bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knights, Cooks, Monks and Tourists: Elite and Popular Experience of the Late-Medieval Jerusalem Pilgrimage
Authors: Beebe Kathryne
Published: March 2016

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.
From Royal Prayer Books to Common Prayers: Religious Practices in Late Medieval and Early Modern Poland
Authors: Borkowska Osu Urszula
Published: March 2016

The Union between Poland and Lithuania, whose foundations were laid in 1386 with the baptism of Jagiello, the pagan grand duke of Lithuania, and his marriage to Queen Jadwiga (Hedwig), daughter of the last king of Poland, marked the beginning of a systematic Christianization to which the pagan Lithuanians offered remarkably little resistance. Recent research on religious practice under the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty in Poland and Lithuania (1386–1572) shows that royal piety was often designed to elicit participation at a popular level, cementing both the diffusion of Christian involvement across the newly unified kingdom, and in turn the role of the royal family at its centre. Surviving royal accounts and prayer books can offer a privileged insight into the personal religion of the monarchs and their relatives. These accounts, although only partially extant, constitute an objective source by which religious practices may be understood. Created for bureaucratic reasons, to keep order in the Treasurer’s Chancery, rather than to present the king as pious, they detail expenses for masses and other opera pia of the king and his family, recording the rhythm of royal religious practices – for the day, the week and the whole liturgical year. The accounts also provide evidence of sacramental practices and royal almsgiving. Pious literature composed at the behest of the Jagiellons, combined with extant pedagogical treatises and didactic sermons delivered in the presence of the monarch, is particularly valuable in admitting us into the world of royal Christian education.
‘Everyone Should Be Like the People’: Elite and Popular Religion and the Counter Reformation
Authors: Johnson Trevor
Published: March 2016

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the GermanVolkskundetradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.
Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: March 2016

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.
Paternalism and Roman Catholicism: The English Catholic Elite in the Long Eighteenth Century
Authors: Jordan Sally
Published: March 2016

There is a general acceptance amongst historians of English Catholicism in the Early Modern period that Catholic landlords were paternalistic towards their tenants, that they were generally in turns charitable and controing, their behaviour invasive yet motivated by a desire for religious and social harmony within the manor. Early modern English Catholicism was certainly seigneurial, with a requirement by the landlord, as suggested by John Bossy, to pay attention to the tenants’ well-being and ‘also to their faith and morals’.’ Michael Mullett echoes these sentiments with regard to late eighteenth-century Catholics who relied ‘on the kind hearts of those who wore the coronets’. The idea of Catholic paternalism is also endorsed by several social and economic historians, such as James M. Rosenheim, who wrote with regard to Lancashire, ‘[the] Roman Catholic gentry sustained closer connections with local communities than did aristocrats elsewhere’. This paper will examine the issue of paternalism on Catholic estates and in the local community to show that the Catholic elite, like their non-Catholic counterparts, gave money to the poor and established schools and almshouses. The focus of this philanthropy, however, was on other Catholics. The Catholic elite were also able to help their tenants, who were usually Catholic, and tie them more closely to the estate by not rack-renting their property and by not hiding behind estate stewards. There were two main reasons for the Catholic elite to focus their efforts on their poorer brethren: without the help of the Catholic elite in providing chapels and relief, Catholicism in England would have floundered; the Catholic elite were also
Rural Religion and the Politeness of Parsons: The Church of England in South Warwickshire, C.1689–C.1820
Authors: Haydon Colin
Published: March 2016

Joseph Arch, the agricultural trade unionist, was born in 1826 at Barford in south Warwickshire. In his autobiography, he recalled, as a boy, witnessing the Eucharist in the village church:

First, up walked the squire to the communion rails; the farmers went up next; then up went the tradesmen, the shopkeepers, the wheelwright, and the blacksmith; and then, the very last of all, went the poor agricultural labourers … [N]obody else knelt with them … ‘[N]ever for me!‘,

vowed Arch.
‘… This Congregation here Present …’: Seating in Parish Churches During the Long Eighteenth Century
Authors: Jacob W. M.
Published: March 2016

Parish churches during the ‘long eighteenth century’ were meeting places for the whole community, elite and popular. Accommodating the hierarchically ordered and theologically aware society of England and Wales in church was not a simple matter. How might the elite and the popular, the squire and his relations, and his groom, and boot boy and the milk maid, and aspiring farmers and attorneys and their wives and sisters and cousins and aunts, along with day labourers and paupers, be included together as the body of Christ before God? People were sensitive about their social stratification.
Indefinite Success: Religion and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Geneva
Authors: Kirk Linda
Published: March 2016

This essay will argue that in eighteenth-century Geneva the religion of most of the lay elite followed the French pattern: learning and fashion alike steered them to a relaxed attitude to religious practice, and a mildly sceptical view of doctrine. It will be shown, however, that Geneva’s clergy – not securely within the elite -often tried to resist any softening of Geneva’s strict rules and social constraints even when they were keen to embrace scientific enlightenment; further, no overarching account of popular religion in Geneva can convincingly be propounded. One reason for this is that Geneva’s popular classes, unlike those of France, were dominated by literate, prosperous townspeople, many of whom still self-consciously lived out their protestant heritage, but some of whom found more meaning in radical, almost-secular politics.
Reflections upon the study of the General Councils in the Fifteenth Century
Authors: Jacob E. F.
Published: March 2016

The twentieth General Council of the Roman Church may provide a sufficient excuse for reflecting on some earlier assemblies of this kind, particularly those of the fifteenth century. One may well enquire what the twin-headed Church of 1409 has to do with the unified body of today. Historical parallels and analyses may be stretched too far, and the Church has indeed turned its back upon the events of the period 1378–1449; but there is always a connection between unity and reform, and we have been reminded recently that they go hand in hand. If the present Council has no longer the task of reconciling a divided body, it has in front of it, just as in those fifteenth-century councils, the problem of internal reorganization and of presenting the result to the outside world.
Augustine’s Visit to Caesarea in 418
Authors: Bonner Gerald
Published: March 2016

In discussing the reason for Augustine’s visit to Caesarea in 418, a clear distinction should be made between what we know for a fact and what we can deduce by inference. Furthermore, we should not regard incidents which were a consequence of the visit as constituting its pretext. The episode for which it is best remembered is Augustine’s encounter with the Donatist Bishop Emeritus, and the saint’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade him to return to Catholic unity. But the meeting between the two protagonists of Catholicism and Donatism seems to have been fortuitous. Again, Augustine was able, while at Caesarea, to prevail on the citizens to discontinue the Caterva, the organised local brawl, hallowed by tradition though by nothing else, which came to resemble a miniature civil war. But Augustine had not made a special journey to Caesarea to speak against the Caterva. His own explanation of the visit is that he went to Caesarea on the orders of Pope Zosimus to settle some ‘ecclesiastical necessity’ which had arisen there, and this assertion is echoed by his biographer, Possidius.
Birinus and the Church at Wing
Authors: Fletcher Eric
Published: March 2016

The recent archaeological revelation that the pre-Conquest church of Wing in Buckinghamshire, on the confines of Wessex and Mercia, dates from the seventh century, has prompted an inquiry into the missionary activities of St Birinus. The archaeological evidence has established that the church of All Saints, Wing, was of basilican pattern, with a shallow apse above a crypt containing a ‘confessio,’ or chamber for relics, immediately under the altar. As in the arrangement of the church plans associated with the Canterbury mission of St Augustine, a small square altar at Wing was built on the chord of the apse, and not at the eastern end of the church. The construction of the crypt indicates that, following Roman tradition, there were passages descending from the nave to the crypt, and an aperture low down at the eastern side of the ‘confessio,’ enabling worshippers in a kneeling position to revere the shrine.
Ely Diocesan Records
Authors: Owen Dorothy M.
Published: March 2016

Augustus Jessopp, reporting in 1891 for the Historical Manuscripts Commission on the records of the bishop of Ely, found three stores of documents: Ely House, Dover Street; the consistory court in Great St Mary’s church at Cambridge; and the palace at Ely. This division seems to have been customary since the sixteenth century and ended only when the bishop of Ely, Bishop Lord Alwyne Compton, had the contents of all three repositories moved, first into Bishop Alcock’s tower in the palace at Ely where Alfred Gibbons saw and listed them, and then into the ‘old prison,’ now 4 Lynn Road, Ely, where they remained until their transfer, in June 1962, to the Cambridge University Library. The consistory court had been a store of current records as long as the registrars or their deputies had their office in Cambridge; but about 1790 the diocesan registry seems to have been transferred to Ely, at which time began the long connection with the diocese of the firm of Evans and Son, solicitors, members of which firm acted as registrars almost without interruption from then until 1959. In Messrs. Evans’s office, and also since 1902 in the ‘old prison,’ the registrars had accumulated a considerable store of documents. These, too, have come to the University Library, where the Church Commissioners have also deposited the records of the Ely episcopal estates which they have held since the mid-nineteenth century.
Oxford and the Origins of Liberal Catholicism in the Church of England
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

The publication of Lux Mundi in 1889 has long been regarded as an important moment in the development of Anglican thought. Equally familiar is the distress which the new turn gave to H. P. Liddon, who could only regard the effort made by the Lux Mundi group to set the Catholic faith in its right relation to modern knowledge as capitulation to the snares of liberalism, and as ultimately fatal to the close coherence of Christian truth. The book represented a new grafting upon the stock of the English Catholic party, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered of the reasons why such a theology was produced within the post-Tractarian circle at Oxford. The new outlook involved a wholesale change from the deductive theology of the Tractarians with its imperatives against the world and all those things which liberalism accepted in the world, to an inductive theology which appealed to men for Christ by showing how the best and truest things led up to Him and found fulfilment in Him. At the same time religion appeared now as an interpretation of the world as well as of the Church, and the intense conservatism of Pusey and Keble was replaced by the radicalism of Scott Holland and Gore. The question is first why these new attitudes grew up amongst men who more than any others were conditioned against them by intense religious training, and, secondly, a question regarded by Prestige as inexplicable, how it came about that Liddon was so shocked by a publication which embodied tendencies which had been notorious for twenty years and of which, in a letter to Scott Holland in 1884, he had seemed quite clearly aware.
Canon Law in England: some Reflections on the Stubbs-Maitland Controversy
Authors: Gray J. W.
Published: March 2016

In March 1851, both archbishops and twenty bishops of the Anglican Church issued a public statement in which they asserted the ‘undoubted identity of the English Church before and after the Reformation’—and we do not have to look far for an explanation of this manifesto; in 1850 the steady trickle of Anglican recruits to Roman Catholicism had been complemented by the so-called ‘Papal Agression’ which re-established Roman Catholic titular sees in England. Undoubtedly, historical conscience played a large part in secessions to Rome, as more and more Anglicans came to feel that the whole constitution of the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana had been fundamentally changed by the abrogation of papal authority in the sixteenth century, and in these circumstances all shades of Anglican opinion were bound to welcome any historical argument which tended to show that the pre-Reformation Church had not been unconditionally subject to Rome, and that its acceptance of the canonical ius commune and papal authority had been free, selective, and discriminating.
Some Effects of the Last Phase of the Hundred Years War upon the Maintenance of Clergy
Authors: Allmand C. T.
Published: March 2016

None will be surprised that there were English clergy in France and Normandy during the period of the Lancastrian occupation in the fifteenth century. What is perhaps surprising is that there were so few of them. Writing on Henry V, Professor Waugh noted that only about twenty of their names were to be found in the Norman Rolls for the last two years of the reign. While it is not always possible to agree with Waugh over the names of clergy whom he considered to be English, his estimate was on the whole correct. It is difficult to question it, since it is sometimes impossible to distinguish French from English names when given in Latin versions. Even Waugh’s contention that few Englishmen were appointed to ecclesiastical positions before 1421 can only be modified in detail: it cannot be gainsaid completely.
John Robinson and the Dutch Reformed Church
Authors: Carter A. C.
Published: March 2016

Whilst the English Separatists and Non-Separating Independents, the forerunners of the congregationalists as delineated by Dexter, Arber, Powicke, Burrage, and more lately by Miller and Stearns, were conducting their internecine warfare in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch Reformed Church was also going through difficult times. John Robinson, who came to the Netherlands in 1606, and whose ‘broadly tolerant mind’ and ‘undying spirit’ ‘dominate the consciences of a mighty nation in the land beyond the seas,’ as is stated on the plaque to his memory inside the mighty Pieterskerk in Leiden, was truly ecumenical. For not only did he deplore the disputes of the Congregationalists among themselves, but also their hostility to the Dutch Reformed Church and its English branches, such as that at Amsterdam.
The Byzantine Church and Hellenic Learning in the Fourteenth Century
Authors: Nicol D.M.
Published: March 2016

In the middle of the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville, travelling through Macedonia, came across the grave of Aristotle. In a place called Strages, he writes, ‘there is an altar upon his tomb, and there they make solemn feast ilk a year, as he were a saint. And upon his altar they hold their great counsel and assembly; and they trow that, through inspiration of God and him, they shall have the better counsel’.

In the thirteenth century the tomb of Plato was said to exist in a church at Konia in Asia Minor. There was a spring and a river of Plato nearby, for it was believed that ‘the plain of Konia was once a sea, which Plato caused to disappear’. In the chapel of the Panagia Portaitissa in the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos one may still see among the rows of saints and prophets painted on the walls the figures of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and even Thucydides. At the lowest level of enlightenment in the Byzantine world the ancient philosophers were revered as magicians or prophets. But among educated people Plato and Aristotle were universally admired for their literary merits, if for no other reason. It was they who, in their differing ways, had set the style and standard of literacy for all Greek Christian writers, philosophers, and theologians.
The Early Oxford Wyclif: Papalist or Nominalist?
Authors: Wilks M. J.
Published: March 2016

From time to time it has been pointed out that Wyclif had a quite exceptional grasp of papal-hierocratic theory. Although its bitter opponent, his extensive knowledge of the refinements of the theory, his almost intuitive appreciation of its most fundamental principles, indicate a depth of penetration into hierocratic ideology which many supporters of papal supremacy must themselves have envied. His effectiveness as an anti-papal writer during the polemics of the 1370s and 1380s lay less in the novelty and originality of his own system of thought, and in the consistency with which he repeated himself, but rather in his superior ability to detect the weakest points in his adversaries’ chain of argument. He not only knew exactly where to thrust between the links, but, more important, how to aim for the pivots of the system, so that the whole hierocratic theory might be turned on its head.
The mission of SS. Cyril and Methodios and its aftermath in Central Europe
Authors: Vlasto A. P.
Published: March 2016

The achievement of SS. Cyril and Methodios may be summarized as follows: in 863 the Byzantine emperor sent to the Prince of Moravia, at the latter’s request, a mission led by the brother saints to develop the evangelization of his lands, since Frankish missionaries were becoming politically more and more personae non gratae in Moravia. By the time that the surviving brother Methodios died in 885, as archbishop and papal legate in Moravia, the principle of the mission had not only been maintained in the face of constant opposition but also accepted, if only partially and grudgingly, elsewhere. This principle was that any people, especially neophyte, must be allowed to praise God in its own language: only through one’s native tongue can one fully understand the promises of baptism, the liturgy, and the Holy Scriptures. During those twenty years a form of the Slav language was elevated to literary status and recorded in a specially designed alphabet, and many clerks had been trained in it. From Moravia its use spread first to those lands which came under Moravian rule in the 870s and 880s—Bohemia, Pannonia, and (very probably) south Poland. On Methodios’s death the Frankish clergy regained the upper hand in Moravia and dispersed the saints’ colleagues and disciples, who then found support for their ministry in yet other Slav lands, namely Croatian Dalmatia and Bulgaria.
The shadow of the Christian symbol
Authors: Baker L. G. D.
Published: March 2016

In the year 1000 the Emperor Otto III went on a grandiose pilgrimage to Gnesen, to the tomb of his friend St Adalbert of Prague, martyred by the Prussians on the borders of their country on St George’s Day, 997. This visit has been seen as a significant moment in the development of the emperor’s imperial policies, but it may also be taken to mark the end of the first great age in the history of Christendom. By the time that Otto came to pay his respects at the shrine of this Germanized Bohemian, St Vojtiekh, and to raise it to metropolitan rank, Europe was outwardly Christian. The tenth century had completed the process begun with the first urban apostolic missions, and had seen the absorption of the Viking settlers into the Christian community, the conversion of the Magyars, the establishment of the faith in Bohemia, Poland, Russia and Denmark, the beginnings of successful missionary activity in the more northerly Scandinavian lands, and the reconversion of Crete. Whatever problems might remain in Islamic Spain, or with the tenacious paganism of the eastern Baltic, by the year 1000 Europe was Christian, and the missionary millennium was over.
The missionary at home: the Church in the towns, 1000–1250
Authors: Brooke C. N. L.
Published: March 2016

The wide span of years which I have boldly claimed in my title is intended to enmesh and hold together for our inspection the first great age of the medieval city, the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the medieval Church first faced the problem of evangelism in growing mercantile communities, and the age when it deployed in the cities and towns of Europe a new army of missionaries in the persons of the friars. The missionary techniques of the friars are familiar and comparatively well documented; the evangelism of the tenth and eleventh centuries is scarcely documented at all. In recent years the dramatic nature of urban history in this early period has been becoming increasingly apparent; and it was in the conviction that the Church’s hand in it could not wholly escape detection that I chose the title for this lecture. Many aspects of this problem have been traced with the closest care; but I justify the breadth and cloudiness of my theme by a conviction that it has rarely been looked at quite from this point of view.
The Archives of York
Authors: Purvis J. S.
Published: March 2016

There are elements of special pleasure in addressing this Conference on the Archives of York. Something of that pleasure arises from the fact that so many of the leading personalities of this meeting are connected in some way with the chief collection with which my address is concerned. The retiring President is not unacquainted with the Borthwick Institute, and more than once has honoured us by giving the opening lecture at our Summer Schools. His successor in office also has lectured in those Schools, and for many years has used the diocesan records there for his published work, for lectures and for research generally. Dom Aveling, since the opening of the Borthwick Institute, has been a much-valued visitor, using the riches of the collections housed there. Dr Tyler has been in a special relation there, for since he first came as an undergraduate from Oxford, it has been a pleasure to observe, and to some extent to direct and aid, his progress in research and in specialized knowledge.
The Foundation of Perpetual Chantries by the Citizens of medieval York
Authors: Dobson R. B.
Published: March 2016

It has long been a truism that the chantry priest, rather than the monk, friar, or member of a large collegiate church, is the most significant figure if we wish to understand how organised religion affected the lives of most citizens of most medieval English towns. Miss Wood-Legh, in her recently published and long-awaited Perpetual Chantries in Britain, has however been the first to provide a detailed demonstration of the sustained interest taken by founders, prelates, parishioners, and corporate bodies in the effective administration and continued welfare of the perpetual chantry. Miss Wood-Legh justifiably describes her work as the ‘first detailed study in English of the chantry as an institution’ and its publication ought to lead to a long-overdue investigation of the exact social and economic, as well as religious, role of the medieval chantry. The hope expressed by Professor Hamilton Thompson almost sixty years ago, ‘that the student of chantry history may possess a more complete and compact apparatus for his work than is at present within his reach’, has been largely unfulfilled, not least in York itself.
Achieving the Millennium: the Church in York during the Commonwealth
Authors: Cross Claire
Published: March 2016

Anglican historians from the Restoration until relatively recently have tended to see the Commonwealth as a catastrophic interruption in English church history, a time when Puritan enthusiasts loosed religious anarchy upon the country; but perhaps the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 can be studied with more understanding if they are considered as the culmination of a century’s long struggle to cleanse the English church from the corruptions of Rome. Certainly in the mid-seventeenth century many York men, laymen as well as clerics, looked at the revolutionary period in this light, as the time during which they at last achieved a church purged of all superstition. Whether in fact to those who lived through it, this period did appear so revolutionary in ecclesiastical history is open to doubt, for in York, at least, the ruling oligarchy kept tight control over events and repressed licentious gatherings of the common people who here, as elsewhere, sympathised with the Baptists and the more extreme sects. The intention of this essay is to try to uncover the religious attitudes of the city’s governing class: for some of these men the break in church life came, not in 1644 with the discontinuance of the Anglican liturgy, but in 1662 when exultant Anglicans set their face against a comprehensive church, and they, the leaders of their local society, for the first time found themselves excluded from the established church.
Ratramn’s Eucharistic Doctrine and its Influence in Sixteenth-Century England
Authors: Van Den Brink J. N. Bakhuizen
Published: March 2016

In the two ninth-century treatises on the Eucharist written by Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus two opinions are expressed which seem to be in complete contradiction with each other. Both, however, are founded in the liturgy of the Church and spring from the same orthodox root. Their doctrines, therefore, do not differ from each other in every detail of the argumentation. The one may be characterised as the realistic-metabolic doctrine, the other as the symbolic doctrine. J. R. Geiselmann in his penetrating studies of the eucharistic doctrine in the early Middle Ages prefers to distinguish between three tendencies: (1) the metabolism of St Ambrose and the Gallican liturgies; (2) the realism of the Roman liturgy; (3) the dynamism of St Augustine’s more spiritual doctrine. The most diverse answers were inspired by closer inquiries into the realisation of the sacrament, i.e. the question firstly how the conversion of the elements should be understood and, secondly, how the relation should be seen between the consecrated elements and the body of Christ ascended to heaven. In these answers the terminology used is not always the same, so that a reliable interpretation offers great difficulties.
Church and State, 1558–1612: The Task of the Cecils
Authors: Hurstfield Joel
Published: March 2016

A week before Christmas 1604, Robert Cecil, secretary of state to James I, and recently elevated in the peerage to a viscountcy, received from Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, a frank piece of advice. ‘Good my Lord Cranborne,’ wrote the archbishop, ‘let me put you in mynde that you wer borne and brought up in true religion. Your worthy father was a worthy instrument to banish superstition and to advaunce the Gospell. Imytate him in this service efectyally.’ There followed some unkind observations about James I’s love for the blood sports, and a further warning about the Roman Catholics, and then a concluding prayer: ‘Thus beseching God to bless your Lordship with his manyfold graces that you may as long serve his most excellent Majestie as your most wyse father did serve most worthy Queen Elizabeth, I bid you most hartely farewell.’
Master Silvester and the Compilation of Early English Decretal Collections
Authors: Mayr-Harting H. M. R. E.
Published: March 2016

It is becoming ever clearer how English canonists, by their intense and early activity in collecting current papal decretal letters, made a vital contribution to the law of the Church in the second half of the twelfth century. Dr Charles Duggan has recently produced a fascinating study of these decretal collections and has shown how they reflect the interest and activity of four bishops in particular: Richard of Dover, archbishop of Canterbury (1174-84); Roger, bishop of Worcester (1164-79); Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161-84); and Baldwin of Ford, bishop of Worcester (1180-4) and archbishop of Canterbury (1184-90). These were all foremost papal judges-delegate, concerned to preserve the pope’s letters for the practical purposes of legal reference. Their collections often consisted of a core of letters directed to themselves. Copies of letters directed to other bishops were added to these as obtainable, and also letters copied from other decretal collections then in circulation. An interesting question arises from Dr Duggan’s work. Although particular decretal collections may in this way be associated with particular bishops, is it likely that the bishops themselves were personally responsible for the work of selection and compilation ? Would they have had time? Since they had trained clerks in their familia, would they not more probably have left all this to them, especially to their legal experts? And so we find ourselves looking past the bishops into their households.
John Foxe and some Sources for Lollard History: Notes for a Critical Appraisal
Authors: Thomson J. A. F.
Published: March 2016

Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. Besides Foxe’s comments, it also contains material, sometimes no longer extant in other records, which Foxe claimed to draw from the original accounts of the heresy trials, and, for the early sixteenth century, memories of observers, and it is some of this material which I wish to consider today. Because Foxe is noted as a propagandist, his reliability has sometimes been questioned, so the first task of the historian is to subject his excerpts from documents and his other source-material to a more than usually careful scrutiny. In cases where the original sources are still extant, these can be used to reach some estimate of his accuracy in general; in cases where they are not, other records can sometimes serve as a cross-check.
Popular religion and christological controversy in the fifth century
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2016

How far does the great religious controversy of the fifth century centred on the mystery of the Incarnation reflect popular religious ideas of the east Roman world? It is well known that factors that had little to do with theological speculation, such as the rivalry for prestige and leadership between Constantinople and Alexandria, played a large part in bringing the controversy between rival concepts of christology to their climax in the twenty years that separate the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. More discussion, perhaps, is needed concerning the contribution of articulate public opinion to the course of events, and in particular, to the persistence of the opposition to the Chalcedonian definition after 451.
Vir Dei: secular sanctity in the early tenth century
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.
Innocent III’s treatment of the Humiliati
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

Manifestations of popular religion both in conscious and less conscious opposition to the official hierarchical church were frequent by the early thirteenth century. Such movements, generated by a new and exciting interpretation of apostolic life among the laity, often expressed particular social and economic needs. This evangelical awakening emphasised urban and fraternal Christianity and was welcomed by those in the towns who were untouched by the ministrations of the local clergy. Strong religious sentiment led them to practise a literal and christocentric piety through corporeal works of mercy and personal experience of poverty. Real spiritual devotion was no longer confined to monastic-enclosed communities but was centred on the domestic family unit, in which women too played a valuable rôle. Yet this spontaneous expression of lay piety represented a threat which could not be ignored. It was also a challenge which Innocent III met, during the seventeen years of his pontificate, by attempting to harness the untapped reserve of religious enthusiasm and vitality and to divert it into an orthodox channel which affected not merely acknowledged heretics but many of his own clergy.
Belief and practice as illustrated by John XXII’s excommunication of Robert Bruce
Authors: Hill Rosalind M. T.
Published: March 2016

The sentence of excommunication was the ultimate spiritual deterrent available to the medieval Church. It was designed to be completely terrifying, and to the devout mind it probably was. In theory, it cut the offender off not only from his hope of eternal salvation but, as many a person found to his cost, from all contacts which made mortal life bearable, or indeed possible. But theory, as father Logan has shown us, is not the same thing as practice. The effectiveness of the sentence was limited both by the character of the person afflicted and, to some extent, by his social position. A king could get away with a good deal, and, for lesser men, the existence of the writ de excommunicato capiendo tacitly acknowledged the fact that a royal prison might be a more effective inducement to repentance than the terrors of the Church’s ban. To some extent the Church itself had asked for trouble by cheapening the sentence. Many a modern librarian must wish for a suitably unpleasant punishment for those who borrow books and fail to return them, but when we find a bishop of Lincoln ordering the excommunication, after trina monitio, of all those who have failed to return a book borrowed from Master John of Dersingham, we may wonder whether a sledgehammer were not being used to crack a nut.

John XXII’s excommunication, in 1318, of Robert Bruce certainly does not fall into the category of excommunication for trivial causes, whatever one may think of the rights of the case, but the way in which the pope attempted, and Bruce frustrated, the execution of the sentence provides an interesting example of the difference between theory and practice in matters of ecclesiastical administration. The pope started from the assumption that Bruce was a lawful and distinguished subject of the king of England who had regrettably defected from his allegiance.
Bacon and eggs: bishop Buckingham and superstition in Lincolnshire
Authors: Owen Dorothy M.
Published: March 2016

I have recently read through almost all the surviving medieval registers of the diocese of Lincoln, while collecting material for a book on the church in medieval Lincolnshire society. As may be imagined, a good many interesting patterns are emerging from this and other sources; this short note results from the examination of one such pattern.

John Buckingham, who like so many other bishops of the fourteenth century, had been a civil servant, ruled over the see of Lincoln, with conspicuous industry and attention to detail, for the twenty-six years between 1362 and 1398. His career is the subject of a doctoral thesis, on which Miss Alison McHardy is now engaged, and I do not propose to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider in detail one or two incidents in his episcopate which are, I believe, of some relevance to the theme of this conference.
Protestant spirituality in the first age of the Reformation
Authors: Rupp Gordon
Published: March 2016

Spirituality is a catholic word, beginning to dissolve into ecumenese, but it is much better than ‘piety’ with its nineteenth-century overtones, or the rather better eighteenth-century phrase ‘inward religion’. And it suggests, as I should wish to do, some of the continuities between medieval and protestant religion.

The fifteenth century is still for historians a very misty valley, but we are coming to see some things more clearly, and one thing is that late medieval thought and devotion is not to be written off or talked down as preparing for the Reformation because it was in fact religion run to seed, and in the field of devotion characterised by a morbid and individualistic pietism. Preaching, for example, was of growing importance. We have not yet the full story of the number of preacherships founded in German towns in the fifteenth century and their significance. We know that this was accompanied by a stress on the importance of hearing the Word, almost to the point of disparaging the sacrament of the altar, and not only Wessel Gansfort but Gabriel Biel can be quoted at this point. Again, the lay study of a vernacular Bible ante-dates the reformers. Much as John Bunyan echoed the older English of the puritan Geneva Bible, so that astonishing market-gardener among the prophets, Clement Ziegler of Strasbourg, is steeped in the pre-Reformation Bible which appeared in 1466.
The Social status of some seventeenth-century rural Dissenters
Authors: Spufford Margaret
Published: March 2016

I feel I must ask the indulgence of this meeting for offering any contribution. I am primarily a social and economic historian, dealing with village communities in Cambridgeshire. Until very recently, I have been trying to establish the economic framework within which these communities worked – the way, in fact, they made their bread and butter, or rather, lard. But I am now trying to extend my terms of reference to include that part of the villagers’ lives which revolved round the parish church, or, occasionally, the nonconformist chapel. As a first step I have been trying to discover the exact social status of villagers who were active members of nonconfomist groups in the later seventeenth century.
Papists, Protestants and the Irish in London, 1835–70
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: March 2016

The increasing interest in nineteenth-century popular religion must serve as the excuse for this summary of my study of one aspect of two great nineteenth-century religious revivals: the ‘second spring’ of the Church of Rome in the 1840s, and that older evangelical rediscovery of the Gospel which in the same decade bore such abounding fruit in the parochial ministry of the Church of England. I have sought to chronicle the institutional development of both these movements in their impact upon the proletarian Irish migrants into mid-victorian London: the least infidel portion of that huge, half-heedless multitude of the destitute against which the best religious impulses of the period lashed themselves so devotedly, and too often in vain.
The Churches and society in nineteenth-century England: a rural perspective
Authors: Thompson David M.
Published: March 2016

In recent years discussion of the relationship between the Churches and society in nineteenth-century England has concentrated on a topic that very much concerned contemporaries: the absence of the working classes from public worship. Much stress has been laid on the parlous position of the Churches in the towns, particularly the large towns where the proportion of the population attending church was lowest and where the working classes, however defined, were most numerous. Because on average church attendance was better in the countryside, and because it is known that the growth of urban population owed more to migration than natural increase before 1851, it has been suggested that the transition made by migrants from a rural to an urban society may explain the difficulties experienced by the urban churches in attracting worshippers. Modern research has shown that church attendance is one of the habits likely to be dropped by migrants; and thus it is suggested that migrants coming from the countryside where church attendance was normal dropped the habit as part of the ‘cultural shock’ of the move to the very different social life of the town.
Pratique, piete et foi populaire dans la France moderne au XIXeme et XXeme siecles
Authors: Latreille A.
Published: March 2016

La question que je voudrais examiner avec vous est la suivante: peut-on, et par quelles méthodes, avec quels documents, mesurer la vitalité religieuse d’un groupe humain, au sein d’un pays catholique, à une époque déterminée?

Depuis longtemps on ne réduit plus l’histoire religieuse à l’histoire des institutions ecclésiales, de leurs structures, de leur personnel et des relations des églises avec les sociétés politiques: mais on s’intéresse au comportement et à la spiritualité du peuple des fidèles ou des moins fidèles, aux croyances, aux dévotions, à la sensibilité religieuse des diverses catégories d’hommes et de femmes, à travers les générations successives. Or la difficulté est grande de rejoindre ceux qui ne se sont pas distingués de la masse par leur héroïsme ou leur sainteté, par leurs écrits ou par leurs œuvres. On a fait des histoires du sentiment religieux en partant des textes des docteurs, des fondateurs de communautés et de mouvements, voire d’écrivains de second ordre: et un Henri Brémond a magistralement démontré tout ce que l’on pouvait tirer même d’auteurs de second ordre, qui ne furent pas forcément les moins influents ou les moins représentatifs. En revanche il paraît malaisé de donner une idée précise de la mentalité, à plus forte raison de la conviction et de la ferveur, d’une société prise dans son ensemble, ou de ‘l’homme de la rue’ qui ne s’est pas exprimé et n’a pas laissé d’archives ou de postérité spirituelle.