The historiographical background to this paper is provided by a recent dramatic change of perspective in the study of the Reformation in Ireland. Traditionally the failure of Protestant reform has been explained in ways that amounted to determinism. In its crudest expression, this involved the self-sufficient premise that the Catholic faith was so deeply ingrained in the Irish as to be unshakable. More subtly, it assumed a set of equations, of Protestantism with English conquest and Catholicism with national resistance, that acted to consolidate the faith. In the 1970s, these simplicities were questioned. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Canny argued that religious reform had made sufficient headway in its initial phase to suggest that the replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism was at least within the bounds of possibility, and raised a fresh question; why did this not happen? That the debate which followed was inconclusive was due in part to an inability to shake off an old habit of circular thought, so that the issue has remained one of deciding whether Protestantism failed because Catholicism succeeded, or Catholicism succeeded because Protestantism failed. Both Dr Robinson-Hammerstein, when she observed that ‘Ireland is the only country in which the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the Head of State’, and Dr Bottigheimer, when he insisted that the failure of the Reformation must ‘concentrate our attention on the nature and limits of political authority’, implied that what needs to be explained is how actions were deprived of their effect. The alternative possibility is that the actions themselves were inherently ineffectual. The premise of this paper is that the failure of Protestantism and the success of Catholicism were the necessary condition, but not the sufficient cause, of each other, and its object is simply to recall attention to the existence of very practical reasons why the Church of Ireland should have evolved as it did in the hundred years or so between the first and second Acts of Uniformity, that is, from an inclusive Church, claiming the allegiance of the entire community, to one that excluded all but a privileged minority.

What did it mean to live with the Bible in post-Reformation England? The increased availability from 1560 of printed vernacular Bibles to own and keep in the home marked a profound change in where and how people experienced Scripture. Most authors have concentrated on the impact of this cultural shift on the textual practices of household religion, especially Bible reading or study in the context of daily prayers and associated instruction. More recent research has examined interactions with the Bible as object, especially the common practice of annotating specific passages, recording information or otherwise marking the pages. A turn in humanities disciplines over the past decade towards visual and material culture has emphasized the connotative role of Bibles as signifiers, with important studies of their display function within female piety, as part of the conventional vocabulary of provincial portraits or as staged properties in Renaissance drama. Yet despite these contributions there is still an overwhelming focus in the existing literature on the use of religious books in relation to the textual and oral practices of domestic devotion - on readers and reading practices – and a good deal of generalization about the locations for such practices, derived from a particular conceptual model of the country house with clearly defined internal arrangements and designated room functions.

The title of this paper, ‘Segregation in Church’, may sound like an appendix to the theme of this year’s conference on Women in the Church. I hope to persuade you otherwise. For although my topic focuses on the ostensibly narrow question of the physical position of the sexes at worship, it is related to much broader issues. Ancient rules about impurity and the protection of holy rites and holy places; the fear of sex and the threat of sexual encounters intruding into divine offices; the elevation of virginity and the Virgin Mary; these are all matters that had to do with the seemingly simple question of the individual’s place at public prayer.

This article explores the links between the assertion of British imperial identities and the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a network of evangelical societies which existed and flourished in Britain and in the dominions from the halcyon days of the empire to the late 1920s. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism and defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and an alleged global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons. Inspired by John Wolffe's pioneering work, the article examines constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national anti-Catholicism across Britain and its dominions.

In medieval narrative the First Crusade and the founding of the Latin kingdom were perceived as Gesta Dei per Francos – God’s own deed. Having no doubt that the success of the First Crusade was a miracle, God’s intervention in history, the chroniclers’ rendering of events was accordingly replete with miracles, such as the discovery of the Holy Lance in Antioch and the saints’ taking an active role in the battle against Kirbogha of Mosul in 1098. Even in the more level-headed historical narratives, military success was seen as a miracle and failures were attributed to the sins of the participants who were not pure enough to merit a miracle. Thus the miraculous intervention of God in history became the logical consequence of the prowess and religious behavior of the crusaders, an almost expected outcome of natural events.

This study discusses relations between the Church and the emperor in the last two centuries of the Byzantine empire's existence, in the Palaiologan period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries). It questions the accepted view that the Church rose in importance and status as imperial power and authority declined. According to this view, expressed by Steven Runciman and accepted by historians since, a strong Church was the legacy of the Byzantine empire to the Ottomans. In this article the ceremonies of the late Byzantine court, as represented by the mid-fourteenth-century text of Pseudo-Kodinos, are examined for indications of continuity in the emperor's dominant role in the Church in this later period. Gilbert Dagron's contrary perspective is considered. It is then argued that the writings of two late Byzantine churchmen, Symeon of Thessalonike and Makarios of Antioch, who insist on a lesser role for the emperor in the selection and the making of a patriarch, provide evidence for the contemporary performance of the promotion of a patriarch as described by Pseudo-Kodinos. While the two churchmen tried to show that the emperor was subject to the Church, practice shows something different.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, ecclesiastical discipline in an Anglican context has been very much a hot topic. Internationally, there has been intense debate over the decision by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America to ordain Gene Robinson, a continent yet avowedly homosexual priest, as one of its bishops, and over the decision of the diocese of New Westminster in Canada to authorize liturgical services of blessing for same-sex couples. The Windsor Report of 2004 was commissioned in order to formulate a Communion-wide response to these developments,1 and although ‘discipline’ is a word which is very seldom in its pages, it is, in effect, a study of the disciplinary framework which its authors believe necessary in order for the Anglican Communion to hold together. At a local level, the Church of England’s clerical discipline procedures are being thoroughly overhauled, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s 1996 report on clergy discipline and the ecclesiastical courts. This paper seeks to explore the themes of discipline and diversity in both an international and an English context. It attempts to shed a little more light on how the Anglican Communion, particularly in the former British Empire, got itself into its current position, as a loosely-federated assembly of provincial synods, without a central framework for handling disciplinary matters. Secondly, it examines how the Church of England has handled discipline in relation to its clergy since the mid-nineteenth century.

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:

The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.

Perhaps the earliest use of trilinguis, to refer to the biblical tongues and the claim to proficiency in them, is in Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 401 A.D., where Jerome reminded Rufinus of his own status as a scholar, ‘Ego philosophus, rhetor, grammaticus, dialecticus, Hebraeus, Latinus trilinguis’. Erasmus who owed so much to Jerome in biblical studies and in his conception of renewal for the life of the Church and Christian society by such studies, would have omitted ‘dialecticus’ from Jerome’s roll-call of his own attainments. For Erasmus the ‘philosophia Christi’ based on trilingual learning was the ground of renewal in personal and public Christian life, of renewal in the Church, and of renewal in the respublica litterarum. As he saw it, disaster came upon the Church’s thinking when dialectics were introduced into theology, mastered it, and produced ‘some of the pseudo-theologians of our time whose brains are rotten, their language barbarous, their intellects dull, their learning a bed of thorns, their manners rough, their life hypocritical, their talk full of venom, and their hearts as black as ink’.

A visitor to the Greco-Roman world about the year 350 AD would have found himself confronted by one of the great ‘sea changes’ in the lives of its peoples. The structure of city, farm and village that had persisted for centuries would appear to be intact. The market-places of the towns would be lined with altars and statues of long-dead benefactors. Temples to the gods of Rome and perhaps to a native deity duly Romanised, would dominate the scene. Wherever one stood in the city the temples in the forum would be the landmark. Nearby, would be the amphitheatre and great bath-building, the social centres of the old community, and near the entrance to the town the triumphal arch, marking perhaps the unification of Roman citizen and native inhabitant into one community.

Although Merovingian cities were not prepossessing they were important. Physically they straggled outside the Roman walls of the third century and divided increasingly into suburbs dependant on the great basilicas. Dijon, technically a castrum, was thought to be worthy of higher status, but its aspect was one of walls, fields, streams and mills. To be fair, urban centres throughout the middle ages possessed equally bucolic attributes. More important, the civitates were secular and ecclesiastical centres. The greatest of them could boast strong associations with the royal court, but even those with no such cachet were distinguished by the presence of a bishop. This last figure has attained considerable eminence in the eyes of historians and perhaps his authority has been exaggerated, nevertheless if his position was weaker than we have been taught, it was because of the strength and vigour of urban society; the reputation of the cities is not diminished. Not surprisingly they provided the backcloth for many of the dramas of sanctity and martyrdom recorded by the hagiographers.

Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.

Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

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.

The wide span of years which I have boldly claimed in my title is intended to enmesh and hold together for our inspection the first great age of the medieval city, the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the medieval Church first faced the problem of evangelism in growing mercantile communities, and the age when it deployed in the cities and towns of Europe a new army of missionaries in the persons of the friars. The missionary techniques of the friars are familiar and comparatively well documented; the evangelism of the tenth and eleventh centuries is scarcely documented at all. In recent years the dramatic nature of urban history in this early period has been becoming increasingly apparent; and it was in the conviction that the Church’s hand in it could not wholly escape detection that I chose the title for this lecture. Many aspects of this problem have been traced with the closest care; but I justify the breadth and cloudiness of my theme by a conviction that it has rarely been looked at quite from this point of view.

From time to time it has been pointed out that Wyclif had a quite exceptional grasp of papal-hierocratic theory. Although its bitter opponent, his extensive knowledge of the refinements of the theory, his almost intuitive appreciation of its most fundamental principles, indicate a depth of penetration into hierocratic ideology which many supporters of papal supremacy must themselves have envied. His effectiveness as an anti-papal writer during the polemics of the 1370s and 1380s lay less in the novelty and originality of his own system of thought, and in the consistency with which he repeated himself, but rather in his superior ability to detect the weakest points in his adversaries’ chain of argument. He not only knew exactly where to thrust between the links, but, more important, how to aim for the pivots of the system, so that the whole hierocratic theory might be turned on its head.

The title of this paper was inspired by a piece of ecclesiastical doggerel published in the Hensal-Cum-Heck Church Monthly for November 1895:

They may call me a Papist, and laugh at my creed,
‘Tis the Faith that will save in the hour of need;
Let them talk, let them laugh, but when death is at hand
The priest is the only true friend in the land.

It is not the only ritualist concept of priestly vocation; in a somewhat earlier tract on confession priests are described as ‘the spiritual police of Almighty God; they must hunt out, track, pursue, and arraign sinners, as the police pursue and apprehend thieves and rascals’. Although both concepts are to be found elsewhere in ritualist literature, and both would have been accepted by many ritualist priests as not being mutually exclusive, it would seem that the concept of the priest as ‘friend’ was the dominant one.

It has been said that Innocent III shared the popular belief existing at the beginning of the thirteenth century that the world would end in 1284. Perhaps this is the reason why throughout his pontificate he was eager to resolve the divisions facing mankind. These divisions were reflected in the deviations of the heretic, the beliefs of the infidel and the schism of the eastern church. In the first of these Innocent was meeting success, albeit in varying degrees, for example in Languedoc. The second and third needed his further attention. He was of the opinion that a renewed crusading effort in both east and west would be able to achieve mass conversions amongst Jews and Muslims. To this end the fourth crusade of 1204, mounted mainly by the Cistercians, came into being.