bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bede on the Jewish Church
Authors: O’Brien Conor
Published: March 2016

We upon whom the ends of the ages have come can love with sincere affection those faithful who were in the beginning of the world, and receive them into the bosom of our love … and believe that we are also being received by them with a charitable embrace.

Bede (d. 735) is renowned as the first Englishman to write seriously about the history of the church in England. But theEcclesiastical History of the English Peoplewas not the only work of his to address the history of the church, and his interest in the past extended far beyond that book’s temporal and spatial boundaries. He saw the Anglo-Saxon church as part of a universal church whose origins lay in the pre-Incarnation past. The above quotation from his commentaryOn the Tabernacle, a work interested in the religious institutions of the Israelites, portrays Jews from before the Incarnation as Bede’s fellow members of that church.
Honorius III and the Crusade: Responsive Papal Government Versus the Memory of his Predecessors
Authors: Smith Thomas W.
Published: March 2016

The medieval papacy was an institution steeped in its own history and traditions, but how far did the popes’ recollection of their predecessors’ ‘blessed memory’ influence their own political decision-making? Through access to earlier letter registers, combined with their memories of experiences at the curia before election to the papal throne, popes could potentially delve into their own institutional history when making contemporary political decisions. In 1977 James Powell suggested that, in negotiations with Emperor Frederick II (1220–50) over his Holy Land crusade vow, Pope Honorius III (1216–27) had reached decisions based on his memory of the negotiations between Pope Clement III (1187–91) and Frederick II’s grandfather, Emperor Frederick I (1155–90).
The Medieval Church in Early Methodism and Anti-Methodism
Authors: Wilson Chris
Published: March 2016

John Wesley’s sermon ‘Of Former Times’ (1787) provides just one example of his belief in the historical importance of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. In its conclusion he noted that ‘[n]o “former time” since the apostles left the earth has been “better than the present”’. In another sermon he argued explicitly that religious progress in the eighteenth century was greater than during the Reformation. Undecided about a more suitable comparison, he could not choose between the apostolic age and the rule of Constantine the Great. In these arguments the early Methodists understandably afforded little time to the Middle Ages, which were seen as a dark period between the light of early Christianity and the brightness of their own movement. Yet this essay will argue that, despite this general approach to the history of the medieval church, there is an early Methodist medievalism worth recovering and that it can be best understood in the context of eighteenth-century religious polemic and debate.
Changing Historical Perspectives on the English Reformation: The Last Fifty Years
Authors: MacCulloch Diarmaid
Published: March 2016

In 1971 and early 1972, as a final-year Cambridge undergraduate, I turned to the study of the English Reformation, under the able supervision of Felicity Heal, while attending the lectures of a wonderfully rackety and quirkily learned Fellow of Selwyn College, the late and much lamented patron of the Cambridge Footlights, Harry Porter. The course was entitled ‘Thought and Religion in England 1500 to 1650’, and it was fairly cutting-edge by the standards of its day: a genuine effort to reach across the divide then standard between the history and divinity faculties. It also tried to integrate England with mainland Europe – what in those days, we would routinely call with sublime and literal insularity ‘the Continent’.
Insider and Outsider History: Theories of Quaker Origins from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Moore Rosemary
Published: March 2016

In the words of a modern Quaker historian, ‘Friends are an historical people, and we derive much of our identity from our tradition’. During the past hundred and fifty years the history of Quaker beginnings has several times been reinterpreted, as different Quaker theologies have risen to prominence and been given historical underpinning, and the interpretations themselves then subjected to historiographical reflections by later scholars. Much of this process has been ‘insider’ history, written by Quakers, but in the second half of the twentieth century Quaker beginnings became for a time a preoccupation of mainstream secular history, which has greatly changed the understanding of early Quakerism.
The Fall and Rise of Church and State? Religious History, Politics and the State in Britain, 1961–2011
Authors: Grimley Matthew
Published: March 2016

In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The prime minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.
Timor Mortis: The Fear of Death in Augustine’s Sermons on the Martyrs
Authors: Martin Elena
Published: March 2016

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries Augustine of Hippo preached a number of sermons at the annual celebrations of martyr festivals. These festivals commemorated the martyr’s ‘birthday’: the day of the martyr’s death on earth and entrance into the eternal life of heaven. They were popular occasions, drawing in larger and more diverse crowds than ordinary services, and attracting a certain air of festivity and merriment in North Africa. Martyr festivals provided the ideal location for the discussion of the afterlife: eschatological hopes had long given meaning to martyrdom, exposing the order permeating chaos, pointing towards beauty amid human suffering, and revealing death as the gateway to true life.
Philosophy, Hagiology and the Early Byzantine Origins of Purgatory
Authors: Dal Santo Matthew J.
Published: March 2016

On 8 June 1438, the Council of Ferrara-Florence began proceedings aimed at the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches. One of the first issues discussed was the Latin doctrine of purgatory. This article examines a particular moment in the divergence of eschatological doctrine between the Latin, Greek and Syriac Churches – indeed, representatives of the West Syrian ‘Jacobites’ and East Syrian ‘Nestorians’ were at Ferrara too. It argues that a debate concerning thepost mortemactivity of the saints proved crucial for the formation of various Christian eschatological orthodoxies. The catalyst for this debate was the sixth-century revival of Aristotelian philosophy, especially Aristotelian psychology which emphasized the soul’s dependence on the body. This threatened the cult of the saints and the Church’s sacramental ‘care of the dead’. Defenders of the hagiological and cultic status quo rejected Aristotle’s claims and asserted the fullpost mortemactivity of the soul after separation from the body by developing a novel doctrine of immediatepost mortemjudgement. This led to the formulation of eschatological opinions which, if not normative in their day, came to be considered so by later generations. One of these ideaswas post mortempurgation.
Individual and Collective Salvation in Late Visigothic Spain
Authors: Wood Jamie
Published: March 2016

Bishop Julian of Toledo is remembered primarily as a key actor in the processes of king-making and -unmaking that went on in the Visigothic kingdom of the 670s. In the early part of the decade Julian’sHistoria Wambae Regislegitimated King Wamba’s hold on the throne in opposition to a rebellion. The text also provides us with the first reference to unction in the early medieval West, while Julian’s actions in putting the same king through penance when he appeared to be on the brink of death in 680 and then insisting that the king could not resume his royal duties when he recovered have long attracted the attention of scholars of penance and conspiracy theorists alike. As the Bishop of Toledo, capital of the Visigothic kingdom, Julian was the main ecclesiastic in Visigothic Spain, presiding over four councils of Toledo (from the twelfth in 681 to the fifteenth in 687). Perhaps as a result of his historical significance in a poorly documented era, Julian’s plentiful writings about the end of time have been largely ignored; after all, they seem not to deal with ‘historical’ events. This is a shame, since Julian’sLiber prognosticum futuri saeculiwas the most widely disseminated work of late seventh-century Spain: hundreds of manuscripts survive and there are well over one hundred references to the work in medieval library catalogues. The great success of thePrognosticumcan be attributed to the contents of its three books, which deal with the origins of human death, the fate of the soul after death, and the fate of the body at the resurrection, and thus address a series of theoretical and practical issues connected to death and its aftermath.
Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late MedievalExempla
Authors: Rider Catherine
Published: March 2016

One of the ways in which medieval Christians thought about the links between this life and the afterlife was by telling ghost stories – a topic which has attracted the attention of several historians. In these stories, a dead person often appears to a living relative or friend and asks them to give alms or to perform other good works on their behalf, in order to speed up their passage to heaven. The dead person usually appears spontaneously, although sometimes this occurs after relatives have said prayers for them. This paper, however, will examine a group of stories about less spontaneous apparitions. These are stories in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife. They have sometimes been mentioned in studies of medieval ghost stories, but they have not been examined in their own right.
Apparitions and Anglicanism in 1750s Warwickshire
Authors: Handley Sasha
Published: March 2016

On Thursday, 1 May 1755, the small churchyard in Harbury, Warwickshire, was the scene of an extraordinary incident. An unnamed member of the local community claimed to have met and had a long conversation with an apparition, which emerged from amongst the tombstones. The precise details of this encounter no longer survive, but it clearly had a powerful impact upon the inhabitants of this sleepy rural village. The interest excited by the appearance persuaded Richard Jago, Vicar of Harbury, to put the episode to a useful didactic purpose. Just a few days later Jago based his Sunday sermon upon this event, which had quickly become the focus of intense curiosity.
‘Angels Seen Today’. The Theology of Modern Spiritualism and its Impact on Church of England Clergy, 1852–1939
Authors: Byrne Georgina
Published: March 2016

In 1852 an American medium, Maria Hayden, crossed the Atlantic, landed in London and began offering séances in fashionable salons. From this point on, and certainly well into the twentieth century, spiritualism proved attractive to many. What spiritualism offered was, primarily, an extravagant claim: that it was possible for the living to communicate with the departed. By various means, people from all classes, religious traditions and geographical locations ‘tried’ the spirits, seeking to make contact with famous characters from history or departed family members. Spiritualism offered, sometimes, spectacular signs and wonders: flying furniture, levitating mediums and ghostly presences, all of which attracted the attention of journalists. Fashions for such signs came and went; the claim to communicate with the dead, however, remained at the heart of spiritualism.
‘I Have Heard from Some Teachers’: the Second-Century Struggle for Forgiveness and Reconciliation
Authors: Trevett Christine
Published: March 2016

In the close-knit valleys communities of South Wales where I was brought up, some fingers are still pointed at ‘the scab’, the miner who, for whatever reason, did not show solidarity in the strike of 1984-5, cement the definition between ‘them’ and ‘us’. In trouble-torn Palestine of the twenty-first century, or among the paramilitary groups of Northern Ireland today, suspected informers are summarily assassinated. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee continues its work in the post-apartheid era. In second-century Rome and elsewhere, the ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ who made up the fictive kinship groups – the churches – in the growing but illicit cult of the Christians were conscious both of their own vulnerability to outside opinion and of their failures in relation to their co-religionists. The questions which they asked, too, were questions about reconciliation and/or (spiritual) death.
Penance and Reconciliation in the Crusader States: Matthew Paris, Jacques de Vitry and the Eastern Christians
Authors: Jotischky Andrew
Published: March 2016

Medieval popes can scarcely have expected such spectacular results from a bull as Gregory EX achieved in 1237. His bull Cum hora undecima of 1235, a fundamental statement of the Church’s missionary function, gave specific licence to the Dominican William of Montferrat to preach, dispense the sacraments, absolve and excommunicate in the lands of schismatics and heretics of the East. Two years later, Philip, the Dominican provincial of the Holy Land, wrote to the pope announcing the conversion to Rome of the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius II, the anticipated conversion of the Nestorian catholicos in Baghdad and possibly also the conversion of the Coptic patriarch. It was a staggering return from a mission only two years old, and represented a triumph for the Dominican Order as well as for the papacy.
Luther and the Sacramentality of Penance
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

At the beginning of hisDe captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludiumof early October 1520, Luther announced that there, were not seven sacraments of the Church, but only three – baptism, penance, and the Lord’s Supper. By the end of the treatise, the three had been reduced to two. His reasoning was starkly logical. A sacrament, to be a sacrament, must contain the promise of forgiveness of sins, and have attached to it a visible sign instituted by Jesus Christ. Because no such visible sign is associated with the rite, penance cannot be a sacrament. A reasonable inference to draw is that Luther must have come to reject the sacramentality of penance by the time he composedDe captivitate Babylonica, in perhaps August 1520.
Judgement and Repentance in Tudor Manchester: The Celestial Journey of Ellis Hall
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: March 2016

Among the diversions for Londoners in the early summer of 1562 was the sight of a man confined in the pillory at Cheapside, bizarrely dressed in grey animal skins, and accompanied with the caption: ‘For seducinge the people by publyshynge ffallce Revelations’. Ellis Hall had come to London from his home in Manchester with the intention of presenting to the Queen a ‘greate booke’ containing secret revelations written in verse. He went to the palace at Greenwich, but was denied his interview with Elizabeth. Instead, Hall was interrogated by the bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, on 12 June, and castigated in a sermon by the bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, two days later. On 18 June he was questioned by five members of the Privy Council, and on 26 June, after his spell in the pillory, he was sent on Grindal’s orders to Bridewell, where he died three years later.
Recantation and Retribution: ‘Remembering Francis Spira’, 1548–1638
Authors: Overell M.A.
Published: March 2016

By 1600 many, perhaps most, English people knew the story of Francesco Spiera, whom they usually called ‘Francis Spira’. Spiera, an Italian lawyer, recanted his Protestant beliefs in 1548, then he despaired and died, convinced of his own damnation. For Protestants during the mid sixteenth-century persecutions, the moral of the tale was urgent and could not have been clearer: recant and you will meet with God’s retribution – in agony, like Spiera.

Spiera’s story was part of the ‘anti-Nicodemite’ propaganda campaign aimed at faint hearts who would not stand up and be counted. Contemporaries called them ‘Nicodemites’ after Nicodemus in the Gospels, who came to Christ by night. This theme was begun by Protestants in the 1540s and 1550s, but was later taken up by Catholics, when they too faced persecution. One particular quotation from Scripture was hammered home relentlessly: ‘The one who disowns me … I will disown’. Recantation was that sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. In this European polemic, Spiera acquired a totemic significance.
‘There Very Children were Soe Full of Hatred’: Royalist Clerical Families and the Politics of Everyday Conflict in Civil War and Interregnum England
Authors: Wolfe Michelle
Published: March 2016

In Ugborough, Devonshire, in the mid-1640s, the young son of Emmanuel Sharp, the former Royalist rector of Bathealston, Somerset, joined a group of children at a bonfire. As people gathered to hear news of another battle won by Parliament, a local tailor spotted one child and denounced him as a ‘priest’s bastard’. Mrs Sharp flew to the defence of her son’s legitimacy and her own marital honour. Heavily pregnant, Mrs Sharp miscarried as a result of the commotion. The involuntary abortion was allegedly acclaimed by local Puritans, who purportedly celebrated ‘[t]hat ye calf was dead, & if ye cow had died also they would have made a Bonfire… [up] to Heaven’.
Community and Discipline in Ulster Presbyterianism,c.1770–1840
Authors: Holmes Andrew
Published: March 2016

Ulster Presbyterians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formally dealt out retribution, repentance and reconciliation through church discipline administered by Kirk sessions and presbyteries. These institutional structures had given Presbyterians an organizational framework that enhanced their geographical concentration in the north-east of Ireland. Hitherto, historians of Presbyterianism in Ireland have taken the view, often based on evidence from the period before 1740, that discipline was effective, broad in its coverage, and hard yet fair in its judgements, claims made all the more remarkable as the north-east had the highest illegitimacy rates in Ireland during the period under consideration. It has been argued that though the system largely survived the eighteenth century, it collapsed at the turn of the nineteenth because of a loss of morale among Presbyterians after the failure of the 1798 rebellion in which many thousands of them had taken part.
Gladiators of Expiation: the Cult of the Martyrs in the Catholic Revival of the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Viaene Vincent
Published: March 2016

In the spring of 1802, the Roman catacombs of Priscilla were the scene of excavations in search of Christian antiquities and martyrs’ bodies. Excavations of this kind had been going on in Rome since the late sixteenth century, though they had been temporarily interrupted during the occupation by French revolutionary troops in the last years of the eighteenth century. On 25 May, the fossores, or diggers, who worked under the authority of a religious dignitary, the Custodian of the Relics, hit on an elaborate tomb. The profuse symbols on the slab were (erroneously) believed to indicate martyrdom: arrows, an anchor and a lash for the instruments of torture, a luxuriant palm for the martyr’s eventual triumph and reward in heaven. From the garbled inscription ‘LUMENA PAX TECUM FI’, the name of Filumena, or Philomena, could be deduced.
From Resistance to National Reconciliation: The Response and Role of the Ecumenical Church in South Africa
Authors: de Gruchy John W.
Published: March 2016

Scattered through the history of the Christian Church are seminal moments that have shaped the future course of Christianity whether for good or ill. When later historians of Christianity will write about the twentieth century, I anticipate that they will refer to the role of the Churches in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa as paradigmatic both in terms of success and failure. They might also refer to the role of the Christian Church in the transition to democracy in both countries in similar terms. In what follows I will offer some reflections on the South African side of the story, briefly tracing the response and role of what I have termed the ‘Ecumenical Church’ in South Africa to African resistance, democratic transition and national reconciliation.
Enforcing Orthodoxy in Byzantium
Authors: Cameron Averil
Published: March 2016

Following in the tradition of Montesquieu and Gibbon, Wolfgang Liebeschuetz has recently again argued that one of the two most revolutionary aspects of Christianity in its history since Constantine has proved to be religious intolerance. The Byzantine state certainly made many efforts to enforce orthodoxy, and the question arises whether Byzantium was therefore a ‘persecuting society’, to use the now-familiar formulation of R. I. Moore. In a telling aside, Paul Magdalino asked in the course of an important discussion of eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium whether it became‘even moreof a persecuting society than before’ (my italics). Another strand of scholarship however has seen a contrast in this respect between western and eastern Europe, and several recent authors have argued for a comparative degree of toleration in Byzantium, or at least for a limitation on the possibilities of real repression. However this desire to find a degree of toleration and religious freedom in earlier societies clearly derives from our own contemporary concerns, and despite recent attempts to claim the Emperor Constantine as the defender of religious toleration, I agree with those who argue that it is misguided to look for an active conception of religious toleration in this period. This paper starts from the position that Constantine himself, and successive emperors after him, inherited an existing assumption that religious conformity was the business of the state, and looks at some of the less obvious ways by which the Byzantine state attempted to promote and enforce orthodoxy.
‘AD Sedem Episcopalem Reddantur’: Bishops, Monks, and Monasteries in the Diocese of Worcester in the Eighth Century
Authors: Ryan Martin
Published: March 2016

Alas! brother, alas! For almost everywhere in this land the rule of regular life falls away and the secular way of life thrives.

Alcuin of York’s famous lament to Abbot. Æthelbald of Wearmouth-Jarrow at the end of the eighth century could serve as a neat summary of the traditional scholarly picture of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monasticism: a movement in near-terminal decline with falling standards in religious observance and monasteries increasingly coming under secular control. The bishops of Worcester have been seen by many scholars as taking a leading role in the fight-back against this creeping secularization. It was not, however, that they played a key role in the drafting of conciliar legislation or that they produced texts condemning the lax standards of Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Rather, successive bishops of Worcester have been seen, since the eighteenth century at least, as challenging secularization through the property strategies they adopted. In order to challenge lay lordship, secularization and declining monastic standards the bishops of Worcester in the eighth century were, in Brooks’ words, ‘attempting, with mixed success, to persuade lords to bequeath their family monasteries to the see of Worcester’. This allowed the bishops to have greater control over the monasteries in tbeir diocese than existing legislation would otherwise have permitted. The bishops could directly intervene in the affairs of these monasteries and impose their own abbots and staff. As Thacker argues, the bishops of Worcester were attempting to ensure ‘independent proprietary monasteries were brought under their control and put in the charge of priests from the episcopalfamilia.
‘Tempering the Wind …’: Moderation and Discretion in Late Twelfth-Century Papal Decretals
Authors: Duggan Anne J.
Published: March 2016

Medieval canon law has generally had a bad press. Its professionalization in the period c. 1140 to 1234 can easily be caricatured as the emergence of a rigid, centralized, and authoritarian system which paid small heed to the needs of the people it was supposed to serve. This conclusion is readily sustained by perusal of theLiber Extra, the GregorianDecretalesof 1234, which enshrined the legal developments of the period, from about 1140, which followed the establishment of Gratian’sDecretumas the principal authority for the teaching and practice of canon law. The genesis of theLiber Extrais well known. Pope Gregory IX commissioned Raymond of Peñafort to compile an authoritative collection of papal decretals and conciliar legislation to supplement Gratian’sDecretum, and it drew, principally but not exclusively, on the so-calledQuinqe compilationes antiquewhich had been compiled for teaching purposes in Bologna between c. 1189–91 and 1226.’ And when the work was completed, it was authorized by the bullRex pacificus, which ordered that ‘everyone should useonlythis compilation in judgements and in the schools (ut hactantumcompilatione universi utantur in iudiciis et in scholis); and a copy was duly dispatched to the canon law school in Bologna. The image of centralized, authoritarian lawmaking could not be clearer; and that perception is reinforced by an examination of its structure, where the individual extracts are organized systematically under Titles, which define the subject matter. Such a compilation, like theQuinque compilationesthemselves, was the result of an analytical method, which totally obscured the processes of consultation which had preceded many of the decisions, as well as depriving them, in many cases, of their historical context in terms of the identity of the pope, the recipient, the litigants, and the local circumstances. What emerged was a disembodied code, shorn of the nuances and hesitations which had characterized the decisions which it enshrined.
‘Contrarie to the Directorie’: Presbyterians and People in Lancashire, 1646–53
Authors: Craven Alex
Published: March 2016

In 1645, Parliament swept away the Anglican liturgy of the Church of England, replacing the Book of Common Prayer with a new Presbyterian alternative, the Directory. The Episcopal hierarchy of the Church had already been demolished, and it was expected that the national Church would be reformed along puritan lines. The campaign to impose Presbyterian discipline in England, and the concomitant struggle for a reformation of manners, has received much attention from historians. There is little doubt that nationally these new measures failed, with John Morrill asserting that ‘these ordinances were not only largely ignored but actively resisted’. Presbyterian classes were successfully erected in a handful of places, however, including Lancashire. This should not surprise us, given the county’s long reputation for Puritanism. Nine classes were created at Manchester, Bury, Whalley, Warrington, Walton, Leyland, Preston, Lancaster and Ulverston, and a Provincial Assembly met at Preston. The full minutes of Manchester and Bury classes, and the several extant sets of churchwardens’ accounts, offer a fascinating insight into the workings of this new system. The popular reaction to the new order is also demonstrated; people who travelled to banned services demonstrated where they stood on the liturgical divide, as did those who presented offenders for punishment. This essay, therefore, seeks to evaluate the efforts to erect Presbyterianism within a county where we might reasonably expect it could succeed. The outcome of this struggle will tell us much about the chances of a national Presbyterian Church of England’s survival.
Disciplining Diversity: The Roman Inquisition and Social Control in Malta, 1743–98
Authors: Ciappara Frans
Published: March 2016

Having lost northern Europe to the Protestants the Catholic Church tried to preserve control over what remained of therespublica Christiana. The attempt was twofold. First, it was political. The popes declared the entire Catholic world for their diocese. The government of the Christian peoples’, Pius V observed, ‘belongs to Us and We should see that they are governed with charity’. Second, the popes admitted that the Reformation had been the result partly of the religious and spiritual shortcomings of the Church itself and tried to make the requisite internal reforms. The Council of Trent defined Catholic doctrine and anathemized whoever disagreed with it. Seminaries were set up to train the clergy while the lay population was held under tight control. The Jesuits and the Office of the Holy Roman Inquisition were the main instruments of discipline. In this article I will explore the ways in which the Holy Office impinged on Maltese society during the time of the last eight inquisitors. Fortunately the archive deposits of the Inquisition in Malta are nearly complete and the recent opening of the Vatican archives has added further to our knowledge of the Maltese Holy Office.
Discipline and Comprehensiveness: The Church of England and Prayer Book Revision in the 1920s
Authors: Maiden John G.
Published: March 2016

The Prayer Book revision controversy was among the most significant events in the Church of England during the twentieth century. The proposals to revise the 1662 Book of Common Prayer provoked considerable opposition from both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, and culminated with the House of Commons rejecting a revised book in 1927 and a re-revised version in 1928. This paper will argue that two issues, ecclesiastical authority and Anglican identity, were central to the controversy. It will then suggest that the aims and policy of the bishops’ revision led to the failure of the book. In taking this angle, it will analyse the controversy from a new perspective, as previous studies have focused on liturgical developments, Church parties and disestablishment. The controversy is bound up with the broader and ongoing problem of maintaining discipline and diversity within the Anglican Communion. The Anglo-Catholic -Evangelical tensions of the 1920s were a precursor to Liberal – Evangelical conflicts on issues such as the ordination of women and sexuality. Therefore, by examining the revision controversy from the angle of discipline and comprehensiveness, a longer perspective is given to later Anglican difficulties.
Past Models and Contemporary Concerns: the Foundation and Growth of the Cistercian Order
Authors: Burton Janet
Published: March 2016

Of all the medieval monastic orders the Cistercian has undoubtedly received the most attention from historians, and this engagement with the White Monks shows no sign of abating. In the words of David Robinson in his recent volume on the Cistercian abbeys of Wales, ‘to turn one’s back on the subject, even for a moment, is to lose the plot’. Current scholarship continues to be concerned with a range of issues. However, much of the most controversial scholarship has centred on the dating of key Cistercian documents: the narratives of the origins of Citeaux, that is, the Exordium Parvum and the Exordium Cistercii, as well as various versions of the Cistercian constitution, the Carta Caritatis, and successive capitula, that is, the pronouncements of the Annual General Chapter. The debate is not new. For over seventy years scholars, including in an English context Dom David Knowles, have sought to unravel the textual and manuscript complexities of the documents relating to the foundation and growth of the mother house itself and of the order. In the last six years two significant contributions to this area of scholarship have appeared, the first more controversial than the second. First, Constance Berman argued that the key Cistercian documents were inventions of the latter part of the twelfth century, designed to create a past for the Cistercian order, an organization which, she argues, did not exist before the mid-twelfth century.
Saint Francis of Assisi’s Repair of the Church
Authors: Kirkham Anne
Published: March 2016

A round 1230 Burchard of Ursperg, a Premonstratensian canon, writing about the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), reported that ‘with the world already growing old, two religious orders arose in the Church – whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s’. The success of the Franciscans in contributing to what Burchard saw as the renewal of the Church’s youth was simultaneously assisted and celebrated by documenting the life of the founder, Francis (1182–1226), in words and images soon after his death and throughout the thirteenth century. Within these representations, the pivotal event in securing Francis’s religious ‘conversion’ was his encounter with the decaying church of San Damiano outside Assisi. His association with the actual repair of churches in the written and pictorial accounts of his life was a potent allegorical image to signal the revival of the Church and the role of Francis and his followers in this. This essay focuses on how references to the repair of churches were used to call attention to the role of the Franciscans in the revival of the Church in the thirteenth century.
Reaction to Revival: Robert Ridley’s Critique of Erasmus
Authors: Harvey Margaret
Published: March 2016

Christian historians have found it hard to approve those who resist revival and resurgence in the Church and particularly in the period of the Reformation. It is often assumed too readily that sympathy with Renaissance biblical and patristic scholarship (resurgencepar excellence)should have led honest scholars to Protestantism. Yet it did not always do so. Erasmus outstandingly did not fit this pattern but nor did many others, even among those who benefited from his scholarship and shared some of his concerns. Modern scholars have too often regarded such dissenting voices as at best conservative and at worst benighted or dishonest. Contemporaries were equally (or more) scathing about one another. It is very difficult therefore to give proper value to those who shared some but not all the tendencies which Erasmus epitomized yet were deeply critical of some of the conclusions to which these could lead.
‘I Will once more shake the heavens’: the 1762 Revival in Wales
Authors: White Eryn M.
Published: March 2016

The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century Wales actually consisted of a number of separate ‘great collective spiritual outpourings’, as John Walsh described them, which seem to have been completely spontaneous and unplanned. By the nineteenth century, periodic revivals had become accepted as a characteristic of Welsh Nonconformity, but were perhaps increasingly less spontaneous. Historians have suggested that arranged revivals became more common in a Welsh context as a result of the influence of the ideas of Charles Finney in the 1830s and 1840s. Daniel Rowland’s first biographer, John Owen, condemned this as a ‘forcing system’ which he thought was ‘calculated only to increase the number of unsound professors’. In contrast, Owen emphasized the genuine unplanned nature of the eighteenth-century revivals. This paper examines the origins and influence of one of those unplanned revivals which occurred between 1762 and 1764, the first general renewal of Calvinistic Methodism in Wales after its initial beginning in the 1730s and the model for the future revivalist tradition.
Reformation, Revival, and Rebirth in Anglican Evangelical Thought, c.1780–c.1830
Authors: Atkins Gareth
Published: March 2016

For Anglican Evangelicals, terms like ‘awakening’ and ‘revival’ pointed rather to reinvigoration and the recovery of old glories than to some new and disturbing disjunction. Those seeking change, remarked Rowland Hill, would do well to follow the example of the reformers, who ‘did not innovate, but renovate, they did not institute, they only reformed.’ Nevertheless, this still left many – like Hill -balancing their urge to reform on the one hand with the importance of Anglican ‘regularity’ on the other. Several initiatives bore the mark of this tension. For example, the foundation of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799 owed much to frustration with the inactivity of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). The new society was ‘founded upon the Church-principle, not the High Church principle’, remarked John Venn, who stressed that it was possible to express Gospel zeal within a solidly Anglican framework. As the Missionary Magazine commented perceptively, ‘a set of people will no doubt contribute to this whose predilection for the Church and dislike to Methodists and Dissenters, would have effectively kept them from aiding the [London Missionary Society]’. The Christian Observer, founded in 1802 to be the periodical mouthpiece of ‘moderate’ Evangelicalism, evinced the same concerns in its first number, when it promised ‘to correct the false sentiments of the religious world, and to explain the principles of the Church’. As the leading Evangelical ‘regulars’ maintained, only this uneasy balancing act could bring far-reaching change.
Napoleon and the Revival of Female Religious Communities in Paris, 1800–14
Authors: Betros Gemma
Published: March 2016

In December 1807, representatives from thirty-five French female religious communities wrote to Napoleon, reminding him that their associations were ‘essentially religious’. They stated that any attempt to secularize them would bring about their death and they announced their wish to remain subject to the authority of the Church in all that concerned their spiritual lives and interior regimes. These women, whom Napoleon had called to Paris especially, thereby warned the Emperor that although he may have been responsible for the official revival of their communities, he could not assume control over every aspect of their existence.
The Resurgence of Colonial Anglicanism: the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, 1840–1
Authors: Strong Rowan
Published: March 2016

Revival and resurgence is not simply something that happens to individuals or groups of persons; it is a phenomenon that, takes place within organized communities, institutions, and societies. The Church has existed in history as an organized society of believers, and this institutional dimension of Christianity has frequently shaped Christian history and the influence of Christianity on wider society for better and worse. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the dimension of Christianity which has been most influential historically. However, in the case of the Church of England in the British Empire its organized influence as a Church was seriously curtailed by its restricted and partial institutional existence throughout the eighteenth century in the North American colonies. There it existed without a bishop to provide local leadership and an effective counterweight to local lay elites. When that situation reversed and the British state began to support colonial bishoprics after the loss of the thirteen colonies in the new United States of America, the Church of England remained largely at the mercy of fluctuating political agendas to supply colonial bishops with sufficient legality and infrastructure. However, in the early 1840s the Church of England underwent a resurgence in the British Empire as a consequence of developing a new response to its metropolitan political situation, which initiated a revival in its colonial engagement.
Culture and Piety in the Far West: Revival in Penzance, Newlyn, and Mousehole in 1849
Authors: Bebbington D. W.
Published: March 2016

A brief but classic account of a Cornish revival is to be found in Salome Hocking’s book Some Old Cornish Folk, published in 1903. Writing semi-fictionally but also semi-ethnographically about a number of years before, the author, herself sprung from Cornish Methodism, described the thronging penitents, the exuberant singing and the ‘thrill of excitement’ that went through the village. Crucially she commented on the circumstances. The revival, she explained, had arisen ‘at a time when no one was thinking about it, and no special services were being held. It seemed to have nothing to do with the preacher either…’ The event, she was suggesting, was entirely spontaneous. Although it was triggered by a young girl going forward to kneel as a convert below the pulpit, the subsequent stir was not the result of any earlier contrivance. The awakening was unexpected, not planned. Much of the writing about revivals – periodic episodes of religious enthusiasm attended by mass conversions in evangelical Protestantism – revolves around this distinction. Nineteenth-century advocates of revivals, in America as well as in the British Isles, contrasted the older pattern in which ‘Christians waited for them as men are wont to wait for showers of rain’ with the later way in which the episodes were promoted by ‘systematic efforts’. Subsequently historians have taken up the theme. John Kent, the leading commentator on English revivals of the Victorian era, while recognizing the existence of planning among some early nineteenth-century Methodists, places the dividing line between the prevalence of contagious spontaneity, and the use of devices to achieve conversions, after 1860.
Boundary Crossing and Boundary Marking: Radical Revival in Congo and Uganda from 1948
Authors: Wild-Wood Emma
Published: March 2016

Dissenters, whatever their cause, challenge the boundaries of their society. Revivalist dissenters are no exception. Their dissent has often been studied in terms of doctrinal nuance and generational tension. The slight variations of enthusiasm are bewildering to the outsider if dissent is understood simply as a ‘second generation movement’ attempting to ignite past passion in a revival that has become clerical and formulaic. This essay places one particular instance of revivalist dissent within the wider context of a counter-cultural stance towards migration, disadvantage, local spirituality and ecclesiastical governance and suggests that the movement is better understood by this holistic approach.
The East African Revival of the Twentieth Century: the Search for an Evangelical African Christianity
Authors: Ward Kevin
Published: March 2016

African Christian history in the twentieth century furnishes many examples of what can justifiably be described as revival or renewal. To the extent that Christian evangelization in sub-Saharan Africa was propelled by the European missionary movement, it is not surprising that an important element in revival should be a concern to ground the Gospel in an African milieu, expressive of African cultures and sensibilities, and driven by an autonomous African agency. The missionary forms in which Christianity was expressed came under critical scrutiny. This essay is an examination of the East African Revival, a movement which originated in the Protestant mission churches in the 1930s and which continues to be a major element in the contemporary religious life of Christian churches throughout the region. There has been considerable scholarly debate about whether the East African Revival should best be seen as an ‘importation’ and ‘imposition’ of a western Evangelical revival culture in an African setting, or as marking the emergence of a distinctive ‘African’ religious sensibility expressed within Christian forms. In endeavouring to avoid the implicit essentialism which such polarities often convey, the essay aims to show how the East African Revival can fruitfully be understood as belonging both to the larger Protestant revivalist tradition, while springing out of the distinctive responses of East Africans to the Christian message as they experienced it from within African cultures which were themselves being transformed by colonialism and modernity.
At Once Elitist and Popular: The Audiences of the Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses
Authors: Carragáin Éamonn Ó
Published: March 2016

The Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses are the finest sculptured monuments to survive from early eighth-century Northumbria. For what audiences were they designed: clerics, monks or lay people? Of the two monuments, it is likely that the Bewcastle Cross is the earlier. Its designer wished to commemorate a number of benefactors of his or her community, whose names were inscribed on a panel of runic inscriptions on the west face (they are, unfortunately, now largely illegible: see figs 1 and 2). He or she was the first to introduce a number of highly significant theological ideas into Northumbrian sculpture. The Ruthwell designer, who did not set out to commemorate any individuals, expanded and developed theological ideas found in embryo on the Bewcastle Cross (figs 3 and 4). The Bewcastle and the Ruthwell Crosses, both, are best understood in terms of the theological and liturgical interests of Bede’s scholarly circle, in particular of Bishop Acca of Hexham, Bede’s bishop and patron; and of Bede’s friend and correspondent Bishop Pehthelm of Whithorn. Hexham lies east of Bewcastle, and Whithorn west of Ruthwell: I would date Bewcastle within the episcopacy of Acca, i.e. between 709 and 731; and Ruthwell a little later, say between 732 and 740 (the year Acca died). In this period the abbot of Wearmoudi-Jarrow was Hwætberht (abbot 716–c.750). Hwætberht was known as ‘Eusebius’ to his scholarly friends, presumably because of his interest in Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine and the cult of the Cross. Rosemary Cramp and Richard Bailey have convincingly related the beautiful cross-slab at Jarrow to the abbacy and patronage of Hwœtberht. In his account of King Oswald’s victory, in the sign of the Cross, at Heavenfield, Bede implies that the Cross was, for the Northumbrian aristocracy and the clerics associated with them, the primary symbol of the Christian Faith.
Superior Spirituality Versus Popular Piety in Late-Medieval England
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

When K. B. McFarlane wrote his biography of John Wycliffe he was surprised to find that the hero who emerged was not Wycliffe himself but his implacable opponent, William Courtenay, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1381 to 1396. ‘Justice has never been done to Courtenay’s high qualities, above all to the skill and magnanimity with which he led his order through the crisis that now threatened it’, he wrote admiringly, adding by way of explanation that, ‘Since the reformation his has been the unpopular side.’ The impression McFarlane gave is that there were two ecclesiastical camps in late fourteenth-century England: heretical and orthodox. The fabric of English church life was fractured then, for ever, by the beliefs and work of Wycliffe and his adherents; was not McFarlane’s biography entitled John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity? Yet McFarlane’s assessment of heresy was that this was far from being a monolithic movement; indeed, in a private letter he wrote, ‘Wycliffe was merely an extremist in a widespread reform movement.’