bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ministering to the Ministers: The Discipline of Recalcitrant Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln 1830–1845
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: March 2016

By 1830, the effectiveness of the Church of England’s ministry was believed to have become seriously compromised, because it still possessed no adequate means for disciplining its clergy. It had long been recognized that the Church’s structure, and in particular the strength of the parson’s freehold, made it impossible for it to exercise the same sort of authority over its ministers as the dissenting bodies, or even the Church of Scotland. The view that the inadequacy of disciplinary measures was detrimental to the standing of the Established Church was in fact shared both by those hostile to and those supportive of it. On the one hand, John Wade’s Extraordinary Black Book, published in 1831 and intended as an indictment of corruption, rapacity, and jobbery within the Establishment, made the exposure of abuses in Church discipline one of its principal objectives. Not unnaturally, loyal churchmen also expressed considerable anxiety at the spectacle of bishops almost powerless in the face of clerical malefactors within their dioceses. Throughout the 1830s, the correspondence of clergy and the speeches of senior Anglicans in Parliament reflect an urgent desire that appropriate measures be swiftly introduced in order to combat cases of clerical irregularity.
Desecration of the Host: The Birth of an Accusation
Authors: Rubin Miri
Published: March 2016

A New tale entered the circle of commonplace narratives about Jews which were known to men and women in the thirteenth century: the tale of Host desecration. This new narrative habitually unfolded (i) an attempt by a Jewish man to procure (buy, steal, exchange) a consecrated Host in order to (2) abuse it (in re-enactment of the Passion, in ridicule of bread claimed to be God), (3) only to be found out through a miraculous manifestation of the abused Host, which leads to (4) punishment (arrest and torture unto death, lynching by a crowd). The tale was a robust morality story about transgression and its punishment, and it always ended with the annihilation of the abusing Jew and often of his family, neighbours, or the whole local Jewish community. It was a bloody story, both in the cruelty inflicted on the Host/God and in the tragic end of the accused abuser and those related to him. This basic narrative was open to myriad interpretations and combinations, elaborations at every stage of its telling. It is a particularly interesting narrative inasmuch as it was often removed from the context of preaching and teaching, of exemplification, into the world of action and choice. The Host-desecration tale was not only a poignant story about Jews, it was also a blueprint for action whenever the circumstances of abuse suggested themselves in the lives of those who were reared on the tale. The story’s fictionality was masked from the very beginning of its life: it was always told as a report about a real event, with no irony or explicit elaboration. It was a concrete, new tale, which provided tangible knowledge about Jews, and through the actions of Jews, about the Eucharist.
Why the Spanish Inquisition?
Authors: Edwards John
Published: March 2016

It seems quite extraordinary that an important European country should apparently have wished to go down in history as the originator of calculated cruelty and violence against members of its civil population. Yet the writers of the famous sketches inMonty Python’s Flying Circuswere far from being the first to introduce ‘the Spanish Inquisition’ as a cliché to represent arbitrary and yet calculated tyranny. By the late sixteenth century, Christian Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, had already formed the image of Spain which has become known as the ‘Black Legend’. Just as many Spaniards distrusted Italy, because Jews lived freely there, and France because Protestants were in a similar condition in that country, so Italian opposition to the forces of Ferdinand the Catholic and his successors, together with the ultimately successful Dutch rebels, created, with the help of growing knowledge of Spain’s atrocities against the inhabitants of the New World, a counter-myth, in which the Spaniards themselves appeared as heardess oppressors, but also, ironically, as crypto-Jews (marranos). Erasmus wrote that France was ‘the most spotless and most flourishing part of Christendom’, since it was ‘not infected with heretics, with Bohemian schismatics, with Jews, with half-Jewishmarranos’, the last term clearly referring to Spain. Not surprisingly, there is also a Jewish story of what happened in Spain before, during, and after 1492, which may best be summed up, in general outline, in the words, written in 1877, of Frederic David Mocatta’s study of Iberian Jews and the Inquisition.
Catholic Anti-Judaism in Reformation Germany: The Case of Johann Eck
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

In any inquiry into Christian attitudes to Judaism in sixteenth-century Germany, exhibit A would undoubtedly be the later writings of Martin Luther against the Jews. The choice for exhibit B presents more of a problem, but a strong case can be made out for an almost contemporary anti-Jewish treatise from the pen of Luther’s staunchest Catholic opponent, Johann Eck. HisRefutation of a Jew Pamphlettends to attract superlatives—‘the most abusive to have been written against the Jews’, ‘the most massive and systematic formulation of the blood libel… thesummaof learned discourse on ritual murder’, ‘the absolute nadir of anti-Jewish polemic in the early-modern period’—and something of its unpleasantness can be gauged from the fact that Trachtenberg cited it so often in his disturbing book,The Devil and the Jews. The year in which our Society has chosen to take for its theme ‘Christianity and Judaism’ is also the 450th anniversary of the publication of Eck’s remarkable treatise. It is perhaps an appropriate occasion on which to explore, in rather more detail than has been done before, the context and nature of Eck’s anti-Jewish polemic.
The Bishops and the Jews, 1828-1858
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: March 2016

Between 1830 and 1858 fourteen separate attempts were made to remove the legal disabilities which prevented Jews from sitting in Parliament. The first bill was dismissed by the unreformed House of Commons, and the next twelve, from 1833 onwards, were rejected by the Lords after being passed by the Commons. It was only the fourteenth attempt, a carefully constructed compromise between leading members of both Houses, which finally was to prove acceptable. The struggle for parliamentary representation became the longest and most bitter battle which the Anglo-Jewish community had to wage with the Christian Establishment during the nineteenth century. After the election of Lionel Nathan Rothschild as Member of Parliament for the City of London in 1847, the campaign became one of constitutional urgency, and not merely of hypothetical significance. Rothschild was re-elected with an increased majority in 1849, and returned again in 1852 and twice in 1857. In 1851 he was joined in the shadows of Westminster by David Salomons, when Salomons won a seat at Greenwich. The electorate, even in places such as Greenwich, which lacked a significant Jewish population, had apparently delivered its own verdict on the suitability of Jews being admitted to the legislature.
Martyrdom in East and West: The Saga of St George of Nobatia and England
Authors: Frend William H. C.
Published: March 2016

Martyrs were the heroes of the Early Church. For a long period after the reign of Constantine until Benedictine monasticism took over their mantle, their lives and exploits provided a focus for the idealism of Christians in Western Europe. They represented the victory of human steadfastness and loyalty in defence of the faith triumphing over irreligious tyranny and the powers of evil. In the East, however, where Constantine had emphasized as early as 324 his complete rejection of the persecutions of his pagan predecessors, it was not long before memories of the past were transformed to meet other pressing needs of the day. Threatened first by Germanic and Slav invaders and then by the armies of Islam, Byzantine cities sought the protection of martyrs and the heavenly hierarchy that led from them through the Archangel Michael to the Virgin herself. In Nobatia, the northernmost of the three Nubian kingdoms that straddled the Nile valley between Aswan and a point south of Khartoum, the military martyrs, George, Mercurius, Theodore, and Demetrius seconded the endeavours of Michael and the Virgin to preserve the kingdoms and their Christian religion.
Bede and the Martyrdom of St Oswald
Authors: Gunn Victoria A.
Published: March 2016

In recent years there has been a definite growth of interest in the royal saints of the early medieval period. Specifically from France, academics such as Robert Folz, and from Britain, historians such as David Rollason and Susan Ridyard, have turned their erudition and their pens to elucidate this topic. The scope of this paper will be to examine one of the saints who has been of interest to these authors: St Oswald of Northumbria. That Oswald was considered a saint from early after his death is not in any doubt: Bede’sHistoria ecclesiasticamakes this quite clear. Rather, this paper turns its attention to the nature of that sanctity in order to decide whether or not Bede actually perceived Oswald as a martyr. To look at this question this study will firsdy compare Oswald with other Anglo-Saxon martyr-kings. Secondly, it will observe what comments Bede actually makes concerning Oswald’s sanctity. And, finally, it will see how he is categorized and discussed in other contemporary and near-contemporary texts.
The Case of the Missing Martyrs: Frederick II’S War with the Church 1239–1250
Authors: Loud G. A.
Published: March 2016

The Emperor Frederick II was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX on Palm Sunday (20 March) 1239. Over the next six years a number of peace negotiations and offers took place, all of which ultimately failed, despite a belief at the imperial court in the spring of 1244 that success had been achieved. Finally, at the Council of Lyons, on 17 July 1245, Frederick was declared deposed and ‘deprived of all honour and dignity’ by Pope Innocent IV, and his subjects’ oaths of fealty made null and void.
Choosing Death? Experiences of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Europe
Authors: Rubin Miri
Published: March 2016

Probably one of the most emotive words in our ethical and religious languages, ‘martyrdom’ poses the historian with a complex array of powerful images and awesome actions. Its very naturalness, as a grounding moment through which religions and radical movements are substantiated and made public, raises serious problems of perspective, empathy, judgement: studying martyrdom brings us in touch with some of the most admirable and some of the most repugnant and saddening aspects in human behaviour. Religions, parties, and nations claim martyrs as unambiguous signs of virtue, truth, and moral justification, and thus render martyrdom seemingly obvious. Painful, yes, but admirable; chilling, but satisfying, since in it men and women turn into gods, become myth-makers, and lend legitimation to whoever may claim them. So martyrdom—its discussion, definition, the claim to its virtue and beauty—is always open to appropriation, to competition, to contestation.
Martyrs on the Move: Relics as Vindicators of Local Diversity in the Tridentine Church
Authors: Ditchfield Simon
Published: March 2016

Robert Bellarmine put it with his customary clarity and forcefulness when he wrote:

There is nothing that they [the Protestants] shudder at and abhor more than the invocation of saints, the cult of relics and the veneration of images. For they consider that these things constitute manifest impiety and idolatry.

It was in recognition of this pressing reality that Rome—principally via the agency of die Sacred Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies—sought to put its house in order. It did so in two main ways: on the one hand, it relaunched official saint-making—the year of the congregation’s foundation (1588) saw the first official canonization after a hiatus of over half a century. Hand in hand with this went the tightening up of canonization procedure which was to culminate in a papal bull of 1634 that remained the final word on the subject until well into this century. On the other hand, regional churches were required to submit their local saints’ offices to Rome for approval. In addition, die authentication, translation, and display of relics became subject tounprecedented regulation.
Segregation in Church
Authors: Aston Margaret
Published: March 2016

The title of this paper, ‘Segregation in Church’, may sound like an appendix to the theme of this year’s conference on Women in the Church. I hope to persuade you otherwise. For although my topic focuses on the ostensibly narrow question of the physical position of the sexes at worship, it is related to much broader issues. Ancient rules about impurity and the protection of holy rites and holy places; the fear of sex and the threat of sexual encounters intruding into divine offices; the elevation of virginity and the Virgin Mary; these are all matters that had to do with the seemingly simple question of the individual’s place at public prayer.
The Reformation and Elizabeth Bowes: a Study of a Sixteenth-century Northern Gentlewoman
Authors: Newman Christine M.
Published: March 2016

More than twenty years ago, in the Introduction to his influential article which focused upon the life of Anne Locke, Patrick Collinson bemoaned the lack of recognition given to the role of women in the English Reformation. Happily, over the last few years this situation has been somewhat rectified, as modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized the degree of feminine participation in the spiritual upheavals of the period. The problem, however, remains that there is little evidence of personal feminine testimony, especially for the immediate post-Reformation period. The example of Elizabeth Bowes is, unfortunately, a case in point. Mrs Bowes, the wife of a prominent Durham gentleman, is well known to historians as a devoted follower and later the mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer, John Knox. Particularly during the early 1550s, Elizabeth maintained a regular correspondence with Knox. Of this, some thirty of Knox’s letters have been preserved, mainly in the form of a transcript copied from the originals in 1603. These letters, indeed, provide the main source of evidence for the life of the reformer during this period. Yet it is also apparent, from the tone of Knox’s replies, that much of the correspondence was devoted to the discussion and analysis of Mrs Bowes’s religious anxieties and aspirations, as she struggled to come to terms with her conversion to the Protestant Faith.
Women in Social Catholicism in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century France
Authors: McMillan James F.
Published: March 2016

This lecture should also have a sub-title, perhaps something like ‘a study in ambiguity’, because I want to use it as a particular example of the great paradox which seems to lie at the core of the relationship between women and the Church. On the one hand, as is well known, most varieties of Christianity have been marked by a more or less powerful misogynist strain which, understandably, has been the focus for feminist denunciations of the Church as one of the principal enemies of women’s rights. On the other hand, as ecclesiastical historians perhaps know better than others, Christianity cannot be viewed crudely as a force invariably responsible for women’s oppression, since from its beginnings it has proved itself specially attractive to women, allowing them to find inner peace and deep fulfilment through Church-related activities. I hope to show tliat the history of women’s involvement in the social Catholic movement in France in the period before the First World War is a perfect illustration of the paradoxical situation in which, within the framework of a potentially restrictive Christian discourse, women have been able to make a distinctive contribution both to their religion and to society in general.
Medieval Liturgy as Theatre: the Props
Authors: Swanson R. N
Published: March 2016

It may be debated how far the liturgy of the medieval Church (in particular the Mass) can be considered as ‘drama’, but its theatrical impact and organization are undeniable. Staged within a distinct space, the principal act of the Church’s worship had its own text and directions, which through contemplation and allegory summarized Christ’s terrestrial experiences and various aspects of the Christian faith. The Mass and other liturgical celebrations were events to be visualized, both externally and internally. It has been said of medieval plays that their

fundamentally visual nature… so apparent to [a] medieval audience, often escapes the attention of modern scholars. The lines drawn between disciplines hinder easy access to methods that would enable readers to pass from a text to a visual reconstruction of it. Nonetheless the readers of dramatic texts need to visualize stage properties, costumes, and sets, and, when appropriate, to see beyond their literal meaning to their symbolic import. Further, readers must see gesture, placement, and interrelationship of actors, and understand how these visual elements contribute to the content.
The Fathers and the Children
Authors: Clark Gillian
Published: March 2016

A Theban once came to abba Sisoes, wanting to become a monk. The old man asked him whether he had anyone in the world. He said, ‘I have a son.’ The old man said to him, ‘Go, throw him into the river, and then you shall be a monk.’ When he went off to throw him in, the old man sent a brother to stop him. The brother said, ‘Stop: what are you doing?’ He said, ‘The abba told me to throw him in.’ So the brother said, ‘But now he has told you not to.’ He left him and went to the old man, and he became a proven monk because of his obedience.
Prescription and Practice: Protestantism and the Upbringing of Children, 1560-1700
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2016

How children should be brought up is an everlasting question that vexed our forefathers just as much as ourselves. The most obvious difference between most of the thinking and writing that goes on about it today and that of the early modern period is that a largely secular approach has replaced a fundamentally and deeply religious one. So it is natural that the historian of this period should ask how and in what ways Protestantism changed things in this respect. What emerges in facing this issue, in a peculiarly acute form, is the common historical problem of relating prescription to practice. Patrick Collinson has remarked upon the ‘stark contradiction’ between ‘the austere severity of the conduct books and what little can be glimpsed of the real world outside these texts’. It is this contradiction that my paper addresses. I shall approach it as follows. First I will explore the conduct-book advice about parental duty and practice and about children’s obligations to their parents. This provides what we may call the Puritan way of upbringing. I shall relate this to some material from personal sources, like diaries and autobiographies, about what may actually have happened in the home. I will then turn to schooling, which, in its new scale and intensity, can be seen as a crucial social development in Elizabethan and Stuart England, fired in large part by the Protestant evangelizing impulse and its concomitant propaganda of social order. The burgeoning grammar schools, it will be argued, were the principal public instrument of a new and purposeful construction of masculinity.
Representations of Children in the Sermons of Philip Doddridge
Authors: Deconinck-Brossard Françoise
Published: March 2016

When one realizes how small a percentage of eighteenth-century pulpit literature consists of sermons to, or about, children, one may wonder whether the much-vaunted new ‘awareness of childhood’ ever influenced preachers in the Augustan age. The most prominent minister to address the theme being Philip Doddridge of Northampton, the influential Dissenter, it seems worth investigating how he and his contemporaries chose to represent children.
St Symeon the New Theologian (969-1022): Byzantine spiritual renewal in search of a precedent
Authors: McGuckin John Anthony
Published: March 2016

St Symeon the New Theologian is, without question, one of the most original and intriguing writers of medieval Byzantium. Indeed, although still largely unknown in the West, he is surely one of the greatest of all Christian mystical writers; not only for the remarkable autobiographical accounts he gives of several visions of the divine light, but also for the passionate quality of his exquisiteHymns of Divine Love, the remarkable intensity of his pneumatological doctrine, and the corresponding fire he brings to his preaching of reform in the internal and external life of the Church. He was a highly controversial figure in his own day. His disciples venerated him as a saint who had returned to the roots of the Christian tradition and personified its repristinization. His opponents, who secured his deposition and exile, regarded him as a dangerously unbalanced incompetent who, by overstressing the value of personal religious fervour, had endangered the stability of that tradition. TheVitawhich we possess was composed in 1054, in an attempt to rehabilitate Symeon’s memory and prepare for the return of his relics to the capital from which he had been expelled when alive. This paper will investigate how he himself understood and appropriated aspects of the earlier tradition (particularly monastic spirituality), hoping to elucidate why he felt himself inspired to reformist zeal, and why many of his contemporaries (not simply his ‘worldly opponents’ as his hagiographer would have us believe) regarded him as unbalanced. It will end by attempting some reflection on what the controversy reveals on the larger front about how the Church ‘selectively looks back on itself, so to paraphrase our president’s description of the conference theme, and whether the model of tradition and its reception exemplified in this Byzantine writer can offer anything to the dialogue between history and theology which the doctrine of Tradition (Paradosis) inevitably initiates.
A twelfth-century view of the historical church: Orderic Vitalis
Authors: Chibnall Marjorie
Published: March 2016

When Eusebius set out to write an Ecclesiastical History he claimed to be ‘the first to undertake this present project and to attempt, as it were, to travel along a lonely and untrodden path’. The claim was justified: there had been little room for religious history, even the history of pagan religions, in the works of classical historians and their imitators. Following the rules laid down by Thucydides, they concentrated on the political life of the present and its military consequences; they preferred oral to written sources, provided the historian had either been present at the scene of action or had heard reports from eyewitnesses. Both in method and in content Eusebius was an innovator. Since his starting point was ‘the beginning of the dispensation of Jesus’ he was entirely dependent on written sources for more than three hundred years; and, innovating still more, he introduced documents such as letters and imperial edicts into his narrative. Far from being political and military, his subject matter was primarily the history of the apostles, the succession of bishops, the persecutions of Christians, and the views of heretics. He was widening the scope of historical writing and using the techniques previously employed in the biographies of philosophers. It is not surprising that, once his work had been translated into Latin and extended by Rufinus and Jerome, it became the starting point for writers on ecclesiastical history for generations to come.
European Calvinism: history, providence, and martyrdom
Authors: Pettegree Andrew
Published: March 2016

For students of the Reformation one of the main conceptual problems is undoubtedly the distance between the mind-set of our age and theirs. We look at the Reformation as a new beginning, the moment when the Church fragmented into competing Churches, and one of the fundamental developments of the Early Modern Age: a term which in itself presents a view of progress and change as one of the determining characteristics of the age.

Contemporaries, however, had a very different perception; they saw the movement for evangelical reform as one of renovation and renewal. They believed that they were attempting to recover what was best in the past of the Church, which had since become hopelessly corrupted. With others of their contemporaries they despised innovation. One can surely only understand Martin Luther if one recognizes the depth of his conservatism; that his personal crusade was to a large extent fuelled by a sense of moral outrage and indignation at what the papacy had done to his Church.
‘Standing in the old ways’: historical legitimation of Church reform in the Church of England, c. 1825–65
Authors: Burns R. Arthur
Published: March 2016

During the early and mid-nineteenth century the Church of England underwent a wide-ranging series of institutional reforms. These were intended to meet the pastoral challenges of industrial society, acknowledge the changing relationship of Church and State, and answer the more pertinent criticisms of its radical and dissenting antagonists. Particularly during the 1830s, the constitutional adjustments of 1828–32, the accession of a Whig administration, and widening internal divisions appeared to place the Church in a newly perilous position. The reforms were consequently enacted in a highly charged and febrile atmosphere. Each measure was closely scrutinized by concerned and sometimes panic-stricken Anglicans,’ seeking to establish whether it would strengthen the Church or was in fact a manifestation of threatening forces. In such circumstances, the legitimation of reform assumed crucial importance. As ever, the prospective reformer required a legitimation which would appeal to the widest possible constituency. Among allies, it could serve to embolden waverers, doubters, and often the reformer himself. If possible, it should engage the sympathies of potential opponents. It was also essential that the legitimation would not so constrain the reformer that the initiative’s practical effectiveness was blunted.
Access to the Divine: Gender and Votive Images in Moldavia and Wallachia
Authors: Peters Christine
Published: March 2016

In Orthodox Last Judgements in sixteenth-century Moldavia, both Adam and Eve appear as saintly intercessors on behalf of mankind. The presence of these suppliant figures, on either side of the throne of hetimasia (Plate i), suggests that Orthodoxy and Catholicism differed significantly in their evaluations of the gender implications of the Fall. In medieval Catholicism the portrayal of a nimbed figure of Eve, or even of Adam, was inconceivable. In the West the ideas of the Fall as the cause of the crucifixion and of Mary as the antithesis of Eve produced a powerful set of negative views of women’s nature. The weaker sex was inherently vulnerable to temptation, flattery, and persuasion, endangering not only women’s souls but those of all mankind. The veneration of Mary tempered this negative image, but Mary’s extraordinary nature could never entirely erase the assumptions of innate female inferiority based on the role of Eve in the Fall. The depiction of Eve as a saint in Orthodox wall painting appears to offer an unexpected challenge to the view that such gender associations are the only possible outcome of the Genesis account. It is also tempting to relate the presence of such representations in Moldavia to the highly unusual social position of women in Moldavian society, based on inheritance customs which divided estates equally between both sons and daughters.
Sexing the Soul: Gender and the Rhetoric of Puritan Piety
Authors: Moore Susan Hardman
Published: March 2016

Patriarchs at home, but brides of Christ in spirit: it is an intriguing fact that while puritan writers opposed any confusion of gender roles in everyday life, they were happy for men to adopt a feminine identity in spiritual experience. On one hand, seventeenth-century conduct books and sermons hammered home the divinely-ordained place of husbands and wives in marriage. William Whately (1583-1639) argued that wives should always have on their lips the refrain ‘Mine husband is my superior, my better’, and that

as our Lord Jesus Christ is to his Church … so must [the husband] be to his wife an head and Saviour … the Lord in his Word hath intitled him by the name of head: wherefore hee must not stand lower than the shoulders…. That house is a … crump-shouldered or hutcht-backt house, where the husband hath made himself an underling to his wife, and given away his power to an inferior.
Methodist Domesticity and Middle-Class Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Tosh John
Published: March 2016

The history of the family, at least for the nineteenth century, has reached a certain maturity. Though not yet incorporated into mainstream history – that would be too much to expect – it now boasts a considerable specialist literature and some useful general surveys. Undoubtedly the driving force has been the aspiration of women’s history to reconstruct the lives of women in the past. Now that the personal records of women are being studied with such attention, there is a wealth of insights into their experience as daughters, wives, and widows. Jeanne Peterson’s account of the Paget family and their circle in Victorian England is a typical example. For the nineteenth-century women’s historian, there is the added bonus that this was the period when the claims of women to have the dominant influence in the family were taken most seriously – as witness the persistent appeal of the Angel Mother. Hence to research the history of the Victorian family promises results which will feature women as agents, and not merely as victims of patriarchal oppression.
‘I don’t sing for people who do not see me’: Women, Gender and the Historiography of Christianity in South Africa
Authors: Cuthbertson Greg , Kretzschmar Louise
Published: March 2016

One of the cultural features of South Africa’s new democracy is the prolific publication of autobiographical narratives by previously marginalized people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has also focused attention on the plight of oppressed groups under apartheid, and many of the voices being heard are those of women. These personal accounts are breathing life into the sinews of organized political protest and – to mix metaphors – unearthing the ‘hidden past’ interred in apartheid history. As Alison Goebel also reminds us, life histories or personal narratives have long been identified as ‘an ideal feminist method’, and have frequently been used in work about African women.
Message, Celebration, Offering: the Place of Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century Liturgical Drama as ‘Missionary Theatre’
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

The Church of Christ, whether congregation, building, or organization, demands at all times continuity in the expression of its message to reinforce the faith of believers and in its purpose to spread the Word among non-believers. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the growth and development of liturgical drama assisted in the expression of a corporate faith, not only that of well-established communities of monks and cathedral clergy, but also that of the laity for whom dramatic presentations could provide the necessary stimuli to worship. On the frontiers of Christendom too, where missionary endeavour was crucial, the dramatization both of the liturgy and of biblical events helped to lay the foundations for a projected continuity of worship amongst neophytes and those whose faith was not yet secure. Problems inevitably arose as new situations provoked liturgical changes. It thus became essential to ensure that neither the central faith nor the purpose of worship were weakened, diminished, or lost in the face of such change.
‘Shut in with thee’: the Morning Meeting among Scottish Open Brethren, 1840s–1960s
Authors: Dickson Neil
Published: March 2016

The Brethren movement had its origins in the early nineteenth century in Ireland and the south of England, first appearing in Scotland in 1838. The morning meeting gave quintessential expression to the piety of the members and was central to its practice. In the 1870s a former Presbyterian who was looking for the ideal pattern of the Church witnessed his first meeting in the village of K-. Converted in the revivals of the 1860s, he was eventually to join the movement.
‘Walking in the light’: the Liturgy of Fellowship in the Early Years of the East African Revival
Authors: Weld Emma L.
Published: March 2016

During a Christmas convention at Gahini mission station in Rwanda in 1933, a large number of people publicly confessed their sins, resolved to turn from their present beliefs and embraced the Christian Faith. From then on, missionaries of the Ruanda Mission wrote enthusiastically to their supporters in Britain of people flocking into churches in South-West Uganda and Rwanda, of ‘changed lives’, of emotional confessions followed by ‘tremendous joy’, and of the spontaneous forming of fellowship groups and mission teams. Ugandans working at Gahini saw an opportunity for ‘waking’ the sleeping Anglican Church in Buganda and elsewhere which had, they believed, lost its fervour. Following in the tradition of the evangelists of the 1880s and 1890s they travelled vast distances to share their message of repentance and forgiveness with others. This was the beginning of the East African Revival, long prayed for by Ruanda missionaries and the Ugandans who worked alongside them. Max Warren, General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, writing in 1954 when the Revival was still pulsating through East Africa, perceived the revival phenomenon as ‘a reaffirmation of theology, a resuscitation of worship and a reviving of conscience … for the church’. All three were in evidence from the early years of the East African Revival, but perhaps the most dramatic change was the form taken by the ‘resuscitation of worship’.
The Itinerary of Egeria: Reliving the Bible in Fourth-Century Palestine
Authors: Hunt E. D.
Published: March 2016

In a letter of exhortation on the ascetic life addressed to monks of the Bierzo region in north-western Spain in the late seventh century, the local spiritual leader Valerius invoked the saintly example of a ‘fragile woman’. Her name was Egeria, who, at the time when ‘the luminous shining light of our holy religion was finally kindled after long delay in this region of the west’, had fearlessly embarked on a monumental journey encompassing the ‘whole world’. The object of Egeria’s God-inspiredWanderlusthad been the biblical holy places of Old and New Testaments, as well as the monastic heartland of Egypt, through all of which Valerius found in her a model of tireless zeal and thanksgiving to parade before his correspondents. It was especially her intrepid ascent to the summits of holy mountains which characterized this exceptional woman as a paragon of spiritual endeavour, and Valerius’ monks were to be encouraged, if not to climb every mountain, at least to reach their own heights of discipline and self-denial, to ‘blush’ at the fortitude of one who ‘transformed the weakness of her sex into an iron strength’.
Palestine under the Arabs 650-750: the Crucible of Byzantine Orthodoxy
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: March 2016

The period from the beginning of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth was decisive for the history of the Byzantine empire. At the beginning of the seventh century, the idea of the Roman, or Byzantine, empire as the political configuration of the Mediterranean world - something that the Emperor Justinian had done his best to restore - still seemed valid, though there were already significant cracks in the edifice. By the end of the seventh century - let alone the middle of the ninth - that was a dream, though a dream to which the Byzantines obstinately clung. For the early years of the seventh century had seen the temporary Persian conquest of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire, soon followed by the Arab conquest which the Byzantines were to prove unable to overturn. The impact on the Byzantine empire of these events and the infiltration into the Balkan peninsula by the Slavs, was profound - politically, economically, culturally, and theologically. But the story of this impact is generally presented, both in the sources and in scholarly accounts, from the point of view of the centre, the Queen City, Constantinople. Central to the Byzantine world view, as it emerged with renewed confidence in the middle of the ninth century, was the idea of the empire, and the Emperor, as the guardian of Christian Orthodoxy, which was symbolized in the proclamation of the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ with the final overthrow of iconoclasm in 843, a proclamation that became part of the normal ecclesiastical calendar, celebrated thereafter each year on the first Sunday of Lent. But that Orthodoxy, in its final form, had not been nurtured in Constantinople, nor had the wealth of liturgical poetry that came to celebrate it. Constantinople had reacted to the catastrophe of the early seventh century by plunging into heresy: first, the Christological heresy of monenergism, with its refinement, monothelitism, and then the heresy of iconoclasm, also believed - by both iconoclasts and their opponents - to be ultimately a matter of Christology. The Orthodoxy whose triumph was celebrated from 843 onwards had been defined, and celebrated, in Palestine, the province that had been lost for good to the Byzantines in the 630s. Orthodoxy, in fact, achieved its final definition at the periphery - and defeated periphery at that - and from there took over the centre. In this paper, we are not concerned with Christians who visited the Holy Land as pilgrims, but rather with those who belonged there: mainly monks, both natives and those who came to the Holy Land to live in the complex of monasteries in and around Jerusalem. How and why did these Palestinian monks come to play this role in the wider history of the Christian œcumene?
Holy Land or Holy Lands? Palestine and the Catholic West in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance
Authors: Housley Norman
Published: March 2016

In one passage in his famous account, Friar Felix Faber described how ‘some dull and unprofitable pilgrims’ to Jerusalem in 1480 mocked the excited behaviour of the devout in the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘calling them fools, hypocrites and Beghards’. The incident is revealing of the spectrum of reactions provoked by the experience of the Holy Land in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Here more than anywhere else, tension was generated by the inescapable paradox of Christology, God become man, and the conflicts which it set up between the immanent and the representational, the universal and the elect, the eschatological and the timeless. This occurred, moreover, within a physical setting which constantly reminded the sensitive pilgrim of the difficulty of reconciling the Old and New Dispensations. But the same electrical charge which caused the Holy Land as sacred space to provoke diverse and at times contradictory responses, endowed the Holy Land as idea with a remarkable attraction. There took place a number of different ‘migrations of the holy’, to use John Bossy’s phrase. To a large extent the status of the geographical Holy Land was weakened by these developments, but in at least one respect it was strengthened.
‘Lesyng of Tyme’: Perceptions of Idleness and Usury in Late Medieval England
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: March 2016

Then came Sloth, all be-slobbered, with two slimy eyes.‘I must sit down to be shriven,’ quoth he, ‘or else I shall fall asleep.I can’t stand or prop myself up, or kneel without a hassock.If I were put to bed, no amount of bell-ringing would get me upuntil I was ready for dinner – well, not unless I had to relieve myself

This is Langland’s description of Sloth inPiers Plowman. Originally a monastic vice, meaning boredom with the cell, sloth, oraccidia, came to be applied to spiritual duties generally. By the time Langland wrote, it had also come to mean physical laziness or idleness, that is ‘lesyng’ or misspending of time. This paper investigates some ideas about idleness and its consequences as they emerge from the spiritual and didactic literature of late medieval England. They are linked with ideas about the most detested idlers, the usurers, the money-lenders. Usurers violated time in a double sense, for not only did they misspend it, but they also made a profit from selling it. Equally vilified as idle were the clergy. The poet John Gower sourly observed that ‘Slouthe kepeth the librarie’ of the corrupt English clergy. They will feature here only incidentally, although it is perhaps worth pointing out that some ecclesiastics profited from lending money. In the late thirteenth century a council held at Exeter had to decree the suspension from both office and benefice of usurious clergy. In the mid-fourteenth century no less a person than Archbishop Melton of York profited from lending money.
Escaping the Common Lot: A Buchanite Perspective of the Millennium
Authors: Söderström Jill
Published: March 2016

On the day of the ‘May’ or ‘Cow Fair’ in 1784 the main streets of Irvine, one of the principal towns in Ayrshire, were crowded to excess with those who had come to take part in the fair. It was not unusual for the streets of this busy seaport to be filled with noise and activity. Whilst Irvine was not a prominent manufacturing town it was, as a royal burgh, a major port for local and foreign trade. Consequently its streets often reverberated with noise from the many carts which transported coal and other merchandise to and from the docks. The town was also a busy commercial centre with banks, a town house, merchant houses, shops, and street markets. Home to some fifty vessels, over three hundred sailors, and thirty-eight taverns, it was a ‘town of crowds – meal mobs, redcoats, pressgangs, smugglers, fairs, and the Buchanites’.
Useful Industry and Muscular Christianity: George Augustus Selwyn and His Early Years as Bishop of New Zealand
Authors: Davidson Allan K.
Published: March 2016

Charles Kingsley in 1855 gave the following dedication to his novel, Westward Ho!:

To the Rajah Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., and George Augustus Selwyn, D.D., Bishop of New Zealand this book is dedicated, by one who (unknown to them) has no other method of expressing his admiration and reverence for their characters.

That type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing, which he has tried to depict in these pages, they have exhibited in a form even purer and more heroic than that in which he has drest it.

Brooke, the adventurer, soldier, and colonial administrator, and Selwyn, the missionary colonial bishop, appealed to Kingsley as exemplars of what he called ‘Christian manliness’. One of Kingsley’s reviewers, T. C. Sandars, described Kingsley as ‘spreading the knowledge and fostering the love of a muscular Christianity’. The defining characteristics of this ‘muscular Christianity’, a term with which Kingsley was uneasy, were ‘an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and an ability to shape and control the world around oneself’.
The Pope, Labour, and the Tango: Work, Rest, and Play in the Thought and Action of Benedict XV (1914-22)
Authors: Pollard John F.
Published: March 2016

Ever since Leo XIII promulgated his encyclical Rerum novarum, ‘On the Conditions of the Working Classes’, in 1891, successive popes have added to the corpus of Catholic teaching on social/ labour questions. Pius X, for example, published an encyclical specifically addressing the vexed question of ‘interconfessional’ Christian trade unions in Germany, and Pius XI published no fewer than three encyclicals on social questions in the space of twelve months – Quadragesimo anno of May 1931, Nova impendet of October 1931, and Cantate Christi compulsi of May 1932. Recent popes, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, have been equally prolific in their commentaries on the labour question.
The Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Religious Development and Myth-Making
Authors: Cameron Averil
Published: March 2016

It is sometimes both necessary and useful to go backwards in history, to disentangle an earlier development not by the usual method of piecing together the contemporary evidence but by approaching it through the eyes of later generations. This is certainly true of the present subject. We can say with confidence that late antiquity, especially the period from the fifth century onwards, marked the formative stage in the growth of cult and veneration offered to Mary. Yet one of the most striking experiences in any attempt to disentangle this development is the gradual recognition of exactly how much of our understanding has been shaped by later ideas, wishes, and religious agendas. Investigation of this subject entails the attempt to deal with many texts which are in themselves extremely hard to date; and indeed some of the ‘evidence’ itself, at least the written evidence, turns out to consist of a tangle of later legend passing for history - so much so in fact that I am considerably less certain about the subject now than when I originally wrote about it over twenty years ago.
The Meeting of the Old and the New: the Typology of Mary the Theotokos in Byzantine Homilies and Hymns
Authors: Cunningham Mary B.
Published: March 2016

This article presents a preliminary report on a research project which will examine the homiletic and hymnographic treatment of the Virgin Mary in eighth-century Byzantium. The texts requiring detailed study are numerous and not without their problems. Some of the surviving hymns and homilies remain unedited, while the authorship of many texts, including those which have been edited, is still disputed. The first stage of the project will therefore be concerned with identifying all eighth-century Marian homilies and hymns; only after that will it be possible to study the historical, theological, and spiritual content of this material.
The Marian Anthem in Late Medieval England
Authors: Skinner David
Published: March 2016

Alma redemptoris mater is one of the four ancient antiphons or anthems in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This anthem may recall Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the image of a choirboy, seven years of age, who, having learnt his Alma redemptoris, sang daily the Virgin’s praises even beyond death. Primer in hand he learnt his Alma by heart, only to be murdered in a Jewish ghetto for singing the anthem that he took such pains to perfect. With the song on his lips his throat was cut; but Mary intervened, placed a precious pearl on his tongue, saying,
My litel child, nowe wol I fecche thee,Whan that the greyn is fro thy tonge ytake.Be not agast; I wol the nat forsake.
Unity in Diversity: The Liturgy of Frankish Gaul before the Carolingians
Authors: Hen Yitzhak
Published: March 2016

Uniformity was at the heart of the Carolingian reforms, and it is apparent more than anywhere else in the liturgical reforms pursued by the Carolingians. It is logical to assume that the early Carolingian reformers’ stress on liturgical uniformity was, at least in part, a reaction to the diversity of Merovingian practice. This paper offers some preliminary observations on liturgical diversity and attitudes towards unified liturgical practices in Merovingian Gaul.