bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The past and monastic debate in the time of Bernard of Clairvaux
Authors: Holdsworth Christopher
Published: March 2016

The period from the earlier decades of the eleventh century to the middle of the twelfth is characterized by a number of great debates on subjects which arose out of some of the most significant aspects of the institutions of the time. There wasthestruggle, that between kingdoms and priesthood, or empire and papacy as it has sometimes misleadingly been called, reflected in the huge folio volumes simply entitledLibelli de Lite. At a rather rarer, theological level, there was a great argument about the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, which had implications both for the status of the clergy (in particular their links with their lay patrons), and for relations between those churches which looked to Rome for their guidance and those which, if they focused anywhere, looked to Constantinople. Somewhat between these two levels, people argued about the right relationship between secular and regular clergy, while within the monastic family there was dispute about the best way in which men, and to a much lesser degree women, could make their route heavenwards. A great deal no doubt was said about all these issues at the time which has now evaporated, but much was written down, the residue which survives making up a series of the most sustained discussions in the West on any kind of subject since the great theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries.
‘Principium et origo ordinis’: the Humiliati and their origins
Authors: Andrews Frances
Published: March 2016

The origins of the Humiliati have long been a subject of discussion amongst historians. In the twentieth century the first person to grapple with the problems was Antonino de Stefano, who was quickly followed by Luigi Zanoni, later by Herbert Grundmann and Ilarino da Milano, and more recently by Michele Maccarrone, Brenda Bolton, and Maria Pia Alberzoni. The modern writers have accepted de Stefano’s view that the Humiliati first emerged in northern Italy in the late twelfth century. The earliest references, dating from the 1170s, describe both a small group of lay men and women devoted to the religious life (humiliati per deum), and an association of clerics living in community at the church of San Pietro Viboldone. Although they initially sought papal approval, those who ‘falsely called themselves Humiliati’ were condemned in 1184 by Lucius III, not because they were guilty of doctrinal error but because they refused to stop preaching without authority or holding private meetings, probably also because of their rejection of oath-taking. In spite of this setback the Humiliati flourished, and by the end of the twelfth century three distinct elements were recognizable: married or single lay men and women living a religious life while remaining in their own homes, male and female monastics living in common under a rule, and clerics living in some sort of canonical communities. In June 1201 these groups were brought back into the Church under the auspices of Innocent III. He gave approval to the three groups or ‘orders’ which recent research has revealed were already distinct before curial intervention, but which were now organized into one framework along Cistercian lines. It was a fortunate decision. Although groups described as ‘Humiliati’ were expelled from Cerea in 1203 and Faenza in 1206, the Order of the Humiliati went on to enjoy spectacular success, becoming a major presence in the religious, economic, and administrative life of northern Italy in the thirteenth century.
Impolitic pictures: providence, history, and the iconography of Protestant nationhood in early Stuart England
Authors: Walsham Alexandra
Published: March 2016

This paper explores the religious politics of remembering and visually depicting the recent past in early modern England. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the commemoration of a series of critical moments in the reigns of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth, and her Stuart successor, King James I, became a powerful bulwark of both Church and State. The story of the nation’s providential rescues from Catholic treachery and oppression, pre-eminently the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, evolved into an enduring myth which fused Protestantism with patriotism – a myth which, moreover, engendered its own highly emotive iconography. By the 1630s, however, the celebration of these same anniversaries grew increasingly contentious: as the theological complexion of the episcopal hierarchy gradually shifted, such events became the victims of a species of ecclesiastical amnesia. Caroline clerics began to take deliberate steps to discourage retrospection, to control the memory of historical milestones which were now regarded as a source of embarrassment. Here I want to suggest tentatively that this trend can be traced into the realm of pictorial representation. In the process, we may learn something more about the relationship between the Calvinist strand of the Reformation and the graphic arts.
Fontevrault looks back to her founder: reform and the attempts to canonize Robert of Arbrissel
Authors: Porter J. M. B.
Published: March 2016

The abbesses of Fontevrault recognized the work of their founder, Robert of Arbrissel, in a number of different ways. It has been suggested by modern scholars that the first abbess of the Order, Petronilla of Chemillé, was dissatisfied with thevitawritten by Baudry of Dol and commissioned a new one from a Fontevrist canon who has long been thought to have been Robert’s personal chaplain. However this secondvitamay have been produced for other reasons, and it may not have been originally written to further the cause of his canonization.
Benjamin Webb (1819-85) and Victorian Ecclesiology
Authors: Crook J. Mordaunt
Published: March 2016

We begin in Trinity College, Cambridge, in May 1839. It is 10 o’clock at night and three undergraduates named Neale, Webb, and Boyce are trying to persuade one of their dons, Archdeacon Thorp, to become senior member of a new society. They refuse to leave until he agrees. The Cambridge Camden Society is born. J. M. Neale becomes President, Benjamin Webb Secretary, and E.J. Boyce Treasurer. Within a year they are joined by another Trinity man with influence in a much wider sphere, Beresford Hope. By 1843 the membership list includes two archbishops, sixteen bishops, thirty-one peers and M.P.s, seven deans or chancellors of dioceses, twenty-one archdeacons or rural deans, sixteen architects, and seven hundred ordinary members. In 1845 the society goes national, moves to London, and becomes the Ecclesiological Society.
Christian civilization and Italic civilization: Italian Catholic theses from Gioberti to Pius XII
Authors: Logan Oliver
Published: March 2016

‘Civilization’ was a major keyword in the Italian Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Indeed Catholic Christian civilization was seen as synonymous with true civilization itself insofar as the post-classical era was concerned. The concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was closely allied to that of cristianità, as distinct from cristianesimo (Christianity). The terms cristianità and chrétienté, like English ‘Christendom’, had originally had primarily geographical connotations, but in post-Revolutionary Catholic thought they acquired connotations of a Christian order of society under the leadership of the Church, the evils of the modern world being presented as consequences of its breakdown. The allied discourse on ‘Christian civilization’ itself in the Italian Catholic world, as in the French one, was in large measure reactionary in character, associated with Counter-Revolutionary ideology and with opposition to liberalism. It asserted that a return of society to the Church was a precondition of social order. Thus the myth of a lost universal order offered a paradigm for the future.
The study of the catholic tradition of the Kirk: Scoto-Catholics and the worship of the reformers
Authors: Murray Douglas M.
Published: March 2016

James Cooper, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Glasgow University and a prominent High Churchman, once remarked that one of the main reasons for the Catholic revival in the Church of Scotland in the late nineteenth century was the renewed study of the history of the Scottish Church. The Catholic revival, or Scoto-Catholic movement, found expression in the formation of the Scottish Church Society in 1892. The High Churchmen who formed the Society considered that a Catholic position was no novelty in the Kirk. According to Henry J. Wotherspoon, one of the leading theologians of the movement, the Presbyterian was from the first ‘the High Catholic of Puritanism’, and it followed that the material for a catholic revival lay at hand in the traditions of the Church. In its classic form and confessional position, he said, Presbyterianism

discerned the Kingship of Christ; it asserted the Church as a Divine imperium, ‘visible, universal, and divinely ordered’, independent and autonomous; it maintained Episcopate, none the less that it was Episcopate put into commission; it asserted for the Presbyterate Apostolic Succession; it held a very distinct sacramental system, cumbered only by the endeavour to combine it with a doctrine of election; it exercised a vigorous discipline; it adhered to the oecumenical creeds in every term of their definitions and on that ground claimed to be acknowledged as Catholic.
A pre-modern interpretation of the modern: the English Catholic church and the ‘social question’ in the early twentieth century
Authors: Wraith Barbara
Published: March 2016

Towards the close of the first decade of the twentieth century there emerged an organized movement within the English Catholic Church which can be distinguished as Social Catholicism. The Catholic Social Guild (CSG), which was founded at the Catholic Truth Society Conference in September 1909, largely represented Social Catholicism in England and, as such, constitutes the focal point of this paper. This small body comprised laypeople, secular priests, and members of religious orders. Of the lay component a significant number of middle-class converts to Catholicism were prominent; whilst at parish level working men and women were recruited largely through schemes of social study. Social Catholicism represented a novel phenomenon not only because of its essential focus upon addressing some of the more intractable social problems of the day but also because it embodied an inherently different social rationale from that of more mainstream Catholic endeavour in this field. Looking back to the Church of medieval times, Social Catholicism perceived an ideal Church which, through its social precepts and actions, had exerted an exemplary socio-economic influence. Moreover such an historical precedent might embody the answer to the ‘social question’ – a multiform modern problematic – provided the Catholic Church could transform its past experience of a pre-modern social engagement into initiatives of theoretical and practical relevance to the modern situation.
St Clare of Assisi and the Poor Clares: a new spring
Authors: Gerrard Paul M.
Published: March 2016

The Second Vatican Council (1962-5) called for religious orders to renew themselves in a two-fold return to the sources of their Christian life, jointly to the Gospels and to the inspiration of each institute’s founder, a process to be combined with a movement to bring the religious life into line with the ‘tenor of the times’.

Thirty years after the issuing on 28 October 1965 of Perfectae Caritatis, the conciliar decree on the religious life, it seems particularly relevant to look at how far this renewal has been enacted since the Council. Furthermore, given the theme of this volume it seems especially apt to examine the role which that call for the rediscovery of the founder’s spirit has played in one such renewal.
Adam’s Engendering: Augustine on Gender and Creation
Authors: Clark Gillian
Published: March 2016

InConfessions13, Augustine discusses the right interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis. His exegesis is allegorical, relating spiritual truth to its expression in the physical world. This physical expression was needed because Adam fell:

All things are beautiful because you make them, and you who made all things are inexpressibly more beautiful. If Adam had not fallen from you, there would not have come forth from his womb[utero eius]that salt sea-water the human race, profoundly curious, stormily swelling, unstable and in flux, and so there would have been no need for your agents, in many waters, to perform mystic actions and sayings in the corporeal and perceptible mode.
‘For pagans laugh to hear women teach’: Gender Stereotypes in the Didascalia Apostolorum
Authors: Methuen Charlotte
Published: March 2016

The broader theme of gender and Christian religion presupposes three definitions: of Christianity, of religion, and of gender. Probably none of these is as simple as it might first appear, but that of gender is perhaps the most critical for our theme. Although there are still some who would use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ interchangeably, there is a growing tendency to recognize an important distinction between gender – that is, femininity and masculinity, regarded as largely socially constructed – and sex, the biological distinction between male and female human beings. Gender is best considered as born out of interactions between men and women. This means that the gender roles which make up what we experience as masculinity and femininity cannot be defined by looking only at men or at women, although ideas about both can be gained from looking at one group or the other. That is why gender history is different from women’s history, and that is why both women’s history and gender history are essential enterprises. We need women’s history because we need to know where women were as well as where they were not.
Custom, Truth, and Gender in Eleventh-Century Reform
Authors: Leyser Conrad
Published: March 2016

The Lord did not say, “I am custom”, but “I am Truth”.’ So, allegedly, Pope Gregory VII, in words that – among medievalists at least – have become almost as well known as the Scriptural text to which they refer, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14.6). The Gregoriandictumembodies the paradox at the centre of the movement for Church Reform in the eleventh century, a paradox which continues to shape historiographical discussion of the period. On the one hand, Gregory and his circle presented themselves as uncompromising fighters for the truth of their vision of the Church, prepared to dismiss any appeal to established practice, however venerable; on the other, and in the same moment, however, they themselves appealed explicitly to past precedent in broadcasting their manifesto. In the comment attributed to Gregory, the authority of ‘the blessed Cyprian’ (mediated in turn by Augustine) is invoked to sanction the rejection of custom. To ‘custom’, then, the reformers opposed not ‘truth’ as a timeless absolute, but a notion of truth embedded in a tradition of moral language. Like many revolutionaries, they saw themselves as restoring their society to a pristine state from which it had fallen away – deaf to the accusation of their opponents that such ‘reform’ was in fact irreparably destructive of the peace of the community. In part because eleventh-century questions about the moral, and in particular the sexual, behaviour of the priesthood continue to be relevant in modern churches, modern scholars continue to take sides over Reform, depicting Gregory VII either as faithful restorer or as demonic innovator. This interpretative deadlock suggests, perhaps, that we should look again at the reformers’ paradoxical notion of truth as it emerges through their use of inherited language. My suggestion is that crucial to the truth of Reform in the eleventh century was its reassertion of a very ancient rhetoric of gender.
Beyond the Church: Women’s Spiritual Experience at Home and in the Community 1600–1900
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2016

The Christian tradition has been elaborated and developed over many centuries in the context of gender, which provides the bedrock and framework of social order, powerfully influencing men and women’s conduct of every aspect of their daily lives. The dynamic relationship between gender and religious experience – a relationship that may at times channel, control, confine, or liberate – is bound to be complex for the historian to unravel. This paper attempts the beginning of such an unravelling, albeit confined to the experience of women and to England. It focuses upon 1600 to 1900, to argue that the effective gender system – the patriarchy – of this period was being revised by men in a radical way which had major implications for the possibilities open for women to find the space they needed for their spirituality. We cannot of course speak of patriarchy as something given and permanent in Western Christendom, only of patriarchies; for, if we take the term to refer to men’s institutionalized dominance over women and children in the family and the subordination of women outside it, men were bound to need constantly to adapt and adjust their means of achieving this end over the centuries. The objective here is as follows: the paper begins by exploring how the meaning of gender and therefore the patriarchal system was revised between 1600 and 1900; it will then offer an outline, with illustrative examples, of the patterns of women’s spirituality in that period. It starts with the home and within the home with the privacy of the closet, besides the family world of the hall and parlour. It will also look at some women who, through visions or prophecy, sought a national platform.
No more ‘Standing the Session’: Gender and the End of Corporate Discipline in the Church of Scotland, c.1890-c.1930
Authors: Brown Stewart J.
Published: March 2016

In 1890, the General Assembly of the established Church of Scotland appointed a Commission on the Religious Condition of the People, with instructions to carry out a comprehensive review of the state of religion and morals in the country. The aim was to determine the reasons for non-attendance at church services and for the Church’s declining social influence. The Commission visited the presbyteries, and issued a series of reports between 1891 and 1896. These revealed widespread irreligion, non-attendance, intemperance, and vice. Among the most disturbing revelations, however, were the high levels of illegitimacy in many regions of the country. Sexual immorality, according to the report for the synod of Galloway, in the south west of Scotland, was ‘a rampant sin in the district, and makes a dark blot on the moral life of [the] community’. In the Presbytery of Strathbogie, in the north east, sexual misconduct ‘has so permeated family life, and is so prevalent in the community, that it is difficult to arouse a healthy and vigorous public opinion against it’. The problem seemed to lie in the nature of ecclesiastical discipline within Scottish Presbyterianism. The mode of administering discipline’, the Commission observed in its final report, in May 1896,

at present fails to impress the community; it fails to promote repentance in offenders; and it may be asked whether, thus failing, it is not a hindrance rather than a help to the cause of morality. To the more sensitive and delicate in feeling who have yielded to temptation there is a natural repugnance in being obliged to face the minister and elders. … To those who have no such delicacy, the ‘standing of the session’ is little regarded.
‘We intend to show what Our Lord has done for women’: the Liverpool Church League for Women’s Suffrage, 1913–18
Authors: Cowman Krista
Published: March 2016

There was nothing unusual in the inauguration, in December 1909, of a Church League for Women’s Suffrage (CLWS). By January 1914, suffrage had become so expansive that fifty-three organizations competed for or shared a membership divided by tactics, religion, political allegiance, ethnic origin, or metier, but united in their desire to see the parliamentary franchise awarded to women. At the time of the League’s formation, the centre stage of suffrage politics was largely occupied by three groups: the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), suffragettes whose commitment to direct militant tactics brought them spectacularly into both the public eye and the prison cell; the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), whose suffragist members condemned all militancy, describing themselves as ‘law-abiding’; and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), militants who had quit the WSPU in 1907 in a dispute over constitutional democracy. Whilst they were often virulently opposed to each other, these three groups shared a commitment to an all-female membership and also the political will to prioritize the franchise above the broader feminist issues which adjoined their public campaigns. By contrast smaller suffrage groups, including the Church League, added extra dimensions to the suffrage campaign. They allowed members of the three main groups to explore issues other than suffrage whilst simultaneously providing alternative arenas for suffrage activity to those who did not feel able to commit themselves to the larger bodies. Thus the Church League did restrict its membership to practising Anglicans, but welcomed both militants and constitutionalists, and men as well as women into its ranks. Whilst the achievement of the parliamentary franchise remained its main aim, it also provided space for those who wished to explore ‘the deep religious significance of the women’s movement’. This paper uses the example of the Liverpool branch of the Church League to examine in greater detail to what extent, if any, such explorations resulted in an alteration of the gendered nature of space within Edwardian Anglicanism.
Continuity and Change in Early Eucharistic Practice: Shifting Scholarly Perspectives
Authors: Bradshaw Paul F.
Published: March 2016

As a result of the great advances that have been made in liturgical scholarship in the last few decades, we now know much less about early eucharistic worship than we once thought that we did. Indeed, it sometimes appears that if things keep on at their present rate, it is possible that we shall soon find that we know absolutely nothing at all; for a large part of what current research has achieved has been to demolish theories that had been built on unreliable foundations. As this paper will demonstrate, the older consensus that there had existed a large measure of continuity between the eucharistic practices of the various early Christian communities is slowly giving way to the acceptance that there are considerable gaps in our knowledge of the period, and that what evidence there is points more towards variety than towards uniformity of practice.
Change and Change Back: the Development of English Parish Church Chancels
Authors: Davidson Carol F.
Published: March 2016

The eleventh-century core of the church at Wittering, Northamptonshire (Fig. 1a), is typical of the type of church which served local communities in the Anglo-Saxon period. It has a rectangular nave and a short, square chancel. Kilpeck, Herefordshire (Fig. 1b), is an equally typical example of a post-Conquest, twelfth-century local church. It also has a rectangular nave, but it has a longer, apsidal chancel. Such early twentieth-century authors on the development of English parish churches as A. Hamilton Thompson and Alfred Clapham suggested that the use of apses for smaller, post-Conquest churches is an example of French/Norman influence overriding the existing English/Anglo-Saxon forms. They cite the widespread use of apses after the Conquest not only for smaller churches, but also for virtually every major church built in the wake of the Conquest, and the use of apses for churches of all sizes in France in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. The use of square ends for later medieval parish church chancels such as those at Polebrook, Northamptonshire (Fig. 2a), or Linton, Herefordshire (Fig. 2b), Clapham suggested, marked a return to native English forms after the immediate impact of the Conquest had passed. But is this actually the case? Or are the rectangular, square-ended chancels so typical of later medieval English parish churches a response to new demands being placed upon these buildings? This paper will explore this issue, and ask whether the use of square-ended chancels represents a continuity with, or a change from, older forms.
The Altars in York Minster in the Early Sixteenth Century
Authors: Sheils W. J.
Published: March 2016

Good God! what a pomp of silk vestments was there, of golden candlesticks.’ The dismissive satire of Erasmus’s pilgrim on looking down on Canterbury Cathedral not only brought traditional piety into disrepute among significant sectors of the educated, both clerical and lay, in early sixteenth-century England, but has also helped to colour the views of historians of the later medieval Church until recently. The work on parochial, diocesan, and cathedral archives since the 1960s, undertaken and inspired by the publication of A. G. Dickens’ The English Reformation, has refined that view, which saw traditional piety as something of a clerical confidence trick designed to impoverish a credulous laity, and recovered the reputation of the early sixteenth-century Church. The most recent, and most eloquent, account of the strength of traditional piety among the people is that by Eamon Duffy. His work has concentrated on the parochial context, where he has shown how intercessory prayer, through gilds, obits, and chantries, remained at the centre of a liturgical tradition which commanded great loyalty from the laity up to and, in some cases, beyond the dissolution of those institutional expressions of that devotion in 1547. The place of such devotion within a cathedral context has largely been ignored, despite the recently published histories, and this paper sets out to fill that gap a little by looking at the minor altars of York Minster and the clergy which served them.
The traditio instrumentorum in the Reform of Ordination Rites in the Sixteenth Century
Authors: Carleton Kenneth W. T.
Published: March 2016

The traditio instrumentorum is the ceremony in the rite of conferring holy orders in which an object or objects symbolizing the office to be conferred is handed to the candidate with an appropriate accompanying form of words. This ceremony grew in importance through the Middle Ages, to the extent that in Catholic theology it came to be seen as the essential act of ordination. Eucharistic doctrine and the role of the Church in salvation were key areas of conflict in sixteenth-century Reform movements. The Church’s ministry, therefore, being both intensely bound up with ecclesiastical structures and intimately concerned with the appropriate conduct of worship, was profoundly affected by these fundamental debates. A continuing need for some form of structured ministry was widely felt, though often understood as simply the appointment (for a time) of appropriate persons to the ministry of Word and Sacrament whose sacramental qualification for ministry was their own baptism, by which they entered into the priesthood of all believers, which was different from the unique high priesthood of Christ and completely replaced any sense of a sacrificing priesthood, which was tied up with the Old (and superseded) Testament. Looking to their Bibles for this, as for so much else in their ecclesiologies, the Reformers found only the apostolic laying on of hands with prayer in the conferring of ministry.
Expedient and Experiment: the Elizabethan Lay Reader
Authors: Usher Brett
Published: March 2016

The origins of the most senior office in the Church of England open to a layman, that of lay reader, are obscure. Sir Robert Phillimore confined himself to the observation that the office was ‘one of the five inferior orders of the Roman church’, adding only that

in this kingdom, in churches or chapels where there is only a very small endowment, and no clergyman will take upon him the charge or cure thereof, it has been usual to admit readers, to the end that divine service in such places might not altogether be neglected.

But when and how did it become ‘usual? There are no references to readers in Edward VI’s Royal Injunctions of 1547, presumably because those holding inferior Roman orders were still legally entitled to exercise their functions. Although the Protestant advances of the next six years removed all such from office there is no sign that the Edwardian regime made any attempt to appoint readers as an emergency or auxiliary measure. Probably there was no immediate need to do so: with the abolition of the chantries in 1549 most chantry priests went on to serve as ‘stipendiaries’, effectively slipping into the ranks of the unbeneficed as ‘curates’. If anything there was a glut in the clerical market between 1549 and the restoration of Catholic orders in 1553.
The Mirage of Authenticity: Scottish Independents and the Reconstruction of a New Testament Order of Worship, 1799-1808
Authors: Lovegrove Deryck
Published: March 2016

The snuffy cobler now you mildly kiss,And Cowgate damsels chuckle at the bliss.By frequent salivations render’d fair,They press your knees that envied bliss to share;And, liquorish fish, wives piously beginTo think it sweeter than their morning gin.

In three satirical couplets the author of an anonymous pamphlet printed in 1812 suggests a possible reason for the popularity of the Haldane Tabernacle Connexion among the female population of Edinburgh at the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so he touches upon an important feature of the wave of evangelical Independency which swept across Scotland from the late 1790s: the appearance of new forms of worship that consciously sought to follow New Testament models. Reinforcing the verse this fiercely polemical work, which almost certainly comes from an establishment source, takes the innovators to task for discarding reasoned biblical interpretation, flouting decency, and ignoring health dangers in their desire to resurrect long extinct practices from ancient Christianity.
Goths and Romans: Daniel Rock, Augustus Welby Pugin, and Nineteenth-Century English Worship
Authors: Champ Judith F.
Published: March 2016

The Chant or music used by the Papal choir, and indeed in most Catholic cathedrals and abbey churches is, excepting in some instances, ancient. Gregory the Great collected it into a body and gave it the form in which it now appears, though not the author of it. The chant of the psalms is simple and affecting, composed of Lydian, Phrygian and other Greek and Roman tunes, without many notes, but with a sufficient inflection to render them soft and plaintive or bold and animating…. This ancient music which has long been known by the name of the Gregorian chant, so well adapted to the gravity of divine service, has been much disfigured in the process of time by the bad taste of the middle and the false refinements of the latter ages. The first encumbered it with an endless succession of dull unnecessary notes, dragging their slow length along, and burthening the ear with a dead weight of sound; the other infected it with the melting airs, the laboured execution, the effeminate graces of the orchestra, useless to say the least even in the theatre, but profane and almost sacrilegious in the church. Some care seems to have been taken to avoid these defects in the papal choir. The general style and spirit of the ancient and primitive music have been retained and some modern compositions of known and acknowledged merit, introduced on stated days and in certain circumstances. Of musical instruments, the organ only is additional in St Peters, or rather in the Papal chapel, and even then not always: voices only are employed in general, and as those voices are numerous, perfect in their kind, and in thorough unison with one another, and as the singers themselves are concealed from view, the effect is enchanting and brings to mind ‘the celestial voices in full harmonic number joined’ that sometimes reached the ears of our first parents in paradise, and ‘lifted their thoughts to heaven’.
Prosper Guéranger O.S.B. (1805-1875) and the Struggle for Liturgical Unity
Authors: Raedts Peter
Published: March 2016

One of the strongest weapons in the armoury of the Roman Catholic Church has always been its impressive sense of historical continuity. Apologists, such as Bishop Bossuet (1627-1704), liked to tease their Protestant adversaries with the question of where in the world their Church had been before Luther and Calvin. The question shows how important the time between ancient Christianity and the Reformation had become in Catholic apologetics since the sixteenth century. Where the Protestants had to admit that a gap of more than a thousand years separated the early Christian communities from the churches of the Reformation, Catholics could proudly point to the fact that in their Church an unbroken line of succession linked the present hierarchy to Christ and the apostles. This continuity seemed the best proof that other churches were human constructs, whereas the Catholic Church continued the mission of Christ and his disciples. In this argument the Middle Ages were essential, but not a time to dwell upon. It was not until the nineteenth century that in the Catholic Church the Middle Ages began to mean far more than proof of the Church’s unbroken continuity.
A ‘fluffy-minded Prayer Book fundamentalist’? F. D. Maurice and the Anglican Liturgy
Authors: Morris J. N.
Published: March 2016

The Liturgy has been to me a great theological teacher; a perpetual testimony that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the one God blessed for ever, is the author of all life, freedom, unity to men; that our prayers are nothing but responses to His voice speaking to us and in us. Why do I hear nothing of this from those who profess to reform it? Why do they appear only to treat it as an old praying machine, which in the course of centuries gets out of order like other machines, and which should be altered according to the improved mechanical notions of our time?
A New Broom in the Augean Stable: Robert Gregory and Liturgical Changes at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 1868-1890
Authors: Cadle Penelope J.
Published: March 2016

The fifth labour of Hercules required that he clean out, in one day, the thirty years of accumulated mess that the thousands of cattle owned by King Augeus had created. The Augean Stable of St Paul’s Cathedral had taken much longer to accumulate its liturgical mess, and would take much longer to clean out!
‘This Romish business’ - Ritual Innovation and Parish Life in Later Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire
Authors: Ambler R. W.
Published: March 2016

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.
Continuity and Change in the Liturgical Revival in Scotland: John Macleod and the Duns Case, 1875-1876
Authors: Murray Douglas M.
Published: March 2016

During the Liturgical Revival of the Victorian period, the worship of the Church of Scotland changed more radically than at any time since the seventeenth century. Those who favoured reform felt that the largely unstructured and didactic character of Presbyterian services no longer appealed to many sections of society. The upper classes, for example, were turning in increasing numbers to the worship of the Episcopal Church. In addition some reformers wished the liturgy of the Kirk to reflect more clearly the doctrinal basis of the Reformed tradition. The innovations which were pioneered in this period included a change in the posture of the congregation for prayer and for singing, the introduction of prayers read by the minister instead of being delivered extempore; the use of set forms such as the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Doxology; the singing of hymns as well as psalms; the use of organs to accompany praise; the observance of the main festivals of the Christian year, and the greater frequency of holy communion.
‘Secular men and women’: Egeria’s Lay Congregation in Jerusalem
Authors: Moriarty Rachel
Published: March 2016

Egeria’s account of her journey to the holy places has been an invaluable source for study of many aspects of fourth-century Christianity, from liturgy and topography to clerical practice. Dr David Hunt, in his analysis elsewhere in this volume, discusses the part played by monks in Egeria’s ‘scriptural vision’. This paper looks at her account of worship in Jerusalem, and particularly at those worshippers who were neither ordained clergy nor committed to life as monks or nuns, whom we can call the ‘laity’ Egeria herself distinguishes between these groups, and is concerned to differentiate the parts played by each in worship. We shall consider here how much can be discovered about the composition, organization, and spirituality of these lay people, how Egeria herself contributed to the account, and how much is special to Jerusalem.
Ideas of Crusade and Holy War in De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi (The Conquest of Lisbon)
Authors: Phillips Jonathan
Published: March 2016

The Second Crusade (1145-9) was, for the most part, a failure. One of its few successes was the capture of the Muslim-held city of Lisbon by contingents of Anglo-Normans, Flemings, and northern Rhinelanders travelling via the Iberian peninsula en route to the Holy Land. At its full extent the Second Crusade consisted of campaigns in the Levant, the Baltic, and the east coast of Spain, as well as the Lisbon expedition. By far the largest forces went to the Holy Land but, following a calamitous crossing of Asia Minor, the combined armies of the kings of France and Germany, along with the troops of the Latin settlers, retreated from the walls of Damascus after only five days. Because the crusade to the Levant had been preached so successfully by Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, this dismal outcome attracted bitter criticism from contemporaries. The defeat was ascribed to the treachery of (variously) the Greeks, the Templars, the count of Flanders, and the Latin settlers, or the incompetence of King Louis VII of France and the papal legates. Some commentators believed the crusade to have been the work of the devil. Bernard himself argued that it was the judgement of God that had caused the expedition to fail. Other writers blamed the participants’ motives, most relevantly here the contemporary historian, Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. He wrote:

In the same year [1148] the armies of the emperor of Germany and the French king, which marched out with great pride under illustrious commanders, came to nothing because God despised them…. Meanwhile, a naval force that was made up of ordinary, rather than powerful, men, and was not supported by any great leader, except Almighty God, prospered a great deal better because they set out in humility. Truly ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble’. For the armies of the French king and the emperor had been more splendid and larger than that which earlier had conquered Jerusalem, and yet were crushed by very much smaller forces and were destroyed like a spider’s web. But no host had been able to withstand the poor men of whom I spoke above, and the large forces who attacked them were reduced to weakness.
Our Lady of Saidnaiya: an Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the Crusades
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

The fortified convent of Saidnaiya (often called Sardeney by medieval Western writers) is situated on a rocky outcrop some twelve miles to the north of Damascus. It claims to have been founded by Justinian, but it is not mentioned in the De aedificiis of Procopius, and its origins are uncertain. The earliest surviving description of it may be that given by Burchard of Strasbourg, the ambassador of Frederick Barbarossa to the court of Saladin, who visited Saidnaiya in c. 1175:

in this church twelve virgin nuns and eight monks devoutly serve God and the Blessed Virgin. In this church I saw a wooden panel … placed behind the altar in an embrasure in the wall of the sanctuary guarded by an iron grille. On this panel a likeness of the Blessed Virgin had once been painted, but now, wondrous to relate, the picture on wood has become incarnate and oil, smelling sweeter than balsam, unceasingly flows from it. By which oil many Christians, Saracens and Jews are often cured of ailments. … To this place on the feast of the Assumption of the glorious Virgin and on that of her Nativity all the Saracens of that province flock to pray together with the Christians, and the Saracens perform their devotions there with great reverence.
Magyar Judah: Constructing a new Canaan in Eastern Europe
Authors: Murdock Graeme
Published: March 2016

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Hungarian society underwent two dramatic changes. Firstly, Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman armies advanced into the northern Balkans, causing the collapse of the Hungarian kingdom after the battle at Mohács in August 1526. Hungary subsequently became divided into three parts, with the Ottomans controlling the central and southern counties, the Habsburgs governing Royal Hungary from the Croatian coast to the mountains of Upper Hungary, and a series of native nobles elected to rule over the Transylvanian principality, which included the counties of the eastern Hungarian plain. Secondly, the spread of Protestant ideas about religious reform brought confessional division to Hungary. The initial reform was to a large degree driven by a desire to purify the Catholic Church, whose spiritual credentials were badly discredited by the Ottoman invasion. By 1570 German- and Hungarian-speaking towns and most Hungarian magnates and nobles had abandoned the Catholic Church. German-speakers and nobles in western Hungarian counties on the whole adopted Lutheranism. Calvinism meanwhile came to dominate religious life in the eastern counties, and also received broad support within Transylvania, although some Hungarian towns and Szeklers in Transylvania instead embraced anti-Trinitarianism. Confessional loyalty across Hungary was decided by a variety of factors including patterns of communication and trading networks, the pre-Reformation structures of ecclesiastical organization, and feudal, regional, and family ties. Linguistic barriers were also crucial in determining adherence to a particular religion, with Lutheranism widely supported by German-speakers whilst Calvinism was almost exclusively the preserve of Magyar-speakers. It seems clear that some sense of linguistic or ethnic community assisted both Protestant Churches to reinforce attachment to their confessions.
Milman’s History of the Jews: a Real Place with Real People
Authors: Mason Alistair
Published: March 2016

For English-speaking Protestants in the early nineteenth century, the Holy Land lived in the Bible. In that Land God had done his mighty works, and every name recalled an episode in the history of salvation. Its placenames were as real and resonant to believers as those of their own home district. Chapel-names like Mizpah and Shiloh were not just ‘somewhere in the Old Testament’, as they are to modern readers. Filtered through the anachronism of its readers’ imaginations, and haloed with devotion, the Holy Land was indeed holy.
By the Labour of their Hands? Religious Work and City Life in Thirteenth-Century Italy
Authors: Andrews Frances
Published: March 2016

In hisHistoria occidentalis, written in the 1220s after wide travels and varied experience, the Augustinian canon, bishop, and finally cardinal, Jacques de Vitry, described the recent and contemporary history of the West and in particular the many orders of both regular and secular persons in the Church, some of whom he had encountered in his journeying. He covered monks, canons, and secular religious, and it is an extensive list, including the Cistercians (male and female), the Carthusians, the Grandmontines, various hospital Orders, and new Orders such as the Valiscaulians, Trinitarians, Friars minor, Friars preacher, and the Humiliati of northern Italy. His text outlines the activities of the religious in these communities, giving us some sense of how such religious used their time. Manual labour was a long-established part of the regular life, and he naturally and frequently refers to it, the ‘labour of their hands’ of my title. Thus, according to Vitry, after daily chapter the Cistercians spent the rest of the day in manual labour, reading, and prayer; while the Valiscaulians had gardens, herbs, and orchards within their enclosure to which they went at set times ‘so that they might eat by the labour of their hands’, a direct allusion to Psalm 127.2: Thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be and it shall be well with thee.’ Premonstratensian canons likewise went out at fixed times ‘ad labores manuum’, and he describes the Humiliati as keeping sluggishness at bay by assiduous reading, prayer, and manual labour, by which they lived for the most part (‘ex magna parte’). By contrast, the canons of Bologna (as he calls the early Friars preacher or Dominicans) spent their days listening to Scripture, preaching, and working to save the souls of sinners from the jaws of the Leviathan (Job 40.20) through learning, so that they might ‘shine like perpetual stars in eternity’.