bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pope Pius IX and Religious Freedom
Authors: Doyle Peter
Published: March 2016

The liberal outcry occasioned by the publication of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 concerned in large part the apparent condemnation by Pius IX of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. Lord John Russell quoted practice in Mexico to show that the Pope meant that Roman Catholicism should be maintained to the exclusion of every other form of worship, while the Saturday Review argued that Pius had defended the duty of the Church and the State to persecute those who worked against Roman Catholicism. The main problem for these and other critics was constituted by articles 24, 77 and 79 of the Syllabus: how could these be interpreted except as condemning religious toleration and liberty of speech? A few years later, Gladstone, in attacking the Vatican decrees on the Church, argued that the Syllabus had not only denied the principle of toleration but had also positively favoured persecution, and referred to article 78.
Persecution and Toleration in pre-colonial Africa: nineteenth-century Yorubaland
Authors: Iliffe John
Published: March 2016

When Christian missionaries penetrated sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century, three main persecutions of their converts caught the attention of Europe. The earliest took place in Madagascar between 1837 and 1857, when several hundred converts attached to the London Missionary Society were killed. The last of the three occurred in the Buganda kingdom of East Africa and culminated on 3 June 1886 when some 26 Baganda Christians were burned on a single pyre. Both these persecutions took place in autocratic and expanding kingdoms whose modernising rulers had initially welcomed missionaries for their skills. In both kingdoms the missionaries converted younger members of the ruling class. In both, the deaths of the modernising rulers precipitated traditionalist reactions in which converts were killed more to discourage and control Christianity than to extirpate it. Both persecutions were bounded in time. Both failed, leading only to further Christian expansion, the capture of power by Christian modernisers, and their use of the authoritarian political institutions to create overtly Christian kingdoms.
The Transformation of Hermitages into Augustinian Priories in Twelfth-Century England
Authors: Herbert Jane
Published: March 2016

The transformation of eremitic communities into Augustinian priories was a notable feature of early Augustinian growth; during the twelfth century no less than about 50 houses of the order began in this way. The popularity of the eremitic way of life had increased considerably during the eleventh century and, once established, a hermit often inspired others to join him, thus becoming the unwitting instigator of a religious group which needed formal organization. The Rule of St. Augustine was the constitution most frequently adopted in these circumstances. This was because it provided a general framework for community life rather than a set of detailed instructions and could therefore be assimilated more easily by an established group.
Via Ascetica: a Papal Quandary
Authors: Bolton Brenda M.
Published: March 2016

‘Rescue us O Lord Pope from barbaric power and subjugation to laymen’ was the cry of despair from the clerics of Grandmont which reached Pope Innocent III about the year 1215. It indicated the growth of the appeal to Rome which took place in the Cannon Law of the twelfth century. Many other examples of an increase in papal authority occurred at this time. The extension of papal jurisdiction is one of two important developments of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christendom with which this paper will be concerned.
Instabilitas loci: the Wanderlust of late Byzantine Monks
Authors: Nicol Donald M.
Published: March 2016

The Byzantines took more kindly than the westerners of the middle ages to their eccentrics of the spiritual life. They never lost sight of the true meaning of the wordmonachos —a solitary, a man who lives alone with God. The ultimate and deepest purpose of the monastic life was, as Saint Basil himself had declared, the ‘salvation of one’s own soul’. The way of themonachoswas a lonely one. For the many who were called it was perhaps only bearable in the gregarious circumstance of a community, akoinobionor coenobitic monastery; and Saint Basil believed that they were right. But in the Byzantine world it was always accepted that there would be a chosen few for whom even thekoinobionwas too gregarious. For them the communal monastery would be the primary school ofaskesisfrom which they would one day graduate to the harder and more rarefied discipline of anasketerion, a small group of monks living in a lavra or a skete under the supervision of a spiritual father.
Luther and the Ascetic Life
Authors: Yule George
Published: March 2016

Luther’s attack on Medieval ascetic practices in general and on monasticism in particular was not because of asceticism as such, nor even because of the abuses that had come into monastic life, but because much of the theology that lay behind them undercut the evangelical understanding of salvation.

This is the chief abomination of monasticism: we had to deny the grace of God and put our trust and hope in our holy monkery and not in the pure mercy and grace of Christ, as we had promised and begun to do in Christian baptism. For relying on works in order thereby to be justified and sanctified is in reality denying God’s grace, as St Paul clearly says (Gal. 5: 4:) ‘Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the works of the law are fallen from grace’.
The Religious Life in the Spain of Philip II and Philip III
Authors: Wright A.D.
Published: March 2016

From the vividly autobiographic Life of St Teresa famous images of conventual life in sixteenth-century Spain have been derived; both the dark impression of unreformed monastic existence and the heroic profile of reformed regulars. Before and after that era the social, not to say political prominence of certain figures, friars and nuns, in Spanish life is notorious, from the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs to that of Philip IV and beyond. Modern historical research has indeed highlighted the contribution to political and ecclesiastical development, to early Catholic reform above all, of key members of the regular clergy under the Catholic Monarchs. For monastics, as opposed to mendicants, in post-medieval Spain, the extensive and meticulous researches of Linage Conde have put all Iberian scholars in his debt. The fascinating origins of the essentially Iberian phenomenon of the Jeronymites have recently received new attention from J.R.L. Highfield, but further insights into the true condition of the religious life in the Iberian peninsula of the supposedly Golden Age are perhaps still possible, when unpublished material is consulted in the Roman archives and in those of Spain, such as Madrid, Simancas, Barcelona and Valencia. Considerations of space necessarily limit what can be suggested here, but the development of monastic life in Counter-Reformation Spain is arguably best considered in its extended not just in its stricter sense: for parallels and contrasts, as well as direct influences, were not confined by the normal distinctions between the eremitic and the monastic, the monastic and the mendicant, the old and the new orders, or even the male and female communities. Furthermore the intervention of Spanish royal authority in Portuguese affairs between 1580 and 1640, not least in ecclesiastical and regular life, provides a useful comparative basis for consideration of truly Iberian conditions.
Freedom through Discipline: the Concept of Little Church
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

Methodism … left a stigma on the mind of the eighteenth-century poor whilst helping at the same time to smother the growth of a working-class consciousness. Its doctrines perverted all that was healthy in men’s emotions, its creed was cruel and grim, its view of life bleak and joyless. Its place in society closely resembled that of a malignant tumour.

Thus a Sheffield undergraduate essayist, year of 1983. The essayist was Methodist bred. For him liberation lay in bondage to E. P. Thompson, year of 1963. His student vigour is as much to be applauded as his interpretation is to be deplored. For him as for so many much older historians the bold stroke or the broad view has become in fact a sweeping into tunnel vision and the emancipation has become in fact a confirmation of old folk wisdom: Methodism is puritanism is repressive is reprehensible. We come very close to the heart of the present volume’s matter: asceticism, or the attainment of spiritual perfection by means of self-discipline. Or at least we come very close to the heart of the matter as it is vulgarly seen, for although asceticism is not a word which is too frequently applied to English protestant Dissent, its associations with discipline, abstinence and repression are far too frequently so applied.
Basil of Caesarea and the Problem of the Wealth of Monasteries
Authors: Gould Graham
Published: March 2016

The work of Basil of Caesarea (c.330–79; Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia from 370) as an organizer and theologian of the monastic life has long been recognized as an important part of his activity as a bishop, and has been extensively studied. The principal authentic ascetic works of Basil which have formed the basis of this study are traditionally known as his monastic rules, though this description is not strictly accurate, since the rules are in fact composed of a series of questions and answers about the organization and administration of monasteries, about the theological principles of the monastic life, and about the interpretation of particular texts of Scripture. Basil’s answers almost always refer to Scripture, and show his asceticism to have been based firmly on obedience to the commandments of Christ as he interpreted them, particularly to the commandments of love of God and love of neighbour, which are discussed at the beginning of LR. Basil believed that obedience to the commandments could best be practised in the context of the common life, rather than that of the solitary monk.
Ecclesiastical Wealth in England in 1086
Authors: Ayton Andrew , Davis Virginia
Published: March 2016

England was a rich prize for William the Conqueror to have won at the battle of Hastings. His conquest was followed by a major redistribution of the wealth of his new kingdom. By the end of his reign, a tenurial revolution had swept through the lay landholding community, leaving only a handful of Anglo-Saxons as tenants-in-chief. The Church had undergone considerable changes of personnel; only one bishopric was still in English hands (Worcester), and of the greater Benedictine houses only Bath and Ramsey were still ruled by English abbots. Domesday Book, the great survey of England made in 1086, although difficult to interpret, provides much information to enable an examination of ecclesiastical wealth, its nature, and its distribution, in the late eleventh century.
‘Laid up Treasure’: The Finances of the English Jesuits in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: McCoog Thomas M.
Published: March 2016

A frequent criticism of the Society of Jesus, and one which Martin Grene, the Jesuit apologist whose An Account of the Jesuites Life and Doctrine was published in 1661, was especially eager to refute, was the possession of immense wealth. Grene’s rebuttal began with a distinction between an individual Jesuit and a Jesuit institution. The former was forbidden to accept any financial compensation for his apostolic services. What he did, he did freely. Grene stressed that the work was done by the Society gratuitously and simply for the love of God. The Jesuits sought no reward but relied on the providence of God ‘who exciteth devout people to supply their [the Jesuits’] necessity out of pure charity’. The alms of the faithful supported the Society and, through its dependence on charity, the Society hoped to avoid all semblance of avarice and simony.
‘A Just and Sufficient Maintenance’: Some Defences of the Clerical Establishment in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Gregory Jeremy
Published: March 2016

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.
Whose are the Teinds? The Scottish Union of 1929
Authors: White Gavin
Published: March 2016

The Church of Scotland, from which Episcopalians had departed in 1690, and Covenanters shortly thereafter, suffered further division in the eighteenth century. The Seceders broke off in 1733 and the Relief Presbytery in 1752. The Seceders split into Burghers and Anti-Burghers in 1747, and at the close of that century each of these bodies divided into New Light and Old Light. The Old Lights found their way back into the mainstream by means which need not concern us, while the two New Light bodies united in 1820 and in 1847 joined with the Relief Church to form the United Presbyterian Church.
Ministry at the Ends of the Earth: Priests and People in New South Wales, 1830-1840
Authors: Collins Paul
Published: March 2016

Catholics arrived at Botany Bay with the first fleet in January 1788. But it was not until 1820 that institutional Catholicism arrived in the persons of two Irish priests—Fathers Philip Conolly and John Joseph Therry. They had been appointed after considerable negotiation between the British government, the London Vicar Apostolic, Bishop William Poynter, the Vicar Apostolic of Mauritius, Bishop Edward Bede Slater (in whose vast territory Australia was included), and the Roman Congregation of Propaganda Fide. In the period 1788 to 1820 sporadic priestly ministry had been carried on by three Irish convict priests and by Father Jeremiah O’Flynn, the maverick Prefect Apostolic, whose brief appearance in Sydney in 1817-18 was terminated by deportation.
An Irish Benedictine Adventure: Dom Francis Sweetman (1872-1953) and Mount St Benedict, Gorey
Authors: Bellenger Dominic Aidan
Published: March 2016

On 11 January 1913 the following article, signed by ‘Me Fein’, appeared in an Irish periodical of pronounced nationalist views under the heading ‘Wexford Again. More Language Compulsion’:

Compulsion in educational matters seems to revolt some good souls in Wexford, and the following flash will possibly electrify Mr Fanning of the County Council of that model county. (By the way, it seems to be rapidly becoming the ‘model county’ for Irish Ireland wobbling and drunkenness prosecutions.) A school has been established at Gorey for some years by the Benedictine Fathers, for the better class young Irishmen, and it will be of interest to note some features of that educational establishment.
A Change of Mind in Some Scholars of the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries
Authors: Evans Gillian R.
Published: March 2016

Guibert of Nogent gives a number of examples of a change for the better (bonae mutationis exempla) in the lives of his contemporaries. He evidently considered conversion to be a subject of strong topical appeal to his readers, as well as a matter of importance in itself, and he gives as many examples as he can. He has a double sense of the word conversio in mind. He often refers to the decision to enter a monastery which was the common meaning of the term in his day, but he also understands by it something closer to the larger sense of‘conversion’. Evrard of Breteuil, he says, turned from his pride to examine the wretched state of his soul, and began to look about him for a way of life in which he might live more worthily. He followed the example of Theobald of Champagne, who came to dislike the profession of arms: inter ipsa rudimenta militiae arma despiciens, and made himself self-supporting as a charcoal-burner. One Simon, count of Valois, ‘enriched the religious life of our day by the outstanding example of an unexpected conversion’: mirabili nostri temporis religionem inopinae mutationis claritate ditavit. Such a conversion was often—as Guibert relates it—sudden and irreversible in the change of direction it brought about. For St Bruno, his conversionis initia was something to which he, and others, could later look back with certainty as the moment when he began to live a different kind of life.
Timeo Barones Et Donas Ferentes
Authors: Mason Emma
Published: March 2016

This sentiment might well have been voiced by any abbot contemplating the ambivalent relationship between his house and its patrons. They expected material, as well as spiritual returns on their investment, and these might well conflict with the best interests of the monastery. Ambivalence, though, was equally reflected in the attitude of religious houses towards their benefactors, as this brief survey of baronial patronage in England, between the late eleventh and the mid thirteenth centuries, indicates.

No real doubt seems to have been held by baronial patrons that benefactions were necessary to their wellbeing in the afterlife, but they were largely guided by the maxim that ‘it is the thought which counts’, judging from the limited extent of their grants, whether on their own behalf or for the souls of deceased kinsfolk. Could things have been otherwise? They were imbued from infancy with the concept that the integrity of the fief must prevail over all other considerations. Inevitably such conditioning was reflected in their response towards things spiritual as well as towards temporal claims on their loyalties.
Religious Motivation in the Biography of Hubert De Burgh
Authors: Cazel Fred A.
Published: March 2016

Hubert de Burgh was the most powerful man in England during the minority of Henry III, the real ruler of England for most of the decade of the 1220s. In his climb to power, in his exercise of it, and perhaps most of all, in his sudden disgrace and persecution, his biography is dramatic and compelling. One of the factors in his rise and fall was the religious motivation for his acts, a factor which is all too often neglected in modern biography and history. No one doubts that Hubert de Burgh was a Christian, though his lord, king John, flirted with disbelief; but no one has really considered what effects Hubert’s Christianity may have had upon his actions. Nor how strong it was by comparison with other motivations.
Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Same Society: The Fall of Convivencia in Medieval Spain
Authors: Highfield Roger
Published: March 2016

On 1 March 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain. Ten years later the Moorish inhabitants of Castile were offered the alternative of conversion or emigration. The fate of the Moors in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon was deferred until the reign of the emperor Charles V. But though he kept the inquisition out of Aragon for forty years, he did not succeed in reconciling his Morisco subjects with their Christian brothers. Philip II failed much more notably. For his policy stimulated the great Morisco revolt of 1568–70. Thereafter they were scattered round the kingdom in a forced diaspora. In 1582 their expulsion was proposed in the council of state. Finally in 1609–10 the government of Philip III, chastened by the twelve years truce in the Netherlands, set about the expulsion of all the three hundred thousand or so Moriscos who remained.
The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I
Authors: Trevor-Roper Hugh
Published: March 2016

It is well known that the church of England, in the time of Charles I, showed a special interest in the eastern church. Archbishop Laud patronised Greek and oriental scholarship. As its chancellor, he enriched Oxford University with Greek and oriental manuscripts and made plans to print them. He projected a Greek press at Oxford and achieved one in London. He obliged the king’s printers to print three Greek texts. He also provided the learned press at Oxford with Arabic type. He then sent qualified scholars to the Ottoman empire in search of more manuscripts. Meanwhile he endowed the study of the Hebrew and Arabic tongues.
Gladstone, Vaticanism, and the Question of the East
Authors: Matthew H. C. G.
Published: March 2016

That Gladstone was religious is obvious enough, and to state it does not get us very far, but this remains as far as most historians get. The aim of this paper is to show by exposition the religious motivation behind two of the greatest Gladstonian and Victorian outbursts—the clutch of writings on the Vatican council published in 1874–5 and the pamphlet and articles on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876. These two expostulations, though they occurred within twenty two months of each other, are usually treated by historians as quite unrelated. Moreover, although attention has been paid to their proximate causes, they have not been placed in the complex and long-drawn out process of Gladstone’s religious development. I hope to show that both groups of pamphlets, though written in passion spurred by proximate causes, reflected long standing and interrelated intellectual, theological and political interests, an understanding of which illuminates both Gladstone and his age. If this paper ranges from idealism to cabinet diplomacy, this reflects the range of influences on Gladstone who consistently and deliberately tried to place himself at the cross-roads of Victorian culture, society, religion and politics.
The Socialist Commitment in Karl Barth
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

The young Karl Barth is not an easy man to assess. It is not just that he covered a major theological revulsion by violent polemics, nor even that in the second world war he became a cult figure with hard-pressed protestants everywhere, overwhelmed by the need to save their churches from the destructive compromises of the church leaders, and subsequently, more briefly, a cult figure with a new theological establishment. More recently the young Karl Barth has been the victim of disputes over the uses to which Barthianism can be put. In the German student revolt the need to unify thought and action in politics and theology exposed a generation gap; a burning concern to many theological students, it embarrassed many of their teachers. At the Kirchliche Hochschule in Berlin, a bastion of Barthianism, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, a pupil of Hellmut Gollwitzer, sought to bridge the gap by showing that from beginning to end the core of Barth’s theology was a socialist commitment. (The first paragraph of this book reads starkly, ‘Karl Barth was Socialist’.) The perspective first opened by the student movement was confirmed by Marquardt’s editorial work on Barth’s Safenwil remains, and especially on forty three socialist speeches. Marquardt worked out his view systematically in a Habilitationschrift which was rejected at the Kirchliche Hochschule as unwissenschaftlich. Gollwitzer made a public scene, got the book published, and took the whole argument further in a long essay of his own. The clinching evidence (if diat is what it really is) of the speeches is not available under the terms on which Karl Barth’s unpublished remains are being edited until the volume in which they are to be incorporated is published. Yet most of the voluminous material ever likely to be available for the young Barth is now in print, and it is worth examining in its own right, as distinct from being expounded in the light of the Church Dogmatics with Marquardt.
Theological and Sociological Approaches to the Motivation of the Ecumenical Movement
Authors: Thompson David M.
Published: March 2016

‘Ecumenicalism is assumed to be the will of God, and is less discussed than eulogized.... In belittling old conflicts and veiling new, the ecumenical movement obscures past and present alike’. This assertion from the introduction to Robert Currie’s study of division and reunion in methodism constitutes a challenge to historians of the modern church which cannot be ignored. The significance of the ecumenical movement is acknowledged by both its protagonists and its critics, but the issue raised here is essentially one of integrity, primarily on the part of ecumenical advocates, but also indirectly on the part of those who study the movement historically. As such it is directly related to questions of religious motivation, whether treated theologically or sociologically.
Curate Infirmos:The Medieval Waldensian Practice of Medicine
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: March 2016

The question posed in this paper is the extent and nature of the medical practice of the medieval waldensian brothers. What lies behind this is in part a historiographical development which gained impetus in the 1960s, principally in the works of Mollat. In these the the period of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries has been identified as crucial in several areas: aprise de conscienceby many of the problems of material need, whether poverty or physical sickness or other disabilities, and the development of new ideas in some of these areas; a peaking of foundations of institutions of assistance, in particular hospitals for the sick, the outlines of which have become clear in Belgian and French work; the embodiment of the spiritual ideal of poverty in the apostolic religious movements which grew at this time. Mollat has juxtaposed these phenomena in order to suggest that one should look for interconnections between them, and it is in the spirit of his enquiry that the present question is raised. If we look at one of the two major evangelical heresies nurtured in the late twelfth cenury matrix described by Mollat, namely the movement of the waldensian brothers, shall we find an element which should be related to the wider interests and developments in assistance and, in particular, medical care which were displayed elsewhere at this time?
Little Brother be at Peace: The Priest as Holy Man in the Nineteenth-Century Ghetto
Authors: Connolly G. P.
Published: March 2016

I wonder whether we have not heard just a little too much of the secular element in functionalist theories as explanations of spiritual power at work within society. For while it is important to understand exactly how such power does its job, it does seem of equal if not far greater importance not to lose sight of its origins. Edward Thompson, for example, has presented a now often quoted summary of the virtues of the nineteenth century Catholic priest amongst the Irish poor of the ghetto. ...... ‘the only authority to whom the Irish labourers showed any deference; poorer; closer to the peasantry; literate but not far removed in class; free from identification with English employers; knowing the Gaelic, he brought news of home and .... relations and could be entrusted with remittances or messages.’ Is this why the priest held a place of honour in folk society, because he could be entrusted with anything from banking to pig keeping? Does it not seem odd that Thompson did not trouble to ask himself what the priest, a representative of everything ‘wholly other’, was doing in the slum in the first place? Had he done so I think he would have found that it was not by being spokesman for the evolutionary social services he held his power, but rather because he was, and instinctively was understood to be an objective bearer of holiness.
The Revival of Spiritual Healing in the Church of England 1920–26
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

‘How are your healing groups going?’ the present archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, enquired rhetorically in a charge to service chaplains in 1979. ‘The renewal of the Church’s ministry of healing’ the bishop of Selby has even more recently written, ‘is one hard obstinate fact that future historians will be unable to ignore when examining the Christian scene in the present century.’ The bishop, who is co-chairman of the Churches’ Council for Health and Healing, particularly singled out for praise the pioneers of this renewal: ‘individuals like James Moore Hickson, George Bennett and Dorothy Kerin’ as well as such later contributors as Leslie Weatherhead from the free churches, and more recently Cameron Peddie in Scotland and the American Dominican, Francis MacNutt. The bishop has further argued that ‘these powerful initiatives given to the healing movement by individual leaders were matched by the leadership of the Churches’, an assertion which is backed by citing the discussions devoted to the subject at the Lambeth conferences of 1908, 1920, 1930 and 1958. The first two of these conferences were presided over by archbishop Randall Davidson, who in the bishop of Selby’s book is presented as a crypto-champion of spiritual healing.
Early christian attitudes to property and slavery
Authors: De Ste. Croix G. E. M.
Published: March 2016

I begin with the central fact about Christian origins: that although the earliest surviving Christian documents are in greek and although Christianity spread from city to city in the graeco-roman world, its Founder lived and preached almost entirely outside the area of graeco-roman civilisation proper; the world in which he was active was not at all that of the polis (the city) but the very different world of the chōra (the countryside). This may require some explanation.
Holy kings – the bane of seventh-century society
Authors: Hill Rosalind M. T.
Published: March 2016

In his recent and excellent book The Coming of Christianity Henry Mayr-Harting has some interesting things to say about lay society and the monastic ideal. Taking as his sources those two fundamental guides to seventh-century history, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and the Penitential of Theodore of Tarsus, he shows how the Christian pattern of holiness, as demonstrated especially in the monastic life, could be observed also in the lives of Bede’s heroic kings. ‘The King’ he says, ‘was a kind of Christ, and his life should show forth the virtues of his prototype as they were cultivated in monastic circles. Oswald demonstrated his generosity and charity, . . . Sigbert of the East Saxons demonstrated his meekness, . . . Oswin of Deira demonstrated his humility . . . The Ecclesiastical History presents a gallery of exemplary kings, each of whom had many virtues, but each of whom is brought forward in a narrative of great care and skill to illustrate the particular virtue in which Bede regarded him as pre-eminent.’
Judicium Dei:the social and political significance of the ordeal in the eleventh century
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2016

‘Church, Society and Politics’ is a theme of great importance, and for most of the history of the church christians have been aware of the distinction between these three areas of human activity. They have differed about their relationship, and in particular about the extent to which political action and social order ought to be controlled directly by the christian ethic, but it has been widely recognised that the conduct of government, for example, was a field which had its own special requirements and expertise, in which God’s personal intervention would be neither expected nor welcomed. ‘Aid from heaven’, went one nineteenth-century comment, ‘aid from heaven you may have by saying your prayers, but no angel will come to name the junior lords of the Treasury’.
Luther and the right of resistance to the emperor
Authors: Cargill Thompson W. D. J.
Published: March 2016

Like most problems connected with Luther, the question of his attitude to the right of resistance to the emperor is one that has attracted a great deal of attention from german scholars. Sixty years ago, at the height of the first world war, Karl Müller published his pioneering essay,Luthers Äusserungen über das Recht des bewaffneten Widerstands gegen den Kaiser,in which he provided the first detailed analysis of the development of Luther’s views: since then the problem has been extensively debated by a succession of german historians and theologians. Yet it is perhaps typical of the insularity of so much english historical writing on the continental reformation that these debates have largely been ignored on this side of the Channel. Even to-day there is no adequate study of the problem in english.
Town and Monastery in the Carolingian Period
Authors: McKitterick Rosamond
Published: March 2016

Although there were both urban and rural monastic communities in the Frankish kingdoms in the Carolingian period, far more is known about the landed monasteries in the countryside regarding both their internal organisation and the relationship between them and the rural community in which they lived and over which they were the lords. The statutes of Adalhard of Corbie for example provide information concerning the monastery both within the monastic community and on its estates, and show us the abbey as the centre of an agricultural region. The monasteries in the towns on the other hand are much less well-documented and the evidence for Carolingian towns themselves is both sparse and difficult to interpret. If a town is understood to be ‘a concentration of population larger than the neighbouring agricultural settlements in which there is a substantial non-agricultural population which may be concerned with defence, administration, religion, commerce or industry’, there are not very many Carolingian centres for which enough evidence survives to justify their being called towns. Valenciennes for example, described recently as une ville carolingienne, is mentioned in the sources occasionally as a portus and seems to have succeeded Farrars in importance in the region sometime in the eighth century. In the time of Charles the Bald it had a mint, and Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Lothar I and Lothar II are all known to have issued charters from a royal palatium at Valenciennes. There were several churches and the abbey of St Salvius in the settlement, and it is likely that some trading activity went on. But other than that Valenciennes was a settlement which carried on some sort of economic activity, very little is known. The abbey of St Amand, a rural monastery nine miles from Valenciennes, achieved a far more influential and important position in the kingdom than the town of Valenciennes ever did.
Priests and Patrons in the Fourteenth-Century Diocese of Carlisle
Authors: Rose R. K.
Published: March 2016

There were several possibilities open to a man entering the secular clergy in the later middle ages. Among these were careers as a royal, papal, or episcopal servant, as a teacher or scholar, or as the rector or vicar of a parish church. If he did not set his hopes high, he could join the ranks of the chaplains of his diocese, helping the incumbents of the parish churches with the administration of their benefices and with the cure of souls, serving chapels and perpetual chantries, and serving oratories in noble and gentry households. Whatever his ambitions and aspirations, however, the secular priest’s situation depended entirely upon the charity and good will of those in a position to exercise patronage: family and friends, the beneficed clergy, the bishop and his familia, and the established, landed families of the area. And whether the possibilities became opportunities in the form of the patronage desired depended to a large extent upon the social position of the priest’s family, the proper connections, and the extent of his education. These were the realities faced universally by the clergy of the universal church, but each region had its own particular system of patronage, varying with the needs and structure of society. As a case in point, the lives and success of the clergy of the northern English diocese of Carlisle, despite the mission and aims held in common with the clergy of the entire church, were dictated to a degree by the rural nature of the diocese and its location on the Anglo-Scottish border.
The Late Byzantine Monastery in Town and Countryside
Authors: Bryer Anthony
Published: March 2016

In this paper I want to look not only at the late Byzantine monastery in town and countryside, but how each category fared after the Turkish conquests, when towns became important again. By the late Byzantine monastery I mean one commonly established by a founder’stypikon,and commonly enjoyingstavropegiacrights of autonomy (especially from the thirteenth century). Material for the late Byzantine monastery is abundant enough both before and after the conquests, especially on Athos which is a special case. But it is comparatively less explored after the conquests. This is curious, for if it is true, as we are so often told, that it was the Orthodox church which kept alive the flame ofHellenismesduring the dark centuries of theTourkokratia,and if it is true that it is monasticism which is the peculiar guardian of Orthodoxy, and that monks are, in Theodore of Stoudion’s words, ‘the nerves and foundations of the Church’, the fate of the late Byzantine monastery should be an important field of study. I have adapted my approach to the nature of the bulk of the surviving evidence, which is economic. This may be like trying to write an account of a university’s research on the basis of its finance department’s records alone, but in times of a squeeze it may not be an unfair approach. A late Byzantine monk had to feast so as to fast. I began my study by making a census of known Byzantine monasteries, within the twelfth-century borders. This has been done before. Beck worked on a corpus of a hundred and sixty monasteries, which Charanis brought up to two hundred and forty one. Charanis reckoned that there might be about seven hundred recorded all told, less than a tenth of the actual total. By chance my list of monasteries came to exactly seven hundred, so I drew the line there, although it is clear that diligence would unearth up to one thousand.
Penitence and Peace-Making in City and Contado: The Bianchi of 1399
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

A major trend in the recent historiography of medieval and renaissance Italy has been towards the reassertion of the fundamental importance of the countryside and of agriculture. This is not so much to deny the unique position occupied by the cities in Italian life as to remind us of some essential features of those cities and of the men who ruled them. Towns were more typically market centres for their localities than entrepôts of long-distance commerce; while many members of both the higher and the lower urban social strata carried with them throughout life a status ultimately derived from the status they or their forebears occupied or had occupied in rural life. Conversely, the members of, say, the Florentine urban patriciate around the year 1400 were almost to a man landlords in the surrounding countryside. They were also of course the men who made the laws, levied taxation and generally controlled the government of the countryside as of the town. At every level of life we have to postulate an intimacy of relations between town and country which the conditions of modern urban life can make it an effort even to imagine.
Perpetual Curacies in Eighteenth Century South Wales
Authors: Guy John R.
Published: March 2016

In 1715 the governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty promoted a bill in parliament ‘for making more effectual her late Majesty’s gracious intentions for augmenting the maintenance of the poor clergy’. Section four of this statute declared that the bounty had been ‘intended to extend not only to parsons and vicars who come in by presentation or collation, institution and induction; but likewise to such ministers who come in by donation, or are only stipendiary preachers or curates’.
Ideals in Urban Mission: Episcopalians in Twentieth Century Glasgow
Authors: White Gavin
Published: March 2016

At the beginning of this century Glasgow was romantic. It was a successful city, and it was growing rapidly. The 1901 census had shown that Scottish cities were growing faster than English, and Glasgow had increased by fifteen per cent in ten years.

Much of this increase came from England, and from urban England at that. The bishop of Glasgow and Galloway said of his flock in 1901, ‘I can never find a west of Scotland man who is a hereditary episcopalian. The church seems to have been wiped away just as a man wipes a dish, and turns it upside down’. Instead they had migrants who ‘have come bringing no money with them, requiring us to provide religious ministrations for them. We have done our best.’ It was estimated that there were fifty thousand episcopalians and Anglicans in Glasgow, of whom only fourteen thousand were known to the clergy. In 1894 a census of four areas rated episcopalians at six per cent of die population, and another census in Govan at ten per cent. In a famous speech to the representative church council of 1901, Anthony Mitchell admitted ‘a feeling of dejection’ at the size of the problem, though he added that nowhere else would missionary work find ‘a readier return’. The bishop substantiated this, saying that Glasgow people were ‘not hostile to religion . . . many of them are thirsting after it’, as shown by the crowds attracted by street preachers. The rural dioceses in Scotland were asked to support the work as their migrants were in Glasgow, though in fact these were probably not a significant number.
L’erudition Ecclesiastique Du XVIIE Siecle Et La Nostalgie De L’antiquite Chretienne
Authors: Neveu Bruno
Published: March 2016

Religion historique et non religion cosmique, le christianisme entretient avec l’histoire universelle et avec son propre passé des rapports qui s’enrichissent et se compliquent d’âge en âge. Le radicalisme des réveils spirituels en révolte contre l’opacité de l’institution ecclésiastique tente régulièrement d’abolir le poids des siècles pour en revenir à la simplicité fervente des origines. Au sein de l’Eglise romaine, où la continuité historique constitue, plus qu’ailleurs, le critère de l’autorité, c’est la tâche de la critique d’érudition que de déchiffrer et d’interpréter les monuments de la tradition—Pères, conciles, papes—pour éclairer et justifier la doctrine du présent par le témoignage de l’antique, auquel on restitue, par là même, son lustre terni par le temps et sa puissance d’exemplarité. Le primitivisme si apparent dans la Réforme protestante n’est pas étranger non plus à la Réforme catholique et à la tridentinité.
The Publishing Policy of the English Jesuits at St Omer, 1608–1759
Authors: Walsh Michael J.
Published: March 2016

The Annual Letters of the college of the English Jesuits at St Omer record the visit to the college in 1608 of the town’s fourth bishop, the Franciscan Jacques de Blaze. He was taken on a tour of inspection. In a frequently-quoted passage the Letters recall that he was impressed by all that he saw, ‘but most of all by a certain little house, equipped with a printing press and all the accessories of printing, which we have lately fitted up, and very handsomely too’. In 1660, apparently with the assistance of the college press, Thomas Geubels published the Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Iesu by a former provincial superior of the English Jesuits, Fr Henry More. According to More’s account Robert Persons had established the printing house to produce books which might ‘both feed piety, and expose the ravings of heretics’.
Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism
Authors: Bossy John
Published: March 2016

My motives in choosing this subject are: to respond to the invitation of our chairman; to expound the conviction that the persistence of French Catholicism through the crises of the Reformation was largely the result of the voluntary association of French Catholics; and to try to discover whether there was anything in Catholic theological or pastoral teaching of the period which might have given these associations a theoretical perspective, or grounded them in some kind of associative conception of the Church. I add that, despite the very considerable importance of the subject, one might even claim its decisive importance for the outcome of the wars of religion in Europe as a whole, it has (with some shining exceptions) not received very much attention from historians, and that in England essential texts and studies are hard to come by.
Idealism and Association in Early Nineteenth Century Dissent
Authors: Lovegrove Deryck
Published: March 2016

In April 1799 Francis Wollaston, rector of Chislehurst, published a pamphlet warning his parishioners and the public at large of the activities of certain seditious societies whose purpose was that of disseminating Jacobin principles; ideas already responsible for plunging France into chaos. His enquiries, he announced, had confirmed his worst suspicions:

The parties who so kindly, and out of pretended benevolence undertake to instruct my people for me, are members of a society, calling itself the Union Society of Greenwich: the same, as I am informed, which under the name of an Itinerant Society, had been driven from a public-house in that neighbourhood some little time since.

Wollaston’s message, an ecclesiastical variant of the more general concern to engage in active defence of the established order, received its definitive form the following year at the hands of Bishop Samuel Horsley. In an important passage in his second visitation charge to the clergy of Rochester diocese the bishop referred to the emergence of an ecclesiastical subculture consisting of religious conventicles, Sunday schools and itinerant preachers. In Horsley’s eyes these ecclesiastical excrescences were merely the outward manifestations of a more sinister and worrying development, the appearance of associations designed to defray the costs of the current spate of unauthorized ‘religious’ activity.
Priest and Layman in a Minority Church: the Roman Catholic Church in the Northern Netherlands 1592–1686
Authors: Spiertz Mathieu G.
Published: March 2016

In 1572, when the provinces of Holland and Zeeland were almost completely overrun by the ‘Geuzen’, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-1585) succeeded to the Holy See. In 1578 this Pope forbade the Roman Catholics in the rebellious provinces to give any civil or military service to the rebels’ authority—on penalty of excommunication—and identified Catholicism with being faithful to the Spanish cause. When this Pope died in 1585, there was reasonable hope held in Rome that the recapture of the Northern Netherlands—and hence the restoration of Catholicism—would soon be realized, as Parma’s campaign was succeeding in the South of the Netherlands and one town after another fell into his hands.

During the pontificates of Sixtus V (1585-1590) and Clement VIII (1592–1605) it gradually became clear to the Holy See that in the Northern Netherlands an independent state under Calvinist authority might be in the making. In these provinces the episcopal sees, set up in 1559, were either vacant or deserted since the bishops lived in exile. In spite of requests by Philip II the Holy See postponed the appointment of new bishops. However, in 1592 Clement VIII appointed an administrator, a ‘vicar apostolic’, who, in the name of the Pope, was to administer all the provinces where Calvinism had gained the upper hand, notably the area north of the great rivers in the present-day Netherlands. This vicar apostolic Sasbout Vosmeer (1592–1614) was consecrated in 1602 and given the title of archbishop of Philippi inpartibus infidelium.