bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Patrick Boyle, The Irish Colleges and the Historiography of Irish Catholicism
Authors: Chambers Liam
Published: March 2016

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.
The Development of G. G. Coulton’s Critique of a Roman Catholic School of History
Authors: Corio Alec
Published: March 2016

Coulton tells the Cambridge youthThat Roman Catholics doctor truth:While Abbot Aidan Gasquet cries:Your English History’s packed with lies!

This essay focuses on the polemical historical writing of G. G. Coulton (1858–1947), chiefly his attacks on Francis Aidan Gasquet (1846–1929), whom he believed was the leading member of a mendacious and well-organized Roman Catholic school of history. Apart from the personal animosity which grew up between them as a result of Coulton’s aggressive attitude, this was an ideological and historiographical conflict between the progressive values of an agnostic Anglican priest turned Cambridge academic and the romanticized medievalism of an English Benedictine who was eventually elevated to the rank of cardinal.
Money Matters: The Neglect of Finance in the Historiography of Modern Christianity
Authors: Flew Sarah
Published: March 2016

The subject of religion and finance is seriously neglected within the historiography of the church during the modern period. This essay explores the pioneering ‘Financing of American Religion’ project and suggests possible fruitful avenues of research into the financing of British religion. By way of a case study, it analyses the size of the religious voluntary sector as a whole and then, within that, the individual finances of a range of Anglican voluntary organizations, all home missionary organizations within the diocese of London. Historians of religion have shown a certain reluctance to grapple with the columns of figures and minutiae of detail contained in cash books, general ledgers and annual reports. This essay serves as a brief taster of the wealth of material contained in such sources.
Saints and Soteriology in Sophronius Sophista’sMiracles of Cyrus and John
Authors: Booth Phil
Published: March 2016

Tensions between public and private forms of religiosity have been endemic to Christianity since its institutionalization during the first four centuries AD. That process was in part characterized by the clerical curtailment of alternative routes of divine access which bypassed the structures of the Church and the controls which it operated: most notably, Scripture and sacrament. Acts had imagined the last Christian days as a spiritual age of prophecy, visions and dreams, but the rapid association of such phenomena with rigorist, schismatic or heretical groups – particularly the Gnostics, Montanists and Manichaeans – rendered them suspect if scripturally unassailable. Dreaming – ‘the paradigm of the open frontier’, ‘epiphany’s most open level’ – became strictly delineated by episcopally defined typologies which restricted access to the divine and necessitated arbitration, thus protecting the centrality and authority of the Church. Those typologies not only emphasized the relative rarity of divinely inspired dreams (as opposed to the physiological or demonic), they also stressed the special status of the recipient. They thus partook of a late antique professionalization of the holy by which an emergent spiritual elite attempted to exercise an unprecedented monopoly on the supernatural.
Michael Glykas and the Afterlife in Twelfth-Century Byzantium
Authors: Papadogiannakis Yannis
Published: March 2016

From the range of sources on Byzantine religious life, and Byzantine views on the afterlife in particular, the correspondence of Michael Glykas stands out as precious but neglected evidence. Glykas’s correspondence with people from all walks of life and his engagement with their preoccupations and with other controversial issues of the day reflect a dense network of communication and links with monks, laymen, members of the imperial family and imperial bureaucrats, situating him at the heart of the moral universe of twelfth-century Byzantine culture. Glykas’s correspondence and, in particular, his collection of ‘Questions and Answers’ (Kephalaia) shed light on the kinds of religious issues that were being raised in twelfth-century Byzantium, and they also highlight the multifarious issues and pastoral challenges which Christian theologians had to be prepared to deal with in their pastoral, pedagogical work.
Fixing the Eschatological Scales: Judgement of the Soul in Late Medieval and Early Modern Irish Tradition
Authors: Ryan Salvador
Published: March 2016

The Annals of Loch Cé, a native Irish chronicle compiled in north Roscommon in the years 1588–9, contains the following entry for the year 1568:

A cold, stormy year of scarcity was this year; and this is little wonder, for it was in it Mac Diarmada died, i.e. Ruaidhrí, the son of Tadhg, the son of Ruaidhrí Óg, i.e. king of Mag-Luirg and Airtech and Tir-Tuathail and chief lord over the whole territory of Clann-Maelruanaidh, and some more of the districts and fair territories of Connacht…
Heaven and Heavenly Piety in Colonial American Elegies
Authors: Weimer Adrian Chastain
Published: March 2016

When the Massachusetts schoolteacher Benjamin Tompson pictured his unmarried sister Elizabeth in heaven, he saw her in a palace-like ‘nunnerye’ where ‘Chast virgins have faire entertainment free’. Elizabeth and the other virgins in heaven ‘Enjoy their purest love in sacred mirth’ as ‘Great Jesus daily steps of his bright throne/And gives them hart embraces every one.’ Colonial Puritan elegies such as this one challenge our inherited scholarly categories, which contrast a spiritualized Christian heaven with a corporeal Muslim one and set ‘a distant, majestic [Protestant] God’ in opposition to the intimate afterlife of medieval Catholic mystics. The most interesting part about Elizabeth Tompson’s elegy, however, is that she narrates it herself. Benjamin imagined her speaking to him from the bosom of Christ, saying ‘I Dare not tell what hear in heart i find’, and then going on to describe her experience of the afterlife in the first person. Christ leads her to the top of a ‘mount of pleasure’ where, she says, ‘i [have] all [the] flowers of paradice to Crop.’ A Protestant saint embracing a physical Jesus, picking flowers to her heart’s content, and telling her brother about it – these are all images which challenge our notions of early modern views of heaven and demonstrate the fruitfulness of elegies, or funeral poems, for opening up the imaginative worlds of early modern belief.
The Chinese Rites Controversy: Confucian and Christian Views on the Afterlife
Authors: Rule Paul
Published: March 2016

The Chinese Rites Controversy is a question that is as much ecclesiastical or missiological as sinological, and the researcher, therefore, has to attempt to embrace two very complex and demanding fields. It was, of course, an argument about cross-cultural understanding (and misunderstanding), and the peculiarities of Chinese religion and language; and an episode in the fraught historical relations between China and the West. But the controversy itself was ecclesiastical, among ecclesiastics, and it was the papacy and its offices which determined the outcome.
‘In their madness they chase the wind’: The Catholic Church and the Afterlife in Late Chosŏn Korea
Authors: Finch Andrew J.
Published: March 2016

Following its introduction to Korea in 1784, the Catholic Church grew and developed within a rich and varied religious milieu. An indigenous tradition of popular religion, characterized in part by shamanistic practices, existed alongside two imported traditions: Confucianism and Mahāyāna Buddhism. The latter had enjoyed state patronage in the Koryŏ period (918/935-1392) but, with the establishment of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1911), it was supplanted by Chu-Hsi Neo-Confucianism (Chuja-hak). This became central to a policy of social reformation and was elevated to the position of state orthodoxy. Neo-Confucianism thereby became the dominant social, political and metaphysical system, and, during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its influence spread to all levels of Korean society. Buddhism was increasingly discriminated against, while popular religion was disparaged as superstitious and potentially subversive. Buddhist monks and nuns, together with shamans (mudang), were classed among thech’ŏnmin, the ‘base people’, the very bottom of society whose members included butchers as well as slaves.
The ‘Restitution of All Things’ in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Premillennialism
Authors: Spence Martin
Published: March 2016

This paper explores the nineteenth-century doctrine of the ‘restitution of all things’, a concept of the afterlife which emphasized material continuity with the present and generated detailed speculation about the activities and events which would take place in the eternal realm. Such beliefs, it will be suggested, resonated with broader developments in nineteenth-century theology which tended to soften the boundary between this life and the life to come, and increasingly suggested that the Christian hope was for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth rather than for the soul to go to heaven after an individual’s death. This belief has been almost completely neglected in previous historiographical discussions of nineteenth-century evangelical eschatology. To recognize its existence challenges many historiographical depictions of the ‘world-denying’ nature of Evangelicalism in general and the pessimistic temperament of pre-millennialism in particular.
Civilians, Soldiers and Perceptions of the Afterlife in Britain during the First World War
Authors: Snape Michael
Published: March 2016

For most educated Britons the First World War is synonymous with death on a massive scale. Although reliable estimates remained elusive for many years (this deceptively straightforward process being complicated by issues such as determining the nationality of the fallen and when to stop counting deaths as war-related), the figures are sobering enough: according to research published in the 1980s, as many as 772,000 Britons died in military service during the First World War. Despite the problems of the statistician, the fact of mass mortality was acutely and painfully obvious to contemporaries, so much so that, in an important essay published in 1981, David Cannadine characterized inter-war Britain as a society that was ‘obsessed with death’. Since 1918, the identification of death with the experience of the First World War has lodged itself deep in the national psyche, spawning the myth of ‘the lost generation’ and dominating the perceptions of posterity. As Dan Todman recently observed:

The terrible cost of the war underpins many of our other received beliefs about it: the incompetence of the generals whose actions resulted in so many lost lives; the purposelessness of any war with such a butcher's bill; and the miraculous veneration of any veteran who managed to survive the carnage.
Informal Penance in Early Medieval Christendom
Authors: Price Richard
Published: March 2016

Throughout the modern period Catholic and Orthodox Christians alike have taken it for granted that forgiveness for sins committed after baptism is obtained first and foremost through confession to a priest and absolution by a priest, the humility of confession plus the power of the sacrament being deemed the most effective remedy for human weakness. Other elements in overcoming sin, such as regular religious observance and the avoidance of the occasions of sin, were not forgotten, but were put in second place. The falling away from sacramental confession in the Catholic Church today is doubtless a complex phenomenon, but one reason for the decline is the widespread perception that this remedy does not work, that a penitential discipline that places so heavy a reliance on the power of priestly absolution, without adequate attention to the other aspects of repentance and forgiveness, is ineffectual. It also represents what is arguably an impoverished and clericalized Catholicism. The aim of this paper is to explore those elements of penitential practice in the early middle ages that belong to a tradition at once richer and more flexible.
Penance in the Age of Gregorian Reform
Authors: Hamilton Sarah
Published: March 2016

On 28 January 1077 at the castle of Canossa in the northern Appenines King Henry IV was absolved from his excommunication by Pope Gregory VII. Henry’s reconciliation with the Church represented the successful conclusion to what had been a hazardous mission for both him and his small entourage, one which had involved a difficult journey through the alpine passes in winter. It culminated in the king, having abandoned his royal garb for simple woollen clothing and with bare feet, standing for three days before the gates of the castle of Canossa, ceaselessly weeping and imploring divine mercy.
Church Discipline in the Later Middle Ages: the Priors of Durham as Archdeacons
Authors: Harvey Margaret
Published: March 2016

It is often forgotten that the medieval Church imposed public penance and reconciliation by law. The discipline was administered by the church courts, among which one of the most important, because it acted at local level, was that of the archdeacon. In the later Middle Ages and certainly by 1435, the priors of Durham were archdeacons in all the churches appropriated to the monastery. The priors had established their rights in Durham County by the early fourteenth century and in Northumberland slightly later. Although the origins of this peculiar jurisdiction were long ago unravelled by Barlow, there is no full account of how it worked in practice. Yet it is not difficult from the Durham archives to elicit a coherent account, with examples, of the way penance and ecclesiastical justice were administered from day to day in the Durham area in this period. The picture that emerges from these documents, though not in itself unusual, is nevertheless valuable and affords an extraordinary degree of detail which is missing from other places, where the evidence no longer exists. This study should complement the recent work by Larry Poos for Lincoln and Wisbech, drawing attention to an institution which would reward further research. It is only possible here to outline what the court did and how and why it was used.
Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700
Authors: Bossy John
Published: March 2016

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.

We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?
‘The Partial Customs of these Frozen Parts’: Religious Riot and Reconciliation in the North of England
Authors: Cambers Andrew
Published: March 2016

John Bossy’s recent book, Peace in the Post-Reformation, should, I think, finally lay to rest Thomas Hardy’s notion that ‘War makes rattling good history; but peace is poor reading.’ In it he suggests that the ‘moral tradition’ was a feature of traditional religion, transformed by the religious and social changes taking place between about 1500 and 1700, and eroded by a current of civility. Furthermore, Bossy argues that in England even the godly sought the moral tradition and attempted to make peace with their neighbours. In this article, I will trace peace-making between the godly and their Catholic neighbours in the North of England in the early seventeenth century. In doing so, I will suggest some alternatives to Bossy’s argument: that the language of civility was exploited by the godly to make peace on their terms; that it was changing in this period; and that it appropriated rather than ran directly against the moral tradition.
Confession and Absolution in Caroline Cambridge: the 1637 Crisis in Context
Authors: Carlson Eric Josef
Published: March 2016

In June 1637, Anthony Sparrow and Sylvester Adams, two Cambridge scholars, preached in Great St. Mary’s Church on the subject of confessing sins. Their sermons caused such a scandal that a deeply divided vice-chancellor’s court had to act. These sermons have not gone unnoticed by historians, but they have not been contextualized in a way that makes complete sense both of the sermons and of their reception. Sparrow’s sermon, published shortly after it was delivered, is the better-known of the two, but not the more radical. Although no complete text of Adams’s sermon survives, there are manuscript sources that make it possible to reconstruct the gist of it and to prove that it made novel claims concerning the necessity of confession for salvation. Moreover, in defending Adams his supporters challenged the sources of doctrinal authority in the English Church in unprecedented ways.
The Canons of Antioch
Authors: Stephens C. W. B.
Published: March 2016

The death of Constantine in AD 337 brought forth a struggle between leading bishops of the eastern and western empire which proved crucially important in the development of ecclesiastical politics. Athanasius of Alexandria was one of several controversial bishops who, having been deposed during Constantine’s reign, were re-instated by the new emperors after the change of regime which followed his death. As with other cases, Athanasius’s restoration was fiercely contested within the Church, where many bishops felt that an imperial edict of repeal could not overrule a just and final deposition by an ecclesiastical synod. He therefore found himself quickly ejected from Alexandria by rival ecclesiastical powers. The numerous theological and polemical writings which Athanasius produced following this period became enormously influential. Historians still widely follow his version of events, seeing the struggle among bishops which his restoration sparked as centred on an ‘Arian versus orthodox’ theological battle, whereby western supporters of Athanasius fended off eastern attacks against the divinity of Christ. This approach is dangerous. Although the Alexandrian’s writings are both detailed and prolific, they can hardly be called disinterested. Throughout his histories, bishops whom he attacks most fervently as Arians are precisely those who contested his own legitimacy as a bishop.
Kings, Bishops and Incest: Extension and Subversion of the Ecclesiastical Marriage Jurisdiction around 1100
Authors: Rolker Christof
Published: March 2016

If we set out to explore ‘discipline and diversity’ in the medieval Church, canon law presents itself as a possible starting point: canon law was first of all disciplinary law. Its history can be, and has been, told as an interplay of moral decline and reform, as a conflict between discipline and diverse customs, as a struggle between one eternal order and a multitude of transgressions. However, the imposition of norms is never a unilateral process; the success of a given set of norms is often shaped by an interplay between enforcement and subversion. In the present article, I want to explore this theme for a crucial phase in the history of medieval incest legislation and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over marriage.
Discipline and the Rule of Basil in Walter Daniel’s Life of Ailred of Rievaulx
Authors: Moatt Michele
Published: March 2016

He made his little body free of everything that is pleasant in this present life. He sacrificed himself on the altar of unfailing suffering: hardly any flesh clung to his bones; his lips alone remained a frame to his teeth. The excessive emaciation of his body and the thinness of his face gave an angelic expression to his countenance. Eating scarcely anything and drinking less, by his unbelievable fasting, he lost altogether, and no wonder, the desire for food.

So wrote Walter Daniel of his erstwhile friend and mentor, Ailred, in his Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, some time after Ailred’s death in 1167. This was written in an attempt to demonstrate his abbot’s sanctity with the clear hope that as a result he might eventually be canonized. It is hard, therefore, to understand why this image of the abbot who, if we are to believe Walter, governed ‘over one hundred monks and five hundred laymen’, s is so at odds with the instructions to abbots contained within the generally moderate Rule of Benedict, which governed the lives of all Cistercian monks. The Cistercians interpreted the Rule more rigidly than the Benedictines, but even for them there should be no ostentatious exhibitions of pious self-starvation since a monk must exhibit mediocritas or moderation in all he did. Moreover, regulation of eating must not be at the expense of life itself. In order to resolve Walter’s anomalous portrait of his abbot I will first seek the source of the textual representation of the ascetic Ailred and then, very briefly, consider its relationship to what we can surmise about Ailred’s actual practices in order to hypothesise about what kind of influences helped to form them. In the process, I will suggest that the extreme form of monastic disciplina, exemplified by the literary model of Ailred, causes us to question Foucault’s notion that: ‘Discipline produces practiced bodies, docile bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).’
Mary and the Middle Ages: From Diversity to Discipline
Authors: Rubin Miri
Published: March 2016

For just over a thousand years the Virgin Mary was central to any attempt to defend or explain Christian Orthodoxy. From the formulations at Ephesos and Chalcedon Mary formed part of the understanding of a God made Flesh and of a picture of redemption which was all-embracing in its promise and tantalizing in its accessibility. This essay shows just how wide and diverse were the medieval ways of thinking about Mary and the ways of exploring the possibilities inherent in the figure of the Mother of God. In liturgy and prayer, in homilies and devotional poetry, in a vast array of material forms Mary was made familiar, above all as mother, as intercessor and companion. Unlike the sacraments, among them the all-important Eucharist, Mary was rarely a subject of discipline or of scrutiny; she entered people’s lives early and seemingly effectively. She stood, however, as a boundary-marker of Christian identity, the quintessential barrier between Christians and Others. Mary did become a subject of discipline to people in the lands of conquest and disease outside Europe.
The Dangers of Diversity: Heresy and Authority in the 1405 Case of John Edward
Authors: Forrest Ian
Published: March 2016

When John Edward of Brington in Northamptonshire abjured heresy in the ‘Greneyerd’ of Norwich cathedral close on Palm Sunday 1405, he was presented to the gathered crowds as a living example of the dangers of diversity in the Christian faith. Because heresy was feared as a fundamental challenge to doctrine, authority, and social harmony, the agents of Church and crown went to great lengths in the period between 1382 and the Reformation to advertise its depravity and illegality. The anti-heresy message was not, however, a simple one, and the judicial performances that constitute the Church’s propaganda campaign on this issue sometimes used highly equivocal rhetoric and images. In these performances heresy was capable of being represented as a minority sectarian problem, or one diffused throughout society. In truth it was both, and so the anti-heresy message had to encompass much more nuance than one might imagine. This essay focuses on the campaign against the lollards in late medieval England, in particular John Edward’s staged abjuration, which is recorded in a letter sent by the presiding bishop, Henry Despenser, to his archbishop, Thomas Arundel. This certification presents a compelling tableau vivant encompassing the penitent, the crowds, and the authorities of Church, crown, and city. In their efforts to stage-manage the abjuration of heresy, however, these authorities had not only to navigate the complexity of anti-heretical rhetoric and present it to a large audience, but, perhaps more importantly, had to overcome considerable rancour and division within their own ranks, to present a unified front against the threat of heresy. For they had to show diat there was a unity from which heretics were deviating. Edward’s abjuration, therefore, offered an important opportunity to demonstrate repentance, and to invite the clergy and people of Norwich to consider the dangers posed by their own tendencies towards disunity.
Defining Heresies: Catholic Heresiologies, 1520–50
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

Few historians nowadays would endorse a simple causal connection between the Reformation and the rise of toleration. Indeed, reformations Protestant and Catholic have become almost synonymous with ‘confessionalization’ and ‘social disciplining’. Nonetheless, the transition from the persecuting society of the Middle Ages to something approaching a pluralist society was an early modern phenomenon which has attracted renewed attention in recent years. This transition was facilitated by the breakdown of the traditional understanding of heresy. The role of Protestantism in de-stabilizing the heresy discourse of mid-seventeenth century England has been expertly delineated by Ann Hughes in her study of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and the responses to it. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the Catholic understanding of heresy was entirely stable during this period. As I hope to show in this survey of Catholic heresiologies from the period 1520 to 15 50, controversialists encountered difficulties when they tried to conscript patristic and medieval heresy discourses into the sixteenth-century conflict. An instability at the heart of the traditional definition of heresy – over whether heresy is primarily a doctrinal error or a moral failing – seemed at first to provide a solution to these difficulties. Ultimately and ironically, however, it made their case vulnerable to a Protestant charge of subjectivism.
‘The Clergy who Affect to Call Themselves Orthodox’: Thomas Secker and the Defence of Anglican Orthodoxy, 1758–68
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: March 2016

The spectre of the seventeenth century loomed large in the eighteenth century. The Anglican orthodox were particularly aghast at the radical assault on the religio-political order during the previous century and feared a reprise during theirs. In 1734, for instance, Thomas Seeker (1693–1768) warned his audience at St James’s, Westminster, that Charles I’s execution was ‘a most peculiarly instructive example of divine judgments, brought down by a sinful people on their own heads’. In all his providential interventions in human affairs, God teaches ‘an awful regard to himself, as moral governor of the world; and a faithful practice of true religion’. And what drew his divine wrath upon Britain during the 1650s was the abandonment of’real religion’ for ‘hypocrisy, superstition, and enthusiasm’. Certainly Laud and his followers might have displayed ‘an over warm zeal, and very blameable stiffness and severity’, Seeker acknowledged. ‘But there was also, in the enemies of the church, a most provoking bitterness and perverseness; with a wild eagerness for innovation, founded on ignorant prejudices, which their heated fancies raised into necessary truths; and then, looking on them, as the cause of Christ, they thought themselves bound and commissioned to overturn whatever was contrary to them.’
Discipline in Dispute: The Origins and Early History of the Methodist Sacramental Fellowship
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

When the annual Methodist Conference assembled in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 14 July 1936, the retiring President appeared wearing the moderator’s gown presented to the Connexion the previous summer. In his Methodist Recorder column, W. F. Howard wondered: ‘Will the Protestant Truth Society discover some subtle Romeward predilection in this departure from our ancient wont and usage?’, but reassured his readers that ‘It is a simple Geneva gown,… black enough for John Knox himself.’
The Anglican Experience of Authority
Authors: Sykes Stephen
Published: March 2016

Several years ago, I had a conversation with an American Roman Catholic Archbishop with a substantial theological background, in the course of which I asked him to be frank about his impression of the American Episcopal Church. His reply was memorable: They appear not to want to say no to anything.’ This encapsulates the inherent difficulty in the idea of ‘inclusiveness’, or in the much-claimed virtue of ‘comprehensiveness’ which Anglicans and Episcopalians are wont to make. Two problems immediately present themselves. The first is that, without difficulty one can suggest views or actions of which it would be impossible for a church to be inclusive, at least with any semblance of loyalty to the New Testament. Then, secondly, the inclusion of disputed actions, such as the ordination of gay persons, presents a different order of difficulty from inclusiveness in relation to disputed beliefs. Churches characteristically have rules about who may, or may not be ordained into a representative ministry. Ordinands are ‘tried and examined’. But tolerance of diversity of belief is one thing: tolerance of diversity of practice another, as the churches of the Anglican Communion discovered when they simultaneously ordained women to the priesthood, but extended tolerance to the beliefs of those who asserted that the priesthood was reserved to males. The illogicality of that position is exposed by the discovery that those being received into the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church were publicly required to state that they accepted the ministry of the Church of England – a higher requirement than was imposed on newly ordained Anglican clergy. On the other hand, it was argued at the time, and the argument has force, that an acknowledged state of incoherence was preferable to overt schism.
The Reinvention of Devotion in the British Reformations
Authors: Ryrie Alec
Published: March 2016

The ideal Protestant life was built around two critical events: conversion and death. At the first, the believer received justification and the assurance of salvation; at the second, the promise once received came into its fullness. This pattern was implicit from the earliest days of the Reformation, and when the English Puritans of William Perkins’ school mapped out a schematic for the Protestant life they made it explicit. Theologically, this pattern made a great deal of sense. However, it created a practical problem. Many believers had to endure a tediously long interval between these two high points. How was the good Protestant supposed to pass the time?
Narratives of Conversion in English Calvinistic Methodism
Authors: Jones David Ceri
Published: March 2016

In May 1741, an anonymous Yorkshire Methodist sent George Whitefield a long letter in which he recorded the details of his nine-year-old daughter’s evangelical conversion. Within a fortnight the letter was printed in The Weekly History, the magazine which had become the official mouthpiece of the Calvinistic wing of the Evangelical Revival by this point. Here is how Whitefield began his account:

We have a little daughter about nine years old; one Lord's Day in the last winter, when she staid at home, she read one of your journals, and afterwards some sermons of yours we had got from London. It pleased God by his Holy Spirit so to impress her mind as is very remarkable. She desires me to tell Mr Whitefield (that sweet minister of Jesus Christ) what she has met with in reading his book, she says, such a change of Heart, that she can now pray to God, and converse with his people in such a manner as she could never do before that day. She is of a sprightly brisk temper, yet if she be never so much engaged in work or play, if she hears any body talk of you, or things relating to religion, she will come and hear, and put in her word about it.
The Pattern of Revival: John Wesley’s Vision of ‘Iniquity’ and ‘Godliness’ in Church History
Authors: Schmidt Darren
Published: March 2016

On 24 August 1744, in a sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, John Wesley indicted what he perceived to be a poverty of ‘Scriptural Christianity’ within the University. Wesley began his homily by portraying an early declension of the Church; already in apostolic times, he maintained, the ‘mystery of iniquity’ had grown up alongside the ‘mystery of godliness’. Wesley then painted a dramatic picture of enduring conflict between these two forces throughout church history, declaring, ‘Here we tread a beaten path: the still increasing corruptions of the succeeding generations have been largely described from time to time, by those witnesses God raised up, to show that he had “built his church upon a rock, and the gates of hell should not” wholly “prevail against her”.’
Renewing Methodist Evangelicalism: the Origins and Development of the Methodist Revival Fellowship
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

When the Wesleyan, Primitive and United Methodist Connexions combined in 1932 to form the Methodist Church of Great Britain, much was made of their shared evangelical heritage. The doctrinal clause of the founding Deed of Union affirmed that the Connexion ‘ever remembers that in the Providence of God Methodism was raised up to spread Scriptural Holiness through the land by the proclamation of the Evangelical Faith and declares its unfaltering resolve to be true to its Divinely appointed mission.’
The ‘Revival’ in the Visual Arts in the Church of England, c.1935–c.1956
Authors: Webster Peter
Published: March 2016

One fruitful organizing theme around which to write the history of the worship of the Church of England in the early part of the twentieth century might be that of the revival of ancient practice. In church music, for instance, the early years of the century saw the gradual readoption of plainsong, the rediscovery of the repertoire of the Tudor and Stuart Church, and the adoption of English folk-song, most visibly in the English Hymnal of 1907. In the placing of contemporary visual art in churches, however, the contrast is marked. Recent analysis of this period has tended to posit a Church largely indifferent to the visual arts, except for the activities of isolated individuals, and of two men in particular: George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester and formerly Vicar of St Matthew’s, Northampton. This sense was shared by Sir Kenneth Clark, former Director of the National Gallery, in a retirement tribute to Hussey, with whose patronage Clark had collaborated since the early 1940s. ‘What’ he asked ‘has the Church done in the way of enlightened patronage of contemporary art in the present century?’ Only one man, Hussey, ‘has had the courage and insight to maintain – I wish I could say revive – the great tradition of patronage by individual churchmen’.
Anglican Evangelicals and Revival, 1945–59
Authors: Chapman Alister
Published: March 2016

This essay is a study of the religious revival that didn’t quite happen in Britain after the Second World War. It focuses on conservative evangelical Anglicans, whose own renaissance during these years puts them at the centre of discussions about the post-war increase in churchgoing. Its central contention is that human agency and cultural peculiarities are just as important for understanding this chapter of English religious history as any seemingly inexorable, broad-based social changes inimical to religious practice. More particularly, the chapter focuses on Anglican evangelical clergy and their attitudes to religious revival. In so doing, it highlights the fact that the practices and prejudices of church people are an essential part of the story of post-war English religious life. Scholars looking to explain religious malaise in post-war Britain have frequently looked everywhere except the decisions made by the churches and their leaders, the assumption seeming to be that because decline was unavoidable there was nothing pastors, priests or their congregations could do to stem the tide. This chapter seeks to redress the balance by examining the ways in which evangelical Anglican clergy pursued revival in England, some of the obstacles they faced in this pursuit, and how they responded when they felt they had failed. Among the things they discovered was that ‘revival’ was a word to be handled with care.
Rescued from the Brink: the Collapse and Resurgence of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford
Authors: Atherstone Andrew
Published: March 2016

The twenty-five theological colleges of the Church of England entered the 1960s in buoyant mood. Rooms were full, finances were steadily improving, expansion seemed inevitable. For four years in succession, from 1961 to 1964, ordinations exceeded six hundred a year, for the first time since before the First World War, and the peak was expected to rise still higher. In a famously misleading report, the sociologist Leslie Paul predicted that at a ‘conservative estimate’ there would be more than eight hundred ordinations a year by the 1970s. In fact, the opposite occurred. The boom was followed by bust, and the early 1970s saw ordinations dip below four hundred. The dramatic plunge in the number of candidates offering themselves for Anglican ministry devastated the theological colleges. Many began running at a loss and faced imminent bankruptcy. In desperation the central Church authorities set about closing or merging colleges, but even their ruthless cutbacks could not keep pace with the fall in ordinands.
Revival, Caribbean Style: the Case of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Grenada, 1983–2004
Authors: Francis Keith A.
Published: March 2016

In 1993, commenting on the changing proportion of Christians in the major regions of the world, John V. Taylor (1914–2001), a past General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (1963–74) and later Anglican bishop of Winchester (1975–85), wrote:

The most striking fact to emerge … is the speed with which the number of Christian adherents in Latin America, Africa, and Asia has overtaken that of Europe, North America, and the former USSR. For the first time since the seventh century, when there were large Nestorian and Syrian churches in parts of Asia, the majority of Christians in the world are not of European origin Moreover, this swing to the ‘South’ has, it would seem, only just got going, since the birth rate in those regions is at present so much higher than in the developed ‘North’, and lapses from religion are almost negligible compared with Europe. By the middle of the next century, therefore, Christianity as a world religion will patently have its centre of gravity in the Equatorial and Southern latitudes, and every major denomination, except possibly the Orthodox Church, will be bound to regard those areas as its heartlands, and embody that fact in its administration.
Prayer and Participation in Late Medieval England
Authors: Swanson R. N.
Published: March 2016

At some point in the 1520s the printer Richard Pynson ran off a poster to spread information about an indulgence. The sheet has a poor survival rate: what appears to be the unique extant copy exists as printer’s waste used for book-binding, and is now badly damaged. Nevertheless, the bit which matters for present purposes is almost intact. It notes that Cardinal Wolsey had offered a pardon of ten years and ten Lents to all who recited a specific psalm and set of prayers ‘for the most noble and prosperous estate of our soverayne lorde king Henry the .viii. the quene and the pryncesse’, which could be gained once each day. In addition, all the other bishops of the realm had offered forty days of pardon to everyone who recited five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, and a Creed for the same intent. (How often that indulgence could be gained is unclear: it may have been secured at each recitation.) The Latin prayers specified to gain Wolsey’s pardon were printed on the bottom half of the sheet, but more than half of that text is now lost.
Popular and Elite Religion: Feastdays and Preaching
Authors: D’Avray David
Published: March 2016

In rejecting the distinction between elite and popular religion, Eamon Duffy’s presidential address echoes a much earlier contribution to Studies in Church History. Arnaldo Momigliano found the dichotomy misleading where Christian historians of Late Antiquity were concerned, as Dermot Fenlon points out later in this volume, showing that the other historians too were thinking along the same lines. In the present volume Professor Duffy makes a similar point with great force for a different time and place, late medieval England. Here and in his Stripping of the Altars the liturgy has a key role in his argument. He observes that Books of Hours or Primers are a form of the monastic office. Taking his thought further on lines he clearly intends, one could argue that the psychology of prayer is similar in the two cases and similar to the rosary also. In all three cases thoughts need not be about the words, for the focus of the prayer may be different, but the words work as a mantra to shut out distractions and create a devout frame of mind.
Martin Marprelate and the Popular Voice
Authors: Cummings Brian
Published: March 2016

The curious career of ‘Martin Marprelate, gentleman’ is one of the most notorious and at the same time elusive episodes in the history of English puritanism, inspiring endless if largely futile speculation into the identity of its author. Part literary canard, part political scandal, part detective story, for around a calendar year between October 1588 and September 1589, Martin and his associates kept one step ahead of the pursuivants and produced seven scurrilous tracts aimed at the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Adding spice to the story, their main targets, John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, and John Aylmer, bishop of London, were also the officers empowered by the Star Chamber in 1586 both to examine religious dissidents and to supervise the press. To keep up his cottage industry of satire and vilification, Marprelate moved his printing press from county to county (from Surrey to Northamptonshire to Warwickshire to Lancashire), from private dwelling to private dwelling, and turned the failure of his pursuers into further occasion for ridicule, insult, and his own popular triumph over adversity. Like a will o’ the wisp, he could disappear into the bushes and then emerge in a printed book whenever he wanted. Even after the main part of the operation was broken up and the typeface destroyed, he managed to get out one final tractlet as a last snook at the authorities. And then, whereas the printmen were examined and tortured, and Whitgift went after the more serious elements of the presbyterian cause with relentless violence, Martin himself escaped entirely.
Elitist Leadership and Congregational Participation Among Early Plymouth Brethren
Authors: Stunt Timothy C. F.
Published: March 2016

When identifying the ‘catalyst for disaffection’ and the ‘trigger for individual secessions’ from the Establishment in the early nineteenth century, Grayson Carter recently concluded that ‘theological “extremism” was probably a more significant irritant than pastoral exasperation’. It is nevertheless evident that episcopal restraints on any ecclesiastical ‘irregularities’ and the dubious spiritual credentials of some of those controlling the appointment of both higher and lower clergy were also significant factors in the discontent of many who seceded in the 1830s. A quest for freedom from such constraints therefore often accompanied the special doctrinal emphases of those who would sooner or later quit the establishment. This was particularly true of the seceders known as the Plymouth Brethren whose congregations proliferated in the 1830s and ‘40s. With clerical ordination abandoned as unscriptural, their meetings came to be noted for spontaneous prayer and exhortation by any member of the congregation, but such an ‘institutionalizing’ of unprogrammed participation was liable to attract ‘free spirits’ whose orthodoxy and ‘manners’ could be questionable. This paper considers the way in which the precise doctrinal convictions and conservative social assumptions of such seceders could come into conflict with, and sometimes, at least for a while, keep at bay some of the elements unleashed by their professed desire for ecclesiastical freedom. Of particular interest is the interplay of social and doctrinal motivation.
Elite and Popular Religion in the Religious Census of 30 March 1851
Authors: Wolffe John
Published: March 2016

In December 1853 Horace Mann, summing up his report on the census of religious worship conducted on 30 March 1851, offered some of the more famously sweeping generalizations in English religious and statistical history:

Even in the least unfavorable aspect of the figures just presented, and assuming (as no doubt is right) that the 5,288,294 absent every Sunday are not always the same individuals, it must be apparent that a sadly formidable portion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion.