Scholars interested in those medieval clergy charged with the delivery of pastoral care have highlighted the flourishing of reforming movements in the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the period between the fall of the Carolingian empire and the beginnings of the so-called pastoral revolution is generally viewed as one of episcopal neglect. Focusing on case studies drawn from the Carolingian heartlands of north-east Frankia and Lotharingia, as well as what had been the more peripheral regions of northern Italy and southern England, this article offers a revised interpretation of the education of the local clergy in the post-Carolingian world. Exploring the ways in which higher churchmen sought to innovate on the texts they inherited from their Carolingian predecessors, it demonstrates how they paid considerable attention to the preparation and ordination of suitable candidates, to the instruction and monitoring of local clergy through attendance at diocesan synods and local episcopal visitations, and to the provision of suitable texts to support local churchmen in the delivery of pastoral care.

In devoting its attention to the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the Ecclesiastical History Society has self-evidently addressed a theme as fundamental as it is often distressing to the practitioners of both religions. For many historians of the English Church, as for many of this Society’s members themselves, that relationship presents the additional irony that it would have been almost impossible actually to encounter a Jew in this country during those three centuries which tend to interest them most. As it is, Edward I’s expulsion of all his Jewish subjects from his realm on 18 July 1290 (‘without any hope of ever remaining there’) not only aborted a still inconclusive experiment in religious co-existence, but for centuries relegated the lives of the Jews and Jewesses of Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet England to the obscurity of the historically irrelevant. No longer in 1991 does that seem at all so obvious; and one supposes that nothing would have surprised Henry III and Edward I more than that their treatment of the Jewish minority within their realm should now often seem more ‘relevant’ to the churches of the modern world than any other feature of their respective reigns. For that reason, above all, there must be every prospect that the relationship between Jews and Christians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England will soon be subjected to more detailed analysis than ever before. Nor, for similar reasons, has it ever been quite so obvious as it is today that the study of medieval Anglo-Jewry is too important to remain the exclusive preserve of historians who are themselves Jews.

‘How are your healing groups going?’ the present archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, enquired rhetorically in a charge to service chaplains in 1979. ‘The renewal of the Church’s ministry of healing’ the bishop of Selby has even more recently written, ‘is one hard obstinate fact that future historians will be unable to ignore when examining the Christian scene in the present century.’ The bishop, who is co-chairman of the Churches’ Council for Health and Healing, particularly singled out for praise the pioneers of this renewal: ‘individuals like James Moore Hickson, George Bennett and Dorothy Kerin’ as well as such later contributors as Leslie Weatherhead from the free churches, and more recently Cameron Peddie in Scotland and the American Dominican, Francis MacNutt. The bishop has further argued that ‘these powerful initiatives given to the healing movement by individual leaders were matched by the leadership of the Churches’, an assertion which is backed by citing the discussions devoted to the subject at the Lambeth conferences of 1908, 1920, 1930 and 1958. The first two of these conferences were presided over by archbishop Randall Davidson, who in the bishop of Selby’s book is presented as a crypto-champion of spiritual healing.

The title of this paper was inspired by a piece of ecclesiastical doggerel published in the Hensal-Cum-Heck Church Monthly for November 1895:

They may call me a Papist, and laugh at my creed,
‘Tis the Faith that will save in the hour of need;
Let them talk, let them laugh, but when death is at hand
The priest is the only true friend in the land.

It is not the only ritualist concept of priestly vocation; in a somewhat earlier tract on confession priests are described as ‘the spiritual police of Almighty God; they must hunt out, track, pursue, and arraign sinners, as the police pursue and apprehend thieves and rascals’. Although both concepts are to be found elsewhere in ritualist literature, and both would have been accepted by many ritualist priests as not being mutually exclusive, it would seem that the concept of the priest as ‘friend’ was the dominant one.

Between the years 850 and 859 forty-eight Christians were decapitated for offences against Islam in Córdoba, the capital of the Islamic Umayyad dynasty in Al-Andalus, Spain (756–1031). The majority of those executed had deliberately instigated their own deaths by making derogatory comments about the Prophet Muhammad, a known capital offence. The calculated nature of their behaviour, in action against rulers considered by their contemporaries to be fellow monotheists, and without the supernatural support of widely accepted miracles, strained the already fractured Christian community. While the Córdoban bishop and the metropolitan of Seville worked closely with the emirs to stop the would-be martyrs, Eulogius, a Córdoban priest and bishop-elect of Toledo, and his friend Paul Alvar composed martyrologies and apologies for the group. Written for prisoners preparing for martyrdom and for circulation amongst the religious communities surrounding the city, the works allow insight into a movement of martyrs composed of men and women, lay and religious, with Christian and non-Christian backgrounds. The works of Eulogius and Alvar reflect an intense preoccupation with public behaviour as an expression of identity in a religiously diverse society. This emphasis on the bodies of Muslims, Christians and martyrs in both hagiography and act draws attention to the movement’s motives by highlighting its relationship with the strictly ascetic monastic communities of Córdoba, where monks and nuns used their own bodies as means of preserving and articulating Christian culture in early medieval Spain.

From time to time it has been pointed out that Wyclif had a quite exceptional grasp of papal-hierocratic theory. Although its bitter opponent, his extensive knowledge of the refinements of the theory, his almost intuitive appreciation of its most fundamental principles, indicate a depth of penetration into hierocratic ideology which many supporters of papal supremacy must themselves have envied. His effectiveness as an anti-papal writer during the polemics of the 1370s and 1380s lay less in the novelty and originality of his own system of thought, and in the consistency with which he repeated himself, but rather in his superior ability to detect the weakest points in his adversaries’ chain of argument. He not only knew exactly where to thrust between the links, but, more important, how to aim for the pivots of the system, so that the whole hierocratic theory might be turned on its head.

Medieval popes can scarcely have expected such spectacular results from a bull as Gregory EX achieved in 1237. His bull Cum hora undecima of 1235, a fundamental statement of the Church’s missionary function, gave specific licence to the Dominican William of Montferrat to preach, dispense the sacraments, absolve and excommunicate in the lands of schismatics and heretics of the East. Two years later, Philip, the Dominican provincial of the Holy Land, wrote to the pope announcing the conversion to Rome of the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius II, the anticipated conversion of the Nestorian catholicos in Baghdad and possibly also the conversion of the Coptic patriarch. It was a staggering return from a mission only two years old, and represented a triumph for the Dominican Order as well as for the papacy.

From the vividly autobiographic Life of St Teresa famous images of conventual life in sixteenth-century Spain have been derived; both the dark impression of unreformed monastic existence and the heroic profile of reformed regulars. Before and after that era the social, not to say political prominence of certain figures, friars and nuns, in Spanish life is notorious, from the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs to that of Philip IV and beyond. Modern historical research has indeed highlighted the contribution to political and ecclesiastical development, to early Catholic reform above all, of key members of the regular clergy under the Catholic Monarchs. For monastics, as opposed to mendicants, in post-medieval Spain, the extensive and meticulous researches of Linage Conde have put all Iberian scholars in his debt. The fascinating origins of the essentially Iberian phenomenon of the Jeronymites have recently received new attention from J.R.L. Highfield, but further insights into the true condition of the religious life in the Iberian peninsula of the supposedly Golden Age are perhaps still possible, when unpublished material is consulted in the Roman archives and in those of Spain, such as Madrid, Simancas, Barcelona and Valencia. Considerations of space necessarily limit what can be suggested here, but the development of monastic life in Counter-Reformation Spain is arguably best considered in its extended not just in its stricter sense: for parallels and contrasts, as well as direct influences, were not confined by the normal distinctions between the eremitic and the monastic, the monastic and the mendicant, the old and the new orders, or even the male and female communities. Furthermore the intervention of Spanish royal authority in Portuguese affairs between 1580 and 1640, not least in ecclesiastical and regular life, provides a useful comparative basis for consideration of truly Iberian conditions.

Religion was the ideological motor of politics in the first age of party. Though the distinction between the Whig and Tory positions on religious issues was often small compared to their internal divisions on other matters, religion was felt to be the only real justification for both parties. The Whigs stood for a cosmopolitan Erastianism embracing protestant dissent, the Tories for a stronger, national Church for which religious uniformity was still a worthwhile goal. The Church was inextricably caught up in these national political divisions, and its own internecine warfare between high and low church mirrored them exactly. It naturally followed from this that religious issues were the most passionately upheld by the Whigs and the Tories, and were those which had most impact on national politics. Hence the Tories put themselves out of office in 1704–5 by the zeal with which they tried to push the Occasional Conformity Bill through, even though it was certain to create a constitutional crisis which would paralyse the British war-effort against France. And the Whigs seized the opportunity to ‘roast a parson’ afforded by Henry Sacheverell’s high church ranting on the theme of ‘the Church in Danger’ by trying to impeach him. Their partial success only served to validate and refresh the ‘Church in Danger’ preaching they had hoped to silence, and they were crushed by an avalanche of outraged Toryism in the 1710 election. Since religious issues were the most keenly felt and constituted the central dynamic of the party battle, the translation of religious conflict from the nation at large to Westminster gives us a glimpse of the real strength of religion’s hold on the concept of party, and hence its influence in contemporary politics.

Let them be forbidden access to this work, wrote Alan of Lille in his Anticlaudianus, who would only look for the image of sensuality and not the truth of reason . . . Do not allow those tasteless men, who cannot take their studies beyond the bounds of the senses, to impose their own interpretations on this book . . . lest the majesty of its secret meanings be profaned, like pearls cast before swine, when divulged to the unworthy. But what is this majestic secret significance which Alan wished to keep hidden from people so lacking in good taste as to want to probe it and misunderstand it? On the surface the Anticlaudianus, Alan’s most famous work, is an epic romance about a celestial journey and a great battle which is clearly being used as a moral treatise, a summa de virtutibus et vitiis. His long poem tells the story of how the goddess Nature, in council with the Virtues, seeks to make a new type of person, the homo perfectus. They realise that such a divine being cannot be created unless a soul is brought from God, whereupon Phronesis, the searcher after truth to whom the secrets of God are revealed, undertakes a journey to heaven in a chariot constructed by the seven liberal arts and drawn by the five senses. With the aid of Theology and Faith, Phronesis meets the heavenly host, the Virgin Mary, and eventually God himself, who has a soul made for her. She brings this soul, carefully sealed to keep it fresh, back to the waiting body, and the novus homo is complete. He then has to prove himself in a great pitched battle between the virtues and the vices.

On 2 March 1865, the Revd Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was hanged from a willow tree close to his own church and mission station at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. John Hobbs, who had arrived as a Methodist missionary in New Zealand in 1823, reported on ‘the very barbarous Murder of one of the best Missionaries in New Zealand’ and noted that Völkner’s death marked ‘a New Era in the history of this country’. Völkner was the first European missionary of any denonomination to be killed in New Zealand since missionary work began in 1814.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.

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.

The Ecclesiastical History Society’s fiftieth anniversary conference provides an opportunity both to celebrate the achievements of the society and to reflect on the current state of the discipline. In asking whether church historians have lost the plot, I do not mean to question colleagues’ reason and sanity, but to wonder whether those of us who work in this field might have forgotten some of the objectives and principles that once distinguished our endeavour. Has ecclesiastical history lost its sense of purpose, its place at the heart of historical enterprise, to the extent that it has become not just marginalized and peripheral, but essentially irrelevant both to academic study and wider society?

At a great protest meeting in Glasgow against Ultramontanism in 1874, the Jesuits, those wily chameleons, were acccused of masquerading as members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. That body was

The controversy which concerns us now, as it once concerned the thirteenth-century participants, centres upon the king’s right to demand corrodies in monastic establishments for his own nominees. Thus it is necessary to begin by defining the term ‘corrody’ in the present context. In describing a corrody as ‘nothing more than an allowance consisting of a share in a common fund’, Professor Hamilton Thompson neatly encapsulated the multifarious forms which it could take; he also drew attention to its potentially disastrous effects when he noted that at least one person, who should have known better, believed that corrodies were so called because they were corrosive. The allowances or provisions were specified in a written agreement between the monastic chapter and the prospective recipient and might include board, lodging, items of clothing, and cash payments, or any one of these, or a combination of them; and so they were often entered on monastic officials’ expense accounts as annuities, pensions, or liveries (liherationes). Acting on their own initiative and often against episcopal injunctions, religious houses in financial straits made such grants to laymen, whose wives were sometimes included, in return for a lump sum or a donation of property. The corrodian who paid cash or bequeathed part of his estate provided an immediate and welcome boost in income for the community which received him, and he and his family gained security and comfort in their declining years. But the financial relief for the monastery which had guaranteed hospitality for life could, and did, turn into a liability when the beneficiaries lived longer than had been anticipated. In addition, outsiders, by virtue of their rights as founders and benefactors, made certain claims on religious houses, among which was the requisition of corrodies on behalf of relatives or retainers. It was this form of exploitation in which the King himself was the chief offender, and Henry III, in financial straits, would argue that he was in principle the patron of all religious establishments in the country.

Tensions between public and private forms of religiosity have been endemic to Christianity since its institutionalization during the first four centuries AD. That process was in part characterized by the clerical curtailment of alternative routes of divine access which bypassed the structures of the Church and the controls which it operated: most notably, Scripture and sacrament. Acts had imagined the last Christian days as a spiritual age of prophecy, visions and dreams, but the rapid association of such phenomena with rigorist, schismatic or heretical groups – particularly the Gnostics, Montanists and Manichaeans – rendered them suspect if scripturally unassailable. Dreaming – ‘the paradigm of the open frontier’, ‘epiphany’s most open level’ – became strictly delineated by episcopally defined typologies which restricted access to the divine and necessitated arbitration, thus protecting the centrality and authority of the Church. Those typologies not only emphasized the relative rarity of divinely inspired dreams (as opposed to the physiological or demonic), they also stressed the special status of the recipient. They thus partook of a late antique professionalization of the holy by which an emergent spiritual elite attempted to exercise an unprecedented monopoly on the supernatural.

My brothers should not grieve that my life has come to an end, because never was I so useful to them in the past as I will be in the future, providing they are willing to keep the commandments of God. As a matter of fact I, and all my brothers whose life has ended as mine has, will stay with them, and I will appear and give them much better advice than hitherto.

In 1852 an American medium, Maria Hayden, crossed the Atlantic, landed in London and began offering séances in fashionable salons. From this point on, and certainly well into the twentieth century, spiritualism proved attractive to many. What spiritualism offered was, primarily, an extravagant claim: that it was possible for the living to communicate with the departed. By various means, people from all classes, religious traditions and geographical locations ‘tried’ the spirits, seeking to make contact with famous characters from history or departed family members. Spiritualism offered, sometimes, spectacular signs and wonders: flying furniture, levitating mediums and ghostly presences, all of which attracted the attention of journalists. Fashions for such signs came and went; the claim to communicate with the dead, however, remained at the heart of spiritualism.

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.