bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Richard Whitford’sWerke for Housholders:Humanism, Monasticism and Tudor Household Piety
Authors: Wooding Lucy
Published: March 2016

In 1530 Richard Whitford publishedA Werke for Housholders, for ‘them that have gydyng and governaunce of any company for an order to be kepte bothe in them selfe | and in them that they have in rule and charge’. The work swiftly went through at least seven editions in as many years; Tudor householders clearly found something of value in its advice. Its author was many things: a Bridgettine monk, a humanist, a prolific author of works in the vernacular, and a survivor who went on writing and publishing even after the dissolution of his monastery. He died in 1543. His books provide some important insights into vernacular humanism and late medieval monasticism, and the often unappreciated relationship between the two, which was demonstrated by his reflections on household piety. This essay argues that Whitford’sWerke for Housholderswas rooted in his monastic experience, closely linked to Syon’s pastoral role, and that ideas about the early modern ‘godly household’ should perhaps be adjusted in the light of this connection.
Reforming Household Piety: John Foxe and the Lollard Conventicle Tradition
Authors: Royal Susan
Published: March 2016

That the ecclesia in antiquity met in private homes was well known to first- and second-generation English reformers who sought to reshape the late medieval established Church. In the wake of Catholic accusations of novelty – and thus illegitimacy – evangelicals developed a history of their movement that stretched back through the generations to the early Church itself, and none more successfully than John Foxe (d. 1587), author of Acts and Monuments and England’s major martyrologist. A crucial link in this historical chain would prove to be the Lollards, medieval English heretics whose ‘privy assemblies’ saw the reading of vernacular Scripture and its exposition, recitation of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and even hints of liturgical activity, all in the private space of the home.
‘Conscientious Attention to Publick and Family Worship of God’: Religious Practice in Eighteenth-Century English Households
Authors: Jacob W. M.
Published: March 2016

Households were the basic units of society in England until well into the nineteenth century, providing the focus of much economic activity, as well as education and, as this essay will argue, religious and devotional life. Recent research has revealed the centrality of religious life in the home in early modern England, but the extensive research about eighteenth-century households over the past fifteen years has seldom made reference to the place and practice of religion in the domestic context. This essay, focusing on the corporate religious life of Anglican households rather than on the piety and devotions of individuals, suggests that religion remained at the heart of the home and family lives of Anglican laypeople throughout the period. It was not rediscovered by Evangelicals, nor was it a distinguishing feature of evangelical households, but was a continuing element throughout the period.
‘Domestic Charms, Business Acumen, and Devotion to Christian Work’: Sarah Terrett, the Bible Christian Church, the Household and the Public Sphere in Late Victorian Bristol
Authors: Wilson Linda
Published: March 2016

Sarah Terrett died suddenly on 25 November 1889, aged 53, after speaking at a meeting of the White Ribbon Army, the temperance organization she had founded in 1878. Following her death many people sent letters of sympathy to her bereaved husband, William. One of these, from the Rev. W. F. James, a minister of the Bible Christians, makes for especially interesting reading. The Bible Christian denomination, to which Sarah and William belonged, was one of the smaller Methodist connexions, and had its heartland in rural Devon, the area where she had grown up. James recalled the hospitality he enjoyed when visiting the Terretts’ home, Church House, in Bedminster, south Bristol:
Intimations of a Massacre: Thessalonica, Theodosius I and Self-Ironization in Socrates Scholasticus’sHistoria Ecclesiastica
Authors: Gardiner Luke
Published: March 2016

From the vantage point of Constantinople in AD 440, under the rule of the orthodox Theodosian dynasty, Nicene Christianity may have appeared unassailable. Many of the most challenging of the heresies that had emerged in the century since Constantine’s conversion seemed to be receding. Even the devastating Christological controversies that had erupted in the early 430s may (understandably, if wrongly) have looked, with Nestorius’s deposition and the Formula of Reunion (433), to be under control. And yet Constantinople retained its confessional diversity, with members of numerous Christian sects – penalized by law theoretically, but often still visible and vocal in practice – living alongside members of the mainstream Nicene church.

The reimposition of a Nicene hierarchy over the major churches of Constantinople had happened only from the 380s onwards. It had been a process fraught with difficulties – not least the survival in large numbers of groups polemically labelled as Arian, and the persistence of their intellectual, theological and historical traditions, even as their hopes of political or theological hegemony faded. From this milieu had come the Eunomian Philostorgius (c.368–439), and his highly sectarian – and anti-Nicene –Church Historyof the fourth and fifth centuries.
The Deposit of Monastic Faith: The Carolingians on the Essence of Monasticism
Authors: Choy Renie
Published: March 2016

We live in an age wary of admitting that any institution has an essence, and this has posed a dilemma for the study of monasticism. Until relatively recently, historians of monasticism zealously sought out its timeless and immutable inner qualities rather than its many varieties. While acknowledging the changes in external form and circumstances, Adolf von Harnack’sMonasticism: Its Ideals and History(1881), Dom Morin’sL’Idéal monastique(1912), James Hannay’sThe Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism(1903) and Herbert Workman’sThe Evolution of the Monastic Ideal(1913) nevertheless pursued the stable qualities of monasticism which had survived the tides of time. Even in 1957 Jean Leclercq could still presume that monasticism had an ‘essence’, in a classic work translated into English under the titleThe Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. To our twenty-first-century ears, such a monolith of a title, suggestive of the existence of a metahistorical ‘monastic ideal’, seems out of date. This essay approaches the subject of monastic historiography via an examination of Carolingian reflection on the monastic past, arguing that the significance of the ninth-century monastic programme lies in its effort to distil the entire received monastic heritage into a coherent and precise statement about the fundamental purpose of the monastic life. So we ask the question: when Eigil described Boniface and Sturm as spending a day away in a ‘sweet discussion about the life and manners of monks’, what exactly did he think they were talking about?
Polydore Vergil and Ecclesiastical Historiography in hisDe Inventoribus RerumIV–VIII
Authors: Arnold Jonathan
Published: March 2016

Polydore Vergil (c.1470–1555) was a controversial critic of the church of his day. As this essay will show, his radical solution to its problems was based upon his reading of the church’s history. An Italian cleric on English soil for much of his life, Vergil is most famous for hisAnglica Historia(1533), the first Tudor history of England. However, he was also responsible for another great (although now neglected) work,De Inventoribus Rerum(‘on the inventors, or discoverers, of all things’). Consisting of eight volumes, it is an example of early encyclopaedic technique from original Latin and Greek sources, including the Bible, Josephus and Eusebius, as well as observation from contemporary life, in which ‘invention’ is depicted as a category of historiography and a means of examining scientific and cultural history. The first three books were published in 1499 in Venice and deal mainly with scientific phenomena. The other five books, with which we are concerned here, consider the origins of Christian institutions(initia institutorum rei Christianae)and were published much later, in 1521, although Vergil continuously revised the entireDe Inventoribus Rerumuntil his death. The topics covered range from early church history, baptism, clerical and religious orders, penance, prayers and simony, to heresies and schisms, martyrs and the triumph of Christianity. An extremely popular work, with over forty editions in Vergil’s lifetime, it was, nonetheless, censured for its criticisms of the church. Indeed, the purpose of Books IV–VIII was to demonstrate what was initiated by Christ and what the true nature of the church was, not by examining its doctrine but by seeking the origins of its practice.
‘Holding up a lamp to the Sun’: Hiberno-Papal Relations and the Construction of Irish Orthodoxy in John Lynch’sCambrensis Eversus(1662)
Authors: Ryan Salvador
Published: March 2016

Competing confessional claims to the early church played a hugely significant part in the revival of the writing of ecclesiastical history during the period of the European Reformations. This question of Christian origins led rival religious groups to contest vigorously the right to claim to be the early church’s legitimate heirs. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works of ecclesiastical history would, moreover, strive to attain and preserve the rigorous standards set by Renaissance humanist scholarship and, in turn, exploit any perceived weaknesses in the work of their opponents in this regard. This essay examines a seventeenth-century Irish example of such ecclesiastical history-writing:Cambrensis Eversus(‘Cambrensis Refuted’), written in Latin, largely for a continental audience, by a County Galway priest-scholar, John Lynch (1599/1600–73), and published in St Malo in 1662. The work is ostensibly a reply to the twelfth-century works of Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223) on Ireland, which had attained a new importance in the confessional controversies of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cited afresh by scholars as evidence of the depraved nature of the medieval Irish (and, by extension, of medieval Irish Catholicism) and the need for their moral and religious reform. This had a particular resonance in the Reformation period: if medieval Catholicism could be proved to have been in a state of decay, then this would further legitimize the argument that it was in need of reform and would underscore the correctness of the Protestant return to a purer and more authentic early Christianity.
Archbishop Tait, The Huguenots and the French Church at Canterbury
Authors: Spicer Andrew
Published: March 2016

Archibald Campbell Tait was enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury in February 1869. It was an inauspicious time to assume the primacy of the Church of England, which was riven by internal conflicts and religious differences. Furthermore, Gladstone had recently swept to power with the support of the Nonconformists. The new prime minister had a mandate to disestablish the Irish church and his political supporters sought to challenge the privileges and status of the Church of England. As primate, Tait attempted to defend the Church of England as the established church and restrict those parties that held particularly narrow and dogmatic beliefs, regardless of whether they were Evangelicals or Ritualists. The archbishop strove to straddle these religious differences and to achieve his aims through a policy of compromise and tolerance, but some of his actions served to cause further divisions within the Anglican church. Tait’s efforts to restrict elaborate ceremonial and services through the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) alienated the Ritualists, for example. Many more clergy were opposed to his concessions to Nonconformists in the Burials Bill (1877), which would have allowed them to be interred in parish churchyards. Amidst the wider religious tensions and political conflicts that marked his primacy, the archbishop also took a close interest in the French Protestant Church at Canterbury, whose history he regarded as reflecting some important attributes of the Church of England, its past, and its current status in the world.
The Church of England in the Diocese of London: What does History have to Offer to the Present-Day Church?
Authors: Wolffe John
Published: March 2016

On 21 February 1900 in St Paul’s Cathedral Bishop Mandell Creighton delivered his first, and what proved to be his last, visitation charge to the clergy of the diocese of London. He began by reflecting briefly on the particular challenges of his own position and of London itself, but quickly moved on to focus on current ecclesiastical controversies, especially the nature of holy communion and the practice of confession. Creighton had been a historian long before he became a bishop, and it was therefore natural that his response to contemporary issues should rapidly move into an insightful lecture on Reformation history. His analysis was both specific and general. For example, he pointed out that breakfast was not normally eaten in medieval and early modern societies and so congregations naturally came fasting to a late morning communion service. In changed social circumstances it would be inappropriate ‘to revive this custom as an absolute law’.
Naked or Clothed? Eschatology and the Doctrine of Creation
Authors: Young Frances
Published: March 2016

A Paper on life after death in the early church should probably begin with the underworld: Sheol in the Hebrew Bible, Hades, in Greek mythology, with parallels in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. It should reflect on the universally connected theme of judgment and its importance for theodicy, and address the wide variety of beliefs discernible in the New Testament and its background, especially in the apocalyptic literature. It should consider the so-called intermediate state, and the supposed distinction between the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul and the Hebrew idea of resurrection: which takes us full circle, since the latter notion assumes the picture of shades in the underworld brought back to full-bodied living – as indeed the traditional Anastasis icon of the Eastern Orthodox tradition makes dramatically clear, Christ springing up from the grave and hauling Adam up with one hand and, often though not invariably, Eve with the other.
What Happened to the Last Judgement in the Early Church?
Authors: Laffin Josephine
Published: March 2016

The Last Judgement was one of the most important themes in Christian art from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. It can be found in glittering mosaics on the west wall of the cathedral on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, on the sculptured centre portal of the west façade of Notre Dame in Paris, in Luca Signorelli’s haunting frescos in the Chapel of the Madonna of San Brizio in Orvieto, and in Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel. Numerous other churches had their own ‘dooms’. A dramatic but not untypical example from the twelfth century can be found above the entrance to the Church of Sainte-Foy at Conques. Christ is enthroned as an austere judge, dividing the saved from the damned. The procession to heaven is neat and orderly while hell is chaotic, being depicted as a hideous mouth devouring the damned, a common representation in medieval art. In ominous foreboding, this Romanesque Last Judgement rivals the thirteenth-century hymn, theDies Irae, as a reminder of the coming ‘day of wrath and doom impending’.
Death and the Afterlife in Jonas of Bobbio’sVita Columbani
Authors: O’Hara Alexander
Published: March 2016

In the seventh century Christians in the Latin West turned with a novel concern to the issues of death and the afterlife. This is a period that has been characterized as marking the ‘rise of the other world’, a development that was rooted in a belief in the imminence of Doomsday and an increasing preoccupation with sinfulness. This shift to a more metaphysical mentality can be noticed in a number of areas ranging from changes in burial and liturgical practices to literary works and the rise in power of the monasteries as intercessory places of prayer.
The Afterlife of Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy
Authors: Kostick Conor
Published: March 2016

My brothers should not grieve that my life has come to an end, because never was I so useful to them in the past as I will be in the future, providing they are willing to keep the commandments of God. As a matter of fact I, and all my brothers whose life has ended as mine has, will stay with them, and I will appear and give them much better advice than hitherto.
Performing the Passion: Strategies for Salvation in the Life of Stefana Quinzani (d. 1530)
Authors: Warr Cordelia
Published: March 2016

In Italy, the years around 1500 were fraught for a number of reasons. There were renewed fears about the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to a sense of instability and impending doom. In this climate many people became increasingly concerned about their fate in the afterlife and the need to be prepared for death and judgement. Central to this was the doctrine of purgatory. Yet, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, ideas surrounding purgatory were highly contested as heretical ideas from northern Europe began to filter into northern Italy. This paper investigates Catholic beliefs about the alleviation of purgatorial suffering through a case study of one holy woman from the north of Italy, the Dominican tertiary, Stefana Quinzani, who, according to a letter of 4 March 1500 written by Duke Ercole d’Este, endured every Friday ‘the whole of the Passion in her body, stage by stage, from the Flagellation to the Deposition from the Cross’.
Revelation and Reckoning: Angels and the Apocalypse in Reformation England, c. 1559–1625
Authors: Sangha Laura
Published: March 2016

Angelology – the science of angels – exercised a compelling hold on the medieval and early modern mind. The role that angels had in the belief and ritual associated with death was perhaps its most theologically resonant aspect – angels were intimately involved in the system of eschatology and the rites associated with dying, mourning and burial. Their responsibilities at the end of life included participation in the cosmic struggle enacted around the deathbed, where good and evil angels were thought to contend for the custody of the soul of the dying; and stewardship of the soul after death, when angels were believed to carry it to its final resting place, as Lazarus was carried to Abraham’s bosom in Luke 16: 19–31. However, angels also assumed important responsibilitiesafterdeath; they featured prominently in the narrative of the Last Judgement and the strategies adopted by Christians to conceptualize and prepare for the afterlife and the events of the Apocalypse.
Strategies for the Afterlife in Eighteenth-Century Malta
Authors: Ciappara Frans
Published: March 2016

According to Protestant eschatology, the dead are no longer with us. In the forceful words of Eamon Duffy they are ‘gone beyond the reach of human contact, even of human prayer’. But if this was the most devastating change in the mind of Protestants, Catholics affirmed Tridentine teaching on the cult of the dead by an ‘obsessional multiplication’ of suffrages or intercessory prayers, especiallypost mortemmasses. This belief was still strong in eighteenth-century Catholic Europe. Italy, Spain and south-west Germany all exhibited such religious ‘frenzy’. Only France may be cited as an example to the contrary. Michel Vovelle has successfully proved that in Provence the will became simply a legal act distributing fortunes, with no reference to the pious clauses. However, we cannot extend this thesis, as Philippe Aries has mistakenly done, to the entire Catholic West.
Life Beyond the Grave: New Churches in York and the Afterlife, c. 1982–2007
Authors: Goodhew David
Published: March 2016

Most studies of Christianity in recent British history are pessimistic about church life in Britain, varying only in the depth of their pessimism. Alongside the assumption that Christianity in Britain is in inexorable decline is the assumption that traditional Christian notions about the afterlife – and indeed stress on the afterlife at all – are fast disappearing. Even studies of charismatic Christianity, the most recent major Christian movement, see it as stagnant or in decline. However, a study of the city of York shows such pessimism to be overstated. Whilst mainline denominations are mostly in slow or rapid decline, a large number of ‘new churches’ have arisen. This paper shows how these churches perceive the afterlife. It uncovers a rich seam of contemporary theology from below. Though largely unknown to those outside its congregations, this strand of belief is already of considerable significance and is likely to become more so in the twenty-first century. This paper offers contemporary religious history, showing that dramatic shifts within Christian history are not solely the preserve of previous centuries, but have taken place in recent decades.
African Christianity and the Eclipse of the Afterlife
Authors: Gifford Paul
Published: March 2016

When asked to address the issue of the afterlife in African Christianity, my immediate reaction was to doubt whether there is much stress on the afterlife in contemporary African Christianity. This brought the response: ‘Well, deal with that; a Christianity from which the afterlife has been displaced.’ What follows is an attempt to do just that.
A Token of Repentance and Reconciliation: Oswiu and the Murder of King Oswine
Authors: Scargill Christopher M.
Published: March 2016

As any parish priest will tell you, the first step in repentance and reconciliation is a recognition that you have done wrong. When, in 651, Oswine of Deira was betrayed into the hands of his enemy, Oswiu of Bernicia, and was put to death, Oswiu was left in little doubt about the sinfulness of such an action, for, if Bede is to be believed, the killing was met with universal disgust. Oswiu might, I think, have been forgiven had he at first wondered why his action provoked such horror. After all, Oswine was not trying to make peace when he was killed. Even Bede, who condemns the murder, admits that Oswine was lying low, awaiting an opportune time to re-open hostilities.
Public Orders into Moral Communities: Eighteenth-Century Fast and Thanksgiving Day Sermons in the Dutch Republic and New England
Authors: van Rooden Peter
Published: March 2016

In the eighteenth century, both in the Dutch Republic and in the colonies of New England, collective repentance and social reconciliation with God were institutionalized in great common rituals. In both polities, Fast and Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed by civil authority, and these occasions brought people together into churches to hear ministers interpret their common situation. These rituals were the main way in which the New England colonies and the Dutch Republic expressed their unity as political communities. It was this aspect of these sermons that made them of interest to nineteenth-century American and Dutch historians. In the nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands, N. C. Kist, the first holder of the newly instituted chair of Church History at Leiden University, finished his career with his two-volumeNeêrlands Bededagen en Biddagsbrieven, offering both an interpretation and an antiquarian overview of all the Fast Days proclaimed in the Netherlands. In the United States, William de Loss Love published his exquisiteThe Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New Englandin 1895, similarly offering both an antiquarian list of all Fast and Thanksgiving Days and an analysis. Kist was deeply involved with the nation-building project of the early nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. De Loss Love, the first chaplain of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, was as inspired by modern nationalism as Kist was. Both scholars interpreted the Fast-day ritual as an indication of the high moral purpose and commitment to the nation of their ancestors.
Imprisonment and Release in the Writings of the Wesleys
Authors: Macquiban Tim
Published: March 2016

This essay focuses on repentance, with respect to one particular aspect of the work and witness of the Methodists as exemplified in the writings of their founders, John and Charles Wesley (1703–91 and 1707–88 respectively). A predominant motif of their preaching and hymn-writing came from the experience of working with condemned prisoners in Oxford and London gaols, an experience which became paradigmatic for the evangelical conversionist stance of the movement. The metaphors of imprisonment and freedom were realities arising from the physical conditions of the few, pressed upon a general population perceived to be languishing in spiritual stupor and captivity as the kairos of Gospel revelation called all those under sentence of death to repentance: This is the time, no more delay; This is the Lord’s appointed day’.
Völkner and Mokomoko: ‘Symbols of Reconciliation’ in Aotearoa, New Zealand
Authors: Davidson Allan K.
Published: March 2016

On 2 March 1865, the Revd Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was hanged from a willow tree close to his own church and mission station at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. John Hobbs, who had arrived as a Methodist missionary in New Zealand in 1823, reported on ‘the very barbarous Murder of one of the best Missionaries in New Zealand’ and noted that Völkner’s death marked ‘a New Era in the history of this country’. Völkner was the first European missionary of any denonomination to be killed in New Zealand since missionary work began in 1814.
Discipline and Domestic Violence in Edinburgh, 1560–1625
Authors: Hollander Melissa
Published: March 2016

As no Citie, Towne, howse, or familie can maynteine their estate and prospere without policie and governaunce, so the Churche of God, which more purely to be governed than any citie or familie, can not without spirituali Policie and ecclesiasticall Discipline continewe, encrease and florishe. [sic]

The form of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, &c, used in the English congregation at Geneva, 1556.

In June 1620 George Johnsoun was ‘scharplie rebukit for his hynous sin of disobediens to his parents in stryking of his mother’ and imprisoned for one week whilst the Session of St Cuthbert’s parish, Edinburgh, decided how to deal with him. The following week the Session ordained ‘george Johnsoun to ga to his parents everie mornyng and evening upoun his kneis and promeis with his grace never to do ye lyk in tymes cumyng’. The Session elders seem to have been aware both of the menace that George represented to his parents, his mother in particular, and of the extent to which he had become a disorderly troublemaker. They therefore required him to ‘[promise] to tak ane office man [with] him quher he so gets yair blissin’. The Session could thus monitor George’s behaviour and the fervency of his repentance, and guarantee that discipline was properly enacted. With this punishment the Kirk sent a clear message to the parishioners of St Cuthbert’s, and the whole Edinburgh Presbytery, that disobedience and disorder in the domestic sphere were entirely unacceptable. Perhaps more significantly, in this case the parish authorities publicly and explicitly declared and demonstrated that violence against domestic authority, particularly against one’s mother, was insupportable.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Pastors’ College and the Downgrade Controversy
Authors: Randall Ian
Published: March 2016

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) began his pastoral ministry in a village Baptist chapel in Cambridgeshire but became a national voice in Victorian England through his ministry in London. The huge crowds his preaching attracted necessitated the building of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, at the Elephant and Castle, which accommodated over 5,000 people. ‘By common consent’, says David Bebbington, Spurgeon was ‘the greatest English-speaking preacher of the century’. Spurgeon, like other nineteenth-century ecclesiastical figures, was involved in theological controversies, including the ‘Downgrade Controversy’, in which, in typically robust style, he attacked theological liberalism. In August 1887, he trumpeted: ‘The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture derided, the Holy Spirit degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin turned into a fiction, and the resurrection into a myth …’ The Downgrade controversy has not attracted nearly as much attention as debates provoked in the nineteenth century by Essays and Reviews (1860) and Lux Mundi (1889), perhaps because the latter affected Anglicanism rather than the Free Churches. But since as many people were attending Free Churches as Anglican churches, the issues raised in the Downgrade, as the most serious nineteenth-century Free Church dispute, are of considerable significance.
William Wilberforce’s Practical View (1797) and its Reception
Authors: Wolffe John
Published: March 2016

Never, perhaps, did any volume by a layman, on a religious subject, produce a deeper or more sudden effect.

This in 1826 was the judgement of Daniel Wilson, vicar of Islington and later bishop of Calcutta, looking back on the publication on 12 April 1797 of William Wilberforce’s Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. Wilson went on to argue that the book ‘contributed in no small measure, to the progress of that general revival of religion which had already been begun’. It subsequently became a historiographical commonplace that the book was ‘the handbook of the Evangelicals’; but its impact on British religion also had other important dimensions that need to be explored.
Baptist Revival and Renewal in the 1960s
Authors: Randall Ian M.
Published: March 2016

According to Callum Brown in The Death of Christian Britain, from 1963 Christianity in Britain went on a downward spiral. More generally, Brown sees the 1960s as the decade in which the Christian-centred culture that had conferred identity on Britain was rejected. This claim, however, which has received much attention, needs to be set alongside David Bebbington’s analysis of British Christianity in the 1960s. In Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington notes that in 1963 charismatic renewal came to an Anglican parish in Beckenham, Kent, when the vicar, George Forester, and some parishioners received the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ and began to speak in tongues. During the next quarter of a century, Bebbington continues, the charismatic movement became a powerful force in British Christianity. Both Brown and Bebbington view the 1960s as a decade of significant cultural change. Out of that period of upheaval came the decline of cultural Christianity but also the emergence of a new expression of Christian spirituality – charismatic renewal. Within the evangelical section of the Church this new movement was an illustration of the ability of evangelicalism to engage in adaptation. To a large extent evangelical Anglicans were at the forefront of charismatic renewal in England. The Baptist denomination in England was, however, deeply affected from the mid-1960s onwards and it is this which will be examined here.
Introduction
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

Since the Enlightenment, historians and theorists of religion have often worked with a two-tiered model of Christianity, in which the pure belief and practice of the enlightened few was perceived as constantly under pressure and in danger of corruption or distortion from the grosser religion of the multitude. This imagined polarity between the sophisticated religion of the elite and the crude religion of the people at large underlay much Enlightenment historiography, most notably Gibbon’s account of the early history of Christianity, and has remained potent in such influential twentieth century works as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. Even the future Cardinal Newman could contrast ‘what has power to stir holy and refined souls’ with the ‘religion of the multitude’ which he once described as ‘ever vulgar and abnormal’. Newman, as more than one contributor to this volume shows, had in fact an acute sense of the value, even the normative value, of popular religious perceptions, but those implicit polarities and the historical condescension they encode have been recurrent and assertive ghosts, haunting the writing of religious history, in contrasts between official and unofficial religion, or those between clerical and lay, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, hierarchical and charismatic.
Elites and Baptism: Religious ‘Strategies of Distinction’ in Visigothic Spain
Authors: Wood Jamie
Published: March 2016

The political connotations of godparenthood and baptismal sponsorship in creating both vertical and horizontal bonds between individuals and groups in early medieval Europe have long been recognized. What follows offers a case study of sixth- and early seventh-century Visigothic Spain, asking whether the baptismal process could also serve to bring elite and popular together. Elites sought to mobilize those lower down the scale than themselves in opposition to other elites at the same time as having constantly to negotiate the elite position from which they gained their authority. In sixth-century Spain the definition and redefinition of baptismal practice in church council legislation by both Catholics and Arians was an important method for achieving this dual aim of distinction and control.
Elite and Popular Perceptions of Imitatio Christi in Twelfth-Century Crusade Spirituality
Authors: Purkis William J.
Published: March 2016

From the time of the proclamation of the First Crusade in 1095 to at least the first decade of the twelfth century, there was an apparently universal understanding amongst the people of Christendom that those who joined the pilgrimage-in-arms that set out to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Land should be regarded as imitators of Christ. This was remarkable, for the imitation of Christ was understood by contemporaries to be the paramount ideal of spiritual perfection and, before 1095, only attainable by a total withdrawal from the world and a commitment to a monastic way of life. Yet with Pope Urban II’s Clermont sermon, the spirituality that was previously the preserve of those milites Christi who fought spiritual battles in the cloister was now also available to those who fought for Christ in the world. As the biographer of one prominent first crusader famously put it, before the proclamation of the crusade, his subject was ‘uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world. But after the call to arms in the service of Christ, the twofold reason for fighting inflamed him beyond belief.’
Elite and Popular Superstitions in the Exempla of Stephen of Bourbon
Authors: Rider Catherine
Published: March 2016

‘When I was preaching against sorcery and hearing confessions…’.

With these words, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon recalled how in a village in the Auvergne he had found a group of women venerating a dog as a saint. He then went on to describe how he had preached against the cult and persuaded the local lord to demolish the dog’s woodland shrine. Thanks to a detailed study by Jean-Claude Schmitt, this encounter between educated friar and unorthodox peasants has become a famous example of interaction between elite and popular religion in the Middle Ages. But it is only one of many such encounters that Stephen describes under the heading of ‘Superstitio’, or Superstition. Part of the interest of these tales for the modern reader is that they provide a window on to some of the unorthodox religious practices of the Middle Ages. Even more interesting, however, is the way in which Stephen links these practices to a clear but flexible idea of the relationship between elite and popular religion.
Some Italian Vernacular Religious Books, their Authors and their Readers, 1543–8
Authors: Preston Patrick
Published: March 2016

What might count as elite religion and popular religion within the restricted sphere of literate culture? The answer here is in terms of the production and reception of religious texts. Who wrote them and who read them, and with what kinds of assumptions and attitudes? Here I discuss the following questions: do the categories ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ divide up the field without remainder? Are ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ necessarily at odds? If ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ are not necessarily at odds, are they sometimes so?
Popular and Elite Religion: the Church and Devotional Control
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: March 2016

Popular and elite are imprecise terms, but it may be possible to give them a closer definition by relating them to categories in the work of John Henry Newman. In 1877, Newman was growing old. He was republishing his Anglican writings, both to preserve what they contained of value and to draw what poison remained. A particular difficulty attached to hisLectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published forty years before, in 1837, which classically defined the peculiar merit of the Church of England as occupying a middle way orvia mediabetween Romanism and popular Protestantism. The work contained some sharp attacks on Rome, which Newman had retracted even before his Roman conversion. There remained, however, a particular matter which had long been an obstacle to his submission to Rome, his conviction that the honours which Roman Catholics paid to the Virgin and saints derogated from the unique worship due to Christ, which Newman combined with a fastidious distaste for the more ‘unmanly’ and sentimental or sugary aspects of modern Catholic devotion.
Elite and Popular Religion: The Case of Newman
Authors: Fenlon Dermot
Published: March 2016

Among the signal insights of twentieth-century scholarship was the recognition that early Christianity accorded personal importance to the plebs. First, Eric Auerbach analysed the humble speech forms of early Christianity, contrasting them with the literature of learned pagans. The point was developed by Ramsay MacMullen in an important essay entitled ‘Sermo humilis’. Arnaldo Momigliano applied these insights to the theologians, historians and hagiographers of the fourth and fifth centuries. He showed how Augustine, Jerome, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret of Cyr succeeded, as pagan intellectuals had not succeeded, in ‘abolishing the internal frontiers between the learned and the vulgar’. Finally, Peter Brown, in a series of brilliant works from The Cult of the Saints to his revised biography of Augustine, supplied a means of discerning in the practice of universal baptism the ‘antidote’ to the exaggerations of fourth-century ascetical elitism. Augustine imparted to the Western Middle Ages a confidence in the power of sacramental grace as efficacious not only for the ascetic few, but as communicating to the many a capacity for growth in charity, purity, and prayer. Such a perspective on the religion of the many bids adieu to Gibbon’s story of ‘philosophy’ collapsing into ‘barbarism and religion’; to Hume’s account of the superstitious and the credulous; and to Henry Hart Milman’s Romantic brand of Liberal Anglicanism as marked by ‘condescension’ towards ‘popular religion’ occluding ‘the thought processes of the average man’; a habit of mind to which Peter Brown surprisingly appended the name of Newman.
The Bolton Prelude to Port Sunlight: W. H. Lever (1851–1925) as Patron and Paternalist
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

Christ Church United Reformed Church (formerly Congregational), Port Sunlight, and St George’s United Reformed Church (formerly Congregational), Thornton Hough, do not spring to mind as Free Church buildings. There is scarcely one architectural respect in which either announces a Dissenting presence. Each conforms to nationally established tradition. Their quality, however, is as incontestable as it is incontestably derivative. Their role in their respective village-scapes is important, even dominant. As buildings, therefore, they are significant and perhaps suggestive, but do they say anything about ecclesiastical polity? The answer to that question illustrates the interaction between elite and popular religion in Edwardian English Protestant Nonconformity, for the polity to which these two churches give space is in fact successively congregational, Congregational, and Reformed. It is representative throughout but never democratic. Yet can any shade of Congregationalism truly develop in either a squire’s village or a manufacturer’s? And what might be deduced of the man who provided these buildings, created their villages, shaped their communities, and regarded himself lifelong as a Congregationalist even if a masonic lodge were the only fellowship to which he could statedly commit himself? These questions prompt this paper.
Anglican ‘Establishment’ Reactions to ‘POP’ Church Music in England, 1956–C.1990
Authors: Jones Ian , Webster Peter
Published: March 2016

The use of popular styles of music in the Church has often proved contentious, and perhaps particularly so in the later twentieth century. Anecdotal evidence abounds of the debate provoked in churches by the introduction of new ‘happy-clappy’ pop-influenced styles, and the supposed wholesale discarding of a glorious heritage of hymnody. In addition, a great deal of literature has appeared elaborating on the inappropriateness of such music. Welcoming a historical study of hymnody in 1996, John Habgood lamented the displacement of traditional hymn singing by ‘trivial and repetitive choruses’. Lionel Dakers, retired Director of the Royal School of Church Music, also saw choruses and worship songs as ‘in many instances little more than trite phrases repeated ad nauseam, often with accompanying body movements’. This paper investigates the reactions of the musical and ecclesiastical establishments to the use of popular music in public worship in the Church of England from 1956 to c. 1990. The period began with a new wave of experimentation epitomized by Geoffrey Beaumont’s Folk Mass and the controversy surrounding it, and ended in the early 1990s, by which time the pop-influenced worship music of the renewal movement had become firmly established in some sections of the Church, with its own figure-heads and momentum.
Some Recent Work on Early Benedictine History
Authors: Knowles David
Published: March 2016

Thirty years ago a phase of monastic historical scholarship was drawing towards its close. For some forty years previously a group of scholars, who may fitly be considered the founders of critical monastic history of our century, had been actively at work. Almost all belonged to, or were connected with, three Benedictine abbeys: Maredsous in Belgium, Farnborough and Downside in England, belonging respectively to the Congregations of Beuron, France and England. Among them stood out Ursmer Berlière of Maredsous, creator and for long editor of the Revue Bénédictine and historian of medieval monasticism; his colleague Germain Morin, equally distinguished in the patristic and monastic fields; André Wilmart of Farnborough, unrivalled in our age in his knowledge of monastic literature and spirituality, and his colleagues Ferdinand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq; and at Downside Edmund Bishop and Cuthbert Butler. To these may be added John Chapman, originally of Maredsous and later of Downside who, though primarily a patristic and New Testament scholar, turned in his last years to the age of St Benedict; and Abbot Delatte of Solesmes who, though not an historian, distilled and presented to modern monks the wisdom of innumerable commentators of the past on the Rule of St Benedict. Taken as a group, these men had surveyed the history and literature of the Benedictine order between 540 and 1350, while Butler had produced a sound critical edition of the Rule and, together with others, had analysed the legislation and spiritual doctrine of Benedictine monasticism with a fulness that had not been achieved for any other medieval order, save perhaps that of St Francis.
Jews and Christians in the Constantinian Empire
Authors: Parkes James
Published: March 2016

The fourth century introduced no new features into the Christian opinion of Jews and Judaism. Yet it is extremely important because it standardised an existing attitude at the earliest moment when the Church had the power to express its view in law and practice, and not merely in the pulpit or in theological argument. It thus set the tone which determined future relations for more than a millenium; and, as Christendom became more and more the total environment of life in the western world, so the attitude towards the Jews adopted by the Church in the early centuries came to determine the whole condition of Jewish life over the whole realm of Christendom. The Church became the arbiter of life and death, of the permission to carry on even the most meagre and restricted existence under a Christian prince.
The Gospel of Philip
Authors: Wilson R. McL.
Published: March 2016

The document with which this paper is concerned was discovered in 1945 or 1946 in the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi, in the same codex as the more famous Gospel of Thomas. Unlike Thomas, however, it has so far attracted comparatively little attention—largely because it affords no scope for the seekers after sensation. It has been held by reputable scholars that Thomas goes back at least in part to a tradition independent of our canonical Gospels, but Philip has never been regarded as anything but a Gnostic work. Yet it is not thereby devoid of interest or of significance.
What is Mediana Week?
Authors: Willis Geoffrey G.
Published: March 2016

Mediana is a term peculiar to Roman liturgy and is applied to the fifth Sunday in Lent, to the Wednesday and Saturday which precede this Sunday, and to the week embracing these three days. The term first occurs in a letter of Pope Gelasius, written in 494, in which he says that ordinations of priests and deacons should only be performed at certain seasons on Saturday evening, namely the fasts of the fourth, seventh and tenth months, which are the original Embertides, on the first Saturday in Lent, which is in the fourth and later Embertide, and on the Saturday medianae quadragesimae. The term occurs again in the next century when Pope Pelagius I (556–561) appointed this mediana septimana paschae as a season for ordinations. The text of Gelasius is quoted in the Liber Diurnus, of which the earliest manuscript dates from the seventh to the eighth century; in a letter of Gregory II of 715; and in the eleventh Canon of the Roman Council of 743.
Donatism: the Last Phase
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2016

The purpose of this paper is to question some generally held assumptions concerning the character of Donatism, and its relations with the Catholic Church, during the later period of Byzantine rule in North Africa. The features of the Donatist Church during its classical period, in the fourth and fifth centuries, are now well known. They are conveniently surveyed by Dr Frend in his magisterial study of the movement. He has established, definitively in my view, that the schism in the African Church had roots far deeper than historians had previously discerned. The theological divergence between Catholicism and Dissent, as he put it, ‘was interwoven with other differences, such as geography, culture and economic circumstance.’ ‘The two churches were in fact two societies, differing fundamentally in outlook on both religious and social questions.’