One purpose of canonization, particularly for founders of religious orders, is to present a paradigm for emulation. The legacy of Charles de Foucauld (1858—1916), a Catholic hermit who lived and died in French Algeria as a witness for Christianity to Islam, has been in some dispute. There are nineteen different congregations and associations in the Foucauldian spiritual family, only one of which came to fruition during his lifetime. His beatification in 2005 has sparked a debate about the nature of his vocation, and consequently about which of his characteristics should be emulated. This raises the question of whether he was a monk or a missionary. Careful consideration of his life is an essential prerequisite for answering these questions.

Race and recreation are two contemporary social problems which historically have had a close connection with religion. Religion has both sanctioned racial discrimination and provided the inspiration to overcome it. It has both opposed and encouraged particular forms of popular recreation. Sociologists and social historians are increasingly investigating the various combinations of these 3 Rs - religion, race, recreation. A great deal of work has been done on the relations between religion and race, quite a lot on race and recreation, especially in the form of sport, and a beginning has been made on religion and recreation. To my knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to bring these three elements together.

Early medieval thinkers often conceived of God in legal terms, especially when they interpreted contemporary disasters as God's ‘just judgement’. Modern scholars have emphasized the importance of these ideas for motivating early medieval reform and legislation and for interpreting history itself. This article explores how these ideas were used in Carolingian legislation and history writing and argues that God's judgement was not as straightforward a theme as it first appears. God's judgement, for example, was not nearly as important for Carolingian historians as it had been for their predecessors. Similarly, in both legal and historical texts, there was great variety in how God's judgement or punishment was expressed, both in how that punishment fell and on whom (whether on the audience or on their enemies). Across these works, however, it is clear that God's judgement was almost never referred to apart from his continuing mercy and help towards to the audiences of these texts. This shows the importance of the various aspects of God's character for early medieval churches and their attitudes to law and history.

One of the consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries was the amount of patronage which fell into lay hands. In the past the influence of laymen, apart from that of the Crown itself, on the emergent Elizabethan Church has largely been ignored. A great deal has been written about the wolves coming out of Geneva, and about the more moderate protestant clerics from less controversial backgrounds. Even recent studies of Church history in the Elizabethan period seem to give the impression that an informed interest in theology was confined to the clergy. Yet by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign there was already a body of educated laymen committed to the doctrines of protestantism and their numbers increased as the reign progressed. In his edition of the letters of Thomas Wood, one such protestant layman, Dr Collinson has given ample evidence that the participation of some of the laity in Church matters cannot be ignored. In the company of Thomas Wood stands Sir Francis Hastings, an equally intrepid Elizabethan layman. By his enthusiasm he succeeded radically and consciously in altering the climate of thinking in the Church in those parts of England where he lived. By his public protestations in Parliament and in his published writings he made his opinions on religion known to the whole nation.

A frequent criticism of the Society of Jesus, and one which Martin Grene, the Jesuit apologist whose An Account of the Jesuites Life and Doctrine was published in 1661, was especially eager to refute, was the possession of immense wealth. Grene’s rebuttal began with a distinction between an individual Jesuit and a Jesuit institution. The former was forbidden to accept any financial compensation for his apostolic services. What he did, he did freely. Grene stressed that the work was done by the Society gratuitously and simply for the love of God. The Jesuits sought no reward but relied on the providence of God ‘who exciteth devout people to supply their [the Jesuits’] necessity out of pure charity’. The alms of the faithful supported the Society and, through its dependence on charity, the Society hoped to avoid all semblance of avarice and simony.

The papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae of 1850 set up a hierarchy of bishops with ordinary power to replace the vicars apostolic who had ruled the catholic church in England since 1688. It stated explicitly that the new bishops were to have all the necessary powers to rule their dioceses in the same way as titular bishops elsewhere, and it spoke clearly about the resumption of the ‘common law of the church’ in England. Yet the commitment of the Roman authorities to a fully independent hierarchy was not wholehearted. The church in England was to remain under the aegis of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda), whose normal brief was to look after missionary territories not stable enough to have properly constituted hierarchies. According to the bull, the English bishops were to send regular reports on the state of their dioceses to Rome, and were to be diligent in informing Propaganda ‘of everything which they shall think profitable for the spiritual good of their flocks’.

‘Civilization’ was a major keyword in the Italian Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Indeed Catholic Christian civilization was seen as synonymous with true civilization itself insofar as the post-classical era was concerned. The concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was closely allied to that of cristianità, as distinct from cristianesimo (Christianity). The terms cristianità and chrétienté, like English ‘Christendom’, had originally had primarily geographical connotations, but in post-Revolutionary Catholic thought they acquired connotations of a Christian order of society under the leadership of the Church, the evils of the modern world being presented as consequences of its breakdown. The allied discourse on ‘Christian civilization’ itself in the Italian Catholic world, as in the French one, was in large measure reactionary in character, associated with Counter-Revolutionary ideology and with opposition to liberalism. It asserted that a return of society to the Church was a precondition of social order. Thus the myth of a lost universal order offered a paradigm for the future.

In Italy, the years around 1500 were fraught for a number of reasons. There were renewed fears about the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to a sense of instability and impending doom. In this climate many people became increasingly concerned about their fate in the afterlife and the need to be prepared for death and judgement. Central to this was the doctrine of purgatory. Yet, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, ideas surrounding purgatory were highly contested as heretical ideas from northern Europe began to filter into northern Italy. This paper investigates Catholic beliefs about the alleviation of purgatorial suffering through a case study of one holy woman from the north of Italy, the Dominican tertiary, Stefana Quinzani, who, according to a letter of 4 March 1500 written by Duke Ercole d’Este, endured every Friday ‘the whole of the Passion in her body, stage by stage, from the Flagellation to the Deposition from the Cross’.

The history of the family, at least for the nineteenth century, has reached a certain maturity. Though not yet incorporated into mainstream history – that would be too much to expect – it now boasts a considerable specialist literature and some useful general surveys. Undoubtedly the driving force has been the aspiration of women’s history to reconstruct the lives of women in the past. Now that the personal records of women are being studied with such attention, there is a wealth of insights into their experience as daughters, wives, and widows. Jeanne Peterson’s account of the Paget family and their circle in Victorian England is a typical example. For the nineteenth-century women’s historian, there is the added bonus that this was the period when the claims of women to have the dominant influence in the family were taken most seriously – as witness the persistent appeal of the Angel Mother. Hence to research the history of the Victorian family promises results which will feature women as agents, and not merely as victims of patriarchal oppression.

On 17 September 1523 a very wealthy widow, Dame Joan Thurscross, made her will in Hull. Her benefactions included £30 for new vestments to her parish church of St Mary’s, £35 to hire a priest for seven years to sing for her soul, the souls of her three husbands, of her parents, and of her son, £4 to the building works at the White Friars’, £12 for a priest to perform an obit in St Leonard’s convent in Grimsby, where she had been born, small presents to her god-daughter and other nuns at Sixhills, £20 for mending the causeway between Beverley and Anlaby, thirteen white gowns for thirteen poor women, and silver masers or standing pieces for Sixhills Nunnery, Kirkstall Abbey, and the Charterhouse of Hull. It is impossible to read this very individual will and not recognize the bequests, however conventional in themselves, as being the carefully thought out intentions of the testatrix. With its emphasis upon Masses for the dead and stress on die necessity of good works it furnishes a poignant example of late medieval piety.

More than twenty years ago, in the Introduction to his influential article which focused upon the life of Anne Locke, Patrick Collinson bemoaned the lack of recognition given to the role of women in the English Reformation. Happily, over the last few years this situation has been somewhat rectified, as modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized the degree of feminine participation in the spiritual upheavals of the period. The problem, however, remains that there is little evidence of personal feminine testimony, especially for the immediate post-Reformation period. The example of Elizabeth Bowes is, unfortunately, a case in point. Mrs Bowes, the wife of a prominent Durham gentleman, is well known to historians as a devoted follower and later the mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer, John Knox. Particularly during the early 1550s, Elizabeth maintained a regular correspondence with Knox. Of this, some thirty of Knox’s letters have been preserved, mainly in the form of a transcript copied from the originals in 1603. These letters, indeed, provide the main source of evidence for the life of the reformer during this period. Yet it is also apparent, from the tone of Knox’s replies, that much of the correspondence was devoted to the discussion and analysis of Mrs Bowes’s religious anxieties and aspirations, as she struggled to come to terms with her conversion to the Protestant Faith.

When asked to address the issue of the afterlife in African Christianity, my immediate reaction was to doubt whether there is much stress on the afterlife in contemporary African Christianity. This brought the response: ‘Well, deal with that; a Christianity from which the afterlife has been displaced.’ What follows is an attempt to do just that.

Town and countryside are contrasting, even opposed ideas: one of those doublets which have dominated European thought since antiquity. Our vocabulary of ‘politics’ and ‘civilization’ bears ample testimony to the deep hold that the prejudices of the townsmen of antiquity have established over our language and our thinking. Sometimes, even in antiquity, those prejudices would be turned on their head: the town, the exclusive milieu of culture, refinement and rational human behaviour, could become, as for instance in the eyes of a Jewish rabbi of the third century the seat of iniquity, set up to extort and to oppress. Whatever the attitude one took to the town, the dichotomy of town and countryside became almost a category in the Kantian sense in terms of which modern Europeans have come to perceive the world around them. With Max Weber it became a fundamental category of sociological understanding, with Rostovtzeff of historical analysis, especially of the ancient world in its decline; and in the hands of William Frend—the Rostovtzeff of ecclesiastical history—it showed its power to illuminate, even to transform, the study of ancient heresy and schism. ‘The church in town and countryside’ might be thought to extend the franchise of a notion which has already had too wide and at times, as some would have it, perhaps even a baleful, influence. But both the value of the notion of town and country as an interpretative tool for the ecclesiastical historian, and its limitations, its liability to obscure and to distort, will, I hope, become clearer in the course of discussion.

One day early in the thirteenth century a wandering scholar broke his journey at the Benedictine monastery of Prüfening near Regensburg in Bavaria. Of the books this scholar was carrying, one Liebhard, a monk of the monastery, was especially fascinated by a copy of Peter the Chanter’s Distinctiones Abel, a dictionary of the Bible for the preacher’s use and a prominent example of the recently developed literary genre of biblical distinctiones. Unfortunately, soon afterwards the scholar resumed his interrupted journey, and was not willing to leave the book behind at Prüfening, so Liebhard was unable to copy the full text but could only take down excerpts, which he later completed with texts from other sources. The result, which he called Horreum formicae (the ant’s harvest), still extant in at least two manuscripts, combines the approach of the masters of the Parisian schools with that of monastic theology. It is, therefore, an excellent example of a process ongoing throughout the whole twelfth century: the transfer of knowledge from the centres of learning in the north of France (Laon, Chartres, Paris) and of Italy (Bologna) towards the periphery of medieval Europe, resulting in the reception and critical discussion of new concepts and ideas, a process most readily visible in the distribution of books. This paper offers a preliminary sketch of this process with special emphasis on medieval Bavaria and Austria.

The Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille was composed in 1183 when its author was in his sixties and when the greater part of his writing must have lain behind him. That writing, as D’Alverny has most recently demonstrated, overwhelmingly consists of treatises of theological and devotional learning. Whilst it would be oversimplification to suggest that these religious works offer little evidence germane to Alan as a renaissance figure, there is no doubt that the Anticlaudianus offers the deepest insights into the secular influences upon Alan’s modes of thought. In this paper I should like to examine the essential nature and purpose of the Anticlaudianus against the liberating twelfth-century influences which directed the author towards its composition, against the extraordinary range of secular authors which he deploys, and finally and most importantly against the attempted synthesis between secular and sacred, between the insights of classical humanism and doctrinal Christianity, which is such a feature of the intellectual thought of the century. Alan is far from being a pioneer in this direction, but his vision of the synthesis illumines the whole intellectual tradition within which he wrote.

The Revolution of 1688 began for the clergy of the Church of England an era of grave crisis. It was not merely that the deposition of James II had posed for many of them a critical question of conscience. More serious were the effects of the Toleration Act of 1689 which quickly showed themselves in diminished attendances at church, and in a marked decline in the authority and status of the parish priest. By its literal provisions the act permitted dissenters a bare liberty to worship in their own way; but, as interpreted by successive administrations and by the great majority of the laity, it effected an ecclesiastical revolution. Although various statutes required all Englishmen to attend their parish-church each Sunday, and though the act merely permitted them to go to a meeting-house instead, it was widely held after 1689 that church-attendance was voluntary. The ecclesiastical courts continued to exercise their traditional jurisdiction in matrimonial, probate, and faculty causes, and over the clergy; but their coercive authority over the morals and religious duties of the laity became virtually impossible to enforce.

In his excellent study of medieval Italian society, Hyde makes a thought-provoking comparison of ‘the Italians of the age of Dante’ with the humanists of a later generation. The former he sees as distinguished by ‘a sense of continuity with the past and with other parts of the Catholic world’ from the humanists who ‘concentrated on what was close at hand, digging deep rather than spreading wide, so that their world revolved around central Italy.’ It is not my intention here to dispute this assertion, but to use it to stimulate reflection on the nature of Italian self-awareness in the early renaissance period, in the light of a further contrast between Hyde’s two ages which he does not himself emphasise.

English monasticism survived the Reformation only in exile. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many monks came to England as pastors to the Catholic community (indeed all members of the English Benedictine Congregation, revived at the beginning of the seventeenth century, took an oath promising to work in England after ordination), but they lived alone or in small groups and except during the early Stuart period there were no organised religious communities in England which could properly be called monastic. This state of affairs was to change dramatically in the years of the French Revolution when the English communities on the continent were repatriated and a number of French religious made their way to England as émigrés. The English communities (including those now represented by the abbeys of Ampleforth in Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset, formerly at Dieulouard in Lorraine and Douai in Flanders respectively) managed to settle in England without too much opposition. These monks had been trained for circumspect behaviour on the mission and were not noticeably ‘monastic’ in either appearance or behaviour; the complete Benedictine habit was not used at Downside, for example, until the late 1840s and working in parishes away from their monasteries remained the normal expectation of most English Benedictine monks until well into the present century. The same could not be said of the community of Saint Susan at Lulworth in Dorset which provided between the years 1794 and 1817 the setting for the first experiment in fully observant monastic life in England for two hundred and fifty years.

The transformation of eremitic communities into Augustinian priories was a notable feature of early Augustinian growth; during the twelfth century no less than about 50 houses of the order began in this way. The popularity of the eremitic way of life had increased considerably during the eleventh century and, once established, a hermit often inspired others to join him, thus becoming the unwitting instigator of a religious group which needed formal organization. The Rule of St. Augustine was the constitution most frequently adopted in these circumstances. This was because it provided a general framework for community life rather than a set of detailed instructions and could therefore be assimilated more easily by an established group.