bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Irish Missal of Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Authors: Gwynn Aubrey
Published: March 2016

Eighty years have gone by since F. E. Warren published his work on The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. Two years before that date Warren had published the full text of a very puzzling Irish missal which had been in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, probably for some three hundred years. Since Warren wrote, the manuscript has been transferred from the library of Corpus Christi College to the Bodleian Library, where it is kept in a box which contains the missal and its satchel of leather. Its class-number is C.C.C. 282. In 1892 an English Jesuit scholar, H. Lucas, made a careful collation of Warren’s readings with the manuscript text; a note in his handwriting, which records a few minor errors, is preserved in the box with the manuscript.
Archbishop Pecham’s Register
Authors: Douie Decima L.
Published: March 2016

Archbishop Pecham’s register is not only interesting as the first surviving Canterbury register, but also because an attempt has been made in it to abandon the older chronological arrangement for some sort of classification of documents in order to facilitate rapid consultation. The scheme adopted is unique among English registers, being that used by the Curia, for the letters are divided into ‘littere directe pape et cardinalibus,’ ‘littere regi,’ ‘littere episcopis’ and ‘littere communes.’ This order, however, is not rigidly followed, for there is a special section of’littere directe domino pape,’ and many letters to bishops are included among the ‘littere communes.’ Nevertheless, the arrangement was probably due to John of Bologna, the Italian notary brought by Pecham to England. To make consultation even easier, each leaf on which they occur has the heading ‘littere communes’ followed by the year of the archiepiscopate. There is also a rough sub-classification, not very systematically followed.
The Beginnings of English Sabbatarianism
Authors: Collinson Patrick
Published: March 2016

This communication summarises the findings of an enquiry into the origins of English Sabbatarianism at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two aspects of this movement have seemed to merit fresh investigation: the sources of English Sabbatarian notions and the circumstances in which the Sabbath became a major controversial issue in the Church of England, dividing the puritan Nonconformists from the representatives of authority.

Sabbatarianism, for the purpose of this discussion, is defined as something more than a certain ethical and social attitude to the use of Sunday: it implies the doctrinal assertion that the fourth commandment is not an obsolete ceremonial law of the Jews but a perpetual, moral law, binding on Christians; in other words, that the Christian observance of Sunday has its basis not in ecclesiastical tradition but in the decalogue.
Reflections on Religious Dissent in North Africa in the Byzantine Period
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2016

There are good reasons for historians’ preferring to write history proceeding from the earlier in time to the later. Why, after all, should they ignore time’s one-way arrow? On occasion, however, it is useful to reverse the normal procedure.

The history of North African Christianity, and especially the history of the tradition of dissent in it, is a case in point. The literature of the Donatist schism of the fourth and fifth centuries is comparatively rich. It is tempting, having crystallized an image of Donatism on the strength of it, to find the same image displayed again during the Vandal or the Byzantine period, periods for which our information is very much more fragmentary. The assumption that there is such a continuity may work in either or both of two ways. It may distort the real bearings of scanty material by the concern to fit it into the pattern; also, or alternatively, it may prevent the historian from noticing affinities with movements which seem at first sight to lack the features singled out as a qualification for entry into the pattern.
The Elections to the Bishopric of Winchester, 1280–2
Authors: Cosgrove A. J.
Published: March 2016

On the death of Nicholas of Ely on 12 February 1280 attempts were made to secure the rich see of Winchester for the royal chancellor, Robert Burnell. Nicholas Hamme, sub-prior of the convent, and two other monks were assigned to seek licence to elect on 17 February and received it on the following day. Four days later prior Adam of Winchester wrote to Burnell about the election. He had originally intended to seek the king’s advice on the matter immediately after the death of the former bishop, but on the chancellor’s advice he had postponed his visit until the licence elect had been granted. Now he was prevented by the pressure of other business from coming in person to consult the king or Burnell, and he therefore requested the latter to send a reply in writing giving his views on how ‘status noster . . . melius valeat reformari.’
Synods in the Diocese of Ely in the latter Middle Ages and the Sixteenth Century.
Authors: Owen D. M.
Published: March 2016

The immediate occasion of this paper was my discovery, when I began to catalogue the sixteenth-century visitation books of the diocese, that what Gibbons and some of the eighteenth-century registry clerks had thought of as libri cleri for visitations were in fact lists of those summoned to diocesan synods. Professor Cheney has pointed out that there is an unusual quantity of evidence for the existence and working of the Ely synod in the fourteenth century, but I do not think that he would have expected, certainly I did not, to find it surviving and working in the sixteenth century. When this fact emerged, it seemed worth while to look again at the medieval evidence of the synod’s working, to see whether the continous existence of the institution could be traced, and to discover how it was being used. The sources quoted are almost entirely the diocesan records in my own care: I have not yet explored even the capitular records, and this is therefore no more than an interim report.
A Tribute to Bishop Skinner
Authors: Jukes H. A. Ll.
Published: March 2016

It would seem appropriate that this Conference assembled in this ancient cathedral and university city of Oxford should pay some brief tribute to the distinguished High Church prelate Dr Robert Skinner, the disciple and collaborator of Archbishop Laud. Especially is this so at the present time when overtures are being made to various nonconformist bodies with a view to their future reunion with the Anglican Church, for it is inevitable that the question of the significance of episcopal ordination and the episcopal system of church government will, in the course of these discussions, receive increasing and critical attention.
The Supposed Illiteracy of Archbishop Walter Reynolds
Authors: Wright J. R.
Published: March 2016

One aspect of the character of Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury 1314–1327, was darkened by three contemporary chroniclers whose words have been accepted with little question by some historians of more modern times—his supposed illiteracy. The question is this: Did Edward II choose a primate for all England who was seriously defective in learning? Even if literacy in medieval usage meant strictly a knowledge of Latin, was Reynolds illiterate?

This notion comes to us originally from the three chronicles most hostile to Reynolds: 1) the Flores Historiarum: ‘vir siquidem laicus et in tantum illiteratus ut nomen proprium declinare penitus ignorabat’; 2) the Vita Edwardi Secundi: ‘simplex clericus et minus competenter litteratus’; and 3) the chronicle of Lanercost: ‘homo quasi illiteratus, et, secundum judicium humanum, tam ratione vitae quam scientiae omni gradu dignitatis indignus.’
The problem of the native clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish Empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
Authors: Boxer C. R.
Published: March 2016

A learned Jesuit historian of the Japan mission recently observed: ‘The aim of Christian missionary activity in every mission land is to establish the Church. The goal of the foreign missionary is primarily to prepare the ground and lay the foundation of the future Church. What he envisages, therefore, is the idea of a fully matured hierarchy of native-born bishops and priests capable of carrying on the work of the Church without foreign assistance.’

Identical sentiments have been voiced by other erudite Jesuit historians of Portuguese India and the Spanish Philippines; but their own well-documented works show very clearly that, however much this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, the road to its achievement was a long and an arduous one. Indeed, at times this objective was actively opposed by those very missionaries who should have been most anxious to attain it. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice the indigenous clergy were apt to be kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European priests, particularly where these latter were members of the Regular clergy. How this discrimination arose, and the length of time for which it endured, is the theme of this paper.
A Christian experiment: the early Sierra Leone colony
Authors: Walls A. F.
Published: March 2016

In the course of the past century the centre of gravity of the Christian world has shifted completely. Europe, once the centre, is now at best an outpost on the fringe of the Christian world, some would say an outpost likely to be overwhelmed. The great majority of Christians, and the overwhelming majority of practising Christians are, and are clearly going to be, Africans, Americans or Asians. And of these, the most startling expansion—the greatest Christian expansion since what were for Europe the Middle Ages—has been in Africa, where Christians have been increasing in geometrical progression, doubling their numbers every twelve years or so, for over a century. The greater part of African Church history, however, has still to be written. Hagiography we have in abundance, and hagiography, like mythology, is a valid literary genre; but (again like mythology) it is a poetic, not a scholarly category. Of missionary history we have a little, though very little in proportion to the vast resources which the missionary society archives supply; but missionary history is only one specialized part of African Church history; by far the greater part of African Christian life and African Christian expansion goes on, and has long gone on, without the presence, let alone the superintendence, of the European missionary.
The history of missions: an academic discipline
Authors: Neill S. C.
Published: March 2016

Everyone knows that the Christian world mission exists. Not everyone would be prepared to agree that the mission should be regarded as a fit subject for academic study.

There is an interesting difference in the manner in which this question has been dealt with in Germany, in the United States, and in Britain.

The Germans are the great theorists; it is not surprising that Germany was the first country to develop a full-scale theory of missions and to invent the unpleasing hybrid ‘missiology’. The first plan for academic teaching of missiology came from Karl Graul, director of the Leipzig mission, who in 1864 drew up a plan for such teaching in the university of Erlangen, and had actually delivered an admired introductory lecture on the subject. His early death made impossible the realization of the plans that he had drawn up. The first full-time professor of missions was Gustav Warneck, whose immense Missionslehre began to appear in 1897, the year in which its author was appointed as professor in the old pietistic university of Halle. Warneck the theorist was followed by the historian Julius Richter in Berlin. Richter was a typically German toiler, whose volumes on various regions of the earth are full of minutely accurate information, a little marred by the all too obvious view of the writer that only Germans understand how to carry out the task of mission, and that the British have never done anything but make mistakes in the political as well as in the religious field.
Paulinus of York
Authors: Mayr-Harting H. M. R. E.
Published: March 2016

The first bishop of York in Anglo-Saxon history is a shadowy figure and, to some historians, not an altogether impressive one, but a conference devoted mainly to the ecclesiastical province of York perhaps provides an opportune moment to consider afresh one or two of the more interesting aspects of his career. We might discuss first what exactly Paulinus was about in his efforts to convert Edwin of Northumbria.

Paulinus was one of the monks of Augustine of Canterbury and he was sent north with Ethelburga of Kent, who was a Christian, when she married the pagan King Edwin—in 625 according to Bede. Edwin promised to think about taking his bride’s religion, but to bring him finally to the point of accepting Christianity in 628 proved, despite all Paulinus’s powers of preaching and prophecy, to be a Herculean labour.
The Collegiate Churches of County Durham at the time of the Dissolution
Authors: Loades D. M.
Published: March 2016

When the Commissioners came to investigate those foundations dissolved under the provisions of the Act of 1547, there were in County Durham six institutions which could be described as collegiate churches. Of these, four were constituted in the ordinary way with a dean and prebendaries; Darlington, Chester-le-Street, Lanchester, and St. Andrews, Auckland; one was a chantry college attached to Staindrop Hospital; and one (Norton, near Stockton) preserved the antique constitution of eight portionaries amongst whom the endowment was equally divided.
The Coronation of the Young King in 1170
Authors: Heslin Anne
Published: March 2016

The coronation of Henry II’s eldest son, the younger Henry, in Westminster Abbey on 14 June 1170 was an event of the highest significance. The ceremony was performed by Roger, archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, in the presence of Henry II, but in the absence, and against the will, of the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and in defiance of the commands of the pope, Alexander III. The coronation itself has an intrinsic interest: the practice of crowning an heir in his father’s lifetime, though customary in France, and occurring at times in the German and Byzantine empires, was unusual in England.
Who Compiled the Sixteenth-Century Patristic Handbook Unio Dissidentium?
Authors: Peters Robert
Published: March 2016

The purpose of this paper is to raise a problem of more than antiquarian interest in Reformation literary history. The Unio Dissidentium is a collection of passages from the Bible together with nearly 550 quotations, many of them quite lengthy, from the Fathers. This latter feature gives to the book much of its interest, as well as a place in the patristic revival begun by the classical humanists and brought to a high level of development by the work of such men as Erasmus and Beatus Rhenanus.

So far as can with certainty be stated, the first part of Unio Dissidentium was published by the Antwerp printer, Martin de Keyser, in March 1527. The ten sections into which it is divided contain passages supporting the compiler’s theology on such current theological issues as original sin, infant baptism, predestination, the nature and function of law, grace and merit, faith and works, and human ordinances. Later that same year the same printer published the second part, dealing with the value of the Word of God, penitence, brotherly correction, fasting, prayer, indulgences, the Eucharist, ecclesiastical constitutions, the vocation of all Christians to be priests, kings, and prophets, and antichrist. To the editions printed in and after 1531 a further three sections were added, the first two of which are on expensive funerals and the flight and persecution of Christians, respectively, while the third is the tract of Pseudo-Augustine, De Essentia Divinitatis.
Puritanism: the Problem of Definition
Authors: Hall Basil
Published: March 2016

There are those ready to admire the Puritans almost for the very name (as did Spurgeon), and there are others who like Sir Andrew Aguecheek when confronted with ‘a kind of Puritan’ are ready ‘to beat him like a dog’ (as did Macaulay): but may we not with Sir Toby say to both these groups, ‘For being a Puritan? Thine exquisite reason?’—for Sir Toby, even in his cups, saw the need apparently to distinguish and define.

The problem of Puritanism is to define what it was and who the Puritans were—a fact often recognised but leading to little change in the treatment of the subject which is nearly always regarded as a comprehensive but homogeneous entity. Three examples may suffice to show what difficulties may arise for those who, seeking instruction, go to the most respected authors. First, A. S. P. Woodhouse, in Puritanism and Liberty, writes that ‘Puritanism is an entity’ capable of being extended to cover ‘the varied forces generated by the Protestant Reformation and given their opportunity by the revolt against the Crown and the Church in the first half of the seventeenth century.’ However, it is also possible to describe the Puritans as ‘the more conservative,’ ‘the strictly calvinistic,’ who ‘followed the Genevan pattern in Church and State’ and were ‘synonymous with Presbyterians.’ But, ‘the cleavage between the Presbyterians and sectaries is marked,’ yet this division leaves ‘the problem of the centre party, the Independents.’ Following Troeltsch one can speak of ‘a Puritan church type and a Puritan sect type, the ideal of the holy community is true of all the Puritan groups.’ Finally, ‘it is not necessary to posit a unity but there is continuity in Puritan thought.’ Here, as elsewhere, as soon as a statement is made a qualification of it, if not a contradiction of it, becomes necessary.
Piety and impiety in thirteenth-century italy
Authors: Murray Alexander
Published: March 2016

Everyone is familiar with the notion of an ‘Age of Faith’. It is the idea that, at some time in the past, everyone believed what religious authority told them to believe. In this paper I propose to test the truth of this idea, in one period, and one region.

I have chosen thirteenth-century Italy. The Middle Ages stand, par excellence, as the Age of Faith; and the thirteenth century, late enough not to starve us of evidence, was still early enough to be safely medieval. Italy, too, chooses itself: its documents, and its debates, yield the historian a clearer picture than he would get elsewhere. Whether Italy was typical of latin Christendom is a question that would call, not for another paper, but for another conference. But hints of her position will appear in the course of our enquiry. Some sources singled her out, some did not – giving an assurance, between them, that any difference between Italy and the rest was a difference between shades of grey.

Italy, then, in the thirteenth century, is our field; and we shall be enquiring in it not, now, about kinds of belief, but about degrees of it. How far were our predecessors, in the time and place chosen, in the modern sense ‘religious’?
The puritan piety of members of the Long Parliament
Authors: Yule G. S. S.
Published: March 2016

Although most historians of the English Civil War pay lip service to Puritanism as one of its main ingredients, as a matter of fact, the analysis of religious conviction is rarely undertaken except, perhaps, in regard to the ministers. How deeply Puritanism impinged on the laity is either ignored or treated in an imprecise fashion or explained as rationalisation of deeper economic or social concerns. The Whig historians, who coined the phrase ‘Puritan Revolution’, really see Puritanism playing a general political role, leading to toleration, with the advanced exponents of liberty, like Cromwell, or as causing the opposition to clerical episcopal tyranny in the case of people like Prynne. Even so careful an historian as W. A. Shaw fails completely to understand Pym’s use of biblical imagery and, I think, basically underplays the religiosity of the Parliament men.
Christianity and dissent in Roman North Africa: changing perspectives in recent work
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2016

The history of North African Christianity in antiquity is a peculiar blend of the local and the universal. Whether we consider the ‘catholic’ or the ‘dissenting’ traditions represented in it, we find ourselves at the intersection of two worlds. It was not only the ‘Catholicism’ of Optatus, Augustine and Aurelius and their friends and successors that linked the African Church with the Great Church across the seas. Professor Frend long ago drew attention to the similarities between the ecclesiologies of the Donatist and of other western schismatic churches. More recently we have been given a portrait of another such ‘dissident’ Church by M. Meslin in his impressive study of the Arian communities of the Danubian lands. As these developed in the course of the later fourth century, after earlier flirtation with the idea of an imperial Church cast in some ‘Arian’ mould, they came to bear many of the same features of ‘dissent’ which distinguished the Donatists. Donatism was no mere aberration; it was the local expression of a permanent religious option. But unlike the other ‘dissenting’ churches of the Roman world, Donatists did not adopt their dissenting posture as a mere response of defeated men driven into a corner by a hostile imperial and ecclesiastical establishment. It had a long pre-history in the African tradition of Christianity.
Society, theodicy and the origins of heresy: towards a reassessment of the medieval evidence
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

I shall not be presenting in this communication the fruits of any original research: my aim will be simply to put together some of the results of recent work by others, and on that basis to offer a little contribution to ‘the great seven-storey library’ which professor Le Bras hopes will one day ‘be devoted to studies of the structure and whole life of every religion at every moment of its history’.

It is best to begin with some explanation of my title: much of the debate on the origins of heresy has centred on the question of whether or not it represented a ‘social problem’. Thus when Grundmann asks if social questions were at the root of heresy, he means, was heresy the expression of material deprivation on the part of the unprivileged? This sort of connection has of course been made by historians usually stigmatised as Marxist (though Marx himself would, I think, have disowned some of their crude anachronisms); Werner, for example, explains heresy as a protest movement against the economic and social exploitation of the feudal system.
The quest for the heretical laity in the visitation records of Ely in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
Authors: Spufford Margaret
Published: March 2016

A tradition existed, and perpetuated itself, amongst the relatively humble Congregationalists of Cambridgeshire that Francis Holcroft, their evangelist, was working on old-established foundations when he gathered in his church in the 1650s and 1660s. Calamy said that he ‘fell in with the Old Brownists’. Robert Browne, the arch-separatist, spent nine years evangelising in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, after taking his degree in 1572-3 and spending a little while in the model puritan household of Richard Greenham, rector of Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, before leaving for the continent in 1581. The Brownists were not the only separatists who might have existed in the diocese of Ely in the late sixteenth century; the Family of Love is known to have taken firm root there, and a portion of the Letter Book of bishop Cox of Ely, is taken up with the examination of nearly seventy of its adherents in October, 1580.
Orthodox and catholics in the seventeenth century: schism or intercommunion?
Authors: Ware K. T.
Published: March 2016

For use on the first Sunday in Lent, the service books of the Greek Orthodox Church include a special office known as ‘The Synodikon of Orthodoxy’, which contains no less than sixty anathemas against different heresies and heresiarchs. Yet in this comprehensive denunciation there is one unexpected omission: no reference is made to the errors of the Latins, no allusion to the Filioque or the papal claims, even though more than a third of the anathemas date from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time when doctrinal disagreements between East and West had emerged clearly into the open. This omission of the Latins is an indication of the curious imprecision which prevails in the relations between Orthodoxy and Rome. It is altogether obvious that an estrangement has long existed between the Greek East and the Latin West. What is much less obvious is the precise point at which this estrangement evolved into a definitive schism, into a clear and final breach in sacramental communion. The division between the two halves of Christendom did not occur as a single event, accomplished once and for all at a specific moment in history: it was, on the contrary, a gradual, fluctuating, and disjointed process, stretching over a remarkably extended period.
Swedenborgianism: heresy, schism or religious protest?
Authors: Ward W. R.
Published: March 2016

The separation of Methodism from the Church of England has become one of the famous chestnuts of ecclesiastical history; despite the allegations of excited high-churchmen and Tractarians at the time, it was not well described in terms of heresy or schism, and embodied a great many other things besides religious protest; moreover it was a separation which has never been quite complete. The case of Swedenborgianism is interesting not only in its own right, but as showing that the issue between the Methodists and the Church was not a bi-partite affair, that there were other possibilities within and between them both, and it illustrates the curious mixture of spiritual and social factors which underlay the religious fragmentation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Royal saints and early medieval kingship
Authors: Nelson Janet
Published: March 2016

The problem I want briefly to focus on concerns the significance of the saint-king in early medieval cosmology: what is his relationship to the sacral king of so many pre-industrial societies? A commonly-accepted view has been that the sacral king was, quite simply, the immediate ancestor of the saint-king. To quote the recent but in some respects old-fashioned work of W. A. Chaney on Anglo-Saxon kingship: ‘The sacral nature of kingship.... would lead the folk to expect God to honour the stirps regia. The recognised form of this in the new religion was sainthood.’ Christianity, so Chaney implies, simply makes a saint out of the sacral king: in essentials, nothing is changed.
Mulieres sanctae
Authors: Bolton Brenda M.
Published: March 2016

The early thirteenth century was an extraordinary period in the history of piety. Throughout Europe, and especially in urban communities, lay men and women were seized by a new religious fervour which could be satisfied neither by the new orders nor by the secular clergy. Lay groups proliferated, proclaiming the absolute and literal value of the gospels and practising a new life-style, thevita apostolica.This religious feeling led to the formation, on the eve of the fourth lateran council, of numerous orders of ‘poor men’ and shortly afterwards, to the foundation of the mendicant orders. From this novel interpretation of evangelical life women by no means wished to be excluded and many female groups sprang simultaneously into being in areas as far distant as Flanders and Italy. Yet how were such groups to be regarded because current attitudes to women were based on inconsistent and contradictory doctrines? It was difficult to provide the conditions under which they could achieve their desire for sanctity as they were not allowed to enter the various orders available to men. How then were men to reply to the demands of these women for participation in religious life? That there should be a reply was evident from the widespread heresy in just those areas in which the ferment of urban life encouraged the association of pious women. And heretics were dangerously successful with them! For the church, the existence of religious and semi-religious communities of women raised, in turn, many problems, not least the practicalities involved in both pastoral care and economic maintenance. Only, after 1215, when it attempted to regulate and discipline them, did it realise the widespread enthusiasm on which their movement was based.
Ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England 1300—1550: the records and their interpretation
Authors: Owen Dorothy
Published: March 2016

The picture drawn by Chaucer in the Friar’s Tale is a little journalistic, not to say sensational, and it deals with only some aspects of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of his day, yet it leaves us in no doubt as to the importance of the courts, and of the way in which they were regarded in some quarters. Perhaps the picture was overdrawn, and true only of the half century or so within Chaucer’s own knowledge. On the other hand it has recently been demonstrated that these same courts furnished some at least of the excuses for royal and parliamentary action at the outset of the reformation, and there seems to be good reason for a closer look at them in this context. Most of all, however, for those whose principal interest is the quality of medieval life, it is desirable to consider the institution during the whole period for which there is some sort of continuous record of its working, that is, for the years covered by my title. There is no doubt that such a study should reveal a considerable section of the public and private life of the time, and while in the limits of this paper I can do no more than skim the surface of my material I hope that I shall persuade others to make further and deeper studies.
Popular piety and the records of the unestablished churches 1460–1660
Authors: Cross Claire
Published: March 2016

John foxe in his long account of ‘the grievous affliction of good men and women in the diocese of Lincoln’, based on Lincoln episcopal records for 1521, gave over a quarter of a page to the Colins family of Ginge, near West Hendred in Berkshire. At a time of wholesale detection of lollards, when episcopal officials had succeeded in getting neighbour to inform against neighbour, John Edmunds revealed what he knew about Richard Colins, Alice, his wife, and their daughter, Joan.

This Richard Colins, as he was a great doer among these good men, so was he much complained upon by divers. . . for bringing with him a book called The King of Beeme [Bohemia] into their company, and did read thereof a great part unto them in this Edmunds’ house of Burford.

This Alice likewise was a famous woman among them, and had a good memory, and could recite much of the scriptures, and other good books. And therefore when any conventicle of these men did meet at Burford, commonly she was sent for to recite unto them die declaration of the Ten Commandments, and the epistles of Peter and James.

This Joan also, following her father’s and mother’s steps, was noted for that she had learned with her father and mother, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, the Five Wits Bodily and Ghostly, the Eight Blessings, and five chapters of St James’s epistle.
Pure air and portentous heresy
Authors: Hill Rosalind M. T.
Published: March 2016

Anyone who studies the works of those western historians who wrote contemporary chronicles of the first four crusades must surely be struck by one curious fact. Almost without exception, these writings show a complete lack of interest in the teachings and practices of any branch of the Christian church except that of the Roman west. The Nestorians and Jacobites whom the crusaders encountered in Syria aroused in them neither surprise nor interest, nor is there any sign that these people were regarded as more incorrect in their beliefs than were the orthodox Greeks. Although the schism between the eastern and western churches was not yet half a century old when the first crusade reached the walls of Constantinople, and although it was an affair of theological scholarship and high-powered ecclesiastical politics, it seems already to have interposed a complete barrier between the ordinary Frank and his Greek counterpart. The political acrimony displayed a hundred years earlier by Liutprand of Cremona had found a safe anchor in religious prejudice.
A mission to the Orthodox? the Cistercians in Romania
Authors: Bolton Brenda M.
Published: March 2016

It has been said that Innocent III shared the popular belief existing at the beginning of the thirteenth century that the world would end in 1284. Perhaps this is the reason why throughout his pontificate he was eager to resolve the divisions facing mankind. These divisions were reflected in the deviations of the heretic, the beliefs of the infidel and the schism of the eastern church. In the first of these Innocent was meeting success, albeit in varying degrees, for example in Languedoc. The second and third needed his further attention. He was of the opinion that a renewed crusading effort in both east and west would be able to achieve mass conversions amongst Jews and Muslims. To this end the fourth crusade of 1204, mounted mainly by the Cistercians, came into being.
Eastern liturgies and anglican divines 1510–1662
Authors: Cuming G. J.
Published: March 2016

It would be difficult to form an accurate estimate of the extent to which the eastern liturgies were known in the west before the invention of printing. At the time of the council of Florence, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom was celebrated at Ferrara and at Venice; and someone brought with him what is now the earliest extant manuscript of that liturgy, and left it behind in Florence. In the debates, however, the western delegates professed to have no knowledge of the rite. After the fall of Constantinople, Greek scholars and manuscripts reached the west in much greater numbers than before. In England an important step forward was taken about the year 1510, when Erasmus gave John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, a copy of St Chrysostom in Greek, with a Latin translation made by himself.
Evangelisation or repentance? The re-Christianisation of the Peloponnese in the ninth and tenth centuries
Authors: Dunn Marilyn
Published: March 2016

Despite its attendant manifestations of renewal, the process of the re-Christianisation of the Peloponnese during the ninth and tenth centuries has not generally been viewed in the context of a renaissance. The remarkable upsurge in church-building in the province from the end of the tenth century onwards, the approximate beginnings of which are marked by the appearance of a large church on the Spartan acropolis, has had its causes ascribed to movements other than the re-vitalisation of religious life in the area. It is true that the great period of church-building in the Peloponnese occurs at a later date than the comparable flourishing in Hellas, where the famous churches of Skripou, of Gregory the Theologian at Thebes, and of John the Baptist in Athens were all built in the ninth century. The late date of this architectural activity has doubtless been one factor which has led some historians to hold an unnecessarily complicated and even untenable view of the impulses which lay behind it.
Alan of Lille and the New Man
Authors: Wilks Michael
Published: March 2016

Let them be forbidden access to this work, wrote Alan of Lille in hisAnticlaudianus, who would only look for the image of sensuality and not the truth of reason . . . Do not allow those tasteless men, who cannot take their studies beyond the bounds of the senses, to impose their own interpretations on this book . . . lest the majesty of its secret meanings be profaned, like pearls cast before swine, when divulged to the unworthy. But what is this majestic secret significance which Alan wished to keep hidden from people so lacking in good taste as to want to probe it and misunderstand it? On the surface theAnticlaudianus, Alan’s most famous work, is an epic romance about a celestial journey and a great battle which is clearly being used as a moral treatise, asumma de virtutibus et vitiis. His long poem tells the story of how the goddess Nature, in council with the Virtues, seeks to make a new type of person, thehomo perfectus.They realise that such a divine being cannot be created unless a soul is brought from God, whereupon Phronesis, the searcher after truth to whom the secrets of God are revealed, undertakes a journey to heaven in a chariot constructed by the seven liberal arts and drawn by the five senses. With the aid of Theology and Faith, Phronesis meets the heavenly host, the Virgin Mary, and eventually God himself, who has a soul made for her. She brings this soul, carefully sealed to keep it fresh, back to the waiting body, and the novus homo is complete. He then has to prove himself in a great pitched battle between the virtues and the vices.
The idea of renewal in Girolamo Aleander’s conciliar thought
Authors: Patterson W. B.
Published: March 2016

The climax of the Italian renaissance in the early sixteenth century merges almost imperceptibly and rather surprisingly with the beginnings of the catholic reformation. Within a single generation, it seems, religious and moral interests came to rival, or even to supplant, that interest in pagan antiquity which had long been the inspiration of Italian culture. The stages by which this transformation occurred have not been clearly defined, but the process can be seen at work in the case of one prominent humanist who decided to devote his career to the defence and then to the renewal of the church of Rome.
Humanistic script in a monastic register: an outward and visible sign?
Authors: Greatrex Joan G.
Published: March 2016

Learning to write the new humanistic script can surely be taken as a sign of humanistic interests’ in the fifteenth century. This is the conclusion of the compilers of a catalogue entitled Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century which was produced in conjunction with an exhibition held in the Bodleian library, Oxford in 1970. As long as our interests are confined to the small circle of English humanists in this period who are known by name this statement may not lead us on to reflection or comment since its truth is self-evident. The situation is altered, however, and the words quoted above assume a new meaning and suggest a new line of approach in the light of an unexpected encounter with anonymous attempts to imitate the script in the unusual setting of a monastic letter–book or register.
Revival at Glastonbury 1530–9
Authors: Dunning Robert W.
Published: March 2016

It is curious that Glastonbury abbey should have attracted more attention for its beginnings than for its ending. The no-man’s-land between history, archaeology and legend, as misty and mysterious as the climate so often makes the abbey and its surroundings, has produced theory and counter-theory in abundance. In contrast, though the tragic deaths of abbot Whiting and his two companions have been described in minute detail a thousand times, little enough attention has been paid to the community which the king’s visitors found so much difficulty in bringing to an end. This community, well enough documented to permit the identification of all its members over the last fifteen years of its life, reveals characteristics which stand in marked contrast to the general level of religious life in the years immediately before the dissolution.
Propaganda for War the Dissemination of the Crusading Ideal in the Twelfth Century
Authors: Morris Colin
Published: March 2016

It was accepted in western Europe, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that there was an obligation upon the military classes, and indeed on Christians generally, to take up arms in defence of the Holy Sepulchre, or to participate in other expeditions authorised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. War ceased to be, for Christians, a regrettable necessity, and became a virtue, and armies were summoned by the trumpet-blasts of the Prince of Peace. There has been a great deal of work by historians in recent decades on the transformation of earlier Christian ideology, and we now understand much more about the origins of crusading ideas, the discussion of warfare by theologians and canon lawyers, and the profound changes in spirituality which accompanied the rise of militarism. There is however a technical aspect of the subject which is less often considered: the actual methods by which the new ideals were communicated to western society generally. By any standards, it was a remarkably successful exercise in publicity. It was also, in the first instance, very rapid. Urban II announced the expedition to Jerusalem at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, and he fixed the date of departure as 15 August 1096. The summons was heard by groups far wider than the princes and their households, and by Easter 1096 an army led by Peter the Hermit had already arrived in Cologne on its way from northern France. Within a few months, therefore, and well in advance of the papal deadline, the message had spread to all levels of society over a wide geographical area. A system of communication as effective as this deserves our respect and study. It would be a mistake to conclude from the total absence of modern technology that the control of opinion was unimportant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Undesirable Aliens in the Diocese of York
Authors: Hill Rosalind M. T.
Published: March 2016

Placed as they are at the extreme outpost of Western Europe, the British Isles have been, over the centuries of their recorded history and probably for millennia before the Roman invasion, a melting-pot of peoples. R. G. Collingwood described them, correctly if unflatteringly, as an ethnic scrap-heap. As each new set of immigrants arrived they were scrutinised, assessed and usually heavily criticised by the resident population before being allowed to settle down. Matthew Paris may have been a little uncertain as to what, in the thirteenth century, constituted a foreigner, but nevertheless he was quite clear in his own mind that all those whom he considered to be foreigners were bad, unless they stayed in their own countries. Foreign laymen, he suspected, would do anything, even to poisoning their fathers-in-law with blue venom, in order to lay hands on English estates. Foreign clergy were nearly as bad—of one set of Poitevins he remarks that they had faces like play-actors, and were moreover given to wearing indecent boots. Matthew was a particularly intolerant critic, but some two hundred and fifty years later Andrea Trefisano noted that ‘the English have an antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into the island but to make themselves masters of it, and to usurp English goods,’ although he admits that the natives, when they see a handsome foreigner, are apt to remark that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.
The English Clergy and the Hundred Years War
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

The Contribution made by the Church to the English war effort during the Hundred Years War was immense. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the forms which this contribution took, and then to offer some reflections on it.

The most important clerical contribution to the war was financial: the taxes voted by the clergy in their two convocations and collected by themselves for the benefit of the crown. These corresponded to the lay subsidies voted in parliament. Normally such taxes were tenths of clerical income as it had been assessed, about 1291, for the benefit of the papacy. No new assessment of clerical wealth was made in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, but during the decade 1371 to 1381 a series of experimental taxes was levied from clergy and laity alike. These experiments, culminating in the notorious poll tax of 1380–1 which provoked open rebellion, were not repeated. But in the fifteenth century successive governments tried to tap the wealth of the chantry and stipendiary chaplains through a series of taxes of the poll tax type. Unlike the fourteenth-century poll taxes these measures were imposed at infrequent intervals (in 1406, 1419, 1430, 1436, 1449), but, like them, were abandoned because they failed to bring in the hoped-for revenue.
Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity
Authors: Garnsey Peter
Published: March 2016

Toleration Implies disapproval or disagreement coupled with an unwillingness to take action against those who are viewed with disfavour in the interest of some moral or political principle. It is an active concept, not to be confused with indifference, apathy or passive acquiescence. In this paper I reexamine, in the light of this strong definition of toleration, the contrast commonly drawn for the world of classical antiquity between a tolerant paganism and an intolerant Christianity. Toleration implies a degree of acceptance as well as a degree of disapproval. In evaluating the attitudes of pagans to other pagans in antiquity we must satisfy ourselves, first, that ancient polytheistic systems were as open and inclusive as is often assumed, and second, that where mutual acceptance might be said to have prevailed, this was not merely casual acceptance, but entailed compromise between competing gods and rituals. Again where religions can be seen to have been seriously at variance with each other, as were the sundry pagan cults with Judaism and Christianity, where therefore toleration was at least in principle a possible option, we must ask how far pagan authorities and (in so far as this can be discerned) ordinary pagans were inclined to choose that option.
Intolerable tolerance: the Canadian bishops and the 1912 ‘Appeal on behalf of Christian Unity’
Authors: Ruggle Richard E.
Published: March 2016

The convocation of Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, was gathered in the chapel. In 1910 an honourary doctorate was being conferred on the bishop of Fredericton. In his convocation sermon, Bishop Richardson confided that the most disquieting thing he saw about the religious life of his day was its attitude of sheer indifference. The foe was seen in impatience with doctrinal sermons and in undenominational religion, but most of all it stood ‘naked and unashamed in countless arguements for Christian union.’ It was not the indifference of the masses outside the Church but of the faithful within it that disturbed him. The Christian world was ‘coming to mistake looseness of belief for liberality of thought.’ He conceded a grudging acceptance of the modern view of’the duty of toleration as the characteristic temper of the religious life’, while warning against the ‘danger of being so wide awake to the value of every other man’s opinion as to fail to form any strong intellectual convictions for oneself.’ Although the Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield were hideous, ‘behind all the cruel intolerance of persecution there was something that is lamentably lacking in the Church to-day,—a magnificently stern sense of responsibility for the safekeeping of a sacred trust.’ The Canadian bishops would soon exhibit their stern sense of stewardship.