On his embassy from Constantinople to the papal curia in 1339, the Greek Orthodox envoy Barlaam confided to Benedict XII his pessimistic belief that genuine union between the Churches was rendered impossible less by theological difference than by the shared history of relations between eastern and western Christendom:

The problem could scarcely have been resolved more precisely. ‘Et tunc intravit lex romana in Sanctum Iohannem de la Penia XIo kalendas aprilis, secunda septimana quad-ragessimae, feria IIIa, hora prima et tertia fuit Tholetana, ora sexta fuit romana, anno Domini millesimo LXXIo et inde fuit servata lex romana.’

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.

In the late twelfth century, the practice of hawking and falconry was symbolically ambiguous, associated powerfully with the secular life yet also open to mystical interpretation. This paper suggests that the authors of St Thomas Becket’s miracle collections, as well as his contemporary biographers, appropriated this ambiguity as a means of reconciling some of the contradictions of Becket’s career. Henry II was himself an avid enthusiast for hunting with birds, and records show a marked increase in the number of transactions involving birds of prey, and the number of falconers employed to handle them, during his reign (1154–1189).

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

This essay focuses on one particular encounter between pagan and Christian in tenth–century Western Europe, namely the aftermath of the Viking settlement in Rouen and its environs in or around the year 911. There is little contemporary evidence for the early settlement and such as exists was written from a Christian perspective. The Vikings left no records, although their descendants wrote several romanticized accounts of their origins, again from a Christian perspective. Despite this bias in the sources, it is possible to use them to examine the interaction between the two groups. In particular, two letters survive, one from Pope John X (914–28/9) and one from Archbishop Hervé of Reims (900–22), which together give a unique perspective on what it was like at the sharp end of the Viking influx.

The field of Oriental studies was the main context in which amateur and professional scholars developed the academic study of Islam before World War II. The role of religion in the rise of this discipline is now widely acknowledged, but the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in the critique and transformation of Orientalism after World War II has never been explored. Given the prevalence of Christian scholars in Islamic studies after 1945, why has this been the case?

This article discusses the impact of the educational method pioneered in the English public schools on the development of education in Anglican schools in the British empire, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of the First World War. It discusses how the focus of missionary activity changed from a desire for overt evangelism into a sense of the transmission of moral and ethical values though a system of education in the Christian virtues. An educational understanding of salvation began to supplant the doctrinal. This is connected with the thinking on ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ civilizations of the period. A central focus is on the preparatory work for, and discussions around, the Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 and the role played by Bishop H. H. Montgomery.

Spirituality is a catholic word, beginning to dissolve into ecumenese, but it is much better than ‘piety’ with its nineteenth-century overtones, or the rather better eighteenth-century phrase ‘inward religion’. And it suggests, as I should wish to do, some of the continuities between medieval and protestant religion.

The fifteenth century is still for historians a very misty valley, but we are coming to see some things more clearly, and one thing is that late medieval thought and devotion is not to be written off or talked down as preparing for the Reformation because it was in fact religion run to seed, and in the field of devotion characterised by a morbid and individualistic pietism. Preaching, for example, was of growing importance. We have not yet the full story of the number of preacherships founded in German towns in the fifteenth century and their significance. We know that this was accompanied by a stress on the importance of hearing the Word, almost to the point of disparaging the sacrament of the altar, and not only Wessel Gansfort but Gabriel Biel can be quoted at this point. Again, the lay study of a vernacular Bible ante-dates the reformers. Much as John Bunyan echoed the older English of the puritan Geneva Bible, so that astonishing market-gardener among the prophets, Clement Ziegler of Strasbourg, is steeped in the pre-Reformation Bible which appeared in 1466.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Sunday schools in Britain played a significant role, both disseminating and forming Christian faith. There was near universal attendance at the schools, and as a result there was widespread exposure to Christian teaching and hymnody. Despite this, their role as an educational arm of the churches is under-researched. This article considers the experience of the schools from the beginning of the century until the outbreak of the Second World War. It examines how and what Sunday schools taught during this time, and the extent to which they adopted pedagogical developments. The article also considers the responses of the schools to the various education acts passed in this period. In addition, it examines what the schools themselves, their scholars and the churches thought of their effectiveness, and reflects upon the tensions that arose between the schools and the churches. The article concludes that Sunday schools were an integral part of the churches’ educational reach in society and therefore deserve much more thorough examination by historians.

Religious processions were commonly held during plague outbreaks in medieval Europe to provide succour against disease. The Bianchi of 1399, a popular religious revival, is one such example. This article addresses the Bianchi in Tuscany, demonstrating the crucial role of ecclesiastical authorities in moulding this response to plague, and contributing to both religious history and the history of medicine. It first problematizes the connection between the Bianchi and a punitive plague which could purportedly be remedied by religious devotions. The role of the clergy in the movement is then examined, demonstrating their prominence in preparing the populace, preaching and even leading processions. An assessment of Bianchi processional composition and routes reveals exploitation of pre-existing liturgical traditions. This localized, comparative analysis demonstrates how individual Tuscan towns organized and supported these devotional activities, successfully managing the popular response to plague expressed in the Bianchi devotions.

This article considers preaching during plague epidemics in early modern Germany, tracing how preachers and priests engaged with the crisis that befell their towns. It does so by discussing three important features of preaching during plague epidemics to illustrate the arrangements made during outbreaks of plague and what they can tell us more broadly about preaching during times of crisis. First, it shows the changes and continuities in personnel during plague epidemics. Second, it considers the contents of the sermons and how plague was a continuous feature of many early modern sermons. Third, the article discusses spaces and how they were used for preaching during outbreaks of plague. The article shows the malleability of sermons and how Protestants and Catholics adapted recurring themes to illustrate divine punishment and mercy.

Historians of the nineteenth-century Keswick holiness movement have long observed, though seldom analysed, its theological appropriation of the natural world. With annual conventions held from 1875 in the Lake District, home territory of Wordsworth and Southey, the movement’s love of nature was one of its most obvious ‘Romantic afFinities’ and marked it out from other streams of contemporary Evangelicalism, as David Bebbington has recendy shown. Yet much of the early theological inspiration behind the Keswick Convention was drawn not from the Lake Poets, but from the devotional writings of Victorian England’s best-known evangelical poet, Frances Ridley Havergal. The Keswick emphases upon absolute surrender to God and ‘entire consecration’ in his service, with a deep christocentric piety and a passion for spiritual transformation, pervade her teaching. Although Havergal’s brief career lasted only two decades, being cut short by her untimely death in June 1879 at the age of 42, her output was prodigious. Alongside indefatigable letter-writing and the production of numerous evangelistic booklets, she published several collections of poetry and hymnody in a short space of time, notably The Ministry of Song (1869), Under the Surface (1874), Loyal Responses (1878) and, posthumously, Under His Shadow (1879). Her popular hymns, such as ‘Take My Life’ and ‘Like a River Glorious’, became synonymous with Keswick spirituality.

Perhaps I can best introduce my paper, explain its nature and state my objective in writing it, by describing it as another step towards completing the second part of a study of which my book The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland was the first part.’ The study which concluded with the Statute of Kilkenny of 1366 needs extending chronologically by at least a century. More importantly, the nature of the analysis itself needs to be deepened. The ‘Two Nations’ book began with asking a fairly simple and limited question: what was the relationship of the ecclesiastical and civil powers within the English-settled parts of Ireland—in short, English law and the Irish Church. But it ended raising a more complex and more fundamental question about the overall effects on the Church of the establishment in Ireland of an English colony which was not coterminous with the country as a whole and whose strength and influence declined in the later middle ages. There may have been a more or less satisfactory answer in the book to the restricted question. There was, at best, no more than a tentative beginning to an answer to the more fundamental one.

It has recently been observed that ‘the corpus of surviving lollard literature is regrettably small, and it is to be found in the volumes of Wyclif’s so-called English writings and a few other printed and manuscript works’. To one concerned to re-edit the vernacular lollard literature the position seems otherwise: the corpus is formidably large, the printed material inadequately represents the state of the texts so edited, and there are a large number of other works still in manuscript. The printed material, if grouped together, would extend to perhaps five bulky volumes, in all about 2400 pages; a rough estimate of the vernacular texts now known suggests that this is perhaps only a fifth of the evidence available. Moreover, the editors were ignorant of a large number of the manuscripts of the works they printed, and hence could not assess the circulation of the texts: to give an example, Arnold used only one manuscript of what I shall call the standard lollard sermon-cycle, with fitful reference to three others, whereas now thirty manuscripts are known, together with a further three containing a modified series based on the original set. It is also impossible from the existing printed editions to gain any picture of the views of the lollard authors: only extensive commentary will reveal the implications of remarks made and vocabulary used.

Judging by the quantity of surviving texts – whether vitae or saints’ lives, libelli miraculorum or narratives of miracles for public reading in church, lectionaries or collections of liturgical readings, inventiones and translationes or accounts of relics found and later moved to a new location, popular receptivity to signs, wonders and miracles had reached a high point by the turn of the twelfth century. Whilst ordinary laypeople remained fascinated by supernatural phenomena, intellectuals were already beginning to challenge the preternatural in a process described by Chenu as the ‘desacralizing’ of nature. In the first book of his treatise, De Sanctis et eorum pignoribus (c.1120), Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, had contrasted the credulity of the faithful towards pseudo-miracles with the growing unease experienced by many scholars at inadequate written evidence for the authentication of relics. Andrew of Saint-Victor (d.1175), in an exposition on the literal interpretation of Scripture, found himself arguing for a natural explanation of events before any recourse to the miraculous. In the School of Pastoral Theology at Paris, Master Peter the Chanter (d.1197) vehemently criticized trial by ordeal as a flagrant tempting of God whereby a supposedly miraculous intervention was allowed to intrude into the regular legalistic operation of the courts. In the years immediately following the Chanter’s death, his former students, led by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and like-minded clerical associates, developed a significant agenda, emphasizing rationality and record keeping to sustain the faith of the Church within a new and more firmly pastoral context.

The history of Scottish protestantism as a clandestine, underground movement can be traced, albeit unevenly, over three decades from parliament’s early ban on Lutheran literature in 1525 to the protestant victory of 1560 when, in disregard of the wishes of its absent queen then resident in France, parliament finally proscribed the Latin mass and the whole apparatus of papal jurisdiction in Scotland and adopted instead a protestant Confession of Faith. Out of a loosely-defined body of beliefs in the 1530s, ranging from a profound dissatisfaction at ecclesiastical abuse (shared by those who remained Catholic), to a recognition of the need for a reformation in doctrine (less readily conceded by orthodox Catholics), Scottish protestantism by the 15 50s had developed a cellular organisation, enabling it to survive periodic persecution. Early protestants, themselves brought up within the Catholic church as baptised and communicating members, by the 1550s had taken the agonising and momentous step of separating themselves from the fellowship of the established church by forming their own separate communities of believers, worshipping in secret and centred on the privy kirks which arose in the years immediately preceding the Reformation.

In December 1853 Horace Mann, summing up his report on the census of religious worship conducted on 30 March 1851, offered some of the more famously sweeping generalizations in English religious and statistical history: