bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Ascetic Ideal in the History of the Church
Authors: Chadwick Henry
Published: March 2016

Asceticism is in no way specifically Christian. It runs from the Pythagoreans to Pachomius, from Sufi mysticism and Buddhist withdrawal to Greenham Common and the protesters of modern western society. But within the Christian tradition asceticism has played so substantial a role, at times beset by controversy, that it seems right for an Ecclesiastical History Society to concentrate on the phenomenon and its consequences. The ascetic life is no doubt understood only from within by those who are or have been monks and nuns; and that is the case with a relatively small proportion of our Society’s members, who are usually the object of an affectionate but silent envy in those of us who have to work away in university arts faculties harassed by cuts and committees in an unsympathetic world, where government policy seems like piecemeal demolition by explosive and where a rotten botanist seems to be more valued than a first-rate historian. Admittedly, in the second half of the 20th century the cloister has been having its problems too. But it is a matter for reflection that, in the case of contemplative orders, there is no evidence in the decline of vocations.
The Death of Ascetics: Sickness and Monasticism in the early Byzantine Middle East
Authors: Horden Peregrine
Published: March 2016

How should an ascetic die? Aaron the presbyter knew how. He had always led an exemplary life. Born in Armenia, probably during the first quarter of the sixth century, he entered a Monophysite Syrian monastery in early youth. He there distinguished himself for his humility, his unremitting labour in the monastery’s vineyard and guest-house, and his abundant zeal for the ascetic life. Frequently he would stand up all night. Only in old age did he consent to the luxury of a rug-covered plank as his bed.
Celtic Asceticism and Carolingian Authority in early medieval Brittany
Authors: Smith Julia M. H.
Published: March 2016

In the earlier Middle Ages, Brittany enjoyed a mixed reputation as a region in which to lead a life of ascetic discipline and dedication to God. The (eleventh-century?) Life of Me wan describes Samson and his disciples leaving Britain for a life of spiritual exile. They headed for Brittany because, according to the hagiographer, the region was not only a ‘desert’ where life would be harsher than elsewhere, but also because the ferocity of its inhabitants made it crueller. Others were not so sure whether this was an advantage. Abelard’s tribulations as abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys are well known: though himself originating fromBretagne gallo, he complained that the Bretons ofBretagne bretonnantewere a barbarian, lawless race, and that the monks of Saint-Gildas were dissolute and uncontrollable. Abelard’s comments echo a long tradition of French, or Frankish, castigation of the Bretons, stretching back at least to the ninth century. This criticism often expresses more than hostility to agenswhose language made them incomprehensible and hence ridiculous: amongst the tensions it reflects are problems of Christian discipline and ecclesiastical authority which the Frankish church was unable fully to resolve. In exploring behind the Bretons’ bad reputation, it is worthwhile investigating both the ascetic practices of early medieval Brittany and the reactions to those practices of the Frankish church. In so doing, I hope to elucidate my juxtaposition of ‘Celtic asceticism’ and ‘Carolingian authority’ by showing how Breton ascetic traditions were modified under the impact of Carolingian political circumstances.
Monk and Canon: Some Patterns in the Religious Life of the Twelfth Century
Authors: Brooke Christopher N.L.
Published: March 2016

If you were a religious of the i ith or 12th centuries choosing the order in which you were to find your vocation, how did you distinguish order from order, monk from canon? How did you determine gradations of the ascetic life? If you were a founder or benefactor, planning to found a new religious house, how did you determine which order to favour? At a time when asceticism and the religious orders flourished as never before, choice must have been bewildering. There is a copious contemporary literature arguing the relative merits of this mode and that; and modern scholars have offered a remarkably wide variety of advice. Some have proceeded on the assumption that there must have been a fundamental difference and have pursued it as best they might; others, disappointed in the chase, have doubted if any true difference existed. Some have seen all such differences engulfed in the deeper stream of new impulses and modes which affected every approach to the religious life in this age; others have said that to lose track of such differences is to take a very superficial view of the meaning of the rules of St Augustine and St Benedict. It is very easy indeed to take an entirely sceptical view; and I propose to start by stating the case for saying there was no difference visible to all in every part of Europe – that no general statement of the difference stands up to close inspection. But to rest the matter there, I am sure, would be superficial and mistaken – and so in the second part of this paper I embark on the much more hazardous path of determining where the difference lay. I shall try not to add another definition to the scrap heap, but to show by looking at a number of local situations how it might have appeared both externally to a founder and at a deeper level to an educated man with some discernment of different approaches to the ascetic life and religious spirituality. Yet the ultimate abiding impression is of the strangeness of the central fact: at a time when men were seeking their own religious vocation in numbers never before approached in medieval Europe – and patrons lavishing resources on an unparalleled variety of new religious houses – it is especially difficult for us to observe in many cases where the differences lay.
The Vine and the Elm Tree: the Patristic Interpretation of Jesus’ Teachings on Wealth
Authors: McGuckin J. A.
Published: March 2016

If patristic tradition on the subject of wealth and possessions often appears ambivalent in its attitudes, then perhaps one of the reasons for this is that this tradition grows from an exegesis of Gospel teachings on the subject that themselves are far from being straightforward, even though they are immensely forthright. Clement of Alexandria, for example, has frequently been accused of twisting the simple and immediately obvious demand of Jesus: ‘Sell all you have and give to the poor’ (Mark 10.21) and subverting a radical vision of Jesus into a comfortable exhortation that any pious property-owner, bourgeois or aristocratic, could be happy to live with. If the rich young man had understood Christ’s real message, as Clement would have it (not so much to renounce his ownership of goods as to free his heart from attachment to them), then he might not have had such a crisis about following Jesus. Whether or not Clement’s case is, in the end, convincing as an exegesis, it none the less successfully raises all the implicit problems of interpreting the New Testament teachings on wealth in any kind of universalist sense—as teachings that are meant to apply to all, and for all time. And there are, consequently, many dangers in being too ready to dismiss Clement’s allegorism as an anachronistic exegesis, not least the danger of reverting to a different kind of biblical fundamentalism than the one Clement thought he was attacking; for contemporary biblical criticism, as it attempts to separate out the original message of Jesus and the insights of his later disciples, and to locate the original words in their correct historical and sociological milieu, has rightly warned us against over-confidence in our historical interpretations of Gospel material.
Making Ends Meet: Wealth and Poverty in the Carolingian Church
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

In the early ninth century, the Frankish Church was unashamedly, triumphantly, rich. The Franks were assured that God loved them. Thanks to the intercessions of churchmen, God had promoted the expansion of the Frankish Empire: in a world of social relations organized and expressed through the exchange of gift and countergift, it seemed only fair that God, or rather his Church on his behalf, should share in the profits. ‘Give tithes to the Lord’, Smaragdus urged a young Carolingian king: ‘He subjected many realms to you, and commanded powerful peoples to serve you’.
Patriarch Poppo (1019–1042) and the Rebuilding of the Basilica at Aquileia: the Politics of Conspicuous Expenditure
Authors: Clark Ian D. L.
Published: March 2016

The traveller between Venice and Trieste may, if he knows where to look, catch a glimpse of a rather aggressive campanile in the coastal plain south of Cervignano. Slightly detached from the great basilica of Aquileia, rebuilt and then dedicated in 1031, the campanile was almost certainly intended by its builder, the Patriarch Poppo, as a gesture of derision towards its contemporary counterpart in Venice. With its foundations firmly skewering an Early Christian mosaic floor, it today overlooks a farmyard midden, the skeletal remains of a huge Roman city, and, of course, the splendid basilica.
Thesaurus Absconditus: the Hidden Treasure of the Waldensians
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: March 2016

Records which survive of interrogations, principally of Waldensian followers, in Fribourg in 1430 preserve for us the figure of a k. person who had clearly been much seen on the streets of Fribourg in the 1420s, a town gossip. The woman in question was called Surer, nicknamed ‘the Fat’. One of the reported street-corner conversations has Surer the Fat talking to an earnest credens, a follower of the Waldensian Brothers. Her opening gambit was this: ‘The confessors of the sect’, she said, ‘must be very wealthy’. As an inquisitive gossip she knew about the offerings made to the Waldensian Brothers by their many lay followers in Fribourg, and from other witnesses we know that Fribourg street-corner conversations were rife with rumours about the Waldensians, both general ones about their evil character and more specific ones about their diabolist practices. These may have included a particular allegation about wealth which had first acquired currency in later fourteenth-century Austria.
Questions of Income and Expenditure in Renaissance Rome: a Case Study of Cardinal Francesco Armellini
Authors: Lowe K. J. P.
Published: March 2016

In, a book of 1567 on the lives and actions of past popes and cardinals written by Girolamo Garimberto, in the section on avarice, is to be found this judgement on Cardinal Francesco Armellini (1470–1528). ‘He truly is to be considered rich who is content to live with what he has, while he who is unhappy with what he has accumulated may be considered poor; and measured in these terms one can say that Francesco Armellini was very poor indeed.’ Given his posthumous, and indeed his contemporary reputation, of which this passage is entirely typical, Francesco Armellini would appear to be an ideal figure through which to approach the general subject of the Church and wealth in this period.
Zinzendorf and Money
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

There are problems with this topic. Zinzendorf himself would certainly have considered it a non-subject, as he would certainly have regarded the counsel of his contemporary Wesley to ‘gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can’ as unspeakably bourgeois, an adjective I have no recollection of Wesley’s applying to himself. The severer kind of economic historian might also regard what I have to say as a non-treatment of a non-subject, for I cannot present you with a profit-and-loss account of Zinzendorf’s transactions; I know no more about his income than he did, which was not very much; and although I shall refer later to the successive valuations of Zinzendorf’s property which that remarkable scholar Otto Uttendürfer dredged up from the Herrnhut archives sixty years ago, I attach no great importance to them. They seem to me the same kind of artificial enterprise as the annual revaluations for borrowing purposes which were made of the empty Centre Point building in its earlier years. Moreover, the straightforward introduction to the theme which I enjoyed not long ago is not readily available to historians in the West. It is to work first in the archive of Francke’s Orphan House at Halle, and then move on to that of the Renewed Church of the United Brethren at Herrnhut. Francke’s Orphan House, one of the biggest buildings of eighteenth-century Europe, has the Thatcherite principle of cost-effectiveness written all over it, and is clearly based on the Prussian barracks. The whole community at Herrnhut combines baroque lavishness with simplicity in a way not easily put into words, but most movingly experienced in the Grosse Saal in which the Brethren now hold their services. A visit to the Moravian settlement at Zeyst in the Netherlands, however, may sufficiently illustrate the point.
Godliness in a Golden Age: The Church and Wealth in Eighteenth-century Geneva
Authors: Kirk Linda
Published: March 2016

In the eighteenth century two things about Geneva were clear to all observers: the city’s astonishing prosperity, and its Calvinism. It is not necessary to suppose that the second caused the first (although many contemporaries thought it did) to read in the republic and such conspicuous expatriates as Necker clear evidence that God rewarded hard work and virtuous living. All Europe knew of the scale and importance of the international Protestant banking connection to which Genevans contributed so much.
‘Gold and the Gospel’: Systematic Beneficence in Mid-nineteenth-century England
Authors: Garnett Jane
Published: March 2016

In 1864, Lord Shaftesbury spoke out against the complacency of those who congratulated themselves on the liberality of the nation. He looked back to the Irish famine, the Indian famine, the Crimean War. ‘The newspapers were loud in bepraising the munificence of the country in all those cases; but I confess I never saw any munificence.’ The first half of the nineteenth century had seen the formation of a multitude of philanthropic enterprises, Bible and Tract societies, missionary societies, which were both symptoms of and conducive to a revived state of religion. Yet, given Britain’s increasing prosperity, itself a focus for Protestant pride, the spirit of benevolence, if it had increased absolutely, seemed relatively to have declined. Too often, income increased, but donations remained the same. Moreover, as the Baptist William Brock put it:

The age is remarkable for its institutions. We have societies for everything … They are the grateful indications of the age’s benevolence. My fear is lest of the age’s selfishness they should now become the excuse.
The Presbyterian Revolution in Ulster, 1660-1690
Authors: Gillespie Raymond
Published: March 2016

In early 1642 a Scottish army under the command of Robert Munroe arrived in Ulster as part of a scheme to defeat the native Irish rebellion which had begun late in the previous year. The conquest was not to be purely a military one. As a contemporary historian of Presbyterianism, Patrick Adair, observed ‘it is certain God made that army instrumental for bringing church governments, according to His own institutions, to Ireland … and for spreading the covenants’. The form of church government was that of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and in June 1642 the chaplains and officers established the first presbytery in Ireland at Carrickfergus. Sub-presbyteries, or meetings, were created for Antrim, Down and the Route, in north Antrim in 1654, for the Laggan in east Donegal in 1657, and for Tyrone in 1659. Within these units the Church was divided into geographical parishes each with its own minister. This establishment of a parallel structure rivalling that of the Anglican Church, but without the king at its head, is what has been termed the ‘presbyterian revolution’.It supported the Presbyterian claim to be ‘the Church of Ireland’, a claim which was to bring it into conflict with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the late seventeenth century. In order to further underpin this claim the reformed church began to move out of its Ulster base by the 1670s. The Laggan presbytery ordained William Cock and William Liston for work in Clonmel and Waterford in 1673 and was active in Tipperary, Longford, and Sligo by 1676. Its advice to some Dublin ministers was to form themselves into a group who were ‘subject to the meeting in the north’. The presbytery of Tyrone also supplied Dublin.
James Martineau and the Catholic Spirit Amid the Tensions of Dublin, 1828-1832
Authors: Waller Ralph
Published: March 2016

James Marrineau is generally known as a Unitarian divine, who in the years which followed the publication of Origin of Species (1859) brought his massive intellect to the defence of Christianity, especially in his debates with Henry Spencer, Professor John Tyndall, and Henry Sidgwick. What is less well-known about Martineau is that in 1828 at the age of twenty-three he began his ministry in Dublin at Eustace Street Presbyterian Meeting House. Through his ‘Biographical Memoranda’, a sermon preached before the Synod of Munster, and his hymn book, A Collection of Hymns for Christian Worship which he compiled for the Dublin congregation, we are given a glimpse of his view of Irish Christianity and see in them a reflection of his strong catholic spirit, which was confirmed and strengthened by his Dublin experience.
Herluin, Abbot of Bec and his Biographer
Authors: Harper-Bill Christopher
Published: March 2016

The Vita Herluini, composed by Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster, has long been recognised as the most important source for the foundation and early history of one of the greatest of the Norman religious houses. It formed the basis of Porée’s account several years before it was first edited in its entirety by Armitage Robinson. The significance of the text is more than local or hagiographical, for it covers a crucial period in Norman ecclesiastical development. When Herluin first determined to adopt the monastic habit, the reconstruction of religious life in the duchy was far from complete. When Gilbert wrote the Vita, some time after the elevation of Anselm to the see of Canterbury, Norman prelates, many of them sons of Bec, were urgently engaged in the reformation of the church in William the Conqueror’s new kingdom. Gilbert Crispin’s interpretation of the religious vocation was very different from that of the founder. He wrote as a man experienced in ecclesiastical government and as a theologian of moderate distinction; he had grown to maturity in the cloister and had experienced no crisis of conversion. His outlook was certainly coloured by his own experience and preoccupations. The Vita is the interpretation by a man raised in a flourishing and learned community of the motivation of an uneducated knight who had experienced spiritual rebirth in a world where religious values were far less certain. The form and emphases of the Life are perhaps worth some consideration.
Equestris Ordo: Chivalry as a Vocation in the Twelfth Century
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2016

The motives of individuals are necessarily conditioned by the expectations of society. Some walks of life are recognised as demanding a high degree of self-sacrifice and noble motivation, as being (in modern terms) vocations. Others are careers worthy of esteem, and yet others are condemned, so that it is supposed that no ethically minded person would engage in them. As the social structure changes there is an adaptation in the pattern of esteem, and an interesting example of this process is provided by the new thinking about knighthood which emerged in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. So much has been written about chivalry that a broad review of the subject is out of the question in this paper, but it may be of interest to re-examine it in the light of this theme. An appropriate starting-point is provided by a passage from the history of the first crusade written about 1110 by Guibert of Nogent:

In our time God has instituted holy warfare so that the knightly order (ordo equestris) and the unsettled populace, who used to be engaged like the pagans of old in slaughtering one another, should find a new way of deserving salvation. No longer are they obliged to leave the world and choose a monastic way of life, as used to be the case, or some religious profession, but in their accustomed liberty and habit, by performing their own office, they may in some measure achieve the grace of God.
‘Poor Protestant Flies’: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth Century England
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.
The Vision of Tainard Miraculum De Quodam Canonico Guatenensi per Sanctum Donatianum Curato
Authors: Karnofsky E. S.
Published: March 2016

The vision of a canon of Watten near St. Omer, northern France which preceded his miraculous recovery from a paralytic illness was recorded in 1091, three years after the event, by an anonymous colleague, and is appended to the Chronicle of Watten. Although the writer’s style is florid to the point of obscurity, the tale he tells is not, in outline, complex or unusual; it resembles scores of similar stories from this period. But we have in this instance the means to see the relation between the content of the vision and the writer’s interest in recording it.
Archbishop Secker as a Physician
Authors: Guy John R.
Published: March 2016

Eighteenth-Century Europe is remarkable for the number of medically qualified men whose fame rests not on medicine, but on their achievements in other fields. The poets Oliver Goldsmith in England and Johann Schiller in Germany come to mind, as do the author Tobias Smollett and the French political activist Jean Marat. Another is the subject of this paper, Thomas Seeker, who in later life was successively bishop of Bristol, Oxford, and archbishop of Canterbury.

Seeker’s undoubted pastoral sensitivity was reflected in his sermons and in the visitation charges which Richard Watson said deserved ‘as much attention as the best’ of those published in the eighteenth century. This, coupled with his own reticence, has tended to overshadow, if not totally eclipse, his earlier years of training as a physician, and his contribution to medicine. His biographer, Beilby Porteus, said of him ‘he chose always rather to talk of things than persons; was very sparing in giving his opinion of characters... Of his own good deeds or great attainments he never spoke, nor loved to hear others speak’.
Healing and Evangelism: The Place of Medicine in Later Victorian Protestant Missionary Thinking
Authors: Williams C. Peter
Published: March 2016

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical change in the attitude of missionary societies to medicine as an aid to evangelism. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century the talents of the medical doctor were seldom sought and, when they were, it was most often to provide protection for missionaries in areas of particular health hazard. In 1852 it was calculated that there were only thirteen European medical missionaries, and in the period 1851-70 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) recruited seven doctors out of a total of three hundred and seven new missionaries. Suitably qualified applicants were not encouraged. In 1842 the CMS informed a surgeon of their willingness to employ him as a catechist on the clear understanding that medicine ‘was only to be an occasional occupation’. James Henderson, an Edinburgh trained doctor, could find no openings as a medical missionary in 1858. In 1861 Henry Venn, the CMS secretary, told an applicant, who was contemplating medical training, that it was inadvisable to devote time to medicine or surgery because when a candidate ‘attempts to qualify himself by medical studies, it very seldom answers any good purpose’. As late as 1875, J. K. Mackenzie, MRCS (London) and LRCP (Edinburgh), applied to the London Missionary Society (LMS) and ‘was treated altogether ... as if I had come up to ask for a special favour, or a situation, at their hands’.
Healing in ‘the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star’
Authors: Amadi G. I. S.
Published: March 2016

Spiritual healing has always been at the core of the religious activities of Nigerian Prophetic Churches. The idea that healing-prayer succeeds where Western medical treatment fails is common among these Churches. This paper examines the notion and nature of healing in ‘The Brotherhood of the Cross and Star’, a prophetic movement in South-Eastem Nigeria.

Christianity has been identified as both the cause and the catalyst of social change in Africa. The emergence of independent Churches founded by Africans in protest at some of the features in Mission Christianity clearly constitutes an important part of the history of the Church in Africa, particularly in Nigeria. Broadly, independent Churches in Nigeria, (which date back to the 1880s) are of two kinds. The first type are those which seceded from mission churches (but retained their liturgies and church government) in protest agains the refusal of the latter to allow Africans any significant say in church government. These are the ‘African Churches’. The second type, with which the BCS could in someways be idenified, are the ‘aladura’ (literally “those who pray” or praying) Churches. These are pentecostal and lay stress on divine healing, prediction and the acquiring of spiritual power. They are mostly founded by individuals who claim to have received a divine call to prophetic ministry and are often referred to as ‘spiritual’ or ‘prophetic’ churches by virtue of this stress on spiritual and or prophetic power.
Outsiders, insiders, and property in Durham around 1100
Authors: Meehan Bernard
Published: March 2016

The monastic community at Durham was founded by bishop William of St Calais in 1083. Its arrival from Jarrow and Wearmouth was accompanied by an act of aggression, when the secular clerks previously in residence were presented with the ultimatum of either becoming monks or leaving. All but one chose to leave. This action can be seen as setting the tone for the community’s attitude to the world outside the see. In their historical writings, particularly Symeon’s Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, written between 1104 and 1109, the Durham monks were self-assertive and defensive.
The Barmen declaration (May 1934)
Authors: Rees Owen Geoffrey
Published: March 2016

The exposition delivered at the synod of Barmen on Wednesday, 30 May 1934, by Pfarrer Hans Asmussen gives us the exact purpose and intention of the committee which had drawn up the six articles of the theological declaration. It is made quite clear that the fundamental concern of the declaration is divine revelation. In the several articles of the declaration the uniqueness of the revelation in Christ is asserted and the uniqueness of the church as the body which is entrusted with the proclamation of that revelation is equally carefully emphasised. The church is alone in her responsibility and any attempt by the world to usurp that responsibility must be rejected. These great claims for the church are made because the church is more than a sociological entity, and the church must ever remain that which she truly is. Positions of responsibility within the church should be exercised with humility, for thus only can church order correspond to the inner essence of the church. The limits which separate the church and the state must be strictly observed and neither the church nor the state should presume to exercise authority in that which does not belong to it. And finally, the freedom of the Holy Spirit must be known, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit must be felt in the church. These statements are the culmination of a series of events in which the German evangelical church had been seriously disturbed by the national socialist policy of Gleichschaltung. Together with this there had been an attempt in various parts of the church to modify its doctrinal position and in that way to admit elements of racial nationalism. Finally, there had been since the collapse of Germany at the end of the great war a formidable amount of political theology which discovered manifestations of God’s will and purpose otherwise than in the revelation of Jesus Christ. It is these three aspects of the life of the church which created a crisis which brought about the first confessing synod of the German evangelical church at Barmen on 29 to 31 May 1934.
Town and Countryside in Early Christianity
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2016

A visitor to the Greco-Roman world about the year 350 AD would have found himself confronted by one of the great ‘sea changes’ in the lives of its peoples. The structure of city, farm and village that had persisted for centuries would appear to be intact. The market-places of the towns would be lined with altars and statues of long-dead benefactors. Temples to the gods of Rome and perhaps to a native deity duly Romanised, would dominate the scene. Wherever one stood in the city the temples in the forum would be the landmark. Nearby, would be the amphitheatre and great bath-building, the social centres of the old community, and near the entrance to the town the triumphal arch, marking perhaps the unification of Roman citizen and native inhabitant into one community.
Church Extension in Town and Countryside in Later Nineteenth-Century Leicestershire
Authors: Thompson David M.
Published: March 2016

Studies of nineteenth-century urban religion have often been conducted with very little reference to the surrounding countryside. Even Obelkevich in his stimulating study of rural religion in Lincolnshire suggested that there, ‘In the Church of England, though the ideal and model of the village parish church continued to inspire town churchmen, towns and villages largely remained in separate compartments. Only through Methodism did the towns have much effect on village religious life. . . . The circuit, the key unit of Methodist organization, brought preachers and people from towns and villages into regular contact with each other and made it possible for the financial and human resources of the town chapels to contribute to the life of the outlying village chapels’. But the methodist exception is significant, not so much in a denominational sense (although the methodist form of organisation was in theory the best for this purpose) but because it is an example of a situation in which the money and men available in any one particular place were not sufficient to carry out what the church concerned wished to do there. It was therefore necessary to tap the resources of other places to help. In large towns such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and in some of the smaller industrial towns as well, the necessary resources often had to be found within the town or not at all; and to that extent the study of urban religion on its own is understandable. But in many parts of the country rural evangelism was felt to be as urgent a priority as urban evangelism. The church of England sought to overcome the consequences of rural neglect; and all nonconformists, not only methodists, attempted to involve town members in the life of country chapels. Thus in less exclusively industrial parts of the country than Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Black Country, a genuine conflict of priorities between town and countryside could arise.
The Truth about Constantine: History, Hagiography and Confusion
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

In about 1380 the choir of the Franciscan church of Florence, Santa Croce, was decorated by Agnolo Gaddi with scenes illustrating the legend of the Holy Cross. The emperor Constantine does not appear in these frescoes, although it was understood that it was his conversion that had moved his mother Helena to undertake her archaeological expedition to the Holy Land to discover the whereabouts of the Cross. It is, nevertheless, his unseen presence that links Gaddi’s cycle to the frescoes of the life and miracles of Saint Silvester, painted by Maso di Banco in the nearby Bardi di Vernio chapel a generation earlier. Here the emperor, afflicted with leprosy, recoils from the advice of his pagan priests that he should bathe in the blood of innocent children and is advised by the apostles Peter and Paul in a dream that to obtain a remedy he must send for the persecuted pope Silvester. Silvester shows Constantine portraits of the apostles, thus authenticating his vision, and cleanses him of his leprosy by baptism. The remaining frescoes illustrate miracles of the saint, notably his quelling of a dragon that had been terrorising Rome and his resuscitation of two magicians who had been overcome by it.
Educating the Greeks: Anglican Scholarships for Greek Orthodox Students in the Early Seventeenth Century
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

In about the year 1615, Cyril Lukaris, the Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria, then on official business in Constantinople, wrote a long letter in Greek to George Abbot, the archbishop of Canterbury. The letter was in reply to one from Abbot, sent with the encouragement of king James I, whose evident interest in the eastern churches Lukaris found deeply encouraging.
Pachomios of Tabennesi and the Foundation of an Independent Monastic Community
Authors: Gould Graham
Published: March 2016

The earliest Christian monasticism falls within the definition of voluntary religious societies since it was not the product of institutional reform in the Church directed by bishops or councils. The founders of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism undertook their task voluntarily and without episcopal constraint. As the founders of voluntary and at first unofficial associations, they deserve our attention. I shall examine some aspects of the sources for the life of one, Pachomios of Tabennesi (c.292–346).
The Confraternities of Byzantium
Authors: Horden Peregrine
Published: March 2016

‘The medieval drive to association’. That phrase comes from a monograph by Susan Reynolds. It is to be found in a chapter on guilds and confraternities. And it is representative of the quasi-biological vocabulary to which historians of those institutions seem especially prone. ‘How appropriate is this talk of drives? What, in this context, is the force of ‘medieval’? My ultimate purpose is to address those questions from a Byzantine perspective; to ask in effect whether evidence of confraternities from the eastern Roman empire between approximately 400 and the Ottoman conquest will sustain talk of a Byzantine ‘drive to association’. The enquiry is, however, worth a preliminary approach on a broader front. This is partly because the historiography of European confraternities shapes the questions that must be put to the Byzantine sources. It is also because, unusually, a Byzantine perspective may illuminate problems arising from the western material. Finally it is because the comparative history of confraternities may, by implication, have a modest contribution to make to the larger question of the differences between eastern and western Christianity. Much energy has been expended on accounting for the ‘parting of the ways’ - less, perhaps, on measuring the distance between them.
The Social and Economic Spread of Rural Lollardy: A Reappraisal
Authors: Plumb Derek
Published: March 2016

The evidence given us by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs provides more information about the social and theological standing of Lollards than we know about many later religious dissidents. Recent work has added to our knowledge. Geoffrey Dickens and Claire Cross have reconsidered the place of the Lollards in the development of the English Reformation, especially in theological matters. John Thomson drew our attention to the continuity shown in some areas. Claire Cross and Margaret Aston showed the importance of women Lollards. J.F. Davis has supported the idea of a continuous movement, and stressed the involvement of the remaining Lollard brotherhoods in the Reformation proper. Margaret Aston saw the reformers using Lollard texts to settle the Reformation into a tradition. And John Fines found one group of Lollards definitely not of a low or ‘middling sort’. But despite this attention on the part of historians, we still know little of the people labelled Lollards. How did they react to developments locally and nationally? Did they assimilate into their local communities despite their beliefs? What social and economic standing did they have? Was contemporary abuse, which dismissed them as ‘lowly sorts’, justified?
The ‘Privy Kirks’ and their Antecedents: The Hidden Face of Scottish Protestantism
Authors: Kirk James
Published: March 2016

The history of Scottish protestantism as a clandestine, underground movement can be traced, albeit unevenly, over three decades from parliament’s early ban on Lutheran literature in 1525 to the protestant victory of 1560 when, in disregard of the wishes of its absent queen then resident in France, parliament finally proscribed the Latin mass and the whole apparatus of papal jurisdiction in Scotland and adopted instead a protestant Confession of Faith. Out of a loosely-defined body of beliefs in the 1530s, ranging from a profound dissatisfaction at ecclesiastical abuse (shared by those who remained Catholic), to a recognition of the need for a reformation in doctrine (less readily conceded by orthodox Catholics), Scottish protestantism by the 15 50s had developed a cellular organisation, enabling it to survive periodic persecution. Early protestants, themselves brought up within the Catholic church as baptised and communicating members, by the 1550s had taken the agonising and momentous step of separating themselves from the fellowship of the established church by forming their own separate communities of believers, worshipping in secret and centred on the privy kirks which arose in the years immediately preceding the Reformation.
The English Conventicle
Authors: Collinson Patrick
Published: March 2016

In the midst of the nervous excitement of the autumn of 1640 a Londoner called Roger Quatermayne, a puritan and, as we might say, barrackroom lawyer, was investigated by Archbishop Laud and other Privy Councillors for the offence of holding religious meetings in circumstances which were politically as well as ecclesiastically suspect, since it was thought that Quatermayne and his friends had made treasonable contact with the Scottish army, then at war with its king and in occupation of English soil. Quatermayne, charged with holding a conventicle, asked the archbishop to inform him ‘what a Conventicle is.’ Laud replied: ‘Why, this is a Conventicle, … when ten or twelve or more or lesse meet together to pray, reade, preach, expound, this is a conventicle.’ Laud’s definition may appear uncontroversial, particularly if to his ‘ten or twelve or more or less’ is added the formula of the 1664 Conventicle Act, ‘over and above those of the same Household’. But Quatermayne objected: ‘My Lord, I do not so understand it.’
Oliver Heywood and his Congregration
Authors: Sheils W.J.
Published: March 2016

The ministerial career of the presbyterian divine Oliver Heywood, spanning as it did the years from 1650, when as a young man still technically too young for ordination he first accepted the call of the congregation at Coley chapelry in the parish of Halifax, until 1702 when on 4 May he died there, a patriarchal figure respected and admired by fellow ministers and congregation alike, was considered by contemporaries and has subsequently been thought of by historians as an exemplary study of the pastoral tradition within old Dissent. His career illustrates how one man could lie at the centre of a network of nonconformist divines, patrons and adherents scattered throughout West Yorkshire, South Lancashire and Cheshire and also demonstrates the ambivalent and shifting relationship between Dissent and the Established Church in the latter half of the seventeenth century. These insights into both the internal and external relationships of Dissenters depend mainly on the corpus of Heywood’s writings, not his published works but his autobiographical notes, diaries and memoranda books published just over a century ago, and it is these writings which form the basis of this paper. To begin with though we can turn to the diary of the antiquary Ralph Thoresby who attended Hey wood’s funeral on the 7 May 1702 and recorded the event as follows:

rode with Mr Peter’s to North Owram to the funeral of good old Mr O. Heywood. He was afterwards interred with great lamentations in the parish church of Halifax. [I] was surprised at the following arvill, or treat of cold possets, stewed prunes, and cheese, prepared for the company, which had several conformist and non-conformist ministers and old acquaintances.
Religious Societies: Methodist and Evangelical 1738–1800
Authors: Walsh John
Published: March 2016

One does not have to believe in free trade to recognize that in religion as well as economic life the erosion of a monopoly can provoke an uprush of private enterprise. It must be more than coincidental that two modern ‘church in danger’ crises which accompanied an erosion of Anglican hegemony - the Revolution of 1688 and the constitutional crises of 1828–32 – were followed by bursts of voluntary activity. Clusters of private societies were formed to fill up part of the space vacated by the state, as it withdrew itself further from active support of the establishment. After the Toleration Act perceptive churchmen felt even more acutely the realities of religious pluralism and competition. Anglicanism was now approaching what looked uncomfortably like a market situation; needing to be promoted; actively sold. Despite the political and social advantages still enjoyed by the Church, the confessional state in its plenitude of power had gone, and Anglican pre-eminence had to be preserved by other means. One means was through voluntary societies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners hoped by private prosecutions to exert some of the social controls once more properly exercised by the Church courts. The S.P.G. sought to encourage Anglican piety in the plantations and the S.P.C.K. to extend it at home by promoting charity schools and disseminating godly tracts. It was a task of voluntarism to reassert, as far as possible, what authority remained to a church which, because it could not effectively coerce, had to persuade.
Voluntary Absolutism: British Missionary Societies in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Hinchliff Peter
Published: March 2016

In 1818 Dr John Philip was sent out to supervise the London Missionary Society stations at the Cape of Good Hope. His first letter to the Society’s headquarters is dated from Liverpool on 5 December of that year and contains the statement, ‘We have been at sea for seventeen days and are still in the Mersey River.’ Philip went on to ask for various items, including - significantly perhaps - a barometer! And there was time for the barometer to reach him before he left the Mersey: it was a further five days before the winds changed.
The Welfare State within the State: The Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Glasgow, 1848–1920
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: March 2016

At a great protest meeting in Glasgow against Ultramontanism in 1874, the Jesuits, those wily chameleons, were acccused of masquerading as members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. That body was

ostensibly to benefit the poor but it is in fact a religio-political organisation. It has local, central and general councils; quarterly meetings, conferences, fetes, pilgrimages; it has passports and circular letters to its members. It adapts itself to all classes and conditions - addresses itself to the scholar, the soldier, the mechanic, the apprentice, the labourer - to the mother and the daughter, for all of whom it issues a suitable publication.’
The Oxford Group Movement between the Wars
Authors: Bebbington D.W
Published: March 2016

IN July 1935 Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, was the setting for an international gathering that attracted thousands of the eminent and the curious, many of them churchmen. ‘Similar ‘house-parties’ had been held every year since 1930. At free periods during the day, recalled Beverley Nichols, an enthusiast on his first visit, ‘the High Street seemed afire with shining faces’; last thing at night attenders could enjoy a ‘lemonade and biscuit’ party in the Toynbee Room. The main business, however, consisted of sessions where those present listened to testimonies of changed lives, of how people had ‘surrendered’ and were now ‘all out for God’. These were the main annual meetings of the Oxford Group.
The Seminary (Presidential Address)
Authors: Chadwick Owen
Published: March 2016

The language of the liturgy will always be a little different from the language of common speech, however carefully the drafters of ritual aim to make it understood by the people. It has in it a strand of poetry, and the nature of reverence carries inside itself a healthy dislike of bathos. Therefore: if ministers of a liturgy are expected to preach to the people, they will need instruction in how best to teach or to speak, not to mention education so that they have something to say and are not windbags. But even if a minister of a liturgy is not expected to preach, but is only there as voice to go through the set text, it will be done better if he does it with understanding; and therefore the minister will need the education to understand what is read, which in the western centuries where all this started would be in Latin. The minister also needs instruction on how not to drop the baby at baptism, and how to behave with a coffin, and what to do to a dying person. It is therefore expected that this will be an educated person, even if for much of the Middle Ages the sort of education for many ministers would be that which we should think specially appropriate to a sacristan rather than to a professional preacher. And since some such qualification was essential to do the job, bishops hardly liked to ordain persons who could not pass some sort of an educational test.