This article argues that the spatial experiences created by the architectural features of Christian sacred spaces on the Roman frontiers of the fourth and fifth centuries were fundamental to how such spaces were perceived and engaged with. It suggests that the principles of spatial design established in Constantine’s basilicas of Rome and the Holy Land influenced the experience of Christian worship, ritual and commemoration on the Roman frontiers. While these frontier Christian sacred spaces generally followed the architectural trends of Constantinian models, they also showed distinct local adaptations. This study highlights the important role of architectural spatial design in shaping religious experiences on the Roman frontiers, illustrating the dynamic relationship between architecture, worship and regional cultural contexts. It shows both continuity with Constantinian norms and evidence of adaptability and localized expressions of Christian sacred architecture on the Roman empire’s peripheries.

Late-seventh-century texts from south-western Britain, especially a letter addressed by Abbot Aldhelm of Malmesbury to a British king and his clergy, offer a different perspective on relations between the British and English churches to that provided by eighth-century Northumbrian authors. The writings of Bede and Stephen of Ripon have cast a long shadow by suggesting that hostility between British and English Christians was the norm. The 660s have been interpreted as a turning-point, with the arrival of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop of Canterbury leading to the Britons being branded as heretics and impeding any interaction between British and English churches. This article argues that, in the South-West, relations remained warm until the final years of the seventh century, notwithstanding differences over the date of Easter and the tonsure. Dumnonia’s political decline was principally responsible for British Christianity’s ultimate marginalization.

This article explores how accounts of those living on the periphery of the Carolingian empire were used by authors at the centre as good examples, in order to promote the lessons of religious reform. Scholarship has primarily focused on how early medieval authors elided geographical distance and a lack of moral probity. In many cases, this helped to construct a sense of a geographically bounded Christian people defined by their moral conformity. The cases in this article, however, demonstrate a willingness – especially in the later ninth century – to take lessons from people who were strange and different, and even to use these as critiques of those at the centre who ought to have known better.

This article examines the distribution of medieval English churches and chapels dedicated to St Gregory, arguing that this distribution reflects Gregory’s symbolic significance in the pre-Conquest church as a figure who could connect centres and margins. Early dedications in ecclesiastical and royal centres recall the Gregorian mission and the connection it forged between Britain, on the margins of Christian Europe, and Rome at the centre. Concentrations of later dedications in East Anglia and the South-West asserted the connection of these more peripheral regions with the newly formed English nation, through veneration of its patron saint. The decline in numbers of Gregory dedications after the Conquest reflects the transfer of Gregory’s status as founder of the English church and patron of the English nation to other saints.

In standard accounts of Christian expansion into the frontier with Islam in early medieval Iberia, if the church plays a role, it is the monastic church, operating as frontier land developer. Alternatively, this action is left to a pioneer peasantry or to acquisitive warlords, with the church only following. A close-up study of the activities of priests around the Catalan frontier town of Manresa, however, shows a collegiate secular church structure building up frontier infrastructure well in advance of developing monasticism. These peripheral priests wove neighbourhoods into larger church networks which were the first institutional structures to develop in this area. Such a pattern may also be characteristic in similar areas elsewhere.

This article examines the process of conversion to Christianity of Scandinavians who left their homelands in the ninth and tenth centuries and settled in Christian societies in the West. The churches that were involved left us no accounts, but fragments of evidence ranging from papal letters to stone sculpture help to construct a picture of diversity, wherever routes to conversion can be glimpsed across this Scandinavian diaspora. Two contrasting settings – Normandy, soon after the Viking Rollo was put in charge in 911, and northern England, under the authority of Scandinavian kings from the late ninth to the mid-tenth century – are discussed, highlighting the agency of churchmen at the interface between paganism and Christianity. The sources hint at contrasting dynamics and a range of strategies, from creativity to coercion, as churches faced the challenge of bringing immigrant Scandinavians into the Christian centre.

In 1053, the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen became patriarchate of the North as part of a process of centralization with which the Curia sought control over Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Although these ambitions risked being cut short by the German archbishops, who aspired to larger margins of independence, Gregory VII (1073–85) was able to secure the Icelandic diocese of Skálholt as a supporter of Roman reforming ideals. Bishop Gizurr Ísleifsson (1082–1118) maintained direct contacts with the Curia and organized the Icelandic church as a loyal Gregorian agent. In the absence of royal and archepiscopal authority in Iceland, Gizurr was considered ‘king and bishop over the country’: arguably, the pontiff of his own diocese. Through the analysis of Latin and Norse sources, this article explores how Gregorian ideals reached Iceland during the Investiture Controversy and how papal supremacy was built into the foundations of the northernmost diocese of Christendom.

The history of infertility is a rapidly growing field but the relationship between infertility and religion remains under-studied. This article investigates the ways in which religious writers in the European Middle Ages thought about infertility, focusing (in keeping with the theme of ‘margins and peripheries’) on how far these sources presented reproductive disorders as leading people to be marginalized or stigmatized. It examines several key sources discussed by earlier scholars before moving on to a detailed analysis of late medieval English retellings of the story of the birth of the Virgin Mary, who was born to her parents in old age. The article argues that there is some evidence that infertility could be viewed as a source of stigma and infertile people as marginalized. However, the narratives of the birth of the Virgin offered a more inclusive view, and were modified by different authors to reflect different experiences of infertility.

This article explores the self-representations of marginality found in the indulgence petitions addressed by Transylvanian supplicants to the papal chancery during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As one of Hungary’s border provinces, Transylvania was located on the eastern frontier of late medieval Latin Christendom. Although Transylvanian Catholics often expressed a sense of marginality in their petitions to the pope, this sentiment was not primarily defined by the petitioners’ distance to the Apostolic see; rather, it was described in relation to the Greek Orthodox Christians in Transylvania and, later, to the approaching Ottoman Turks. To illustrate this point, the article presents three case studies of indulgence petitions submitted by Transylvanian supplicants between 1350 and 1450, highlighting how the petitioners’ discourse about marginality changed over the course of this period. In addition, this article emphasizes the role attributed by petitioners to papal indulgences in converting the ‘schismatics’ in Transylvania to the Latin faith.

Stained-glass windows were a dominant focal feature within the pre-Reformation parish church building, where they were invested with multiple layers of spiritual meaning. A large and rich variety of stained-glass fragments survive in parish churches today, alongside textual evidence of lost glass, providing valuable insight into parochial religious experience. However, these sources have traditionally been marginalized in the art-historical canon in favour of fuller, sequential stained-glass programmes located in ‘greater’ ecclesiastical sites, such as cathedrals and minsters. This article places fragments and lost schemes at the centre of discussion. It traces and contextualizes three iconographic patterns that emerge from a closer study of fragments and textual accounts from the South-West of England. In doing so, it demonstrates the potential of such piecemeal evidence to illuminate the nature and function of the decorative arts in pre-Reformation worship.

Historians of the Reformations have increasingly explored a comparative ‘British’ dimension, seeking to transcend the separate national historiographies of England, Scotland and Ireland. To date, however, little attempt has been made to survey patterns of religious change across the multiplicity of islands that came to form part of the composite British monarchy: in particular, the Channel Islands, Isles of Scilly, Isle of Man, Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland. This article argues that attention to the collective experience of islands enhances our understanding of the implementation and reception of religious change, requiring us to think more carefully about questions of environment, law, language and culture, and about the aims and achievements of confessional state-formation. The ‘frontier’ status of islands also underlines the interconnectedness of British Reformations with developments elsewhere in Europe.

This article explores how the language barrier reinforced the Manx church’s peripheral position by its effect on the course of Protestant reform on the Isle of Man. It considers the nature of this barrier, focusing on the lack of published Manx translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and outlines how this affected the course taken by reform. Lack of access to Manx texts and education militated against the emergence of a body of theologically aware laity, while the necessity for parish clergy to be bilingual restricted the pool of potential candidates, hindering the infusion of new personnel and ideas from elsewhere. Educational and economic factors combined with language to exacerbate these problems and retard the impact of new patterns of clergy recruitment and training. The consequence was to limit the Manx church’s participation in developments shaping the Church of England, and to complicate attempts by later seventeenth-century bishops to overcome this.

Patrick’s purgatory in Lough Derg, Donegal, is one of the great medieval pilgrimage sites. On the extreme edge of Europe, it physically embodied the theological idea of purgatory, offering pilgrims a this-worldly encounter with its horrors. Despite Protestant efforts to destroy it, it survived the Reformation and posed a classic challenge for Protestant and Roman Catholic historians. For the latter, it exemplified the continuity of Catholicism in Ireland from Patrick to the present, a living embodiment of the unchanging loyalty of the Irish people to their national saint. For Protestant historians, it was, like purgatory, a twelfth-century invention, revealing both the medieval corruption of the Roman Catholic Church as it added non-scriptural embellishments to the Christian faith, and the superstition of Irish Catholicism. The interaction, and tension, between theological belief and historical objectivity was to prove a persistent challenge for both sides, right down to the twentieth century.

This article offers a close reading of a collection of letters written by Capuchin missionaries in the Ottoman empire in the early seventeenth century. It does so with a view towards understanding how the early Capuchins reflected on their position in both local and global contexts. Rather than see these early Capuchin missions as operating ‘in the margins’ – whether by virtue of their presence in the world of Eastern Christianity, or by virtue of their distance from Rome or their own countries of origin – this article starts from a different perspective, that is, by situating these individuals at the heart of the Ottoman communities in which they established themselves. To this end, the article shows how Capuchin missionaries envisioned themselves as participating in a global religious order based in Brittany whilst they sought in their everyday lives to achieve proximity to Ottoman Christians and Muslims. In its attention to questions of distance, mobility and the specificity of place, the article contributes to recent attempts to reimagine the field of ‘global Catholicism’: where is the centre; where are the margins; and who decides which is which?

This article examines encounters between Venetian Greeks and English reformers, c.1545–c.1700, focusing on two figures, Andronikos Noukios alias Nikandros (c.1500–c.1556) and Kyrillos Loukaris (1572–1638), and their textual afterlives. It is the first study to examine the role the Venetian empire played in Greek Orthodox contacts with the Church of England during the early modern period. In doing so, it takes an under-utilized approach to studying early modern encounters between Eastern and Western Christianities, bringing the field of religious history into direct dialogue with that of bibliographical history to extend our understanding of the long-term intellectual and religious impact of specific episodes of encounter. It argues that Anglo-Hellenic religious contacts were shaped by a shared sense of operating on the peripheries of power, but also limited by the mutual perception of the other as intriguing but inferior, or of marginal importance.

This article uses the case studies of two Greek clergymen, Anastasius Comnenus and Hierotheos Abbatios, to explore Anglo-Greek interactions and perceptions in early modern England. Both men visited the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the mid-seventeenth century on fund-raising trips. This article details their time in the universities and in England more widely. It focuses on the issue of charity: who gave them money and why. This approach, making extensive use of new archival material, offers a fruitful perspective on English attitudes to Greek travellers. Suspicion was balanced by philhellenism and a desire to reference the Greek Orthodox Church in confessional or ecclesiastical disputes. These were common trends in early modern Europe, but they were inflected by specific contextual concerns in England. This article also demonstrates that analysing questions of charity can help to recover insights into the decision-making and agency of the early modern Greek traveller.

The Chinese Rites Controversy (c.1643–1724) marked the most significant rupture in seventeenth- to eighteenth-century Sino-European relations. Fourteen Chinese Roman Catholics on the fringes of political and cultural circles, neither a part of the state authorities nor influential literati, defended the legitimacy of Chinese rites. Among them, Xia Dachang grounded his analysis on an exhaustive study of the Confucian ‘Book of Rites’ (Liji). This article, focusing on Xia’s treatises, proposes a novel approach to reassessing the Controversy by analysing the role of the human body in Neo-Confucianism. It aims to reveal previously overlooked yet essential aspects of the debates: the Neo-Confucian conception of the human ‘being’ and the interconnectivity between external physical presence and actions, and internal moral values.

When George Berkeley was seeking funds to establish a college on Bermuda, he expressed the need to train a colonial clergy that he deemed ‘meanly qualified in both learning and morals’ who might yet become instrumental in a ‘reformation of manners’ and ‘the propagation of the Gospel among the American savages’ on Britain’s imperial periphery. When Berkeley arrived in Rhode Island in 1724, however, he encountered instead Anglicans who were well read in the philosophy and theology of the early Enlightenment. Using the correspondence of Berkeley and the New England priest and theologian Samuel Johnson, this article explores how Anglican clergy and their institutions – operating in a religiously plural environment as members of a denominational minority – were actively developing an ‘Anglican republic of letters’ that was advancing early Enlightenment thought in the colonies in the decades prior to the Revolution.

Between 1849 and 1856, the Reform controversy cost the Wesleyan Methodist denomination an estimated 100,000 members. Triggered by personality conflicts within the Wesleyan ministry, the Reform movement drew on long-standing grievances, including tensions between itinerant ministers and local lay leaders. This case study of Wesleyan Reform in the Oxford Circuit explores the interplay of local and national events, and considers how protagonists in the controversy saw themselves as central to the structure and flourishing of Methodism and their opponents as subsidiary or peripheral. Different standpoints, combined with the perception or fear of marginalization, fractured the Oxford Wesleyan Circuit, in a microcosm of the impact of Wesleyan Reform on the denomination as a whole.