Did the twelfth century discover the individual? For a number of years now medievalists have claimed that it did. Indeed, over the past fifty years, in what Wallace Ferguson calls ‘the revolt of the medievalists’, scholars have claimed for the twelfth century many of the characteristics once given to the fifteenth century by Michelet and Burckhardt. As a result, standard textbook accounts now attribute to the twelfth century some or all of the following: ‘humanism’, both in the narrow sense of study of the Latin literary classics and in the broader sense of an emphasis on human dignity, virtue and efficacy; ‘renaissance’, both in the sense of revival of forms and ideas from the past (classical and patristic) and in the sense of consciousness of rebirth, and historical perspective; ‘the discovery of nature and man’, both in the sense of an emphasis on the cosmos and human nature as entities with laws governing their behaviour and in the sense of a new interest in the particular, seen especially in the ‘naturalism’ of the visual arts around the year 1200. In the past fifteen years, however, claims for the twelfth century have increasingly been claims for the discovery of ‘the individual’, who crops up–with his attendant characteristic ‘individuality’—in many recent titles. In the area of political theory, Walter Ullmann has seen the individual emerging in the shift from subject to citizen. Peter Dronke, Robert Hanning and other literary critics have argued for the emergence of the individual both as author and as hero of twelfth-century poetry and romance. And, in the area of religious thought, R. W. Southern, Colin Morris and John Benton have called to our attention a new concern with self-discovery and psychological self-examination, an increased sensitivity to the boundary between self and other and an optimism about the capacity of the individual for achievement.

T. W. Manson posed the following problem:

…quotations are absent in those places where we should most confidently look lor them it the Fourth Gospel was composed in Ephesus about A.D, 100 by John the Apostle. No theory about the Gospel that fails to give an explanation of the phenomenon presented by the writings of Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin has much chance of survival.

No information about the Fourth Gospel or its author appears in the Pastoral Epistles.

Since apostolic times Christians have treated the family as a micro-community which reflects the values and problems of the larger Christian community as a whole. Most communities, including Christian ones, are reluctant to contemplate the possibility that their own existence will end. But although Jesus is said to have promised St Peter that His Church would survive death, and although the notion of the Church as a community that never dies became a commonplace in subsequent ecclesiology, there was no such guarantee of immortality to the individual family. The breakup and restructuring of family units through death or the dissolution of marriage was a reality which medieval Christian communities had to face in each generation. Even so, high-ranking social groups sought to minimise generational disruptions by adopting the fiction of the family that never dies, a notion that is especially familiar to historians of the theory of monarchy in the Middle Ages. The medieval Church was a keen champion of the continuity of domestic units. As Georges Duby has recently pointed out, the Church in the early Middle Ages struggled mightily to make its own theory of marriage prevail over the alternative marriage theory popular among the laity. The ecclesiastical model of marriage, which emphasised the free consent of the contracting parties and the indissolubility of unions, triumphed over the lay model of marriage, which, according to Duby, valued family concerns above the wishes of the individual at the end of the eleventh century in France. The pattern of marriage arrangements that Duby calls the lay model seems to have persisted vigorously until much later in other places, including Catalonia and Aragon. This paper will examine a case from mid-thirteenth century Arago-Catalonia in which the conflict of lay and ecclesiastical marriage ideals features prominently.

The rapid increase in monastic acquisition of parish churches in the twelfth century reflected a number of trends, both temporal and spiritual, in the Christian society of western Europe. It was an expression of the laity's continuing devotion to the monastic ideal, now reinforced by the foundation and spread of new religious orders, and it was in part a consequence of the redefinition of relations between the laity and the clergy following in the wake of the Gregorian Reform. More than that, however, it raised within the Church questions as to the proper relationship between the monastic clergy and the pastoral and juridical structure of the Church. To understand the phenomenon, therefore, it is necessary to examine the motives of donors of parish churches and those of the religious who received them, to bear in mind the climate of respectable opinion (both lay and-ecclesiastical) which came increasingly to deny possession of parish churches to the laity and yet could countenance their passage into the hands of religious houses, and to consider the repercussions of widespread monastic acquisition of churches in the Church at large. This article is concerned in particular to re-examine the means by which monasteries obtained grants of churches, viewed against the background of the Church's assault on lay ownership of churches and tithes, and to reconsider the evolution of the vicarage system, as the ecclesiastical authorities strove to accommodate within the mission of the reformed Church monastic efforts to exploit the churches in their possession.

We have learnt long since that the pioneers of humanism in early Renaissance Italy are not to be regarded as atheists, pagans, or even non-conformists. Some might be cynical about the institutional and political Church with which as Italians, and not infrequently as ecclesiastical employees, they were all too familiar, but they were not looking to disturb the Church in its role as one of the pillars of established society. If as intellectuals they were critical of the language and philosophical apparatus in which the Church had elaborated its doctrines, this did not usually imply scepticism of the revealed truths that were presumed to be enshrined in dogma or rejection of the rituals and practices of the Church, whatever dangers to the faith conservatives might claim to see in their classical enthusiasm. Among these familiar and respected practices, to the early humanists as to their contemporaries, was the veneration of the saints. Old saints were venerated and new saints made in fifteenth-century Italy as elsewhere, and occasionally they furnished subjects to a man classifiable by his education and professional expertise as a humanist.

The privilege Caritatis Bonum (JL 6831), addressed to Archbishop Tliurstan of York and his successors, was issued on 11 March 1120. By this privilege, Pope Calixtus 11 forbade the archbishops of Canterbury to demand a profession of obedience from the archbishops of York and the archbishops ol York to make any such profession. The object ol this paper is to consider the importance of the privilege and to examine (and reject) suggestions that the known text was forged or interpolated; in the course of this examination we shall consider an abbreviated text in a Rouen manuscript, which has been treated as a separate document of an earlier date. We shall also consider the brief account given twice over by Hugh the Chantor in slightly different terms, of the scene at the papal court when the privilege was brought before the pope for subscription, both because such accounts are rare, and because this account throws some light on the curious fact that one of the cardinals who subscribed was not at the curia at the appropriate time. No attempt will be made to tell yet again the story of the conflict between the two English archbishops, but it will be necessary to examine in detail some of the evidence relating to events in the winter of 1119-20. Some small amount of repetition has been unavoidable, as different aspects of the matter are considered in turn.

While much has been written about the London Missionary Society and its very impressive record in the foreign mission held, comparatively little recognition has been given to the Society's early and equally important contribution to church union. This is not surprising. The London Missionary Society has historically been associated with the Congregational Church and until recently was called the Congregational Council for World Missions. Its founding fathers and early patrons, not to mention its missionaries, were mostly Independents although other sympathetic evangelicals—mostly Calvinistic Methodists and English and Scottish Presbyterians—were also involved in its formation. In the view of most historians, the significance of the London Missionary Society lay principally in its impact on heathen popujations in far away lands, only minimally in its impact on those who united to direct its affairs in England. In short, it has often been assumed that, like the Baptist and Wesleyan missions that preceded it, the London Missionary Society was designed to serve a limited denominational or theological constituency and that its evolution into a branch of the Congregational Church was almost inevitable from the beginning.

It has become a commonplace of modern historical scholarship that most Elizabethan Protestants regarded the pope as Antichrist. The present article is an attempt to penetrate beneath the surface of that commonplace. It does not seek to cast doubt on the existence of such a common perception of the pope as Antichrist. However, it will be argued that within that consensus, and to an extent masked by it, there existed very important implicit differences over the consequences of that doctrine.

The role of women in heresy has long been a matter for observation and comment. It must be attributed to historians' lack of interest, rather than lack, of evidence, that the Lollards have until now escaped analysis on this front. There are certainly grounds for supposing that they, like Cathars and Waldensians, derived a large measure of support from members of the female sex. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as earlier, unorthodoxy offered women outlets for religious activity that were not to be found in the established church.— But, while the sources can tell us a good deal about women participating in the Lollard movement as learners, readers and expounders of the gospel and other vernacular texts, the question of whether they ever advanced to the point of acting as priests is less easily answered. We know, indeed, very little about Lollard rites of any kind, and this makes it all the more worth while exploring fully what evidence we have. This little is enough to show that at one formative stage at least in Lollard development, claims were being advanced for women as capable of priesthood.

The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with ‘vindications’ of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events.

‘As one that honoureth and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart’, wrote Archbishop Hutton to Cecil from Bishop-thorpe in December 1604, ‘I wish less wasting of the Trasure of the Realm, and more Moderation in the lawful exercise of Hunting; both that poor Men's Corn may be less spoiled, and other his Majesty's subjects more spared.’ At the time James I was again in the field, as he had been for much of 1604, complementing his natural propensity for settling the principles of a policy and leaving its working out to his ministers with an addiction to strenuous exercise for his health's sake. He had already allowed delay among his more reluctant bishops in carrying through the series of concessions granted to the puritan clergy at the Hampton Court conference; and as the expiry of the period of grace before the full enforcement of the new canons drew nearer, he made it clear that he did not expect to be troubled with whatever detailed problems might arise. They were his bishops’ responsibility. In Bancroft he seemed to have found the primate he need to succeed Whitgift. Not only would Bancroft enhance the prospects of stability within the state by bringing a sense of discipline and order to the Church, but he had the energy and determination to take charge of ecclesiastical administration for months at a time. For these reasons above all the Calvinist James had overcome his reservations about Bancroft's views on iure divino episcopacy. As the guiding hand in convocation behind the revised and more fully explained canons, Bancroft was undoubtedly best fitted, by experience as well as temperament, to take charge of the efforts to enforce them. By the time he died late in 1610, after a hard struggle to ‘reconstruct’ the English Church, only a minority of its dioceses had not lost clergy through deprivation from their livings, mostly for inconformity and most of them in the southern province; countless others had been suspended. So closely has Bancroft been associated with the efforts to obtain obedience to the new canons, especially to the articles in canon 36 referring to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty Nine Articles, that debate about his impact on the Church, both in the parliamentary skirmishing at the time and among commentators since, has commonly used as a measure the number of clergy he is supposed to have dispossessed, whether the 300 his puritan critics claimed, the 60 or so he himself once asserted and which R. G. Usher subsequently endorsed, or the 80 to 90 finally established by S. B. Babbage. The case for or against him has always tended to be built on numbers rather than on any assessment of the degree of responsibility he had for what happened. James, although clearly not open to direct attack in parliament, has in any case seemed a peripheral figure, expressing anger and alarm when signs of opposition to conformity came his way, but in no sense providing continuous direction of his bishops’ efforts. Before he departed once more for the countryside in mid-November, he had settled with Bancroft the manner in which the new canons were to be introduced, quietly permitting additional time beyond the deadline at the end of November for all but the most notoriously inconformable clergy in the hope of edging the rest fairly quickly towards full conformity and, where appropriate, subscription to the new terms ‘willingly and ex animo’.

Many missionaries in the nineteenth century came from the lower middle and artisan classes. From this two deductions have been drawn. Firstly, it has been pointed out that these were the social origins of many of the most dynamic and discontented elements of Victorian society, for example, trade union leaders. This parallel has led t o the suggestion that the typical nineteenth-century missionary was a potential radical who could easily become a threat to the status quo. Secondly, the employment of so many men from the skilled mechanic class has been taken to indicate some awareness by missionary administrators of the wider dimensions of the gospel message; that they were concerned with the material as well as the spiritual, with the passing on of practical skills as well as with the inculcating of a new religious understanding. It will be argued below, on the evidence from four British missionary societies, the Church Missionary Society, the London Missonary Society, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society and the China Inland Mission, that these deductions require substantial qualification.

During the past forty years, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England has received a great deal of attention from intellectual, social and Church historians. Because of the nature of the general interpretation traditionally followed, most scholars have found it fruitful to concentrate their research upon particular groups or individuals and to fit the ensuing studies into either a rather narrow stream labelled ‘Anglican’ or a very broad one named ‘Puritan’. While the number of biographies of English bishops and analyses of ‘Anglican’ divines has increased at a more than respectable rate recently, studies of English ‘Puritans’ and their brethren in New England have grown to almost unmanageable proportions. With all of these riches at hand, however, no recent historian has published an overall synthetic history of the Church of England under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts to match that completed by W. H. Frere more than two-thirds of a century ago. Indeed, a good deal of controversy still ranges over the boundaries and validity of such terms as ‘Anglican’ and—especially— ‘Puritan’. Plunging into that dispute, this paper will examine the nature and historiographical origins of these categories, redefine them so that they better apply to the evidence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and spell out some of the social and political implications that spring from this modified point of view. While the argument presented here, no doubt, will neither please nor satisfy all historians working in the field, one hopes that it will provide some with a glimpse at the outlines of a new synthesis.

Much recent commentary on Henry viii and Thomas Cromwell emphasises their use of propaganda against ‘papacy’ during the initial stages of the schism from Rome. G. R. Elton, for example, considers this genre to be well conceived and mature in technique, all the more remarkable since Cromwell's project was the ‘…first such campaign ever mounted by any government in any state of Europe’. Notwithstanding its sophisticated presentation during the years after the schism, such polemic has been described by Elton and others as having started ‘rather late’, i.e. when definite political action had already commenced. Its purpose, therefore, was to explain specific official enterprises, commencing with the legislation on Appeals in 1532–3. But was this an after-the-fact endeavour? Might not a creation so well-wrought in fact antedate Henry's use of parliament against Rome? At least two MS documents describing a new sort of ‘christian’ kingship survive to suggest that Henry's propaganda efforts commenced in early

At about noon on Thursday, 2 March 1905, Charles Gore knocked on the south-west door of St Philip's Birmingham, and, having been admitted, proceeded to be enthroned as the first Anglican bishop of Birmingham. A commemorative booklet described those ceremonies minutely, but only briefly alluded to the prolonged agitation for the creation of the diocese. Apart from passing references and a perceptive analysis, in an earlier pamphlet, of the reasons for the initial failure of the scheme, no substantial secondary literature on the subject exists.

In an article in the last number of this JOURNAL, Caroline Walker Bynum drew attention to the way in which historians during the past few decades have written of the twelfth century in terms which would once have been thought more appropriate to the fifteenth. We have become used to hearing about the twelfth-century renaissance, about the classical revival and the growth of humanism and about the discovery of the individual. The period has been credited with a rapidly growing awareness of the regularity of the natural order and with an increased confidence in the power of reason. The idea has now been widely accepted that the twelfth century saw the emergence of institutions and sensitivities which were to become characteristic of western civilisation, but which previously did not exist or played only a subordinate cultural role. It is then, as R. R. Bolgar has expressed it, that we can discern for the first time the lineaments of modern man. This is obviously not to say that the attitudes displayed were the same as those in subsequent centuries; it would be absurd to look for the humanism of the fifteenth century, the rationalism of the eighteenth, or the individualism of the nineteenth, in the writings of Cistercians or magitri. Some phrases will strike us by their modernity, but the context of thinking is usually different in important ways from our own. The question is not whether there is a cultural identity between the twelfth century and the modern world, for there obviously is not, but whether in the twelfth century we can discern elements of respect for humanity, reason and individuality which were largely lacking during the preceding five hundred years, and which were to have a lasting impact on the growth of.western culture.

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.

Beyond a doubt, the newspaper La Croix and its publisher, the Maison de la Bonne Presse, have played a central role in French Catholic journalism for over thirty years. Indeed, it was the leading Catholic press voice of the Third Republic from the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of France. No newspaper of Catholic inspiration could seriously contest its circulation dominance, with the possible exception of the Breton Christian Democratic L'Ouest-Eclair. However, the impact of this latter daily was limited to western France, and by the time it outdistanced La Croix's circulation, it had largely abandoned its Catholic or Christian character. La Croix, on the other hand, was known and read throughout France and remained forthrightly Catholic throughout the life of the Third Republic. Its editorial policy was openly papal, and it sought consciously to be the organ of the French Catholic masses.

The role of Thomas Cromwell in the events of the English Reformation has long been a contentious issue. This brief study is designed to introduce some new evidence on Cromwell's interaction with the monasteries and the issue of the royal supremacy. The information arises out of Henry viii's exchange of lands with the abbey of Waltham Holy Cross in 1531-2. On 1 November 1531 the abbot and convent granted to the crown the manor of Stansted Abbot and other property in Stansted, Hertfordshire, and Roydon, Essex. They were compensated on 1 January following with a royal gift of Blackmore Priory, the manor of Wormingford, and other lands. The abbey's surrender has long been available in print, but these sources have been based upon the formal copy in the close roll. The discovery of a longer, more informative draft version of this grant, composed by the crown, provides new insights of significance for the Church at large during this period.