At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.

‘It is possible that no breed of men and women can be so safely assessed as the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. No other breed, certainly, left more voluminous accounts of themselves to posterity.’ If the volume of documentation is a guarantee of safe assessment then Moorhouse’s bold assertion is particularly applicable to the subject of missionary motivation in Britain in die nineteenth century. Statements of motive, explicitly requested by directors of missionary societies, prayerfully considered and copiously detailed by candidates, and lovingly preserved by missionary-society archivists, might comprise the most voluminous extant documentation on religious motivation (Moorhouse’s boldness is infectious). Furthermore, this vast corpus of primary source material has been thoroughly ransacked by postgraduate students of history and sociology, so that the motives of English and Scottish missionaries for the whole of the nineteenth century have now been explored.

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

Regional identity in medieval Durham depended crucially on St Cuthbert. The property and privileges of the diocese were presented as possessions of an originally Celtic community which had carried the miraculously incorrupt body of the saint from Lindisfarne to a final home in Durham. Tradition added other holy abbots, bishops and kings, remembered as obedient to the Roman tradition after the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Durham story included the expulsion at the Conquest of married guardians of Cuthbert in favour of proper monks, a change corroborated by miracle stories and holy lives, such as that of Godric in the dependent cell of Finchale. Increasing possessions were given to the saint; miracle stories showed him punishing violators of his shrine. Relics, including the head of King Oswald and remains of Bede, linked the priory with these traditions. These ideas had penetrated the local identity; the notion of the Haliwerfolc, the community of the liberty of St Cuthbert, the lands belonging to the saint, remained strong in the late Middle Ages for people ‘between Tyne and Tees’. Nonetheless, in the 1570s Christopher Watson attempted a history which denigrated Cuthbert’s life and miracles and those of other Durham saints.

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.

Motives are the inner springs of action, the invisible causes which are apprehended only in their visible effects. The latter, when collected and classified as numerical data, are known as statistics, through which at least one aspect of the former can be explored and analysed. Thus, while we cannot ask them to reveal such fundamental questions as to what moved men to enter or leave the monastic life, we can legitimately seek an answer in quantitative terms to what is preliminary and, as such, vital to our understanding of the problem of religious motivation: what do statistics disclose with regard to the force of religious motivation and to its rise and decline among the black monks in England in the two centuries between the first catastrophic onslaught of the Black Death and the dissolution (AD 1350–1540)? This question encompasses a vast field and, for the purposes of this present study, our attention must be limited to the three cathedral priories of Ely, Norwich and Worcester.

Perhaps the most striking features of the history of Renaissance Venice are its highly commercialised economy and its precocious sense of secular state sovereignty. These characteristics owed much to the city’s independence of and isolation from rural and seigneurial influences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the high level of business activity and the confident awareness of statehood could also be related to the weakness of ecclesiastical influence in economic and political affairs. This was the case long before the spectacular conflict of 1606 when Venice was placed under the Interdict. The location of the Cathedral had always been a telling symbol of the place of the Church in Venetian life. It stood at San Pietro di Castello in an isolated area of the city. It is easy to overlook the fact that the centre of religious life, Saint Mark’s, was the Doge’s private chapel: a constant reminder of the intimate relationship between religious and political power, a material manifestation of the divine favour attached to Venice’s wealth and authority, both of which were unmistakably worldly.

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.

Probably the oldest existing institution of its kind in present-day Dissent, though now but a shadow of its former self, is that which has long gone under the name of ‘The Exeter Assembly’. This body, composed of ministers only, and in the main of ministers of Presbyterian congregations in the county of Devon, first met at Tiverton on 17 and 18 March 1691, with fifteen ministers present. The inaugural meeting was followed by regular meetings held twice a year, usually in May and September. Save for three short breaks (1717-21, 1728-33, and 1753-63), the Assembly’s minutes, or for the years 1691-1717 a contemporary copy transcribed by the Assembly’s scribe and published in 1963 by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society, have been preserved for the whole period from 1691 to the present time.

In his De civitate Dei, Augustine stated that anyone who wants to lead a good and Christian life must necessarily have lived in sin in his life up to then. It is quite conceivable that Augustine had his own course of life in mind when writing these words; he never made a secret of his own sinful youth, as is clear from the Confessiones. None the less, his statement is expressed in the form of a general rule.

Many medieval saints’ lives seem to accord with Augustine’s statement. The saint repents after a life of sin and henceforth leads a model Christian life until the day of his death. Thus the eventual victory of Christianity over the forces of evil was demonstrated.

However, there are also many vitae that follow a different pattern. The saint is sometimes supposed to have been perfect in every respect from childhood onward. He was born a saint rather than becoming one through a process of ‘spiritual maturation’. Stories about such precocious saints have not escaped notice in modern scholarship. Following E. R. Curtius, the phrase puer senex is sometimes used to denote the topos; in hagiography, expressions such as as quasi senex and cor gerens senile are used.

There is little direct evidence about the education of girls in classical times and Late Antiquity. Our conception of what provision was available has to be based chiefly on an examination of the material relating to the education of adult women and to the early training of little girls of four or five years of age. For the second half of the fourth century we are fortunate in possessing the testimony of three Christian writers on the subject of the education of mature women: Palladius, Gerontius of Jerusalem, and Jerome. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of their limitations. All three writers deal with women of a narrow social class, members of the wealthy Roman aristocracy, who were attempting to live a disciplined and austere monastic life, the majority of them against the incongruous background of their family mansions on the Aventine Hill, which was then a fashionable residential district. They were perhaps in the tradition of those earlier learned and cultivated aristocratic Roman ladies, recalled by Cicero, and exemplified by the daughter of his friend Atticus, who provided her with a tutor even after her marriage, and by Hortensia, the daughter of the orator Hortensius, who was trained by her father in public speaking, and who even made a speech in the Forum against a tax assessment. For information about the early training of little girls in fourth-century Rome we are indebted to the letters of Jerome, but this evidence, as we shall see, has certain limitations.

Two difficulties confront us when we examine the evidence provided by our three Christian writers: in the first place, none of them describes the educational process by which these ladies achieved so high a degree of cultivation and learning; secondly, the advice which Jerome gives about the training and education of little girls is intended for child oblates, consecrated to God even before their birth, and is, in any case, suspect, because much of it has been culled from an earlier writer.

There are problems with this topic. Zinzendorf himself would certainly have considered it a non-subject, as he would certainly have regarded the counsel of his contemporary Wesley to ‘gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can’ as unspeakably bourgeois, an adjective I have no recollection of Wesley’s applying to himself. The severer kind of economic historian might also regard what I have to say as a non-treatment of a non-subject, for I cannot present you with a profit-and-loss account of Zinzendorf’s transactions; I know no more about his income than he did, which was not very much; and although I shall refer later to the successive valuations of Zinzendorf’s property which that remarkable scholar Otto Uttendürfer dredged up from the Herrnhut archives sixty years ago, I attach no great importance to them. They seem to me the same kind of artificial enterprise as the annual revaluations for borrowing purposes which were made of the empty Centre Point building in its earlier years. Moreover, the straightforward introduction to the theme which I enjoyed not long ago is not readily available to historians in the West. It is to work first in the archive of Francke’s Orphan House at Halle, and then move on to that of the Renewed Church of the United Brethren at Herrnhut. Francke’s Orphan House, one of the biggest buildings of eighteenth-century Europe, has the Thatcherite principle of cost-effectiveness written all over it, and is clearly based on the Prussian barracks. The whole community at Herrnhut combines baroque lavishness with simplicity in a way not easily put into words, but most movingly experienced in the Grosse Saal in which the Brethren now hold their services. A visit to the Moravian settlement at Zeyst in the Netherlands, however, may sufficiently illustrate the point.

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.

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.

It would seem that in the assessment of the forces prevalent on the eve of the Reformation too little attention has been paid to the determined steps which a number of cardinals initiated in 1511 when they took it upon themselves to convoke a general council at Pisa. The cardinals and the ensuing council have never had a good press. In fact there seems a unanimous condemnation of their initiative: they were labelled schismatics paradoxically because they tried to prevent a schism; they had proved themselves, so it was alleged, as mere instruments of French expansionist policy and had acted against the interests of papacy and Church prompted as they were by personal considerations and animosity against Julius II. It seems almost ‘heretical’ to question this general verdict.

When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1661, almost the last item to be added was the General Thanksgiving. ‘On Saturday, 14 December’ (only a week before the Book was signed), ‘between the hours of 8 and 10 a.m., the Reverend Father the Lord Bishop of Norwich [Edward Reynolds] introduced and delivered into the hands of the Lord President a form of a certain prayer conceived by him at another time concerning thanks to God for general mercies to be used publicly.’ So the Proceedings of the Upper House of Convocation, which then tail off with the tantalizing words: ‘After this prayer had been read aloud and some discussion held thereon, the Reverend Father, etc.’ The normal procedure in 1661 for additions to the Prayer Book, as opposed to alterations, was to entrust their compilation to a committee whose chairman duly introduced the new form, when completed, into the House of Bishops. There is, however, no trace of such a committee’s being appointed to devise a general thanksgiving. By 14 December the section of the manuscript text headed Thanksgivings was already written out in full, and no space was left for further additions. Reynolds would seem to have acted on his own initiative.

In 1232 Germanus II (1223-40), the Nicaean Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Pope Gregory IX and to the cardinals of the Roman Church requesting discussions on the reformation of peace between the Greek and Roman Churches. In response to this request the Pope sent two English Franciscans and two French Dominicans, at least one of them proficient in Greek, as his representatives to Nicaea. After their return the friars presented a detailed account of the mission to the Pope, which was copied into the Liber Censuum. The extant documentation of the mission allows us to examine the ideas of the Greeks and Latins about unity and schism in the Church. And it shows us that there was no prospect of a union of the Churches because each had a fundamentally different conception of the nature of ecclesiastical authority.

For he called pope Leo IX not pontifex but pompifex and pulpifex; the Roman Church a council of vanity, the church of the malignant; and the Apostolic See the seat of Satan.’ This hostile epitaph, and more in the same vein, was written in 1088, the year that Berengar died. They are perhaps unequal crimes: to call even a scion of the German aristocracy ‘not pope but a maker of pomp’ or (worse still) ‘pulp’, and to reject the entire Roman Church as an institution. The charges are based on Lanfranc’s indictment of twenty-five years before: that Berengar had ignored the judgements of pope and council and despised the testimony of the faithful throughout the ages, saying that in himself and his followers only was the true Church to be found on earth.