bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ventriloquism and the Miraculous: Conversion, Preaching, and the Martyr Exemplum in Late Antiquity
Authors: Cooper Kate
Published: March 2016

Disciples of Christ do not consider how things will proceed in the sight of judges. For thus he forewarned us, saying, ‘But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you’.
The Diabolical Power of Lettuce, or Garden Miracles in Gregory the Great’sDialogues
Authors: Müller Barbara
Published: March 2016

Gregory the Great wrote hisDialoguesbetween July 593 and October 594. Like most scholars of Gregory the Great, I am convinced that theDialoguesare a genuine Gregorian work and do not share Francis Clark’s opinion that theDialoguesare the rather clumsy product of a later forger. TheDialoguesare an extremely complex work on holiness, a skilful pastoral pedagogy, and a programme of mission as well. They contain Gregory’s ideal of the Church which he developed during a time of crisis. Some elements may even seem to be Utopian.
Miracles, Missionaries and Manuscripts in Eighth-Century Southern Germany
Authors: Pilsworth Clare
Published: March 2016

There was a certain poor little crippled girl, who sat near the gate of the monastery begging alms … she committed fornication When her time came, she wrapped the child in swaddling clothes and cast it at night into a pool…. When day dawned, another woman came to draw water and seeing the corpse of the child, was struck with horror … and reproached the holy nuns … ‘Look for the one who is missing from the monastery and then you will find out who is responsible for this crime’. […] no one was absent except Agatha who … had gone with full permission….
Multos Ex Medicinae Arte Curaverat, Multos Verbo Et Oratione:Curing in Medieval Portuguese Saints’ Lives
Authors: McCleery Iona
Published: March 2016

The following is a description of a miracle attributed to the Portuguese friar-physician, Gil de Santarém (d. 1265):

… Domingas Pires… had a great abscess on her left hand and for more than forty days had suffered pain so strong that she could not bear it. She went to Gil’s tomb and, scattering some of its earth on her hand and arm, she prayed in supplication and with tears to the blessed man that, since in life he had been a physician not only of souls but also of bodies and had cured many through the art of medicine and through word and prayer and now that he was powerful with God, he would deign to cure this his supplicant. As soon as she had prayed, her very serious abscess burst spontaneously.
Bloody Miracles of a Political Martyr: The Case of Thomas Earl of Lancaster
Authors: Piroyansky Danna
Published: March 2016

The blood of Thomas, earl of Lancaster, executed in March 1322 under King Edward II, was central to his representation as a political martyr. In this paper I shall discuss the miraculous flow of blood from Lancaster’s tomb, which occurred on two occasions, and shall suggest two interpretations, symbolic and political, of the meaning of these miracles.
Late Seventeenth-Century Quakerism and the Miraculous: A New Look at George Fox’s ‘Book of Miracles’
Authors: Moore Rosemary
Published: March 2016

George Fox, chief among the founders of Quakerism, died in 1691, leaving a huge mass of papers for publication together with funds to support the project. In the event, some of his papers were never published and were lost, and little was known about them until the discovery in 1932 of an annotated list of all Fox’s papers, which had been compiled in the 1690s, and which included references to two unknown books, a ‘Book of Miracles’ and a ‘Book of Examples of God’s Judgements on Evildoers’. The finder was Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), who is best known in non-Quaker circles as a New Testament scholar, and the skills he needed for the analysis of New Testament documents were invaluable in handling the Fox corpus. He was able to gain an idea of the contents of these lost books, particularly the ‘Book of Miracles’, and his partial reconstruction of it, published in 1948 with a comprehensive introduction, is still an important source for any study of the miraculous element in early Quakerism.
Seeing Salvation: The Place of Dreams and Visions in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine
Authors: Webster Robert
Published: March 2016

On Whitsunday, I went to bed weak in body, but happy in mind. In my sleep, I dreamed that I heard a band of Angels singing around me in a most delightful manner. On this I awoke with my heart full of love, and quite transported. O if a blind world did but feel what I then did, how would They also love and adore the God of their salvation! How would they run in the way of Wisdom, and partake of the felicities of thy chosen!
Trying the Spirits: Irvingite Signs and the Test of Doctrine
Authors: Stunt Timothy C. F.
Published: March 2016

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge read Edward Irving’s sermon in 1825 on the apostolic missionary ideal, he was disappointed that Irving had not met at the outset what would be the main objection of his more cautious antagonists. The absence in modern times of the miraculous gifts of the apostolic missionaries was a problem that, Coleridge felt, hung

like a dead weight around the neck of his [Irving’s] Reasoning. They say to themselves To whom Christ commended a supernatural
independence of human means and aids, to them in the same commission he delegated superhuman powers … conferred for their performances. This argument Mr Irving should have met at the outset: for the Removal of this obstacle is as the foundation of all he would build up; inasmuch as not being removed it prevents the foundation from being laid.
‘Signs and Wonders That Lie’: Unlikely Polemical Outbursts Against the Early Pentecostal Movement in Britain
Authors: Walsh Tim
Published: March 2016

The phenomenon of speaking in tongues was manifested at All Saints’ Parish Church, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, during the autumn of 1907. This outbreak rapidly became the object of criticism and opposition from a variety of sources, but one of the most vehement, if unexpected, emanated from an organization known as the Pentecostal League of Prayer. This non-denominational body had been established by Reader Harris Q. C. in 1891, and integral to its aims was the promotion of ‘Holiness’ teaching which advocated an experience of sanctification distinct from, and subsequent to, conversion. A network of branches had been established across England, and the Revd Alexander A. Boddy, vicar of All Saints’, had been actively involved in its Sunderland branch prior to 1907. Harris, who was in Sunderland at the time of this new departure in All Saints’, objected to the identification of the ‘gift of tongues’ with what he perceived to be genuine Pentecostal experience. One of the principal ironies of the situation is that his opposition was promulgated in the Pentecostal League’s periodical Tongues of Fire. It is contested that this local controversy represents not only a curious chapter in the history of Protestant polemics against the miraculous, but that it embodied broader ramifications than might first appear, not least in the impetus generated toward the establishment of distinctive Pentecostal identity and orthodoxy.
Angels in the Trenches: British Soldiers and Miracles in the First World War
Authors: Finlay Katherine
Published: March 2016

In their interactions with the soldiers during the First World War the British military chaplains were afforded the opportunity to see the Christian body in microcosm. The chaplains’ frontline experiences shaped their positions on popular religion and the sincerity of Christian belief and practice amongst Britain’s youth. A comparative assessment of clerical responses to soldiers’ claims of the miraculous not only demonstrates a critical divide in clerical understanding of the supernatural – a divide which is more appropriately separated along theological rather than denominational lines. It also indicates that many of the differences between Catholic and Protestant evaluations of popular religion were, fundamentally, differences of clerical perception rather than popular practice and belief.
A Saint and the Natural World: A Motif of Obedience in Three Early Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives
Authors: Gusakova Olga
Published: March 2016

Saints’ interactions with the natural world (with beasts and birds as well as the elements) as represented in hagiographical literature constitute an integral part of a much wider theme concerning Christian perceptions of nature and the place of humankind in it. While being in line with the general Christian ideas on creation, hagiographical accounts of the saints’ relationship with nature may reveal different aspects of such ideas and perform diverse narrative functions in various traditions and texts. This paper will look at the Anglo-Saxon hagiographical tradition which was enriched in its development by Irish, Continental and Eastern influences. Thus analysis of Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives is an essential part of a broader study of medieval hagiographical literature, both Eastern and Western.
‘Bless, O Lord, This Fruit of the New Trees’: Liturgy and Nature in England in the Central Middle Ages
Authors: Rowe Tamsin
Published: March 2016

In Bede’s dialogue on the book of Genesis, a pupil asks his master, ‘Why did [God] bless man and the animals, but not the trees or the plants?’ And the master replies: ‘He blessed these things in order to increase their generation. [But] trees do not have the sense of perceiving or understanding … Therefore he did not say to the trees:Come forth and multiply.’This dialogue raises important issues about the benediction of different elements of the natural world. While God did not bless the trees and the plants at the Creation, nevertheless during Bede’s time liturgical compilers were producing a body of material for just such a purpose. By the tenth century, benedictional texts for trees, fruits, nuts, seeds and herbs from different liturgical traditions were routinely included in the service-books of the western Church, petitioning God to multiply their number or else to bestow physical or spiritual well-being on those who used them.
God’s Bounty, Pauperes and the Crusades of 1096 and 1147
Authors: Kostick Conor
Published: March 2016

Cease, therefore, your discords, let your quarrels fall silent, your wars become quiescent, and let the disagreements of all controversy be put to sleep. Start the journey to the Holy Sepulchre, get that land off the criminal race and make it subject to you, that land the possession of which had been given by God to the sons of Israel, which – as the Scripture says – is flowing with milk and honey.

Robert the Monk was present at the famous Council of Clermont in 1095, at which Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade by announcing that there would be a major expedition against the pagans to assist the Christians of the East. According to Robert, Urban reminded his listeners of the journey of the Children of Israel from Egypt; a journey in which God’s bounty several times saved Moses and his followers from famine and thirst. The report of another eyewitness at Clermont, Baldric (or Baudri) of Dol, reinforces the hkelihood that the Book of Exodus was in the thoughts of those who listened to Urban.
Subiaco – Innocent III’s Version of Elijah’s Cave
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

In Biblical history and Christian literature alike, caves or grottoes, those works of nature,’as if cut painstakingly but elegantly in the rocks or the cliff side without any tool’, have always played their significant part. Had not Benedict of Nursia, father of western monasticism, spent three years in eremitical solitude in just such a grotto beneath Monte Taleo in the Simbruini range of the Apennines? It was no surprise then that it was to this, the Sacro Speco or Holy Cave, that Innocent III (1198–1216) came in person during the summer of 1202. Drawn to Subiaco in no small part by his reading of Book II of Gregory the Great’sDialogues, in which his distinguished papal predecessor had described Benedict’sLife and Miracles, Innocent’s visit was notable on several counts.
What Did Natural History have to do with Salvation? José de Acosta Sj (1540–1600) in the Americas
Authors: Ditchfield Simon
Published: March 2016

At the southern foot of the Palatine Hill in Rome, a little more than one hundred metres due west of the triumphal arch erected by the emperor who is associated more than any other with the Christian conversion of the Old World — Constantine the Great – there stands another arch. Relocated from its original position at the eastern foot of the Palatine, more or less directly across from the biggest remaining ruin in the forum — that of the Basilica of Maxentius — it formed the monumental entrance to one of the most important botanic gardens in sixteenth-century Europe — theOrti farnesiani, which were given their definitive shape between 1565 and 1590. I propose that this second arch has reason to be considered as occupying a similar symbolic significance for the conversion of the New World.
The Mountain and the Flower: The Power and Potential of Nature in the World of Victorian Evangelicalism
Authors: Smith Mark
Published: March 2016

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.
Frances Ridley Havergal’s Theology of Nature
Authors: Atherstone Andrew
Published: March 2016

Historians of the nineteenth-century Keswick holiness movement have long observed, though seldom analysed, its theological appropriation of the natural world. With annual conventions held from 1875 in the Lake District, home territory of Wordsworth and Southey, the movement’s love of nature was one of its most obvious ‘Romantic afFinities’ and marked it out from other streams of contemporary Evangelicalism, as David Bebbington has recendy shown. Yet much of the early theological inspiration behind the Keswick Convention was drawn not from the Lake Poets, but from the devotional writings of Victorian England’s best-known evangelical poet, Frances Ridley Havergal. The Keswick emphases upon absolute surrender to God and ‘entire consecration’ in his service, with a deep christocentric piety and a passion for spiritual transformation, pervade her teaching. Although Havergal’s brief career lasted only two decades, being cut short by her untimely death in June 1879 at the age of 42, her output was prodigious. Alongside indefatigable letter-writing and the production of numerous evangelistic booklets, she published several collections of poetry and hymnody in a short space of time, notably The Ministry of Song (1869), Under the Surface (1874), Loyal Responses (1878) and, posthumously, Under His Shadow (1879). Her popular hymns, such as ‘Take My Life’ and ‘Like a River Glorious’, became synonymous with Keswick spirituality.
Hagiography and Autobiography in the Late Antique West
Authors: Turner Peter
Published: March 2016

Peter Brown’s classic essay of 1971, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, is celebrated for applying the tools of sociology and anthropology to the study of late antique sanctity. It strove to remove holy men from the distorting literary texts through which we know them, and to place them instead in a rich context of everyday concerns. My starting point here, however, is not the essay itself but a no less interesting critique of it subsequently made by the author himself. In 1998, Brown offered a number of pieces of advice he would now give to a younger self embarking on the same topic. In 1971, he claimed, he had unwittingly colluded with the hagiographical texts by presenting holy men in dramatic, epic terms. Focusing on what holy men did for society, he had observed the phenomenon from a purely third-person perspective, and had neglected their own personal quest for sanctity. Although he had located the holy man’s activity in the everyday, he had effectively conceded that the ultimate locus of the holy man’s holiness — his superior understanding — was unknowable.
Repentance as the Context of Sainthood in the Ascetical Theology of Mark the Monk
Authors: Torrance Alexis
Published: March 2016

It seems fitting to begin with a tribute to the late Henry Chadwick, whose thorough, even-handed, and ever readable work contributed much to our understanding of the theme of sanctity in the early Church. In particular, his address at a conference on ‘The Byzantine Saint’ held in Birmingham in 1980 exemplified his capacity to identify and constructively pursue the broad issues at stake. In speaking of the early saints and the content of their lives, Chadwick explains, ‘we are tempted either to tell the stories of their mortifications and then, as was said of Lytton Strachey, ostentatiously refrain from laughing, or we go in search of trendy non-religious explanations of the social needs that created them’. He goes on to acknowledge, as most would, the importance of sociological interpretations and their potential for the study of sanctity, but warns that ‘a stripping away of their religious motivation will leave the historian with a distorted picture’. It is along this route of keeping the religious or theological motivations and presuppositions of sanctity in mind, that the present essay will proceed. It focuses on the neglected concept of μετάνoια or ‘repentance’ (lit. a ‘change of mind’) which dominates much of the ascetic theology of the early Christian East, particularly as expounded by the influential fifth-century theologian Mark the Monk (or ‘the Hermit’ / ‘the Ascetic’).
Saint and Monster, Saint as Monster: Exemplary Encounters with the Other
Authors: Riches Samantha
Published: March 2016

The concept of the monstrous is tremendously powerful as a cultural signifier of Otherness, not least when it is embodied into a physical form such as a dragon or other fantastical and threatening creature which can be clearly contrasted with a human hero. A wide range of saints’ narratives — written and visual — which emanate from the Middle Ages include an encounter with a monster; the motif offers an excellent opportunity to present the saintly figure with a foil, not only in simple terms of good human versus evil beast, but also by demonstrating the contrast between the civilized nature of a form of perfected humanity and the untamed wilderness which is the natural habitat of monsters.
Penance, Mercy and Saintly Authority in the Miracles of St Thomas Becket
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman Gesine
Published: March 2016

The miracle stories of St Thomas Becket, recorded first by Benedict of Peterborough (d. 1193) and then by his successor in the task, William of Canterbury (of whom little is known), comprise the largest collection of miracles of the high Middle Ages, and describe the nature of medieval sanctity in manifold ways. The two writers went about their task in markedly contrasting ways, with William generally the more ambitious of the two. He frequently returned to records entered by Benedict to adapt, correct or expand upon them.
‘Erat Abigail Mulier Prudentissima’:Gilbert of Tournai and Attitudes to Female Sanctity in the Thirteenth Century
Authors: Walsh Christine
Published: March 2016

For many people in the Middle Ages it was the belief in the intercessory powers of saints at the court of heaven which drove individual acts of veneration. However, saints were not just sources of assistance in times of need; they could also be perceived as role models both for those who wanted to live a religious life and for the broader laity. Not surprisingly, the lessons drawn from a particular saint’s life tended to reflect individual attitudes and beliefs, and the same saint could be used to justify contradictory forms of behaviour. This paper examines two contrasting responses to the cult of St Katherine of Alexandria and what they tell us about attitudes to women and female sanctity in the thirteenth century.
Liturgical Changes to the Cult of Saints Under Henry VIII
Authors: Mézerac-Zanetti Aude De
Published: March 2016

The origin of the word ‘canonization’ is a timely reminder of the liturgical nature of the cult of saints. Up to the ninth century, including a new saint in the canon of the mass was one of the two steps, along with the translation of his or her relics, leading to the creation of a new cult. The cult of saints is essentially a liturgical matter.
Pope John Paul II and his Canonizations
Authors: Walsh Michael J.
Published: March 2016

In his much quoted article ‘How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Professor Peter Burke remarks on the ‘crisis of canonisations’ which afflicted the papacy in the middle years of the sixteenth century. That particular crisis, of course, was that there were no canonizations. As the veneration of saints came under attack from the reformers, successive pontiffs thought it politic to refrain from creating yet more. In the long pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II (1978—2005), the longest in papal history apart from that of Pope Pius IX (1846–78) — whom John Paul beatified, along with Pope John XXIII, on 3 September 2000 — there was another crisis of canonizations. In this instance, however, there were, in the eyes of some, far too many of them, devaluing the currency. Even the then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was heard to utter words of disquiet. Indeed, John Paul’s saint-making policy was a topic almost as much for the secular press as the religious: ‘Catholicism turns to computers as the saints go marching in’ was the headline over a piece inThe Sunday Times.
Ecclesiology on the Edge: Dante and the Church
Authors: Took John
Published: March 2016

Dante is probably famous above all for three things: for his encounter at the age of nine with Beatrice, for his exile in 1301 from Florence (to which he never returned), and for his nothing if not graphic account of sin and suffering in hell. Each of these things, had we time and space, would benefit from an essay of its own, for each alike points on beyond itself to the still centre of Dante’s spirituality as a Christian poet, the anecdotal and the occasional everywhere being taken up in the analytical and the ontological, in an account of what it might mean for man as man fully and unambiguously to be as a creature of moral and eschatological self-determination. Thus his early encounter with Beatrice, far from being exhausted by its merely historical interest, provides the basis for a fresh enquiry into the nature of love precisely as such, as a matter by turns of acquisition and of disposition, of self-ingratiation and of self-transcendence, the historical thus shading off, as it always does in Dante, into the reflective and the philosophical. In the same way, the experience of exile furnishes in all its grim historicity the basis for an account of human experience generally as a matter of far-wandering and of homecoming in respect of the call to be in, through and for God, while the Inferno, for all its animated account of suffering in the next life, contains within itself, as, in fact, its point of arrival, an invitation to consider the no less tortured state of the soul in this life, the eschatological thus constituting (again as it always does in Dante) but a mode of the existential, the abiding truth of what is under the aspect of time and space. Everywhere, then, the pattern is the same. Everywhere the iconic moment points beyond itself to a more spacious meditation, in terms of which it stands ultimately to be interpreted.
‘No Milkless Cow’: The Cross of Christ in Medieval Irish Literature
Authors: Ryan Salvador
Published: March 2016

The cross of Christ in the Middle Ages was the most powerful symbol of God’s victory over sin, death and the forces of evil, while also representing the most abject suffering and degradation of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. A simplistic reading of the evolution of the theology of the cross during this period posits a transition from the early medieval victorious and heroic Christ figure, reigning and triumphant upon the cross, to a late medieval emaciated and tortured object of pity whose ignominious death was supposed to elicit heartfelt compassion for his plight and sincere sorrow for the sin which placed him on the beams of the tree of crucifixion. Of course, there is a great deal of value in this argument, and much evidence might be brought forward to support its central thesis. However, it should not be pushed too far; it might also be remembered that the essential paradox of Christ the victor-victim is a constant theme in Christian theology, expressed in the sixth-century Vexilla regis in its identification of the cross as ‘victim of the passion’s glory, by which life brought death to an end, and, by death, gave life again’ and in the hymn Victimae paschali laudes from the central medieval period: ‘Death with life contended, combat strangely ended, life’s own champion slain yet lives to reign’. The image of the victorious cross of Christ, conceived of as simultaneously an instrument of triumph and of torture, would persist right through the late medieval period, despite the development of a greater emphasis on the physical sufferings of Christ in his passion and their ever more graphic depictions. This essay, which examines the way in which the cross of Christ is presented in medieval Irish literature, provides sufficient examples to make this point clear; these are drawn from a variety of sources including religious verse, saints’ lives, medieval travel accounts and sermon material. Of course, these examples are best viewed within the context of a broader medieval European devotional culture from which Ireland was certainly not immune.
William Perkins’sThe Arte of Prophecying:A Literary Manifesto
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

William Perkins, the late sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian and one of the best-selling authors of his time, wrote the first major English book on preaching. During his ministry in Cambridge, as a fellow of Christ’s College and lecturer at Great St Andrew’s Church, he also preached a large number of sermons, which illustrated the art he taught. Historians of preaching have generally seen him as the chief proponent of the puritan ‘plain style’, a way of preaching sometimes contrasted with the learned, elaborate, ‘metaphysical’ style of preaching fashionable in the Established Church during the early seventeenth century. Recently it has been argued that preachers like Perkins were so insistent on the moral demands of the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, that they became increasingly unpopular in the English Church. According to Christopher Haigh, preaching of the kind favoured by Perkins and like-minded ministers - morally demanding, hortatory and focused on predestination - was deeply resented and strongly resisted by many English parishioners, who helped to fashion what he describes as a more relaxed, ‘anglicised’ Protestantism that they found more congenial. Peter Iver Kaufman has written that Perkins, like other members of what he calls ‘the Protestant opposition to Elizabethan religious reform’, aimed to shame his hearers, and that ‘at Cambridge, [he] taught the next generation of dissident preachers to shame and thus save their parishioners’. Some parishioners were no doubt made uncomfortable by Perkins and preachers influenced by him. But these recent assessments of Perkins and his place in the history of preaching are misleading and inadequate. They underestimate the character and extent of his influence on preaching. Moreover, many commentators have failed to recognize the effect of Perkins’s views on the development of English prose. This essay will show what Perkins taught in his treatise on preaching, and argue for its lasting significance for modern prose style.
Reserve and Physical Imagery in the Tractarian Poetry of Isaac Williams (1802–65)
Authors: Boneham John
Published: March 2016

The Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement began as a conservative reaction to the reforming measures of the 1820s and 1830s and in particular to the Whig government’s passing of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill in 1832. For the Tractarians, the cumulative effect of such legislation was that the authority of the Church was being seriously compromised by interference from the secular government, which could now include those who were not necessarily Anglicans or even Christians. While it was these overtly political concerns that moved John Keble to preach his ‘Assize Sermon’ which has. traditionally been seen as marking the beginning of the movement in July 1833, the Oxford Movement was to develop into a spiritual revival whose concerns went far beyond politics. In rejecting the established relationship between Church and state the Tractarians came to emphasize the Church’s innate spiritual autonomy and appealed increasingly to the authority of tradition as reflected in the writings of the church fathers of the third and fourth centuries. In doing so their emphasis on certain beliefs and practices of the primitive Church, such as baptismal regeneration, the real presence and the apostolic succession, was seen as betraying sympathy for Roman Catholicism and disloyalty towards the Church of England.
The Pastor Chief and other Stories: Waldensian Historical Fiction in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Smith Mark
Published: March 2016

[The Pastor spoke.] The whole audience listened to this brief but emphatic address as if spell-bound. Curiosity had moved them to listen; amazement at the supernatural calmness of the speaker held them attentive; and as he uttered the last words and turned his eyes from the human throng beneath him, to the clear, blue vault of heaven, his countenance became so radiant with hope and joy, so indicative of a soul already severed from the things of time, and sharing - ere yet stripped of its clay tabernacle - in ‘the blessedness of the just made perfect,’ that every eye became riveted upon it, with the rapture of admiring awe; and it was the breathless silence of the spectators which at length roused Jacomel from the oblivion to which alone all were indebted for the unwonted mercy of such a pause.
Christian Dickens
Authors: Sanders Andrew
Published: March 2016

In September 1844 Charles Dickens had a vivid dream while he was staying at the Villa Peschiere in Genoa. He dreamed that he was ‘in an indistinct place, which was quite sublime in its indistinctness’ and he was visited by a spirit which wore blue drapery, ‘as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael’, but which bore no resemblance to anyone he had known. He recognized a voice, however, and concluded that this was the spirit of his much loved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. The seventeen-year-old Mary had died in his arms on 7 May 1837, six years before she conjured herself up in Dickens’s dream. At the time he had been distraught. For months after her death he had dreamed of her ‘sometimes as a spirit, sometimes as a living creature, never with any of the bitterness of my real sorrow, but always with a kind of quiet happiness’. Those dreams had long ceased, but the new manifestation of Mary in Genoa was evidently of a different kind. He beheld this visionary Mary ‘in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms to it called it “Dear.”’ He then entered into a dialogue with the spirit. ‘Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!’, he pleaded.’Form a wish’, the spirit replied. Dickens then asked that Mary’s mother might be released from ‘great distresses’ and he was told that this would be so. He then posed a new question: ‘What is the True religion?’ The spirit seems to have hesitated, and Dickens blurted out:’Good God … You think, as I do that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? – or’ (the ghost still hesitated) ‘perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? Perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?’ ‘“For you,” said the spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; “For you, it is the best!”’ Dickens then woke up, with tears running down his cheeks.
Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan: Priest and Novelist
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: March 2016

‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.
‘Oh Dear, if Only the Reformation had Happened Differently’: Anglicanism, the Reformation and Dame Rose Macaulay (1881–1958)
Authors: Maltby Judith
Published: March 2016

‘Take my camel, dear’, said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

Thus begins, with one of the most memorable opening sentences in twentieth-century Anglophone fiction, Dame Rose Macaulay’s novelThe Towers of Trebizond. It is now largely seen as a somewhat quirky ‘niche novel’ for Anglican aunts or a perfect present for the diminishing number of ordinands with historical and literary interests. In fact,Trebizondwas a transatlantic literary sensation, a best-seller as well as a critical success. It won Macaulay the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was no doubt partly responsible for her being made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1958, the year of her death.
Households of St Edmund
Authors: Foot Sarah
Published: March 2016

Theodred, bishop of London, who also held episcopal authority in Suffolk and Norfolk, drew up a statement in the 940s of how he intended to leave his property after his death. Despite his German name, he was probably a native of Suffolk, for he bequeathed a number of Suffolk lands to close relatives living in the region. His most generous bequests were to his cathedral church of St Paul in London, but he made a substantial grant of four estates in Suffolk to the church of St Edmund. Theodred’s will provides one of the earliest datable references to the existence of a religious household charged with maintaining the cult of St Edmund. King of the East Angles, Edmund had died in 869, having been defeated in battle by a Danish army which went on to conquer his kingdom. Later generations remembered him as a martyr, although contemporary sources said little about the circumstances of his death. A community of St Edmund was well established at Bury by the middle years of the tenth century, inspiring not only the generosity of the local bishop, but also his confidence in the efficacy of the congregation’s prayers. Theodred bequeathed land to the church of St Edmund as the property of God’s community there, for the good of his own soul. Exactly when a religious congregation first assembled to preserve the memory of the martyred king, and when it erected a wooden church to house his shrine remains, however, debatable.
Perfection and Pragmatism: Cathar Attitudes to the Household
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

When the Cathar Church was first established in southern France in the twelfth century it was generally tolerated by the secular authorities. At that time its hierarchy recognized only one type of Cathar household, which consisted of single-sex communities of initiated members known as ‘the perfect’. After the introduction of the Papal Inquisition in Languedoc in 1233, the Cathar Church was systematically persecuted and one consequence of this was that its leaders’ conception of what constituted a Cathar household became diversified. The traditional households of the perfect retained their central place in Cathar life, but the hierarchy also recognized a new type of Cathar household. This consisted of families of committed believers and their dependants, whose work was seen to be vital to the survival of their Church. This essay examines how this change in attitude came about and what its practical consequences were for Catharism.
Adoramus Te Christe:Music and Post-Reformation English Catholic Domestic Piety
Authors: Murphy Emilie K. M.
Published: March 2016

On the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross, 3 May 1606, Henry Garnet was hung, drawn and quartered in St Paul’s churchyard, London. In his last dying speech Garnet adapted the liturgy from the office hours of the day and he proclaimed in Latin: ‘We adore thee, O Christ and we Bless thee, because by thy Cross, thou hast redeemed the world. This sign shall appear in heaven, when the Lord shall come to judgment’. Finally, beseeching God to let him always remember the cross, he crossed his arms upon his chest and was turned off the scaffold.
Catechesis, Socialization and Play in a Catholic Household,c.1660: the ‘Children’s Exercises’ from the Blundell Papers
Authors: Underwood Lucy
Published: March 2016

Among the papers of the Blundell family of Little Crosby, Lancashire, are two dramatic sketches entitled ‘An Exercise to Embolden the Children in Speaking’ and ‘Children Emboldened to Speak. By an Exercise’. They were written by William Blundell, recusant, royalist and Lancashire gentleman, in 1663 and 1665 for his daughters and their cousins to perform, probably at Christmas family gatherings. Humorously mingling Catholic catechesis, social education, the exercise of parental authority and childish misbehaviour, these sketches open a rare window onto the life of a Catholic household in the Restoration era. They offer an opportunity to explore the household as the location for the practice and appropriation of religion.
‘My House Shall Be Called the House of Prayer’: Religion and the Material Culture of the Episcopal Household,c.1500 toc.1800
Authors: Ashby Michael
Published: March 2016

Over the past three decades, the study of material culture has become a pervasive feature of historical scholarship. From art to shoes, from porcelain to glass, ‘things’ are increasingly viewed as a useful medium through which to reconstruct what mattered to historical actors in everyday life. Taking its lead from this vast scholarship, this discussion examines how material culture was integrated into a programme of devotion, edification and religious instruction within England’s episcopal palaces, a group of buildings in which the relationship between the material and the spiritual was particularly fraught. Adopting a long chronological span, from 1500 to 1800, it analyses how that relationship evolved into the eighteenth century, a period noted for its proliferation of things and apparently ‘secular’ character.
‘Idle Reading’? Policing the Boundaries of the Nineteenth-Century Household
Authors: Atkins Gareth
Published: March 2016

In April 1805 the Christian Observer reviewed George Burder’s Lawful Amusements, a sermon preached earlier that year in London and recently published. Burder was a leading Independent minister, ‘a serious man, employed about serious things’, his son later recalled, and the Christian Observer might have been expected to approve. Yet it was clear that the reviewer thought he had gone too far. The sermon, he complained, ‘might more properly be entitled “Unlawful Amusements’”, given that only one out of its thirty-eight pages told readers what they could do with their leisure hours. Walking, riding, reading biography, history and natural philosophy, and music ‘in moderation’ were the only permissible pursuits. ‘Visiting the sick and poor in their abodes of penury and pain’ was, in Burder’s eyes, lawful, but the reviewer doubted whether it was, strictly speaking, an amusement. Nevertheless, to see Burder’s comments as symptomatic of a joyless religiosity in which every recreational minute was a minute wasted is to misunderstand them. For, as Evangelicalism gained a foothold in the Church of England during the 1780s and 1790s and came to thrive among well-heeled Nonconformist congregations, there was a growing consensus that leisurely pursuits were permissible and even necessary. However, not everyone agreed as to where the boundaries lay. Those who wrote for the Christian Observer, for instance, were clearly more relaxed about pastimes, but took a very dim view of Burder’s earthy vehemence. Indeed, one of the reviewer’s chief complaints about Lawful Amusements was the saltiness of its language, especially its ‘very strong, as well as coarse, Philippic against the theatre’, from which the reviewer fastidiously declined even to quote.
The Oxford Movement, Marriage and Domestic Life: John Keble, Isaac Williams and Edward King
Authors: Boneham John
Published: March 2016

While a number of studies have highlighted the theological and social importance of the household in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain, the significance of domestic life for the leaders of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement remains almost completely unexplored. In a sense this is unsurprising, since the movement, which began in the 1830s, emphasized the importance of recalling the Church of England to its pre-Reformation heritage and consequently tended to stress the spiritual value of celibacy and asceticism. Whilst B.W. Young has highlighted the importance of celibacy for John Henry Newman, the movement’s main figurehead until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and other works have reflected upon the Tractarian emphasis on celibacy and tried to explain its origins, historians of the Oxford Movement have paid very little attention to the Tractarian attitude towards marriage and domestic life.
Islam at Home: Religion, Piety and Private Space in Muslim India and Victorian Britain,c. 1850–1905
Authors: Jones Justin
Published: March 2016

Allegiance is due, under God, to the head of the family from his dependents, as to a king; and though I confess with shame that I have been a weak and faithless ruler hitherto, the time has come for me to exert my authority in removing the abuses which I have allowed to creep into my jurisdiction … I have been close to death, and have realised that sooner or later I must give account to God not only for myself but for my family.

In a bleak and diseased Delhi, sometime after the wanton British decimation of the city in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, a Muslim nobleman by the name of Nasuh succumbs to the city’s recent cholera epidemic. After Nasuh falls unconscious, his father, who had recendy died in the same outbreak, appears to him in a dream. He tells his son that a day of reckoning awaits, and that as a father it is Nasuh’s duty to inculcate piety in his home. Surviving his illness, Nasuh sets about correcting the excesses of the various members of his family. These include his eldest daughter, who had such foolish habits as playing all night at cards, reading romances and singing idle songs; and his three sons, who were neglectful of their religious duties, read unsuitable poetry, flew kites and kept company with scandalous friends. Despite these blemishes in their household lives, Nasuh is able to persuade some members of his family of the rightness of his vision, turning his children into (respectively) a God-fearing wife and mother, and upstanding gendemen with right manners and good government professions. All are thus rewarded both in this world and the hereafter.
Unfettering Religion: Women and the Family Chain in the Late Twentieth Century
Authors: Brown Callum G.
Published: March 2016

There is a significant case to be made that women are central to the secularization of the West since the midtwentieth century. This case has started to be argued in a variety of ways. A number of scholars have linked secularization to women via change to the family. In 1992, French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger theorized secularization not as the collapse of religions but as modernity’s transformation of conventional forms of religion (especially Judaism and Christianity) into ‘the religious’ – a state of sacredness devoid of shared liturgy, even of belief in God, but characterized by belonging to new types of secular institution (notably she cited football clubs), and instigated by the collapse of the nuclear family (what she called ‘the traditional family’). In this process, she suggested, what modernity had done was to sustain a ‘chain of memory’ of religious ritual, but not of religious beliefs. At the heart of Hervieu-Léger’s narrative of causation of the ‘religious crisis’ that was ending belief, she identified the collapse of the traditional family through the coming of ultra-low fertility in the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote that the ‘collapse of the traditional family’ was ‘the central factor in the disintegration of the imagined continuity that lies at the heart of the modern crisis of religion’, pinpointing the period ‘around 1965 with the downturn in the statistics of births and marriages which had risen markedly in the period 1945-50’. With falling fertility and marriage, and rising divorce, cohabitation and births outwith marriage, ‘[i]ndividual well-being and fulfilment take precedence.’ Although the British religious sociologist Grace Davie used Hervieu-Léger’s concept in support of her thesis of Christianity’s survival through believing without belonging, the French sociologist was explicitly not sanguine about the fate of the Churches: ‘The rise of the religious does not necessarily give rise to religion.’ Hervieu-Léger regards the change in the family resulting from the 1960s as putting organized religion in a parlous state in western Europe, whilst Davie sees the secular family as relying vicariously by 2000 on religion for the enactment of a Christian or Jewish liturgy on behalf of the secular.