bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
In Defence of Magisterial Reformation: Martin Bucer’s Writings Against the Spiritualists, 1535
Authors: Broadhead Philip
Published: March 2016

The Protestant Reformation was the largest and most sustained challenge to authority ever experienced within the western Church. It involved a repudiation of existing teachings and forms of worship, along with a rejection, even a demonization, of the clergy and ecclesiastical hierarchy. From the 1520s a number of evangelical Churches developed which were often as hostile to each other as they were to the Catholic Church, and, as a result of polemical public discussions over competing teachings and beliefs, it was no longer clear to many people what constituted the Church or who should exercise authority over religious life. Some were led to question whether there was any need for a Church which imposed dogma and religious discipline on all people within a community or country. It is the discussion on the role and powers of the visible Church which will be examined here, by focusing on the city of Augsburg, but doing so through two significant writings by Martin Bucer, the leading theologian of the Protestant Church in Strasbourg. Recent research has added to our awareness of Bucer’s understanding of the relationship between Church and community, and this contribution will provide insight into how the views of Bucer impacted upon the debate on religious separatism which was taking place in Strasbourg, Augsburg and elsewhere in Germany. They show that even after Bucer had persuaded the government of his own city to expel religious radicals, he continued to believe that support for separatist and spiritualist ideas constituted a substantial challenge to the establishment of disciplined Protestant Churches.
Literature and Church Discipline in Early Modern England
Authors: Smith Nigel
Published: March 2016

That English literature is suffused with religion is news to no one; the English language is throughout history part of the structure of the Church or churches. But there is a way in which Church history and English literature have been missing each other for a good many years. This is in part because, until recently, religion in literature has been the preserve of relatively small groups of enthusiasts with partisan views. Their work has appeared unattractive or irrelevant to a largely secular mainstream that has been preoccupied with the ‘political’ (as opposed to the religious) in early modern literary studies (this is especially so with regard to the drama). But we now have an account of Church history that is more sophisticated and variegated, more attuned to confessional variety and its politics, local and national. This is crying out for engagement with literary studies in ways that literary scholars would find compelling, not least in offering many solutions to the kinds of questions they have come to ask. To some extent the dialogue has already begun, and indeed several exemplary studies are cited in what follows. Nonetheless, we are at the beginning of what may well be a long and extremely fruitful interdisciplinary encounter.
Reviving the Memory of the Apostles: Apocryphal Tradition and Travel Literature in Late Antiquity
Authors: Johnson Scott Fitzgerald
Published: March 2016

In this essay I aim to consider the association of place with apostolic personae. The imaginative worlds generated between the time of the apostles in the first century and the rise of the medieval Christian world in the seventh and eighth centuries can be seen as an integral part of what we now label ‘late antiquity’. The period of late antiquity, roughly from 300 to 600 AD (from Constantine to Mohammed), is substantively a period of consolidation and reorientation: knowledge from the ancient Greco-Roman civilizations was queried, repackaged, and disseminated; classical literature was copied, commented upon, and imitated; Roman law was collected, rearranged, and declared authoritative. What has been less studied in this period is the reception of the apostolic world as a realm of knowledge in its own right.
Revivalism and Populism in the Franciscan Observance of the Late Quattrocento
Authors: Dickson Gary
Published: March 2016

Revival, as this volume shows, has had many different meanings within Christian history, and has taken many different, forms. Institutional revitalization, for example, is one thing; popular revivalism is another. Of course, they may be intertwined, as they were in the case of the Franciscan Observance of the late Quattrocento. The ‘re’ of ‘revivalism’ is usually taken in a retrospective sense -that which previously existed is brought to life once more. Renaissance classicism is an obvious instance. With the Franciscan Observance, it is true, one does get a sense of the desire to restore, to re-institute, the idealized primitive poverty of the order in the days of St Francis. For the Observants, pristine Franciscanism would have been the equivalent of the early Church in the eyes of the Protestant reformers. Yet ‘revivalism’ can also be thought of as pertaining to remarkable occasions of religious intensity, moments of collective enthusiasm, moments, as Emile Durkheim puts it, of ‘general effervescence.’ But champagne is too light-headed and celebratory to do justice to the phenomenon. A better symbol of ‘revivalism’ would be the flames of Pentecost. Here I shall attempt to show how the Observance rose to prominence, and eventually triumphed within the Franciscan order, through the raging fires – creative as well as destructive – of popular, indeedpopulistrevivalism.
Revival and Resurgence in Sixteenth-Century Catholicism: the Contribution of the Italian and Spanish Dominicans
Authors: Preston Patrick A.
Published: March 2016

This essay is intended as a contribution to the history of the revival and resurgence of Catholicism in the sixteenth century. The debates about this topic that have arisen since 1945 have mostly concerned either the nature and importance of Evangelism (where the most important views are those of Jedin, Simoncelli and Mayer), or the relative importance of the Inquisition and the Council of Trent in reforming the Church and responding to the Protestant threat (a debate which first pitted the views of Firpo against those of Jedin, and then, with particular reference to Cardinal Pole, those of Mayer against both of these). Whereas the focus in the above debates has usually been on developments in religion and politics at the top of the Church, the intention in this essay is to concentrate instead on issues of reform as they were faced by perhaps the most influential mendicant order of the period. The sixteenth-century Dominicans did indeed have their impact on high politics as the argument below will show, but they were also very influential at local level and in the universities.
The Revival of Practical Christianity: the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Samuel Wesley, and the Clerical Society Movement
Authors: Hammond Geordan
Published: March 2016

Reflecting on the early endeavours of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) following its establishment in 1699, John Chamberlayne, the Society’s secretary, confidently noted the ‘greater spirit of zeal and better face of Religion already visible throughout the Nation’. Although Chamberlayne clearly uses the language of revival, through the nineteenth century, many historians of the Evangelical Revival in Britain saw it as a ‘new’ movement arising in the 1730s with the advent of the evangelical preaching of the early Methodists, Welsh and English. Nineteenth-century historians often confidently propagated the belief that they lived in an age inherently superior to the unreformed eighteenth century. The view that the Church of England from the Restoration to the Evangelical Revival was dominated by Latitudinarian moralism leading to dead and formal religion has recently been challenged but was a regular feature of Victorian scholarship that has persisted in some recent work. The traditional tendency to highlight the perceived dichotomy between mainstream Anglicanism and the Revival has served to obscure areas of continuity such as the fact that Whitefield and the Wesleys intentionally addressed much of their early evangelistic preaching to like-minded brethren in pre-existing networks of Anglican religious societies and that Methodism thrived as a voluntary religious society. Scores of historians have refuted the Victorian propensity to assert the Revival’s independence from the Church of England.
The Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Movement: Revival in the West Midlands, 1875–90?
Authors: Killingray David
Published: March 2016

In January 1875 John Blackham, a West Bromwich draper, a deacon and Sunday school teacher from the Ebenezer Congregational Church, went to Birmingham intent on hearing the American evangelist Dwight D. Moody. So large was the crowd that Blackham was turned away from the meeting. He then went to look for an alternative Christian gathering and, in his own words,

I came across a room where about 30 fine young fellows were assembled listening to their teacher, a magnificent man, with a marvellous store of information. His address was so long and so good that my head and back ached with the prolonged attention. … I wondered how it was that Moody could get 4,000, while this splendid Bible class leader could only draw about thirty, and as I thought on this the first light broke in, and I saw clearly why we had failed. I learnt also how not to do it. I realised that if the men were to be won, we must give them a service neither too long nor too learned, we must avoid dullness, gloom, and constraint.
Elite Reform and Popular Heresy inc.1000: ‘Revitalization Movements’ as a Model for Understanding Religious Dissidence Historically
Authors: Taylor Claire
Published: March 2016

Amongst various features still being evaluated as characteristic of West Frankish society inc.1000 AD, one of the most striking, is that into the middle of the century a range of essentially unrelated and geographically widespread sources speak of ‘heresy’ newly affecting the populace. But how should we interpret these apparently diverse phenomena? Of the models which heresiologists explore, too often overlooked is that proposed by Janet Nelson in this very forum in 1971. Her thesis, that a ‘crisis in theodicy’ produced a cognitive need for new explanations which ‘heresy’ answered, whilst not explicitly anthropological, focused on understanding phenomena within societal wholes. This explanation was challenged by the anthropologist Talal Asad, who argued that heretical activity simply indicated urban movements over which clerics were unable to extend their authority.
Narrative, Audience and the Negotiation of Community in Twelfth-Century English Miracle Collections
Authors: Yarrow Simon
Published: March 2016

The institutional emphasis on distinctions between the elite and the ordinary faithful is a feature of a number of religions. Such distinctions permit rich and diverse forms of exchange across the lines they demarcate, not simply reducible to economic models of explanation, but subject to symbolic and cultural negotiation. These exchanges fostered social ideals, implicit understandings and modes of behaviour that helped to make hierarchy in complex societies appear cohesive, normative and consensual. But a danger exists in confusing the normative value of these exchanges as represented in writing with the material and ideological effects towards which they worked. In the absence of popular religious thoughts and feelings, which Christopher Brooke rightly reminds us ‘have left little memorial for posterity’, we are left with the discursive claims made in historical sources on behalf of elite and popular distinctions. My aim in this paper is to explore the implications of this for the study of the cult of the saints in twelfth-century England. I will argue that in such interpretive conditions, any discussion of these matters in terms of elite and popular religion risks losing sight of the discursive function of these texts and of the wider understandings and negotiations that lie behind them.
Poets, Peasants, and Pamphlets: Who Wrote and Who Read ReformationFlugschriften?
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

In the early 1520s, there appeared from the press of Michael Buchführer in Erfurt a pamphlet entitledA Dialogue or Conversation between a Father and a Son concerning the Teachings of Martin Luther and Other Matters of the Christian Faith. It was an unremarkable publication, a typical ReformationFlugschriftin almost every respect: it was quarto size, sixteen pages long, unbound, with a woodcut illustration on the title page depicting the main events described in the pamphlet. The dialogue is between a student home from the university of Wittenberg and his peasant father: the son converts his father to Luther’s cause, and his mother consigns to the flames the family’s prized letter of indulgence. The pamphlet is anonymous.
The Romance of the slum: Gender and Cross-Class Communication of Religious Belief, 1880–1920
Authors: Martin M. C. H.
Published: March 2016

Despite relatively low working-class church attendance over the nineteenth century, evidence of religious practice in working-class households and a more diffuse religious mentality have been identified by historians, even until the mid or late twentieth century. Yet little analysis has been undertaken into how such a mentality was created. While Cox noted of late nineteenth- century Lambeth that the most successful churches were those which contained vast philanthropic networks, elsewhere he claimed that ‘philanthropy … did little to promote definite Christian belief. Indeed, both he and Williams regarded schools as the primary agency for conveying religious teaching: Cox claiming that Board schools were more effective than Sunday schools, Williams, that Sunday schools provided not only a means of instilling religious belief in children but a form of ‘religion by deputy’ for their parents.
Seeing Protestant Icons: The Popular Reception of Visual Media in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America
Authors: Morgan David
Published: March 2016

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.
Primitive Decretal Collections in the British Museum
Authors: Duggan Charles
Published: March 2016

Ecclesiastical historians are already aware of the richness of the British Museum in canonical manuscripts of all kinds. The Royal Library alone preserves at least one copy of the greater number of major canonical collections, as well as an imposing range of the works of leading commentators, decretists and decretalists alike, glosses and summae, together with the fascinating, if minor, canonistic exercises known as distinctiones, abbreviations, casus, quaestiones, transformationes and notabilia. A history of the canon law of the medieval Church could in most essentials be written on the basis of these considerable and varied sources. What is perhaps rather less familiar is the particular value of these manuscripts to the historian of the medieval English Church, both in a positive and a negative way: negative in the sense of the ample evidence provided of a rapid and wide-spread reception of ecclesiastical common law in England; and positive in the sense of the record preserved of the initiative and originality revealed by English canonists, and of the contribution which they made in turn to the law of the Universal Church.
Correspondence between England and the Council of Constance, 1414–18
Authors: Crowder C. M. D.
Published: March 2016

The problem with which this paper is concerned is the present poverty of material to illustrate the policies which the English delegates to the Council of Constance were intended to carry out. The problem is one of particular interest in the case of the most important group among these delegates, the ambassadors of Henry V. There is no great difficulty in tracing their activity in the Council between the autumn of 1414 and the spring of 1418 since this is recorded in the official and unofficial records of its proceedings, but it is not always possible to identify and then establish with documents the motives behind their actions. Partly this is due to the absence of reports of the discussions within the separate nations into which the Council was divided; partly it is due to the large gaps in the correspondence between principals in England and their representatives at Constance.
The Trilingual College of San Ildefonso and the Making of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible
Authors: Hall Basil
Published: March 2016

Perhaps the earliest use of trilinguis, to refer to the biblical tongues and the claim to proficiency in them, is in Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 401 A.D., where Jerome reminded Rufinus of his own status as a scholar, ‘Ego philosophus, rhetor, grammaticus, dialecticus, Hebraeus, Latinus trilinguis’. Erasmus who owed so much to Jerome in biblical studies and in his conception of renewal for the life of the Church and Christian society by such studies, would have omitted ‘dialecticus’ from Jerome’s roll-call of his own attainments. For Erasmus the ‘philosophia Christi’ based on trilingual learning was the ground of renewal in personal and public Christian life, of renewal in the Church, and of renewal in the respublica litterarum. As he saw it, disaster came upon the Church’s thinking when dialectics were introduced into theology, mastered it, and produced ‘some of the pseudo-theologians of our time whose brains are rotten, their language barbarous, their intellects dull, their learning a bed of thorns, their manners rough, their life hypocritical, their talk full of venom, and their hearts as black as ink’.
Gregory the Great and a papal missionary strategy
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2016

In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede includes a deservedly famous letter of Gregory I containing the Pope’s instructions to his missionaries in Kent on how to go about converting the heathen English to Christianity. The letter is addressed to Abbot Mellitus, one of the band of reinforcements sent to England from Rome in June 601. In it Mellitus is asked to instruct Augustine, established at Canterbury for the last four years, that ‘the sanctuaries of the idols among this nation should on no account be destroyed’; by all means, let the idols go; but the temples, if they be soundly constructed, need only be sprinkled with holy water and consecrated to the worship of the true God. In this way hardened English minds may be won to a stepwise ascent and not be required to make too large a leap of faith.
Secular and Religious Motivation in the Pilgrimage of Grace
Authors: Dickens A. G.
Published: March 2016

There can be few English historians still maintaining a lively interest in their fields over half a century after the publication of a major work, but this is happily true of the Misses Madeleine and Ruth Dodds, with whom I corresponded not many months ago. Their extensive two-volume workThe Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracydisentangled with admirable system and discretion the huge deposit of evidence calendared (sometimes too summarily) in theLetters and Papers of Henry VIII.As a work of narrative history their book seems unlikely to call for major revisions, and it demands the warmest recognition from every student of Tudor history. Though its judgments are in general sober and well-grounded, its deep sympathies have possibly tended to encourage those who for various reasons wanted to idealise the Pilgrimage and overestimate its creative possibilities.
Archbishop Vernon Harcourt
Authors: Stephenson A. M. G.
Published: March 2016

On 5 November 1847, as the villagers of Bishopthorpe were burning Guy Fawkes in effigy, news came down from the Palace that their beloved archbishop had died. Only four days before, he had travelled into York, still hale and hearty, though in his ninety-first year, a patriarchal figure, majestic in physique and princely in appearance. No archbishop since Walter de Gray (1215-1255) had been Metropolitan of the Northern Province so long. His departure marked the end of an era. He was the last aristocratic archbishop of York. What a contrast to the archbishops who followed him! There was nothing aristocratic about Thomas Musgrave, whose father had been a Cambridge tailor, and who, before setting foot in Bishopthorpe as archbishop, had previously been there only to assist his father in measuring Vernon Harcourt for his clothes! Charles Thomas Longley came from an old family which lived on friendly terms with the Darnleys, but, though very dignified, he was no aristocrat. William Thomson, physically a magnificent figure, was the son of a tradesman, and never felt quite at home with the aristocracy, preferring the steel workers of Sheffield. With the death of Vernon Harcourt an era had, indeed, passed.
An Example of Lay Intervention in the Elizabethan Church
Authors: Cross M. C.
Published: March 2016

One of the consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries was the amount of patronage which fell into lay hands. In the past the influence of laymen, apart from that of the Crown itself, on the emergent Elizabethan Church has largely been ignored. A great deal has been written about the wolves coming out of Geneva, and about the more moderate protestant clerics from less controversial backgrounds. Even recent studies of Church history in the Elizabethan period seem to give the impression that an informed interest in theology was confined to the clergy. Yet by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign there was already a body of educated laymen committed to the doctrines of protestantism and their numbers increased as the reign progressed. In his edition of the letters of Thomas Wood, one such protestant layman, Dr Collinson has given ample evidence that the participation of some of the laity in Church matters cannot be ignored. In the company of Thomas Wood stands Sir Francis Hastings, an equally intrepid Elizabethan layman. By his enthusiasm he succeeded radically and consciously in altering the climate of thinking in the Church in those parts of England where he lived. By his public protestations in Parliament and in his published writings he made his opinions on religion known to the whole nation.
Two Interesting Documents found in the Register of the Consistory at the English Church in Amsterdam
Authors: Carter A. C.
Published: March 2016

These twenty questions, which clear so many points of difference between Reformed and non-Separating Independent polity, as well as elucidating doctrinal issues, have hitherto been known from a copy made of them, with their orthodox Reformed, and with Hooker’s own answers, for Sir William Boswell. This copy, to be found in the British Museum, was printed as an appendix by Professor Stearns in his study of ‘Congregationalism in the Dutch Netherlands,’ and was discussed by Professor Perry Miller, among others, in his definitive ‘Orthodoxy in Massachusetts.’ In the Consistory Register of the English Reformed Church in the Begynhof in Amsterdam, is a different version. Persons familiar with the subject will know that Thomas Hooker, who had been obliged to flee to Holland in 1630, following a threatened attack by the English High Commission, was about to receive a call, though irregularly, to the ministry of this church, where John Paget had been pastor since its opening in 1607. The Amsterdam version of this document, possibly more exact than that in the Boswell Papers, does illumine some of the considerable difficulties posed by the version as printed by Stearns. A collated text of both manuscripts and of the printed version appears as an appendix to my book about the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century.
Reformatio regni: Wyclif and Hus as leaders of religious protest movements
Authors: Wilks Michael
Published: March 2016

In May 1382 William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury since the murder of his predecessor Sudbury during the Peasants’ Revolt the previous year, declared it to be a matter of frequent complaint and common report that evil persons were going about his province preaching without authority, and spreading doctrines which threatened to destroy not only ecclesiastical authority but civil government as well. They were the adherents, he was informed, of a certain teacher of novelties at Oxford, named John Wyclif, whose sect broadcast the seeds of pestiferous error so widely in the pastures of Canterbury that only the most savage hoeing would root them out. The chroniclers hastened to confirm this account. According to their accounts, by 1382 Wyclif had been able, through his writings and the preaching of his followers, to seduce the laity, including great lords and members of the nobility, over a great part of the realm. Even members of the clergy and scholars were not free from infection. Thus Knighton commented that – at least in the area around Leicester – every other person one met was a Lollard. Thirty years later it is the same story in Bohemia. As the carthusian prior Stephen of Dolany complained, despite the condemnation of Wyclif’s teachings at the university of Prague in 1403, the Wycliffites swarmed everywhere: ‘in the state apartments of princes, in the schools of the students, in the lonely chambers of the monks, and even in the cells of the Carthusians’.
The emergence of schism in seventeenth-century Scotland
Authors: Donaldson Gordon
Published: March 2016

It is perhaps debatable whether the Reformation itself had involved schism, or at any rate whether those who took part in it thought that it did. It is true that in 1555, on the insistence of John Knox when he was in Scotland on a visit from Geneva, some of the reforming party were prevailed on to give up attending ‘that idol’, the mass, and that before he left Scotland Knox administered the Lord’s Supper after the reformed model. It is true, too, that from this time or shortly thereafter Protestants began to gather together for worship, hardly in secret – for the government’s policy was not repressive – but at least without official recognition. These ‘privy kirks’, which existed before there was ‘the face of a public kirk’ and had their preachers, elders and deacons, were parallel to the congregations which English exiles were organising on the continent in the same years, and parallel, too, to the much more secret congregations which then existed in London. In the ‘First Bond’ of December 1557 a few notables renounced ‘the congregation of Satan’ and pledged themselves to work for the erection of a reformed Church, but, as they followed this with a supplication that the ‘common prayers’ should be read every Sunday in all parishes, it is evident that the aim was to reform the whole Church, not to separate from it.
‘The surest road to heaven’: ascetic spiritualities in English post-conquest religious life
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

That the changes which occurred in the conduct of the regular and ascetic life in the eleventh century were deep seated has long been accepted, and their dependence on a fundamental reappraisal of the principles and practice of that life is clearly demonstrated by contemporaries. This ‘crisis’, as it has become normal to term it, was characterised by a rejection of the world and worldly values. In a general social context it can be seen in ‘gregorian’ ideas and attitudes on the relations between church and state, on the status and attributes of the clergy, and on the position and authority of the popes as individuals and the papacy as an institution. In the context of the regular life it is evident in a rejection of the formal round and ritual over-elaboration of monastic observance, and in an abhorrence of die complex inter-relationship and inter-dependence of monastic communities and the secular society in which diey were set. When the papal legate Hugh, archbishop of Lyons, wrote to Robert of Molesme accepting and authorising the abbot’s proposed initiative he indicated where the issues and problems lay

you and your sons, brethren of the community of Molesme, appeared before us at Lyons and pledged yourselves to follow from now on more strictly and more perfectly the rule of the most holy Benedict, which so far in that monastery you have observed poorly and neglectfully. Since it has been proven that because of many hindering circumstances you could not accomplish your aim in the aforementioned place, we ... consider that it would be expedient for you to retire to another place which the divine munificence will point out to you and there serve the Lord undisturbedly in a more wholesome manner.
The ‘Frankish’ penitentials
Authors: Pierce Rosamond
Published: March 2016

The penitentials in use in the frankish lands in the eighth and ninth centuries were designed as handbooks to aid the priest in the administration of private or secret penance, being at their most simple, tabulations of various misdemeanours associated with particular vices stipulating the penances to be performed.

In the early centuries of the Christian church however, penance seems to have been performed in public, involving both confession and an act of contrition before the assembled congregation. It was, moreover, then undergone only in cases of severe crimes, usually one of three capital sins of homicide, perjury and adultery. The ritual of penance is described fully by Basil the Great, from whom we also learn that the physical act of the laying on of hands by the bishop was the outward sign of reconciliation. This severe form of penance was gradually mitigated and its rarity lessened as it became associated with the increasingly more common practice of death-bed confession and penance, as well as with the lenten period of fasting and contrition, both of which practices are particularly evident in the church in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries. Both the bishop and, in the case of the absence of the bishop, the priest, were now empowered to reconcile the penitent.
Eastern and western Christendom in late antiquity: a parting of the way
Authors: Brown Peter
Published: March 2016

I must begin with the words of the clergyman: ‘My short sermon for today is divided into three parts. One: God. Two: Man. Three: The Universe.’ It will be impossible to do justice to the subject in hand in the short span of one lecture. This is not only because of the vast range of time and space involved in any consideration of the parting of the ways between eastern and western Christianity in the late antique period. To embark on such a theme involves holding up for scrutiny the very nature of ecclesiastical history. For what we have to deal with is not merely what happened in the relations between east and west, but why what happened happened as it did. Once the ecclesiastical historian asks why, he will find himself sooner or later forced to grapple with the whole quality of men’s lives in the past—that is, with how they lived the full twenty-four hours of the day, not only in their books, but in their churches, not only in their churches, but in the most intimate and most monotonous rhythms of their life.
The Scottish bishops and archbishop Arsenius
Authors: Sefton Henry R.
Published: March 2016

Some time before July 1716 bishop Archibald Campbell made the acquaintance of Arsenius, archbishop of Thebais, who was in England on a begging mission on behalf of Samuel, patriarch of Alexandria. The circumstances of this mission are described in a fragmentary manuscript preserved in the Jolly Kist at the Edinburgh episcopal theological college. According to this account Samuel was elected patriarch by the clergy of Grand Cairo, Alexandria and Damiata in 1710. The new patriarch resolved to travel to Constantinople, Moldavia and Wallachia to procure some charitable assistance for the support of his church and was about to embark at Alexandria when he was informed by letters from Constantinople that one Cosmo, formerly archbishop of Mount Sinai had by bribery been invested in the patriarchal throne by the grand visier and would shortly be arriving with commands to the Greek nation to acknowledge him.

This news obliged the patriarch to return to Grand Cairo to consult with his clergy. They strenuously opposed all thoughts of submitting to the intruder and told Samuel that he ought to stand his ground and make the bashaw a sufficient offer to secure his possession against the pretences of his adversary. Cosmo arrived soon afterwards but Samuel had by this time secured the support of the bashaw and the intruder’s designs were defeated. All this was accomplished only at very great expense which had involved the patriarch in borrowing thirty thousand dollars upon high interest from what are described as infidels and foreigners. He was also obliged to sell much of the church plate and to pawn other utensils for the loan and credit of this money. It was therefore decided to send a deputation to several parts of Christendom ‘in order to procure the charity and beg the benevolence of princes and other persons disposed to assist the afflicted’. The persons appointed for this errand were Arsenius, metropolitan of Thebais and Gennadius, archimandrite of Alexandria who set sail for England with the recommendations of their patriarch and the English consuls at Grand Cairo and Tripoli. Along with their attendants they arrived in London in 1712.
Reform at the council of Constance: the Franciscan case
Authors: Nimmo Duncan
Published: March 2016

In the history of Christian renewal, the council of Constance (1414–18) holds an important, and on the whole unhappy, position. It embodied the highest aspirations: as is well known, its aim was the regeneration of the Roman church at every level—the familiar ‘reform in head and members’; this cause was the council’s chief preoccupation from mid-1415 until its close; yet by common consent its achievement was, if not null, then negligible, in relation both to the task it had set itself, and to the real requirements of the day; and thus—it is tempting to conclude—in failing to reform itself, the medieval church made necessary the different and in many respects regrettable reform of the sixteenth century.
‘A magazine of religious patterns’: an Erasmian topic transposed in English protestantism
Authors: Collinson Patrick
Published: March 2016

In his Paraclesis or Adhortatio ad christianae philosophiae studium Erasmus of Rotterdam proposed a famous anti-scholastic definition of the theologian:

To me he is truly a theologian who teaches not by skill with intricate syllogisms but by a disposition of mind, by the very expression and eyes . . .

In this kind of philosophy, located as it is more truly in the disposition of the mind than in syllogisms, life means more than debate, inspiration is preferable to erudition, transformation is a more important matter than intellectual comprehension. Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and—I shall boldly add—all can be theologians.

In the context of this preface to the new testament the model was the supremely Christian life, ‘the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself’. Elsewhere, Erasmus sketched a portrait of exemplary Christian character as he had witnessed it at first hand, among his contemporaries. In response to a correspondent whom he judged to be in search of ‘some eminent pattern of religion’ he described the obscure Jehan Vitrier, ‘a man unknown to the world but famous and renowned in the kingdom of Christ’, as a foil, in the manner of Plutarch, for the more celebrated John Colet. Of Vitrier Erasmus said that ‘in truth his whole life was nothing else than one continual sermon’; of Colet that ‘nothing could divert him from the pursuit of a gospel life.’
The renaissance tradition in the reformed church of Scotland(presidential address)
Authors: Cameron James K.
Published: March 2016

In the sixteenth century Scotland was in close conscious relation with the continent. In international politics she had through the dynastic connections of her royal house acquired a crucial importance, and in ecclesiastical, academic, and literary spheres that relationship had never before and perhaps has never since been quite so intimate or so fully developed. The end of the Auld Alliance in 1560 did not weaken although it may have changed these ties. Indeed they were in many ways strengthened. In ever increasing numbers the sons of Scottish nobility went abroad in the furtherance of their general education and experience of the world. Almost every university in Europe was at some time visited by Scottish scholars and almost every educated Scot who in this century achieved distinction in religion, education or politics had spent some time at one or more of the great centres of learning. Nor was this traffic one way. Scotland had its modest share of travellers from overseas in the early days of the grand tour, and although only a few itineraries have so far come to light there is ample evidence in surviving alba amicorum and in the university rector’s books that a visit to the northern kingdom and an extended period of residence at one of its universities was unexceptional.
An abortive renaissance: catholic modernists in Sussex
Authors: Vidler A. R.
Published: March 2016

Storrington in Sussex, at the beginning of this century, was described as ‘a quiet, peaceful village.’ Although in the intervening period its population has more than doubled, it is still known as a village and has retained much of that agreeable character. In 1909 it suddenly became the centre of an ecclesiasticalcause célèbrethat attracted international attention. Anyone who was in Storrington on 21 July in that year could have witnessed an extraordinary funeral.

It was the burial of a Roman catholic priest. The mourners, who numbered about forty, assembled in the garden of the house in the middle of the village where the priest had died and walked from there in silence to a grave that had been prepared in the anglican or parish churchyard. There was no requiem or formal funeral service, but prayers were said and an address was given by an unrobed priest who was in fact a Frenchman, though that might not have been evident since he was fluent in English. He said that he spoke in the name of many French, Italian and German friends, for father George Tyrrell, whose funeral it was, had become well-known in those countries and in others too. He was one of the most conspicuous representatives of what is known to historians as the modernist movement in the Roman catholic church and of what may be described as an abortive renaissance.
Medieval Waldensian Abhorrence of Killing Pre-c1400
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: March 2016

Waldensians figure high among the protagonists in accounts of medieval pacifism. The two areas on which these accounts usually concentrate correspond to two broad areas in the sect’s history—the genesis of abhorrence of killing during the formative early years, and the perseverance (or decline) of this position during the later centuries of an underground and only slowly changing movement—and they are also the two themes of this paper. The first theme poses a question. Is the received account of the genesis of this position satisfactory?
The Way of Action: Pierre d’Ailly and the Military Solution to the Great Schism
Authors: Swanson R. N.
Published: March 2016

The traditional role of the medieval latin church in legitimising warfare tends to fall into two main categories. On the one hand, there are the secular political wars, in which the church can perhaps be seen as a third force: while called on to legitimise and support partisan conflict between supposedly Christian antagonists, it could also work as a force for peace. On the other hand, there are the religious wars, to which the church was itself a party, either in warfare against infidels, or against those who, in their obstinacy, refused to recognise and accept the authority of the Roman church.
Holy Men and Rural Communities in Zimbabwe, 1970–1980
Authors: Ranger Terence
Published: March 2016

A good deal has been written about the response of the mission churches to the guerilla war in Zimbabwe. Much less has been written about their experience of it. Yet it has been persuasively argued that the real significance of the war for the churches lay not at the level of institutional pronouncements upon it but at the level of the participation of churchmen in the sufferings of local rural communities. The war was an embarassment to institutional spokesmen. In the early colonial past the leaders of the catholic and protestant churches in Southern Rhodesia had legitimated war, providing chaplains for the white columns that defeated the Ndebele in 1893 and suppressed the risings in 1896 and preaching the duty of the representatives of Christian civilisation to overthrow barbarism. By the 1960s some churchmen had come to condemn violence—both the institutional violence of the Rhodesian state and the revolutionary violence of the nationalist and liberation movements. As guerilla war spread in the 1970s, hardly any church spokesmen could move beyond this position. It became clearer and clearer that the majority of their African rural flocks supported the guerillas and even clearer that African rural Christians were suffering terribly in the violence of civil war. But no-one was able to articulate a theology appropriate to such a crisis.
The First Crusade and the Persecution of the Jews
Authors: Riley-Smith Jonathan
Published: March 2016

Between December 1095 and July 1096 there took place the first pogrom in western European History, a series of events so distressing to the Jewish people that rumours of them reached the Near East in advance of the First Crusade, inspiring the communities there with messianic fervour, while dirges in honour of the martyrs are recited in the synagogues to this day. The first outbreaks seem to have occurred in France soon after the preaching of the crusade and the first evidence of them is a letter written by the French communities to their Rhineland counterparts, warning them of the impending threat. It is possible that persecution was widespread in France, even though the details of it are lost, apart from a reference to an anti-Jewish riot which broke out among men gathering to take the cross in Rouen. Much more evidence is available about events in the Rhineland. On 3 May 1096 the storm broke over the community at Speyer, where a crusading army of Rhinelanders and Swabians under Count Emich of Leiningen had gathered.
The Language of Persecution: John of Salisbury and the early phase of the Becket Dispute (1163–66)
Authors: McLoughlin John
Published: March 2016

Medieval churchmen who became involved in ecclesiastical disputes or in disputes with secular authority, had access to a rich ‘language’ of phrase and imagery with which to strengthen their case. This ‘language’, drawing on Scriptural sources and on standard interpretations of Scripture, could be used to depict almost any dispute as a struggle between good and evil, as the persecution of pious men by the impious, as the renewed persecution of the Church Universal, as a latterday trial and passion of Christ, or as an assault on church liberties.
Mission and Inquisition among Conversos and Moriscos in Spain, 1250–1550
Authors: Edwards John
Published: March 2016

The example of co-existence between Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain should, in theory, be an inspiration to those who hope for a successful multi-faith society today. On the other hand, the expulsion in 1492 of Jews who refused baptism, and of Muslims who adopted a similar attitude, from Castile in 1502 and Aragon in 1610, implies that the Spanish example should rather be seen as a warning of the consequences of failure. The question of interfaith relations will be considered here mainly from the point of view of Christians who attempted to cope with the proximity of the other two ‘religions of the book’. It will, however, be possible to look at the feasibility of the long-term existence of Jewish and Muslim communities in Spain, and at the problems faced by converts from these two faiths to Christianity.
Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation
Authors: Elton G. R.
Published: March 2016

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?