bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Daniel’s Practice: The Daily Round of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Laurence Anne
Published: March 2016

Godly women from noble, gentry, mercantile, and clerical families were much commemorated at their deaths in funeral sermons. Apart from preaching on a suitable text, ministers commonly gave an account of the life of the deceased, describing, amongst other things, how she passed her time. Godly lives from sermons for men outlined the course of their careers, stressing their public activities, the manner in which they took religion out into the world and engaged with worldly matters; those for women followed a formula describing the deceased’s childhood, virtuous education, marriage, performance as wife, mother, mistress of servants, hospitality (especially if the woman was the wife of a minister), and charitable work, and enumerated her merits in these roles. Instead of recounting the events of their whole lives, ministers dwelt upon the women’s daily routine of pious practices, with variations for the Sabbath or days on which they took communion. The convention of de mortuis nil nisi bonum was strictly observed, but the edificatory nature of the life was also an important element in the telling of it. Sometimes sermon titles acknowledged this, otherwise they referred to the good death of the deceased or, if they were published to improve the career prospects of the preacher, they referred to the text upon which he had preached.

Women were praised for following Daniel’s practice, the practice for which he was thrown into the lions’ den. This was to kneel upon his knees, three times a day, and pray and give thanks before his God. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Mrs Mary Gunter, companion to Lettice, Countess of Leicester, ‘resolved upon Daniels Practice’. ‘Besides Family duties, which were performed twice every day, by the Chaplain …. And besides the private Prayers which she daily read in her Ladies Bed-Chamber, she was thrice on her Knees every day before God in secret.’ Lady Elizabeth Langham’s ‘constant retirements’ for her devotions in the 1660s ‘were answerable to Daniels thrice a day’.
‘The Sabbaths …. Spent Before in Idleness & the Neglect of the Word’: the Godly and the Use of Time in their Daily Religion
Authors: Wykes David L.
Published: March 2016

Historians have long been aware that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the intensely religious were especially strict in their observance of the Sabbath, in their rejection of amusements and diversions, and their dedication of the day to public duties and religious exercises. The godly did not restrict their religion to the Sabbath nor indeed to public exercises, for they attempted to maintain a daily regime of family worship and private study or devotion. Yet the godly were distinguished not only by the seriousness of their religious observance, but also, out of fear of neglecting their religious duties, by their attempts to discipline their day and regulate their time.
The Sabbath Question in Victorian Scotland in Context
Authors: Murray Douglas M.
Published: March 2016

The question of the observance of the Sabbath as a day of rest arose most notably in Scotland during the Victorian period over the running of Sunday passenger trains. In the 1840s Sabbatarians were successful in stopping a passenger service between Edinburgh and Glasgow, but failed to prevent the introduction of a similar service in 1865. The controversy which was aroused over this issue in the 1860s has been called the ‘Sabbath War’ and it centred round Norman MacLeod, the celebrated minister of the Barony Church in Glasgow and one of Queen Victoria’s favourite preachers.
Industrial Day-Dreams: S. E. Keeble and the Place of Work and Labour in Late Victorian and Edwardian Methodism
Authors: Macquiban Tim
Published: March 2016

Discussion of the use of time in industrial Britain hardened in the nineteenth century into debates about the morality of work and its rewards, about the ethics of labour and the exploitation of the labourer, issues neglected in a Methodism dominated by the prevailing social thought of evangelicalism which persisted throughout most of the century. While much valuable work has been done recently on a re-assessment of the place of Wesleyan Methodist businessmen’s influence in politics, commerce, and industry in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, not so much has been done on the attitudes to poverty and wealth, work, and wages from within the Church establishment, or investigation of how ministers were shaping or reflecting social and political attitudes. This paper seeks to identify the particular contribution of one pivotal figure, Samuel Keeble (1853-1947) whose work deserves a more detailed biography than the Wesley Historical Society lecture published in 1977. His mentor, Hugh Price Hughes, a Wesleyan revivalist but less clearly a Christian socialist, created the environment in which the Wesleyan Methodist Union of Social Service (WMUSS) emerged, through which Keeble was able to channel much of his energies in the promotion of social issues, including those concerning work and labour. It is their contribution that this essay seeks to highlight.
Marianne Farningham: Work, Leisure, and the Use of Time
Authors: Wilson Linda
Published: March 2016

In 1907, aged seventy and nearing the end of her long life as a journalist and writer, Marianne Farningham published her autobiography. She gave it the forthright title A Working Woman’s Life, thus indicating that in her old age she constructed her identity as that of both ‘woman’ and ‘worker’, closely bound up with her gender as well as with the type of life she had lived. Looking back from the perspective of the early twentieth century, although with a view of life largely shaped in the 1840s and 1850s, she recounted, amongst other things, the joys of her work, the perils of overwork, and the pleasures of relaxation. Her writing accordingly included several passages addressing matters relating to the use and abuse of time.
‘A Peculiarly English Institution’: Work, Rest, and Play in the Labour Church
Authors: Cowman Krista
Published: March 2016

The Labour Church held its first service in Charlton Hall, Manchester, in October 1891. The well-attended event was led by Revd Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister from Hyde, and John Trevor, a former Unitarian and the driving force behind the idea. Counting the experiment a success, Trevor organized a follow-up meeting the next Sunday, at which the congregation overflowed from the hall into the surrounding streets. A new religious movement had begun. In the decade that followed, over fifty Labour Churches formed, mainly in Northern England, around the textile districts of the West Riding of Yorkshire and East Lancashire. Their impetus lay both in the development and spread of what has been called a socialist culture in Britain in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and in the increased awareness of class attendant on this. Much of the enthusiasm for socialism was indivisible from the lifestyle and culture which surrounded it. This was a movement dedicated as much to what Chris Waters has described as ‘the politics of everyday life …. [and] of popular culture’ as to rigid economistic doctrine. This tendency has been described as ‘ethical socialism’, although a more common expression at the time was ‘the religion of socialism’.
Discussing Mary’s Humanity in Medieval Byzantium
Authors: Baun Jane
Published: March 2016

Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries toiling in the vineyard in Ottoman Armenia found the native women receptive to many of their ideas - until the subject of Mary came up. An American missionary recorded the following encounter in 1877:

There was another very religious woman, I once met with in one of the villages on Harpoot plain. She said, ‘Lady, I love you, and think you are a real Christian, but one thing you say I cannot receive. You say the Virgin Mary is not our intercessor. What should we women do, if we could not call upon the Virgin when in trouble, or suffering? She was a woman, and knows how to pity women like us’. This is what they all say.
The Couch of Solomon, a Monk, a Byzantine Lady, and the Song of Songs
Authors: Linardou Kallirroe
Published: March 2016

In the early twelfth century, the Byzantine monk James of the monastery ofKokkinobaphoucomposed six sermons on the early life of the Virgin Mary. Two copies of these sermons, known collectively as theKokkinobaphosmanuscripts, have survived: BN, MS gr. 1208 and BAV, MS gr. 1162. Based on a combination of internal and external evidence, scholars have dated the manuscripts to the second quarter of the twelfth century, and furthermore suggested that their production and decoration was undertaken during the lifespan of James. Both copies bear an extensive and almost identical narrative and typological cycle of illumination, which has been securely connected to the imperial environment of the Byzantine court of the twelfth century and was linked, more tentatively, with theSevastokratorissaEirene, a prominent patroness of the court, widow of theSeuastokratorAndronikos, the second son of the Emperor John II Komnenos (1118-43). The miniatures illustrating the text of James are renowned for their artistic quality and their iconographical peculiarities.
Early Medieval Latin Poetry of Mary
Authors: Berschin Walter
Published: March 2016

In the tenth century Gandersheim was a small, proudly independent principality ruled by women. All who belonged to Gandersheim (except for the servants) were of noble birth, taking vows as canonesses - that is, free to leave the abbey, if they wanted. Hrotsvit, born around 935, was one of these canonesses. She was well aware of her talent for writing Latin and - as she confessed later in a rhyming prose-preface - ‘was not to lie sluggish in the heart’s dark cavern and be destroyed by the rust of negligence, but rather struck by the hammer of unfailing diligence, was to echo some small ringing note of divine praise.’ ‘In complete secrecy’ she began to write poems based on writings she had found in the library of Gandersheim.
Marian Studies and Devotion in the Benedictine Cathedral Priories in Later Medieval England
Authors: Greatrex Joan
Published: March 2016

On 15 November 1407, in the monastic infirmary of Christ Church, Canterbury, Thomas Wykyng breathed his last with a prayer for the intercession of the Virgin Mary on his lips. The brethren in attendance, so the memoir continues, were convinced that at the moment of his departure the Blessed Virgin summoned him to herself (‘ad se evocavit’) because next to his trust in God he had always placed supreme confidence in her. He was remembered as a model monk who had served his turn in many offices including those of cellarer, sacrist, novice master, and warden of Canterbury College, Oxford. To the many young monks who owed their instruction in the celebration of mass to him he strongly recommended that this same prayer be included as part of their personal devotions as they stood at the altar.
The Virgin Mary and the People of Liguria: Image and Cult
Authors: Garnett Jane , Rosser Gervase
Published: March 2016

We begin with an image, and a story. Explanation will emerge from what follows. Figure 1 depicts a huge wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, once the figurehead on the prow of a ship, but now on the high altar of the church of Saints Vittore and Carlo in Genoa, and venerated as Nostra Signora della Fortuna. On the night of 16-17 January 1636 a violent storm struck the port of Genoa. Many ships were wrecked. Among them was one called the Madonna della Pieta, which had the Virgin as its figurehead. A group of Genoese sailors bought this image as part of the salvage washed up from the sea. First setting it up under a votive painting of the Virgin in the harbour, they repaired it, had it repainted, and on the eve of Corpus Christi brought it to the church of San Vittore, close by the port. A famous blind song-writer was commissioned to write a song in honour of the image. Sailors and groups of young girls went through the streets of the city singing and collecting gifts. The statue became at once the focus of an extraordinary popular cult, thousands of people arriving day and night with candles, silver crowns, necklaces, and crosses in gratitude for the graces which had immediately begun to be granted. Volleys of mortars were let off in celebration. The affair was managed by the sailors who, in the face of mounting criticism and anxiety from local church leaders, directed devotions and even conducted exorcisms before the image. To stem the gathering tide of visitors and claims of miracles, and to try to establish control, the higher clergy first questioned the identity of the statue (some held it to represent, not the Virgin, but the Queen of England); then the statue was walled up; finally the church was closed altogether. Still, devotees climbed into the church, and large-scale demonstrations of protest were held. The archbishop instituted a process of investigation, in the course of which many eye-witnesses and people who claimed to have experienced miracles were interviewed (giving, in the surviving manuscript, rich detail of their responses to the image). Eventually the prohibition was lifted, and from 1637 until well into the twentieth century devotion to Nostra Signora della Fortuna remained strong, with frequent miracles or graces being recorded. So here we have a cult focused on an image of secular origin, transformed by the promotion of the sailors into a devotional object which roused the enthusiasm of thousands of lay people. It was a cult which, significantly, sprang up at a time of unrest in the city of Genoa, and which thus focused pressing issues of authority. The late 163os witnessed growing tension between factions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ nobility, the latter being marked by their hostility to the traditional Genoese Spanish alliance. Hostilities were played out both within the Senate and in clashes in the streets of the city. The cult of Nostra Signora della Fortuna grew up in this context, but survived and developed in subsequent centuries, attracting devotion from all over Italy.
Mother Mary and Victorian Protestants
Authors: Engelhardt Carol Marie
Published: March 2016

One of the defining characteristics of Victorian culture was its insistence that women were naturally maternal. Marriage and motherhood were assumed to be the twin goals of every young woman. Those who did not bear children were termed ‘redundant’ (perhaps most famously in W.R. Greg’s 1862 article, ‘Why are women redundant?’), yet were still assumed to have maternal instincts. Equally significant to Victorian culture was its Christianity. Notwithstanding the fact that only about half of the English and Welsh actually attended religious services, the presence of an established Church, the frequency with which political and religious questions coincided, and the certainty that England was (as one clergyman confidently expressed it) illuminated by the ‘very sun-shine of Protestantism’, combined to make Victorian culture Christian, and moreover, Protestant.
‘An infallible Fact-Factory Going Full Blast’: Austin Farrer, Marian Doctrine, and the Travails of Anglo-Catholicism
Authors: Morris Jeremy
Published: March 2016

In 1960 the Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer preached a sermon ‘On being an Anglican’ in the chapel of Pusey House which must have amazed his hearers. It began gently enough; but halfway through, the tone changed. Human perversity had rent the unity of the Church with schisms and heresies. How could he, ‘truly and with a good conscience’, stay in the Church of God? ‘Only by remaining in the Church of England’.’ Farrer put down two markers for his Anglican identity. One was stated briefly and with restraint: ‘I dare not dissociate myself from the apostolic ministry.’ It was the other that must have startled his congregation:

I dare not profess belief in the great Papal error. Christ did not found a Papacy … Its infallibilist claim is a blasphemy, and never has been accepted by the oriental part of Christendom. Its authority has been employed to establish as dogmas of faith, propositions utterly lacking in historical foundation. Nor is this an old or faded scandal - the papal fact-factory has been going full blast in our own time, manufacturing sacred history after the event.
Unity and Diversity in the Church of the Fourth Century
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: March 2016

To look back to the early Church as a theologian and historian, and ask questions about her unity, is to enter on a long tradition, which goes back at least to the Reformation, if not to the Great Schism of 1054 itself. Once the Church had split, the various separated Christians looked back to justify their position in that tragedy. They scoured the early sources for evidence for and against episcopacy, papacy, authority confided to tradition or to Scripture alone: they questioned the form in which these early sources have come down to us - the sixteenth century saw reserves of scholarly genius poured into the problem, for instance, of the genuineness of the Ignatian correspondence, and what fired all that, apart from scholarly curiosity, was the burning question of the authenticity of episcopal authority on which Ignatius speaks so decisively. Out of that the critical discipline of patristics emerged. It was, in fact, rather later that the fourth century became the focus of the debate about the unity, authority, and identity of the Church - Newman obviously springs to mind and his Arians of the Fourth Century (London, 1833) and his Essay on the Development of Doctrine (London, 1845). Later on, the fourth century attracted the attention of scholars such as Professor H. M. Gwatkin and his Studies in Arianism (Cambridge, 1882), and Professor S. L. Greenslade and his Schism in the Early Church (London, 1953), and in quite modern times Arianism, in particular, has remained a mirror in which scholars have seen reflected the problems of the modern Church (a good example is the third part of Rowan Williams’s Arius: Heresy and Tradition [London, 1987], though there are plenty of others). Continental scholars such as Adolf von Harnack also studied the past, informed by theological perspectives derived from the present; in a different and striking way Erik Peterson turned to the fourth century to find the roots of an ideology of unity that was fuelling the murderous policies of Nazism. In all these cases the fourth century seemed to be a test case ‒ for questions of modern ecclesiology: Rome defended by development in the case of Newman, the justification for the ecumenical movement in the case of Greenslade.
Unity and Diversity in the Early Anglo-Saxon Liturgy
Authors: Cubitt Catherine
Published: March 2016

The early Anglo-Saxon Church felt that it possessed a special relationship with the papacy and Rome, going back (according to Bede) to the Gregorian mission of 597. Despite setbacks to this mission, unity with the Church of Rome triumphed over Irish traditions to become the keystone in the identity of the English Church. Imitation of Roman liturgical customs was a significant element in this union. In the early days of the Gregorian mission, liturgical uniformity had been unimportant, indeed Gregory specifically instructed Augustine to create a liturgy of mixed ancestry, taking the best from what he had experienced. But by the late seventh century, indifference had been overtaken by enthusiasm for the Roman chant: Bede tells us of the efforts of, for example, Benedict Biscop and Bishop Wilfrid to introduce Roman liturgical customs into their foundations. In 747, the Southumbrian Council of Clofesho decreed that the feasts of the Christian calendar and the monastic office should be performed in accordance with Roman texts and practices.
Unity and Diversity in the Carolingian Church
Authors: McKitterick Rosamond
Published: March 2016

With their steady series of conquests during the eighth century, adding Alemannia, Frisia, Aquitaine, the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy, Septimania, Bavaria, Saxony, and Brittany to the Frankish heartlands in Gaul, the Carolingians created what Ganshof regarded as an unwieldy empire. Was the Carolingian Church unwieldy too? Recent work, notably that of Janet Nelson, has underlined not only the political ideologies that helped to hold the Frankish realms together, but also the practical institutions and actions of individuals in government and administration. Can the same be done for the Church? Despite the extraordinary diversity of the Carolingian world and its ecclesiastical traditions, can it be described as a unity? What sense of a ‘Frankish Church’ or of ‘Frankish ecclesiastical institutions’ can be detected in the sources?
Was there a ‘the Church’ in the Middle Ages?
Authors: Macy Gary
Published: March 2016

Scholarly works on the Middle Ages frequently enough mention ‘the Church in the Middle Ages’, or ‘the teaching of the Church in the Middle Ages’ without further specification, as if the reader could immediately identify the institution to which the author is referring. The authors of such works assume both that the reader readily recognizes what the author means by the phrase, but also, and perhaps more troubling, assume that there was an easily identifiable group in the Middle Ages that was ‘the Church’. Yet, when one tries actually to establish some agreement among medieval sources as to what constituted ‘the Church’ or even some agreement as to the criteria by which one could recognize a ‘the Church’, the ‘the Church’ which ought to be so solid seems to disappear into a thousand disparate factions. If, in fact, ‘the Church’ is really better described as a set of common traditions rather than as an institutional monolith, then the question of unity within ‘the Church’ would centre more on the commonality of this tradition than on the structural integrity and uniformity of belief within the institution. In short, how one understands and defines ‘the Church’ will determine the criteria by which one affirms or denies the unity of that Church. A discussion of what ‘the Church of the Middle Ages’ might be seems to be methodologically prior to any determination of the unity or disunity of Christianity in the Middle Ages. This contribution will limit itself to an exploration of some of the problems inherent in assuming that there was a ‘the Church in the Middle Ages’ and, further, that this ‘Church of the Middle Ages’ can be easily identified and defined.
Pierre du Moulin’s Quest for Protestant Unity, 1613-18
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

Pierre Du Moulin was the leading intellectual in the French Reformed Church in the early seventeenth century. His influence within French Protestantism rivalled and complemented that of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, the prominent nobleman, soldier, and adviser to Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot leader who became Henry IV of France. If Duplessis-Mornay was, as he is sometimes called, the ‘Huguenot Pope’, Du Moulin, the pastor of the congregation of Protestants in Paris, was the chief cardinal. A prolific writer and a skilful speaker, Du Moulin became noted for his success as a polemicist. Yet during a period of five years, 1613–18, Du Moulin was also the chief spokesman for a plan which would unite the English, Calvinist, and Lutheran Churches. The rather startling final point of the plan called for the reunited Protestants to make a fresh approach to Rome. Du Moulin’s volte-face in 1613-18 — his sudden emergence as an irenicist — has never been satisfactorily explained.
From Diversity to Sectarianism: the Definition of Anglican Identity in Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: March 2016

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the subject of Anglican identity in the period from about 1800 to about 1870. This is a complex topic, and it will be possible here only to highlight a few themes. It will be suggested that the understanding of who was and who was not a ‘real’ Anglican underwent several important shifts during the period, until by the 1870s the definition had become increasingly narrow and exclusive. The result was not unity, but an atmosphere of increasingly narrow sectarianism, which had the effect of repelling those who were on the fringes of Anglican allegiance, and thus narrowing the base of lay support for the Church of England in the country at large.
The Politics of the Bible: Radicalism and Non-Denominational Co-Operation in the Birmingham Political Union
Authors: Groth Eileen L.
Published: March 2016

In May 1832, as emissaries from the Birmingham Political Union sought to gain support for the Reform Bill in Staffordshire, the editor of the pro-Reform Birmingham Journal, W. G. Lewis, exhorted ‘Our cause is a holy cause, — it is the cause of religion, - it is the cause of humanity, — it is the cause of the Bible.’ This is but one of many declarations by radical Christian figures of the intrinsic connection they saw between religion and politics. They not only confirmed that it was right for Christians to be involved in the political sphere, but asserted that the teachings of Scripture demanded fundamental changes to the socio-political order and the principles upon which it was founded.
Ecumenism or Distinctiveness? Seventh-Day Adventist Attitudes to the World Missionary Conference of 1910
Authors: Francis Keith A.
Published: March 2016

For the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose doctrines are rooted in eschatological and apocalyptic theology, ecumenism is problematic. While the Church sees itself as one heir of the historic tradition of Christianity and so welcomes recognition as part of the mainstream, it also claims to be the organization through which God proclaims a special message to the modern age. Put simply, sometimes Seventh-day Adventists are happy to be part of the universal Church and at other times they claim to be members of the only true Church. Obviously, the latter, exclusivist attitude is in contradiction to the ethos of the ecumenical movement.
In the Beginning was the Codex: the Early Church and its Revolutionary Books
Authors: Hall Stuart G.
Published: March 2016

A revolution in book-production marked the beginning of the Church. Almost all literary works were written on scrolls (or roll-books), and were read by unrolling from one hand to the other. It was and remains the obligatory form of the Jewish Torah-scroll. The revolution replaced the roll with the codex or leaf-book of papyrus or parchment: ‘the most momentous development in the history of the book until the invention of printing’. A quire or quires of papyrus or parchment, folded and bound at the back, produced the kind of book with pages familiar to us.
Early Medieval Introductions to the Holy Book: Adjuncts or Hermeneutic?
Authors: O’Loughlin Thomas
Published: March 2016

In a famous passage on the training of those who wished to become wise in sacred letters, in effect, learned readers of the Christian scriptures, Cassiodorus wrote:

The first thing a student should do, having read [my] book is to go back and study carefully the works of those (introductores) who have written introductions to the sacred scriptures. We have found the following [useful]: Tyconius the Donatist; St Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana; Hadrian; Eucherius; and Junilius. I have carefully collected their works and bound them together into a collection so that through their various explanations and examples these men might make matters known who were previously unknown.
TheRituale:the Evolution of a New Liturgical Book
Authors: Hamilton Sarah
Published: March 2016

Odo of Sully, Bishop of Paris (1200-8), decreed in his statutes that each parish priest within his diocese should have a book called amanuale, which should contain theordoof service for extreme unction, the catechism, baptism, and everyday things. His prescription is the earliest mention in the episcopal legislation that a parish priest should have one particular book dedicated to the liturgy for all the services associated with pastoral care. But codices concerned with the sacerdotal rites for thecura anitnarumhave a history which goes back to the late ninth and tenth centuries. These earlyritualiawere often combined with the monastic collectar, as in the mid-tenth-centuryDurham Collectar. There are also some examples from the late tenth and eleventh centuries ofritualiamade for the secular clergy. Odo of Sully was thus providing his powerful support to an existing practice rather than instituting a new form of service book. This paper investigates further the context in which these early examples of ‘parish’ rituals were compiled, beginning with the Carolingian background.
Piety, Penance, and Popular Reading in Devotion to the Virgin Mary and Her Miracles: Italian Incunabula and Early Printed Collections
Authors: Chavasse Ruth
Published: March 2016

‘Those folk are all men [and women] of my kidney who delight in miracles and fictitious marvels, whether hearing or telling about them’, exclaimed Erasmus’s Folly. As for saints,

Each one of these is assigned his [or her] special powers … so that one gives relief from toothache, another stands by women in childbirth.… There are some whose influence extends to several things, notably the Virgin, mother of God, for the common ignorant man comes near to attributing more to her than to her son.

Reformers saw such cults as detracting from the centrality of Christ in Christian devotion. One of the reforming factors of anticlericalism in the early sixteenth century was the search for a more direct route to salvation, a more direct line to God than through the mediating authority of the perhaps all too earth-bound priest. Increasingly often in pre-Reformation Europe the mediating influence of Mary or of a favourite saint was felt to be more effective than that of the priest. Both lay and religious found Mary, the mother of God, more accessible than a judgemental Christ. Despite the teaching of the Church, Mary did appear to come between Christ and his people, as often illustrated by the iconography of the Madonna of Mercy upon whose mantle the arrows rained down by Christ or God the Father were broken.
Bernardino Ochino’s Books and English Religious Opinion, 1547–80
Authors: Overell M.A.
Published: March 2016

Bernardino Ochino was one of the less famous and more unpredictable of the Protestant refugees whom Thomas Cranmer invited to England in 1547. He remained in the limelight throughout Edward VI’s reign, largely because of his writing. A study of the English publication of his works throws some light on the complex interaction between English books and European Protestantism. Collinson’s comment that ‘English theologians were as likely to lean on Bullinger of Zurich, Musculus of Berne or Peter Martyr as on Calvin or Beza’ is important here. In Edward VI’s reign they leant quite confidently on more unsteady props, of whom Ochino was one.
‘I Will Tell You a Word or Two About Cardiganshire’: Welsh Clerics and Literature in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Jenkins Geraint H.
Published: March 2016

In the process often characterized by Welsh historians as ‘the remaking of Wales in the eighteenth century’, the clergy played a central role in the literary and national revival. While the national and international contexts of these cultural movements are of paramount importance, particularities also count, and need to be integrated into the larger picture. An examination of the special flavour of the careers of several literary-minded clerics and other writers in the deeply rural county of Cardiganshire offers a means of throwing light on some of these broader themes, and of illustrating the importance of literacy, culture, and learning to relatively humble middling sorts within a particular community notorious for its isolation, poor communications, monoglottism, and slow-moving economy.
A Journal. La Civiltà Cattolica From Pius IX to Pius XII (1850-1958)
Authors: Logan Oliver
Published: March 2016

The explosion of the periodical press in mid-nineteenth-century Italy provoked a substantially new form of literary engagement on the part of clergy and lay militants. Following the 1848 revolutions, which in Italy had brought about the temporary collapse of the papal monarchy, Italian clericals identified the periodical press as a dangerous and even ‘nefarious’ force and as the most powerful instrument of their liberal opponents. The remedy, so the founders of the Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica, among others, asserted, was to combat the liberals with their own weapons: to counter the ‘bad press’ with the ‘good press’. An extensive but mainly local and in many instances, ephemeral Catholic periodical press did in fact develop in Italy from the mid-nineteenth century, asserting Catholic and essentially conservative values against secular ones. In united Italy much of this press was clericalist and ‘intransigentist’, demanding the restoration of the papacy’s temporal power and resisting compromise with the new order, although part of it was liberalizing and ‘conciliatorist’, seeking to reconcile Catholics to the new order. The two great survivors from this proliferation of Catholic periodicals, both intransigentist, were La Civiltà Cattolica (1850+), and the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano (1861+). The former was unusual in aiming at a national circulation and was a pioneer in the development of commercial distribution networks. Over the decades, its editorial team or ‘college’ of Jesuits, subject to a collective discipline, sought to combine lively polemic with information, erudition, and entertainment in an attractive and readily marketable product. This college, alongside the faculty of the Collegio Romano (alias Gregorian University), has constituted the main intellectual force of the Jesuits in Italy; indeed, it has substantially been the intellectual vanguard of hard-line clericalist Catholicism there. It has generally enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Vatican, and has contributed to the papacy’s teaching. The concern with social and political order which marked the periodical from its inception was a characteristic feature at least up to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-38), after which the papacy became more detached from political matters.
Nationalism as a factor in anti-Chalcedonian feeling in Egypt
Authors: Frend W. H. C.
Published: March 2016

The writer of the History of the Patriarchs preserves an interesting tradition concerning the attitude of the monks of the monastery of Metras towards the Monophysite patriarch Benjamin (619–661/5)’ during the reign of the emperor Heraclius. ‘The inmates,’ we are told, ‘were especially powerful.’ They were Egyptians (Miswrani) by race, all natives, and there was no stranger among them. Therefore, Heraclius could not make their hearts pliant, and therefore they received Apa Benjamin when he returned from Upper Egypt, because they kept the orthodox (that is, Monophysite) faith and did not deviate from it’. Other monasteries might bow to ‘Heraclius the heretic’, but not they.
Coptic Christianity in a changing world
Authors: Lee G. M.
Published: March 2016

In the year 619 the forces of Sassanid Persia crossed the Eyptian border, and a long-lasting conquest, like that of the Achaemenids of old, was to be feared. The bishop of Keft, Pisentios, though an ascetic detached from worldly interests, did not fail to take note of this critical development. He put the affairs of his diocese in order and set out with a faithful disciple, John, to the mountain of Gimi to pray. Although Keft (better known perhaps as Coptos) had not yet been captured, we may wonder why he did not stay with his flock at such an anxious moment and pray with them.
The ‘archbishopric’ of Dol and the ecclesiastical politics of ninth-century Brittany
Authors: Smith Julia M. H.
Published: March 2016

In the history of the invasions which marked the end of the Roman empire in the west, the Armorican peninsula of northwestern Gaul holds a distinctive place. It witnessed the only substantial settlements by people whose homeland lay within the Roman empire, and who had been subject to Roman civil government for several centuries. These settlers crossed the English Channel probably between the late fourth and early seventh centuries. Establishing new communities in the sparsely populated areas of western Armorica, they brought with them their own language, social patterns and Christian organisation, and a strong sense of affinity with the Celts of Wales and Cornwall from whom they derived.’ Whilst the Britons were establishing themselves as Bretons, the Franks were asserting their hold over the remainder of northern Gaul. A few of them settled in the eastern approaches to the peninsula, in the Roman civitates of Rennes and Nantes. Culturally and politically, only this part of Armorica was attached to Merovingian Gaul, having as its kings the descendants of Clovis, and as its bishops members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy.
Pro statu et incolumnitate regni mei: royal monastic patronage 1066–1154
Authors: Mason Emma
Published: March 2016

Dangers to the cohesion of the Anglo-Norman regnum correlate to a marked extent with the fluctuating patronage extended by the Anglo-Norman kings towards Westminster Abbey, and other religious houses, in their search for one which would symbolize and enhance the stability of their dynasty.

Westminster itself had royal connections from the outset. The original church of St Peter, on Thorney Island in the Thames, to the west of London, was founded by Saebert, king of the East Saxons, and his wife Ethelgoda.’ The couple were allegedly buried there early in the seventh century, but it was some four hundred and fifty years before further royal burials took place in St Peter’s The church was restored by Offa of Essex in the early years of the eighth century, and c959 king Edgar sold it to Dunstan, who founded a monastery on the site. Edgar gave several manors to this abbey, and Aethelred II gave or confirmed others. Less exalted donors followed suit, and the house was already fairly prosperous when Harold I Harefoot was buried there in 1040. His successor and half-brother Harthacnut, is said to have had his body thrown out.
Cumbrian society and the Anglo-Norman church
Authors: Rose R. K.
Published: March 2016

The twelfth century was a period of both political and ecclesiastical settlement in the north-west of England, when the conquerors were seeking to establish Anglo-Norman institutions in an area as much Celtic and Norse as Anglo-Saxon. The church was re-vitalised, monasticism re-established, and parish churches were built and re-built to an extent previously unknown. The response of Cumbrian’ society was favourable, but a ‘national’ flavour of the diverse elements making up that society was retained. When in 1092 William Rufus marched into the north-west, seized Carlisle, and drove out the ‘ruler’, Dolfin son of earl Gospatric of Dunbar, he was enacting the final phase of the Norman conquest of England. The border between England and Scotland was established, and this only deviated when David I brought the district back under Scottish control during the reign of Stephen. At one time part of the kingdom of Northumbria and then of the kingdom of Strathclyde, by the eleventh century the north-west had become a political no-man’s-land, the kings of England and Scotland each regarding it as belonging to his respective realm. Church life had been greatly eroded, and monastic communities, as in the rest of northern England, had totally disappeared, due as much to the unstable political situation over the previous two centuries as to the lack of any strong spiritual control. The region itself was in a depressed condition, depopulated and devastated by the invasions of king Edmund in 945, Ethelred in 1000, and most recently by early Gospatric in 1070.
The origins of English protestant nationalism
Authors: Loades David
Published: March 2016

In 1581, in his Answer to a seditious pamphlet, William Charke wrote

He that smiteth our religion woundeth our commonwealth; because our blessed estate of policie standeth in defence of religion, and our most blessed religion laboureth in maintenance of the commonwealth. Religion and policie are, through God’s singular blessings, preserved together in life as with one spirit; he that doth take away the life of the one doth procure the death of the other.

This was, of course, a partisan point of view. However, the extent to which it had won general acceptance among Englishmen of all social classes can be demonstrated by reference to the Armada crisis of seven years later. Not only did pamphleteers like Thomas Deloney appeal for patriotic effort,

That... all with one accordOn Sion hill may sing the praiseof our most mightly Lord

but recusant apologetic makes it clear that the catholics were fully aware of the prevailing opinion that papists could not be good Englishmen.
King James I and the protestant cause in the crisis of 1618–22
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

In the early seventeenth century, when Europe was divided along religious lines and works of polemical theology circulated widely, most Englishmen seem to have been convinced that their nation was part of a protestant community of nations with certain common interests. This attitude had its roots in the recent past, when the government of queen Elizabeth had aided—albeit adroitly—the Dutch and French Calvinists and had maintained close relations with several protestant states, particularly in the Rhineland. When the ‘Invincible Armada’ from Spain had been thwarted in its intended object, the English were thankful to Providence for the events which had preserved protestantism on the island. The common cause among protestant states thus came to be thought of, by statesmen and ordinary citizens alike, as an effort to safeguard the political autonomy of the protestant states, particularly against the great Hapsburg monarchy in Spain and Austria, and to preserve the protestant faith against the revived Roman Catholicism of the counter-reformation. Religion and national identity were so closely linked that English ‘papists’ had constantly to struggle against a suspicion that they were unpatriotic or disloyal.
The significance of indigenous clergy in the Welsh church at the restoration
Authors: Guy John R.
Published: March 2016

‘Until 1563 the progress of the reformation in Wales was linked with the use of English as a prescribed language . . . Few decisions had more far-reaching consequences than the decision to abandon this principle so far as religion was concerned in Wales’. Walker believes that this change of policy in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign was brought about by what he calls ‘the deep-seated conservatism of the Welsh Church’, and quotes the letter of bishop Nicolas Robinson of Bangor (1566–86) to Cecil, in which Robinson claims that the slow progress of the reformation in the principality was at least partly due to ‘the dregs of superstition which did grew chefly upon the blindness of the clergie’ and ‘the closing up of God’s worde from them [that is, the Welsh people in an unknown tongue’. Richard Davies, bishop successively of St Asaph (1560–1) and of St Davids (1561–79) believed that if the Welsh church was to be directed along the path required by Elizabeth’s government then the language of the overwhelming majority of the people would have to be employed in both liturgy and pulpit. Only worship in Welsh would make the Anglican church an acceptable institution in Wales, and that necessitated ministers fluent in the vernacular whose teaching was buttressed by the reading of the scriptures and the performance of divine service in the same tongue.
‘Englishmen in vaine’: Roman Catholic allegiance to George I
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

Of the many problems confronting post-reformation English catholics, that of national identity was among the most acute. For the nation at large, to be English was to be protestant, and to be papist was to be an alien.’ That catholics owed primary allegiance to the pope, to Spain, to France, was an axiom throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the exile of the catholic Stuarts at the revolution of 1688 merely varied the form in which the national tradition expressed itself. In his last public utterance William III equated ‘a Popish Prince, and a French Government’, judicial proclamations spoke of ‘papists and disaffected persons’, and George I’s first parliament declared that catholics

take themselves to be obliged by the Principles they profess to be enemies to His Majesty and to the present happy Establishment, and watch for all opportunities of fomenting and stirring up new Rebellions and Disturbances within the Kingdom and of inviting Foreigners to invade it.
The Know-nothing party, the protestant evangelical community and American national identity
Authors: Carwardine Richard
Published: March 2016

By the mid-nineteenth century, two generations after the revolution and the creation of an independent state, Americans were still unsure of the ultimate limits and character of their nation. If there was too much evident optimism over the country’s prospects to write of the nation’s suffering a crisis of identity, it is equally clear that the major questions of the 1840s and 1850s—territorial expansion, the future of slavery, and massive immigration—provided issues the precise resolution of which would fundamentally affect the future direction of the Union. Over the first two of these the evangelical protestant community, the dominant and most influential opinion-forming religious group in American society, found itself seriously divided; indeed by the eve of the civil war the slavery question had split all the major evangelical denominations. In contrast, this same community appeared to show much more cohesion and unanimity in defending the nation’s evangelicalism against the swollen tide of foreign immigrants, three million of whom poured into American ports between 1845 and 1854, the vast majority victims of Irish famine and refugees from the European revolutions of 1848. The immediate danger to American nationality, as evangelicals defined it, lay not in the immigrants’ poverty and foreignness, but in their Catholicism. The Lutheran minister, Frederick Anspach, likened the American nation to a virgin who should ‘sacredly guard her honor’ against catholic vampires who ‘would convert her into a courtezan for the Pope.’
English free churchmen and a national style
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

We are building a Church’, wrote Ernest Barson, minister of Penge congregational church in 1911, ‘. . to welcome to worship and service men and women . . . of real faith, such as we often meet in our homes, in business, in social service, but for whom room and freedom have not always been found in the Churches . .’ A year later he opened his church. A minister from Purley spoke on the church and the businessman, and one from Brixton spoke on worship: ‘the church must be learned, common and catholic’. This speaker delighted in paradox:

the minister incurred a grave responsibility who deprived any one of the right to utter prayer and praise. [But] the overwhelming experience of Christianity was in favour of a Liturgy . . . Then their Church must be Catholic. They should forget that they were Nonconformists in their worship . . . and never never forget that they worshipped not as Nonconformists, but as members of the holy family of the Church.