bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gerrard Winstanley's Experimental Knowledge of God (The Perception of the Spirit and the Acting of Reason)
Authors: Baxter Nicola
Published: March 2011

This essay is an attempt to find out what Winstanley meant by certain terms, using close textual analysis. Extensive work has already been done in locating Winstanley in political, theological and, as far as possible, intellectual terms. This will receive only cursory treatment here. A scholarly tradition can be traced from Bernstein, through Petergorsky and Margaret James to Christopher Hill, which places Winstanley at the beginning of the development of materialist socialism although, it is suggested, his ideas proved to be a false start and went underground for a century or more. This view derives from his later works, especially The Law of Freedom, with its practical design of tilling the land communally, and sees his mysticism either as a cloak for revolutionary aims or as an undeveloped stage in his thought which he later left behind and which is thus of secondary importance. Work has been done, sometimes by the same scholars, to map out the tenets of his religious beliefs in the context of contemporary radical Puritanism, considering whether he was, for instance, a mortalist, a universalist or a millenarian, and how far he was any of these. For such doctrinal identification one can look to W. S. Hudson, the co-operative study of L. Mulligan, J. K. Graham and J. Richards and to Christopher Hill, for all of these have compared and contrasted his beliefs with those of Seekers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. Hill himself, however, has pointed out the difficulties of placing Winstanley in a particular group because of the fluidity of the borders between one sect and another; sects sharing certain beliefs while differing in others and changing character internally with changing political circumstances.
Royal Taxation and the English Church: The Origins of William of Ockham'sAn princeps
Authors: Nederman Cary J.
Published: March 2011

In the summer of 1337, representatives of the English King Edward III and the German Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria concluded negotiations leading to the formation of an Anglo-imperial alliance. Edward, who was in the midst of preparations to pursue by force his dynastic claim to the French crown, received from Ludwig the title of imperial vicar-generalper Alemanniam et Galliam, an act which conferred upon him sovereign rights over subjects and lands west of the Rhine. In return, Edward provided the emperor with the substantial financial remuneration which he required to stabilise his own position within Germany. This Anglo-imperial treaty, the greatest achievement of Edward's early diplomatic programme, was solemnised in a ceremonial meeting between the two rulers during September of the following year. One figure who was no doubt in attendance throughout these events was William of Ockham, the Franciscan philosopher and theologian exiled from his native England as the result of a dispute with Pope John XXIL. Ludwig, while never an entirely reliable protector, had sheltered Ockham and numerous other intellectuals who had run afoul of the papal court at Avignon.
Clerical Poverty in Early Sixteenth-Century England: Some East Anglian Evidence
Authors: Pound John
Published: March 2011

The economic standing of the English parochial clergy in the early sixteenth century has been re-examined recently by Michael Zell, and the evidence at his disposal suggests that many of them were poverty-stricken in the extreme. He points to the large surplus of unendowed curates, chaplains and the like, and to the fact that when employment was available it was neither rewarding, in a monetary sense, nor necessarily secure. Stipends were officially regulated by an early fifteenth-century statute which set a maximum of £5 6s. 8d. per annum, and ‘evidence from all regions of England indicates that very rarely were curates and chaplains given more than that’. It was not uncommon for areas in the north to pay even less than this. In Lancashire, for example, the average salary of about 100 curates and chaplains in 1524 was £2 9s. 6d. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a year later it was £4. On the basis of such evidence, Mr Zell reasonably concludes that the unbeneficed clergy must have found it very difficult to survive, and that ‘the average country priest could not have been a person of high social status’.
On the Consolation of a Christian Scholar: Zacharias Ursinus (1534–83) and the Reformation in Heidelberg
Authors: Burchill Christopher J.
Published: March 2011

It is perhaps the most fitting comment on a Christian scholar to note that, whereas his work has been of importance to the Church down the years, the details of his life have passed into obscurity. This remark is particularly appropriate in looking at the figure of Zacharius Ursinus, the main author of the Heidelberg Catechism and one of the founding fathers of the German reformed tradition. Most previous analysis has been focused on his growing sympathy with the teaching of Calvin in the period prior to his open adoption of the reformed cause following the death of Melanchthon. The effort to explain the background to the break-up of the Philippist party in the 1560s has yet deflected attention from a proper consideration of Ursinus' own views. Even the most recent account by Derk Visser, where some new insights have been provided on the basis of the published correspondence, is mostly concerned with this problem of his early development. Yet any serious attempt to place his writing in its historical context must concentrate on the situation in Heidelberg, which was the setting for the bulk of his work both as a reformer and pedagogue. In seeking to fill this gap, it is the purpose of the present paper to rediscover something of the man's character and the nature of his religious conviction, rather than to take up the now established debate about the relation of his theology to that of the other leading reformers. Such a study should furnish a useful basis for a more balanced assessment of his own contribution to the broader history of the Church.
Revivalism in Theory and Practice: The Case of Cornish Methodism
Authors: Luker David
Published: March 2011

Religious revivals in early industrial England have received considerable attention from historians concerned with explaining their appearance in relation to social, economic, and political trends. R. B. Walker, for example, in a general assessment of the impact of external forces on Wesleyan Methodist growth after 1830, argued that political tension in the years 1832 to 1834 may have contributed to religious revival, and that the outbreak of cholera in 1832 certainly increased religious excitement. Chartism, on the other hand, probably competed with the chapels and made revival less likely, while general economic trends of boom and depression had no apparently conclusive impact. Some historians have noted these connections between religious revivals and secular stimuli and have gone on to ask what functions revivals might serve for those participating in them. Eric Hobsbawm in 1957 suggested that, in the half-century after 1790, intense political and religious excitement often coincided and that at such times ‘preachers, prophets, and sectarians might issue what the labourers would regard as calls to action rather than to resignation’. E. P. Thompson, by contrast, forwarded an ‘oscillation’ theory by which it was conceivable that religious revivalism reflected ‘the chiliasm of despair’ amongst working people and occurred ‘just at the point where “political” or temporal aspirations met with defeat’. More recently, Hobsbawm appeared to concur with this theory when he interpreted the revivalism which superseded Swing riots in several parts of the country in 1830 as ‘an escape from, rather than a mobilisation for social agitation’.
The Piety of Margaret, Lady Hungerford (d. 1478)
Authors: Hicks M. A.
Published: March 2011

It is notoriously difficult for biographers of late-medieval people to recapture the personalities of their subjects, and consequently motives often have to be deduced from actions. This fundamental difficulty prompted the great Professor Jacob Burckhardt to date the emergence of the individual from the Renaissance and to assert that, rulers apart, there were few developed personalities in the Middle Ages. Medieval people saw their world through a sort of ‘religious mist’, perceiving things distorted rather than as they really were. In spite of some recent support, Burckhardt's theory is not really tenable, but historians still find the prevalent religious aura difficult to penetrate. We may know the official doctrine and moral teaching of the Church, but we cannot safely assume that they were understood by the laity, when both contemporary sermons and literature proclaim the contrary. Even were the Church's teaching understood, historians would still not know in what ways and to what extent religion influenced other fields of individual activity – economic, social or political. Burckhardt's problem remains of more than purely religious importance.
The Beginning of the Veto Controversy in Ireland
Authors: O'Brien Gerard
Published: March 2011

The year 1808 does not feature with any greater prominence in the history of Catholic relief legislation than it does generally in Irish history. It was an uneventful year for Anglo-Irish relations, and for the Irish Catholic community in particular it was – on the surface at least – a period of embarrassment, division and failure. The veto controversy, which dominated Catholic politics in 1808, was productive of mutual misunderstanding and was to cast a shadow over the later proceedings of Catholic interest groups. But the significance of the dispute, hidden even to the protagonists, lay in the very breadth and depth of the misunderstanding. With the veto controversy began the gradual loss of confidence in the traditional champions of Catholic relief, the equally gradual transfer of the initiative to new champions and, all unseen, the first faint crack in the union of Britain and Ireland. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the causes and course of an incident which was fraught with such long-term serious consequences.
The Exile Churches and the Churches ‘Under the Cross’: Antwerp and Emden During the Dutch Revolt
Authors: Pettegree Andrew
Published: March 2011

In the middle years of the sixteenth century Antwerp reached the zenith of its economic power. With ninety thousand inhabitants it was far from being the largest city in Europe, but its pre-eminence as a centre for European trade was now universally acknowledged. As a money market, commodity market and, above all, as a centre of the cloth trade Antwerp had by 1550 eclipsed its rivals in Flanders and Brabant and made itself indispensable to merchants from all over the continent. Germans made up the largest contingent among Antwerp's foreign merchant community, but there were substantial numbers of both Portuguese, still dominant in the international spice trade, and Italians, who had first introduced the sophisticated financial and accounting techniques which were now developed to a new peak of refinement in Antwerp. The concentration of capital in the city was an inducement to every major banking house to maintain a permanent representation there, as did their most regular clients, the princely houses of Europe. The real foundation of Antwerp's greatness, however, was the trade in English broadcloths, established there since the turn of the century and carried on by an English merchant community that numbered three or four hundred by 1560. All this frenetic economic activity was presided over with studied negligence by the city elders, whose tradition of minimum controls was calculated to avoid alarming an extremely heterogeneous trading community.
Congregationalism and the Social Order: John Goodwin's Gathered Church, 1640–60
Authors: More Ellen S.
Published: March 2011

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.
College Principals — a Cause of Nonconformist Decay?
Authors: Brown Kenneth D.
Published: March 2011

Nonconformity was one of the major formative influences on Victorian society in Britain. The census of 1851 revealed that of seven million worshippers attending service on census day roughly half were counted in a nonconformist chapel. Even the Victorian who failed to attend service regularly found it difficult to evade the influence of nonconformity — and the Evangelicalism with which it was most closely —identified — in a society whose very customs, attitudes and even political life were so largely moulded by it. The main physical manifestation of this pervasive influence was the ubiquitious chapel, its most obvious human expression the professional minister. Of the leading nonconformist denominations the Congregationals were served by some 1,400 full-time men in 1847 while the Wesleyan, Primitive, New Connexion and Association Methodists had respectively 1,125, 518, 83 and 91 ministers in 1851.
Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered
Authors: Freeze G. L.
Published: March 2011

The history of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in the modern imperial period (1700–1917), has been a woefully neglected field of scholarly research. That neglect antedates the collapse of the ancien regime in 1917, for pre-revolutionary historiography on the Church was neither abundant nor sophisticated; rarely did it produce more than myopic diocesan histories, fatuous accounts of the local seminary, or hagiographic paeans devoted to some prominent clergyman. The reasons for this neglect of so fundamental an institution in ‘Holy Rus’ are many – restricted access to ecclesiastical archives, difficulties in publication because of vigilant censors, but above all the intelligentsia's indifference to an apparently moribund and state-controlled institution. Paradoxically enough, Catholic polemicists, Orthodox Slavophiles, anticlerical intellectuals and reform-minded clergy all concurred – from different motives, for different reasons – in believing that the Church had become a mere instrument of the secular state, and that this change derived from ‘revolutionary’ and ‘Westernizing’ reforms in the Church imposed by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century.
Constitutional Conflict and Change in the Hospital of St John during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Authors: Forey A. J.
Published: March 2011

The leading studies of the Hospital of St John in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have presented somewhat differing accounts of the power structure at the centre of the Order. Delaville Le Roulx in his brief analysis of government provides an essentially static picture and maintains that although in theory the plenitude of power rested with the chapter general, which delegated executive authority to the master, in practice the latter's power was almost absolute: although the master had few rights of his own and on most matters was expected to seek the counsel of the central convent or of the chapter general, these bodies would not refuse assent to measures which did not conflict with the statutes and usages of the Order; and, as the chapter general met only infrequently, the master enjoyed a considerable freedom of initiative. Therefore, despite the restrictions on his authority, ‘le róle du grand-maítre était prépondérant’. More recently, Riley-Smith has argued at greater length that the relationship between the master, the central convent and the chapter general did not remain unchanged and that during this period the convent and chapter general assumed predominance, as is shown by the convent's victory in 1299 over the master William de Villaret, who was obliged to travel out to the East and hold a chapter general there against his will. The power gained by the convent and chapter general was not the outcome of a process of gradual evolution, but resulted from a series of bitter constitutional conflicts, in which the convent and chapter general - influenced by current baronial ideas - demanded not only government in accordance with law and custom but also the right to be consulted.
‘Defying the Powers and Tempering the Spirit.’ A Review of Quaker Control over their Publications 1672–1689
Authors: O'Malley Thomas
Published: March 2011

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.
The Beginnings of Church Feminism: Women and the Councils of the Church of England 1897–1919
Authors: Heeney Brian
Published: March 2011

Historians of the Church of England have paid little attention to the women's movement. There have been several serious studies of religious communities for women, and there is increasing interest in churchwomen's part in Victorian philanthropy and moral reform. Studies of Victorian marriage and family life have an important religious dimension. Alan Wilkinson's recent book on The Church of England and the First World War makes a number of references to women's work and aspirations, subjects virtually excluded from Roger Lloyd's standard history of the twentieth-century church. The history of women's place in the management and recognised ministry of the Church of England, in its institutional life at local, regional and national levels, has not been touched.
Some Thirteenth-Century Sermons and their Authors
Authors: Sweet Jennifer
Published: March 2011

The object of this paper is to draw attention to some of the English preachers and sermons of the thirteenth century. It is known that preaching gained new importance in this period, as a subject of study and as a means of evangelism, but we lack a comprehensive work on its development in England. The following pages are based on manuscripts in Oxford, Cambridge and London. In them I hope to indicate the contemporary attitude to preaching, to discuss some sermons whose authors can be identified, and to show something of the form and content of the sermons themselves.
Richard Baxter's Apology (1654): its occasion and composition
Authors: Nuttall Geoffrey F.
Published: March 2011

Rich. Baxters Apology Against the ModestExceptions of Mr T. Blake, and the Digression of Mr G. Kendall. Whereunto is added Animadversions on a late Dissertation of Ludiomaeus Colvinus, alias, Ludovicus Molinaeus, M. Dr. Oxon. and an Admonition of Mr W. Eyre of Salisbury, with Mr Crandon's Anatomy for satisfaction of Mr Caryl (London 1654) contains, besides the five main parts indicated in the title, a number of dedicatory epistles, prefaces and postscripts, some of them with and some without dates. In the following analysis of the work an attempt is made to elucidate its manifold occasion and the order in which the various pieces included in it were written, with the approximate dates of their composition.
Lorenzo Casoni and Papal Policy for the Church in France, 1682–1689
Authors: Morey Adrian , Landor Anthony
Published: March 2011

The conflict between Louis XIV and the Papacy which centred round the régale and the decrees of the Assembly of the Clergy of 1682 has not lacked full treatment by church historians and its details are too well known to bear repetition. The Curia was not greatly concerned with the question of the régale; it was gravely affected by the decrees of the Assembly, which re-stated the historic Gallican view of the limitations on papal authority. By royal edict these decrees were to be taught in all colleges of every university and subscribed by all professors of theology. A crisis had arisen which had been feared by Rome as a possibility since 1516, especially since the last days of the Council of Trent, and the gravity of the situation was at once appreciated: the heresies of Basle and Constance had again raised their heads. The resulting deadlock lasted until the death of Innocent XI and by 1692 over forty episcopal sees in France were vacant. If the danger to papal authority was realised at Rome the effect of the crisis on Church order and discipline were appreciated in France. Both sides strove by all available means of diplomacy and propaganda to secure a victory.
Anne Boleyn and Reform
Authors: Dowling Maria
Published: March 2011

In 1530 or 1531 Thomas Alwaye, an otherwise obscure evangelical prosecuted by Wolsey and the bishops for buying English new testaments and other prohibited books, petitioned Anne Boleyn for intervention in his affairs in the following extraordinary terms:

When extreme need began to compel me, right honourable lady, to make me friends by whose means I might be released out of my miserable thraldom, I could not find one in all this realm in whom I had any hope or looked for any comfort until your gracious ladyship came unto my remembrance. But anon I remembered how many deeds of pity your goodness had done within these few years, and that without respect of any persons, as well to strangers and aliens as to many of this land, as well to poor as to rich: whereof some looking for no redemption were by your gracious means not only freely delivered out of costly and very long imprisoning, but also by your charity largely rewarded and all thing restored to the uttermost, so that every man may perceive that your gracious and Christian mind is everywhere ready to help, succour and comfort them that be afflicted, troubled and vexed, and that not only in word and tongue, but even after the saying of St John.
Prophecy and Anti-Episcopal Activity: a Third Error Combatted by Ignatius?
Authors: Trevett Christine
Published: March 2011

Discussion of the errors combatted by Ignatius of Antioch of centred on the question of whether they were one or two in number. While some scholars have discovered opposition to a single, composite Judaeo-Christian-Docetic error, others have argued that Ignatius opposed two groups, viz. Docetists and Judaisers. Here I intend to discuss a third error which appears to be connected with the continuing tension, observable in other writings of the time, between the priestly and prophetic ministries.
Episcopal Succession in Egypt
Authors: Telfer W.
Published: March 2011

In most English minds, episcopal succession from the apostles is associated with the unbroken series of impositions of episcopal hands, stretching right back to certain layings-on of hands by apostles whereby the first bishops were set apart for an office that perpetuated something of apostolic authority. That this notion is thus prevalent is due to the Tractarians. Characteristic is their emphasis upon a particular action, the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Einar Molland doubtless had this in his thought when, in the first issue of this Journal, he showed that Irenaeus, when upholding the importance of a regular and continuous succession from the apostles, laid no such emphasis on the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Molland went on to indicate that Irenaeus himself cannot have received episcopal consecration at the hands of bishops. Only his fellow-presbyters of the Rhône valley can have solemnized his succession to the office of the martyred Pothinus. Professor Molland says, ‘Irenaeus may have been consecrated in the same way as the bishops of Alexandria’. It is probable that a majority of scholars hold the opinion that the early bishops of Alexandria received their episcopal office at the hands of their fellow-presbyters. Nevertheless Bishop Gore claimed that the opinion had not become a certainty, even after the discovery of the support it receives from Severus of Antioch. Gore saw clearly what were the consequences as touching the nature of valid episcopal succession, and endeavoured to maintain doubt concerning the fact of presbyteral ‘consecration’ at Alexandria.
The Origins of The Canterbury Convocation
Authors: Kemp Eric
Published: March 2011

In the current standard text-book of English Church Law appear the following statements about the origin of Convocation: ‘The Convocation, in its origin, was for the purpose of taxation and no other; it was altogether unlike the Convocation of the foreign synods, which were composed solely of the bishops, collected to declare what was the doctrine, or what should be the discipline, of the Church. It is easy, however, to conceive how the clergy, when once convoked, gradually assumed the same power as existed in those foreign synods to which their Convocation might appear to bear some analogy.’ In examining this quotation we must consider, (a) the composition of the foreign synods; (b) their relation if any to the English Convocation; (c) the taxing functions of both bodies.
The Case of St. Albans Abbey in 1490
Authors: Knowles Dom David
Published: March 2011

The character of abbot William Wallingford of St. Albans (abbot 1476–92), the state of the abbey under his rule, and the issue of his controversy with archbishop Morton in 1490, provided matter for a lively controversy at the beginning of the present century which has recently found an echo in a posthumous work of the late Dr. G. G. Coulton. Despite considerable research, much has hitherto remained obscure, and the so-called ‘St. Albans case’ has remained an obstacle in the path of all students of the last phase of pre-Reformation monasticism. The present writer some years ago, in the course of other work, attempted a review of the problem, but subsequently put aside what he had written, as Dr. Coulton had declared, both in print and in conversation, that he intended to give a full treatment of the case in the last volume of his Five Centuries of Religion. This, when at last it appeared in the autumn of 1950, was found indeed to contain two chapters on Wallingford and St. Albans, but these, when carefully considered, appeared neither to give a final judgment nor to provide a clear presentation of the sequence of events and of the difficulties of interpretation presented by the documents. Coulton's pages, in fact, so far from speaking the last word, give the impression of being a series of notes never fully resolved into an ordered narrative or argument and, in addition, there is more than one omission or misplacement in important footnote references, possibly due to uncorrected slips in the typescript of the book, which leave the reader at a loss.
Literature and Religion in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Humphreys A. R.
Published: March 2011

For several decades the reputation of eighteenth-century religion has been rising. Where the Victorians saw on the whole only apathy and even cynicism, their successors have found that the sober goodwill, rising at times to a luminous devotion, which characterises much Hanoverian worship still makes its appeal. Yet our conversion is not (and never can be) complete, and it is still widely felt that the Victorian indictment was right, viz. that the people had forsaken the fountain of living waters.
The Extinction of Paganism and the Church Historian
Authors: Bonner Gerald
Published: March 2011

Any period of history which later ages deem to have been significant is apt to gather to itself a mythology. To the medieval Church the first three Christian centuries appeared as a period of continuous slaughter, in which legions of martyrs preferred to perish rather than deny their faith in Christ. With such an assumption it was inevitable that the extinction of paganism during the years which followed the conversion of Constantine should be seen as a pious work undertaken in conformity with God's will –gesta Dei per Christianos– and when Julian the Apostate attempted to turn back the tide, he was duly slain by two warrior saints sent for the purpose from heaven – a legend which had sufficient vitality eventually to find its way into the EthiopicMiracles of the Virgin Mary, with Julian transformed into a gigantic artisan named Gôlyâd, who threatens to destroy a monastery and is slain by a martyred knight raised by Our Lady to that end. On the pagan side we have the well-known story of how Serena, wife of Stilicho and favourite niece of Theodosius the Great, took a necklace from the image of the Great Mother for her own adornment and mocked and humiliated an aged vestal virgin who denounced her. At a later date, when Alaric the Goth threatened Rome, Serena was suspected of treachery and strangled. To the pagan historian Zosimus her fate was the reward of her impiety, and it seemed fitting that the neck which had usurped the goddess's ornament would at the last be encircled by the executioner's rope. The factual truth of these stories is not, for our purposes, important. What matters is the witness that they provide to the mythological – or, if you prefer it, the theological – interpretations which were early given to the victory of Christianity.
The Cistercian Founders and the Rule: Some Reconsiderations
Authors: Goodrich W. E.
Published: March 2011

All sources of Cistercian history avow repeatedly that the primary aim of the founders was a stricter adherence to the Rule. Most scholars accept this but disagree considerably over what this implied in practice. Against an older view that the Cistercians were determined to observe the Rule in every detail and to prohibit not only what St Benedict condemned but even what he failed to mention, a number of more recent commentators, including P. Salmon, B. K. Lackner and J. Leclercq, have argued that the ideal was not a complete literalism so much as a complete fidelity to its spirit of renunciation, penitence, prayer and work. L. B. Lekai has taken this argument several steps further to claim that the Cistercian movement had little to do with a return to the Rule for its own sake. It derived rather from a general desire among the more advanced spirits of the eleventh century ‘to create a life of perfect austerity and seclusion from the world’. The founders ‘handled that venerable document of monastic legislation with remarkable liberality. They invoked and applied it when it suited their purpose; they ignored or even contradicted it when it could not be fitted into their concept of monasticism, largely based on the ideals of the eleventh-century reforms’. The increasing emphasis on the Rule, which Lekai does not deny, is to be explained by two secondary objects: to establish the movement on an indisputably legal foundation and to defend the Cistercians against charges of novelty. In fact, so little were the first Cistercians concerned with literal adherence to the Rule that they immediately departed from it in several important respects. Other deviations followed quickly, not as is often alleged because the Cistercians betrayed their ideals almost as soon as they proclaimed them, but because a literal interpretation of St Benedict had never been their intention in the first place.
FitzRalph's Antimendicant ‘proposicio’ (1350) and the Politics of the Papal Court at Avignon
Authors: Coleman Janet
Published: March 2011

The conciliar movement is often seen as the major political issue in which the universities of Oxford, Paris and the newer universities became actively embroiled during the fourteenth century and thereafter. It was the last and most ambitious product of the medieval vision of government by consent and representation that had evolved during the fourteenth century, and it marshalled the resources of theorists and practitioners of politics, of arts and theology faculty lecturers, of canon and civil lawyers, of monarchical publicists and papal hierocrats. In general, conciliarism drew upon the university-trained in a manner not previously seen on such a scale. During the Great Schism (1378–1449), the universities assumed exceedingly important roles in the affairs of the universal Church, with the University of Paris playing a dominant part from the start in proposing the via concilii. Pierre d'Ailly was, like Gerson, Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, and like the earlier Marsilius of Padua, a Paris scholar. And it has recently been argued that university support for the Basle conciliar programme was motivated not only by an attachment to the ideal of conciliar government but also by the hope of reforms which would improve the status of university-trained doctors in the Church. While the bulk of controls proposed by the conciliar movement concerned the reduction of papal control, a few aimed more explicitly at promoting the interests of graduates.
The Rev. William Harte and Attitudes to Slavery in Early Nineteenth-Century Barbados
Authors: Gilmore J. T.
Published: March 2011

In St Mary's Church, Barbados, there is a monument to a curate who died in 1851, and ‘whose labours as a clergyman of the Church of England for fifty years were distinguished by talent, energy & faithfulness. His efforts were unceasing to make known the truths of the Gospel to all classes in this island. At an early period in his ministry he led the way in rescuing the then slave population from spiritual bondage and darkness. In this work of Christian love he was ever resolute, singlemin-ded, Sc uncompromising’. Mr Harte's claim to our interest is further increased when we learn that he was once prosecuted by the vestry of his parish for, among other things, teaching slaves ‘doctrines of equality inconsistent with their obedience to their masters’ and for comparing the white inhabitants of his parish to those of Sodom and Gomorrah, somewhat to the advantage of the latter.
Joan of Kent, Lollardy and the English Reformation
Authors: Davis John
Published: March 2011

Joan Bocher, or Joan of Kent as she came to be called, is well known as the victim of the Edwardine Protestants in 1550. She was burnt for her Anabaptist view of the Incarnation: that Christ did not take flesh of the Virgin. Her Lollard and sacramentarian background is less well known. The purpose of this study is to draw attention to that background and to its significance. The story of Joan of Kent reveals that Tudor Lollardy, far from being an abortive movement, was a highly influential, eclectic and evolutionary branch of reform in England.
The Concordat of Nablus
Authors: Mayer Hans Eberhard
Published: March 2011

On 23 January 1120, in the ancient town of Nablus in Samaria, Patriarch Warmund of Jerusalem and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem held a famous assembly of the highest dignitaries of the clergy and nobility. It has become known as the Council of Nablus, although it was not, strictly speaking, a church synod. Because of lay participation it was more of a parlement, or a Reichsversammlung, a kind of assembly common in all medieval kingdoms which would have been summoned to decide matters of general interest. William of Tyre gave it a whole chapter of his chronicle and stated that its decisions were so widely known that it was superfluous to enumerate them. He correctly called the assembly a conventus publicus et curia generalis, and only in the rubric to the chapter was its synodal character referred to: Apud Neapolim urbem Samariae concilium celebratur.
Fashions in Monastic Endowment: the Foundations of the Clare Family, 1066–1314
Authors: Ward J. C.
Published: March 2011

The great expansion in monasticism in Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a commonplace of medieval history, as is the marked diminution in monastic grants after c. 1200. Far more attention, however, has been paid to the religious houses than to their founders, and it is only by looking at a baronial family over a long period that one can discern the fashions which undoubtedly existed in monastic benefaction and the changes in attitude of successive generations. The Clare family were both long-lasting and prolific, and, because of the numerous changes in the landed position of various members of the family, it is possible to see how closely in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the acquisition of new territories and the endowment of monasteries went together. Moreover, we are able to trace the changing preferences for different monastic orders and, to some extent, the reasons for this, and, in addition, to see this in the context not only of Normandy and England, but of Wales and Ireland as well. Whereas in the eleventh and early twelfth century, the Clares' gifts passed to Benedictine houses, many of them Norman or with Norman connections, they became more interested later in the new orders of the Augustinian canons and Cistercians which were spreading rapidly over Europe. At the same time they made grants to the military orders of the Hospitallers and Templars which, by giving knights the opportunity to combine fighting with a monastic life, fused two ideals of the twelfth-century world. In contrast to the variety and amount of these monastic benefactions, the Clares were content in the thirteenth century to make only the occasional grant, but they were insistent on maintaining their rights of patronage. In addition, their interest turned to the new orders of friars. There is, however, no indication here of continuous family interest from one generation to the next as would have been the case in the early twelfth century.
Thomas More and Tyranny
Authors: Fenlon Dermot
Published: March 2011

Tyranny is a recurrent preoccupation in the life and thought of Thomas More. It is among the first of the subjects which he takes for his own in his earliest examination of Greek prose. It is the theme of a significant number of his Latin poems. It provides the matter of his Richard III and the anti-matter of Utopia: it is among the evils which his imaginary commonwealth is designed to annihilate. ‘He always’, wrote Erasmus, ‘had a special loathing of tyranny.’
Alexander Alesius' Lectures on the Psalms at Cambridge, 1536
Authors: Wiedermann Gotthelf
Published: March 2011

In the summer of 1535 Anglo-German relatios assumed a new dimension. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic alliance on the continent and the possibility of a general council in the near future, Henry VIII was forced to consider more seriously than ever before a defensive alliance with the German Protestants. In August of that year, while Robert Barnes was approaching Wittenberg via Hamburg, commissioned by Henry both to prevent Melanchthon's rumoured visit to France and to make preparations for a full diplomatic mission to the princes of Lutheran Germany, Philip Melanchthon sent copies of the latest edition of his Loci Communes to the king of England, to whom they had been dedicated. The envoy on this mission was the Scottish Augustinian, Alexander Alesius, who was lecturing at the University of Wittenberg at that time. Alesius had received his own university education in St Andrews. Upon his graduation in 1515, he had entered the Augustinian priory there and subsequently proceeded to the study of theology. As a successful student of scholastic theology he had felt himself called to refute Lutheran theology as soon as it began to be debated in Scotland. In February 1528 he was commissioned to bring about the recantation of Patrick Hamilton, but the discussions with this first martyr of the Scottish Reformation as well as the latter's steadfast death at the stake led to a profound questioning of his own convictions. In the following year Alesius emerged as a severe critic ofthe old Church, for which he paid dearly by persecution and imprisonment. After an adventurous escape from St Andrews and months of travelling he finally reached Wittenburg, where he was inscribed in the faculty of arts in October 1532. So far very litde is known about Alesius' activities in Wittenberg. Yet there are two reasons why some elucidation of his academic activities and theological development during his three years at Wittenberg is highly desirable. First, it would be surprising indeed if his first experiences at this university, and especially the direct contact with Luther and Melanchthon, had not left a mark on his thought and career as a reformer. Second, his close friendship with the English reformers and his involvement in the doctrinal debates in England during the late 1530s suggests that Alesius formed an important link between the Reformation in England and in Germany.
A Study in the Formulation of Policy: The Genesis and Evolution of the Act of Six Articles
Authors: Redworth Glyn
Published: March 2011

The Act of Six Articles of 1539 affirmed half a dozen key Catholic beliefs and their denial was made punishable by law: a heretic's death was automatically prescribed for repudiation of transubstantiation, and possible death as a felon for those who denied the divine authority of clerical celibacy, vows of chastity, private masses or the practical necessity of auricular confession. The measure was made even more severe as recantation was of no effect where transgression of the first article was concerned. Little wonder its detractors called the act ‘the whip with six strings’, or the ‘bloody statute’. From early on, the passage of the act was often seen in terms of a personal triumph for Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, along with Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, who piloted the measure through parliament. All of the allusions to Gardiner's involvement come from hostile sources, and most of these ascriptions are vague and lacking in circumstantial detail. William Turner, in The rescuyinge of the Romishe fox, referred to the act in a much quoted statement as ‘the six articles, otherwise called Gardiner's gospel’; it remains a moot point whether Winchester's enemy, Turner, was ascribing to Gardiner authorship of the act or merely endorsement of its orthodoxy. An unknown author, whose work is to be found in Narratives of…the Reformation, argued that the act stemmed from the king's anger against reformist bishops who quarrelled over his deployment of monastic wealth, so Henry, ‘being stirred thereunto by Winchester and other old papists in the next parliament, made vj new articles of our faithy.… The most comprehensive and detailed indictment of Winchester's involvement comes in a highly virulent, and extremely effective, piece of propaganda directed against the bishop.
William I's Relations with Cluny
Authors: Barlow Frank
Published: March 2011

Those who have written about William the Conqueror and the English Church have usually implied that in the beginning it was the king's wish to reform his conquest with the help of a Cluniac mission, and that it was the refusal of Hugh of Semur, abbot of Cluny (1049–1109), to supply a contingent of monks which forced William to look elsewhere for helpers.1 This diplomatic failure therefore determined the effect of the Norman Conquest on the English Church. It led to Lanfranc, and so Anselm. Indeed, the consequences could be regarded as so vast as to be incalculable. There has, however, been a good deal of erroneous reference and general uncertainty on this matter; and diere are, indeed, some grounds for thinking that the king's approaches to Cluny occurred in the second half of his reign. A re-examination of all the evidence is required.
Pelagianism: Britain and the Continent
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2011

The debate about the social and political attitudes associated with Pelagian theology has exercised a stranglehold on the discussion of Pelagianism in Britain in recent years. Edward Thompson's new book on Saint Germanus and the end of Roman Britain prompts a re-examination of the nature of Pelagianism, a re-examination in which its fate in Britain must take a key part. It will not be necessary to recall here the interesting views on Pelagianism and the end of Roman Britain associated with Dr J. N. L. Myres and the late Dr John Morris which, as Gerald Bonner has rightly remarked, have ‘always appealed to historians of Roman Britain rather than to church historians who approached Pelagianism as a Christian movement of the Mediterranean region’. I do not want to take sides between the historians of Roman Britain and the church historians; and from the debate aroused by Myres and Morris I want to stand aside. In this paper I pursue the implications of thoughts which have germinated in the course of reading Thompson's fascinating book.
Richard Hooker and John Calvin: a Comment
Authors: Bauckham Richard
Published: March 2011

The question of Hooker's relationship to Calvin is an interesting one, but I wonder how far the evidence Dr Avis presents can really take us towards understanding it.

One aspect of the evidence which he has pointed out is the rather surprising paucity of Hooker's references to Calvin. In the Polity, outside the account of Calvin's proceeding at Geneva, Hooker cites Calvin only nine times, six times in his support and three times in order to disagree with him. In Hooker's works other than the Polity, there are six citations from Calvin, all in support of Hooker's argument. It should also be noticed that almost all of these references are polemical in intent, referring to Calvin because Calvin is an authority for Hooker's opponents. In most cases Hooker is trying to show that at some point even Calvin supports Hooker's case against the puritans. This material can, therefore, tell us little about Calvin's real theological influence on Hooker, which, if significant, must appear in ways other than explicit reference to Calvin.
Geneva and British Evangelicals in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Stunt Timothy
Published: March 2011

Several historians have recently observed a dichotomy in early nineteenth-century British evangelicalism both within the establishment and outside it. One camp was increasingly traditional, concerned with moral and social improvement, preaching an individualistic gospel of salvation by faith, and decidedly fearful of emotion and enthusiasm; other more daring spirits proved to be more radical, millenarian and ‘apostolic’ emphasising the place of spiritual experience, the need for a ‘higher’ ecclesiology and the dangers of respectability, and in so doing were generally alarming their more staid contemporaries.
Calvin and the Duty of Guardians to Resist
Authors: Lloyd H. A.
Published: March 2011

Calvin's teaching on the authority of magistrates to resist a tyrannical ruler has been much debated. The main ground of debate has been his discussion of the source of that authority, in the penultimate paragraph of the Institutes. Some commentators have stressed that for Calvin magisterial ‘authority comes from God and not from the people’. Others have insisted that on this question his thought has ‘democratic aspects’, and have argued that these influenced his immediate protestant successors.