The letter, as the format of twenty-one of the twenty-seven documents in the canonical New Testament, is arguably the literary form which has played the most significant role in the history of Christianity. But scholars have often been troubled by how to treat the conventions framing Christian letters: since little of Christian literature from its earliest time to the medieval period escapes the influence of classical traditions of rhetoric, can constant epistolary formulas be taken as expressions of genuine sentiment? In fact, it is precisely because the lines between classical influence and Christian innovation are so difficult to make out that E. R. Curtius was able to argue that the humility formula of medieval charters, for so long assumed to have originated in Paul, was in fact a pagan Hellenistic prototype like scores of other rhetorical conventions. His study of the formula serves, Curtius writes, to ‘furnish a warning against making the Middle Ages more Christian or more pious than it was’, and to demonstrate that ‘a constant literary formula must not be regarded as the expression of spontaneous sentiment’. So the entrenchment of rhetoric in letter-writing is often set in opposition to genuine Christian feeling, commonplace utterance against living expression, empty verbiage against religious sincerity.

An episode unique to the late ninth-century Life of Gregory the Great by John the Deacon reports a famine that occurred in the year of Gregory’s death; a hostile party blamed the lavish generosity of the late pope for Rome’s suffering. The fury of the people was roused and they set out to burn Gregory’s books. However, the deacon Peter, Gregory’s familiarissimus, intervened to dissuade them, telling the people that Gregory’s works were directly inspired by God. As proof he asked God to take his life, and promptly dropped dead. This episode is not found in the earlier accounts of Gregory’s life: the brief account in the mid seventh-century Liber pontificalis, the early eighth-century Life by an anonymous monk of Whitby, and the mid eighth-century account by Paul the Deacon. Doubtful as John the Deacon’s account of the exchange between Peter and the mob may be, it does tell us something about the status of Gregory and his works in the mid 870s, when Pope John VIII commissioned the new hagiography. Gregory the Great became one of the most widely read authors of the Middle Ages, and even in his lifetime some of his works were eagerly sought after. With his popularity and influence Gregory not only added to the body of Christian literature, but also made a lasting contribution to the debate over what kinds of works it was appropriate for Christians to read. This essay will survey his works and discuss his ideas on reading and literature, and on the establishment of a Christian literary canon. The influence of Gregory’s works and ideas will be examined in relation to one particular medieval nation - Anglo-Saxon England. As the instigator of the Anglo-Saxon mission, Gregory enjoyed a great reputation as an author in Anglo-Saxon England, where his ideas on literature and society had a lasting impact.

By the middle of the eighth century, a new genre of Christian writing had developed among those Christians living within the Islamic empire, that of apologetics intended to defend Christianity against attacks from Muslims. Although the Islamic empire had come into existence a century earlier, a series of changes took place in the mid eighth century, including the rise of the Abbasid caliphal dynasty and the stabilization of the empires border with Byzantium, which led to more stable internal politics. In this new atmosphere, Christian authors began to consider, for the first time, the theological ramifications of an empire that was ruled by Muslims, but which still had a majority Christian population. The purpose of this essay is to enter into the ongoing scholarly discourse surrounding the genre of Christian apologetics produced under Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries. There are two competing perspectives on studying these works. One argues for them as historical sources authentically representing an ongoing dialogue between Christians and Muslims during a period commonly known as the Golden Age of Islam. The other argues that these texts are literary creations; at its most extreme, this school of thought asserts that these texts are purely fictional, creating a world of Christian rhetorical superiority in the face of mass conversion from Christianity to Islam.

In mid November 1064, what was perhaps the most important pre-Crusade pilgrimage to Jerusalem left Bavaria under the leadership of Günther, bishop of Bamberg. The number of pilgrims, all unarmed, is stated as some seven thousand in the least incredible source text. The leading ecclesiastics came from all over the northern half of the Empire, from Utrecht to Regensburg. A substantial contingent hailed from the province of Mainz, led by Archbishop Siegfried. Only some two thousand are said to have returned the following year. Our earliest source is the chronicle kept at Mainz by the Gaelic inclusus, Moelbrigte / Marianus Scottus (d. 1082/3), who had lived at Mainz since 1069 and was certainly writing his chronicle by 1073/4.

Dante is probably famous above all for three things: for his encounter at the age of nine with Beatrice, for his exile in 1301 from Florence (to which he never returned), and for his nothing if not graphic account of sin and suffering in hell. Each of these things, had we time and space, would benefit from an essay of its own, for each alike points on beyond itself to the still centre of Dante’s spirituality as a Christian poet, the anecdotal and the occasional everywhere being taken up in the analytical and the ontological, in an account of what it might mean for man as man fully and unambiguously to be as a creature of moral and eschatological self-determination. Thus his early encounter with Beatrice, far from being exhausted by its merely historical interest, provides the basis for a fresh enquiry into the nature of love precisely as such, as a matter by turns of acquisition and of disposition, of self-ingratiation and of self-transcendence, the historical thus shading off, as it always does in Dante, into the reflective and the philosophical. In the same way, the experience of exile furnishes in all its grim historicity the basis for an account of human experience generally as a matter of far-wandering and of homecoming in respect of the call to be in, through and for God, while the Inferno, for all its animated account of suffering in the next life, contains within itself, as, in fact, its point of arrival, an invitation to consider the no less tortured state of the soul in this life, the eschatological thus constituting (again as it always does in Dante) but a mode of the existential, the abiding truth of what is under the aspect of time and space. Everywhere, then, the pattern is the same. Everywhere the iconic moment points beyond itself to a more spacious meditation, in terms of which it stands ultimately to be interpreted.

The cross of Christ in the Middle Ages was the most powerful symbol of God’s victory over sin, death and the forces of evil, while also representing the most abject suffering and degradation of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. A simplistic reading of the evolution of the theology of the cross during this period posits a transition from the early medieval victorious and heroic Christ figure, reigning and triumphant upon the cross, to a late medieval emaciated and tortured object of pity whose ignominious death was supposed to elicit heartfelt compassion for his plight and sincere sorrow for the sin which placed him on the beams of the tree of crucifixion. Of course, there is a great deal of value in this argument, and much evidence might be brought forward to support its central thesis. However, it should not be pushed too far; it might also be remembered that the essential paradox of Christ the victor-victim is a constant theme in Christian theology, expressed in the sixth-century Vexilla regis in its identification of the cross as ‘victim of the passion’s glory, by which life brought death to an end, and, by death, gave life again’ and in the hymn Victimae paschali laudes from the central medieval period: ‘Death with life contended, combat strangely ended, life’s own champion slain yet lives to reign’. The image of the victorious cross of Christ, conceived of as simultaneously an instrument of triumph and of torture, would persist right through the late medieval period, despite the development of a greater emphasis on the physical sufferings of Christ in his passion and their ever more graphic depictions. This essay, which examines the way in which the cross of Christ is presented in medieval Irish literature, provides sufficient examples to make this point clear; these are drawn from a variety of sources including religious verse, saints’ lives, medieval travel accounts and sermon material. Of course, these examples are best viewed within the context of a broader medieval European devotional culture from which Ireland was certainly not immune.

This essay offers a reconsideration of the idea of ‘The Great Century’ of Welsh literature (1435–1535) and related assumptions of periodization for understanding the development of lay piety and literature in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Wales. It focuses on the origins of these ideas in (and their debt to) modern Welsh nationalist and Protestant and Catholic confessional thought, and their significance for the interpretation of Welsh literature and history. In addition, it questions their accuracy and usefulness in the light of contemporary patterns of manuscript production, patronage and devotional content of Welsh books of poetry and prose produced by the laity during and after this ‘golden age’ of literature. Despite the existence of over a hundred printed works in Welsh by 1660, the vernacular manuscript tradition remained robust; indeed, ‘native culture for the most part continued to be transmitted as it had been transmitted for centuries, orally or in manuscript’ until the eighteenth century. Bardic poetry’s value as a fundamental source for the history of medieval Ireland and Wales has been rightly acknowledged. However, more generally, Welsh manuscripts of both poetry and prose must be seen as a crucial historical source. They tell us much about contemporary views, interests and priorities, and offer a significant window onto the devotional world of medieval and early modern Welsh men and women. Drawing on recent work on Welsh literature, this paper explores the production and patronage of such books and the dynamics of cultural and religious change. Utilizing National Library of Wales Llanstephan MS 117D as a case study, it also examines their significance and implications for broader trends in lay piety and the nature of religious change in Wales.

The Protestant Reformation was a movement based on Scripture and its leaders believed that it was important for all clergy and laity to know and understand the word of God. In 1522 Luther published his translation of the New Testament into German and, although it was not the first translation available, it made an enormous impact, selling in large numbers despite being a relatively expensive book for ordinary readers. In recent years the impression of laypeople readily accepting the Reformation as a result of individual reading of the Bible and evangelical preaching has been challenged, but there is evidence that gradually ordinary people did become aware of Protestant beliefs and the biblical basis for those teachings. Familiarity with the Bible has been shown to have been spread in a variety of ways, including attendance at regular worship, the production of children’s Bibles and the publication of extracts from Scripture, including the Psalms and Gospels. Another medium was the mastersingers, guilds of artisans found in several south German cities, who wrote and performed their own verses (Meisterlieder) that followed strict musical and poetic rules. This paper will consider how they used their literary traditions to popularize evangelical teaching and to spread knowledge and awareness of the Bible in ways that were readily comprehensible to ordinary people. The focus is on the work of the Nuremberg shoemaker and poet Hans Sachs, who achieved national fame, both for his works of the early 1520s in support of religious reform and for his creativity as a playwright and mastersinger. It will show too how changing perceptions of the role of the individual in Christian society in the Reformation period were embedded within the messages found in Sachs’s poems.

Between June 1529 and December 1533 Thomas More published no fewer than seven books comprising more than a million words against the Reformation. The young More had achieved European fame as the author of Utopia, and the friend and defender of the greatest scholar, satirist and literary innovator of the age, Desiderius Erasmus. Utopia remains one of the handful of books which would have to be included in any representative library of Western civilization. More himself, however, came to place a far higher value on the remarkable stream of English works which gushed from his pen in the four years leading up to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, which, however, are nowadays read, if at all, mainly as evidence that More was losing his grip. They form a remarkable series: the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Supplication of Souls, in June and September 1529 respectively; the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (Part I, the Preface and Books I–III, published in January 1532, and Part II, Books IV–VIII, more than a year later, after his resignation as Chancellor). That same year, 1533, saw the last four in this astonishing polemical outpouring, the Apology of Sir Thomas More, the Debellation of Salem and Byzance, the Answer to a Poisoned Book and the Letter Against Frith. Though these books were directed against a variety of authors, Mores main target, implicit even in writings ostensibly directed against others, was the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale. More viewed Tyndale as the most important conduit for Lutheran ideas into England, and he saw in Tyndale’s version of the New Testament the fountainhead from which lesser heresiarchs drew lethal draughts of error with which to poison the souls of unsuspecting English men and women.

This article revisits the relationship between dramatic production and religious change in the sixteenth century, specifically by examining the allegorical Vice figure - a dramatic embodiment of evil forces - that came to particular prominence during this period. It suggests that the professional actor became increasingly associated with this figure of moral evil. I propose also that understanding the moral ambivalence of the actor’s presence can inform our understanding of many plays in which no obviously coherent Vice figure is present, but in which possibilities of such an allegory are important. It would be impractical to present this argument across the range of dramatic examples it deserves, particularly since substantial contextual argument will be necessary if the article’s conclusions are to have any weight. It is partly for this reason that an examination of Shakespeare’s Hamlet concludes the paper, a play needing no introduction. It will be suggested that the play’s issue of conscience was mediated in important ways by the actor’s potentially Vice-like presence, defined as such by Tudor legislation as well as by a variety of anti-theatrical religious writings.

William Perkins, the late sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian and one of the best-selling authors of his time, wrote the first major English book on preaching. During his ministry in Cambridge, as a fellow of Christ’s College and lecturer at Great St Andrew’s Church, he also preached a large number of sermons, which illustrated the art he taught. Historians of preaching have generally seen him as the chief proponent of the puritan ‘plain style’, a way of preaching sometimes contrasted with the learned, elaborate, ‘metaphysical’ style of preaching fashionable in the Established Church during the early seventeenth century. Recently it has been argued that preachers like Perkins were so insistent on the moral demands of the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, that they became increasingly unpopular in the English Church. According to Christopher Haigh, preaching of the kind favoured by Perkins and like-minded ministers - morally demanding, hortatory and focused on predestination - was deeply resented and strongly resisted by many English parishioners, who helped to fashion what he describes as a more relaxed, ‘anglicised’ Protestantism that they found more congenial. Peter Iver Kaufman has written that Perkins, like other members of what he calls ‘the Protestant opposition to Elizabethan religious reform’, aimed to shame his hearers, and that ‘at Cambridge, [he] taught the next generation of dissident preachers to shame and thus save their parishioners’. Some parishioners were no doubt made uncomfortable by Perkins and preachers influenced by him. But these recent assessments of Perkins and his place in the history of preaching are misleading and inadequate. They underestimate the character and extent of his influence on preaching. Moreover, many commentators have failed to recognize the effect of Perkins’s views on the development of English prose. This essay will show what Perkins taught in his treatise on preaching, and argue for its lasting significance for modern prose style.

This essay considers both John Milton’s relationship to the churches he attended and his developing attitude to the Church of England and to the wider Protestant faith community, nationally and internationally. The objective is better to place Milton within the divisive and shifting religious politics of seventeenth-century England. Only incidental reference is made to his poetry; this is primarily a study of life records and his prose publications.

As every historian knows, religious minorities and other ‘out-groups’ have repeatedly faced accusations of sexual misconduct and its consequences: seduction, the breaking of families, promiscuous fornication, participation in orgies, ‘unnatural vice’, incest, sadism and masochism. In the second or third century, Minucius Felix recorded such charges against the early Christians: they make ‘love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust, a promiscuous “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest’. The Cathars and other medieval heretics were accused of promiscuous, incestuous orgies. Across early modern Europe, witches at their sabbats, it was learnedly pronounced, copulated with the Devil himself and, indiscriminately, with unknown members of both sexes, even parents, brothers and sisters.

‘A Nun’s dress is a very becoming one’, wrote Cornelius Cayley in 1772. Similarly, Philip Thicknesse, witnessing the clothing ceremony at the English Augustinian convent in Paris, observed that the nun’s dress was ‘quite white, and no ways unbecoming … [it] did not render her in my eyes, a whit less proper for the affections of the world’. This tendency to objectify nuns by focusing on the mysterious and sexualized aspects of conventual life was a key feature of eighteenth-century British culture. Novels, poems and polemic dwelt on the theme of the forced vocation, culminating in the dramatic portrayals of immured nuns in the Gothic novels of the 1790s. The convent was portrayed as inherently despotic, its unnatural hierarchy and silent culture directly opposed to the sociability which, in Enlightenment thought, defined a civilized society. This despotic climate was one aspect of a culture of tyranny and constraint, which rendered nuns either innocent and victimized or complicit and immoral. Historians have noted that these stereotypes were remarkably similar to those applied to the Orient and have thus extended Said’s notion of ‘otherness’ - the self-affirmation of a dominant culture as a norm from which other cultures deviate – to apply not merely to oriental cultures but to those aspects of European culture deemed exotic. In so doing, they have challenged the notion that travel writing was an exact record of social experience and have initiated a more nuanced understanding of textual convention and authorial experience. For historians of eighteenth-century Britain this has led to an examination of the construction of anti-Catholicism within travel literature and its use as an ideology around which the Protestant nation could unite. Thus, Jeremy Black has noted that anti-Catholicism remained the ‘prime ideological stance in Britain’ and has claimed that encounters with Catholicism by British travellers in France ‘excited fear or unease … and, at times, humour or ridicule’. Likewise, Bryan Dolan and Christopher Hibbert have seen encounters with continental convents culminating in negative descriptions of rituals, relics and enclosed space.

‘Their annual increase is counted by thousands; and they form a distinct people in the empire, having their peculiar laws and manners, a hierarchy, a costume, and even a physiognomy of their own’, wrote Robert Southey for the Quarterly Review in 1810, opening a balanced critique of what he called ‘the Evangelical Sects’. Leaders of the Evangelical Revival had taught in pulpit, pamphlet and periodical that to be truly Christian meant radical difference from others in society, even others professing faith; or, as Charles Simeon, the model and mentor for hundreds of Cambridge-educated evangelical ministers, stated it, ‘Christians are either nominal or real’. Following William Wilberforce’s urging in his Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians… Contrasted with Real Christianity, Evangelicals strove in their separate spheres to accomplish a social revolution by which the mores, values and social practices received from the eighteenth century would be overturned by normalizing evangelical values in society. While working in their individual vocations, Evangelicals were also cooperating, ‘linked in a single, if multiform, social and religious phenomenon’. As Southey’s comments indicate, even by 1810 their revolution was proving noticeably effective.