In this essay I aim to consider the association of place with apostolic personae. The imaginative worlds generated between the time of the apostles in the first century and the rise of the medieval Christian world in the seventh and eighth centuries can be seen as an integral part of what we now label ‘late antiquity’. The period of late antiquity, roughly from 300 to 600 AD (from Constantine to Mohammed), is substantively a period of consolidation and reorientation: knowledge from the ancient Greco-Roman civilizations was queried, repackaged, and disseminated; classical literature was copied, commented upon, and imitated; Roman law was collected, rearranged, and declared authoritative. What has been less studied in this period is the reception of the apostolic world as a realm of knowledge in its own right.

Of all the medieval monastic orders the Cistercian has undoubtedly received the most attention from historians, and this engagement with the White Monks shows no sign of abating. In the words of David Robinson in his recent volume on the Cistercian abbeys of Wales, ‘to turn one’s back on the subject, even for a moment, is to lose the plot’. Current scholarship continues to be concerned with a range of issues. However, much of the most controversial scholarship has centred on the dating of key Cistercian documents: the narratives of the origins of Citeaux, that is, the Exordium Parvum and the Exordium Cistercii, as well as various versions of the Cistercian constitution, the Carta Caritatis, and successive capitula, that is, the pronouncements of the Annual General Chapter. The debate is not new. For over seventy years scholars, including in an English context Dom David Knowles, have sought to unravel the textual and manuscript complexities of the documents relating to the foundation and growth of the mother house itself and of the order. In the last six years two significant contributions to this area of scholarship have appeared, the first more controversial than the second. First, Constance Berman argued that the key Cistercian documents were inventions of the latter part of the twelfth century, designed to create a past for the Cistercian order, an organization which, she argues, did not exist before the mid-twelfth century.

A round 1230 Burchard of Ursperg, a Premonstratensian canon, writing about the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), reported that ‘with the world already growing old, two religious orders arose in the Church – whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s’. The success of the Franciscans in contributing to what Burchard saw as the renewal of the Church’s youth was simultaneously assisted and celebrated by documenting the life of the founder, Francis (1182–1226), in words and images soon after his death and throughout the thirteenth century. Within these representations, the pivotal event in securing Francis’s religious ‘conversion’ was his encounter with the decaying church of San Damiano outside Assisi. His association with the actual repair of churches in the written and pictorial accounts of his life was a potent allegorical image to signal the revival of the Church and the role of Francis and his followers in this. This essay focuses on how references to the repair of churches were used to call attention to the role of the Franciscans in the revival of the Church in the thirteenth century.

Revival, as this volume shows, has had many different meanings within Christian history, and has taken many different, forms. Institutional revitalization, for example, is one thing; popular revivalism is another. Of course, they may be intertwined, as they were in the case of the Franciscan Observance of the late Quattrocento. The ‘re’ of ‘revivalism’ is usually taken in a retrospective sense -that which previously existed is brought to life once more. Renaissance classicism is an obvious instance. With the Franciscan Observance, it is true, one does get a sense of the desire to restore, to re-institute, the idealized primitive poverty of the order in the days of St Francis. For the Observants, pristine Franciscanism would have been the equivalent of the early Church in the eyes of the Protestant reformers. Yet ‘revivalism’ can also be thought of as pertaining to remarkable occasions of religious intensity, moments of collective enthusiasm, moments, as Emile Durkheim puts it, of ‘general effervescence.’ But champagne is too light-headed and celebratory to do justice to the phenomenon. A better symbol of ‘revivalism’ would be the flames of Pentecost. Here I shall attempt to show how the Observance rose to prominence, and eventually triumphed within the Franciscan order, through the raging fires – creative as well as destructive – of popular, indeed populist revivalism.

Christian historians have found it hard to approve those who resist revival and resurgence in the Church and particularly in the period of the Reformation. It is often assumed too readily that sympathy with Renaissance biblical and patristic scholarship (resurgence par excellence) should have led honest scholars to Protestantism. Yet it did not always do so. Erasmus outstandingly did not fit this pattern but nor did many others, even among those who benefited from his scholarship and shared some of his concerns. Modern scholars have too often regarded such dissenting voices as at best conservative and at worst benighted or dishonest. Contemporaries were equally (or more) scathing about one another. It is very difficult therefore to give proper value to those who shared some but not all the tendencies which Erasmus epitomized yet were deeply critical of some of the conclusions to which these could lead.

The ideal Protestant life was built around two critical events: conversion and death. At the first, the believer received justification and the assurance of salvation; at the second, the promise once received came into its fullness. This pattern was implicit from the earliest days of the Reformation, and when the English Puritans of William Perkins’ school mapped out a schematic for the Protestant life they made it explicit. Theologically, this pattern made a great deal of sense. However, it created a practical problem. Many believers had to endure a tediously long interval between these two high points. How was the good Protestant supposed to pass the time?

This essay is intended as a contribution to the history of the revival and resurgence of Catholicism in the sixteenth century. The debates about this topic that have arisen since 1945 have mostly concerned either the nature and importance of Evangelism (where the most important views are those of Jedin, Simoncelli and Mayer), or the relative importance of the Inquisition and the Council of Trent in reforming the Church and responding to the Protestant threat (a debate which first pitted the views of Firpo against those of Jedin, and then, with particular reference to Cardinal Pole, those of Mayer against both of these). Whereas the focus in the above debates has usually been on developments in religion and politics at the top of the Church, the intention in this essay is to concentrate instead on issues of reform as they were faced by perhaps the most influential mendicant order of the period. The sixteenth-century Dominicans did indeed have their impact on high politics as the argument below will show, but they were also very influential at local level and in the universities.

Reflecting on the early endeavours of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) following its establishment in 1699, John Chamberlayne, the Society’s secretary, confidently noted the ‘greater spirit of zeal and better face of Religion already visible throughout the Nation’. Although Chamberlayne clearly uses the language of revival, through the nineteenth century, many historians of the Evangelical Revival in Britain saw it as a ‘new’ movement arising in the 1730s with the advent of the evangelical preaching of the early Methodists, Welsh and English. Nineteenth-century historians often confidently propagated the belief that they lived in an age inherently superior to the unreformed eighteenth century. The view that the Church of England from the Restoration to the Evangelical Revival was dominated by Latitudinarian moralism leading to dead and formal religion has recently been challenged but was a regular feature of Victorian scholarship that has persisted in some recent work. The traditional tendency to highlight the perceived dichotomy between mainstream Anglicanism and the Revival has served to obscure areas of continuity such as the fact that Whitefield and the Wesleys intentionally addressed much of their early evangelistic preaching to like-minded brethren in pre-existing networks of Anglican religious societies and that Methodism thrived as a voluntary religious society. Scores of historians have refuted the Victorian propensity to assert the Revival’s independence from the Church of England.

In May 1741, an anonymous Yorkshire Methodist sent George Whitefield a long letter in which he recorded the details of his nine-year-old daughter’s evangelical conversion. Within a fortnight the letter was printed in The Weekly History, the magazine which had become the official mouthpiece of the Calvinistic wing of the Evangelical Revival by this point. Here is how Whitefield began his account:

On 24 August 1744, in a sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, John Wesley indicted what he perceived to be a poverty of ‘Scriptural Christianity’ within the University. Wesley began his homily by portraying an early declension of the Church; already in apostolic times, he maintained, the ‘mystery of iniquity’ had grown up alongside the ‘mystery of godliness’. Wesley then painted a dramatic picture of enduring conflict between these two forces throughout church history, declaring, ‘Here we tread a beaten path: the still increasing corruptions of the succeeding generations have been largely described from time to time, by those witnesses God raised up, to show that he had “built his church upon a rock, and the gates of hell should not” wholly “prevail against her”.’

The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century Wales actually consisted of a number of separate ‘great collective spiritual outpourings’, as John Walsh described them, which seem to have been completely spontaneous and unplanned. By the nineteenth century, periodic revivals had become accepted as a characteristic of Welsh Nonconformity, but were perhaps increasingly less spontaneous. Historians have suggested that arranged revivals became more common in a Welsh context as a result of the influence of the ideas of Charles Finney in the 1830s and 1840s. Daniel Rowland’s first biographer, John Owen, condemned this as a ‘forcing system’ which he thought was ‘calculated only to increase the number of unsound professors’. In contrast, Owen emphasized the genuine unplanned nature of the eighteenth-century revivals. This paper examines the origins and influence of one of those unplanned revivals which occurred between 1762 and 1764, the first general renewal of Calvinistic Methodism in Wales after its initial beginning in the 1730s and the model for the future revivalist tradition.

For Anglican Evangelicals, terms like ‘awakening’ and ‘revival’ pointed rather to reinvigoration and the recovery of old glories than to some new and disturbing disjunction. Those seeking change, remarked Rowland Hill, would do well to follow the example of the reformers, who ‘did not innovate, but renovate, they did not institute, they only reformed.’ Nevertheless, this still left many – like Hill -balancing their urge to reform on the one hand with the importance of Anglican ‘regularity’ on the other. Several initiatives bore the mark of this tension. For example, the foundation of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799 owed much to frustration with the inactivity of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). The new society was ‘founded upon the Church-principle, not the High Church principle’, remarked John Venn, who stressed that it was possible to express Gospel zeal within a solidly Anglican framework. As the Missionary Magazine commented perceptively, ‘a set of people will no doubt contribute to this whose predilection for the Church and dislike to Methodists and Dissenters, would have effectively kept them from aiding the [London Missionary Society]’. The Christian Observer, founded in 1802 to be the periodical mouthpiece of ‘moderate’ Evangelicalism, evinced the same concerns in its first number, when it promised ‘to correct the false sentiments of the religious world, and to explain the principles of the Church’. As the leading Evangelical ‘regulars’ maintained, only this uneasy balancing act could bring far-reaching change.

This in 1826 was the judgement of Daniel Wilson, vicar of Islington and later bishop of Calcutta, looking back on the publication on 12 April 1797 of William Wilberforce’s Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. Wilson went on to argue that the book ‘contributed in no small measure, to the progress of that general revival of religion which had already been begun’. It subsequently became a historiographical commonplace that the book was ‘the handbook of the Evangelicals’; but its impact on British religion also had other important dimensions that need to be explored.

In December 1807, representatives from thirty-five French female religious communities wrote to Napoleon, reminding him that their associations were ‘essentially religious’. They stated that any attempt to secularize them would bring about their death and they announced their wish to remain subject to the authority of the Church in all that concerned their spiritual lives and interior regimes. These women, whom Napoleon had called to Paris especially, thereby warned the Emperor that although he may have been responsible for the official revival of their communities, he could not assume control over every aspect of their existence.

Revival and resurgence is not simply something that happens to individuals or groups of persons; it is a phenomenon that, takes place within organized communities, institutions, and societies. The Church has existed in history as an organized society of believers, and this institutional dimension of Christianity has frequently shaped Christian history and the influence of Christianity on wider society for better and worse. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the dimension of Christianity which has been most influential historically. However, in the case of the Church of England in the British Empire its organized influence as a Church was seriously curtailed by its restricted and partial institutional existence throughout the eighteenth century in the North American colonies. There it existed without a bishop to provide local leadership and an effective counterweight to local lay elites. When that situation reversed and the British state began to support colonial bishoprics after the loss of the thirteen colonies in the new United States of America, the Church of England remained largely at the mercy of fluctuating political agendas to supply colonial bishops with sufficient legality and infrastructure. However, in the early 1840s the Church of England underwent a resurgence in the British Empire as a consequence of developing a new response to its metropolitan political situation, which initiated a revival in its colonial engagement.

It was ‘one of the most wonderful revivals in church history’, to be compared to the religious revival in the ‘days of Josiah towards the close of the Jewish monarchy’. This extravagant comment referred not to the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century, that paradigm of all religious revivals, but to something which the author, writing in 1912, characterized as ‘the Catholic Revival’.

The idea of a revival or resurgence in either the individual soul or the life of the Church as a whole is as old as Christian history. Yet in the vast recent explosion of scholarship on the subject of religious revival, the term itself and whole framework of discussion continues to be applied primarily to Protestant Evangelicalism. While religious resurgence has not been tied to a specific theological or denominational tradition, religious revival (which is often classified in terms of a hierarchy of significance from ‘Awakenings’ downwards) and especially ‘revivalism’ (a term used to describe religious movements of enthusiasm) has tended to become synonymous with Evangelicalism.