bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘From Fire and Water’: the Responsibilities of Godparents in Early Modern England
Authors: Coster William 
Published: March 2016

Richard Hooker, in justifying the formula of the baptismal rite of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, objected to the Puritan preference for referring to godparents as witnesses ‘… as if they came but to see and to testify what is done’, adding,
It savoureth more of piety to give them their old accustomed name of Fathers and Mothers in God, whereby they are well put in mind what affection they ought to bear towards those innocents, for whose religious education the Church accepteth them as pledges.
The study of the catholic tradition of the Kirk: Scoto-Catholics and the worship of the reformers
Authors: Murray Douglas M. 
Published: March 2016

James Cooper, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Glasgow University and a prominent High Churchman, once remarked that one of the main reasons for the Catholic revival in the Church of Scotland in the late nineteenth century was the renewed study of the history of the Scottish Church. The Catholic revival, or Scoto-Catholic movement, found expression in the formation of the Scottish Church Society in 1892. The High Churchmen who formed the Society considered that a Catholic position was no novelty in the Kirk. According to Henry J. Wotherspoon, one of the leading theologians of the movement, the Presbyterian was from the first ‘the High Catholic of Puritanism’, and it followed that the material for a catholic revival lay at hand in the traditions of the Church. In its classic form and confessional position, he said, Presbyterianism
discerned the Kingship of Christ; it asserted the Church as a Divine imperium, ‘visible, universal, and divinely ordered’, independent and autonomous; it maintained Episcopate, none the less that it was Episcopate put into commission; it asserted for the Presbyterate Apostolic Succession; it held a very distinct sacramental system, cumbered only by the endeavour to combine it with a doctrine of election; it exercised a vigorous discipline; it adhered to the oecumenical creeds in every term of their definitions and on that ground claimed to be acknowledged as Catholic.
St Clare of Assisi and the Poor Clares: a new spring
Authors: Gerrard Paul M. 
Published: March 2016

The Second Vatican Council (1962-5) called for religious orders to renew themselves in a two-fold return to the sources of their Christian life, jointly to the Gospels and to the inspiration of each institute’s founder, a process to be combined with a movement to bring the religious life into line with the ‘tenor of the times’.Thirty years after the issuing on 28 October 1965 of Perfectae Caritatis, the conciliar decree on the religious life, it seems particularly relevant to look at how far this renewal has been enacted since the Council. Furthermore, given the theme of this volume it seems especially apt to examine the role which that call for the rediscovery of the founder’s spirit has played in one such renewal.
Adam’s Engendering: Augustine on Gender and Creation
Authors: Clark Gillian 
Published: March 2016

InConfessions13, Augustine discusses the right interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis. His exegesis is allegorical, relating spiritual truth to its expression in the physical world. This physical expression was needed because Adam fell:All things are beautiful because you make them, and you who made all things are inexpressibly more beautiful. If Adam had not fallen from you, there would not have come forth from his womb[utero eius]that salt sea-water the human race, profoundly curious, stormily swelling, unstable and in flux, and so there would have been no need for your agents, in many waters, to perform mystic actions and sayings in the corporeal and perceptible mode.
No more ‘Standing the Session’: Gender and the End of Corporate Discipline in the Church of Scotland, c.1890-c.1930
Authors: Brown Stewart J. 
Published: March 2016

In 1890, the General Assembly of the established Church of Scotland appointed a Commission on the Religious Condition of the People, with instructions to carry out a comprehensive review of the state of religion and morals in the country. The aim was to determine the reasons for non-attendance at church services and for the Church’s declining social influence. The Commission visited the presbyteries, and issued a series of reports between 1891 and 1896. These revealed widespread irreligion, non-attendance, intemperance, and vice. Among the most disturbing revelations, however, were the high levels of illegitimacy in many regions of the country. Sexual immorality, according to the report for the synod of Galloway, in the south west of Scotland, was ‘a rampant sin in the district, and makes a dark blot on the moral life of [the] community’. In the Presbytery of Strathbogie, in the north east, sexual misconduct ‘has so permeated family life, and is so prevalent in the community, that it is difficult to arouse a healthy and vigorous public opinion against it’. The problem seemed to lie in the nature of ecclesiastical discipline within Scottish Presbyterianism. The mode of administering discipline’, the Commission observed in its final report, in May 1896,
at present fails to impress the community; it fails to promote repentance in offenders; and it may be asked whether, thus failing, it is not a hindrance rather than a help to the cause of morality. To the more sensitive and delicate in feeling who have yielded to temptation there is a natural repugnance in being obliged to face the minister and elders. … To those who have no such delicacy, the ‘standing of the session’ is little regarded.
Expedient and Experiment: the Elizabethan Lay Reader
Authors: Usher Brett 
Published: March 2016

The origins of the most senior office in the Church of England open to a layman, that of lay reader, are obscure. Sir Robert Phillimore confined himself to the observation that the office was ‘one of the five inferior orders of the Roman church’, adding only thatin this kingdom, in churches or chapels where there is only a very small endowment, and no clergyman will take upon him the charge or cure thereof, it has been usual to admit readers, to the end that divine service in such places might not altogether be neglected.But when and how did it become ‘usual? There are no references to readers in Edward VI’s Royal Injunctions of 1547, presumably because those holding inferior Roman orders were still legally entitled to exercise their functions. Although the Protestant advances of the next six years removed all such from office there is no sign that the Edwardian regime made any attempt to appoint readers as an emergency or auxiliary measure. Probably there was no immediate need to do so: with the abolition of the chantries in 1549 most chantry priests went on to serve as ‘stipendiaries’, effectively slipping into the ranks of the unbeneficed as ‘curates’. If anything there was a glut in the clerical market between 1549 and the restoration of Catholic orders in 1553.
The Mirage of Authenticity: Scottish Independents and the Reconstruction of a New Testament Order of Worship, 1799-1808
Authors: Lovegrove Deryck 
Published: March 2016

The snuffy cobler now you mildly kiss,And Cowgate damsels chuckle at the bliss.By frequent salivations render’d fair,They press your knees that envied bliss to share;And, liquorish fish, wives piously beginTo think it sweeter than their morning gin.In three satirical couplets the author of an anonymous pamphlet printed in 1812 suggests a possible reason for the popularity of the Haldane Tabernacle Connexion among the female population of Edinburgh at the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so he touches upon an important feature of the wave of evangelical Independency which swept across Scotland from the late 1790s: the appearance of new forms of worship that consciously sought to follow New Testament models. Reinforcing the verse this fiercely polemical work, which almost certainly comes from an establishment source, takes the innovators to task for discarding reasoned biblical interpretation, flouting decency, and ignoring health dangers in their desire to resurrect long extinct practices from ancient Christianity.
Ideas of Crusade and Holy War in De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi (The Conquest of Lisbon)
Authors: Phillips Jonathan 
Published: March 2016

The Second Crusade (1145-9) was, for the most part, a failure. One of its few successes was the capture of the Muslim-held city of Lisbon by contingents of Anglo-Normans, Flemings, and northern Rhinelanders travelling via the Iberian peninsula en route to the Holy Land. At its full extent the Second Crusade consisted of campaigns in the Levant, the Baltic, and the east coast of Spain, as well as the Lisbon expedition. By far the largest forces went to the Holy Land but, following a calamitous crossing of Asia Minor, the combined armies of the kings of France and Germany, along with the troops of the Latin settlers, retreated from the walls of Damascus after only five days. Because the crusade to the Levant had been preached so successfully by Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, this dismal outcome attracted bitter criticism from contemporaries. The defeat was ascribed to the treachery of (variously) the Greeks, the Templars, the count of Flanders, and the Latin settlers, or the incompetence of King Louis VII of France and the papal legates. Some commentators believed the crusade to have been the work of the devil. Bernard himself argued that it was the judgement of God that had caused the expedition to fail. Other writers blamed the participants’ motives, most relevantly here the contemporary historian, Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. He wrote:
In the same year [1148] the armies of the emperor of Germany and the French king, which marched out with great pride under illustrious commanders, came to nothing because God despised them…. Meanwhile, a naval force that was made up of ordinary, rather than powerful, men, and was not supported by any great leader, except Almighty God, prospered a great deal better because they set out in humility. Truly ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble’. For the armies of the French king and the emperor had been more splendid and larger than that which earlier had conquered Jerusalem, and yet were crushed by very much smaller forces and were destroyed like a spider’s web. But no host had been able to withstand the poor men of whom I spoke above, and the large forces who attacked them were reduced to weakness.
Our Lady of Saidnaiya: an Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the Crusades
Authors: Hamilton Bernard 
Published: March 2016

The fortified convent of Saidnaiya (often called Sardeney by medieval Western writers) is situated on a rocky outcrop some twelve miles to the north of Damascus. It claims to have been founded by Justinian, but it is not mentioned in the De aedificiis of Procopius, and its origins are uncertain. The earliest surviving description of it may be that given by Burchard of Strasbourg, the ambassador of Frederick Barbarossa to the court of Saladin, who visited Saidnaiya in c. 1175:
in this church twelve virgin nuns and eight monks devoutly serve God and the Blessed Virgin. In this church I saw a wooden panel … placed behind the altar in an embrasure in the wall of the sanctuary guarded by an iron grille. On this panel a likeness of the Blessed Virgin had once been painted, but now, wondrous to relate, the picture on wood has become incarnate and oil, smelling sweeter than balsam, unceasingly flows from it. By which oil many Christians, Saracens and Jews are often cured of ailments. … To this place on the feast of the Assumption of the glorious Virgin and on that of her Nativity all the Saracens of that province flock to pray together with the Christians, and the Saracens perform their devotions there with great reverence.
Daniel’s Practice: The Daily Round of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Laurence Anne 
Published: March 2016

Godly women from noble, gentry, mercantile, and clerical families were much commemorated at their deaths in funeral sermons. Apart from preaching on a suitable text, ministers commonly gave an account of the life of the deceased, describing, amongst other things, how she passed her time. Godly lives from sermons for men outlined the course of their careers, stressing their public activities, the manner in which they took religion out into the world and engaged with worldly matters; those for women followed a formula describing the deceased’s childhood, virtuous education, marriage, performance as wife, mother, mistress of servants, hospitality (especially if the woman was the wife of a minister), and charitable work, and enumerated her merits in these roles. Instead of recounting the events of their whole lives, ministers dwelt upon the women’s daily routine of pious practices, with variations for the Sabbath or days on which they took communion. The convention of de mortuis nil nisi bonum was strictly observed, but the edificatory nature of the life was also an important element in the telling of it. Sometimes sermon titles acknowledged this, otherwise they referred to the good death of the deceased or, if they were published to improve the career prospects of the preacher, they referred to the text upon which he had preached.Women were praised for following Daniel’s practice, the practice for which he was thrown into the lions’ den. This was to kneel upon his knees, three times a day, and pray and give thanks before his God. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Mrs Mary Gunter, companion to Lettice, Countess of Leicester, ‘resolved upon Daniels Practice’. ‘Besides Family duties, which were performed twice every day, by the Chaplain …. And besides the private Prayers which she daily read in her Ladies Bed-Chamber, she was thrice on her Knees every day before God in secret.’ Lady Elizabeth Langham’s ‘constant retirements’ for her devotions in the 1660s ‘were answerable to Daniels thrice a day’.
Discussing Mary’s Humanity in Medieval Byzantium
Authors: Baun Jane 
Published: March 2016

Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries toiling in the vineyard in Ottoman Armenia found the native women receptive to many of their ideas - until the subject of Mary came up. An American missionary recorded the following encounter in 1877:
There was another very religious woman, I once met with in one of the villages on Harpoot plain. She said, ‘Lady, I love you, and think you are a real Christian, but one thing you say I cannot receive. You say the Virgin Mary is not our intercessor. What should we women do, if we could not call upon the Virgin when in trouble, or suffering? She was a woman, and knows how to pity women like us’. This is what they all say.
‘An infallible Fact-Factory Going Full Blast’: Austin Farrer, Marian Doctrine, and the Travails of Anglo-Catholicism
Authors: Morris Jeremy 
Published: March 2016

In 1960 the Anglican philosopher Austin Farrer preached a sermon ‘On being an Anglican’ in the chapel of Pusey House which must have amazed his hearers. It began gently enough; but halfway through, the tone changed. Human perversity had rent the unity of the Church with schisms and heresies. How could he, ‘truly and with a good conscience’, stay in the Church of God? ‘Only by remaining in the Church of England’.’ Farrer put down two markers for his Anglican identity. One was stated briefly and with restraint: ‘I dare not dissociate myself from the apostolic ministry.’ It was the other that must have startled his congregation:
I dare not profess belief in the great Papal error. Christ did not found a Papacy … Its infallibilist claim is a blasphemy, and never has been accepted by the oriental part of Christendom. Its authority has been employed to establish as dogmas of faith, propositions utterly lacking in historical foundation. Nor is this an old or faded scandal - the papal fact-factory has been going full blast in our own time, manufacturing sacred history after the event.
Early Medieval Introductions to the Holy Book: Adjuncts or Hermeneutic?
Authors: O’Loughlin Thomas 
Published: March 2016

In a famous passage on the training of those who wished to become wise in sacred letters, in effect, learned readers of the Christian scriptures, Cassiodorus wrote:
The first thing a student should do, having read [my] book is to go back and study carefully the works of those (introductores) who have written introductions to the sacred scriptures. We have found the following [useful]: Tyconius the Donatist; St Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana; Hadrian; Eucherius; and Junilius. I have carefully collected their works and bound them together into a collection so that through their various explanations and examples these men might make matters known who were previously unknown.
Piety, Penance, and Popular Reading in Devotion to the Virgin Mary and Her Miracles: Italian Incunabula and Early Printed Collections
Authors: Chavasse Ruth 
Published: March 2016

‘Those folk are all men [and women] of my kidney who delight in miracles and fictitious marvels, whether hearing or telling about them’, exclaimed Erasmus’s Folly. As for saints,
Each one of these is assigned his [or her] special powers … so that one gives relief from toothache, another stands by women in childbirth.… There are some whose influence extends to several things, notably the Virgin, mother of God, for the common ignorant man comes near to attributing more to her than to her son.Reformers saw such cults as detracting from the centrality of Christ in Christian devotion. One of the reforming factors of anticlericalism in the early sixteenth century was the search for a more direct route to salvation, a more direct line to God than through the mediating authority of the perhaps all too earth-bound priest. Increasingly often in pre-Reformation Europe the mediating influence of Mary or of a favourite saint was felt to be more effective than that of the priest. Both lay and religious found Mary, the mother of God, more accessible than a judgemental Christ. Despite the teaching of the Church, Mary did appear to come between Christ and his people, as often illustrated by the iconography of the Madonna of Mercy upon whose mantle the arrows rained down by Christ or God the Father were broken.
Pro statu et incolumnitate regni mei: royal monastic patronage 1066–1154
Authors: Mason Emma 
Published: March 2016

Dangers to the cohesion of the Anglo-Norman regnum correlate to a marked extent with the fluctuating patronage extended by the Anglo-Norman kings towards Westminster Abbey, and other religious houses, in their search for one which would symbolize and enhance the stability of their dynasty.Westminster itself had royal connections from the outset. The original church of St Peter, on Thorney Island in the Thames, to the west of London, was founded by Saebert, king of the East Saxons, and his wife Ethelgoda.’ The couple were allegedly buried there early in the seventh century, but it was some four hundred and fifty years before further royal burials took place in St Peter’s The church was restored by Offa of Essex in the early years of the eighth century, and c959 king Edgar sold it to Dunstan, who founded a monastery on the site. Edgar gave several manors to this abbey, and Aethelred II gave or confirmed others. Less exalted donors followed suit, and the house was already fairly prosperous when Harold I Harefoot was buried there in 1040. His successor and half-brother Harthacnut, is said to have had his body thrown out.
The origins of English protestant nationalism
Authors: Loades David 
Published: March 2016

In 1581, in his Answer to a seditious pamphlet, William Charke wroteHe that smiteth our religion woundeth our commonwealth; because our blessed estate of policie standeth in defence of religion, and our most blessed religion laboureth in maintenance of the commonwealth. Religion and policie are, through God’s singular blessings, preserved together in life as with one spirit; he that doth take away the life of the one doth procure the death of the other.This was, of course, a partisan point of view. However, the extent to which it had won general acceptance among Englishmen of all social classes can be demonstrated by reference to the Armada crisis of seven years later. Not only did pamphleteers like Thomas Deloney appeal for patriotic effort,That... all with one accordOn Sion hill may sing the praiseof our most mightly Lordbut recusant apologetic makes it clear that the catholics were fully aware of the prevailing opinion that papists could not be good Englishmen.
‘Englishmen in vaine’: Roman Catholic allegiance to George I
Authors: Duffy Eamon 
Published: March 2016

Of the many problems confronting post-reformation English catholics, that of national identity was among the most acute. For the nation at large, to be English was to be protestant, and to be papist was to be an alien.’ That catholics owed primary allegiance to the pope, to Spain, to France, was an axiom throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the exile of the catholic Stuarts at the revolution of 1688 merely varied the form in which the national tradition expressed itself. In his last public utterance William III equated ‘a Popish Prince, and a French Government’, judicial proclamations spoke of ‘papists and disaffected persons’, and George I’s first parliament declared that catholicstake themselves to be obliged by the Principles they profess to be enemies to His Majesty and to the present happy Establishment, and watch for all opportunities of fomenting and stirring up new Rebellions and Disturbances within the Kingdom and of inviting Foreigners to invade it.
English free churchmen and a national style
Authors: Binfield Clyde 
Published: March 2016

We are building a Church’, wrote Ernest Barson, minister of Penge congregational church in 1911, ‘. . to welcome to worship and service men and women . . . of real faith, such as we often meet in our homes, in business, in social service, but for whom room and freedom have not always been found in the Churches . .’ A year later he opened his church. A minister from Purley spoke on the church and the businessman, and one from Brixton spoke on worship: ‘the church must be learned, common and catholic’. This speaker delighted in paradox:the minister incurred a grave responsibility who deprived any one of the right to utter prayer and praise. [But] the overwhelming experience of Christianity was in favour of a Liturgy . . . Then their Church must be Catholic. They should forget that they were Nonconformists in their worship . . . and never never forget that they worshipped not as Nonconformists, but as members of the holy family of the Church.