‘Raptus’, the abduction of women in order to marry them, was seen as a serious problem in Carolingian Francia. This article examines the only Frankish text that provides a theological justification for condemning raptus, Hincmar of Rheims's De coercendo et exstirpando raptu viduarum, puellarum ac sanctimonialium. It shows the difficulties that Hincmar found in providing a coherent theological argument against a practice normally condemned for its social and familial disruption. In particular, it suggests that Hincmar was worried that laymen, who had been encouraged by Carolingian reformers to study the Bible, might use Old Testament precedents to justify raptus.

This article examines the neglected role of religious ideas and vocabulary in expressions of English national sentiment in the fourteenth century, particularly in official rhetoric. Many official uses of religious language followed well-established literary conventions. However, documents requesting nationwide prayers during national crises suggest that the government encouraged the concept of a special relationship between God and England, modelled on Old Testament Israel, well before the Protestant Reformation. National misfortunes were explained as divine punishment for national sins, with England presented as a collective moral community. Parallels with Israel were then drawn out more explicitly in public preaching, bringing this interplay between religion and politics to a wider audience.

It is clear from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica that England then enjoyed close relations with the Roman Church. Some passages in the work have been seen as reflecting a high doctrine of the papacy, but when carefully read they turn out to be devoid of any understanding of the papacy. The same is true of Bede's discussions of Christ's words to Peter (Matthew xvi.18a, 19) in his writing on the Bible. Yet other English authors of the period had attitudes very different to those of Bede; suggestions are offered as to why Bede took the line he did.

Using the records of heresy trials as well as the vernacular texts composed by English dissenters during the period 1381–1521, this article chronicles the development of Wycliffite and Lollard views about sexuality and lay and clerical marriage. John Wyclif's Latin writings reveal that he both professed caution about clerical marriage and articulated a culturally traditional theology of sexuality. Whereas his hesitation at the prospect of a married clergy gave way to enthusiasm among later dissenters, his ideas about lay sexuality resonated with dissenting and mainstream writers alike. The evidence calls further into doubt the view that Lollardy was an innovative movement with respect to issues of gender and sexuality.

In two texts written between 1185 and 1205, Gervase of Canterbury proposed a vision of the role of the Benedictine community of Christ Church in relation to the archbishop, their nominal abbot. In the Tractatus de combustione and the Actus pontificum, Gervase repeatedly presented the monks as the guardians of the archbishops' relics and memory. This in turn allowed him to establish close links between the prelates and a precise locus, the cathedral, in an attempt to reassert the traditional role of Christ Church as the archiepiscopal church at a time when this role was under threat.

In contrast with recent assertions that the term ‘double house’ is both anachronistic and dysfunctional when used with reference to mixed communities of the twelfth century, this paper demonstrates that contemporary writers did in fact perceive a difference between religious houses that housed both men and women, and a small group of ‘houses of canons and nuns’. The absence of a more specific term was in itself an indication of the perceived novelty of such houses, which were seen as diverging both from earlier Anglo-Saxon mixed communities, and from other twelfth-century houses for men and women.

The early Wycliffite William Swinderby expressed some strong criticisms of excommunication. He was alarmed that churchman thought that it was their power, rather than God's power, that consigned a soul to hell. The rhetoric of sentences of excommunication in this period was indeed intended to frighten offenders into compliance with ecclesiastical judgements, but the theory and practice of excommunication was in fact far less simple that the Wycliffite criticism of it allowed. This article examines Swinderby's attitude towards ecclesiastical sanctions in light of Wyclif's own ideas, and the theory and practice of excommunication in the late medieval Church. Swinderby's links with early Wycliffism are elucidated and the relationship between Wycliffism and the Church is looked at in a new light.

For forty years, the sisters of St Katherine's, Augsburg, resisted the introduction of strict enclosure as a consequence of Dominican reform. This article examines the initial reactions of the sisters, explores the Dominican practice of enclosure and its connections with obedience, and the influence it had on the sisters' spirituality. After the community had finally accepted enclosure, they managed to gain a papal privilege granting them all the indulgences usually acquired through pilgrimage to Rome and commissioned a cycle of monumental paintings of the seven Roman pilgrim churches. Thus the sisters could ‘jump’ their convent's walls by embarking on substitute pilgrimages.

This article examines foundations of perpetual mortuary intercessions in Nantes between 1500 and 1700. The sixteenth-century religious wars were a crucial era of devotional change. In reaction to Protestantism and conflict, collective ritual, devotion to the eucharist and charitable work received emphasis, while mortuary intercession declined. After 1600 traditional practices reasserted themselves, encouraged by Tridentine-inspired devotions and renewed clericalism. Foundations in convents and collegiate churches became the hallmark of the wealthy devout. However, elite and popular groups also turned to greater engagement with the world through good works, and dependence upon Mary for intercession. While interiority was a vital part of the new spirituality, exterior and collective religious acts remained vital.

This paper analyses the scheme of imagery designed in about 1638 by Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor, for the chancel of East Knoyle parish church in Wiltshire. While Wren's close association with Lancelot Andrewes and the Laudian circle makes this scheme understandable as ‘Laudian’, its particular combination of picture and text accommodated a broader range of beliefs. The study of the theological content of the scheme, and of its intended manner of reception, sheds new light on the function of imagery within the pursuit of the ‘beauty of holiness’, drawing attention to the role it could play in establishing an active understanding of the liturgy.

The act of comforting soon-to-be executed martyrs was a collective and participatory affair in early modern England, but it was Catholics’ consolation of dying priests that resonated with a sacramental and doctrinal meaning all its own. This article seeks to highlight the late medieval traditions as well as contemporary Tridentine practices that infused such acts of comfort, particularly as they were negotiated in a time of Catholic persecution and upheaval. Of prime importance in instructing consolers, however, was Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual exercises, which, as this essay argues, provided a guidebook for behaviour and an answer to suffering for priests and followers alike.

This article examines the triple biography of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Becket and Thomas More, published by Thomas Stapleton in 1588 and generally regarded as a work of pious hagiography. By focusing on the circumstances in which the book was written and published, the article demonstrates its polemical significance at a time of rapid political change in Catholic/Protestant relations in both England and Europe. Conceived as a Catholic alternative to the history of the Christian past produced by Foxe, Stapleton's book also addressed contested issues within Catholicism: how to deal with the Elizabethan regime, and the status to be accorded to recent martyrs. In answering these questions, Stapleton's views reflect the complexity of Catholic thought at this time, and its fluidity in response to the shifting political circumstances of the late 1580s.

The first century of the Catholic Church in Korea was characterised by recurrent and often severe persecutions. Consequently a cult of martyrs developed from early in the Church's history. Wider Catholic concepts relating to martyrdom and spirituality, in particular belief in a corrupting world and the significance of martyrdom in offering a means of release, set individuals on the path of martyrdom. They were then informed and encouraged by the development of the cult itself, and the solidarity and support of the Christian community. However, Korean Christians also carried with them Confucian and Buddhist concepts concerning the nature of virtue, asceticism, world-renunciation and self-sacrifice, and they subscribed to a set of social values which saw kinship ties and posthumous reputation as paramount. In the area of martyrdom these indigenous concepts and values complemented and reinforced those derived from Catholicism.

From the early Reformation the Scottish Kirk had seen national public fasting as an essential exercise in furthering the spiritual, political and material well-being of the nation. For that reason fasts were held frequently, particularly at times of national crisis in Church and State. In 1706, with parliament about to deliberate on a treaty for an incorporating union with England, a national fast seemed an obvious step. The refusal of the Court party to grant a civil sanction to a fast therefore placed the issue to the forefront of national debate, providing the opposition with a major opportunity to disrupt the progress of the treaty.

Pope Benedict xv's gradual rehabilitation of the French Christian Democrat Marc Sangnier, whose Sillon movement stood condemned for social Modernism, demonstrated his desire to end the excesses of his predecessor's anti-Modernist crusade and to return to the policies of Leo xiii. Sangnier, unofficial emissary of the French republic to the Vatican, helped to prepare for the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1921. Perplexed, like most French Catholics, by papal neutrality on the war, he later campaigned for Franco-German reconciliation, adopting the Vatican critique of the Versailles settlement. Sangnier's pardon, like Benedict's cautious endorsement of the Popolari in Italy, highlights the paradoxical papalism of advanced Social Catholicism.