bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Religious protest and urban authority: the case of Henry Sherfield, iconoclast, 1633
Authors: Slack Paul
Published: March 2016

The trial of Henry Sherfield, the puritan recorder of Salisbury, before Star Chamber in February 1633 was one of the most famous in that court’s last years; and his offence, ‘unlawfully, riotously and prophanely’ smashing the window in St Edmund’s church which contained pictures of the Creation, is one of the best-known cases of puritan religious protest in the years preceding the Civil War. But the background to the trial, and in particular the local tensions which lay behind it, have never been thoroughly explored. Yet Sherfield’s case, like the contemporary churchales controversy in Somerset, provides an example of that important amalgam of local and national issues which shaped the English Revolution. It also illuminates the social and political conditions which moulded Puritanism in an urban setting.
An Irish heretic bishop: Robert Clayton of Clogher
Authors: Winnett A. R.
Published: March 2016

In 1735 a great change took place in Cork society. Hitherto, wrote John Boyle, fifth earl of Cork and Orrery, ‘we trembled at a bumper and loath’d the Glorious Memory. We were as silent and melancholy as captives and we were strangers to mirth’. But now, he went on, ‘we sing catches, read Pastor Fido and talk love.’ The change was due to the death of Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross, and the advent of his successor, Robert Clayton. Browne, according to Harris, was ‘an austere, retired and mortified man’, but Clayton was a man of the world and given to social life. Browne had written treatises against drinking in memory of the dead (his inclusion of the toast to the memory of king William in his condemnation led to his being regarded by some as a Jacobite) and against the drinking of healths: the former was a blasphemous profanation of the Lord’s Supper, and the latter a pagan custom and a cause of intemperance. Under the more relaxed rule of Clayton glasses could be raised unaccompanied by troubled consciences.
‘God and Mammon’ religious protest and educational change in New England from the Revolution to the Gilded Age
Authors: Hampson Keith
Published: March 2016

I hasten at the start to point out that I am not an ecclesiastical historian, but a historian of America who is interested in church history since the field in which I work - educational history - desperately needs to be studied in a wider historical context. Then, as now, educational ideas, and the functions people ascribe to education, cannot be dissociated from the political, social, and economic background. Of all the many factors bearing upon the evolution of education in New England from approximately the 1780s to the 1880s religion was in several ways of central importance. Most studies have been interested in the religious nature of the mass of colleges founded from 1780 to 1860. My interest here is entirely different. Although the rhetoric naturally changed in emphasis, it seems to me that right from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century religious forces in New England, but of course not just there, used schools and colleges as cardinal agencies in efforts to restrain secularism and a growing materialism.
Reason and emotion in working-class religion, 1794–1824
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

In the last decade considerable attention has been paid to Methodism, revivalism, and the development of working-class consciousness in early nineteenth-century England. The purpose of this paper is to add a few footnotes and caveats to some of the assertions which have been made about these topics. The assertions on which I wish to comment can be divided into two groups. The first includes the view widely accepted by sociologists and social historians that in so far as working-class people resort to religion in periods of rapid social change, the religious style which they adopt tends to be of an highly emotional type. Hence the numerical success of Methodism in the lower if not the lowest regions of the social scale is attributed to the prominence which it gave the experiential dimension of religious commitment. On the other hand a religious system like Unitarianism which was theologically highly rational and stressed the intellectualist dimension is dismissed, almost on a priori grounds from having any popular appeal. K. S. Inglis after claiming that before 1850 the Unitarians were ‘uninterested in evangelizing the masses’, quotes G. M. Trevelyan to the effect that theirs was ‘a faith likely to be taken up by the mill-owner but not by his workmen’. According to E. P. Thompson ‘it seemed too cold, too distant, too polite and too much associated with the comfortable values of a prospering class to appeal to the city or village poor’. The first area in which I wish to submit new evidence is concerned therefore with the general relationship between working-class religion and reason and emotion.
African separatists: heresy, schism or protest movement?
Authors: Hinchliff Peter
Published: March 2016

Africa has never been an absolutely dark continent to those who live elsewhere. From the days of the Phoenician traders of Carthage to the Afro-Arab mercantile empires of the fifteenth century Africa was always a source of what more literate peoples wanted. Long before modern Europeans began to explore the continent others had been there and taken their literary skills with them. In 1857 Richard Burton - the real Richard Burton - went on a journey to find the ‘reputed great Lake Tanganyika’ for the Royal Geographical Society. One hundred and thirty-four days’ journey into the interior he was the guest of an Arab dealer in slaves and ivory, of whom he said, ‘ He had read much, and, like an oriental, for improvement, not only for amusement: he had a wonderful memory, fine perceptions and passing power of language’. Arabic and Islamic culture penetrated into, and made a lasting impression on, many parts of Africa. Reading and writing sometimes accompanied this penetration and there are fascinating traces of attempts to reduce African languages to writing in Arabic script. Nevertheless, writing a history even of modern Africa requires a very different technique from that which is needed to write a history of Europe in the same period because it is far less concerned with documents.
The desanctification of nature
Authors: Sherrard Philip
Published: March 2016

The theme of the environment is one of the most popular and pressing themes of the present time. Somewhat late in the day we have become aware that we have been blindly secreting around ourselves conditions in which it is increasingly difficult for human or any other life to be lived. We have managed to build up a technological and economic order based on machine production and the possession of material goods which inescapably determines to a greater or lesser degree die lives of all the individuals born into it, reducing a great many of them to a state bordering on panic or hysteria. Indeed, we are told that the only real issue before us in this respect is whether uncontrolled technological destruction or uncontrolled population will be the first to tear the fabric of our civilisation to pieces. In spite of this, in the name of a ‘war on want’ or of developing ‘underdeveloped’ countries, or simply of progress or evolution or efficiency we go on methodically trying to apply on an even more diorough and extensive scale-on a global scale - exactly the same techniques and habits which have brought about the bleakness of our own world - a bleakness which one might describe as resulting at least in part from a desanctification of nature.
The representation of the English lower clergy in parliament during the later fourteenth century
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

The service of God in Church and State’: in medieval England these two usually separate activities were combined in the parliamentary attendance of the clergy. Two methods were employed in summoning the clergy: parliamentary abbots and the bishops were called by individual writs of summons; the lower clergy were called indirectly.

The writ of summons to each bishop of England and Wales included a mandate, called, from its opening word, the premunientes clause, ordering the bishop to cause to appear in parliament the head of his cathedral chapter, one proctor for the cathedral clergy, all the archdeacons, and two proctors for the diocesan clergy. After 1340, obedience to the premunientes clause was not enforced by the crown, so technically the command to the lower clergy to be present in parliament was episcopal, not royal. It is not the intention to discuss here the theoretical and constitutional issues involved but to describe the execution of the premunientes clause between 1340 and 1400 as far as the limitations of the sources allow.
Blood and baptism: kinship, community and christianity in western Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries
Authors: Bossy John
Published: March 2016

Historians of west-European Christianity in its late medieval and early modern phases have recently been much concerned with the relations of the church and the devil. Our subject here, the church and the world, may seem by comparison, and notably for the period immediately preceding the reformation, a well-worn topic; inspired by the achievements of historical demography, we may be tempted to abandon it for more promising researches into the relations of the church and the flesh. This is indeed what I shall be doing here, at least to the degree that ‘flesh and blood’ can be considered as falling under the last heading. Yet, since it may be argued that ‘flesh and blood’ formed, for the average western Christian of this time, a major constituent of his ‘world’ or social environment, I do not feel that I am stretching a point in offering, within the present context, some comments on the subject indicated in my title. I am concerned with the connections of the Church and the ‘world’, meaning by that the complex of human relations it lives in. I am particularly concerned with the structure of one such society, that of western Europe in the immediately pre- and post-reformation age. And I am finally interested in pursuing or criticising some socio-historical arguments about what happened to European Christianity in and after the sixteenth century.
Bishop John Hacket and his teaching on sanctity and secularity
Authors: Knox R. Buick
Published: March 2016

John hacket was the son of a Scot who had prospered in business in London and had become a burgess in the city of Westminster. John was born in 1592 and passed through Westminister school to Trinity college, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1616. His later episcopal eminence is attested in the full-scale portrait which adorns the walls of the Wren library in the college and in the bishop’s hostel which was founded in the college by his generosity in 1670. He was ordained by bishop King of London on 20 December 1618. By then he had already come under the influence of John Williams, a fellow of the neighbouring St John’s college, whose ability and charm were soon to take him to the deanery of Westminster, the bishopric of Lincoln, and the high office of lord keeper of the great seal. He took Hacket into his household as his chaplain and furthered his career by introducing him to the court where he became a royal chaplain. Williams also assisted his rise in the ecclesiastical firmament by appointing him to a prebend in Lincoln cathedral and then to the archdeaconry of Bedford, and by influencing the king to secure his appointment to the rectory of St Andrew’s, Holborn, and to the rectory of Cheam. His Holborn pulpit proved to be a position of great influence and he drew a large congregation, especially from the upper classes of society. His prestige among the clergy of London was so high that he was chosen by them in 1634 to be the second president of Sion college, an institution founded in 1633 as a centre where the city clergy could meet and study.
Ritual and reality in the early medieval ordines
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.
Sources for the early history of the humiliati
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

The task of understanding the significance of any religious movement in its historical context normally depends upon documents being available for description and analysis. In the case of the humiliati this is almost impossible. Such documentary evidence as exists for the period 1179 to 1216 comes not from the humiliati themselves but from others whose reasons for mentioning them varied considerably - suggestions as to why this is so will be made as the paper develops. Analysing these sources for information about the humiliati will thus be difficult. Nevertheless, as these documents cover certain aspects peculiar to the movement, they can be used to indicate such information as the humiliati might themselves have given. Indeed, if carefully pieced together, an even more coherent whole can appear on the principle that onlookers see more of the game than the players. The scope of this paper therefore is to examine the sources available in an attempt to show something of the early history of the humiliati; bearing in mind all the time, the limitations involved; the inevitable omissions in such accidental or incidental evidence; and the demonstrable bias which will be found to exist. That these documents are few in number and only rarely rich in detail increases the difficulty.
Uncovenanted blessings of ecclesiastical records(presidentail address)
Authors: Hill Rosalind M. T.
Published: March 2016

The theme of this volume has been defined as ‘the sources, materials and methods of ecclesiastical history’. After the illuminating, fruitful and often racy subjects which have been discussed in earlier volumes in this series, a theme such as this may at first sight appear to be sober to the point of dullness. I hope to show that it is not, and I make no excuse for presenting it. We are historians, knowing that the study of history is a complex affair, demanding a high degree of imaginative understanding and at the same time a great deal of patient, accurate and often very exacting craftsmanship. Before we can understand what ecclesiastical history is about, either we must go back to its sources, with all the problems of time, language and palaeography which that process entails, or we must at least possess sufficient knowledge to enable us to form some reasonable opinion about the validity of the methods used by those who have cleared the ground for us. Not all historians have the time, or indeed the inclination, to edit texts, but all of us are to an increasing extent dependent upon the work of those who do edit them. A medieval scholar might perhaps have compared the two sides of the historian’s work, the interpretation of ideas and the transcription or calendering of records, to those two great ‘types’ of the contemplative and the practical life, the sisters Mary and Martha. The two were interdependent, and they lived in one house. True, it was the spiritually-minded Mary who chose the good part, while Martha’s obsession with the practical problems of housekeeping earned her a gentle but unmistakable reproof which historians would do well to take to heart.
Misleading manuscripts: Wyclif and the non-wycliffite bible
Authors: Wilks Michael
Published: March 2016

The precise nature of Wyclif’s connection with the production of the first English bible is shrouded in mystery, a subject for the fierce controversy and debate that is possible only where ignorance and uncertainty prevail. To begin with, there is an almost total absence of reliable contemporary evidence. The first statements explicitly attributing authorship to Wyclif do not occur until the generation after his death. Of these, the earliest is that of the chronicler Henry Knighton, whose contacts with early lollardy might make him appear to be a more reliable source than most. Writing perhaps in the mid-1390s, Knighton referred back to the year 1382 as the time when Wyclif translated the gospel, which Christ had given to the clergy and doctors of the church, into the tongue, not of the angels, but of the Angles.
The compilation of a late fourteenth-century precedent book—Register Brian 2
Authors: Haines Roy M.
Published: March 2016

Among the episcopal registers housed at the county record office in St Helen’s, Worcester, is a neatly written paper book, which though it bears no medieval title, has often been described as the second volume of bishop Brian’s register. As has been pointed out recently, it was taken to be such by the county historian, Treadway Nash, and also by Reginald Lane Poole when he examined the Worcester records for the Historical Manuscripts Commission. On the other hand, it is now common knowledge among those acquainted with the registers that this is a misnomer. My intention here is to examine me manuscript in more detail and to suggest the manner of its composition and the sources from which it is derived.
The letters of the university of Oxford on withdrawal of obedience from pope Boniface IX
Authors: Harvey Margaret
Published: March 2016

In this paper I shall discuss two letters apparently sent in 1399 by the University of Oxford to Richard II, in answer to the king’s request for advice on whether to withdraw obedience from pope Boniface IX in an endeavour to end the great schism. There has been a controversy about which letter represents the official view of the university, and this argument has largely arisen, I suspect, because hitherto one of the letters has been studied in its printed form which is incomplete and does not give a true idea of its arguments. I will also consider how these letters are to be seen in the context of the final stages of Richard II’s policy on the schism.
Institutions and illusions: the dilemma of the modern ecclesiastical historian
Authors: Robbins Keith
Published: March 2016

The modern ecclesiastical historian is an uncertain and hesitant creature; an acute case, it may be thought, of status deprivation. He looks with envy at his august and serene colleagues who have the history of the medieval church as their field of study. He knows that they are in process of uncovering the different layers of belief in medieval or early modern society. It is, no doubt, an illusion to suppose that an ‘age of faith’ ever existed. Nevertheless, at all levels of society, the church seems to be central to the life of the time. If we consider the reformation or counter-reformation periods, church questions seem to be in the forefront. The ‘Wars of Religion’ may not be at bottom about religion, but we cannot avoid some consideration of religious issues.
Eastern attitudes to Rome during the Acacian schism
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2016

The Acacian schism which lasted from 484 to 519 has been regarded as a bitter affair, characterised by intransigence on both sides and ending in an unqualified disaster for the Byzantine church. A closer look at the evidence suggests that the rigid attitudes of popes Gelasius (494–8) and Hormisdas (514–23) were far from being reproduced on the Byzantine side even at moments of provocation, and among the populace as a whole its existence was for most of the time a matter of indifference. The eventual ending of the schism through the initiative of the emperor Justin I was not regarded in the east as involving a derogation of the rights of the eastern patriarchates and of the church at Constantinople in particular.
Symbols in context: rulers’ inauguration rituals in Byzantium and the west in the early middle ages
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

Hobsbawm recently reminded young historians prone to methodologising that they would be well advised always to begin with a problem. He meant to imply—and very properly—that experimentation with methods becomes vapid and useless unless it is seen clearly for what it is: a means to an end. I propose to experiment with a method, so I want first to emphasise that I do have a problem. It is this: why, within a common framework of Christian theology, belief and practice, did the rituals for the inauguration of rulers, in early Byzantium on the one hand, and in the early medieval western kingdoms on the other, diverge as they did? What has this divergence to tell us about the differences not just between types of political power but between the two societies? These questions relate, of course, to a mere subsection of the whole vast subject of ‘liturgies eastern and western’ which Brightman long ago promised to survey. Unfortunately, even his work was left only half-complete: the further task of systematic comparative analysis seems hardly to have been begun. But that would surely be a lifetime’s work. In this paper, I confine myself to a small though significant area of the field, a single type of ritual; and I cover a limited time-span, the period down to about 1000 AD.
The fifth earl of Guilford (1766–1827) and his secret conversion to the Orthodox church
Authors: Ware Kallistos
Published: March 2016

In September 1725 archbishop Wake of Canterbury wrote to patriarch Chrysanthos of Jerusalem, warning him that the non-jurors were in schism from the official and established church of England; and so the remarkable correspondence between the non-juring bishops and the patriarchs of the east was suspended without ever coming to any decisive conclusion. Wake’s letter marks in many ways the end of an era. During the previous hundred years, from the reign of king James I onwards, there had been a series of surprisingly positive contacts between England and the Orthodox world. Archbishop Abbot, for example, exchanged letters with Cyril Lukaris (1572–1638), patriarch first of Alexandria and then of Constantinople; and as a result of this Cyril not only sent the Codex Alexandrinus as a gift to king Charles I in 1628, but also despatched his most promising disciple, Mitrophanis Kritopoulos (1589–1639), future patriarch of Alexandria, to study for five years at Balliol College, Oxford (1617–22). Later in the century Orthodoxy was made known in England through a series of books, such as Thomas Smith’s An Account of the Greek Church, published in Latin in 1676 and in English four years later, and Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, published in 1679. To these should be added John Covel’s magnum opus entitled Some Account of the Present Greek Church, which did not appear until 1722, but which reflects experience gained in the Levant some fifty years before. During 1699-1705 there was even a short-lived Greek College at Gloucester Hall, Oxford. Last but not least, in 1716–25 came the negotiations between the non-jurors and the Orthodox, to which reference has been already made.
Anglican intervention in the election of an Orthodox patriarch, 1925–6
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

I am very sorry for being the instrument through which some of these unprincipled Greeks, for their own selfish aims, troubled our Archbishop’; in March 1926 Llewellyn H. Gwynne, anglican bishop in Egypt had good reason to feel sorry, though perhaps not quite as much reason as his critics supposed. His apparently maladroit intervention in the name of the archbishop of Canterbury in the election of a new Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria had been maliciously exploited to produce results entirely opposite to his intentions and caused serious embarrassment both to archbishop Davidson and to the British government. But his behaviour, though certainly injudicious, was not so entirely incomprehensible as it originally seemed. An examination of the episode in its context will not only explain Gwynne’s behaviour but more importantly shed light upon the complex set of circumstances, attitudes and assumptions which have conditioned relations between Greek Orthodoxy and the church of England in the twentieth century. Any such relationship involves also the relations of centre and periphery, of personal ambitions, party objectives, strategic processes and the larger international religious systems of anglicanism and orthodoxy.
On the limits of the Carolingian renaissance
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

Einhard tells us that Charlemagne had a special liking for ‘those books of St Augustine calledThe City of God’. If only he had told us why. Did Charlemagne demand readings from book 5 on the happy Christian emperors? Or was he, as Ladner suggests, particularly attracted by ‘the idea of a society embracing earth and heaven, a society which a man could join through personal renewal’? If Ladner is right, then, he tells us, we should talk not of a Carolingian renaissance—‘secondary classicising features notwithstanding’—but of a Carolingian reform ‘as just one phase in the unfolding history of the realisation of the Reform idea in Christian history’ and specifically ‘an attempt to recreate the religious culture of the fourth and fifth centuries’. ButisLander right about Charlemagne? I have my doubts: perhaps what he really enjoyed most was book 22’s meaty chapter on the resurrection of the flesh or its rattling good miracle-story.
Rebuilding Zion: the holy places of Jerusalem in the twelfth century
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

It is unusual for a period of Christian renewal to begin with a massacre, yet that is what happened when the crusaders entered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of the count of Toulouse, boasted that they rode through moslem corpses heaped up in the Haram al-Sharif with blood ‘even to the horse bridles’ This should not obscure the fact that the crusading movement was motivated partly by a growing devotion to the humanity of Christ in the western church in the late eleventh century, or, as the author of the Gesta Francorum expressed it, a desire to ‘follow in the footsteps of Christ, by whom they had been redeemed from the power of hell’. It was this sentiment which led the crusaders to seek to restore the shrine churches of Jerusalem and in the eighty-eight years of their rule they filled the city with fine churches and monasteries closely resembling those which were being built in the west at the same time. It should be emphasised that the crusaders were seldom concerned to rebuild existing churches in Frankish style: their primary interest was to restore churches which had been ruined by war and persecution in the centuries of moslem rule. The pilgrim Saewulf, who visited the east four years after the Latin conquest, reported that ‘nothing has been left habitable by the Saracens, but everything has been devastated . . . in all. . . the holy places outside the walls. . . of Jerusalem’.
‘What has Christ to do with Apollo?’: evangelicalism and the novel, 1800–30
Authors: Rosman Doreen M.
Published: March 2016

In December 1800 theEvangelical Magazinepublished a ‘Spiritual barometer; or, a scale of the progress of sin and of grace’. Towards the positive pole it was calibrated with the attributes and practices thought to characterise those destined for ‘glory’ and ‘dismission from the body’; at the other extreme, graded in degrees of depravity, were the activities of those assumed to be heading heedlessly to ‘death’ and ‘perdition’. Among the most heinous of sins, even more damning than attendance at the theatre, was ‘love of novels’.

Novel-reading was condemned as a hallmark of worldliness. Evangelicals believed that church and world were diametrically opposed and that the safest route to sanctity lay in separation from the world, its contaminating company and perverting practices: ‘If we are not to think, to feel, to act, and to perish with the world, let a deep and wide interval yet exist between the habits of pleasure of the two parties.’ Ignorance of evil was deemed bliss: to read novels was to become familiar with just such beliefs and behaviour as were avoided in everyday life. Moreover, it was argued that novelists rarely upheld Christian values: they depicted wickedness sympathetically and effectively denied that sin, an affront to God, had dire consequences. They therefore misled their readers in matters of ultimate importance. Evangelicals maintained that the worthiness of characters should be evaluated according to criteria which God might be assumed to adopt. Failure to reflect a biblical outlook on life was a culpable misrepresentation of reality.
John Lingard and the catholic revival
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: March 2016

The nineteenth-century histories of England were inspired by and reflect the political and religious ideologies of the era; the liberal anglican school described by Duncan Forbes, the varieties of high church scholarship from Christopher Wordsworth to canon Dixon, the optimistic whiggery of Hallam and Macaulay, the protestant high toryism of Southey, the political protestantism of Froudc and the teutomania of Freeman. Most of these writers had two ideas in common; a strong sense of the importance of national history as a reinforcement of the English sense of self identity, and the oneness of English history. This was a view given classic expression m John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, and has been perpetuated by Trevelyan and Churchill into the twentieth century. Far better than most of his predecessors, Green’s history was more than just a history of the nation written from a partisan point of view, and owed its popularity as much to its breadth of sympathy as to the author’s gift for quicksilver generalisation and narration which move the reader on at the pace of a hare. In this last quality, it was most unlike the most popular nineteenth-century history of England before its publication, the work of a Roman catholic priest John Lingard, though Lingard also professed to rise above the turmoil of parties to write an impartial history.
New names for old things: Scottish reaction to early tractarianism
Authors: White Gavin
Published: March 2016

Storms are more easily studied in tea-cups than in oceans. Early tractarianism was clearly a storm and the Scottish episcopal church was equally clearly a tea-cup. It is assumed for this study that tractarianism was only one aspect of a wider movement which affected the church of England and Roman Catholicism in similar ways, though it affected the church of Scotland in dissimilar ways. Its basic tenet was that God is holy and cannot be approached directly, or known directly, but only through a cultural screen. This screen, which was also a lens, would extend throughout the world as did Christianity. Its specific form might be gothic architecture or language or any other purely ecclesiastical form of expression. Such forms were essentially a matter of style, and style mattered.
The renaissance of public worship in the church of Scotland, 1865–1905
Authors: Barkley John M.
Published: March 2016

On his way to one of the early meetings of the church service society, Story met Charteris on the street, who asked what were their aims. He replied, ‘To restore the ring in marriage, the cross in baptism, and the denial of the cup to the laity’. Charteris fled in horror.

Before discussing the renaissance of public worship in the church of Scotland it is necessary to look at the background. The lineage of reformed worship can be traced from Diebold Schwarz’s translation of the Hagenau Missal into German in 1524 through Bucer and Calvin, both of whom desired weekly communion, to the Scottish Book of Common Order (1564). When the civil authorities forbade weekly communion, Bucer and Calvin did not prepare an order of service for Sunday morning, but rubricated the order for communion as to how it should end when there was no celebration of the supper: that is, the eucharist was the norm for public worship.
Neo-orthodoxy, liberalism and war: Karl Barth, P. T. Forsyth and John Oman 1914–18
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

There is a theological renaissance today’, proclaimed the American theologian Daniel Day Williams in 1952. ‘The rebirth of theology means a renewal of the effort to discover the foundations of the Christian life’. He maintained that following the publication of Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans in 1918 ‘there has been a deepening consciousness that there is a radical settlement to be made between Christianity and the thought and values of the modern world’. Williams’ assertion is better read as an indication of the mood of ‘pessimistic optimism’ manifested by many American theologians in the post world war two era than as an accurate description of the development of American theology from 1918. Moreover one man’s ‘renaissance’ is another man’s ‘reaction’, and there is something distinctly bizarre in the use of the former term in connection with a thinker like Karl Barth who devoted the most productive period of his life to total opposition to those intellectual assumptions which were characteristic of the sixteenth-century renaissance and were further developed in the European enlightenment. Nevertheless the historian of religion would be the last to deny the importance of investigating the factual basis of mythical beliefs, especially when they were as widely held as those put forward by Williams.
Missionaries and Crusaders, 1095–1274: Opponents or Allies?
Authors: Siberry Elizabeth
Published: March 2016

The Christian missions to the Muslims in the Near East during the Central Middle Ages have already attracted much attention from historians, but as yet no real attempt has been made to analyse the relationship between those who advocated peaceful conversion by means of preaching and teaching, in other words a programme of missionary work, and the crusaders, who sought to defeat the enemies of the faith in battle. In the past, historians have tended to portray advocates of missions as opponents of the crusades and it has been suggested that by the late thirteenth century, as a result of a series of Christian defeats in the Near East. the missionary ideal had won a great deal of support and that this was one of the factors which contributed towards the decline of the crusading movement. The aim of this paper is to challenge this thesis. The first step towards this reappraisal will be to examine the attitude of certain prominent supporters of a policy of peaceful conversion towards the crusades.
Omnino Partialitate Cessante: Clement VI and the Hundred Years War
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: March 2016

The attitude of the Limousin pope Clement VI to the early stages of the Hundred Years War between France and England occasioned conflicting verdicts. These varied predictably according to the nationality of their authors. One of the pope’s biographers, the Frenchman Jean la Porte, hailed him as a creator of concord, a lover of peace. By contrast the Englishman William of Ockham accused Clement of being ‘schismatic’, in the sense that he deliberately provoked hostilities between the two countries and favoured one side against the other. The German Conrad of Megenberg tried to adopt a via media. Replying to Ockham he claimed that he had himself seen Clement sending out cardinals to conduct peace negotiations between the kings of France and England. On the other hand, he was driven to admit Clement’s partiality, excusing it somewhat feebly on the grounds that the Holy See had always adhered more to France than to other nations, so one read. Some impression of the truth of these differing judgements can be gleaned from the registers of Clement’s correspondence, from the political collationes he delivered both as pope and earlier as Pierre Roger, the trusted counsellor and official of Philip VI, Valois, and from contemporary accounts of a peace conference over which the pope presided at Avignon in 1344.
Clergymen and Conflict 1660–1763
Authors: Napthine D. , Speck W. A.
Published: March 2016

The views of clergymen towards virtually any activity under the sun, and many over it, are preserved in an inexhaustible seam of sermons published between the Restoration of Charles II and the end of the Seven Years’ War. Thousands were listed by Sampson Letsome in his The Preacher’s Assistant, which appeared in 1753, and in an updated sequel by J. Cooke in 1783. Nor were these all-inclusive.

Faced with this mass of evidence, historians are forced to be selective. They can concentrate on the works of certain preachers, on precise dates or on particular genres of sermon, such as those preached at Assizes or funerals. The authors of this paper have studied three types. One of them is working on the Jeremiad in the years 1660–1720, Jeremiads being sermons preached during, immediately after, or on the anniversary of such national disasters as the plague in 1665, the fire of London in 1666 and the hurricane of 1703. War featured in them as one of the many visitations of Providence held to be afflicting the nation. The other addressed himself specifically to fast and thanksgiving-day sermons published during the wars of 1739 to 1748 and 1756 to 1763. These were delivered expressly to comment on military setbacks and failures, and to celebrate victories.
English Evangelical Dissent and the European Conflict 1789–1815
Authors: Lovegrove Deryck
Published: March 2016

In november 1789 a notable address was delivered at the meeting-house in Old Jewry in the city of London to the society formed to commemorate the glorious revolution. The overtly political tone of Richard Price’s words to that audience of dissenters and fellow-sympathisers appeared to Edmund Burke to epitomise the democratic and levelling spirit already operating with such devastating results across the Channel. Eight years later the fear of dissenting ambition was if anything enhanced. In a rising tide of clerical polemic dissenters were accused of a variety of evils including anti-establishment activity, schism, covert Jacobinism, regicide and the encouragement of fanaticism and ignorance among the lower classes. At a time when England was embroiled in a long and costly struggle with revolutionary France the real charge was that of siding with the enemy; of implicit disloyalty. The principal difference from 1789, a distinction not always apparent to the accusers, was that those now engaging their attention were evangelicals, men of an entirely different stamp from the provocative rationalists surrounding Priestley and Price.
Christian Responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: March 2016

In an article published over a decade ago, Olive Anderson demonstrated the major contribution made by the Indian mutiny to the growth of Christian militarism in Victorian Britain. The Crimean war had accustomed the British public to the view that Britain’s soldiery had spiritual needs which could and should be met by the exertions of voluntary subscription, but it was the mutiny which established the more ambitious claim that Christian soldiers were the best ones. The military exploits of Henry Havelock and others of similar piety in stemming the tide of the sepoy rebellion enshrined Christian faith of an evangelical stamp as an almost indispensable ingredient in the constitution of the Victorian hero. The intention of this paper is to endorse and amplify Anderson’s conclusions by examining the responses of Christian opinion in Britain to the mutiny at its most alarming stage in the later months of 1857. Specific attention will be given to the reactions of nonconformists, in the light of the generally accepted view that early Victorian nonconformist attitudes to foreign affairs were characterised by a firm commitment to pacific principles and a disinclination for imperial entanglements.
The Instruments of Providence: Slavery, Civil War and the American Churches
Authors: Parish Peter J.
Published: March 2016

On 13 September 1862, when Abraham Lincoln was awaiting an opportune moment to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, he received at the White House a delegation from a meeting of Chicago Christians of all denominations. In pressing hard the case for immediate emancipation of the slaves, they assured the president that such action would be in accordance with the will of God. In a characteristically wry, tongue-in-cheek reply, Lincoln observed that:

I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation.
War, The Nation, and the Kingdom of God: The Origins of the National Mission of Repentance and Hope, 1915–16
Authors: Thompson David M.
Published: March 2016

The National Mission of Repentance and Hope, launched by the archbishops of Canterbury and York and led by the bishop of London in the autumn of 1916, has not been regarded as one of the more successful episodes in the history of the Church of England. Hensley Henson, who can always be relied upon for a suitable comment, called it ‘a grave, practical blunder’, whilst a very different type of churchman, Conrad Noel, called it ‘the Mission of Funk and Despair’. Its treatment in the secondary sources is curious. Bell has a chapter on it in his life of Randall Davidson, but it says much about Davidson and little about the Mission. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Iremonger’s treatment in the life of Temple. S. C. Carpenter chose to omit the chapter on the National Mission from his life of Winnington-Ingram. Lloyd depends heavily on Bell; Wilkinson is more rounded, but the fullest account by Mews remains unpublished.
The Cowley Fathers and the First World War
Authors: Taylor Brian
Published: March 2016

Three sundays after the outbreak of war, Fr Congreve, aged nearly 79, preached in the society’s church in Oxford, and gave a summary of professor J. B. Mozley’s sermon on war, delivered during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, ‘for the sake’ he said, ‘of those of us who do not know it’. Fr Benson, the founder of the society, lived until 14 January 1915. At the age of 90 he kept abreast of the news, and was angered by the German bombardment of West Hartlepool and Bridlington; ‘he spoke with scorn of this effort of the enemy, and again and again spoke of its uselessness from a military point of view. ‘

The Superior General of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Maxwell, realised that the war would cause a reduction in subscriptions. While no new work would be undertaken, he urged ‘we are really anxious to impress upon our friends that by far the greater part of our work is not such as can be retrenched without causing much suffering, and without crippling our effort in the future’. For example, they had the care of young children in the missions, who could not wait for ‘their next meal until after the war is over’.
The Mohammetan and Idolatry
Authors: Bray Jennifer
Published: March 2016

The anachronistic ascription of membership of the Moslem faith to the persecutors of Christians in the period before the Peace of the Church appears in Anglo-Norman hagiography in the late twelfth century, or early thirteenth, and in English lives later in the thirteenth century. It may be, at least in part, the result of the corruption in meaning of a derivative of the word Mahomet, found in Anglo-Norman as mahumez in the early twelfth century and in English by the end of the same century in the form of maumez, idols. The confusion in identification was made possible by the attribution of the rôle of the Roman officials to the Moslems—both groups martyred Christians in large numbers—and by an association of practices and qualities based on the opposition, real or alleged, of both Romans and Moslems to the Christian faith.
The Possibility of Toleration: Marsiglio and the City States of Italy
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

In the course of his lengthy arguments in the Defensor Pacis against the right of the priesthood to exercise coercive jurisdiction over men in this life, Marsiglio of Padua deals with the problem of the persecution of heresy, pausing in one place to remark:

By these considerations, however, we do not wish to say that it is inappropriate that heretics or those who are otherwise infidel be coerced, but that the authority for this, if it be lawful to do so, belongs only to the human legislator.
Persecution and Toleration in Reformation Europe
Authors: Sutherland N. M.
Published: March 2016

Persecution is self-explanatory, but toleration, when one starts to consider it, blurs like the recollection of a dream. To what, in the first place, does toleration refer: to deviant opinions, deviant practices, or to potentially subversive organisations? Genuine toleration has probably always been very rare—and probably still is. In the sense of complete religious liberty, it was not generally accepted until varying dates in the nineteenth century. Then it had more to do with materialism and indifference than with any generous spirit of tolerance. If, in the sixteenth century, toleration was not entirely unknown—both in theory and in practice—it must be attributed to something more compelling than ‘a disposition to be patient with the opinions of others’—in the OED’s rather engaging definition. For one thing, toleration was not then regarded as a particularly desirable virtue, and therefore not widely entertained as an ideal. The ideal was rather that God, in his mercy and wisdom, should reunite the Church, or churches. This was expressed, for example, in the preamble to the edict of Nantes in 1598, though one could discount it as propaganda.
The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts 1664–1679
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2016

The denominational writers on late Stuart dissent used to put their emphasis upon the heroism and sufferings of forbears in the faith and on cherished works of spiritual autobiography produced under restraint such as John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and William Penn’s No Cross, No Crown.’ The most important, and to my mind the most interesting, questions about persecution in this period have therefore gone unasked and unanswered. Aware of the most dramatic cases of malice and brutality, we have too readily accepted that the decades between the Restoration and the Toleration Act can be represented as the period of the ‘Great Persecution’. But how far did the acts which are conventionally summarised as the Clarendon Code represent the settled mind of the Anglican gentry, whose supremacy was confirmed by the political events of 1660 and 1670? How far were these acts actually enforced? How easy were they to enforce? These are large questions, much too large for a short communication. What I shall attempt here is an analysis of the enforcement of two statutes, the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, in a limited number of counties over a confined period. By 1679 popery, the alternative bogey to dissent, was at the front of magisterial minds and the 1670 act was for the moment largely in abeyance. Greater glory for the Second Conventicle Act was yet to come, with the Tory reaction of 1682 to 1686, but that period is beyond the scope of this paper.