bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Roman books and Carolingian renovatio
Authors: Bullough D. A.
Published: March 2016

Jean Mabillon’s incidental treatment in his De re diplomatica of the lead bulla of an emperor Charles with the reverse legend Renovatio Roman. Imp. gives no inkling of the reputation it was to acquire in later historiography of the Carolingian empire. Mabillon himself favoured an attribution to Charles the Fat, although between the publication of the first and supplementary volumes of his epoch-making work it had been correctly attributed to the first Charles by the numismatist François Le Blanc. Without these early publications, modern discussion of early Carolingian imperial and renaissance ideology might have been deprived of one of its key texts: for the bull was already in a much damaged condition in the late-nineteenth century and both sides are now almost completely illegible. Its uniqueness, and the great rarity of the ‘imperial bust’ coins which are icono-graphically linked with it, invite us to consider whether the slogans and images of a ‘renewed Roman empire’ were known to more than a privileged few in Charlemagne’s lifetime: even so, if the Annales Mettenses, completed in 805, have been rightly interpreted, someone in the court circle had felt the need to appease critics by emphasising the strictly-Frankish roots of his imperial authority at the same time as the dies of the new coins were being prepared.
Some heretical attitudes to the renewal of the church
Authors: Moore R. I.
Published: March 2016

For the most part the authors of the few lurid and fragmentary accounts we have of eleventh and early twelfth-century heretics concentrated almost exclusively on their virulent denunciations of the church, its authority, its sacraments and its priests. Consequently such success as they had has generally been explained in negative terms as the exploitation of anti-clerical sentiment arising from resentment of the church’s corruption on the one hand and the extension of its claims on the other, or as the embrace of alien doctrines imported from outside western christendom. That the second explanation is no longer held to apply before the middle of the twelfth century makes it the more necessary to ask again whether the ability of extremely varied manifestations of religious dissent to attract support in many places did not imply the existence of some positive alternative to orthodoxy, some conception of what a church might be, or what its renewal should involve.
Old wine in new bottles: attitudes to reform in fifteenth-century England
Authors: Baker Derek
Published: March 2016

Wherever one turns in the pages of those who have written about the later medieval church there are reminiscences of Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’:

Shape without form, shade without colourParalysed force, gesture without motion

As Knowles put it, ‘by and large the whole body ecclesiastic was lukewarm’, adding of monasticism in particular that ‘it had little warmth to spare for others’. It was, he commented elsewhere, ‘an age of waning fervour’ - ‘the rhythm of life becomes universally slower, and scarcely any new feature appears until the abrupt end’. To other less compelling and considered writers it has been all too easy to characterise these waning medieval years simply as ones of ‘inevitable decline’, the retreat of the spiritual tide proceeding unchecked by the vain efforts of even the most able and dedicated men of the period to halt its recession - ‘it was his misfortune’, it has been said of Marmaduke Huby, one of the major English monastic figures of the period, ‘to be born at a time when ideals were at a low ebb, when the spirit of monasticism had grown languid and when material preoccupations demanded far too much attention’. There is little to be gained from such generalised speculation, which, if the subject of the passage was not known, could readily be ascribed, with equal non-validity, to almost any period in monastic history. Nonetheless, it remains true that the particular circumstances of church and society in the fifteenth century placed massive obstacles in the way of men like Huby, and there is ample evidence of the difficulties with which they had to contend.
The origins of the so-called regius professorships: an aspect of the renaissance in Oxford and Cambridge
Authors: Logan F. Donald
Published: March 2016

The universities at Oxford and Cambridge constituted two of the principal foci for the forces favouring renewal in sixteenth-century England. The towering personalities of John Fisher and Erasmus of Rotterdam set the goal of loosening the bonds of the traditional pedagogy and curriculum. The establishment of new foundations such as, at Cambridge, Christ College and, even more immediately, St John’s College and, at Oxford, Corpus Christi College and Cardinal College provided an institutional framework for the new learning. So, too, did the provisions for new ‘professorships’—the term will be used for the moment.
The Church’s Military Service in the Ninth Century: A Contemporary Comparative View?
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

‘Comparisons are odorous’. Modern historians, far from sharing Dogberry’s repugnance, have found the scent of the comparative method irresistible. ‘Perhaps even the future of our discipline’ depended on its pursuit, wrote Marc Bloch in 1928. Since then, comparison has become fashionable enough, and hardly remarkable in our contemporaries’ work. Remarkable it certainly is, however, in the ninth century. I would like to begin by quoting a passage written in 857 or 858 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims:

In the regions [of the English] the bishoprics and monasteries are not so endowed with ecclesiastical property as they are in these Gallic regions; and for this reason, military services are not rendered from the bishoprics of those [English] regions, but [instead] the costs of rewarding those who fight (stipendia militiae) are allocated from public resources (ex roga publica). Here, on the other hand, in our regions, our clergy, instead of being given a fourth part of the bishopric’s income from renders and offerings, have an appropriate share (pars congrua) assigned them; then another share is assigned for lighting of churches, and another share goes to the hospices for the poor; but then a share goes to the fighting-men who are listed under the name of ‘housed ones’ (casati); and finally a share goes to the bishop and those who are under his direct command. Thus, at the dictate of necessity and the urging of reason, the rulers of provinces and churches have established customary arrangements appropriate to the respective qualities of provinces and quantities of church property.
Monasteries as ‘War Memorials’: Battle Abbey and La Victoire
Authors: Hallam Elizabeth M.
Published: March 2016

Charters, Chronicles and letters which record the foundation of religious houses in the period 1050–1250 abound in the images of both war and peace. Whereas king Henry I of England, a military leader of renown, founded an abbey at Cirencester for the repose of his soul and the stability of his realm, Bernard of Clairvaux, that celebrated man of religion, wrote of the new Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx as an outpost of his lord which he proposed to occupy. The juxtaposition of such conflicting ideas is epitomised by the military orders, formed to fight holy wars against the infidel; and a logical symbol of the triumph of Christianity is the foundation of a monastery such as Louis IX’s Franciscan friary at Jaffa, created in 1252 after the capture of this Moslem stronghold, or the building of Alcobaça by Alphonso I of Portugal (c1153) after his great victory over the Moors at Santaren.
Christian Pacifism in the Era of Two World Wars
Authors: Ceadel Martin
Published: March 2016

‘Whenever the actual historical situation sharpens the issue, the debate whether the Christian Church is, or ought to be, pacifist, is carried on with fresh vigour both inside and outside the Christian community.’ Thus wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, the American commentator on Christian ethics, in 1940, having himself been converted first to pacifism and then back again in the course of the interwar period. Final agreement in this debate is, of course, improbable. But this paper will argue that the Christian cases for pacifism and non-pacifism alike were clarified, at least in Britain and for several decades, by the extraordinary ‘sharpening’ of the issue afforded by the ‘actual historical situation’ in the era of the two world wars. The shock of the first world war produced unprecedented support for Christian pacifism; and the aggressions of the 1930s, culminating in the crisis of 1940–1 when Britain faced the possibility of invasion and defeat, provided a series of tests which only the most rigorously thought-out version of that faith could survive—but, having survived them, it could survive anything.
Anglicans, Puritans and American Indians: Persecution or Toleration?
Authors: Porter H. C.
Published: March 2016

‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mark 16: 15). Modern historians find it fashionable to categorise Missions as examples of Cultural Conflict. Members of the ethnohistorical school—concerned especially with the meeting and blending of Indian and European ways of life—present Conversion as a species of Persecution: an infringement of Indian human rights, an exercise in ethnocentrism or exploitative capitalism—part of the Cant of Conquest. Conversion—the colonialisation of a native belief system—means ‘acculturation’, ‘deculturation’, or tragic ‘despiritualisation’. Accounts of the relation between Indians and English colonists in colonial North America take a hint from the complaint of Roger Williams of Rhode Island, writing in 1654 to the authorities of Massachusetts about the destructive wars, cruel and unnecessary, against the tribes of New England. Christianity means conquest, harsh and brutal. Some of this emphasis on atrocities may spring from historians’ indignation at Christian activities apparently so alien to the Sermon on the Mount.
Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate
Authors: Worden Blair
Published: March 2016

Toleration is a Victorian subject, a monument to Victorian liberalism. ‘To us who have been educated in the nineteenth century’, proclaimed F. A. Inderwick in his book on the Interregnum, ‘any declaration inconsistent with religious toleration would be abhorrent and inadmissible’. His sentiment would not have seemed controversial to a generation raised on such best-selling works as Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England and Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism. It may be that the Victorians, enquiring into the origins of the toleration which they had achieved, were prone to congratulate the past on becoming more like the present. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when interest in the subject was perhaps at its peak, we can also detect, in the statements on toleration of a Creighton or a Figgis, a fear that the present might become more like the past: that materialism and religious indifference might destroy the moral foundations of toleration, and foster a new barbarism which would persecute Christians afresh.
‘No Law Would be Granted Us’: Institutional Protestantism and the problem of Catholic poverty in England 1839–42
Authors: Connolly Gerard
Published: March 2016

After the Rebellion (of 1745) a soldier, on return from Manchester, called at Stretford and tarried at a public house. A man who was a bitter enemy to my parents because they were Papists, dropt into the soldier’s company, and they drank till they were intoxicated. The man told the soldier that if he would go to my father’s house, and demand a sum of money he might have it because we were Papists and no law would be granted us. The soldier came and without apology entered the house. Providentially my father was from home, or it would have cost him his life. The soldier having loaded his fire-lock, clapped it to my mother’s breast and demanded money…. As the soldier was putting the money into his pocket my mother laid hold of the fire-lock, and giving it to me, I immediately ran away and hid it. She then seized the robber by the collar of his coat and shook him, tho’ he was a lusty man and thrusting him out of the door locked it. My father came home and procured a constable to apprehend the soldier and he was brought to our house; but upon acknowledging his fault and returning the money, he was dismissed.
Multum ieiunantes et se castigantes: medieval Waldensian Asceticism
Authors: Biller Peter
Published: March 2016

The first half of a recently published book describes Waldensianism in the Cottian alps c. 1500. The author decides to pass over both the Waldensian preachers, whom I shall call ‘Brothers’, and their literature. He argues that there is insufficient trial evidence about the Brothers, and that in any case their ‘ascetic detachment from society’ would have made it unlikely that they would have had much influence among peasant Waldensians. Their books were only uncertainly Waldensian, he says, and there is little evidence of their actual use. In the resulting picture of Waldensianism as a popular, rural, lay movement asceticism plays no special part, though there is some question of a Waldensian sense of moral superiority.
Puritan Asceticism and the Type of Sacrifice
Authors: Hardman Susan
Published: March 2016

The sacrificial rites of the Old Testament are ‘neither dark nor dumb, but mystical and significant, and fit to stir up the dull mind of man to the remembrance of his duty before God.’ So preached a nonconformist, Samuel Mather, in the 1660s, recalling with a deliberate or unconscious twist a phrase used in the Book of Common Prayer to defend contemporary rites of which he disapproved. The Reformation that set aside the ascetic ideal of monasticism also saw a revaluation of the place of sacrifice in the life of the Church. While its role in Protestant activity was diminished by the rejection of the Mass as a propitiatory act, teaching about the priesthood of all believers prepared for a new emphasis on the devotion and duty of Christians as ‘spiritual sacrifice’; an emphasis informed in puritanism by lessons from the types of the Old Testament. Much is known about puritan religious practice; and of puritan interest in typology, stimulated by Calvin’s conviction of the unity of the Old and New Testaments – the same covenant present in each, accommodated to the capacity of a ‘Church under age’ in Israel. But familiar themes combined can give fresh perspectives: here their combination illustrates one of the ways in which the ascetic ideal was being reformulated among protestants of the third and fourth generation in seventeenth-century England. Sacrifice was not often a dominant theme in their description of the Christian life, and yet, despite an untidiness of evidence, it is clear that certain allusions to Israelite sacrifice were conventional, part of a common rhetoric, a common and powerful imagery. Some representative examples of the conventions follow, organised around simple questions. What were ‘spiritual sacrifices’ and what practical exercises of devotion and discipline were associated with them? By what means and in what manner should they be offered?
Self-Denial and the Free Churches: some literary responses
Authors: Keep David
Published: March 2016

The ascetic ideal found in wandering holy men in the east and in the self- and world-denying vows of regular clergy and laity in the middle ages came down to English nonconformity through puritanism. Bunyan’s pilgrim, like Benedict and Francis was passing through a temporary and evil world. Their attitude to life was that of the Sermon on the Mount, on the lips of the shepherd lad:
‘I am content with what I have,Little be it, or much.‘

Wesley blended the high Anglican discipline of Jeremy Taylor and the Oxford Holy Club with his field evangelism and exhorted his Methodists to ‘Gain all you can; save all you can; then give all all you can.’ The gain was to be without doing harm to anyone. The Methodist was ‘to despise delicacy and variety, and be content with what plain nature requires.’ He was to ‘waste no part of it … in costly pictures, painting, gilding, books; in elegant rather than useful gardens.’ The Methodist was to avoid sensuality, curiosity and vanity. Wesley’s sermon on ‘The use of money’ is regularly quoted and is required reading for every Methodist preacher.
The Two Jurisdictions: Theological and Legal Justifications of Church Property in the Thirteenth Century
Authors: Coleman Janet
Published: March 2016

With the revival of Roman and the development of canon law in the twelfth century a doctrine of supreme and universal jurisdiction began to be expounded with increasing vigour by the papacy. By the thirteenth century those learned in Roman and canon law began to distinguish in more subtle ways between jurisdiction on the one hand and holy orders on the other; between the capacity to make law and to discover law; between legislating and adjudicating; and, most importantly, between ruling and owning. Jurisdiction had become one of a cluster of terms used to define aspects of rulership, authority, prelacy, and imperium. It combined the idea of rightful administration with the legitimate and authoritative use of coercive force.
‘Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy’s Wealth’: Pecock’s Exculpation of Ecclesiastical Endowment
Authors: Foss David B.
Published: March 2016

The life and works of Reginald Pecock continue to fascinate, though they are a well-reaped field from which little new can be gleaned. Students of Pecock have naturally concentrated on the sensational and significant aspects of his career and writings: political historians on his trial and deposition, and the political motivations which may have lain behind these; ecclesiastical historians, following Gascoigne, on his defence of the abuses of the late-medieval Church, especially of non-preaching and non-resident bishops. Historians of thought have seen a modern rationalist exalting thejudgement of reason above the dogmas of Faith and Scripture. Historians of doctrine have been concerned by his rewriting of the Apostles’ Creed, omitting the descent into hell. Biblical historians have questioned whether he used the later Lollard Bible, or undertook his own translation of the Vulgate. Protestant historians have with Foxe claimed as their own a bishop whose attack on the Lollards paradoxically demonstrated his close affinity with them; the less evangelically committed have praised a tolerant protagonist anxious to enter into dialogue with his opponents rather than to coerce them with ‘fire, sword or hangment’. Historiographers have welcomed a scholar possessed of a Renaissance sense of history. Linguistic historians have detailed his contribution to the development of the English language by his pioneering use of it as a vehicle for theological assertion.
Conformist Clericalism? Richard Bancroft’s Analysis of the Socio-economic Roots of Presbyterianism
Authors: Lake Peter
Published: March 2016

If the English Reformation can be seen as an extended transaction between the laity and the clergy, then its outcome is surely well described, in Claire Cross’s phrase, as the ‘triumph of the laity’. While most Elizabethan Protestant divines were more than happy about the spiritual aspects of that triumph, they were altogether less enthusiastic about its impact on the standing of the clergy. Certainly the independence, status, and thus the material wealth of the clergy were subjects of concern for many Elizabethan Protestants. Presbyterians, moderate Puritans, conformists, both ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, all were much exercised by the problem of the status and financial independence of the clerical estate. But while they may have shared a common concern with the question, the different priorities and values which divided Elizabethan Protestant divines amongst themselves inevitably coloured their attitude to church property and clerical status. In particular the issue provided a central strand in the polemical exchange between Presbyterians and conformists, as each tried to label the other as the clergy’s own worst enemy in its protracted, indeed interminable, negotiations with lay society for improved pay and conditions.
The Stewardship of Resources: Financial Strategies of Roman Catholics in the Glasgow District, 1800–70
Authors: McCaffrey John F.
Published: March 2016

Too much of this world’s goods has traditionally been regarded as detrimental to Christians. But the experiences of a small, poor area like the Western District of the Scottish Roman Catholic Mission from the 1800s to the 1860s show that religion can become entangled with worldly questions of money through arguments over how to spend scarce resources. Scottish bishops in order to make the most effective use of the meagre funds they had (derived from grants from Rome, bequests and donations from laymen, and loans secured on church buildings) were forced to operate as bankers as well as pastors. Like bankers they had to provide stability and protect existing funds; at the same time they had to expand their credit basis laying out speculatively what they could to create new congregations, hoping that these new resource centres would, through their contributions, pay off the interest on the loans raised to erect their chapels. - Like all banking systems everything ultimately depended on credit and credibility, not only on trustworthiness, but also shrewd and cautious business management to keep the web of such monies as they had utilized to best advantage.
‘The Miser of Headingley’: Robert Arthington and the Baptist Missionary Society, 1877–1900
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: March 2016

A gravestone in a Teignmouth cemetery displays the following inscription:

Robert Arthington

Born at Leeds                 May 20th, 1823

Died at Teignmouth       Oct. 9th, 1900

His life and his wealth were devoted to the spread of the Gospel among the Heathen.

That unassuming epitaph bears testimony to one of the most remarkable figures in the story of Victorian missionary expansion. The missionary movement from both Britain and North America depended for its regular income on the enthusiasm of the small-scale contributor, but the munificence of the wealthy was essential to the financing of special projects or the opening up of new fields. The role of, for example, the jam manufacturer William Hartley as treasurer of the Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, or of the chemical manufacturers James and John Campbell White in providing much of the finance for the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia Mission, is relatively well known.
Broadfield Revisited: Some Scottish Catholic Responses to Wealth, 1918–40
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: March 2016

You do need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilization’, wrote G. K. Chesterton. ‘It does really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think Glasgow is a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved, and while I was in Glasgow I shared the illusion.’ The industrial dream suited the Scots. Here was a really romantic vista suited to a romantic people. On a visit in 1919, Eric Gill was far more pointed: ‘Love God and do what you will’ would never lead you to a life in Glasgow. On one of his many visits, Rev. Vincent McNabb, the Dominican, declared a walk through the Glasgow slums demonstrated the futility of the money standard of civilization. Only a return to the land could bring real wealth and contentment. In similar vein John Ruskin and his active local following in the city confidently awaited the collapse of industrialism. William Cassels, the President of the Glasgow Ruskin Society, championed these ideas in lectures, pamphlets, and reading guilds. Impressed by Rerum Novarum and associated with local Catholics in the Single Tax movement, he and a socialist friend had spent some time with Edward Carpenter’s communal land experiment. Glasgow, the Second City of the Empire and the epitome of the Victorian acquisitive society, had a remarkably prolific record in spawning alternative social visions. Catholics were to draw on these native experiences and their own traditions in founding the Scottish Land Colonisation Association. Rev. Professor John McQuillan was their inspiration. Their farm, Broadfield, Symington, Lanarkshire, was a practical statement about their attitudes to wealth.
Liberation Theology: the Option for the Poor
Authors: Hebblethwaite Peter
Published: March 2016

One fairly obvious difference between this paper and those you have heard so far is that liberation theology, whatever it means, is still being discussed, attacked, caricatured, and defended with great vehemence and passion. The theme does not possess the completeness and neatness that historians prefer. It sprawls and proliferates. The bibliography is immense. We have already reached the stage of the overarching survey. D. W. Ferm has provided a 150-page summary with a helpful ‘reader’ for the use of college students. Ferm’s survey includes African and Asian theologians as well as Latin Americans. I can understand his desire to include Archbishop-elect Desmond Tutu in South Africa and to provide some hints as to why President Marcos could be deposed in the Philippines. And there is indeed a body called the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians—its unfortunate acronym is EATWOT—which gives some substance to this universalizing claim. But I am going to confine myself to Latin America because it was there that the ‘option for the poor’ was first spoken about. The date was 1968. CELAM, the regional association of Latin American Bishops, met at Medellin in Colombia in August. Pope Paul VI was present, and was the first Pope to kiss the soil of Latin America. There was a feeling abroad that at the Second Vatican Council, which had ended three years before, an essentially European agenda concerned typically with ecumenism and Church structures (collegiality) had prevailed; the Council had yet to be ‘applied’ to the Latin American situation. One phrase, however, provided a stimulus and a starting-point. Gaudium etSpes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the World of Today, begins with the ringing assertion that ‘the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this time, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties, of the followers of Christ’.
Popular Protestantism in Ulster in the Post-Rebellion Period, c1790-1810
Authors: Hill Myrtle
Published: March 2016

Popular Protestantism in Ulster in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, characterized by variety and liveliness, was directly related to events of more immediate national significance. While remaining a mere undercurrent in Irish affairs, Ulster evangelicalism in this important transitional period—shaped and moulded by the rebellion, the Act of Union, and the rise of a more articulate and assertive Catholicism—laid the foundations of a scripture-based, politically conservative Protestantism, which continues to influence the province’s social and political development.
The Demographic Impact of Irish Immigration on Birmingham Catholicism 1800-1850
Authors: Champ Judith F.
Published: March 2016

The Birmingham congregation suggests what Manchester Catholicism might have looked like if Irish immigration had been a fraction of what it was.’ This remark of John Bossy points in the direction of a different view of the impact of Irish migration on urban Catholic congregations in England from that which has become familiar. The relationship between Irish and English Catholic population growth in Birmingham before 1850 was not straightforward and led consequently to an interesting pattern of social and religious interaction. What Birmingham illustrates in the period up to 1850 is the effect of relatively modest Irish immigration into an English Catholic congregation already well advanced in prosperity and organization. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Birmingham Catholicism was not over whelmingly Irish, but the reception of the Irish had significant demographic and social effects on the congregation. These can be used to highlight and illustrate urban Catholic population structure, industrial enterprise, and quasi-parochial organization.
The Irish Abroad: Michael Condon in Scotland, 1845-1878
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: March 2016

In May 1859, a beautifully printed card urging Revd Michael Condon to visit ‘La Plus Belle Dame de Greenock’ dropped through his letterbox. He had just arrived that day in his new parish of Cartsdyke. Given the prejudice encountered, the appalling living conditions, and the endless demands on him and his fellow clergy, their resistance to such charms seems remarkable. The Irish were allegedly ‘liars, blasphemous, ignorant, lying, thieving etc.’ And that was a Scottish priest speaking. Not surprisingly Condon could write to a Scottish priest. ‘I cannot wonder that being treated like a dog by your confrere, I should be classed among dogs by yourself.’
Popular Catholicism in Irish New York, c1900
Authors: McLeod Hugh
Published: March 2016

In 1905 was published one of the most interesting books ever written about New York. It was a study by Elsa Herzfeld of twenty-four working-class families living on Manhattan’s West Side. All too briefly, yet with many tantalizing quotations and anecdotes, she discussed a whole series of themes that most previous students of New York life had taken for granted, or perhaps regarded as too trivial to be worth recording: the pictures people had on their walls, the music they liked, relations between spouses and between parents and children, beliefs about good and bad luck, funeral customs, and attitudes to physicians and hospitals. The families all included at least two generations, the older of which was predominantly European born. Most were of Irish or German descent. The purpose of the volume was to identify the distinguishing characteristics of what it termed Tenement-House Man’. There is thus a tendency to stress what is common to the families studied, and to suggest a shared pattern of life. Time and time again, though, there are hints that religion was a differentiating factor within this allegedly homogeneous culture. In particular there are frequent references to Catholics as in some sense a group apart—a very large group apart, as they made up about 40 per cent of the city’s population at that time.
The Elephant of Christ: Reynald of Châtillon
Authors: Hamilton Bernard
Published: March 2016

It is written in the Koran:Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with thearmy of the Elephant?Did he not cause their strategem to miscarry?

Historically the Elephant was the Christian king of Ethiopia who attacked Mecca in 570, but some twelfth-century Moslems considered that this sura was a prophetic reference to Reynald of Châtillon, who was singled out as the chief enemy of Islam.
Saints and Doctors in the Early Byzantine Empire: The Case of Theodore of Sykeon
Authors: Horden Peregrine
Published: March 2016

‘Have done with doctors. Don’t fall into their clutches: you will get no help from them. Be satisfied with this prayer and blessing and you will be completely restored to health.’ Theodore of Sykeon’s obloquy and exhortation find numerous parallels in the social history of early Byzantine medicine. The hostility of holy men to doctors is a familiar theme. Less familiar may be that delegation of responsibility and spirit of cooperation suggested by another passage in theLifeof Theodore:

Again, if any required medical treatment for certain illnesses, or surgery or a purging draught or hot springs, this God-inspired man would prescribe the appropriate remedy to each like an experienced doctor trained in the art. He might recommend one to have recourse to surgery and would always state clearly which doctor he should employ. In other cases he would dissuade those who wished to have an operation or to undergo some other medical treatment, and would recommend rather that they should visit hot springs, and would name the springs to which they should go.
‘Rocamadour in Quercy above all other Churches’: The Healing of Henry II.
Authors: Mason Emma
Published: March 2016

In the month of September (1170), King Henry fell sick almost to the point of death, at La Mote de Gerin (near Domfront). But by the divine mercy, and the supplication of the servants of God, to Whom he humbly commended himself... he recovered his health ... Then (he) travelled to Rocamadour to pray, This place, in the district of Quercy, is encircled by mountains and horrible wilderness.... King Henry, travelling hither in order to pray, as we said, gathered a great company of armed men, both cavalry and footsoldiers, since he was approaching the lands of his enemies, (and) came to pray equipped as though for battle, doing harm to no-one, (but) providing generously for all, and especially for the poor, with alms.

This account of Henry II’s pilgrimage to Rocamadour comes from Robert de Torigny, a well-informed contemporary, hence the significance of the details which he included. From Domfront, on the frontiers of Normandy, the king travelled hundreds of kilometres to the south.
Doctors, Demons and Early Methodist Healing
Authors: Rack Henry D.
Published: March 2016

Methodist historians have naturally tended to emphasise the reasonableness and sobriety of their founder and his followers, the social as well as the spiritual benefits they produced. The elements of irrationality and what some will see as religious hysteria in the movement have been played down. Non-methodists have been less reticent. Methodist ‘enthusiasm’ was a popular target in the eighteenth century and the charges made, however one-sided and exaggerated, had a solid basis in fact. They were to be repeated with varying degrees of distaste and disapproval by writers such as Southey; or in more balanced accounts like that of Lecky. Even the sympathetic Alexander Knox who had known Wesley personally, perceptively remarked that ‘he would have been an enthusiast if he could’. Ronald Knox suspected that the rational controls in Wesley’s mind were only superficial: he was easily swayed on supernatural phenomena ‘when the evidence supported views which he wanted to be true’. A taste for religious excitement and credulity about the supernatural were often even more marked among his followers, especially the ordinary membership.
Bishop Milner, Holywell, and the Cure Tradition
Authors: Champ Judith F.
Published: March 2016

In September 1805 bishop John Milner, Vicar Apostolic of the midland district, published an account of the Miraculous cure of Winefrid White in which he concluded that ‘This is the finger of God Exod 8:19, and that even in this age of domineering vice and incredulity, God hath not left himself without testimony Acts 14:16, or to speak in plain terms that an Evident Miracle has been wrought among us’.

Milner’s clear and public conviction about whatever happened at Holywell in the summer of 1805 leads us to enquire about the catholic tradition of miraculous cures in post-Reformation England, and about the possibility of such matters playing a part in the revival of English catholic life. The positive and concerned investigation by the local bishop also indicates something of the changing nature of episcopal duty and responsibility in the early nineteenth century. There are obviously the usual questions about truth and falsehood, physical and psychosomatic recovery, which any ‘cure’ provokes, but the case of Winefrid White is far more interesting in terms of what it tells us about the persistence and recovery of certain catholic traditions.
Shrines, Pilgrimage and Miraculous Powers in Roman Catholic Sri Lanka
Authors: Stirrat R. L.
Published: March 2016

At present, roman catholics number just under 7% of the total population of Sri Lanka. The dominant religious groups in the country are the Sinhalese buddhists and the Tamil hindus with 65% and 25% respectively of the population. The remainder consists of muslims (around 7%) and a few protestants. Here, unlike sub-Saharan Africa, European religions were introduced into a context dominated by other world religions with long literary and intellectual traditions. Furthermore, religion enters so intimately into the culture of various groups in the island that it is difficult to demarcate an area of thought or activity which can be clearly labelled as ‘religious’.
Fulk of Toulouse: the escape that failed
Authors: Bolton Brenda
Published: March 2016

Elo dozes sera Folquetz deMarseilla, us mercadairetzque a fait un fol sagramenquan juret que chansos no fetzet anz dizon que fo per vetzqe·s perjuret son escienAnd the twelfth one will be Fulk ofMarseille, a merchant of importanceWho made an oath so madAnd swore his songs no more to writeThis seemed to all to be in true sincerityWhen he so consciously forswore.

This short piece of a contemporary troubadour’s song makes a suitable introduction to Fulk of Toulouse who was first a jongleur and troubadour, a citizen and merchant and later in life a monk and bishop. Underlying most of this varied career was a desire on Fulk’s part to retreat from the world in order to achieve the vita apostolica.
Ecclesiastical attitudes to novelty c. 1100 – c. 1250
Authors: Smalley Beryl
Published: March 2016

Novelty in this paper refers to a new idea or institution. I shall not distinguish between religious, social and political novelties, since medieval churchmen did not do so. The church concerned herself with every aspect of Christian life: any change in men’s way of living affected her either directly or indirectly and generally the former.

I shall begin by quoting four examples of attitudes to novelty. My first two come from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. One will illustrate an attitude to new ideas, the second to a new institution. The distinction is artificial, but convenient. Men normally think up ideas in order to justify or criticise institutions. First listen to an anonymous opponent of Manegold of Lautenbach. Manegold contributed an extremist theory to papal polemic in the gregorian reform movement in order to explain and justify Gregory’s action in declaring the emperor Henry IV deposed and absolving subjects from their oath of allegiance (1085).
The alien priories and the expulsion of aliens from England in 1378
Authors: McHardy A. K.
Published: March 2016

The expulsion of aliens from England in 1378 forms one episode in the history of the alien priories, a story which began with the norman conquest and continued into the fifteenth century. The alien priories—they may be defined as the english dependencies of foreign religious houses—had been subjected to interference from the english crown since 1295, when Edward I’s seizure of them on the outbreak of the anglo-french war became the precedent, both of occasion and method, for the future. By 1378 the priories had been in crown hands during four periods of hostilities: 1295 to 1303, 1324 to 1327, 1337 to 1360, and again from 1369.
Church, society and politics in the early fifteenth century as viewed from an English pulpit
Authors: Haines Roy M.
Published: March 2016

Some may question the suitability of sermon material as a means of illuminating the thought and background of a specific period. If anything, preachers were even less original—though that is too modern a concept—than other categories of medieval author. Frequently the same material was recast and pressed into service on a variety of occasions; a practice familiar to preachers down the centuries, but one which effectively blurs the dates of initial ‘publication’ and the extent of an individual’s contribution.

Much of this criticism is applicable to the collection of twenty-five sermons which occupies the first part of Bodley MS 649. Yet, when all the customary quotations from classical and medieval authors have been abstracted, along with the time-worn exempla to be found in the works of Jacques de Vitry, Vincent de Beauvais, Jacques de Voragine, and a host of other compilators, acknowledged and unacknowledged, there remains a core of material which is both contemporary and in the manner of its handling, particular. As one reads the sermons there is an increasing awareness of atmosphere, the sense of a distinct historical period and its problems. A wealth of contemporary metaphor and apt proverbial phrase, the interpolation of arresting—albeit to our ears incongruous—passages in english, and the mention of specific events, together contribute to an impression of society which is both vital and convincing.
The resolutioners and the Scottish nobility in the early months of 1660
Authors: Buckroyd Julia
Published: March 2016

One of the difficulties in the way of understanding the establishment of episcopacy in Scotland which followed upon the restoration of Charles II, is that of accounting for the apparent willingness on the part of the politically active nobility to co-operate in such a change, when that nobility had previously taken a leading part in abolishing episcopacy and setting up presbytery. Some light can, I believe, be thrown on this problem by considering the relations between the resolutioner ministers and the Scottish nobility in the early months of 1660. In particular I should like to consider the correspondence between Robert Douglas and the earls of Crawford, Lauderdale, Glencairn and Rothes. An examination of the letters reveals, it seems to me, a disposition on the part of the resolutioners to perpetuate ministerial control and direction of the nobility. This attitude may well have prompted an answering disposition on the part of the nobility to take back into their own hands as quickly as possible the conduct of political and religious negotiations in order to reduce ministerial pretensions to the direction of public affairs.
The politics of the enabling act (1919)
Authors: Thompson David M.
Published: March 2016

I doubt whether any event in the constitutional history of Church and State (wrote Randall Davidson in February 1921) has ever been wrought out with so little friction, and on so smooth a current as this great change ... I think it is indisputable that if we had failed in December 1919 to get through Parliament what is popularly known as the Enabling Bill, we might have waited for it for many a long year with increasing and most harmful loss of enthusiasm, and growth of irritation among the progressive groups. Instead of this we have had a continuous stream of praise and thankful gratulation at the way in which the new system has begun to work.

These words are a useful reminder that contemporaries were surprised at the easy passage of the enabling act, and that its success therefore requires explanation. The ‘rightness of the cause’ has tended to obscure the fact that right causes often fail. Moreover subsequent criticisms of the act, and particularly the disappointment of the life and liberty movement with what followed, have tended to minimise the significance of the changes it made. Nevertheless the charisma of William Temple and Dick Sheppard seems to have led even the critics to attribute the act’s success to the life and liberty movement; viscount Wolmer’s church self-government association has been relegated to the sidelines; and the verdict of bishop Bell (who in 1919 was Davidson’s chaplain) that ‘Its achievement was due to Randall Davidson more than to any other single person’ has been forgotten. In this paper I shall argue that the political success of the enabling act requires a political explanation, that parliamentary tactics in both the house of commons and the house of lords are therefore of prime importance, and that the significance of the success is enhanced by a fact which has never been discussed before - the initial opposition of the government of the day.
From Town to Country: The Christianisation of the Touraine 370–600
Authors: Stancliffe C. E.
Published: March 2016

When Martin became bishop of Toursc370, Christianity had already taken root in the town; but the surrounding countryside was still untouched by the new religion. Although it was over fifty years since Constantine had first recognised Christianity, and thirty-three years since Tours had had a permanent bishop, the attention of the Gallic bishops had been distracted first by the Arian heresy, and latterly by Julian’s revival of paganism. Martin was therefore the first bishop of Tours to concern himself with the conversion of the countryside, and this work was continued by his successors in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Work of Audoenus of Rouen and Eligius of Noyon in Extending Episcopal Influence from the Town to the Country in Seventh-Century Neustria
Authors: Fouracre Paul
Published: March 2016

Held almost as an article of faith amongst Merovingian historians is a belief in the strength of the bishops’ position in the town in early Frankish society. Passages from the life of bishop Desiderius of Cahors are often used to illustrate the busy bishop at work in his town, responsible, it seems, for maintaining the town’s defences. The assumption of secular duties by the bishop has been charted by a German scholar—Claude—who shows how in many cases the crown’s principal representative in the town—the count—began to reside outside the town, having been deprived of his specifically urban functions by the bishop. The interest shown in the bishops in the town has, however, led to a rather unbalanced picture of the bishop as an urban creature. In contrast, the Merovingian church councils of the sixth and seventh centuries show that the bishops were very much concerned with rural work, and from the legislation which applies to both town and country it could be argued that the distinctions between the two are less clear-cut than a concept such as bischöfliche Stadtherrschaft implies.
Charles the Bald and the Church in Town and Countryside
Authors: Nelson Janet L.
Published: March 2016

‘The church in town and countryside’ is a fruitful theme. But for early medievalists it is an especially challenging one. We first have to establish our right to participate at all. There is a classic tradition of interpreting western history, and the history of western Christianity too, in terms of an opposition between town and countryside: but according to exponents of this tradition, from Marx and Engels through Weber and Troeltsch to some contemporary historians, the early middle ages present a dull, townless void between antiquity and the eleventh or twelfth century. We have to begin then, by affirming that there were towns in the early middle ages. To justify this, we must do more than point out continuity in the terminology used by late classical and early medieval writers. We need to show that places existed which functioned as towns. Biddle has given a useful archaeologist’s list of functional criteria: defences, a planned street-system, a market, a mint, legal autonomy, a role as a central place, a relatively large and dense population, a diversified economic base, plots and houses of ‘urban’ type, social differentiation, complex religious organisation, a judicial centre.
The Town in Church History: General Presuppositions of the Reformation in Germany
Authors: Moeller Bernd
Published: March 2016

‘The German Reformation was an urban event.’—so A. G. Dickens wrote in his valuable and instructive book The German nation and Martin Luther (1974). In some directions this judgment may need qualification; nevertheless, it contains an essential element of truth. On any reckoning, put in a negative form, its truth is undeniable: the occurrence and the success of the reformation in Germany are inconceivable except in terms of the importance, and of the specific form, which urban life had attained in Germany at the end of the middle ages. No towns, no reformation; of this assertion we may be certain.