political entities, for the most part monarchies, whose rulers had their own conceptions of the appropriate place of scholars in the scheme of things.
Ius dictum est a iure possidendo: Law and Rights in Decretales, 5.40.12
Authors: Tierney Brian
Published: February 2016

Francisco Suarez devoted the opening chapter of his major work, De legibus ac Deo legislatore, to definitions of the words lex (law) and ius (right). In one sense, he wrote, ius could mean the same as lex, as in phrases like ius civile (civil law) or ius divinum (divine law). But there were other meanings too. In discussing them, Suarez quoted Isidore of Seville, ‘Ius is so called because it is just’, and Augustine, ‘What is done by right (iure) is done justly’—two texts that earlier had been incorporated into the medieval Corpus iuris canonici. According to this etymology, Suarez wrote, ius could mean ‘the just and fair’ or ‘what is prescribed by law’. Then Suarez presented a third, ‘strict’ definition.
The Venetian Mediterranean Empire after the Council of Trent
Authors: Wright A. D.
Published: February 2016

In the period from the conclusion of the Tridentine Council in 1563 to the Turkish conquest of Crete in 1669 the Venetian Republic feared for its sovereignty over its Mediterranean possessions. These stretched from Istria, along the Dalmatian littoral, to the islands of Corfu and Zante. Cyprus was lost to the Turks from 1570, despite the Christian maritime victory at Lepanto subsequently. Venetian relations with the papacy were also strained after the Council of Trent, not only in the exceptional and dramatic circumstances of the Interdict of 1606-7. Defence of both Crete and the other remaining Mediterranean possessions was thus complicated by Venetian anxiety over Ottoman power on the one hand and concern at papal policy on the other. From the end of the Tridentine Council to the Interdict, and indeed beyond, Venice insisted on its role as a devoutly Catholic state, claiming from the papacy the concession of decime, paid by the clergy of the Republic, to sustain its defence of Christendom against militant Islam. But the Republic also resisted Roman suggestions that Catholic belief and practice were insecure or in need of reform within its territories. In the Mediterranean possessions, however, the presence of a Greek Christian population represented a particular problem.
Collective Sovereignty? Conscience in the Gathered Church c. 1875-1918
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: February 2016

Sovereignty ought to be a natural concept for Christians whose rhetoric is full of words or collections of words like ‘Lord’ or ‘King’ or ‘Kingdom’ or ‘Crown Rights of the Redeemer’. It ought to be doubly natural for the Christian inhabitants of an earthly kingdom whose monarch protects a national church. In fact, ‘sovereignty’ is not a word which comes trippingly to ordinary Christian lips, and it is a religious concept as fraught with theological ambiguity for Christians as it is a political concept fraught with secular ambiguity for citizens. Indeed, for British Christians and citizens the ambiguities merge. For a Roman Catholic who recently edited The Times, ‘Liberty puts the individual in command of his own decisions; his vote is the ultimate political sovereign in a democracy; his purchase is the ultimate economic sovereign in a free market.’ For a critic of the Methodist-turned-Anglican who was Prime Minister when that was written, ‘Where the Church of England lists thirty-nine essential articles of faith, Mrs Thatcher names three: the belief in the doctrine of Free-Will; in the divinely created sovereignty of individual conscience; and in the Crucifixion and Redemption as the exemplary, supreme act of choice.’ Yet to a political journalist, interpreting the same Prime Minister’s view of British sovereignty as opposed to any Western European understanding, it seems that Parliament alone is sovereign: ‘no citizen or subordinate authority can have any unalienable rights against the state, which can lend out power to groups or individuals but never give it away.’ Whose vote then is ultimate political sovereign? Whose conscience then is divinely-created sovereign?
Parisian Theologians and The Jews: Peter Lombard and Peter Cantor
Authors: Watt Jack
Published: February 2016

To honour the scholar whose distinguished contribution to medieval intellectual history has included examination of the early history of Parisian scholarship, I have chosen to examine an aspect of the work of two major teachers and authors in that ‘monde scolaire qui préfigure déjà le monde universitaire de demain’, the school of Notre Dame. The work of Peter Lombard and Peter Cantor makes clear that in the second half of the twelfth century, Judaism was being placed firmly and permanently on the Parisian theological agenda. Peter Lombard (d. 1160) lectured on the Psalms and the Letters of St Paul. His commentaries on these books came quickly to be received as the standard teaching texts in Paris, the magna glossatura replacing, for those books, the glossa ordinaria of Anselm of Laon and his associates. Medieval exegetes held these particular books of the Bible in esteem. For Aquinas, articulating common opinion, they contained ‘almost the whole of theological doctrine’. And thus, it might well be claimed, almost the whole of theological doctrine about Judaism.
The Medieval Idea of Heresy: What Are We to Make of It?
Authors: McGrade Arthur Stephen
Published: February 2016

For Thomas Aquinas, writing in a society where there was widespread persecution of heretics, heresy was a species of unbelief (infidelitas) worthy of death. In Aquinas unbelief is the genus of vices opposed to the fundamental theological virtue of faith (fides). Today, in the liberal West, heresy itself is a more or less serious candidate for theological virtue.2 What are we to make of this?
Cross-Referencing in Wyclif’s Latin Works
Authors: Hudson Anne
Published: February 2016

One of the most immediately striking features of all of Wyclif’s major writings, whether philosophical, theological, or polemical, is the frequency with which cross-references are found both between different chapters or parts of the same work and between works other than the current one. The frequency of cross-referencing is variable. In the philosophical works and the intermediate tracts traditionally placed before the twelve-part Summa theologie, links are not enormously numerous. The first text to show a plethora of them is De civili dominio: here on average one instance occurs roughly every other page, more frequently in parts I and III, in other words some 600 in all. This habit continues with slight abatement in De veritate sacre scripture, and into De ecclesia. Thereafter the remaining parts of the Summa show a diminishing number, still further reduced in the De eucharistia. Cross-referencing is relatively common in the three long sets of sermons composed after Wyclif’s retirement to Lutterworth, and in the Sermones quadraginta written dum stetit in scholis. The device is obviously in origin an academic one, and it is worth observing that some of the major works which were written after Wyclif left Oxford have few if any: in the Trialogus the virtually complete absence of internal Unkings could be explained as the result of a perception that the orderly organization of the whole obviated the necessity for such an aid, but this explanation does not seem relevant to the final Opus evangelkum. Cross-referencing has previously been observed by students of Wyclif, and has traditionally been used in the attempt to order his vast output chronologically, and to put dates to individual works. But this is to jump to conclusions – to assume that the references are authorial and that the works in which they occur were composed as a whole at one time. The discussion here will suggest that there are questions to be answered in regard to the former assumption, and substantial objections to the latter. More modestly, I hope here to use the cross-references to throw light on the ways in which Wyclif’s works were written, put together, and ‘published’.
Claire Cross: A Tribute
Authors: Dobson Barrie
Published: February 2016

‘Sobriety and restraint are not fashionable today.’ So Claire Cross chose to introduce her first major work, The Puritan Earl: the Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536-1595, completed in the King’s Manor at York in September 1965. Over thirty years, and many, many publications later, the relevance of that sentiment for her own distinctive qualities as a historian of the sixteenth-century Church seems more obvious than ever. Claire’s many admirers are, of course, well aware of how prepared she can be to abandon restraint herself when confronted with either blatant scholarly inaccuracy or serious injustice to the academic causes she holds most dear. Nevertheless, Claire Cross’s exceptional influence as a historian throughout her many years at the University of York has probably owed more than anything else to the value she sets upon the exercise of what she once called the ‘deliberately unexciting’ virtues. As she herself suggested, Hastings and his fellow godly peers may well have had a more enduring effect upon English life and English moral standards than did their more obviously dazzling Elizabethan contemporaries. If so - and who would find it altogether easy to deny the force of that argument? - how hard it is to resist the thought that Claire’s own contributions to English Reformation Church history may well outlast those of many of her own contemporaries. In a field of scholarship noted for the brilliance and iconoclasm of its recent practitioners, Claire has long been the mistress of those who know.
Thomas Arundel of York: The Appellant Archbishop
Authors: Wilks Michael
Published: February 2016

History in a very religious or ideologically inspired society is always liable to become a victim of propaganda. A concern for what is right takes precedence over what actually happens, and the justification of events replaces the accurate recording of them: there is what may be termed virtuous reality. In such a climate evidence has not only to be rigorously tested and questioned, but close attention has also to be given to what is not recorded or omitted. At no time in English history is this more true than the years around 1400, when justification of a new government required the condemnation of the reign that had gone before. It is well known that the domestic chronicles of the period are a striking example of Hobbes’s dictum that in an intolerant society ‘imagination and memory are but one thing’. Despite the long centuries of struggle within virtually all medieval kingdoms for supremacy between laity and clergy, the contest ofregnumandsacerdotium, which reached a climax in England during the fourteenth century, the sources - and therefore modern historians -have concentrated upon an alternative, purely secular interpretation of events. The drama of the later 1390s, which saw the deposition of both Archbishop and King, is treated as if it were all a straightforward contest between absolute and limited kingship, in which a feudal aristocracy sought justice against a tyrannical ruler, and this has served to obscure the overriding significance of the crisis as a matter of ecclesiastical history.
Wyclif and the North: The Evidence from Durham
Authors: Hudson Anne
Published: February 2016

The present-day hamlet of Wycliffe stands on a small spit of level ground on the south bank of the river Tees, some seven miles east of Barnard Castle, at a point where the north bank rises in a high cliff; the churchyard stretches almost to the river bank. The claim that John Wyclif takes his name from the village cannot, unless further documentation is discovered, be finally proved; but it seems a reasonable one. Robert Wyclif, a clerk in the diocese of York, acted on behalf of John in 1371 in regard to tithes from an alien priory granted to the latter by the king, and again in 1376 to pay part of the annates claimed by the papal collector Arnald Gamier for the prebend of Caistor, a prebend from which Wyclif was displaced by the appointment of the papal provisor Philip Thornbury.
An Appropriate Anomaly: Topcliffe Parish and the Fabric Fund of York Minster in the Later Middle Ages
Authors: Swanson R. N.
Published: February 2016

Money provides the sinews of religion no less than of war. Since their emergence, parishes have been and remain fundamental to many ecclesiastical financial regimes. In pre-Reformation England, their revenues not only supported the incumbent, but might be diverted to many other purposes. The process of appropriation transformed a monastery, collegiate church, or other institution or office into the perpetual rector, entitled to receive the revenues in full. The ordination of a vicarage would then normally divide the income, the rector usually taking the lion’s share of the spoils, while the vicar received a small portion. Parishioners then found their parochial payments being used not in the locality, but perhaps hundreds - occasionally thousands - of miles away, for purposes over which they had no influence. At the same time, the perception of the parish as milch cow might lead the appropriators to ignore the cure of souls, whilst exploiting the finances to the full.
The Arrival of Humanistic Script in York?
Authors: Rycraft Ann
Published: February 2016

Amongst the very fragmentary collection concerning elections of deans of York, now in the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York, is a file of the surviving papers for the election, in 1503, of Christopher Bainbridge, ‘capellanum et consiliarium’ to Henry VII. In it there are two examples of humanistic script - an autograph subscription to a letter written for the prebendary of Botevant, John Colet, and a letter written by Peter Carmelian, prebendary of Ampleforth. The occurrence of this script is rare, possibly unique, in the archbishops’ archives.
Bishops, Seals, Mitres
Authors: Aston Margaret
Published: February 2016

The four volumes of Robert Surtees’s greatHistory and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, which were published between 1816 and 1840, included a series of engraved plates of episcopal seals. They started in the eleventh century, with the seal of William of St Carilef, and ended in the sixteenth century, with Cuthbert Tunstall. According to a note in the late volume, written by Surtees’s friend, helper, and literary executor, James Raine, in 1839, five years after the author’s death, ‘The Seals of the Bishops of Durham, after Tunstall’s period, are so devoid of taste and character, that Mr Surtees did not consider them worthy of being engraved.’ While the aesthetic judgement that explained this decision may be understandable, historical and iconographie interests now make it regrettable. For it was precisely at this time, after the death of Cuthbert Tunstall in 1559, that reforming dictates began to have an impact on episcopal seal-making. And, as was realized by G. C. Gorham less than twenty years after Raine’s note, changes in ecclesiastical seals reflect wider issues in church affairs, and may be revealing of their owners’ opinions.
‘An Honourable and Elect Lady’: The Faith of Isabel, Lady Bowes
Authors: Newman Christine M.
Published: February 2016

The Bowes of Streatlam, in the bishopric of Durham, were notable on two counts in the later part of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, they were highly regarded for their uncompromising loyalty to the Crown, an attachment which was to bring them disastrously close to the brink of financial ruin under the parsimonious Elizabeth, who repeatedly failed to reimburse and compensate them for activities undertaken in her name. On the other hand, the family was particularly noted in the religiously conservative north for its staunch adherence to the Protestant faith. The seeds of this Protestantism were in evidence from the earliest years of the Reformation, but it was given greater definition and inspiration by the example of Elizabeth Bowes, the ardent adherent and later mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer John Knox. Yet, if Elizabeth was the first, she was certainly not the only uncompromisingly Protestant matron in the Bowes family during this period. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the second wife of her grandson Sir William Bowes was to assume Elizabeth’s spiritual mantle, thereby reinforcing still further the family’s attachment to the Reformed faith.
Yorkshire’s Godly Incendiary: The Career of Henry Darley During the Reign of Charles I
Authors: Scott David
Published: February 2016

The Puritans of northern England have been well served by modern historians. The work of J. T. Cliffe and R. C. Richardson has shed a considerable amount of light on the Yorkshire and Lancashire godly in the seventeenth century, while case-studies of prominent northern parliamentarians, such as Claire Cross’s recent biography of Alderman Hoyle of York, have contributed much to our understanding of how the region’s Puritans reacted to the Laudian ‘captivity’ of the Church and the endeavours after 1640 to build a new Jerusalem.
Bishop Lightfoot and the Northern church
Authors: Thompson David M.
Published: February 2016

IT is always a surprise to discover one’s prejudices. Some time ago while attending a meeting at Ushaw College, Durham, I was surprised to see the extent to which the College and its chapel reflected the sense of being in continuity with the Church of Bede and Cuthbert. But why was I surprised? Because I had always associated that continuity with the Church of England and the magnificent cathedral church of Durham. I have no hesitation in regarding the Presbyterianism of Northumberland as part of that continuing tradition, because I regard the pre-Reformation Church as part of all our traditions. So the only reason to be surprised to find the same sense at Ushaw is an underlying prejudice that Roman Christianity represented an alien intrusion into the indigenous Church - a proposition that only has to be articulated for its incoherence to become apparent, for where did the indigenous Church come from, except originally from Rome?
The Vernacular and the Propagation of the Faith in Anglo-Saxon Missionary Activity
Authors: Fadda Anna Maria Luiselli
Published: February 2016

The fundamental problem that every religious conversion process grapples with – at all times and in all areas – is that of finding a linguistic medium, as a suitable means of facilitating an easy communication with pagans. Undoubtedly, to overcome this otherwise almost insuperable language barrier, the use of native tongues seems to be crucial.
Political Rivalry and Early Dutch Reformed Missions in Seventeenth-Century North-Sulawesi (Celebes)
Authors: Niemeijer Hendrik E.
Published: February 2016

The northernmost region of North Sulawesi, Minahasa, is one of the most Christian provinces of Eastern Indonesia. About ninety per cent of its total population of approximately one million is Protestant. The upland province capital of Tomohon and the city of Manado – the capital of North Sulawesi – are important centres for Christian education. On Sundays, the sound of bells of the white cathedral-style churches can be heard in almost every Minahasan town. Travellers who venture out to the beach villages on the Sangihe-Talaud islands north of Manado experience the same Protestant features of this part of the eastern archipelago.
Civilizing the Kingdom: Missionary Objectives and the Dutch Public Sphere Around 1800
Authors: Eijnatten Joris Van
Published: February 2016

Reflecting trends in international scholarship, recent explanations of the rise of Dutch missionary activity and thought in the period around 1800 tend to draw on a revised image of the Dutch eighteenth century as a period of Enlightenment. This revised image is based on the twofold claim that there was an Enlightenment in the Netherlands and that this Enlightenment was Christian or Protestant in character. At the turn of the eighteenth century, it is maintained, the strong influence of revivalism and pietism led to widespread missionary fervour, and this newly-found enthusiasm was able to bear fruit because it was spread through the private societies and social activism developed during, and characteristic of, the Dutch Enlightenment. Thus in recent accounts the positive connotations of the Enlightenment and the emancipatory significance of the new missionary enterprises have been strongly emphasised.
Missionaries, Mau Mau and The Christian Frontier
Authors: Casson John
Published: February 2016

In May 1955, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, visited Fort Hall in Kenya’s Kikuyu native reserve. The colonial government had declared a state of emergency nearly three years before in response to a secret and violent Kikuyu anti-colonial movement which it knew as Mau Mau. In the ensuing guerrilla war several thousand were killed, almost all of them Africans, and some eighty thousand Kikuyu were held in detention camps.
Thou shalt not slay a tyrant! The so-called theory of John of Salisbury
Authors: van Laarhoven Jan
Published: February 2016

It is a commonplace in the history of political theory to mark John of Salisbury as the first medieval defender of the so-called theory of tyrannicide according to which it is allowed and properly rightful to kill a tyrant. Yet commonplaces run the risk of platitudes: they need control and regular revision; from time to time the foundations of a platform have to be revisited in order to inspect their bearing-power. That is the intention of this communication, the first section of which will investigate some traditional arguments for the existence of such a theory; the second section will replace the problematic issue in the context of John’s works, especially of his main work, the Policraticus.
John of Salisbury and the world of the Old Testament
Authors: Saltman Avrom
Published: February 2016

It is likely that during the years of his exile (1163/4-70) John of Salisbury’s attachment to the bible was strengthened at the expense of his ‘classical humanism’. A glance at the index to Brooke’s volume of the later letters of John of Salisbury does much to confirm this hypothesis. As Smalley pointed out in this context, ‘the holy page reasserted her rule over the artes’. The ancient pagan sources which bulked large in his earlier writings are submerged under a flood of biblical quotations, allusions and exempla. The main topics of these later letters arc the Becket controversy, the papal schism and the empire-papacy conflict. The very nature of these themes must have influenced John’s mental processes. He was no hypocrite, and would not have recommended his exiled archbishop to study the psalms and Gregory’s Moralia had he himself not done likewise.
Römisches und kirchliches Recht im Policraticus
Authors: Kerner Max
Published: February 2016

Daβ Johannes von Salisbury in seinem zwischen 1156 und 1159 verfaβten Policraticus römisches, aber auch kirchliches Recht verwertet hat, ist in der Forschung häufig herausgestellt worden. In welch breitem Umfang dies vor allem für das römische Recht geschah, macht bereits ein kurzer Blick in den kritischen Apparat oder in den Autorenindex der Webb’schen Policraticus-Ausgabe deutlich.
The Maccabees as Exemplars in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries
Authors: Dunbabin Jean
Published: February 2016

When the court chaplain Wipo produced his Gesta Chuonradi in 1046 as an instruction in kingship for the young Henry III, he prefaced it with an indictment of contemporary writers’ laziness in failing to chronicle the deeds of their great men, although convenient models had been provided by pagan authors and Old Testament historians. The latter, in describing David’s single combats, Solomon’s counsel, Gideon’s magnanimity, and the battles of the Maccabees, had created a remarkable series of biographies illustrative of the different ways in which a man could serve the common weal. Their achievement deserved imitation. The main drift of Wipo’s argument is unfortunately too broad a theme for discussion here. What concerns us is simply that for him the Maccabees were the archetypes of heroic warriors, and that he expected his audience to be as familiar with their exploits as he was himself.
A Wycliffite Scholar of the Early Fifteenth Century
Authors: Hudson Anne
Published: February 2016

Twenty-Five years ago the title of this paper would have seemed to many a contradiction in terms; even now there may be some who will expect the scholar of my title to be a critic of Wyclif, erudite in the heresiarch’s manifold outpourings. The scholar was, however, himself a Wycliffite, indeed of the radical wing of that persuasion. His misfortune, from a modern viewpoint, is that he did not in his works reveal his name, and hence a cumbersome periphrasis is unavoidable. The writer reveals most about himself in the Tractatus de Oblacione Iugis Sacrificii, despite its title an English work of nearly 4000 lines, dealing primarily but not exclusively with the Eucharist: there it becomes clear that he must have been writing between March 1413, since Henry IV is spoken of as recently dead, and February 1414, since Arundel (þe grettist enmy þat Crist haþ in Ynglond) is still said to be archbishop of Canterbury, and that he had previously treated the subject of clerical temporalities in a sermon on the text Omnis plantacio qu[am] non plantauit pater meus celestis eradkabitur. The Tractatus survives in a single manuscript, now BL, Cotton Titus D. v, of the first half of the fifteenth century and clearly not the author’s original.
Medieval Saints’ Cults as International Networks: The Example of the Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria
Authors: Walsh Christine
Published: February 2016

Veneration of the saints was an important element of medieval piety and was pervasive throughout all levels of medieval society. In the early centuries of Christianity there was no formal process for declaring someone a saint and many cults were purely local affairs. However there were a number of saints who enjoyed an international cult. These were often major figures from the early days of Christianity, such as the apostles, the most famous perhaps being Peter, whose cult was centred in Rome at the heart of the western Christian establishment. For those cults that developed an international dimension, it is possible to view the transmission of the cult as creating a network or networks of individuals linked by their devotion to that particular saint. At one level this concept of a network is more metaphorical than actual. Individuals, unknown to each other, could share a common veneration for a particular saint. They were linked by their shared knowledge of the saint’s story, which provoked a common reverence. Indeed the actual transmission of the saint’s story can be considered to create a network of sorts as it passes from person to person, either by word of mouth or through the movement of written texts. A network of this sort can be considered to span both time and space.
St Sabas and the Palestinian Monastic Network under Crusader Rule
Authors: Jotischky Andrew
Published: February 2016

The monastery founded in the fifth century by St Sabas, in the Kidron Valley a few kilometres south-east of Bethlehem, has been described as ‘the crucible of Byzantine Orthodoxy’. The original cave cell occupied by Sabas himself grew into a monastic community of the laura type, in which monks lived during the week in individual cells practising private prayer and craft work, but met for communal liturgy on Saturdays, Sundays and feast days. The laura, which differed from the coenobium in the greater emphasis placed on individual meditation, prayer and work, was the most distinctive contribution of the Palestinian tradition to early Christian monasticism. The first laura had been founded in the Judean desert in the fourth century by Chariton, and cenobitic monasteries had been in existence in Palestine both in the desert and on the coastal strip since the same period. Nevertheless, partly as a result of an extensive network of contacts with other foundations, both laurae and cenobitic monasteries, partly through Sabas s own fame as an ascetic, and partly through a burgeoning reputation for theological orthodoxy, St Sabas became the representative institution of Palestinian monasticism in the period between the fifth century and the Persian invasion of 614. The monastery’s capacity to withstand the Persian and Arab invasions of the seventh century, and to adapt to the cultural changes brought by Arabicization, ensured not only its survival but also its continued importance as a disseminator of monastic practice throughout the early Middle Ages. In 1099, when the first crusaders conquered the Holy Land, it was almost the sole survivor of the ‘golden age’ of Palestinian desert monasticism of the early Byzantine period. The monastery continued to prosper under crusader rule. It was an important landowner and its abbot was in the twelfth century a confrater of the Knights Hospitaller. Moreover, it is clear both from varied genres of external documentary sources – for example, pilgrimage accounts and hagiographies – and from the surviving manuscripts produced in the monastery between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, that the monastery’s spiritual life also flourished in this period. The role of St Sabas and Palestinian monasticism within the broader scope of Byzantine monastic reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries suggests that the continuing function of the monastery at the centre of a wider network of practices and ideals across the Orthodox world engendered a revival of early monastic practices in a period more often associated with decline and the struggle to preserve the integrity of monastic life.
Religious Networks in Action: The European Expansion of the Cult of St Thomas of Canterbury
Authors: Duggan Anne J.
Published: February 2016

‘Wonder not at our coming here, for unto you, Englishmen, God gave such a wondrous martyr, that he filleth nearly all the world with miracles.’ This admiring assertion, attributed to an archbishop and primate from the Nigros Monies – possibly Stephen, archbishop of Tarsus, which lies at the foot of. the Taurus Mountains in Armenia – provides a good introduction to the theme of this book, for it links Iceland, Canterbury and the eastern Mediterranean in a remarkable manner. The quotation comes from a lost life of St Thomas written in Latin by Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide in Oxford, who died in 1174; but it is known only from its transmission through one of the longest texts in Old Norse, the Thomas Saga Erkibyskups, compiled in Iceland through the thirteenth century from English Latin sources. This Anglo-Icelandic example, however, is only one part of an extraordinary phenomenon which saw the cult of the ‘wondrous martyr’ established, and not only at the official level, across the whole of the West, from Norway to Sicily and from Portugal to Poland, before the end of the twelfth century. The English martyr was probably depicted among the array of saints on the West front of Trondheim cathedral; his mosaic image stands next to that of St Silvester in the apse behind the high altar in Monreale; the headquarters of the Portuguese Templars at Tomar had a chapel with a reliquary containing fragments of his brains and blood; and French monks from Morimond brought the cult to Sulejów in the diocese of Gneisno in 1177.
From Frontier to Mission: Networking by Unlikely Allies in the Church International, 1198–1216
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: February 2016

The year 1198 witnessed the start of an unlikely alliance between a new pope and a long-established monastic order. It would have been considered unlikely because relationships between secular and regular branches of the church were often uneasy and sometimes even tense. 1198 was indeed a chance for a new beginning. In Rome on 8 January, the cardinals raised one of their fellows, the thirty-seven-year-old Lotario dei Conti di Segni, to the Chair of St Peter as Innocent III. In Burgundy, on 14 September, the Cistercian Order was beginning its second century of existence at Cîteaux. It was time, not only for a celebration of the hundredth anniversary but also for a radical reassessment of the motives of the foundation. Guido de Paray, presiding over the annual General Chapter by right as abbot of Cîteaux, read out to the assembled abbots a letter received from the new pope in Rome. Surely the coincidence of these two events could bring forth fruit in some form or other? For his part, Innocent, while stressing his youth and inexperience, earnestly begged the Cistercians to remember him in their prayers. By so doing he would be better enabled to fulfil the pastoral office to which he had recently been called. In a phrase that he was later to use to cities of the Patrimony, he reminded the order that, although Christ’s yoke was easy and the burden light, it was, nevertheless, of vital importance that it be taken up. Mary’s spiritual contemplation was to be just as vital as Martha’s activity! In return for their prayers, the pope made a personal threefold promise to the abbots. He stated his intention to watch carefully over their progress, to be ‘powerfully’ at hand for them in their necessities and, lastly, to provide a safeguard by his apostolic protection against the attacks of all those who were ill-intentioned. ‘These things we shall pursue the more willingly when we feel that we are supported by your prayers and merits. For it is right that the universal Church should pour forth its prayers for us and mitigate our inadequacy by its supplications’