bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reflections on Early Christian Topography
Authors: Greenslade S. L.
Published: March 2016

One day early in the sixth century a house by the convent of nuns in the city of Arles caught fire. As the flames drew nearer, the cloistered ladies, forbidden to go outside, flung books and treasures and finally themselves into cisterns which were mercifully empty (one might think some water useful). The praepositi ran to Bishop Caesarius, warning him that the fire was getting close to his cell. Quickly he came out, went along the wall to the spot where the flames burned brightest, shouted encouragement from the wall, and brought the fire under control by his prayers.

This story from the near-contemporary life of Caesarius throws an uncertain light upon the Christian topography of Arles. From the Vita and from the Rule which Caesarius gave to his nuns we know that he had brought the convent within the walls after the Franco-Burgundian siege of A.D. 508. The Rule speaks of turris juxta pomoerium, and there it is still, Tour des Mourgues, turrsi monacharum, at the south-west corner of the Roman walls. In that corner was the Abbaye de S. Césaire until the Revolution; and recently a cistern has been uncovered which may well be that in which the nuns took refuge. So far, so good. But where was the bishop? Any well-instructed schoolboy will convict me of a howler. If the praepositi told Caesarius that the fire was near cellae suae, it was their cell, not his. But few schoolboys are encouraged to read late Latin or even colloquial Latin of classical times. I shall continue to trust that they were not so pusillanimous as to leave the ladies to their fate and run trembling to the bishop in fear for their own rooms. They feared for him.
Christianity and Geography in Early Northumbria
Authors: Hill Rosalind
Published: March 2016

When Augustine came to Kent in 597, bringing to its inhabitants the good news of the Gospel, he came as the emissary of St Gregory the Great for the conversion of England. Within four years of his arrival, and probably as soon as the news of Æthelbert’s baptism had reached Rome, St Gregory had despatched a carefully worked-out scheme for the ordering of the Church among the English. Augustine was to set up a metropolitan see at London with authority over twelve dioceses, and, wrote St Gregory, ‘we wish you to send to the city of York a bishop, the choice of whom we leave to you, on the understanding that if this city and the surrounding lands shall receive the word of God, he also shall establish twelve bishops and enjoy metropolitan authority.’
A recent view of the General Interdict on England, 1208–1214
Authors: Cheney C. R.
Published: March 2016

In recent years there have been several obvious places where an enquirer might learn about the interdict laid by Pope Innocent III on England and Wales. Powicke in the Cambridge Medieval History, Poole in the Oxford History, and Painter inThe Reign of King Johnall described this episode in the history of the English Church and discussed its bearing on political affairs. People who wanted more detail could go to two papers, published in 1948 and 1949, and would find additions to their knowledge in fragmentary documents discovered recently in the Public Record Office and the Canterbury archives, and edited by Dr Powell and Dr Barnes for the Pipe Roll Society in I960. From all these places they would receive roughly the same impression. But last year Messrs Richardson and Sayles published the first volume ofThe Governance of Mediaeval England.
John Calvin, the Jurisconsults and the Ius Civile
Authors: Hall Basil
Published: March 2016

The first brief writing of Calvin to appear in print was the epistle to the French jurisconsult François de Connan, which preceded the short treatise Antapologia issued by Calvin’s fellow student Nicholas Duchemin against the Italian jurisconsult Alciati. In this epistle, headed Ioannes Calvinus Francisco Connano iuris studiosissimo, Calvin wrote ‘. . .our friend Duchemin who, as you know, is a man most careful in his studies, of perspicacious mind, and what is of the first importance, of the most penetrating judgement; and who is abundantly learned in the best literature has now become engaged upon, and has already been engaged upon, legal studies. . .’: every word here could have been applied to himself. The occasion of this dedication, written in March 1531, when Calvin was a young law student of twenty-two at Orléans, was the eagerness of Duchemin and Calvin to support their admired master, Pierre de l’Estoile, against the devious method of attack by Alciati at Bourges, who had published a criticism, under the name of a pupil or under a pseudonym, of l’Estoile’s interpretation of a point of civil law wherein he had shown that Alciati on this point had borrowed from the greatest of French classical scholars, Guillaume Budé, without acknowledgment.
The Wesleys and Howell Harris
Authors: Knox R. B.
Published: March 2016

The movement inaugurated in England by the Wesleys has received and is still receiving much attention from historians. There was a contemporary and related movement in Wales, but, due to barriers of language, geography, politics, and national outlook, it has received much less attention. The leader of the Welsh movement was Howell Harris: the discovery and piecemeal publication of his journals and of a great mass of his correspondence have provided fresh material for the study of his life and work, and, in particular, of his relationship to the Wesleys.
St Boniface and the German mission
Authors: Talbot C. H.
Published: March 2016

On this, the anniversary of the bringing to Mainz of the martyred body of St Boniface, it seems appropriate that any remarks about the Anglo-Saxon mission to Germany should be confined to his activities alone. Unfortunately, the story of his life has been told by many people at many times, and in default of new facts and documents, it is not possible to do more than repeat what is already well known.

To me the life of St Boniface appears to fall into three main periods: his mission from Gregory II to preach the gospel ‘ad quascumque gentes infidelitatis errore detentas’; his work in Thuringia among a partly christianized people; and his organization of the Church in Germany together with the reform of the Frankish Church. In other words, his activities as priest, as bishop, and as archbishop. These three divisions illustrate not only the problems he had to face, but also the methods with which he attacked them.
The Church’s response to the cholera outbreak of 1866
Authors: Huelin G.
Published: March 2016

The publication of Mr Norman Longmate’s book King Cholera in November 1966 served as a reminder of the terrible scourge which afflicted this country on no less than four separate occasions during the nineteenth century. While this volume was, no doubt—as the ‘blurb’ on its dust-jacket affirms—‘an important contribution to social history’, so far as the part which the Church played during those critical years, the half was not told in its pages. In this short paper it will be my task to try to repair this omission in regard to just one of the four major outbreaks of the disease in England, the last in fact, that of the year 1866; and to say something of the response made by churchmen and women to the cholera outbreak of a century ago.
The Status of the Elizabethan Parochial Clergy
Authors: Tyler Philip
Published: March 2016

The continuity of English ecclesiastical history is so strong that one is always faced with the problem of when to begin. Paradoxically enough, so far as the diocese of York is concerned, 1499 seems to be a good choice to begin any examination of the Elizabethan clergy. In that year one of the last appropriations of a benefice by a monastic house took place. After this only three more similar appropriations are recorded. This concluded a process which had lasted more than two centuries and was to influence the status of the parish clergy in local society until Queen Anne’s Bounty and after. In 1710 the commissioners found that 5,597 benefices out of a total of nearly 10,000 livings in England and Wales were not worth more than £ 50 a year. A further examination revealed that of these 5,597 livings 2,122 had a yearly value of less than £30, and a further 1,200 were valued at less than £ 20 a year.
The Old Syrian Baptismal Tradition and its Resettlement under the Influence of Jerusalem in the Fourth Century
Authors: Ratcliff E. C.
Published: March 2016

It is well known that the old Syrian, or to give it a more comprehensive description, the old Eastern liturgical usage of Baptism differed markedly from that which obtained in the West. The most obvious difference is one of pattern, and appears in connection with the ceremony known to us as Confirmation. In Western usage, as we find it in North Africa, described by Tertullian at the beginning of the third century in his De Baptismo, the act of baptising is followed by two ceremonies. The first of these is an anointing with oil. Tertullian connects this anointing with that of Aaron by Moses, and ascribes to it an undefined spiritual benefit. The second ceremony is the last of the rite, and its culmination; it conveys, according to Tertullian, the gift of the Holy Spirit. ‘Dehinc,’ he says, ‘manus imponitur per benedictionem advocans et invitans spiritum sanctum. . . . Tunc ille sanctissimus spiritus super emundata et benedicta corpora libens a patre descendit.’ Shortly after the writing of De Baptismo, we meet with evidence for the existence of a similar rite at Rome. The text of Apostolic Tradition, as it has been put together from its several versions, requires to be treated with caution; but there is no doubt that Hippolytus knew a post-baptismal ceremony, comparable with the use of oil after the bath, and held to apply, ώς μύρῳ, the powers of the Holy Spirit, to those who have newly come up from the ‘bath’ (λουτρόν) of Baptism.
The Greek Church under the Ottoman Turks
Authors: Runciman Steven
Published: March 2016

My theme is a melancholy one. It is the story of what happens to a Church of second-class citizens in a land dominated by rulers of an alien religion, an alien culture, and, officially at least, an alien race. We all know, with Tertullian, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. But when the martyrs are not fiercely persecuted but, instead, merely consistently humiliated, the outcome is less stimulating. It leads to decline and decay.
The Unit of Pastoral Care in the Early Church
Authors: Greenslade S. L.
Published: March 2016

When, in modern ecumenical converse, it is suggested that a non-episcopal church may do well to take episcopacy into its system, there is bound to be discussion of the theology of episcopacy, of whether or not the bishop is of the esse of the Church, is necessary to its being, necessary for the perpetuation of orders and sacraments, and of the nature and significance of apostolic succession. But that is not all. Besides these high doctrinal problems, there will be questions about bishops as facts of history. Fear of prelacy may cast doubt upon their being even of the bene esse of the Church. Frequently, however, there is a genuine interest in the pastoral potentialities of episcopacy. While it is claimed that the ministers of non-episcopal churches do in fact exercise episkope over their parishes or congregations, it is freely allowed that, for good pastoral and evangelistic reasons (and not solely for the sake of what is sometimes called mere administration), the modern trend has been strongly towards the appointment of ministers to an office involving supervision of larger areas and of other ministers, whether the former are called moderators, superintendents, chairmen, general secretaries, what you will—even bishops. But if such men are meant to exercise a pastoral office, how can it be secured that they do not degenerate into ‘mere administrators’?
A Durham Canonical Manuscript of the Late Twelfth Century
Authors: Duggan Charles
Published: March 2016

This paper seeks to present merely a preliminary report on a twelfh-century English canonical manuscript of more than usual interest. The work in question is the Durham Cathedral MSC.III.i, ff. 1v-18r, of which a complete analysis with full palaeographical description will be published later, giving clearer definition to the discussions simply outlined here. To deal briefly with the physical appearance of the manuscript first: the folios are 13½ × 9½ in. in size, and the canonical matter is transcribed in double or triple columns with an average of sixty-five lines to the column, carefully written in several different hands of the later twelfth century, with many rubrics and occasional brief marginal references, comments or glosses. It may be said at once that one obvious point of interest in this work is the variety of types of composition, many of them common-place enough individually, gathered together compactly within a few folios of a single volume, revealing the many-sided activities of English canonical collectors at a very creative and formative period in the history of canon law.
Mediaeval Deposition Theory: a Neglected Canonist Consultatio from the First Council of Lyons
Authors: Watt J. A.
Published: March 2016

This communication treats of a small detail of a large subject. The claim to a power of deposing secular rulers is a major theme in the history of the papacy. As a theory, it epitomises the whole political logic of the mediaeval papacy: the deposing power was the primum caput of papal hierocracy and its origins lie deep in early papal centuries. As a political doctrine put into practice, it had profound effects at several points in the history of mediaeval Europe, particularly in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while its shadow lay banefully over many a governmental decision and politico-religious controversy of more modern times.
Predestination, Property, and Power: Wyclif’s Theory of Dominion and Grace
Authors: Wilks Michael
Published: March 2016

For nearly six hundred years the significance of Wyclif’s theory of dominion and grace has been in dispute, although it is generally agreed that his chief claim to fame as a political figure rests upon it. It has recently been described as his main contention, and there can be no doubt that it was a thesis of which he was inordinately proud. It became a major feature in both the papal condemnation of 1377 and that of the Blackfriars Council five years later; it looms even more largely in the forty-five Wycliffite propositions condemned at Prague in 1403, at Rome in 1413, and subsequently by the Council of Constance in 1415. Hus’s defence of the theory was an important factor in bringing him to the stake. But if Wyclif’s contemporaries had little hesitation in recognising a destructive potential, modern scholars have been far more cautious in assessing its political value. Neither R. L. Poole nor Workman could reach a firm judgement.
The Role of Women in the English Reformation illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke
Authors: Collinson Patrick
Published: March 2016

The notable part played by women in the Reformation has rarely been given its due recognition in English historical studies. In recent years Professor Wallace Notestein has written with characteristic authority and grace on ‘The English Woman, 1580-1650,’ but one does not learn from this essay that the English women of this age had any religious propensities at all. And leaving aside the more prominent figures such as Queen Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, and Catherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, women make but few appearances in most accounts of the English Reformation. This is no doubt only one symptom of the tendency of so many of our histories to dwell upon the officially inspired aspects of the Reformation to the neglect of the spontaneous and the local; to be concerned with the making of settlements and their enforcement rather than with the means by which Protestantism actually spread in families, towns, and other communities. And of course there are special factors which obscure the female contribution to history, the legal disabilities of the sex, which so often hide the married woman and allow us to catch glimpses only of the widow, a ‘person’ in law.
A Corpus of Elizabethan Nonconformist Writings
Authors: Carlson Leland H.
Published: March 2016

It is easy to lament the paucity of source materials, whether for certain historical periods, specific topics, or the lives of individuals. The cry is usually for more, more, whether of documents, monographs, or money, and the inordinate desires of man are frequently stimulated but rarely satisfied. Perhaps we should occasionally accentuate the positive, rejoice in what we have, and give silent thanks for the labours and foresights of those who have gone before. If we consider the Elizabethan period, we are blessed with the State Papers, Domestic, Foreign, Venetian, and Spanish. There are 45 volumes of the Acts of the Privy Council of England for the period 1542-1630, of which 26 relate to the Elizabethan period. We have the 27 volumes of John Strype, the 55 volumes of the Parker Society, the various works of the Alcuin Club Collections and the Canterbury and York Society. The members of the Catholic Record Society have provided us with 57 volumes of materials, and A. F. Allison and David Rogers have edited Biographical Studies and Recusant History since 1951.
The Merovingian monastery of St Evroul in the light of conflicting traditions
Authors: Chibnall Marjorie
Published: March 2016

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.
A critique of popular religion: Guibert of Nogent on The Relics of the Saints
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2016

In his fascinating paper, Professor Momigliano drew to our attention the degree to which the aristocracy of the late Roman Empire accepted within its religious ethos beliefs and practices which we would be inclined to label as ‘popular’. In doing so, he raised the recurrent problem of cultural diffusion. How far, in a given period, were intellectuals willing to accept as normative the piety of the simple faithful? Conversely, how far did the more critical attitudes of scholars influence popular devotion? These are permanent questions which we may ask of the history of the church, but perhaps the problem was never so acute as in the medieval church. Its intelligentsia (the humanists of the twelfth century, the philosophers of the thirteenth) had received a long and exacting formal education. The ordinary faithful, conversely, were illiterate, cut off, we might think, from the very sources of christian spirituality, for they could neither read the Scriptures nor follow the latin liturgy. Critics of the medieval church have been inclined to see two religions rather than one: a philosophical, indeed over-rational, religion of the intelligentsia, and a set of popular superstitions. A valuable piece of evidence in assessing the truth of this estimate is to be found in the first book of the treatise on The Relics of the Saints written in about 1120 by Guibert abbot of Nogent. Its significance lies, not only in the useful information which it contains about popular practice, but in the fact that it was an attempt to assess it, made by one of the more learned and attractive men of the time. Although Guibert made little direct impact on the history of the age, he was in close sympathy with many of the leaders of the twelfth-century Renaissance, and was a fine scholar in his own right.
Some popular prophecies from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries
Authors: Reeves Marjorie E.
Published: March 2016

In the summer of 1304 the leaders of the Spiritual Franciscan party in Italy, Fra Angelo Clareno and Fra Liberato, were gathered with their followers in Perugia. They had recently returned from exile in the east. Benedict XI was dead and western Christendom awaited the outcome of what was to be one of the most crucial papal elections in the later Middle Ages. It was to be a trial of strength between the pro-and anti-French parties, accompanied by much political manœuvring, rumour and bargaining. In the interval, while the political groups were mustering their forces, there appeared a set of prophecies of the popes, called the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus, which can with some confidence be ascribed to the little group at Perugia. Seldom in history can the gap between hope and political reality have been wider. The Spiritual Franciscans were thinking in terms of heilsgeschichte, and for them the crisis of all history was at hand, while cardinals Napoleone degli Orsini, Nicholas of Prato, and others were laying down the tortuous lines of the intrigues which resulted in the election of Clement V and the removal of the papacy to Avignon. It is only through these prophecies that we can discern the high expectations and pent-up emotion with which this moment was approached by some at least. Though the moment passed and salvation drew not nigh, there was some powerful force of attraction in these prophecies: they were seized on immediately, quickly disseminated and imitated. Why was this?
Evangelicalism and worldliness 1770–1870
Authors: Hennell Michael
Published: March 2016

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ The carrying out of this injunction has been interpreted differently in different ages. Professor Rupp reminded us in an early book that sixteenth-century Puritans and Protestants were not Victorian Christians in period costume. Calvin and Knox would have been hounded by the Lord’s Day Observance Society if their views on Sunday games had been known to Victorian evangelicals. During the years 1770–1870 there was an increasing strictness and rigidity with regard to ‘the world’. First of all there was the question did the world belong to God or the devil. Most evangelicals in 1770 would have said that it belonged to God, but by Victorian times they were not so certain. Abner Brown, speaking of one parson’s wife, says: ‘When her fine manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “ Satan’s earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ On the other hand Lord Mount Temple when censured by friends for attending the Queen’s fancy-dress ball replied: ‘This is God’s world by right, and not the devil’s. Our business is to subdue it to its lawful king, and not to abandon it to the enemy.’ With regard to pleasures and amusements there was a growing strictness; I was able to give an example of this with regard to the Venn family in John Venn and the Clapham Sect.
Bishop Buckingham and the lollards of Lincoln diocese
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

The first case of lollardy in which Buckingham is known to have acted concerned William Swinderby, the hermit of Leicester. Swinderby’s story is well known, and needs no retelling here. What should be noted as important for our purpose is the timing of his prosecution: the first inhibitions and citations against him were dated 5 March 1382. Thus Buckingham took action before additional powers were obtained from the lay arm and before the Blackfriars council itself met, though it may be conjectured that when he acted he had the forthcoming meeting of the council in view. Buckingham issued the commission to Swinderby’s two judges on 12 May 1382 when he was in London for the council, and published the sentence against him on 11 July. On the following day he passed on to his archdeacons the council’s condemnation of Wycliffite opinions, though the decrees had already been published in the diocese, at Oxford, on 15 June 1382.
A sermon by John Luke on the ending of the great schism, 1409
Authors: Harvey Margaret
Published: March 2016

In 1409 the council of Pisa, called by the cardinals in defiance of two rival popes, attempted to end the thirty-year-old Great Schism by deposing both rivals for heresy and schism. On 26 June 1409, the cardinals unanimously elected as pope Peter Philargi of Candia, cardinal ‘of Milan’, and amid general rejoicing he took the name Alexander V. The schism seemed over, provided that all the powers of Europe were prepared to acknowledge the new pope. Some time after the new election but before 27 July 1409, master John Luke who was at the council as a theologian, probably representing Oxford university, preached a sermon before the new pope, praising his election and hopeful of his role in the unity of the Church. Luke gave an elaborate justification of the deposition for heresy and schism of Gregory XII (the Roman pope, whom the English thought was the true one). It is with this sermon that I am concerned in the present paper.
‘Dens of loitering lubbers’: protestant protest against cathedral foundations, 1540–1640
Authors: Cross Claire
Published: March 2016

In A View of Popishe Abuses which enlarged upon the corruptions remaining in the English church, already itemised by protestant radicals in An Admonition to the Parliament of 1572, the writer dwelt at some length upon the iniquities of cathedral foundations.

We should be too long to tell your honours of cathedral churches, the dens aforesaid of all loitering lubbers, where master dean, master vicedean, master canons or prebendaries the greater, master petty canons or canons the lesser, master chancellor of the church, master treasurer, otherwise called Judas the pursebearer, the chief chanter, singingmen, special favourers of religion, squeaking choristers, organ players, gospellers, pistellers, pensioners, readers, vergers etc. live in great idleness and have their abiding. If you would know whence all these came, we can easily answer you, that they came from the pope, as out of the Trojan horse’s belly, to the destruction of God’s kingdom. The church of God never knew them, neither doth any reformed church in the world know them.
The Anglo-Gallicanism of dom Thomas Preston, 1567–1647
Authors: Lunn Maurus
Published: March 2016

Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.
The arian schism in Ireland, 1830
Authors: Barkley J. M.
Published: March 2016

In Irish Presbyterianism Henry Cooke is commonly regarded as the champion of orthodoxy. Was it not he who drove the Arians out of the Synod of Ulster in 1830? The purpose of this paper is not to examine the theological issues involved, but rather to try to discover the real cause of the schism.

The Reverend J. Smethurst (Moreton Hampstead) visited the North of Ireland during the autumn of 1821. The traditional picture is that of Cooke routing the Unitarian Smethurst in Killyleagh (where Cooke was minister) and pursuing him from place to place in his zeal for orthodoxy. This, however, fails to take into account an important aspect of Smethurst’s campaign. He writes,

I feel persuaded that there is considerable inquiry on religious subjects amongst the Dissenters in the North of Ireland, and that liberal opinions are fast gaining ground amongst them... One of the greatest obstacles in the way of their doing so, is the view they have been accustomed to take of the Christian religion, as being a system upheld solely by its union with the secular power. If they could see it free from this connexion, they would view it in a far more favourable light, and the most formidable of their prejudices would be removed. Even amongst the Dissenters the natural tendency of the most remote connexion of this kind is too obvious to escape notice. The Presbyterian Church of Ireland has long been considered as a sort of demi-establishment. And though its connexion with the civil power is not so close as that of the Church of England, yet the union, as far as it goes, is no less injurious.
A. H. Clough: a case study in Victorian doubt
Authors: Scott P. G.
Published: March 2016

In 1868, F. W. Farrar addressed the Church Congress in Dublin on the reasons why young men were increasingly alienated from the church: ‘the alienation of the most highly educated’, he declared, ‘is as much an intellectual as the alienation of the uneducated is a moral and social phenomenon’. The emphasis we have inherited on the intellectual difficulties in religious belief felt by Victorian doubters of the upper-middle classes has obscured the extent to which their alienation, like that of the uneducated, was part of a broader shift in attitudes. This change of attitudes could precede disengagement from institutional religious allegiance by many years, and had little to do with specific intellectual difficulties. Discussion in terms of ‘difficulties’ caused by geology, biblical criticism, and so on, may be the way doubters chose to explain their detachment from the Church, and only one cause among many of that detachment.
Sanctity and secularity in the early Irish church
Authors: Hughes Kathleen
Published: March 2016

Ireland was odd in the early middle ages. She lay on the outer edge of the world, the survivor of that Celtic civilisation which had once covered much of the west. She had never immediately known the pervading influence of Rome, which continued in so many ways for so long after the Roman empire collapsed. Christianity had reached her rather early (there were enough christians to make it worth while to send a continental bishop, Palladius, in 431) and it came before many of the developments which determined the nature of monasticism in early medieval Europe. Ireland’s political and social organisation were somewhat different from those of the Germanic peoples of the west; and though the early church in Ireland had an episcopal, diocesan structure, within two hundred years or so of its inception it had been fundamentally modified by native Irish laws and institutions. It is therefore not surprising to find that both Ireland’s sanctity and her secularity had peculiar features.
The blessings of work: the cistercian view
Authors: Holdsworth Christopher J.
Published: March 2016

Around 1180 Conrad of Eberbach writing about the history of his own order, the cistercian, noticed that it had been founded the year before Jerusalem was freed from the saracens and close to the beginning of the Carthusian and premonstratensian orders. This seemed to him a significant cluster of events, for as the holy city was restored to the Christians, so the orders of monks, hermits and canons were being brought back to their old and proper ways of life by the new orders. Whilst today we may find Conrad’s chronology a little puzzling (La Grande Chartreuse and Prémontré were founded in 1084 and 1120, Cîteaux in 1098, whilst Jerusalem was freed in 1099), we can recognise that the first cistercians were aware that they were attempting a new thing; they called their first home at Cîteaux the New Monastery, thus distinguishing it from Molesmes, the old monastery from which they had come, and from the monastic world at large.
The business of belief: the emergence of ‘religious’ publishing
Authors: Scott Patrick
Published: March 2016

In 1863, when a London printer, called Collingridge, produced a handbook for the aspiring author, he made it clear that one particular class of aspiring author was of dominant commercial importance:

We may venture to assert that no other profession produces so many works as the clergy. This is no more than might be expected from a body of gentlemen having the advantages of sound learning and well-regulated minds . . . there are thousands of clergy who neither know, nor desire to know, the toils, the anxieties, or the pleasures of authorship; yet even they, if in active duty, require the services of the printer. Special sermons, schools, and other local institutions in the parish or district, necessitate an outlet for printing.
The council of Westminster 1175: new light on an old source
Authors: Cheney Mary
Published: March 2016

The text with which this study is concerned is not the text of the canons of the council of Westminster of 1175. It is the text printed long ago by Wilkins from the single manuscript source, Cotton Claudius A IV folios 191v–92, where it has the heading Concilium Ricardi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi. Wilkins gave it the heading Canones condlii . . . and assigned it to 1173, an impossible date, since Richard was not then archbishop. This part of Claudius A IV is a decretal collection, put together from various sources not before, and probably not long after, 1185. Our text, copied as one item in the collection, consists of thirty-seven imperative propositions, all quite short and almost all negative; they all condemn something or forbid something: ‘Christians shall not be usurers’, ‘Lepers shall not in future live among the healthy’, and so on. There is little sign of any attempt at arrangement; related topics may appear more or less widely separated.
John Strype as a source for the study of sixteenth-century English church history
Authors: Cargill Thompson W. D. J.
Published: March 2016

Because he was not a medievalist John Strype does not find a place in David Douglas’s classic study of the golden age of English antiquarian scholarship, English Scholars 1660–1730. Yet in terms both of his output and of his influence on the subsequent development of the study of English church history Strype is arguably one of the most important scholars that the age produced. Even to-day, nearly 250 years after his death, the twenty-five volumes of his works in the Clarendon press reissue of the 1820s are still a standard source for the study of English church history in the sixteenth century and it is difficult to open a book dealing with any aspect of the English reformation, which does not have its quota of references to Strype. At the same time, as any one who works on the period knows, Strype’s standing as an ecclesiastical historian is ambiguous. If, on the one hand, he is widely quoted, on the other, he is frequently attacked for his mistakes and his works are notoriously full of pitfalls for the unwary. It is therefore perhaps appropriate, in a volume devoted to ‘the Sources, Materials and Methods of Ecclesiastical History’, to consider, first, what is Strype’s value to-day as a source for the study of the English reformation and, secondly, the question of his reliability as a church historian. The two questions, one should stress, are distinct, although they are not unrelated.
Supernaturalised culture: catholic attitudes and latin lands 1840–60
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: March 2016

There is still a remarkable book to be written about a phenomenon as yet little recognised or understood: the sudden appearance in England of a serious and scholarly interest in religious experience as a subject worthy of study in itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Possibly the two best-known landmarks of the movement were William James’s Gifford Lectures and dean Inge’s Christian Mysticism, which popularised mystical theology beyond the circles to which it had been for the most part confined, within the roman catholic church. Dean Inge had many harsh words for the popish mysticism associated with monasticism, and pervaded by an easy familiarity with the ‘supernatural suspensions of physical law’ of roman catholic hagiography. He passed these strictures on French and Belgian treatises and seminary textbooks, but he might have found materials as outrageous in English, in the writings of the mid-nineteenth century ultramontanes who had striven to reproduce in native dress the religious forms of Italy, France and Spain, and to recreate in England a foreign and professedly ‘supernatural’ culture which accepted mystical experience as an ordinary fact of life.
Victorian religious periodicals: fragments that remain
Authors: Scott Patrick
Published: March 2016

‘Victorian Britain was not only the first urbanising society,’ Michael Wolff has recently reminded us, ‘. . . it was the first “journalising” society,’ also. Recent research, resulting from professor Wolff’s victorian periodicals project, shows that there were upwards of eighteenthousandperiodicals of differing title, published during the victorian period. Of course, these periodicals varied greatly both in duration and in influence, but the average ‘run’ of a victorian periodical was about twenty-eight years, and most victorians would have agreed with professor Wolff’s verdict that the magazines were one of the major new characteristics of their age. ‘We look for our monthly and weekly magazines,’ wrote one correspondent to theBritish Controversialistin 1862, ‘as readily as we look for our daily food.’ ‘Periodical literature,’ agreed another, ‘is essentially an outgrowth of modern times.’ They were both contributing to a debate, in a monthly periodical, on the question, ‘Does the present multiplicity of periodicals retard rather than foster intellectual progress’?
The early religious policies of Justin II
Authors: Cameron Averil
Published: March 2016

On 14 November AD 565, Justinian died and his nephew Justin was raised to the throne in a well managed senatorial coup. He was already of middle age and had spent the latter part of his life building up useful connections at court which served him well when the critical moment came: his rival, cousin and homonym was far more glamorous, being a military man, but he was not on the spot and Justin was easily able to have him removed. We are told that the murder was engineered by Justin’s empress, Sophia, the niece of Theodora, a lady who emerges as a figure as powerful and in many ways more interesting than her aunt. From the first the reign was a partnership; Sophia is shown in a novel way together with her husband on Justin’s coins, and is named with him in the headings to decrees preserved on papyri. So Justin at least acquiesced in her prominence, even if he did not like it, and it was natural for poets and historians to give as much attention to the empress as to the emperor. When the loss of the Mesopotamian border fortress of Dara to the Persians in 573 drove Justin out of his wits Sophia very naturally took control, even though nominally the government had to be put into the hands of a man (Tiberius, appointed caesar in AD 574 and augustus in 578); yet her influence had been strong from the beginning, and we shall see that if it is right to see her driving force behind the harsh persecutions of monophysites in the 570s, we must also seek her initiative in the religious policy of the late 560s.
Theodore of Sykeon and the historians
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

Saint George, it was noted in the epilogue to an eleventh-century collection of his miracles, ‘did not only perform his daily miracles in his own person: his gracious power was extended to those whose life accorded with his, and whose trust in him was beyond doubt or question. Sometimes he rescued them from the perils that oppressed them: sometimes he collaborated with them in the miracles and wonders which they performed. Of this there is ample testimony, but particular reference may be made to that great and famous Theodore, called the Sykeote, whom everybody knows. In all this George followed his master Christ, who gave his disciples power over demons, and sent them out to heal the sick.’ Of the extent of Theodore’s posthumous reputation there can be no question.
Did Gregory the Great know Greek?
Authors: Petersen Joan M.
Published: March 2016

Two assumptions have been made by generations of scholars, including F. Homes Dudden, Pierre Batiffol, and in more recent times, Pierre Riché; the first is that Gregory the Great, in spite of six years’ residence in Constantinople as apoaisiarius, knew no Greek; the second, that he was totally ignorant of eastern theological thought.

As we shall see later, there are good grounds for challenging both these assumptions, though it will not be possible in this paper to do more than to indicate the lines upon which the second of them may be answered. However, before we examine them, it would be as well to consider how far Greek was known and studied in Rome during the century and a half which preceded Gregory’s birth in about 540, and in his own lifetime.
Robert Grosseteste and his work of Greek translation
Authors: Hill Kathryn D.
Published: March 2016

Robert Grosseteste was a scholar of many parts; regarded by contemporaries and later historians alike as the vital figure in the intellectual life of thirteenth-century England, his writings range from the theological and pastoral to philosophical and scientific studies. An important aspect of his scholarship, which provides a link through many of his other fields of study, was his work of translation from Greek texts, and it is with this aspect that this paper will deal. In his early writing Grosseteste’s interest in Greek authors, both classical and patristic is clear; indeed he was almost the first western medieval writer to use Greek sources extensively, but it is equally clear that in his citation of authorities he was not working from original texts, but from collections of quotations or earlier Latin translations. It was no easy matter, however, to acquire a knowledge of Greek in England in the early thirteenth, century; but Grosseteste remedied this situation, learning the language when he was over sixty years old and thus providing a path for others to follow him more easily. He summoned Greek scholars to England, of whom some remained in his household and he collected Greek manuscripts, although this involved sending far afield to Athens or Constantinople, to find and procure them.
New light on the visit of Grigori Tsamblak to the council of Constance
Authors: Heppell Muriel
Published: March 2016

The council of Constance, convened by Sigismund, king of the Romans, in 1413 had as its primary aim the reform of the western church in head and members. Its most urgent task, which in fact took almost three years to accomplish, was to end the schism which had divided the western church since 1378; it also took measures to combat the ‘Wycliffite heresy’, which resulted in the condemnation and burning of John Hus, and later of his friend and supporter, Jerome of Prague. However, the problem of relations with the eastern, or Orthodox church was not forgotten, though it played only a marginal role in the council’s activities. This subject was kept before the notice of the council by the presence of delegates from Constantinople, who were among the first to arrive, and by some sermons on the subject. For the Byzantines, some kind of understanding with the western church seemed to offer the only hope of securing effective military aid from the west, which might yet save Constantinople from the Turks; and indeed it was the belief that Sigismund would place this topic on the agenda of the council that induced the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos to send representatives to Constance.
Anti-clericalism in pre-independence Greece c 1750–1821
Authors: Clogg Richard
Published: March 2016

Writing in the 1820s, during the Greek war of independence, of his tour of the Peloponnese Sir William Gell noted that there was ‘a saying common among the Greeks, that the country labours under three curses, the priests, the cogia bashis, and the Turks; always placing the plagues in this order’. This kind of sentiment is a commonplace of the sources, both Greek and non-Greek, relating to pre-independence Greece and it is clear that anti-clericalism was deeply rooted, and not only among the intelligentsia, but among virtually all classes of Greek society. The prevalence, and indeed, the virulence of anti-clerical attitudes in Greece during the pre-independence period must call into question the view still advanced by authorities on this period that the church played a central role in the forging of the Greek national movement. Sir Steven Runciman, for instance, has written that ‘Hellenism survived, nurtured by the Church, because the Greeks unceasingly hoped and planned for the day when they would recover their freedom’, while Douglas Dakin has written that ‘so closely knit was the national existence of the Greeks with their Church that in their liberation movement there was no hostility to the Greek patriarchate comparable to that which the Italians displayed towards the Papacy’.2 Views of this kind also constitute the common currency of Greek historiography. D. A. Zakythinos, for instance, has written that ‘it is universally admitted that die Church saved the Greek Nation during the dark years of slavery’. But he goes on to say that earlier and more recent historians, the ‘healthy minded’ among them, as well as those having ‘certain special political tendencies’, do not subscribe to such a view in toto. He quotes the founding father of modern Greek historiography, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, to the effect that ‘the ancestral religion did not cease to constitute one of the principal moral mainsprings of Hellenism, but it did not itself alone constitute Hellenism’.