In the summer of 1304 the leaders of the Spiritual Franciscan party in Italy, Fra Angelo Clareno and Fra Liberato, were gathered with their followers in Perugia. They had recently returned from exile in the east. Benedict XI was dead and western Christendom awaited the outcome of what was to be one of the most crucial papal elections in the later Middle Ages. It was to be a trial of strength between the pro-and anti-French parties, accompanied by much political manœuvring, rumour and bargaining. In the interval, while the political groups were mustering their forces, there appeared a set of prophecies of the popes, called the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus, which can with some confidence be ascribed to the little group at Perugia. Seldom in history can the gap between hope and political reality have been wider. The Spiritual Franciscans were thinking in terms of heilsgeschichte, and for them the crisis of all history was at hand, while cardinals Napoleone degli Orsini, Nicholas of Prato, and others were laying down the tortuous lines of the intrigues which resulted in the election of Clement V and the removal of the papacy to Avignon. It is only through these prophecies that we can discern the high expectations and pent-up emotion with which this moment was approached by some at least. Though the moment passed and salvation drew not nigh, there was some powerful force of attraction in these prophecies: they were seized on immediately, quickly disseminated and imitated. Why was this?

The continuity of English ecclesiastical history is so strong that one is always faced with the problem of when to begin. Paradoxically enough, so far as the diocese of York is concerned, 1499 seems to be a good choice to begin any examination of the Elizabethan clergy. In that year one of the last appropriations of a benefice by a monastic house took place. After this only three more similar appropriations are recorded. This concluded a process which had lasted more than two centuries and was to influence the status of the parish clergy in local society until Queen Anne’s Bounty and after. In 1710 the commissioners found that 5,597 benefices out of a total of nearly 10,000 livings in England and Wales were not worth more than £ 50 a year. A further examination revealed that of these 5,597 livings 2,122 had a yearly value of less than £30, and a further 1,200 were valued at less than £ 20 a year.

In the spring of 999 the Emperor Otto III went on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Monte Gargano in southern Italy. His pilgrimage was not widely recorded; it was not referred to in any of the works produced in the Empire in the next half century, and only briefly mentioned in three South Italian works. But Otto’s pilgrimage was described more extensively in the eleventh-century vitae of two saints: the anonymous Greek Vita Nili and Peter Damian’s Vita Beati Romualdi. This article will make a case-study of the way in which the authors of these vitae used Otto’s pilgrimage to help construct the sanctity of their own subject, and of how far this reflects the degree of unity, and of diversity, between the Greek and Latin traditions of the Church in southern Italy in the first half of the eleventh century.

In August 1976 the remains of a substantial building were uncovered in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, by the street which has been called at least since 1116 the rue aux Juifs (see plate I). That it was a Jewish building is confirmed by the Hebrew graffiti on its interior walls. It can be dated firmly to the years around 1100 by its scale, style, and workmanship, which are strongly reminiscent of the so-called ‘Norman exchequer’ in the ducal castle at Caen. The quality of its masonry is as good as may be found anywhere in northern Europe at this time. The function of the building is not altogether certain. At 14.14 X 9.46 metres, with at least one storey above the ground floor, it seems too large for a private dwelling, and indeed it is bigger than any known synagogue of this date north of the Alps. Not only the graffiti, but the lions of Judah finely carved at the base of one column, and the dragon from Psalm 91 on another, strongly suggest a religious purpose. The synagogue was on this street, but it is usually thought to have been on the south side, opposite the Palais de Justice site. This has led Norman Golb, the author of a major study of the Jewish community at Rouen, to suggest that the building unveiled in 1976 was a school, which acted as a centre of advanced study, not only for the Jewry of Rouen, but for a much larger region in which educational and scholarly activity is attested throughout the twelfth century by a rich crop of surviving manuscripts and other references, including many from places like Pont-Audemer, Touques, Falaise, Evreux, and Coutances, which were by no means major urban centres at this time.

It is unusual for a period of Christian renewal to begin with a massacre, yet that is what happened when the crusaders entered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of the count of Toulouse, boasted that they rode through moslem corpses heaped up in the Haram al-Sharif with blood ‘even to the horse bridles’ This should not obscure the fact that the crusading movement was motivated partly by a growing devotion to the humanity of Christ in the western church in the late eleventh century, or, as the author of the Gesta Francorum expressed it, a desire to ‘follow in the footsteps of Christ, by whom they had been redeemed from the power of hell’. It was this sentiment which led the crusaders to seek to restore the shrine churches of Jerusalem and in the eighty-eight years of their rule they filled the city with fine churches and monasteries closely resembling those which were being built in the west at the same time. It should be emphasised that the crusaders were seldom concerned to rebuild existing churches in Frankish style: their primary interest was to restore churches which had been ruined by war and persecution in the centuries of moslem rule. The pilgrim Saewulf, who visited the east four years after the Latin conquest, reported that ‘nothing has been left habitable by the Saracens, but everything has been devastated . . . in all. . . the holy places outside the walls. . . of Jerusalem’.

On the second day of the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, King James I rebuked Dr John Reynolds of Oxford in words which are almost painfully familiar. A Scottish presbytery, pronounced the royal theologian, ‘as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil,’ and there followed what a Scot later remembered as ‘that unkoth motto,’‘no bishop, no king.’ The king’s bon mot so perfectly epitomises an important principle of Stuart policy that it may seem an act of pedantry to ask whether in fact the proposals which provoked it included the extirpation of bishops. But Dr Barlow, author of the Summe and substance of the conference, seems to have appreciated that Reynolds had spoken of no such thing. The king was ‘somewhat stirred,’ he explains, ‘thinking that they aymed at a Scotish presbytery.’

Guibert of Nogent gives a number of examples of a change for the better (bonae mutationis exempla) in the lives of his contemporaries. He evidently considered conversion to be a subject of strong topical appeal to his readers, as well as a matter of importance in itself, and he gives as many examples as he can. He has a double sense of the word conversio in mind. He often refers to the decision to enter a monastery which was the common meaning of the term in his day, but he also understands by it something closer to the larger sense of‘conversion’. Evrard of Breteuil, he says, turned from his pride to examine the wretched state of his soul, and began to look about him for a way of life in which he might live more worthily. He followed the example of Theobald of Champagne, who came to dislike the profession of arms: inter ipsa rudimenta militiae arma despiciens, and made himself self-supporting as a charcoal-burner. One Simon, count of Valois, ‘enriched the religious life of our day by the outstanding example of an unexpected conversion’: mirabili nostri temporis religionem inopinae mutationis claritate ditavit. Such a conversion was often—as Guibert relates it—sudden and irreversible in the change of direction it brought about. For St Bruno, his conversionis initia was something to which he, and others, could later look back with certainty as the moment when he began to live a different kind of life.

We are all familiar with the idea that the Church is in the world but not of it, and that too great a preoccupation with earthly things may compromise the Church’s other-worldly objectives. One thinks of the extravagance of a Renaissance pope such as Leo X, reputed to have said, ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’: or of an ancien régime prelate like the Archbishop of Mainz, who arrived for the coronation of the Emperor Joseph II with a retinue of fourteen sumptuous carriages: or, in our own time, the Vatican’s reported links with some of the shadier elements in the world of international finance. Yet, it is equally obvious that lack of adequate material resources can act as a serious impediment to the Church’s mission to go forth and teach all nations. Excessive poverty, like excessive wealth, brings its own problems. As the adage has it, not money itself but the desire for money is the root of all evil. Excessive poverty and the desire for money are the themes which I wish to pursue in this paper, in the context of the Scottish Catholic Mission in the eighteenth century, and more specifically as they relate to the so-called Jansenist quarrels which divided the Mission in the 1730s and 1740s.

It was a ghetto, undeniably,’ concluded the American political journalist, Garry Wills, when recalling from the safe distance of 1971 his ‘Catholic Boyhood’. ‘But not a bad ghetto to grow up in.’ Wills’s ghetto was defined by the great body of shared experiences, rituals, relationships, which gave Catholics a strongly felt common identity, and separated them from their Protestant and Jewish neighbours who knew none of these things. Wills talked about priests and nuns, incense and rosary beads, cards of saints and statues of the Virgin, but in this essay said very little about Catholic organisations (apart from a brief reference to the Legion of Decency). In many European countries, by contrast, any reference to the ‘ghetto’ from which many Catholics were seeking to escape in the 1960s and ’70s inevitably focused on the network of specifically Catholic organisations which was so characteristic of central and north-west European societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans even have a pair of words to describe this phenomenon, Vereins- or Verbandskatholizismus, which can be defined as the multiplication of organisations intended to champion the interests of Catholics as a body, and to meet the special needs, spiritual, economic or recreational, of every identifiable group within the Catholic population. So when in 1972 the Swiss historian Urs Altermatt wrote a book on the origins of the highly self-conscious and disciplined Swiss Catholic sub-culture, the result was an organisational history, as stolid and as soberly objective as Wills’s book was whimsical and partisan. Its purpose was to determine how it came about that so many a Catholic ‘was born in a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools (from kindergarten to university), read Catholic periodicals and newspapers, later voted for candidates of the Catholic Party and took part as an active member in numerous Catholic societies’, being also ‘insured against accident and illness with a Catholic benefit organisation, and placing his money in a Catholic savings bank’.

The confraternities of late-medieval Europe have been seen as associations which were in some ways almost independent of the Church, and drew their special dynamism from the fact that the parish was supposedly in decline and had ceased to provide an adequate religious service to the lay community. However true this may have been north of the Alps, the problem when this proposition is applied to southern Europe, and particularly Italy, is that very little is known about the late-medieval parish to ascertain whether confraternities were really syphoning off the adherence of the local inhabitants. So often our impressions about the state of the Italian church derive from the sporadic visitations of local bishops or the ribald stories of a Boccaccio or Franco Sacchetti, later repeated and taken almost at face value by such influential writers as Burkhardt. But we may also be in danger of seeing late-medieval religion filtered through sixteenth-century eyes and taking for granted the correctness of the criticisms of the Council of Trent or for that matter following Luther’s gripes that confraternities had become no more than beer-drinking clubs.

The trial of Henry Sherfield, the puritan recorder of Salisbury, before Star Chamber in February 1633 was one of the most famous in that court’s last years; and his offence, ‘unlawfully, riotously and prophanely’ smashing the window in St Edmund’s church which contained pictures of the Creation, is one of the best-known cases of puritan religious protest in the years preceding the Civil War. But the background to the trial, and in particular the local tensions which lay behind it, have never been thoroughly explored. Yet Sherfield’s case, like the contemporary churchales controversy in Somerset, provides an example of that important amalgam of local and national issues which shaped the English Revolution. It also illuminates the social and political conditions which moulded Puritanism in an urban setting.

8 February 1782. This day being appointed as a Fast on the present Troubles and Wars abroad, I went to Weston church this morning at 11 O’clock and there read Prayers proper on the occasion—but there was no sermon after.

8 March 1789. I read prayers and preached this afternoon at Weston Church. Also read with the greatest pleasure a Prayer composed on the occasion on the restoration of his Majesty’s Health, which I received this morning.

In offering special prayers upon occasions of national importance Parson Woodforde was following an old tradition. One earlier phase of this tradition which is worth close scrutiny is the Hundred Years War, which affected all sections of the English population, civilian as well as military, clerical as well as lay.

On 29 June 824, a woman named Dhuoda went to Aachen to be married in the imperial palace. She herself tells us about the wedding, yet it is characteristic of the Carolingian age that we know far more of the groom, Bernard of Septimania, than of the bride. His career and connections can be pieced together from a wide range of sources, but she is only known from the manual of moral and spiritual advice which she composed in 841–3 for her absent fifteen-year-old son William. Bernard’s life can be reconstructed as a coherent narrative, but Dhuoda’s only emerges from a few tattered snapshots, without even a family album to contain them. Famous as she is as the only lay woman among the tiny handful of women writers known to us by name from the early Middle Ages, Dhuoda’s isolation must be stressed. Not merely her personal sense of loneliness, powerfully conveyed, nor even the difficulty of placing her within any secure literary context, but also her historiographical isolation mark her out, for we know all too little about the women of the early medieval aristocracy to which Dhuoda belonged. We can neither sketch with any precision the lifestyle of Dhuoda’s peer group, nor assess whether she is typical of it – or exceptional. The married women of the Carolingian aristocracy remain largely occluded from our sight, chronicled only in disjunct fragments of evidence which do not permit of any extended or systematic analysis. When we can find them, aristocratic women more often appear enveloped within the bonds of family and kinship than independent individuals within political contexts. But there remains the unsettling image of the young Dhuoda, briefly translated out of her familial and domestic setting into the shadowy corridors of imperial power: and the scene prompts questions about the place of wives and marriage within the Carolingian polity.

These words were written twenty years ago, for a conference at the Library of Congress in 1980 on ‘Literacy in historical perspective’. Since then, these themes have been addressed in several lectures and research papers at conferences, and I would stand by the main ideas expressed in that passage. Monks had indeed given extraordinary prestige to books and in particular to the illuminated liturgical book, which is a medieval invention. By the thirteenth century such books were being adapted for lay use and ownership, typically in Books of Hours. However, it is mistaken to say that lay use ‘began’ then, as the aristocracy – particularly in Germany – had been familiar with prayer books for centuries. In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen was said to have learned only the Psalter ‘as is the custom of noble girls’. A Psalter for lay use dating from c.1150, which belonged to Clementia von Zähringen, has been preserved. It contains a full-page portrait of a lady – presumably Clementia herself – at folio 6v between the end of the Calendar and the Beatus page beginning the Psalms. This book has 126 folios in its present state (possibly one folio is missing at the end) and it measures 11 cm X 7 cm, no larger than a woman’s hand. The biography of Marianus Scotus, the eleventh-century Irish hermit who settled at Regensburg, describes how he wrote for poor widows and clerics ‘many little books and many Psalter manuals’ (‘multos libellos multaque manualia psalteria’). The diminutive form ‘libellos’ and the adjective ‘manualia’ emphasise that these manuscripts were small enough to hold in the hand, like Clementia von Zähringen’s book.

Noli pater
Father do not allow thunder and lightning,
Lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.
We fear you, the terrible one, believing there is none like you.
All songs praise you throughout the host of angels.
Let the summits of heaven, too, praise you with roaming lightning,
O most loving Jesus, O righteous King of Kings.
(Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, 85)

Early medieval attitudes to the natural world were distinctly ambivalent. At one level the natural world represented the marvel of God’s creative power; filled with beauty, it supplied everything necessary for human existence, meriting praise, as in the hymn sung by the herdsman from Whitby, Cædmon:

Catechizing played an important part in domestic religious education in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in the better documented early modern period. However, its significance has been neglected in comparison with family prayers (often deemed to be an expression of patriarchy), Sunday observance or even private prayers. This article analyses the incidence of catechizing across religious denominations in Britain from 1740 to 1870, and within selected overseas missionary families. Drawing on a wide range of personal memoirs, the article analyses the range of contexts and relationships within which catechizing could occur. These included not only household worship (which could be conducted by women) but also relationships between siblings. It demonstrates that catechizing could provide opportunities for asking questions and spending ‘quality time’ with parents and / or children, rather than embodying an alienating form of rote-learning. The article therefore challenges many stereotypes relating to family domestic education, relating to themes such as patriarchy, denominational difference and adult-child interaction.

Historians tend to approach books primarily as vehicles for ideas, sources for the thought of the individuals and groups who wrote and read the words on the pages inside. They rarely pause to consider their significance as physical artefacts and items of material culture. This paper brings the format, appearance, and practical function of Bibles, prayer books, and other small devotional works to the very centre of our attention. It suggests that close scrutiny of the diminutive size and artistically crafted covers of some of the copies that survive yields fresh insights into the shape and texture of piety in late medieval and early modern England. The following investigation is heavily indebted to the findings of researchers in the specialized field of the history of bookbinding, a field once light-heartedly described as ‘a humble auxiliary discipline … not entirely useless and undoubtedly innocuous’. Yet, as we shall see, situated against the backdrop of developments in Tudor and Stuart embroidery and jewellery, domestic furnishing and female fashion, decorated bookbindings provide us with a unique and interesting reflection of the values and preoccupations of pre- and post-Reformation society.

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.

Odo of Sully, Bishop of Paris (1200-8), decreed in his statutes that each parish priest within his diocese should have a book called a manuale, which should contain the ordo of service for extreme unction, the catechism, baptism, and everyday things. His prescription is the earliest mention in the episcopal legislation that a parish priest should have one particular book dedicated to the liturgy for all the services associated with pastoral care. But codices concerned with the sacerdotal rites for the cura anitnarum have a history which goes back to the late ninth and tenth centuries. These early ritualia were often combined with the monastic collectar, as in the mid-tenth-century Durham Collectar. There are also some examples from the late tenth and eleventh centuries of ritualia made for the secular clergy. Odo of Sully was thus providing his powerful support to an existing practice rather than instituting a new form of service book. This paper investigates further the context in which these early examples of ‘parish’ rituals were compiled, beginning with the Carolingian background.