bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Decalogue, Patriarchy and Domestic Religious Education in Reformation England
Authors: Willis Jonathan
Published: March 2016

The Decalogue was central to religious education in Reformation England, but this had not always been the case. The early Christian communities sought to distance themselves from the Ten Commandments and what they saw as the legalism of the Jewish faith, while the Middle Ages saw the ascendency of a parallel moral tradition: that of the seven deadly sins. Although the Decalogue never disappeared entirely from Christian life, by the fourteenth century, the parson from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could remark of the Commandments that ‘so heigh a doctrine I lete to divines’. The eventual triumph of the Decalogue over the sins during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was enormously significant, for the Ten Commandments not only taught religious doctrine; they also conditioned personal and communal devotions and moral and ethical behavioural norms. To an unparalleled extent, the Ten Commandments engendered a sense not only of the individual’s bond with God but also of the social and familial bonds they shared with mother and father, brother and sister, master and servant, and the broader community of neighbours wherein they dwelt. This essay will argue that one unintended consequence of the increasing prominence of the Decalogue in the households of sixteenth-century England was that it not only reinforced traditional understandings of household authority: it also modified them significantly. Understandings of gender relations in early modern England have been framed in a number of different ways over the past forty years: in terms of the essential stability of the household, the tightening of patriarchal control, and even in terms of crisis. But what these approaches fail to recognize is that, while the Decalogue undoubtedly reinforced parental (and particularly patriarchal) authority, it did so by stressing in equal measure the responsibility that was also inherent in authority, and the duties of care owed by superiors to inferiors. In both senses of the word, the commandments came to constitute a new, universal ‘moral system of the west’, given authority by Scripture and ubiquity through catechesis. An important aspect of this system was a much more nuanced understanding of patriarchal responsibility than has often hitherto been recognized.
Living with the Bible in post-Reformation England: the Materiality of Text, Image and Object in Domestic Life
Authors: Hamling Tara
Published: March 2016

What did it mean to live with the Bible in post-Reformation England? The increased availability from 1560 of printed vernacular Bibles to own and keep in the home marked a profound change in where and how people experienced Scripture. Most authors have concentrated on the impact of this cultural shift on the textual practices of household religion, especially Bible reading or study in the context of daily prayers and associated instruction. More recent research has examined interactions with the Bible as object, especially the common practice of annotating specific passages, recording information or otherwise marking the pages. A turn in humanities disciplines over the past decade towards visual and material culture has emphasized the connotative role of Bibles as signifiers, with important studies of their display function within female piety, as part of the conventional vocabulary of provincial portraits or as staged properties in Renaissance drama. Yet despite these contributions there is still an overwhelming focus in the existing literature on the use of religious books in relation to the textual and oral practices of domestic devotion - on readers and reading practices – and a good deal of generalization about the locations for such practices, derived from a particular conceptual model of the country house with clearly defined internal arrangements and designated room functions.
‘A Dose of Physick’: Medical Practice and Confessional Identity within the Household
Authors: Mann Sophie
Published: March 2016

In early modern England the place where most people experienced and treated illness was the home. Medical practices were therefore invariably centred on the family, and in many cases, sufferers diagnosed and nursed their ailments without seeking advice from a practitioner, instead favouring the counsel of a family member or friend. Centred on the personal transactions between patients, kin, neighbours, and in some cases a practitioner, how might the religiously plural context of the Reformation era have shaped these close social relationships? The subjects of this study belonged to two Catholic families: Nicholas Blundell (1669–1737) of Little Crosby in Lancashire, and Catharine Burton (1668–1714) of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Focusing on the sickness experiences, lay healing practices and medical treatment described at length in their diaries, this essay asks three central questions. First, in what ways did confessionally opposed families integrate or separate from one another in relation to matters of health? Second, did these subjects forge more exclusive ties with medical practitioners of their own confession, or, conversely, did they find a way to coexist comfortably with, and interact in, the ‘medical marketplace’? Third, by examining the practices through which religion and medicine interrelated within the household, I aim to challenge longstanding assumptions concerning the progressive ‘secularization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the sickbed. I hope to shed fresh light on the ways in which medical practices were embedded in social relations and community experiences; and to begin to unravel some of the complex channels through which confessional identity was experienced and expressed in relation to healing.
The Death of Charlotte Bloomfield in 1828: Family Roles in an Evangelical Household
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2016

A small collection of family papers provides intimate and illuminating material on the illness and death of a much-loved teenager. Charlotte Bloomfield was the daughter of Lord Benjamin Bloomfield, confidant of the Prince Regent and from 1823 British ambassador at Stockholm. In 1825 Bloomfield had Charlotte painted with pretty golden curls by the fashionable miniaturist Anne Mee (Fig. 1). She holds her pet rabbit. Her story has rich resonances for the study of the evangelical household. This essay explores how a lingering death of this kind could produce a family crisis, which was in effect a test of faith. The case is also interesting in terms of the history of the medical treatment of children at home. Moreover, it shows how memorialization of such a death sustained the evangelical piety of the family in the decades that followed. This account gives particular attention to the particular roles and responsibilities of family and household members.
Household Sovereignty and Religious Subjectification: China and the Christian West Compared
Authors: Chau Adam Yuet
Published: March 2016

This essay is an attempt to explore the cultural logics behind two very different orientations towards spirits (divinities), one Chinese and the other Christian, and the kinds of religious subjects that are produced by practices informed by these two differing orientations. Specifically, I examine the role the household plays in Chinese religious life as a site and structural unit to host different categories of spirits (gods, ghosts and ancestors), and contrast this with the Christian idiom of being hosted by God. In Christianity, God is the supreme host; humans (Christians) can only be guests at God’s banquet but they cannot host God in return. It is explicitly an unequal relationship. And even though they are unworthy of such generous treatment Christians must accept this divine grace and join the communion. The eucharist, the most important Christian ritual for almost all Christians, is a constant reminder to Christians that they are guests, and that when they go to heaven, they will be God’s guests eternally. In the Chinese case, on the other hand, the household hosts the spirits by providing offerings. Gods, ghosts and ancestors are invited to the bountiful banquet at fixed times of the year and then sent off when the banquets are over. The spirits can only be guests; they do not, and indeed cannot, host human guests. In Chinese religious culture there are no accounts of spirits, be they deities, ancestors or ghosts, hosting humans. In the Chinese hosting of spirits, the guest is accorded honour and respect, but it is the host who is the most active, potent and pre-eminent agent. In other words, agency rests with humans. And the social idiom of hosting enframes the entire cluster of ritual actions.
Constructing the Apostolic Past: The Case of Dionysius the Areopagite
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: March 2016

Somewhere around the 620s, there began to appear in the Byzantine world references to works allegedly by Dionysius the Areopagite, that is, the judge of the court of the Areopagus converted by Paul the apostle according to the account in Acts 17. The corpus of works consisted of two works, on the heavenly and earthly church respectively, theCelestial Hierarchyand theEcclesiastical Hierarchy;a treatise called theDivine Names; a short treatise called theMystical Theology;and ten letters, addressed to various people, arranged hierarchically, from a monk called Gaius, through lesser clergy, bishops (or ‘hierarchs’) such as Polycarp and Titus, to the apostle John. Although they were initially cited by Monophysite theologians who rejected the Council of Chalcedon, there was little resistance to the acceptance of this body of texts; gradually in the course of the sixth century these works came to be regarded as genuinely belonging to the apostolic period.
Carmelites and Crusading in the Later Middle Ages
Authors: Jotischky Andrew
Published: March 2016

In contrast with their larger competitors, the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Carmelites seemed to eschew the Holy Land after its loss to the Mamluks in 1291. At first sight, the apparent lack of interest on the part of Carmelites in crusading and the Holy Land is surprising. Founded on Mount Carmel as an eremitical and contemplative community in the first decade of the thirteenth century, by the 1240s the Carmelites had begun to spread westward via Cyprus to England, France and Sicily, where they adapted their original Rule in order to become mendicants. In 1291 they left the Holy Land altogether, but unlike the Franciscans, who negotiated a return in the 1330s through their custody of the Holy Places, and the Dominicans, who maintained missions in Mongol and Turkish territories, the Carmelites seemed to show little interest in returning to their original homeland. Nor have they been generally associated with preaching the crusade in the systematic fashion of the larger mendicant orders. In fact, one could be excused for assuming that the order willingly lost touch with its geographical roots.
Historian or Prophet? John Bale’s Perception of the Past
Authors: Royal Susan
Published: March 2016

The late medieval prophetic tradition played a significant role in how John Bale (1495–1563), England’s first Protestant church historian, formulated his ideas about the nature of revelation, which would become a contentious issue in the course of the Reformation. It is the goal of this essay to examine this first-generation evangelical’s views, which will bring us closer to understanding prophecy and its legitimacy in Reformation-era Europe. In an influential essay, Richard Southern illustrates the important role of the prophetical tradition in premodern historical writing: ‘Prophecy filled the world-picture, past, present, and future; and it was the chief inspiration of all historical thinking.’ But while its significance is easy to pinpoint, the varied nature of prophetic revelation does not make for easy delineations or definitions. Southern names four types of prophecy in the Middle Ages: biblical (Daniel, Revelation); pagan (sibylline); Christian (such as that of Hildegard of Bingen); and astrological (stars and celestial events). Of course, even these are not clearly distinct categories; Southern notes that Merlin is ‘half-Christian, half-pagan’. Lesley Coote points out that the ‘subject of political prophecy is king, people and nation’, separating this from theological, apocalyptic prophecy, though she also asserts that the two are closely related. Bernard McGinn remarks that in the later Middle Ages, prophecy is ‘seen as a divinatory or occasionally reformative activity – the prophet as the man who foretells the future, or the one who seeks to correct a present situation in the light of an ideal past or glorious future’.
What did Women do for the Early Church? The Recent History of a Question
Authors: Lieu Judith M.
Published: March 2016

The question posed in the title deliberately reverses one that has accompanied me through my academic career: what did the early church do for women? The reversal signals what will prove to be an underlying theme of what follows, namely the role of women in history as objects or as the subjects of action and of discourse. Yet already the question as conventionally phrased highlights different points of stress that reflect where it belongs within reflective historiography, the subject of this volume. Firstly, ‘Whatdid the early churchdo?’ The coming of early Christianity, it is implied, brought blessings or perhaps curses, evoking a way of writing church history which goes back to Eusebius and which continues both through Edward Gibbon and through those who still portray the social and religious context of the time as one of the inarticulate search for alternative conceptions of the divine or for alternative social values that Christianity would answer. Secondly, ‘forwomen’: thus, a deliberate rejection of any universalizing interpretation of such effects; a recognition, or at least a suspicion, that any apparently universalizing claim is actually spoken from a ‘normal’ that is already gendered as male; an invitation to ask how women’s experience could be recovered, what the sources would look like, and, indeed, whether it can be recovered from the extant sources.
Historiography of the Scottish Reformation: The Catholics Fight Back?
Authors: Holmes Stephen Mark
Published: March 2016

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in theRecords of the Scottish Church History Society:‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’sHistory, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).
Histories of Heterodoxy: Shifting Approaches to a Millenarian Tradition in Modern Church History
Authors: Lockley Philip
Published: March 2016

In 1956, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge published a work chronicling a subject billed as ‘an unrecorded chapter of Church history’. The author was an elderly Anglican clergyman, George Balleine. The book wasPast Finding Out: The Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and her Successors.

Before Balleine, the early nineteenth-century figure of Joanna Southcott, and her eventually global religious movement, had garnered scant mainstream attention. The most extensive work was Ronald Matthews’s rudimentary analysis of Southcott and five other ‘English Messiahs’ in a 1936 contribution to the psychology of religion. Southcott had not, in fact, claimed to be a messiah herself; rather, she was the prophet of a coming messiah named ‘Shiloh’. Southcott’s followers (variously labelled ‘Southcottians’, ‘Christian Israelites’ ‘Jezreelites’, among other names) believed that she and certain later figures were inspired by God to signal the imminence of the Christian millennium. Claimants to be the actual Shiloh messiah occasionally featured within this particular tradition of biblical interpretation, inspiration and theodicy. The splinter-prone movement spread through Britain, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and retained a few thousand members in the twentieth century.
Church and State, Religion and Power in Late Antique and Byzantine Scholarship of the Last Five Decades
Authors: Rapp Claudia
Published: March 2016

Tackling issues of church and state is a tall order under any circumstances. Taking the metahistorical view and summarizing the scholarship on church and state makes it positively daunting, especially when the half-century under consideration spans the entire lifetime of the author. This task is made even more challenging when the societies and cultures under investigation are late antiquity and medieval Byzantium, the former (c.300–c.800, encompassing the entire Mediterranean) a paradigmatic period of religious change, the latter (330–1453, focusing on the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire and its subsequent history) emblematic of ‘otherness’ when compared to the Christian tradition in the West that has shaped our worldview to the present day.
Church and State in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Historiography
Authors: Milton Anthony
Published: March 2016

‘Church and state’ is a phrase that one rarely meets with in most early modern ecclesiastical history that has been written over the past fifty years. One major exception has been the United States of America, where the phrase even has its own journal. With regard to early modern English history, one rare exception very much proves the rule: Leo Solt’sChurch and State in Early Modern England(a synthetic work published in 1990) is the work of an American historian, who admits in his preface that he has chosen to interpret the relationship ‘very broadly’, and that the book ‘might be more accurately entitled “Religion and Politics in Early Modern England”’. The axiomatic status of the separation of church and state in the United States, and its continuing use as a political football, has given the phrase a prominence in public discourse that has naturally been reflected in American historiography, where figures such as Roger Williams invite the application of later terminology to the seventeenth century. Where ‘church and state’ have not been separated (or at least had not been in the early modern period), the term seems to have been less appealing to historians, at least to those working on the period before the assault on established churches in the nineteenth century.
Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages
Authors: Swanson R. N.
Published: March 2016

The dead are the silent majority in the Church’s history – as they are, indeed, in humanity’s. The life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried and tested certainty, predicated on a soul which survives the death of the body. That raises issues about the nature and structure of the afterlife, its pains and delights. For the late medieval Church, the afterlife raised particular concerns and anxieties, its complex division into heaven, hell, and purgatory promising a future which had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were a major force in religious practice, with death as the threshold to something unknown until experienced.
‘An Afterlife in Memory’: Commemoration and its Effects in a Late Medieval Parish
Authors: Burgess Clive
Published: March 2016

Investigations of the more routine expressions of pre-Reformation spirituality inevitably tend to dwell on the conventions employed by individuals to ease the progress of the soul. The pious attestations and exhortations that some men and women recorded may merit the closest attention for the insight they afford into beliefs and aspiration; but hardly less instructive, and much more common, are the services and good works that individuals commissioned both to express repentance and expedite deliverance. Focusing in this way on individuals poses problems, however. While a few had the means to establish a ‘freestanding’ institution – such as an almshouse the great majority channeled penitential activity into the arena, and to the benefit, of their parish. Individuals ordinarily acted as parishioners, contributing towards and depending upon the services of a well-defined, broader community, within which they did their best to enhance collective memory and experience to their own advantage by securing the benefit of others. If anything, ensuring the benefit of others was reckoned the essential, practical prerequisite for personal advantage. As a result, if we accept that the desire to be saved – and as expeditiously as possible – spurred on most contemporary Christians, the doctrinal emphases in the centuries before the Reformation predicated a series of distinctive consequences, two of which are of particular significance here. First, many parishioners assured themselves of long remembrance, amounting to an afterlife in the world and in the consciousness of those that came after.
Christ’s Descent into Hell in Reformation Controversy
Authors: Bagchi David
Published: March 2016

By far the shortest of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England is the third, ‘Of the going down of Christ into Hell’. In its entirety it reads: ‘As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell’. One might be forgiven for thinking that the brevity of the article, together with the notable absence of polemic, indicates the doctrine’s relative unimportance amid the other great debates of the day. In fact, the descent of Christ into hell was one of the most controverted of all the creedal articles in the Reformation era. Article III is so short, not because it was a routine recital of the Apostles’ Creed, but because no further elaboration or explanation of the doctrine could command consent in the febrile climate of early Elizabethan England: disagreement over what was meant by ‘hell’, what was meant by Christ’s ‘descent’, and over the doctrine’s fundamental significance, was rife. This particular manifestation of the afterlife – be it only Christ’s afterlife, and only a temporary destination at that – is not the most obvious candidate as a theological cause célèbre of the Reformation era. But the intensity and the longevity of trie debates it fuelled make it at least an intriguing footnote to the study of the period.
Did Calvinists Have a Guilt Complex? Reformed Religion, Conscience and Regulation in Early Modern Europe
Authors: Murdock Graeme
Published: March 2016

This essay assesses ideas and evidence about the response of Calvinists to sin during the Early Modern period. It takes as a starting-point the analysis provided by Max Weber about the development of Reformed salvation theology in later Calvinism. Weber suggested that Calvinists came to connect the eternal fate of their souls with their behaviour on earth, and attempted to exert systematic controls over their own conduct. Calvinists, Weber argued, developed a mind-set of methodical self-analysis and exhibited constant vigilance, concern and guilt about ongoing sin. Some early modern Calvinists certainly did demonstrate this highly refined personal anxiety about their wrong-doing, and worried about what their lack of enthusiasm and commitment to true religion and moral conduct might mean. However, most Reformed ministers across the Continent seem to have been rather more concerned that members of their congregations did not feel guilty enough about their sins, and alongside encouraging self-discipline through sermons and catechizing, turned to elders and, where possible, to state authorities, to enforce high standards of morality on often recalcitrant parishioners.
‘In Love and Charity with your Neighbours …’: Ecclesiastical Courts and Justices of the Peace in England in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Jacob W. M.
Published: March 2016

The aim of this paper is to account for the busyness of the ecclesiastical courts in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, and to suggest why, apart from matters of strictly ecclesiastical business, and defamation, matrimonial and probate causes, their business declined during the second half of the century.

The ecclesiastical courts in the first part of the century were a popular part of the lowest level of judicial activity in England. That the churchwardens of St Mary’s Beverley paid the ringers 2s.6din 1721 for ringing when ‘the Spiritual Court Men came’ suggests the arrival of the consistory court to conduct business in a town was an occasion of note. Archdeacons’ and consistory courts show evidence of considerable activity in almost every diocese in which research has been undertaken about eighteenth-century church life. The diocese of Ely seems to be the exception, where the evidence for much activity in the courts peters out in 1704.
Penance and the Priestless Old Believers in Modern Russia, 1771–c.1850
Authors: Paert Irina
Published: March 2016

The epidemic of bubonic plague that spread in Russia between 1770 and 1772, claiming about 100,000 lives, was perceived as a divine punishment by many ordinary Russians. In 1771, Moscow witnessed popular riots, which were partly caused by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to allow Muscovites to venerate the icon of the Mother of God placed above the St Barbara Gates in the Kremlin and which was believed to have miraculous powers against epidemic. In order to stop the spread of the infection, the Moscow authorities established sanitary cordons around the city. In such an atmosphere of social crisis the Old Believers, a conservative current of Russian religious dissent, articulated popular fears and proposed a solution to these. The Old Believer merchants had received permission from the government to set up quarantine hospitals and cemeteries on the borders of the city. This led to the emergence of two Old Believer centres in Moscow in the suburb of Lefortovo: Rogozhskoe, that belonged to the priestly Old Believers, and Preobrazhenskoe, belonging to a branch of the priestless Old Believers, the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy).
British Army Chaplains and Capital Courts-Martial in the First World War
Authors: Snape Michael
Published: March 2016

Of all the dark legends which have arisen out of the British experience of the First World War, perhaps none is more compelling than the fate of more than three hundred British, Dominion and Colonial soldiers who were tried and executed for military offences during the course of the conflict. Controversial at the time, these executions were the subject of much debate and official scrutiny in the inter-war period and, even today, the subject continues to have a bitter and painful resonance. Led by the Shot at Dawn Campaign, pressure for the rehabilitation of these men continues and the case for a millennium pardon was marked in June 2001 by the opening of an emotive memorial to them at the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield. However, this paper is not concerned with the justice of the proceedings which led to the deaths of these men. Whether due legal process was followed or whether those executed were suffering from shell shock are difficult and probably unanswerable questions which I will leave to legal and to military historians. Instead of investigating the circumstances of the condemned, this paper turns the spotlight onto the circumstances and attitudes of men whose presence at military executions was as inevitable as that of the prisoner or the firing squad; namely, the commissioned chaplains of the British army.
Varieties of Monastic Discipline in Southern Italy During the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Authors: Loud G. A.
Published: March 2016

The conquest of southern Italy by the Normans during the eleventh century incorporated what had hitherto been a peripheral region more fully within the mainstream of Western Europe. However, notwithstanding this, in a number of respects the development of the Church in Norman Italy followed its own idiosyncratic pattern, rather different from the trends that prevailed in other parts of contemporary Latin Christendom. This distinctive evolution can be clearly observed in south Italian monasticism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
‘Danger, Stupidity, and Infidelity’: Magic and Discipline in John Bromyard’sSumma for Preachers
Authors: Rider Catherine
Published: March 2016

One of the places in which medieval churchmen tackled questions of discipline and diversity was in their writing on magic. Magic appeared in many different kinds of ecclesiastical writing, including canon law, theology, and the records and manuals of the inquisition. Some of these sources have been well studied; in particular, historians have often attempted to trace the medieval origins of the early modern witch-hunts in theology and inquisition records. However, many other texts have received little attention, among them the pastoral manuals written from the thirteenth century onwards, which instructed priests on how to preach and hear confessions. In contrast to academic theology and inquisitors’ manuals, which catered for specialist readers, pastoral manuals were aimed at any Latin-literate cleric, perhaps especially at students in England’s secular and religious schools. Because they reflect what this wider audience might be expected to encounter, they offer a broader perspective than do the specialist texts on why medieval people employed diverse ritual practices, and why churchmen labelled some of these practices as ‘magic’ and sought to discipline them.
Discipline and Diversity in the Medieval English Sunday
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: March 2016

The medieval Church had strict disciplinary rules about how Sunday should be observed, but in England there was considerable diversity in interpreting and honouring them. The medieval English Sunday is a vast and challenging subject, yet despite this, and the controversy excited by the Sunday Trading Act of 1994 which allowed shops to open, it has excited little recent attention.

The discipline of Sunday was laid down in the Third Commandment (Exod. 20: 8–11), where Christians were ordered to keep holy the Sabbath day and told ‘In it thou shalt not do any work.’ This was reinforced in canon law, in episcopal mandates, in commentaries, in theological treatises, in sermons, inpastoralia, and in popular literature. The Sunday Christ, the image of Christ surrounded by craftsmen’s tools, which enshrined the idea that Sunday working with such implements crucified him anew, adorned the walls of many late medieval English parish churches. Secular rulers, starting with Wihtred of Kent (695), included Sabbath-keeping in their legislation. Diversity occurred in the varying interpretations of the law on Sunday observance, and in the patchiness of its enforcement. The questions to be addressed here are, firstly, what actually constituted Sunday? Secondly, what were people supposed to do on Sundays, and did they do it? Finally, how well observed was the work prohibition as applied to Sunday trading?
Religious Exiles and the Tudor State
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: March 2016

Much of the best recent scholarship on the implementation of the Tudor Reformations has chosen as its leitmotif the themes of obedience, conformity and acquiescence, collaboration even. The revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s overthrew convincingly the notion of widespread popular enthusiasm for religious change. But given that changewassuccessfully imposed, part of revisionism’s legacy has been a somewhat optimistic assessment of the capabilities of the Tudor state. Whether allied to the cause of religious reform, or that of religious reaction, Tudor governments were apparently remarkably effective at enforcing their will, largely because of their ability to co-opt the energies and loyalties of locally-based elites and sub-elites. In terms of this volume’s twin themes, it appears to be a case of discipline successfully exerted; diversity effectively curtailed.
Thomas Walbot: The last ‘Freewiller’ in Elizabethan England?
Authors: Usher Brett
Published: March 2016

The special character of discipline and diversity in the London of the 1560s has never lacked commentators. Following Elizabeth I’s settlement of religion in the parliament of 1559 the new government had many factors to consider. Although convinced Roman Catholic clergy were no longer to be tolerated Elizabeth was anxious not to alienate leading Catholic laymen. Convinced Protestant clerics or potential ordinands, many of them returning from exile or else emerging from prudent seclusion in the British Isles, would either accept her Settlement and shoulder the burden of governing her Church or else, wanting more than it had offered them, move into increasingly militant revolt. These things have been intensively studied and altogether the government’s agenda, like that of many a government swept suddenly to power, can be described as ‘the imposition of discipline and the quashing of diversity’.
Disciplined Disobedience? Women and the Survival of Catholicism in the North York Moors in the Reign of Elizabeth I
Authors: Watson Emma
Published: March 2016

The history of post-Reformation Catholicism in Yorkshire can be divided into two distinct periods: pre- and post-1570. Only in the aftermath of the 1569 Northern Rebellion did the Elizabethan government begin to implement fully the 1559 religious settlement in the north, and to take firm action against those who persistently flouted religious laws by continuing to practise the traditional religion of their forefathers. In the Northern Province, serious efforts to enforce conformity and to evangelize did not begin until the arrival of Edmund Grindal as Archbishop of York in 1571. He was joined a year later by the Puritan sympathizer Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, as President of the Council of the North and together they spear-headed the region’s first real evangelical challenge to traditional religion. 1571 also saw the enactment of the first real penal law against Catholics, although only in 15 81 was the term ‘recusant’ coined. Grindal and Huntingdon formed a powerful team committed to Protestant evangelization and the eradication of Catholicism in the North, however, in Yorkshire, their mission was not entirely successful. The North Riding consistently returned high numbers of recusants in the Elizabethan period, and was home to some well-established Catholic communities. In the West and East Ridings recusancy was not so widespread, although religious conservatism persisted, and Catholicism remained a much more significant force across Yorkshire than elsewhere.
‘A Church without Discipline is No Church at All’: Discipline and Diversity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Anglicanism
Authors: Knight Frances
Published: March 2016

In the early years of the twenty-first century, ecclesiastical discipline in an Anglican context has been very much a hot topic. Internationally, there has been intense debate over the decision by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America to ordain Gene Robinson, a continent yet avowedly homosexual priest, as one of its bishops, and over the decision of the diocese of New Westminster in Canada to authorize liturgical services of blessing for same-sex couples. The Windsor Report of 2004 was commissioned in order to formulate a Communion-wide response to these developments,1and although ‘discipline’ is a word which is very seldom in its pages, it is, in effect, a study of the disciplinary framework which its authors believe necessary in order for the Anglican Communion to hold together. At a local level, the Church of England’s clerical discipline procedures are being thoroughly overhauled, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s 1996 report on clergy discipline and the ecclesiastical courts. This paper seeks to explore the themes of discipline and diversity in both an international and an English context. It attempts to shed a little more light on how the Anglican Communion, particularly in the former British Empire, got itself into its current position, as a loosely-federated assembly of provincial synods, without a central framework for handling disciplinary matters. Secondly, it examines how the Church of England has handled discipline in relation to its clergy since the mid-nineteenth century.
The Oxford Movement as Religious Revival and Resurgence
Authors: Nockles Peter B.
Published: March 2016

It was ‘one of the most wonderful revivals in church history’, to be compared to the religious revival in the ‘days of Josiah towards the close of the Jewish monarchy’. This extravagant comment referred not to the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century, that paradigm of all religious revivals, but to something which the author, writing in 1912, characterized as ‘the Catholic Revival’.

The idea of a revival or resurgence in either the individual soul or the life of the Church as a whole is as old as Christian history. Yet in the vast recent explosion of scholarship on the subject of religious revival, the term itself and whole framework of discussion continues to be applied primarily to Protestant Evangelicalism. While religious resurgence has not been tied to a specific theological or denominational tradition, religious revival (which is often classified in terms of a hierarchy of significance from ‘Awakenings’ downwards) and especially ‘revivalism’ (a term used to describe religious movements of enthusiasm) has tended to become synonymous with Evangelicalism.
Revivalism, Historians, and Lived Religion in the Eastern Canada-United States Borderlands
Authors: Lane Hannah
Published: March 2016

Historians of evangelicalism in Canada and the United States have long debated the timing and nature of changes in revivalism in the northeast during the nineteenth century and the vocabulary that best describes these changes. Calvinist and Arminian theologies provided two approaches to this history: revivalism and ‘declension’ as widespread but cyclical, and wholly dependent on God; or revivalism as a dispersed but continual force, sustained also by human effort. The former framework has informed studies of Baptists and Congregationalists, and the latter, studies of Methodists, whose history did not fit common periodizations of the Second Great Awakening.
Revival as Cultural Spotlight: the Strange Case of Rugby Football and the Welsh Revival of 1904–5
Authors: Erdozain Dominic
Published: March 2016

Historians of religion should be used to seeing phenomena such as revivals ‘reduced’ to some other social or cultural phenomenon. Fifty years ago, Perry Miller was exasperated by attempts to explain the American Great Awakening in terms of ‘debtors against creditors’, ‘the common man against the gentry’ or any other such social relations. The Great Awakening, he insisted, was its own event and one that both illuminated and moulded the society that witnessed it. The Welsh Revival of 1904–5 was not as far-reaching in its consequences but it shares a stubborn irreducibility with other great revivals and, as I will argue, it provides vital perspectives on non-religious phenomena. The bold suggestion here is that, rather than looking to social phenomena to explain revival, we use the coruscating clarity of revival to explore ‘secular’ social phenomena – in this case, the powerful threads of sporting affiliation that had been insinuating themselves in the cultural pattern since the 1870s.
The Roots of Resurgence: Evangelical Parish Ministry in the mid-Twentieth Century
Authors: Smith Mark
Published: March 2016

Historical analyses of twentieth-century evangelicalism have rarely focused on the experience of the parish. In many respects this is unsurprising. The renaissance in the historiography of evangelicalism since the 1970s has concentrated primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving the twentieth – and especially the period after the Second World War – relatively unexplored. Where work has been done, it has tended to focus on ecclesiastical politics, activity in universities, and biographies of major leaders. Nor are more general histories particularly illuminating in this respect. Roger Lloyd, for example, concentrates on Anglo-Catholics and modernists rather than evangelicals and Paul Welsby, whose work devotes considerable space to pastoral ministry, is more concerned with its organization than with its practice. The consequence of this historiographical gap has not been so much to create a vacuum in relation to mid-twentieth century Anglican evangelicalism as to leave an impression of a rather elitist movement, dominated by the products of Public Schools and the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (IVF) and therefore almost irremediably middle class. Ironically, this impression has been reinforced by the one substantial study of mid-twentieth century parish evangelicalism so far in print – Alister Chapman’s study of the ministry of John Stott at All Souls, Langham Place: ‘Evangelical Anglicans,’ he notes, just as much if not more than other Anglicans, continued to be associated with the middle classes, and they had significant difficulties reaching people lower down the social scale.’
Cistercian Nuns in Medieval England: Unofficial Meets Official
Authors: Freeman Elizabeth
Published: March 2016

Late twentieth-century scholarship on the Cistercian monastic order was dominated by the distinction between elite and popular. The terminology was specific to the Cistercian debate -namely, ‘ideals’ versus ‘reality’ rather than ‘elite’ versus ‘popular’ – but the logic of a high Cistercian culture and a low Cistercian culture is one that students of any elite/popular debate will find familiar. The indispensable modern survey of Cistercian history, published in 1977, is the key promoter of this argument, with its title presenting an eloquent statement of its thesis:The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality. Although the focus of current investigations into elite and popular religion is undoubtedly the extent to which both varieties of religion are legitimate cultural forces which influence and depend on each other, the Cistercian argument was formulated in a much more hierarchical way and clearly saw the elite Cistercian life as the more legitimate of the two monastic expressions. The argument is that members of the Cistercian order exhibited a more or less ideal form of corporate religious life during the first one hundred years of the order’s existence, but that after the late twelfth century the order gradually lost its purity. Two aspects of popular life infiltrated the enclosed world of the cloister: first, the grubby realities of economics; and, second, interactions with women, generally meaning interactions with the increasing numbers of Cistercian nunneries.
The Most Traversed Bridge: A Reconsideration of Elite and Popular Religion in Late Medieval Ireland
Authors: Ryan Salvador
Published: March 2016

Recent years have witnessed the study of late medieval religion change and develop almost beyond recognition. In particular, the phenomenon of ‘popular’ or ‘traditional’ religion has increasingly been placed under the microscope. A succession of studies has questioned the view that an unbridgeable chasm existed between the religious sensibilities of the privileged echelons of society (the higher clergy and members of the nobility) and those of the lower social orders. The apparent sea-change in our understanding of how many expressions of belief and devotion were shared across a wide social spectrum has led, however, to more questions than answers.
Elite and Popular Religion: The Book of Hours and Lay Piety in the Later Middle Ages
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: March 2016

The very phrase ‘elite and popular religion’ is laden with potentially misleading polarities. In talking about elite religion or popular religion, are we contrasting notions of orthodoxy with heterodoxy or superstition, or the religion of the clergy with the religion of the laity, or the religion of the rich with the religion of the poor, or the religion of the polite and educated with the religion of the unwashed and unlettered, or the religion of the thinking individual over against the religion of the undifferentiated multitude, or the disciplined and liturgically-based official religion of the institutional Church with something more charismatic, less structured – or some permutation of any of the above?
Divine Idea and ‘our Mother’: Elite and Popular Understanding in the Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico
Authors: Brading D. A.
Published: March 2016

In 1648 the creole elite of Mexico City was enthralled to learn that in December 1531 the Virgin Mary had appeared to a poor Indian and had miraculously imprinted on his cape the likeness of herself, which was still venerated in the chapel at Tepeyac just outside the city limits. The moment was opportune, since in 1622 Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna had completed the construction of a new sanctuary devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe and in 1629 the image had been brought to the cathedral in a vain attempt to lower the flood waters that engulfed the capital for four years. In effect,Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe(1648) was a heartfelt response to the growth in devotion to the Mexican Virgin; and its author, Miguel Sánchez, wrote as if inspired by a particular revelation, since his only guides were oral tradition and the stimulus of other apparition narratives. A creole priest, renowned for his piety, patriotism and great learning, Sánchez appears to have modelled his account on Murillo’s history of Our Lady of Pilar and her apparition at Zaragoza to St James, which is to say, to Santiago, the patron saint of Spain.
Ulster Presbyterianism as A Popular Religious Culture, 1750–1860
Authors: Holmes Andrew
Published: March 2016

Both the study of popular religion and popular culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suffer from a number of methodological and definitional problems. Historians of religion often assume that popular religion is synonymous with superstitious beliefs that have little or no relation to confessional orthodoxy. It is further claimed that during the nineteenth century superstition was abandoned as a consequence of the modernization of society and the imposition of respectable behaviour. Complementing this tendency, historians of popular culture in this period have generally ignored the religious aspects of everyday life and describe culture primarily in secular terms. This has much to do with the tendency to adopt, consciously or otherwise, a world-view that automatically assumes the subservience of religion to culture in the modern world. According to this view, once the events of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had cast their spell, organized religion and personal religious faith were jettisoned, often in favour of the nebulous term ‘culture’, and a wedge driven between the sacred and secular. Given the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, it is obvious that this tendency significantly hinders our understanding of the everyday lives and thoughts of our ancestors, especially in the Irish and specifically Ulster context where religion still has an importance that some fail to credit with sufficient patience, let alone understanding. As a result of these problems, the study of popular religion in the modern period lags well behind the advances made by historians of religion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.