In choosing this subject (on which many speakers have touched in talking to this Society) I started by intending to be more precise in my topic, as well as to introduce the question of church reform. The scholarship I had in mind was classical scholarship and all that went with it in eloquence, enjoyment and understanding of ancient authors. Against this I wished to pit those proponents of a religious life who rejected antiquity and all it stood for. Not of course all of either kind, but some representative examples drawn from the later Middle Ages. In the event the task I had chosen proved much more intricate that I had supposed it would be, the emerging picture more blurred. This, as we all know, is a fairly familiar phenomenon. And as for reform it figures, I am afraid, rather incidentally in what follows.

This paper deals with a particular narrow aspect of biblical learning, as it appears to have impinged on art some considerable time before 1500. If the material which I have proposed as my subject has relevance to the theme of Religion and Humanism it may be, in the first place, by reminding us that we owe the preservation of many of these works of art to the scholars and clerics of the reformed establishment, men like archbishop Matthew Parker in the late sixteenth century, and even to thoroughly post-medieval practical scientists like Dr William Hunter. They found respectable homes in college or university bookcases for the disjecta membra of the old monastic and cathedral libraries.

In terms of their achievements in the field of learning, Reginald of Durham and saint Godric of Finchale present an enormous contrast. Reginald was a monk of the powerful and wealthy community of Durham and also, naturally enough in the second half of the twelfth century, a priest. As such he was the product of a formal monastic education. He was especially favoured, in addition, because the house which moulded him was at that time passing through a phase when letters flourished to a greater extent than at any other period in its history. Godric, on the other hand, was never anything but a layman. He earned a living as a pedlar and merchant first of all and only later decided to abandon the world and lead the eremitic life. His contacts with learning were thus tenuous at best. Both Reginald and Godric were trying, however, to achieve the same ideal: to live the religious life, and for some years in the third decade of the twelfth century circumstances led them to follow their vocations in close contact with one another. Students of this period are fortunate in having some insight into the relationship that developed between them. In particular one can isolate the part played in the relationship by learning or, more precisely, by Reginald’s substantial education and the hermit’s lack of it.

One of the most interesting of the classicizing friars appears to have remained undiscovered and unstudied to date. I know him from only one work, a collection of sermons or collationes, and that work from one anonymous manuscript. It may be that further research will succeed in identifying the author (which is a reason for publicizing the manuscript). From internal evidence and the script of the manuscript it is likely that he lived in the later thirteenth century or the first half of the fourteenth. Despite their anonymity, however, these curious Franciscan collationes have a freshness and individuality which makes them stand out from the mass of thirteenth and fourteenth century sermon collections. Taken as a whole, and aside from exempla, the sermon literature of this period ‘holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of Truth In order to give it its due, one must first learn the difficult grammar of its forms of thought, for in these sermon collections the ideas are organized in a manner different not only from our own but also from that of contemporary scholastic works (whose approach is relatively familiar after a century of scholarly effort). The sermon collection with which I am concerned in this paper differs from most others in that it meets the modern student halfway, as it were: it might have been written in order to answer the sort of questions historians now tend to ask about medieval attitudes. Here I am concerned with one question only: how did educated men of this period view the classical world? More specifically, how did they relate the classical world to their own time?

When I accepted, a year ago, Professor Hay’s invitation to join ‘his team of main speakers, and contribute a paper to this volume it was not without hesitation and trepidation. Religion, in some of its aspects, I knew a little about: of Humanism virtually nothing. Like many another historian I use the term in discussion of twelfth-century renaissance, but hardly in any articulated fashion, or with any precise meaning, and from time to time I have paid a passing acknowledgement to Renaissance humanism—a nodding acquaintance at best. I was, however, reassured by the prospect of a sabbatical term, and by the proximity of Professor Hay himself: at leisure and with proper guidance all would be made clear in time for this first paper of the new decade. In fact, otium has been replaced by negotium, and however much the fifteenth-century humanist might approve the change, the whole glory of man lying in activity, as Vittorino de Feltre observed, I find myself in little better state now than I was a year ago—like Auden’s ‘Artistic souls that lie out in the weed and pollen belt the need for sympathy is felt’.

Whatever criticism may justly be levelled against the church in the later Middle Ages there is no doubt that it succeeded in stirring up, in the minds of many lay people, a deep and vivid sense of the real presence of God in the context of ordinary affairs. Church congregations behaved, according to our standards, with considerable freedom and restlessness, but only the heretical and the excessively careless stayed away, and even those who were fairly uneducated could be connoisseurs of popular preaching. Drama was religious drama with a strong topical flavour—the soldiers who crucified Christ were real ‘ribalds’ such as you might have feared to meet in the course of the Hundred Years’ War, and the Angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin as ‘turtle’ in much the same way as a modern postman might call her ‘love’. Julian of Norwich, a great mystic whose communion with God passed, as she says, the limit of human expression, was yet concerned by the love which she felt towards her fellow-Christians to try to explain in the simplest terms the truth which came to her in her revelations. She saw, as she says, the whole of creation in the form of ‘a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut’ which, but for the sustaining love of its Creator, would have perished ‘for sheer littleness’.

In about 1380 the choir of the Franciscan church of Florence, Santa Croce, was decorated by Agnolo Gaddi with scenes illustrating the legend of the Holy Cross. The emperor Constantine does not appear in these frescoes, although it was understood that it was his conversion that had moved his mother Helena to undertake her archaeological expedition to the Holy Land to discover the whereabouts of the Cross. It is, nevertheless, his unseen presence that links Gaddi’s cycle to the frescoes of the life and miracles of Saint Silvester, painted by Maso di Banco in the nearby Bardi di Vernio chapel a generation earlier. Here the emperor, afflicted with leprosy, recoils from the advice of his pagan priests that he should bathe in the blood of innocent children and is advised by the apostles Peter and Paul in a dream that to obtain a remedy he must send for the persecuted pope Silvester. Silvester shows Constantine portraits of the apostles, thus authenticating his vision, and cleanses him of his leprosy by baptism. The remaining frescoes illustrate miracles of the saint, notably his quelling of a dragon that had been terrorising Rome and his resuscitation of two magicians who had been overcome by it.

Scholarly fashions have rightly reacted against the division of the renaissance into ‘two cultures’, the Christian and the pagan, and tend now to emphasise more the positive side of the relationship between religion and humanism. The early humanists themselves were at pains to defend their activities by stressing the contributions that poetry and classical studies could make, the divine origins of poetry and the moral value of many pagan writings. Yet these very defences were necessitated by a series of assaults, mostly by churchmen, on the activities of these early humanists. The old misgivings about the value and permissibility of the study of pagan authors inevitably came to the fore again with the revival of such studies. And the humanist stance was developed specifically in response to such criticisms. Mussato defended his profession against the pulpit denunciations of Giovannino of Mantua: Petrarch against the claims of a doctor of Avignon that medicine, not poetry, was the handmaid of philosophy: Salutati against successive strictures by Giuliano Zonarini, Pellegrino Zambeecari, Giovanni of Sanminiato and Giovanni Dominici.

Henry VII, wrote Knowles, ‘was not personally interested in religion in its theological or devotional aspects, still less in its spiritual depth, but neither was he a critic or libertine. His actions and policies, as we see them, were earthbound’. However, Storey has written that ‘Henry’s piety must be emphasised . . . [his] devotions went far beyond those of his contemporaries’. The king’s most recent biographer, Chrimes, remarks on his meticulous religious observances, his contemporary reputation as a sound churchman, and his discriminating religious patronage. Chrimes’s verdict on Henry’s relations with papacy and church is that they were ‘in no way remarkable’, and on his patronage of learning that it is ‘far from clear’ whether ‘much in the way of humanistic influences were at work in his court’. Speculating on whether the king possessed ‘genuine religious feeling’ he inclines to Knowles’s steely verdict.

John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s from 1504 or 1505 until his death at the age of 52 in 1519 was a man, according to the brief biography of him written a couple of years after his death by his friend Erasmus—it remains the best sketch of his character—whom neither the smiles of fortune (he was born well-to-do, and was early on the path of ecclesiastical preferment) nor the impulse of a far different natural bent (he was high-tempered, self-confessedly prone to incontinence and luxuriousness, to indulgence in sleep, to jests and raillery, was not even free from the taint of avarice) could divert from the pursuit of a gospel life. His defects he counteracted by philosophy and sacred studies, watching, fasting and prayer, in a life that was both chaste and charitable. His large patrimony went, in the first decade of the sixteenth century, to the foundation of St Paul’s School, ‘specially to increase knowledge and worshipping of god and our lorde Crist Jesu and good Cristen lyff and maners’. There a limited number were to be taught by a High Master and a Sur-Master, with a chaplain, who were to devote their whole time to the school. Delighting in the purity and simplicity of children, Colet saw that ‘a nation’s chief hope lay in having the rising generation trained in good principles.

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.

In his essay The origins of the French Reformation, Lucien Febvre exposes a number of weaknesses in common interpretations of the Reformation—that it had been brought about because of abuses in the church and especially because of Luther’s anger at these abuses. But what, asked Febvre, does one then make of those independently of Luther, who like Briconnet, bishop of Meaux, worked for reforms, often of a different kind to those advocated by Luther, or more especially of Lefèvre d’Étaples a mystical catholic whose biblical studies says Febvre ‘contained some very bold things’. So Febvre asked could this many sided movement ‘spring from nothing more than a revolt of healthy and honest minds and consciences against the nasty people and wicked spectacles around them?’ Why could not the ‘many pious Christians often supported by their princes and the officers of the princes put an end to the excesses which everyone deplored? No one noticed that if the Reformation in France had originated with Lefèvre and not with Luther the abuses theory would no longer be valid ... for Lefèvre had never campaigned against the morals of the clergy’. Febvre then went on to point out the evidence for the deep and increasing piety of the early sixteenth century in northern Europe—the many new churches and oratories, the deep sentiment attached to the Christ of the Passion and the Virgin of the Rosary.

Most scholars, one imagines, of sixteenth-century Scotland will think that Giovanni Ferrerio was a fairly marginal figure at the remote edge of Scottish life, his interest confined to his brief sojourn as tutor to the Cistercian monks at Kinloss and his work as continuator of Hector Boece’s history covering the reign of James III. Whether he might have had any say in Scottish ecclesiastical or educational policies or any wider contact with the court or leading Scots of the time and whether indeed he may have acted as a vehicle for the entry of Italian ideas, are questions that so far have scarcely been broached.

Religion historique et non religion cosmique, le christianisme entretient avec l’histoire universelle et avec son propre passé des rapports qui s’enrichissent et se compliquent d’âge en âge. Le radicalisme des réveils spirituels en révolte contre l’opacité de l’institution ecclésiastique tente régulièrement d’abolir le poids des siècles pour en revenir à la simplicité fervente des origines. Au sein de l’Eglise romaine, où la continuité historique constitue, plus qu’ailleurs, le critère de l’autorité, c’est la tâche de la critique d’érudition que de déchiffrer et d’interpréter les monuments de la tradition—Pères, conciles, papes—pour éclairer et justifier la doctrine du présent par le témoignage de l’antique, auquel on restitue, par là même, son lustre terni par le temps et sa puissance d’exemplarité. Le primitivisme si apparent dans la Réforme protestante n’est pas étranger non plus à la Réforme catholique et à la tridentinité.

In about the year 1615, Cyril Lukaris, the Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria, then on official business in Constantinople, wrote a long letter in Greek to George Abbot, the archbishop of Canterbury. The letter was in reply to one from Abbot, sent with the encouragement of king James I, whose evident interest in the eastern churches Lukaris found deeply encouraging.

The Annual Letters of the college of the English Jesuits at St Omer record the visit to the college in 1608 of the town’s fourth bishop, the Franciscan Jacques de Blaze. He was taken on a tour of inspection. In a frequently-quoted passage the Letters recall that he was impressed by all that he saw, ‘but most of all by a certain little house, equipped with a printing press and all the accessories of printing, which we have lately fitted up, and very handsomely too’. In 1660, apparently with the assistance of the college press, Thomas Geubels published the Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Iesu by a former provincial superior of the English Jesuits, Fr Henry More. According to More’s account Robert Persons had established the printing house to produce books which might ‘both feed piety, and expose the ravings of heretics’.

The Spacious Firmament on high
And all the blue aetherial sky
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great original proclaim.
Th’ unwearied sun from day to day
Doth his Creator’s power display
And publishes to ev’ry land
The work of an Almighty hand.
What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball;
What though no real voice nor sound
Mid all their radiant orbs be found:
In reason’s ear they all rejoice
And utter forth a glorious voice
For ever singing as they shine
‘The hand that made us is Divine’.

Despite its pre-Copernican cosmology, Addison’s well-known paraphrase of the nineteenth psalm perfectly expresses a whole religious world picture, the essence of that rational apologetic for Christianity which was evolved in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. For this school of thought the beauty, elegance and order of the universe were the chief evidences of the existence, wisdom and benevolence of God. Behind that serene conviction, however, lay a great unease. The world of law which Newton so wonderfully displayed to an admiring age was purchased at the cost of an increasingly remote deity.