bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Supporting the Faith in Medieval Rome
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

Judging by the quantity of surviving texts – whethervitaeor saints’ lives,libelli miraculorumor narratives of miracles for public reading in church, lectionaries or collections of liturgical readings,inventionesandtranslationesor accounts of relics found and later moved to a new location, popular receptivity to signs, wonders and miracles had reached a high point by the turn of the twelfth century. Whilst ordinary laypeople remained fascinated by supernatural phenomena, intellectuals were already beginning to challenge the preternatural in a process described by Chenu as the ‘desacralizing’ of nature. In the first book of his treatise,De Sanctis et eorum pignoribus(c.1120), Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, had contrasted the credulity of the faithful towards pseudo-miracles with the growing unease experienced by many scholars at inadequate written evidence for the authentication of relics. Andrew of Saint-Victor (d.1175), in an exposition on the literal interpretation of Scripture, found himself arguing for a natural explanation of events before any recourse to the miraculous. In the School of Pastoral Theology at Paris, Master Peter the Chanter (d.1197) vehemently criticized trial by ordeal as a flagrant tempting of God whereby a supposedly miraculous intervention was allowed to intrude into the regular legalistic operation of the courts. In the years immediately following the Chanter’s death, his former students, led by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and like-minded clerical associates, developed a significant agenda, emphasizing rationality and record keeping to sustain the faith of the Church within a new and more firmly pastoral context.
Miracles in Post-Reformation England
Authors: Walsham Alexandra
Published: March 2016

To speak of miracles in post-Reformation England may seem like something of an oxymoron. The sense of internal contradiction in my title springs from the fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. They did not deny that supernatural acts of this kind had taken place in biblical times. As set down in the books of the Old Testament, God had vouchsafed many wonders to His chosen people, the Hebrews, including the parting of the Red Sea, the raining of manna from heaven, and the metamorphosis of Aaron’s rod into a serpent. Equally, the New Testament recorded the prodigious feats performed by Christ and his apostles to convince the disbelieving Gentiles and Jews: from the raising of Lazarus and the transformation of water into wine at the marriage at Cana to curing lepers of their sores and restoring sight to the blind, not to mention the great mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection. But dozens of sermons and tracts reiterated the precept that God no longer worked wonders above, beyond, or against the settled order and instinct of nature – the standard definition of miracle inherited from the scholastic writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Such special dispensations were the ‘seales and testimonials’ of the Gospel. They had been necessary to sow the first seeds of the faith, to plant the new religion centring on the redemption of mankind by Jesus of Nazareth. But this gift, stressed John Calvin and his disciples, was only of ‘temporary duration’. Miracles were the swaddling bands of the primitive Church, the mother’s milk on which it had been initially weaned. Once the Lord had begun to feed His people on the meat of the Word, he expected them to believe the truth as preached and revealed in Scripture rather than wait for astonishing visible spectacles to be sent down from heaven. Although there was some uncertainty about exactly when such wonders had come to an end, Protestant divines were in general agreement that, as a species, miracles were now extinct. Christians could and should not expect to see such occurrences in the course of their lifetimes.
Plenty, Portents and Plague: Ecclesiastical Readings of the Natural World in Early Medieval Europe
Authors: Foot Sarah
Published: March 2016

Noli paterFather do not allow thunder and lightning,Lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.We fear you, the terrible one, believing there is none like you.All songs praise you throughout the host of angels.Let the summits of heaven, too, praise you with roaming lightning,O most loving Jesus, O righteous King of Kings.(Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus,Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, 85)

Early medieval attitudes to the natural world were distinctly ambivalent. At one level the natural world represented the marvel of God’s creative power; filled with beauty, it supplied everything necessary for human existence, meriting praise, as in the hymn sung by the herdsman from Whitby, Cædmon:
Nature, Music and the Reformation in England
Authors: Willis Jonathan
Published: March 2016

The story of music in the Elizabethan Church is, in many ways, an embodiment of the relationship between two larger, competing and often contradictory discourses: those of Renaissance and Reformation. As Alexandra Walsham noted in the introduction toProvidence in Early Modern England, published in 1999,

there is a growing conviction that too much ink has been spilt arguing about the pace, geography and social distribution of conversion and change and too little charting the ways in which the populace adjusted to the doctrinal and ecclesiastical revolution as a permanent fact.’
Commemoration, Representation and Interpretation: Augustine of Hippo’s Depictions of the Martyrs
Authors: Martin Elena
Published: March 2016

Recent studies of martyrdom in early Christianity look beyond the traditional perception of martyractaandpassionesas historical documents that can help us to reconstruct the past. While previously these texts had been deemed worthy of attention on account of their proven authenticity or historical veracity, now they are all valued as important sources that have much to tell us about the communities and environments in which they were produced. This approach does not deny the historical value of the sources, but rather it appreciates that they are a special kind of historical document. Texts and sermons about holy men and women never were created as objective accounts. Every textual portrait of a martyr reveals a prior judgement that inscribes meaning and purpose into seemingly meaningless events to present condemned criminals as religious heroes, horrific tortures as divine gifts, and public deaths as cosmic dramas. Consequently, the various methods of representation that were used to construct depictions of the martyrs are significant elements in their own right, whether they are rhetorical devices, scriptural allusions, artistic embellishments or miraculous occurrences. These are the very details that make martyrs; they turn death into martyrdom, and the dead into martyrs.
Popes, Patriarchs and Archbishops and the Origins of the Cult of the Martyrs in Northern Italy
Authors: Thacker Alan
Published: March 2016

Although exceptional skill and learning have been devoted to the origins of martyr cult, undeniably this grand and highly distinguished tradition has been shaped by certain widely shared and long-standing assumptions. In particular, while great scholars such as Duchesne and Delehaye have exhibited a strong (and very proper) scepticism about particular legends, there has in general been a predisposition to accept at face value the underlying context as presented by the post-Constantinian Church. Most historians of the martyrs have followed hagiographical tradition and accepted that, as Pope Leo I claimed in the mid-fifth century, ‘uncounted numbers’ of the faithful had died in the imperial persecutions and were marked out as endowed with power ‘to help those in danger, to drive away sickness, to expel unclean spirits and to cure infirmities without number’. That carefully constructed picture, however, only emerges in the late fourth and fifth centuries, and it is the circumstances and processes which shaped its emergence that will be examined here.
The Vision of St Fursa in Thirteenth-Century Didactic Literature
Authors: Wilson Chris
Published: March 2016

The vision of the otherworld seen by St Fursa (c. 590 — c. 649) and recorded in a Vita and in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History achieved a high level of popularity in England and France during the thirteenth century, especially through its inclusion in preaching aids for the friars and the pastoralia (the various guides and manuals for priests on the care and confession of their congregation) produced before and after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. This essay will discuss how compilers of this material altered, rearranged and summarized Fursa’s vision, and what these changes reveal about shifting attitudes towards sanctity in the thirteenth century. In some of these redactions, Fursa’s sainthood was sidelined or ignored completely. In others, the point at which Fursa is described as a saint varies and the emphasis of the vision shifts from a reward for a saintly life to the purgation of a sinful priest. It will be suggested that these modifications to Fursa’s role in the vision were linked to the genre and audience of the redactions and to other thirteenth-century theological preoccupations, including debates over the sinfulness of usury and the emergence of the doctrine of purgatory.
‘I, Too, am a Christian’: Early Martyrs and their Lives in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Irish Manuscript Tradition
Authors: Ryan Salvador
Published: March 2016

Veneration of the martyrs as powerful intercessors and exemplars of Christ-like fortitude is one of the earliest and most powerful manifestations of Christian religious practice. Not only were martyrs thought to be assured of salvation, but the blood which they shed was conceived by Tertullian as ‘seed’ for the upbuilding of the Christian Church. As legends of their lives and, more importantly, the manner of their deaths developed over time, martyrs would also function as valuable instructors in the essentials of the Christian life, their speeches before death often assuming a sermon-like quality. By the fifth century recourse to the relics of martyrs was also already well established. The cult of the martyrs would have a long future.
Simulated Sanctity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Malta
Authors: Ciappara Frans
Published: March 2016

Revelations, apparitions, voices, stigmata and ecstasies were extraordinary phenomena and profoundly emotional, in which God was perceived as communicating with human beings through bodily phenomena. It was up to churchmen to regulate and control divine intervention in daily life and separate truth from deceit. But attempting to fulfil this pastoral duty was a complicated matter. Were these experiences authentic, really proceeding from God or were they illusions of the devil, the deceiver par excellence and able to capture human trust? Furthermore, besides the devil’s deceit, might there not also be an element of human simulation or ‘false sanctity’, that is, a mixture of lies and hypocrisy? This was the art of the actor, who makes the audience believe what is untrue. Hypocrites have one sole aim: to obtain praise and fame through the exercise of sham virtues.
St Winifred, Bishop Fleetwood and Jacobitism
Authors: Haydon Colin
Published: March 2016

During the Middle Ages, the cult of St Winifred was the most important of the many Welsh cults centred on wells. Winifred’s story was recounted in two medieval Lives: the Vita prima by Pseudo-Elerius (c. 1100), written from a Welsh perspective, and the Vita secunda by Robert, prior of Shrewsbury, written after the translation of the saint’s supposed relics to his abbey in 1138. According to these, Winifred (fl. c. 650) was educated by St Beuno in North Wales; and, although she had vowed herself to virginity, she inspired the lust of a local prince, Caradog, who, when repulsed, decapitated her. Where her head fell, a spring erupted; and Beuno restored Winifred to life and killed Caradog with a curse. Winifred subsequently became abbess at Gwytherin and, after her death, the spring’s waters were held to cure the sick miraculously. The spring, at Holywell in Flintshire, attracted countless pilgrims in the later Middle Ages, and Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, encased it in a fine building. At the Reformation, however, the cult of saints was abolished, the Twenty-Second of the Thirty-Nine Articles specifically denouncing their invocation.
Commerce and Culture: Benjamin Gregory’s Sidelights on Wesleyan Sanctity in the Later Nineteenth Century
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

In September 1790, some six months before his death, John Wesley was pleased to observe in a letter to Robert Carr Brackenbury that an unnamed Methodist, Brother D., ‘has more light with regard to full sanctification’. ‘This doctrine,’ Wesley continued, ‘is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly He appeared to have raised us up.’
Staging Vice and Acting Evil: Theatre and Anti-Theatre in Early Modern England
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: March 2016

This article revisits the relationship between dramatic production and religious change in the sixteenth century, specifically by examining the allegorical Vice figure - a dramatic embodiment of evil forces - that came to particular prominence during this period. It suggests that the professional actor became increasingly associated with this figure of moral evil. I propose also that understanding the moral ambivalence of the actor’s presence can inform our understanding of many plays in which no obviously coherent Vice figure is present, but in which possibilities of such an allegory are important. It would be impractical to present this argument across the range of dramatic examples it deserves, particularly since substantial contextual argument will be necessary if the article’s conclusions are to have any weight. It is partly for this reason that an examination of Shakespeare’sHamletconcludes the paper, a play needing no introduction. It will be suggested that the play’s issue of conscience was mediated in important ways by the actor’s potentially Vice-like presence, defined as such by Tudor legislation as well as by a variety of anti-theatrical religious writings.
Anti-Catholicism and Obscene Literature: The Case of Mrs. Mary Catharine Cadiere and its Context
Authors: Haydon Colin
Published: March 2016

As every historian knows, religious minorities and other ‘out-groups’ have repeatedly faced accusations of sexual misconduct and its consequences: seduction, the breaking of families, promiscuous fornication, participation in orgies, ‘unnatural vice’, incest, sadism and masochism. In the second or third century, Minucius Felix recorded such charges against the early Christians: they make ‘love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust, a promiscuous “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest’. The Cathars and other medieval heretics were accused of promiscuous, incestuous orgies. Across early modern Europe, witches at their sabbats, it was learnedly pronounced, copulated with the Devil himself and, indiscriminately, with unknown members of both sexes, even parents, brothers and sisters.
W. E. Heygate: Tractarian Clerical Novelist
Authors: Herring George
Published: March 2016

In the 1830s a small group of Anglican clerics, mainly resident tutors and fellows of Oxford University, initiated a campaign for the revitalization of their Church, which they perceived to be threatened by secular forces. The inspiration for this was derived from the pre-Reformation roots of Anglicanism, specifically from a study of the fathers of the Early Church, supplemented by the post-Reformation Caroline divines of the seventeenth century. One of the main vehicles for propagating these ideas was the series known as theTracts for the Times, which ran to ninety tides issued between 1833 and 1841, and from which this growing Oxford Movement derived its more popular title of’Tractarian’.
A Writer or A Religious? Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Dilemma
Authors: Jaeger Kathleen
Published: March 2016

Discussing the conflict Gerard Manley Hopkins perceived between his two vocations of priest and poet, W. H. Gardner distinguished between ‘character … the stamp imposed upon the individual by tradition and moral training; which may also be desired and self-imposed, … maintained by an effort of the will’ and ‘personality … the free or comparatively untrammeled psychic individuality, that complex of native faculties … which find their expression in art’. Such a dichotomy can also be seen in a less familiar figure, Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–85), a novelist who for decades sought in vain to reconcile the demands of her religious aspirations with her drive for self-expression.
Writing the Sabbath: The Literature of the Nineteenth-Century Sunday Observance Debate
Authors: Spence Martin
Published: March 2016

‘It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale.’ I This line from Charles Dickens’sLittle Dorritencapsulates the common view that the nineteenth-century Sabbath was a tedious, gloomy and tiresome institution that embodied the full weight of Victorian Britain’s old-fashioned, sombre and somewhat hypocritical evangelical piety. Taking such contemporary portrayals at face value, historian John Wigley, whose thirty-year-old monograph remains the only full treatment of the subject, depicted the Victorian Sabbath as ‘a day which had a funereal character, notorious for its symbols – the hushed voice, the half-drawn blind and the best clothes’. Sabbatarianism, he argued, ‘appeared to consist of a perverse reluctance to enjoy oneself on Sundays and a determination to stop other people enjoying themselves too’.
Breadth from Dissent: Ada Ellen Bayly (‘Edna Lyall’) and Her Fiction
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

Attitudes change. They broaden as well as contract. They reflect the permeation of dissenting ideas in apparently settled communities and the assimilation of conventionally accepted ideas by dissenters. The process is transformative. Literature is a prime medium for the transmission of ideas. It shapes attitudes. What, then, of the role of popular literature, especially fiction, in shaping the attitudes, especially the religious attitudes, of a rapidly growing, clearly intelligent and significandy female reading public? This paper considers an Anglican writer, formed in part by Dissent, whose work particularly appealed to Nonconformists exercising their citizenship in a complex but now promisingly open society. This Broad Churchwoman enlarged the minds of her readers in liberal directions without diminishing their Dissenting formation. She is now quite forgotten, but her apparently modest achievement was in fact considerable.
‘A Faithful and Wise Servant’? Innocent III (1198–1216) Looks at his Household
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

Arriving at the Lateran on 8 January 1198, officials conducted Innocent III (born Lotari dei Conti di Segni) ceremonially to his apartments within the palace, there to rest, pray and dine.’ Foremost amongst his concerns was the household, last reformed by Gregory I (590–604). Whilst Innocent clearly adopted Gregory as his model, both for the shaping of his personal life as pope and for his understanding of the papal office, the young pope’s efforts to make his household as exemplary as that of his great predecessor have not received the attention they undoubtedly deserve. Gregory’s finestLife, composedc.875 by John, a Roman deacon, uses material from the earlyvitae, thus avoiding the ‘scrappy and grudging’ biography of theLiber pontificalis. Instead, John draws extensively on Gregory’s letters and the crumbling but then still extant papyrus volumes of theRegistrumto demonstrate how this pope transformed his household into monastery, hospice and refuge. Three centuries later, the author of theGesta InnocentiiorDeeds of Innocent IIIcould do no better than to adapt portions of John’sLifeto highlight reforms not evidenced since the sixth century Like Gregory, Innocent wished to restore the ideas of the apostolic age to the Church. And where better to begin the spiritual renewal than within a reformed household? His inaugural sermon as pope on St Matthew’s faithful and wise servant accords perfectly with John the Deacon’s view of Gregory aspaterfamilias Domini, head of the Lord’s household. Innocent, therefore, regarded the household not only as a metaphor for the congregation of the faithful but also, like Gregory before him, as a model to be used by missionaries to plant and nurture the faith throughout Christendom. Whilst the ongoing conversion of Livonia would provide Innocent with a rare opportunity to inculcate the Christian household within a pagan society, in the Patrimony of St Peter he diverged from Gregory’s path by purposeful itineration with hisfamilia, thus initiating a public role for the household.
Holy Families: The Spiritualization of the Early Modern Household Revisited
Authors: Walsham Alexandra
Published: March 2016

The household has been a compelling metaphor for the Christian Church since biblical times. In his epistle to the Ephesians (3: 15), St Paul wrote of ‘the whole family’ of Christ’s followers ‘in heaven and earth’; in Galatians 6: 10, he equated the congregation of the elect with ‘the household of faith’. But these were merely variations on a more ancient theme. In the Old Testament too the language of kinship is deployed to describe the community of God’s chosen people, the Jews, while the idea of the family as the basic building block of human society and the state has its roots in the fourth century BCE, in Aristotle’s celebrated treatise onPolitics. The interrelated tropes of the household as a microcosm and nursery of the Church and commonwealth continued to be invoked throughout the medieval period and they proliferated in the wake of the religious upheavals inaugurated by the Reformation. Expressions of these commonplaces abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. A long succession of Protestant ministers compared families with ‘seed-plots’ and ‘seminaries’ in which the tender plants of godly religion and good citizenship were nurtured, and with ‘[bee]hives, out of which swarm the materials for greater assemblies’.
Needlework and Moral Instruction in English Seventeenth-Century Households: the Case of Rebecca
Authors: Pullan Amanda
Published: March 2016

In the seventeenth-century household, in which biblically themed decor was fashionable, many needlework projects included images of female biblical characters. Rebecca was among the most frequently embroidered. In both Protestant and Catholic traditions, Rebecca’s story, recorded in Genesis 24, was perceived as especially pertinent to the household. Depictions of her story appeared in the sixteenth-century picture Bibles which were dedicated to, and circulated among, Protestant and Catholic audiences in parts of western and central Europe. Rebecca also featured in Erhard Schön’s didactic illustrated woodcut,Zwölf Frawen des Alten Testaments(c.1530). Not all biblical stories involving female figures were included in these illustrated works, so the inclusion of her story suggests that Rebecca was perceived as a proper model for young women. Moreover, the absence of Rebecca from the large-scale tapestries which throughout the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries commonly depicted biblical scenes provides an important contrast to the popularity of her story in smaller-scale domestic needlework projects.
Sons of the Prophets: Domestic Clerical Seminaries in Late Georgian England
Authors: Slinn Sara
Published: March 2016

The late Georgian Church was not exclusively the preserve of the graduate clergyman: Oxford and Cambridge universities produced too few graduates to supply all the titles for orders. My current study of ordination records indicates that between 1780 and 1839 about one in four new entrants to the Church had no degree and that the majority of ordinands in Wales and the Northern Province were non-graduates, generally termed by contemporaries as ‘literates’. Why is this relevant to the subject of the household? The answer lies in the way in which these non-graduates prepared for ordination. There were various well-trodden routes: for instance in Wales and north-west England some grammar schools provided tertiary level study. But most non-graduate clerical aspirants followed a schoolboy classical education with private study, often assisted by a clergyman. This essay is concerned with a subsection of this type of preparation, the domestic clerical seminary, in which students prepared for ordination while residing in a clergyman’s family. It will consider the markets for such institutions, the nature of the pre-ordination training provided by them, and what a recognition of the operation of these seminaries contributes to an understanding of the channels through which emerging currents of ideology and professional practice flowed in this period.
The Missionary Home as a Site for Mission: Perspectives from Belgian Congo
Authors: Maxwell David
Published: March 2016

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant missionaries considered themselves exemplars of the Christian home. They devoted considerable energy to writing about domesticity and to constructing model homes in the mission field. In spite of their good intentions there was often a large gap between their ideals and the realities of life on mission stations. By means of a case study of a Pentecostal faith mission in Katanga, Belgian Congo, this essay demonstrates how models of the Western Christian home were unsustainable and examines the manner in which missionaries coped with unfulfilled domestic dreams. It shows how Western notions of the Christian home were undermined by the harshness of the tropical environment, the disparity in numbers between male and female missionary vocations, and the persistence of African notions of domesticity. The missionaries endured the material and emotional deprivations of life in the bush through faith in a providential God and by constructing intimate but tense relationships with African Christians. The essay begins with a discussion of some of the most pertinent scholarship on missionaries and domesticity.
Remembering Pope Gregory VII: Cardinal Boso and Alexander III
Authors: Doran John
Published: March 2016

In the conclusion to his masterly biography of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), H. E. John Cowdrey notes the paradox that the pope so lionized by modern historians, to the extent that the age of reform bears his name, was largely forgotten in the twelfth century and made little impact on Christian thought, spirituality or canon law. Cowdrey is not alone in his observation that Gregory ‘receded from memory with remarkable speed and completeness’; when he was remembered, it was as a failure and as one who brought decline upon the church. For Cowdrey, the answer to this conundrum lay in the fact that Gregory VII was in fact far closer to the ideals of the sixth century than of the twelfth; he was a Benedictine monk and shared the worldview and oudook of Gregory the Great (590–604) rather than those of the so-called lawyer popes Alexander III (1159–81) and Innocent III (1198–1216). Yet within a century of Gregory’s death he was presented by Cardinal Boso as a model pope, who had overcome a schismatic emperor and the problems which his interference had precipitated in Rome. For Boso, writing for the instruction of the officials of the papal chamber, the very policies set out by Gregory VII were to be pursued and emulated. Far from being a peripheral and contradictory figure, with more in common with the distant past than the near future, Gregory was the perfect guide to the beleaguered Pope Alexander III, who was also struggling against a hostile emperor and his antipope.
Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: March 2016

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.
The Evangelical Discovery of History
Authors: Bebbington David W.
Published: March 2016

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.
Anglo-Saxon ‘Purgatory’
Authors: Foot Sarah
Published: March 2016

Since a countless multitude of misshapen spirits, far and wide, was being tortured in this alternation of misery as far as I could see and without any interval of respite, I began to think that this might be Hell, of whose intolerable torments I had often heard tell. But my guide who went before me answered my thoughts, ‘Do not believe it,’ he said, ‘this is not Hell as you think.’ … As he led me on in open light … [we came to] a very broad and pleasant plain … [where] there were innumerable bands of men in white robes, and many companies of happy people sat around; as he led me through the midst of the troops of joyful inhabitants, I began to think that this might perhaps be the kingdom of Heaven of which I had often heard tell. But he answered my thoughts: ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not the kingdom of Heaven as you imagine.’
Byzantine Visions of the End
Authors: Brubaker Leslie
Published: March 2016

As is well known, western medieval apocalyptic literature owes a considerable debt to Byzantine apocalyptic literature, which itself built on Roman and Jewish sources. The classic studies are now Evelyne Patlagean’s ‘Byzance et son autre monde’, published in 1981; Paul Alexander’sThe Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition, published posthumously in 1985; and Jane Baun’s edition and commentary of three Middle Byzantine apocalyptic texts that appeared in 2007. In addition, Paul Magdalino has recently published several articles on the theme. On top of this, numerous studies connect specific Byzantine apocalypse traditions to particular political events, most notably the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Byzantine eschatology has been even more thoroughly studied, and, with the subtitle ‘Views on death and the last things’, was the subject of a recent (1999) Dumbarton Oaks symposium.
‘But where shall my soul repose?’: Nonconformity, Science and the Geography of the Afterlife, c. 1660–1720
Authors: Cambers Andrew
Published: March 2016

Life, the afterlife, and life beyond the Earth are matters of scientific inquiry as well as religious belief. As we might expect, in the wake of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the afterlife was subjected to new scrutiny. Such scrutiny, notably the demonology of Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, both fellows of the Royal Society, was undoubtedly scientific and serious, even if it has rarely been treated as such by scholars preferring to treat belief in witchcraft as a hangover from an earlier age. Far from being opposed, or necessarily pulling in opposite directions, the conjunction of science and religion in this era breathed new life into old problems and opened up new questions for debate. One such area, with a long history as a philosophical conundrum, was the possibility of life beyond Earth. It is this question, its place within religious cultures, and its relation to traditional ideas about the afterlife, that is the subject of this essay.
Rescuing the Perishing Heathen: The British Empire versus the Empire of Satan in Anglican theology, 1701–1721
Authors: Strong Rowan
Published: March 2016

In 1493–94, Pope Alexander VI divided the globe between Spain and Portugal with reference to their conquest of the territories of the New World. In the eighteenth century, Anglicans divided the globe into the territory of Christ and the lands and peoples under the dominion of Satan. The Bishop of Carlisle in 1719 was adamant that that indigenous heathen peoples were ‘insensible of the great Concernments of their immortal Souls, and very much uncertain, at best, in their apprehensions of a future life; they are abandoned to their lusts and passions; and under the dominion of Satan’. Consequently, affirmed Edward Waddington of Eton College in 1720, Satan was alarmed by the formation of a new Anglican mission society for work in British North American and West Indian colonies ‘at the approaching Loss of so many Millions of Subjects’. Through heathen ignorance of their spiritual captivity the Devil ‘supported an Empire of almost equal extent with the Universe, and led the World captive at his pleasure’, except where Christ had delivered humankind from devilish tyranny and dominion.
Theologies of Reconciliation in Thirteenth-Century England
Authors: Campbell William H.
Published: March 2016

One of [the Pharisees], a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question, to test Him. ‘Teacher, what is the great commandment in the Law?’ And [Jesus] said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’

Reconciliation of the relationships broken by sin, or the fall, is one of the central themes of Christianity, as this collection, of studies duly highlights. The themes of reconciliation to God and reconciliation to neighbour run throughout both the New Testament, with special emphasis in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and the Hebrew Scriptures, for in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew Jesus was quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This text would have been well-known to Christian authors on the subject of reconciliation in Western Europe in the thirteenth century; and the passage, or at least its message, should have been familiar to most clergy and many of their people. As an item of catechesis, one of its virtues is that it is short, and thus easy to teach and to remember.
Relationships Human and Divine: Retribution and Repentance in Children’s Lives, 1740–1870
Authors: Martin Mary Clare
Published: March 2016

The place of repentance and retribution in children’s lives between 1740 and 1870 has not been viewed positively. E. P. Thompson famously claimed that ‘the child’ in Methodist Sunday schools and in pious homes, from about 1780, was subjected to ‘the worst kind of emotional bullying to confess his sins and come to a sense of salvation’. In the 1840s children in the mines allegedly reported that they had been taught at Sunday school that hell was a place full of fire and brimstone. Nor have such assertions been made only about working-class children. Lawrence Stone, James Walvin, Walter Houghton and others claimed that the young of the middle and upper classes were intimidated by stories such as Mrs Sherwood’sThe Fairchild Family, and other Evangelical tracts threatening hell and retribution and urging immediate repentance. In 1995, Hugh Cunningham still followed Stone’s chronology in suggesting that the early nineteenth century was a period of ‘reaction’ in religious terms for children.
Judging the Nation: Early Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicals and Divine Retribution
Authors: Wolffe John
Published: March 2016

Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,But God now thunders in an awful strain!Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see theHand.’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!

In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.
God and the Gallows: Christianity and Capital Punishment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Mcleod Hugh
Published: March 2016

At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.
An Exegesis of Conformity: Textual Subversion of Subversive Texts
Authors: Steenberg M. C.
Published: March 2016

‘We have learned from the Scriptures …’

To speak with authority in the early Church was to speak from the Scriptures. While early Christianity may not have been a ‘religion of the book’ in the same way it is today, it was unquestionably a religion of text, and the refrain ‘we have learned from the holy Scriptures’ is a chorus in the early Christian witness. Here stood the authority of divine fulfilment. To confess merely Christ might be to proclaim a man, perhaps a prophet, perhaps a deity; but to confess ‘the scriptural Christ’ was to proclaim the Messiah foretold in divine writ, the revealed Saviour, and to find in that revelation the character and substance of the confession newly made. Nonetheless, while the text of the Old Testament might be of common heritage (though even this faced the challenge of a Marcion, who wished to do away with it), the emerging textual tradition of the Christian era provided a challenge: which text? what scripture? If the Christ of the Church is the ‘Christ of the scriptures’, determining the content of those scriptures – or those texts accorded scriptural authority in their receipt and influence -becomes critical. More than this, subverting the potential influence of texts deemed unsuitable stands as an essential task. To approach the era authentically, scholarly reading of the rise of a New Testament canon in the early Church must be combined with an understanding of the means and methodologies of its necessary correlate, textual exclusion. I shall argue here that this was accomplished through an exegetical method of subversion more intricate and nuanced than is often perceived.
Hippolytus and the Cabbage Question: Beyond Acceptable Discipline and Diversity
Authors: Trevett Christine
Published: March 2016

Usually it is those of the mainstream in religion who impose upon those going against the flow discipline, doctrine and uniformity in place of flexibility. Before Christian orthodoxy and heresy had achieved clear definition, however, there were against-the-flow innovators who opposed flexibility. By requiring greater rigour and regularity in Christian practices they highlighted questions of authority and what manner of people might exercise it. The Church’s own self-definition and status as an institution evolved in response to such things.
Patristic Divergences about the Image of God in Man
Authors: Hall Stuart George
Published: March 2016

The pathologically pious heresy-hunter Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis from 365 to 403, might be reckoned a champion of uniformity in the Church. Notoriously he promoted the campaign against Origen in Palestine, and in his Panarion attacks Origen’s theology at length. Never the brightest of the Fathers, he was confused by the question of the image of God in man. He comes to it when considering the sect of Audians, who were anthropomorphites; that is, they held God to have a bodily form which the human body replicates. According to Genesis 1: 26–7, God made man, male and female, in (after, according to) the image and likeness of God When Epiphanius gets to the detail of the Audian argument, it is plain that they argued from the use in Scripture of bodily language about God’s eyes, hand, feet, and other organs, and from the Lord’s appearances to Moses and the prophets, to demonstrate his bodily shape. Epiphanius can refute this in detail, but is aware of other suggestions about wherein what is ‘in the image’ consists, and regards none as wholly coherent with orthodox faith and Scripture. He mentions the theories that it is the soul that is in the image, or that it is virtue, or that it is the grace received in baptism, or that it applied to Adam only before his sin.
Rod, Line and Net: Augustine on the Limits of diversity
Authors: Clark Gillian
Published: March 2016

Augustine of Hippo is especially appropriate for the theme of this volume. He is acknowledged as a Father and Doctor of the Church, that is, as an authoritative Christian writer from the early centuries of the Church, and as a major theologian. Patristics, the study of the Fathers, used to be where it all started in terms of Church teaching: wherever possible, doctrines and practices were traced back to the Fathers. In the last half-century of early Christian studies there has been much more emphasis on ecclesiastical history, on the intellectual and political detail of a specific historical context. So patristics is where it all starts in that we can see Church leaders working out their responses to problems and tensions that recur through the history of the Church. In the case of Augustine, there is an unusual range of evidence from his own sermons and letters and theological treatises, and from records of Church councils in Roman Africa from the years when he was bishop (395 to 430). On the older model of patristics, Augustine was taken as the source for some of the most extreme forms of Church discipline. His writings were conflated to produce coherent ‘Augustinian’ doctrine. Phrases and sentences, images and speculation, were taken out of context to be used for purposes he never envisaged. On the newer model of early Christian studies, we can trace Augustine’s reflections about when and how to discipline people who appear to be rejecting the fundamental Christian principles, love of God and love of neighbour.
Taming the Muse: Monastic Discipline and Christian Poetry in Hermann of Reichenau’sOn the Eight Principal Vices
Authors: Williams Hannah
Published: March 2016

In 1054, the Benedictine monk Berthold of Reichenau took up the task of continuing the worldChroniclecompiled by his friend and teacher Hermann of Reichenau. The key event recorded for this year is the death of Hermann himself, with Berthold highlighting the monk’s great learning, his good-natured dealings with others, but above all the particular devotion to reading and writing which he pursued despite great physical disability. Even on his deathbed, we are told, Hermann’s mind was focused on matters textual. Throughout the night he was caught up in a kind of vision or ecstasy, during which he was able to read – and re-read – the lost letter, much beloved by the early Fathers, of CiceroTo Hortensius. Running back and forth through the text, he displayed the same ‘memory and knowledge’ of the pagan author that one might expect of a Christian reader in recalling the Lord’s Prayer. He was also able to set forth the remaining part of his own unfinished work, his poetic dialogueOn the Eight Principal Vices, as if he were ‘composing’ and at the same time ‘reading repeatedly’ both the sense and words of the text. As Berthold claims, his master had always ‘affected such great knowledge of both worldly and spiritual letters, that all those who came from everywhere were held stupefied and in wonder’.