bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Richard Kilby: A Study in Personal and Professional Failure
Authors: Lake Peter
Published: March 2016

The image of the minister of the word current amongst English evangelical protestants and puritans was both exalted and ambiguous. Ministers were ‘the lord’s ambassadors, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the dispensers of God’s mysteries, the builders of God’s church and the chariot and horsemen … of a Christian kingdom.’ However, the qualities and qualifications necessary successfully to fulfill that role were onerous in the extreme. To be a true minister it was necessary firstly and essentially to preach, which in turn entailed the mastering a large range of scholarly skills, involving knowledge of the original languages, of logic, rhetoric, church history, and theology. But it was necessary also for a true minister to be personally godly, first because he had to lead his flock toward a Christian life not merely through exhortation but also through example and, second, because his own spiritual condition, the integrity of his calling both as a Christian and as a minister, vitally effected the efficacy of his ministry. After all, the deeper his own understanding of the word—always as much a function of spiritual insight as formal learning—and the more completely his own character had been made over by the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit, the more effectively he could communicate his saving message to his flock.
Origen on the Jews
Authors: Mcguckin John A.
Published: March 2016

This present study is a note added to what has already become an extensive bibliography concerning Origen’s doctrinal relation to Judaism in general, and the extent and significance of his awareness of Jewish exegetical procedures in particular. Among that list of previous studies on the theme, special reference ought to be made to the seminal workOrigen and the Jews, by Professor Nicholas de Lange, which demonstrated Origen’s knowledge of rabbinic traditions in his exegeses. This present study will offer, firstly, a general contextual discussion of the question of Origen’s dependence on Jewish tradition, and, secondly, a small test-case analysis of his attitude to the Jewish question from observing his New Testament exegesis of those passages directly concerning the issue. From the latter some interesting biases will emerge that throw some light on his personal attitudes.
The Faith of Christians and Hostility to Jews
Authors: Langmuir Gavin I.
Published: March 2016

There is a fundamental question that any historical analysis of the relations between Christianity and Judaism must face. What is the relation between the hostility that Christians have directed at Jews and their faith as Christians? It is a hard question to answer for both conceptual and evidential reasons. The conceptual problem is that historians may be misled by some of the theological categories which are so deeply embedded in the languages of Western culture. Let me give an example close to home. At the first conference of the Society, C. N. L. Brooke spoke of the Christian religion and of the Church with a capital ‘C’. Similarly, several titles of the volumes of Studies in Church History and many of the contributions in them have used ‘the Church’ as if there was such a thing as the universal Christian Church. Indeed, the style sheet for Studies in Church History states that a capital is required for ‘the Church’ where the universal Church is implied and gives as an example the sentence, ‘The Church preaches tolerance’—an assertion that may seem passing strange in the context of this year’s conference.
Views of Jews from Paris Around 1300: Christian or ‘Scientific’?
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: March 2016

A Term in many ways inappropriate to the Middle Ages’: so begins AA a recent medieval encyclopaedia article on ‘antisemitism’. It is the first worry of the medievalist. On the one hand, he or she hears thec’est la même chosecry of the non-medievalist when the latter looks at examples of medieval hatred of the Jews. On the other hand, he or she is acutely aware both of the modernity of racial thought and the way in which twelfth-or thirteenth-century texts, when discussing Jews, use religious vocabulary, not ‘racial’. Painful modern Jewish and Christian concern to examine the Church’s guilt pushes in the same direction as the medievalist’s anxiety about anachronism. The effect is to underline religion.
The Roman Catholic Church and Genocide in Croatia, 1941-1945
Authors: Steinberg Jonathan
Published: March 2016

Just before I sat down to write this paper, I heard the editor of the Serbian newspaper in Knin giving an interview to the BBC. ‘Remember’, he said over the crackling telephone line, ‘we Serbs had our Auschwitz too; it was called Jasenovac’ Jasenovac can legitimately be compared with Auschwitz in the annals of human horror. Nobody knows how many Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were hacked to pieces with butcher knives, beaten to death with clubs and rifle butts, worked to death on detachments, or died of fright, illness, and starvation in the Croatian death camp. A Serb friend of mine recalls being pulled by his mother from the rails of a ferry on the river Sava, near Jasenovac, in 1941 as he stared at the bits of human anatomy bobbing in the current. In the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome there is a file of photographs of the butcher knives and mallets used in the camp and elsewhere by the Ustase in their pogroms, as well as pictures of the mutilated victims. Those pictures have been indelibly burned on to the retina of my memory. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasants Party, was arrested and sent to Jasenovac on 15 October 1941, six months after the foundation of the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia. He described it in his memoirs:

The camp had previously been a brick-yard and was situated on the embankment of the Sava river. In the middle of the camp stood a two-storey house, originally erected for the offices of the enterprise … The screams and wails of despair and extreme suffering, the tortured outcries of the victims, broken by intermittent shooting, accompanied all my waking hours and followed me into sleep at night.
Jewish and Christian Concepts of Time and Modern Anti-Judaism: Ousting the God of Time
Authors: Brearley Margaret F.
Published: March 2016

One of the major factors which distinguish Judaism and Christianity from virtually all non-monotheistic religions is the concept of time. The Jews were alone among ancient peoples in worshipping the God of Time. In most ancient religions the pagan gods of space, embodied in sacred places and things, were worshipped. Nature was perceived pantheistically, as sacred, inhabited by spirits and devas. Gods of space were visualized in images: ‘Where there is no image, there is no god’, their worship necessarily involving idolatry. Generally anthropomorphic and often personifying man’s own instincts, such gods could inspire no clear moral code. Separation from them could be bridged only by physical means—by Dionysiac frenzy, by re-enactment of myths about them. Thus Cretans tore apart a living bull to re-enact Hera’s murder of Dionysos Zagreus; worshippers of Attis in Phrygia engaged in self-castration. Shamanisric trances, eating sacrifices, and temple prostitution were among other means of temporarily embodying the spatial gods.
Women among the Early Martyrs
Authors: Hall Stuart G.
Published: March 2016

The Pentecostal sermon attributed to Peter in Acts announces Joel’s prophecy fulfilled:

It shall happen in the last days, says God, that I will pour some of my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your youths shall see visions and your elders shall dream dreams; yes, even on my slaves and slavegirls in those days I will pour some of my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

The gift thus overrides sex, rank, and social status; it is often overlooked that the company on whom the Spirit falls in Acts 2 includes, beside the restored Twelve, ‘women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers’, and Acts in this respect agrees with Paul that in Christ ‘there is no Jew nor Greek, there is no slave nor free man, there is no male and female; you are all one person in Christ Jesus.’
The Franks, the Martyrology of Usuard, and the Martyrs of Cordoba
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

The bodies of holy martyrs, which the Romans buried with fire, and mutilated by the sword, and tore apart by throwing them to wild beasts: these bodies the Franks have found, and enclosed in gold and precious stones.

For the author of the longer prologue toLex Salica, writing in 763–4 in the reign of Pippin I, the first king of the Carolingian dynasty, the Franks’ devotion to the martyrs was the secret of their success. It proved the strength of their Christian faith; it was at once the manifestation and the explanation of special divine favour.Vivit qui Francos diligit Christus….
Woman and Home: the Domestic Setting of Late Medieval Spirituality
Authors: Webb Diana M.
Published: March 2016

‘From the earliest days of Christianity, the domestic community has served as a unit of worship’. In the later medieval period, the home certainly played an important part in the religious observances of many laypeople. By the fifteenth century in England, chapels in private houses were increasingly common, even if they were simply small rooms adapted for the purpose. The practice of informal prayer and private devotional reading did not require special accommodation. We know that individuals prayed in their bedrooms, while Italian women were encouraged to have a bedroom image of the Virgin and to conduct themselves properly in her presence. Italian preachers also thought that children should join in holy play-acting at home, and that they should set up and decorate toy altars. The garden, too, could furnish a setting for the spiritual life. Agnes Paston gives us a haunting glimpse of the life and death of a pious layman in 1453:
Purity, Profanity, and Puritanism: the Churching of Women, 1500-1700
Authors: Coster William
Published: March 2016

In the past the ceremony of churching was the only means by which, after childbirth, a woman could return to the community of the Church, and indeed to society in general. It is a subject that has received very scant scholarly attention, in spite of the existence of a considerable body of source material concerned with the ceremony, as well as with the ideas and circumstances surrounding it. This material includes the works and debates of theologians and reformers, the survivals of the Church administration, its courts and visitations, biographical material, particularly diaries, and, finally and more unusually, parish registers that record the dates on which churchings occurred. This neglect is all the more surprising in an era that has seen so much emphasis placed on investigations into the historical circumstances of women. This paper will attempt to rectify this situation by utilizing these and the focus point of this ceremony in order to determine the interconnection of religious ideas, with those about sex, motherhood, and women in the early modern period. The theological origins of churching lie ultimately in Leviticus 12, but more directly through the story of the purification of the Virgin in Luke 2. These biblical precedents led to the adoption of such ceremonies into western liturgy around the eleventh century. However, the fact that similar beliefs and rites seem almost universal, perhaps suggests that the introduction of this rite was a response to popular feelings, rather than the imposition of a new ceremony on an increasingly Christianized society. Equally it would seem that the survival of churching through the theological upheavals of the sixteenth century indicates that there continued to be, as Keith Thomas has suggested, within early modern English society, a widespread belief that a woman who had given birth was both unclean and unholy.
‘Let Your Women Keep Silence in the Churches’. How Women in the Dutch Reformed Church Evaded Paul’s Admonition, 1650-1700
Authors: De Baar Mirjam
Published: March 2016

’Tis not a woman’s placeTo say a word of graceIn Church or in the street:Behind the spinning-wheel is her proper seat.Ioh. van Beverwiick, Van de wtnementheytdes vrouwelicken geslacht.

It was beyond dispute what the place of women in the Church ought to be. According to the commandments of the Apostle Paul (I Timothy 2. 11-12, I Corinthians 14. 34-5) the weaker sex should remain silent. However, it remains to be seen if women have always heeded this admonition. Does not the text of the quoted rhyme already show otherwise?
Quakerism and its Implications for Quaker Women: the Women Itinerant Ministers of York Meeting, 1780-1840
Authors: Wright Sheila
Published: March 2016

In York Monthly Meeting, women ministers were to become dominant by the end of the eighteenth century, having been outnumbered by men since the beginning of the century. The Meeting for Ministers and Elders appears to have degenerated between 1726 and 1768 under the stewardship of Nathaniel Bell and Daniel Peacock. At the same time, female influence in the Meeting suffered a hiatus, the Meeting ceasing to send female representatives to the Quarterly Meeting in about 1718. This situation continued until 1783, when women once again began to feature strongly in the Meeting of Ministers and Elders; they were appointed to the positions of elder and minister and resumed sending representatives to Quarterly Meetings. From 1706 to 1775, York Meeting had 7 male ministers, of whom 4 were itinerant. There were 5 female ministers; 3 made more than one journey in the ministry. From 1775 to 1860 there were 11 male ministers, 2 being itinerant. There were 20 female ministers, of whom 11 made regular journeys in the ministry.
The Language of Images: the Rise of Icons and Christian Representation
Authors: Cameron Averil
Published: March 2016

One has to be brave to return to the subject of Byzantine Iconoclasm, a subject which, we may feel, has been done to death. But the division in Byzantine society which lasted off and on for over a century, from 726 to the ‘restoration of orthodoxy’ in 843, was so profound that any Byzantine historian must at some time try to grapple with it. This is especially so if one is trying to understand the immediately preceding period, from the Persian invasions of the early seventh century to the great sieges of Constantinople by the Arabs in 674-8 and 717. It is well recognized by historians that this was a time of fundamental social, economic, and administrative change, which coincided with, but was by no means wholly caused by, the loss of so much Byzantine territory to the Arabs. However, the connection, if any, of this process of change with the social and religious upheaval known as Iconoclasm still leaves much to be said; indeed, no simple connection is likely in itself to provide an adequate explanation. In this paper I want to explore further some of the background to the crisis, without attempting here to provide a general explanation for Iconoclasm itself. I shall not venture beyond the first phase of Iconoclasm, which ended with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, and after which the argument is somewhat different. Indeed, I shall be focusing here not even on the period known as ‘first Iconoclasm’, but mainly on the preceding period, when the issues inherent in the controversy were already, and increasingly, making themselves felt. Though we shall inevitably be concerned with some of the arguments brought against icons by their opponents, it is the place of images themselves in the context of the pre-Iconoclastic period which will be the main issue. Finally, while I want to offer a different way of reading the rise of icons, I do not pretend that it is the only one, or even possibly the most important. I do suggest, though, that it can help us to make sense of some of the issues that were involved.
A Chapel and its Architect: James Cubitt and Union Chapel, Islington, 1874-1889(Presidential Address)
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

Anonconformist church is a place for drama, not mime or magic. It is a place for the production of the Word; for communication and for decision; for encounter, therefore, and crisis. It is a place for salvation. Its sole purpose is to promote the crisis of salvation and sustain its outworking in worship. When the question which must be asked of any building is asked of such a building—‘Does it work?’—what is really asked is: ‘How effectively does this meeting of client, architect, and craftsman house that historic crisis of man’s salvation when God meets man and is recognized? Has this been especially a place for such a crisis?’ This paper concentrates on one architect’s role in this process. James Cubitt (1836–1912) was a Nonconformist architect twice over, since he happened to be a Nonconformist as well as an architect who worked consciously for an architecture of Nonconformity.
Making Catholic Spaces: Women, Decor, and Devotion in the English Catholic Church, 1840-1900
Authors: O’Brien Susan
Published: March 2016

Nanda took in her surroundings… At the end of the corridor stood a statue of Our Lord in white robes wearing a red, thorn-circled heart on his breast like an order. The bent head with its pale brown hair and beard was girlish and gentle; the brass halo had been polished till it winked and reflected each flicker of the little glass lamp that burned on the pedestal… At the end of the passage hung a large oil painting of Our Lord, showing his five wounds … Between the lines [of desks] stood a statue of Our Lady, supported on each side by angels with folded wings and flying girdles. Nanda thought it was a privilege to be near so holy company. Her desk was empty but for a small picture of the Sacred Heart gummed inside the lid. … ‘I never thought there were so many holy pictures in the world,’ she thought to herself. Every room she had entered since she had arrived at the Convent of the Five Wounds had had its picture or statue.’
British Churches and the Cinema in the 1930s
Authors: Machin G. I. T.
Published: March 2016

With the possible exception of the ‘wireless’, the cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s, when attendances began to decline and cinemas to close because of the competing power of television. On the eve of the Second World War, television was still in struggling infancy, while the number of cinemas had grown from some 3,000 in 1914 to about 5,000 in 1939, some of the recent ones having been built on a palatial scale. The introduction of sound films in 1929 enhanced the cinema’s popularity, and by 1939 annual attendances exceeded 1,500 million. Still higher figures were reached for a few years from 1945.
The Education of Girls in Fourth-century Rome
Authors: Petersen Joan M.
Published: March 2016

There is little direct evidence about the education of girls in classical times and Late Antiquity. Our conception of what provision was available has to be based chiefly on an examination of the material relating to the education of adult women and to the early training of little girls of four or five years of age. For the second half of the fourth century we are fortunate in possessing the testimony of three Christian writers on the subject of the education of mature women: Palladius, Gerontius of Jerusalem, and Jerome. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of their limitations. All three writers deal with women of a narrow social class, members of the wealthy Roman aristocracy, who were attempting to live a disciplined and austere monastic life, the majority of them against the incongruous background of their family mansions on the Aventine Hill, which was then a fashionable residential district. They were perhaps in the tradition of those earlier learned and cultivated aristocratic Roman ladies, recalled by Cicero, and exemplified by the daughter of his friend Atticus, who provided her with a tutor even after her marriage, and by Hortensia, the daughter of the orator Hortensius, who was trained by her father in public speaking, and who even made a speech in the Forum against a tax assessment. For information about the early training of little girls in fourth-century Rome we are indebted to the letters of Jerome, but this evidence, as we shall see, has certain limitations.

Two difficulties confront us when we examine the evidence provided by our three Christian writers: in the first place, none of them describes the educational process by which these ladies achieved so high a degree of cultivation and learning; secondly, the advice which Jerome gives about the training and education of little girls is intended for child oblates, consecrated to God even before their birth, and is, in any case, suspect, because much of it has been culled from an earlier writer.
Childhood in Eastern Patristic Thought: Some Problems of Theology and Theological Anthropology
Authors: Gould Graham
Published: March 2016

The writings of the Early Church concerning childhood are not extensive, but in the works of a number of Eastern Christian authors of the second to fourth centuries it is possible to discern some ideas about childhood which raise important problems of Christian theology and theological anthropology. The theological problem is that of the question posed for theodicy by the sufferings and deaths of infants. It is harder to give a brief definition of the anthropological problem, but it is important to do so because to define the problem as the Eastern Fathers saw it is also to identify the set of conceptual tools—the anthropological paradigm—which they used to answer it. These are not, naturally, the concepts of modern anthropology and psychology. Applied to patristic thought, these terms usually refer to speculations about the composition and functioning of the human person or the human soul which belong to a discourse which is recognizably philosophical and metaphysical—by which is meant that it is (though influenced by other sources, such as the Bible) the discourse of a tradition descending ultimately from the anthropological terminology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Patristic anthropology seeks to account for the history and experiences of the human person as a created being—fhe experience of sin and mortality in the present life, but also of eternal salvation and advancement to perfection in the image of God.
Parents, Children, and the Church in the Earlier Middle Ages(Presidential Address)
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

The titles of Ecclesiastical History Society conferences have sometimes presented the Church as part of a pair that carries more than a hint of contradiction: the Church and War; the Church and Wealth. Well now: the Church and Childhood? Ecclesiastical Historians and Childhood? I can’t help recalling Heloise’s rhetorical question: ‘What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles?’ Last year we reminded ourselves that the blood of the martyrs is the life of the Church: this year and, more fortunately placed than Heloise, I’m confident that we’ll show the multifarious ways in which flesh-and-blood children have been part of that life. ‘The Church’ is shorthand: not only do we have to speak of many churches, but of many varieties of ecclesiastical attitude, of conflicts of ecclesiastical interest, of juxtapositions and negotiations between clerical and lay (for parents, too, are members of the Church), and, in all the above, of change. Equally subject to change and variety is the other element in this year’s pair. Although the stages of a child’s development are biological, physiological, perhaps psychological givens, and genetically programmed, childhood itself is a construct, culturally determined. As historians, it’s our job to historicize it: identify the phases and modes and variations in its construction, its adaptation, and its lived experience.
The Almonry School of Norwich Cathedral Priory in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Authors: Greatrex Joan
Published: March 2016

In 1535 the monks of Norwich Cathedral Priory made the following report:

Each year there are thirteen boys dwelling within the monastery and receiving free instruction in the scola grammaticalis or ‘almery scole’. They are also given food and clothing, which costs us 26s. 8d. per head per annum. In addition a master is provided to teach the boys, together with a servant to attend to their other needs; the former is paid an annual stipend of 53s. 4d., and the latter 20s. This school was founded by Herbert, the first bishop of the see of Norwich and the founder of the monastic cathedral community.
The Boy Bishop’s Feast: a Case-study in Church Attitudes towards Children in the High and Late Middle Ages
Authors: Shahar Shulamith
Published: March 2016

THE main sources for the boy bishop’s feast are available in print. These include sections in ceremonial- and service-books, cathedral statutes, councils’ decrees,compotus, that is, accounts of the gifts and offerings of money the boy bishop received, as well as his expenses, household books that include registrations of the expenses for the annual entertainment of the boy bishop and his retinue, as well as two sermons the boy bishop delivered. Chambers, in hisMedieval Stage, first published in 1903, dedicated a detailed description to the feast. A short reference to the feast appears in most research works on medieval schools and a number of articles have also been published on the subject. I’ll thus refer to the origins of the feast, but describe it only briefly, disregarding variations between places, and then turn to the subject of my paper: the boy bishop’s feast, as reflecting the image of childhood, attitudes towards childhood, and medieval educational conceptions. These are expressed in the feast itself and more clearly in the sermons written by adults to be delivered by the boy bishop.
Counter-Reformatory Theories of Upbringing in Italy
Authors: Logan Oliver
Published: March 2016

Italian churchmen from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries saw parents as playing a crucial role in forming new generations in the Catholic faith and thus as an indispensable support to the clergy. They stressed the importance of conditioning from the earliest years. They therefore emphasized parental, and more particularly paternal, authority. On the other hand, another major preoccupation was to prevent violation of the wills of young people with regard to religious vocations and marriage. A balance therefore had to be struck between paternal authority and the legitimate desires of young people who had attained the age of discretion. The matter of the all-importance of conditioning raises the question of our writers’ views of infant human nature. They emphasized to varying degrees the tractability of unformed infant nature and the need to curb unruly instincts, but by and large the emphasis was on nurture rather than on vitiated human nature, on formation rather than on repression.
The Bible for Children: the Emergence and Development of the Genre, 1550-1990
Authors: Bottigheimer Ruth B.
Published: March 2016

Books for children have existed for centuries. Their contents range from instructional manuals to flights of fancy. In children’s literature, a variety of narrative forms have emerged, developed, flowered, and faded, but one genre, Bible stories for children’s use, has remained in existence as long as print itself.
Perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon past in the tenth-century monastic reform movement
Authors: Coates Simon
Published: March 2016

Retrospection is a recognized characteristic of reform movements. An appeal to the past legitimates ideological concerns which seek to replace a state of affairs considered decadent and decayed. Reforming rhetoric depends on the past as a means of proving its value and credibility. Such preservation of the past as a key organizing principle in transforming events is necessarily selective and often has a tendency towards schematization and simplification. Not only does the reforming agenda determine what aspects of the past are remembered, and hence what aspects are buried, but it also determines who is responsible for the act of remembering itself. ‘Different groups of people remember things in different ways.’ The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which the Anglo-Saxon past was perceived and utilized during the tenth-century monastic reform movement. It will be shown how, under an influence which was heavily Benedictine in inspiration, the collective memory of monks created a picture of the Anglo-Saxon past which was ‘all of a piece and all monastic’. The past was closely linked to the exercise of power. It will thus be shown how this monastic view of the past competed with an alternative tenth-century view and was ultimately to triumph over its competitor.
Wyclif and the wheel of time
Authors: Wilks Michael
Published: March 2016

During the 1370s Wyclif wrote to defend a monarchy which made extensive use of bishops and other clergy in the royal administration and yet was faced with aristocratic factions encouraged by bishops like Wykeham and Courtenay who espoused papal supremacy, if not out of conviction, at least as a very convenient weapon to support their independence against royal absolutism. At first sight Wyclifs attempts to define the right relationship between royal and episcopal, temporal and spiritual, power seem as confused as the contemporary political situation. His works contain such a wide range of theories from orthodox two swords dualism to a radical rejection of ecclesiastical authority well beyond that of Marsilius and Ockham that it seems as if his only interest was in collecting every anti-hierocratic idea available for use against the papacy. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a much more coherent view of episcopal power can be detected beneath his tirades if it is appreciated that his continual demand for a great reform, areformatio regni et ecclesiae, is inseparably linked to his understanding of the history of the Christian Church, and that in this way Wyclif anticipates Montesquieu in requiring a time factor as a necessary ingredient in constitutional arrangements.
Theodolinda: the fifteenth-century recollection of a Lombard Queen
Authors: Martindale Andrew
Published: March 2016

This paper arises out of an art historian’s interest in the frescoes of ‘Queen Theodolinda’s chapel’ in the cathedral of Monza, executed c. 1444 by the brothers Zavattari. Although these paintings have aroused intense regional interest, outside Italy they are possibly less well-known than they deserve to be. They call forth the questions of how and why Theodolinda – a ‘barbarian’ queen who lived in the late sixth and early seventh centuries – could have come to assume such a central role for the church of Monza. The interpretation and re-interpretation of her story – perhaps the projection of the present back into the past? – offers an appropriate topic for the theme of ‘The Church Retrospective’.
Text before trowel: Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea revisited
Authors: Ditchfield Simon
Published: March 2016

Before returning home to his royal master, the ambassador of Poland went to say farewell to the reigning Pope, Pius V. They met in St Peter’s Square, where the ambassador asked for a relic to take back with him to Poland. In reply, the pontiff bent down and took earth from the square with both his hands and placed it in a handkerchief, before handing it to the understandably bemused Pole with the reassurance that this was no ordinary earth but that mixed with the blood of Christian martyrs (nobis notum omnino erat, Vaticanum pulverem Martyrum sanguine plenum esse). The earth then proceeded to bleed, staining the handkerchief to the wonder and amazement of all present.
Reconstructing the Reformation: F. D. Maurice, Luther, and Justification
Authors: Morris Jeremy
Published: March 2016

I know well the double danger of giving a mere dry summary of events, or of going into endless disquisitions. … But I do think both may be avoided if we seriously believe that our business is to study our records earnestly and devoutly; because they have a meaning in them which we may be helped to draw out; not because we must put a meaning into them.
The Oxford Movement in late-nineteenth-century retrospect: R. W. Church, J. H. Rigg, and Walter Walsh
Authors: Wellings Martin
Published: March 2016

Although over 160 years have passed since John Keble’s Assize sermon on National Apostasy, the study of the Oxford Movement continues to absorb the attention of historians. Within the last decade, for example, two major biographies of Newman have appeared, together with a careful examination of the relationship between Tractarianism and the Anglican High Church tradition. In an essay on ‘The Oxford Movement and its reminiscencers’, Owen Chadwick commented concerning the historiography of Tractarianism that ‘too many have made it an industry’: the industry, however, still seems to be productive.
Regendering Radegund? Fortunatus, Baudonivia and the Problem of Female Sanctity in Merovingian Gaul
Authors: Coates Simon
Published: March 2016

In the prologue of herDe vita sancti Radegundis, Baudonivia, an inhabitant of Radegund’s community of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, adopted a phrase from Venantius Fortunatus’Vita Hilariito express her unworthiness for the task: ‘I can as easily touch heaven with my fingers as perform the task you have imposed on me.’ Baudonivia, the first female hagiographer in Merovingian Gaul, was here drawing from theLifeof a male saint to introduce her work. She was thus, like all hagiographers, not alone in her task. This was doubly the case, since immediately prior to the composition of her own work Venantius Fortunatus had himself composed aVitaof the saint. Radegund was thus a focus of both male and female interest. This paper will examine the twoLivesfrom a gendered perspective, exploring the manner in which gender, a constructed rather than a physiological form of sexual differentiation, may illumine Radegund’s sanctity.
Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the Conduct Books of William Whately (1583–1639)
Authors: Eales Jacqueline
Published: March 2016

Conduct books, or household manuals offering advice about marriage and the ordering of domestic relationships, attained their greatest popularity in early modern England between the late sixteenth century and the Civil War. Many of these works, including William Whately’s popular A Bride-Bush, which ran into three editions between 1617 and 1623, and William Gouge’s influential Of Domesticall Duties, which first appeared in 1622, originated as sermons and were written by puritan preachers. They are also a valuable source of information about the construction of ideal masculine and feminine behaviour in the early modern period. At the start of A Bride-Bush, which was based on a marriage sermon, Whately asserted ‘I will make the ground of all my speech, those words of the Apostle Paul, Ephes. 5. 23. where hee saith, The Husband is the Wives head.’ Towards the end of the book he noted that the male sex is ‘preferred before the female in degree of place & dignity, as all men will yeeld that read what the Scriptures speake in that behalfe’.
Gender and the Clerical Profession in England, 1660–1850
Authors: Gregory Jeremy
Published: March 2016

The relationship between the two co-ordinates of this essay, ‘gender’ and ‘the clerical profession’, might be interpreted in a number of ways. It could, for instance, be taken to mean the manner in which clergy articulated and encouraged differences in gender roles. For it is certainly true that the most commonly quoted conduct books of the period – and especially those which prescribed roles for women – were written by the clergy. Clerics like James Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister in London, in his popularSermons to Young Women(1765) advised his presumed audience:
Ministerial Authority and Gender in Dutch Protestantism around 1800
Authors: Van Rooden Peter
Published: March 2016

In 1807 Carolus Boers published hisManual for Young Clergymen. He started this introduction to the ministry with an overview of prerequisites for theological students. Physical requirements come first. A strong body, a good voice, a hardy constitution are necessary. Bodily disfigurements will expose a minister to ridicule. A weak or sickly clergyman will perhaps be pitied, but certainly not respected by his flock. The body bearing these physical perfections is male. This, for Boers, went without saying. Dutch Protestants did not seriously discuss opening the ministry to women before the twentieth century; and even then it was solely the growing number of women having finished their studies in theology that made this an issue at all. The Dutch minister around 1800 was a man. Yet maleness is not the same thing as masculinity. What kind of man was the minister supposed to be?
From Private Counsellor to Public Church Politician – Three Female Expressions of Conservative, Urban Lutheranism in Western Sweden, 1810–1910
Authors: Jarlert Anders
Published: March 2016

During the nineteenth century, the High Church revival tradition initiated by Henric Schartau (1757-1825) was widely spread and accepted in western Sweden. According to Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury, Schartau ‘had something of the character of Dr. Pusey in his relation to those who consulted him, but, in his position at Lund, and his general influence, he was perhaps more like his English contemporary, Charles Simeon (1759-1836), at Cambridge’. Wordsworth found great merit in his teaching, being ‘strong and spiritual, and without the defects of Moravian or Pietistic sentimentality’. During his Scandinavian journey in 1889, Randall Davidson characterized the followers of Schartau as a High Church party in their emphasis on private confession and their strict rules of conduct. On the other hand he found them to be zealous about the Sabbath, and preaching conversion in a quasi-Methodist way. Here, we shall study this movement through the examples of three women of urban culture. The Schartau tradition has been studied mainly with emphasis on its doctrines and clergy, and as a rural tradition connected to the unchanging values and structures of the old rural society. Through these examples of urban women, the general impact of the tradition is widened, and the emphasis is put on the changes in reception of the tradition among lay people in a changing society.
‘She succeeds with cloudless brow …’ How Active was the Spirituality of Nonconformist Women in the Home during the Period 1825–75?
Authors: Wilson Linda
Published: March 2016

He role and place of women in the nineteenth century has been the subject of much recent debate. In their influential book, Family Fortunes, Davidoff and Hall traced the development of separate spheres, which, they argued, was linked to the process of industrialization and the emergence of the middle class during the period 1780–1850. They emphasised that both nonconformists and evangelical Anglicans had played a determining role in this development. Amanda Vickery, amongst others, has questioned this thesis. She believes that the premises are flawed, and that early modern studies have shown that neither industrialization, nor the development of separate spheres, can be located at the end of the eighteenth century. Additionally, Helsinger and others have pointed out that there was a contemporary debate over the issue of women, with several varieties of ideology under discussion. Whilst these criticisms of Davidoff and Hall need to be recognized, nevertheless, as Helsinger acknowledges, the ideal of the passive, home-based woman was a major influence in mid-nineteenth-century society.
Coronets and Altars: Aristocratic Women’s and Men’s Support for the Oxford Movement in Scotland during the 1840s
Authors: Strong Rowan
Published: March 2016

The Oxford Movement has been portrayed in its classic historiography as both clericalist and, in so far as all nineteenth-century Anglican clergy were male, a movement of masculine leadership and initiatives. This is not to deny that the movement was largely priest-led and therefore male in its leadership but ‘largely’ does not mean ‘exclusively’. By looking at the introduction of the Oxford Movement into Scotland, a neglected aspect of its dissemination can be restored, that is, the importance of the laity and of women in the spread of Tractarianism. In Scotland the initial impetus given to Oxford Movement ideals and projects lay not with the clergy but with the aristocratic laity. It also was not the preserve of men, for among its first great supporters in Scotland was a woman, Cecil Chetwynd, widow of John William Robert Kerr, seventh Marquess of Lothian. She would become one of the leading Scottish Tractarians during the 1840s until her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1851 as a consequence of the Gorham judgement.
The Song of Songs and the Liturgy of the velatio in the Fourth Century: from Literary Metaphor to Liturgical Reality
Authors: Henry Nathalie
Published: March 2016

Jerome and Ambrose often quote from the Song of Songs in their ascetic treatises. The writings of Ambrose on virginity contain no fewer than 130 quotations from or allusions to the poem. Jerome’s letter 22 to the young virgin Eustochium includes around thirty references to it. It seems paradoxical for the Fathers to use the erotic images of the Song of Songs to encourage young women to keep their virginity. How can we explain this phenomenon?

Were the Fathers simply seduced by the nuptial images of the poem? If so, Ambrose and Jerome were not the first. Before them Methodius of Olympus and Athanasius had already applied the Song of Songs to virginal life: Methodius in his Symposium and Athanasius in his letters to virgins. Another possibility is that Ambrose and Jerome quote from the Song of Songs because the poem was used in the consecration of virgins in their day. This is the question which is discussed below.
The Carolingian Liturgical Experience
Authors: Bullough Donald
Published: March 2016

The Carolingian Liturgical Experience’ may well seem, and indeed is, a recklessly broad topic for a single paper. ‘Experience of the Liturgy in the Carolingian Period: some questions and not many answers’ might be truer but not necessarily better. So I stay, uneasily, with my original title.
Transcendence and Community in Zwinglian Worship: the Liturgy of 1525 in Zurich
Authors: Gordon Bruce
Published: March 2016

Iconoclasm, rather than liturgical formulation, usually springs to mind when one reflects upon the events in Zurich in the mid-1520s. Indeed, historians of the Swiss Reformation have hardly interested themselves in liturgy, and one searches in vain the most recent and comprehensive treatment of Zwingli’s theology for a discussion of the subject. Ignored by both historians and theologians, the study of liturgy in the Swiss Reformation cuts the figure of the unknown guest at a party who everyone assumes is being entertained by someone else. The consequence has been that liturgy has not been allowed to inform our understanding of Swiss religious change; historians have preferred to leave it in the safe keeping of liturgists who, for the most part, have attended to the history of worship as a separate and distinct act of the community controlled by the clergy. This, surely, can only form part of the picture, for liturgy was perhaps the most inclusive act of the Church: worship was experienced by all levels of society, even if the people brought and took away a panoply of varied levels of comprehension and acceptance. As the central, public act of the Church, the early liturgies of the Reformation articulated the tangled web of convictions, needs, and requirements of communities in transition. Liturgies cannot be separated from either the beliefs which created them or the physical space in which they were performed. The ordered rhythm of words and actions in a particular locality was intended to engage the intellect and senses, drawing out responses at once emotional and cognitive. If we can glimpse something of the experience of worship, whether positive or negative, we shall have an insight into the mental world of the early Reformation.
Evaluating Liturgical Continuity and Change at the Reformation: a Case Study of Thomas Müntzer, Martin Luther, and Thomas Cranmer
Authors: Spinks Bryan D.
Published: March 2016

In his now classic work,The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945, the Anglican Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix, was concerned to demonstrate that in the origin and development of the eucharistic liturgy, and underneath the verbal differences, the cultural diversity, and the growth of the centuries, a particular unchanging core shape could be identified. His study was primarily concerned with the eucharist from its institution in the New Testament to the sixth century, and it was not his intention in that work to survey in any depth the later medieval developments, East or West, or the Reformation. Nevertheless, as an Anglican in the Anglo-Catholic tradition Dix felt obliged to use his findings of the earlier period to embark upon a not too subtle criticism of the sixteenth-century Reformation liturgies, and particularly those revisions of his own denomination instigated and presided over by Thomas Cranmer. For Dix, the later medieval liturgical development saw a shift of emphasis to an unhealthy preoccupation with the Passion, and was brought to its logical unfortunate conclusion in the rites of the Reformation. With reference to Cranmer, Dix could thus write: ‘With an inexcusable suddenness, between a Saturday night and a Monday morning at Pentecost 1549, the English liturgical tradition of nearly a thousand years was altogether overturned.’ We should note the phrase, ‘inexcusable suddenness’. When combined with rhetoric such as ‘a horrible story all round’ and ‘enforcement by penal statutes of a novel liturgy’, it is clear that Dix was using a different set of criteria from earlier Anglican apologists. Compare Jeremy Taylor in 1658, who wrote: ‘the Liturgy of the Church of England hath advantages so many and so considerable as not onely to raise it self above the devotions of other Churches, but to endear the affections of good people to be in love with liturgy in general.’
Giving Tridentine Worship back its History
Authors: Ditchfield Simon
Published: March 2016

Question: What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist?

Answer: You can negotiate with a terrorist!

As well-known, humour - by juxtaposing like with unlike - can make a serious point, concisely and memorably, and this quip, too, has a serious import. To begin with, the source for this joke was an Oratorian priest As will become clear, this is of more than passing significance - aside, that is, from the fact that their founder, St Philip Neri was well-known for his use of humour to mortify the spirit of his favourite disciples. For my principal concern in this paper is with ecclesiastical erudition (something of an Oratorian speciality during this period) and its relationship to the shape, content, and practice of Christian worship.
From David’s Psalms to Watts’s Hymns: the Development of Hymnody among Dissenters following the Toleration Act
Authors: Wykes David L.
Published: March 2016

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing has been described as one of the greatest contributions made by dissent to English worship. Yet, with the exception of specialist studies by hymnologists, church historians have largely ignored eighteenth-century hymns and hymn-singing, though it is clear they represented a powerful and popular source of contemporary religious expression. Hymns, that is compositions which depart too far from Scripture to be called paraphrases, have been one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence. The only recent academic studies have been in English Literature, where hymns have been examined as literary texts for their poetic value. As a consequence neither the historical context of the development of the hymn in the decades following the 1689 Toleration Act, nor the liturgical significance of their introduction to public worship, has been addressed.