Twenty-Five years ago the title of this paper would have seemed to many a contradiction in terms; even now there may be some who will expect the scholar of my title to be a critic of Wyclif, erudite in the heresiarch’s manifold outpourings. The scholar was, however, himself a Wycliffite, indeed of the radical wing of that persuasion. His misfortune, from a modern viewpoint, is that he did not in his works reveal his name, and hence a cumbersome periphrasis is unavoidable. The writer reveals most about himself in the Tractatus de Oblacione Iugis Sacrificii, despite its title an English work of nearly 4000 lines, dealing primarily but not exclusively with the Eucharist: there it becomes clear that he must have been writing between March 1413, since Henry IV is spoken of as recently dead, and February 1414, since Arundel (þe grettist enmy þat Crist haþ in Ynglond) is still said to be archbishop of Canterbury, and that he had previously treated the subject of clerical temporalities in a sermon on the text Omnis plantacio qu[am] non plantauit pater meus celestis eradkabitur. The Tractatus survives in a single manuscript, now BL, Cotton Titus D. v, of the first half of the fifteenth century and clearly not the author’s original.

The process of adapting universal religions to local cultures, conditions, and milieux is as old as the religions themselves. As far as Christinity is concerned, it was also subject to the continuous blending of general doctrinal principles with the national form of their expression, especially with age-old traditions in folklore. Consequently, Frankish or Germanic Christianity differed considerably from the Slavic version, while the latter again differed from that prevailing in the Eastern Roman Empire. Although in missionary areas the Church sometimes approved of investing the cult with specific features, taking into account the nationality and mentality of its congregations, in Europe itself conflicts between local church authorities on the one hand and Rome on the other often broke out over these matters. They found expression and were finally ossified in successive divisions of Christianity; beginning with the Great Schism of 1054, through the attempt to organize a national church in Bohemia (the Hussite Movement), to the permanent split brought about by the Reformation.

During her own career Beryl Smalley greatly expanded our knowledge of Peter Comestor. When she first discussed his works, Peter’s links with Peter Lombard and his activity as a commentator upon the Gospels had only recently been established. She went on to show Peter’s connections with the school of St Victor and, before she died, she explored some aspects of Peter’s glosses on the Gospels. It may therefore be appropriate to try to fit together some of the pieces of the jigsaw that we now have, and to follow the lines along which, as we can now see, Peter’s career evolved.

The Church’s Founder enjoined the life of perfection on all his followers, but the Cathars were unique in describing themselves as perfect or as ‘good men’. In all other forms of Christianity it is an observable fact that the more devout church members are, the more they are conscious of their imperfections and lack of goodness. This suggests that Cathar spirituality was very different from that of the mainline Christian churches, and it is this which I want to investigate here.

The history of teaching and study at the Parisian convents of the mendicant orders has largely been viewed and written as part of the history of the university of Paris. The Parisian doctors of theology at the Dominican, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Carmelite convents, from the time of Bonaventure, Albert, Thomas, and Giles of Rome until the end of the Middle Ages, were regent masters, or professors, at the university, at least for a year or more after inception as masters. And presumably mendicant students sent to Paris for theological study were being sent there for university studies; the brightest of them would be expected to complete the university degree in theology. The connection between the mendicant masters and the intellectual history of the university of Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century is so strong that it is almost impossible to think of these convents except as religious colleges attached to the university of Paris.

In this essay we will turn our attention to a rather distinctive phenomenon of Norwegian history; the rise and activity of the network of so-called women’s mission groups. From its outset in the first half of the nineteenth century, this movement was part of the international call for female participation in the new cause of propagating the Christian message overseas. But in Norway the movement underwent a self-development that gave it a distinctive role, not only in the missionary movement but also in the sociopolitical formation of modern Norwegian society as a whole and in the creation of international links.

Among the strangest of the rumours circulating about early Methodism was the charge that it promoted the notion of Christian communism—‘the community of goods’. In the early summer of 1739 Lord Egmonc, one of the Georgia Trustees, got wind of the story and after hearing Whiteficld preach at Blackheath pressed him whether, among other eccentricities, he held that ‘all things should be in common’. The same year two anti-Methodist pamphlets raised the same issue, and in 1740 it surfaced again in the papers when another former Oxford Methodist, Benjamin Ingham, was accused by his local vicar of helping to foment a violent riot of Dewsbury cloth workers by ‘preaching up … a community of goods, as was practised by the Primitive Christians’. Ingham was said to urge a sharing of wealth so drastic that his brother had remarked in disgust, ‘if I mind our Ben, he would preach me out of all I have’.

History in a very religious or ideologically inspired society is always liable to become a victim of propaganda. A concern for what is right takes precedence over what actually happens, and the justification of events replaces the accurate recording of them: there is what may be termed virtuous reality. In such a climate evidence has not only to be rigorously tested and questioned, but close attention has also to be given to what is not recorded or omitted. At no time in English history is this more true than the years around 1400, when justification of a new government required the condemnation of the reign that had gone before. It is well known that the domestic chronicles of the period are a striking example of Hobbes’s dictum that in an intolerant society ‘imagination and memory are but one thing’. Despite the long centuries of struggle within virtually all medieval kingdoms for supremacy between laity and clergy, the contest of regnum and sacerdotium, which reached a climax in England during the fourteenth century, the sources - and therefore modern historians -have concentrated upon an alternative, purely secular interpretation of events. The drama of the later 1390s, which saw the deposition of both Archbishop and King, is treated as if it were all a straightforward contest between absolute and limited kingship, in which a feudal aristocracy sought justice against a tyrannical ruler, and this has served to obscure the overriding significance of the crisis as a matter of ecclesiastical history.

Introduction

In Palestine, Syria, the provinces of Asia Minor, Armenia, Georgia, and Persia, though Mohammedan countries, there are many thousands of Jews, and many thousands of Christians, at least in name. But the whole mingled population is in a state of deplorable ignorance and degradation, – destitute of the means of divine knowledge, and bewildered with vain imaginations and strong delusions.

Johannes Sarebiriensis, quondam clericus beati Thomae martiris, diuina dignatione et meritis beati Thomae martiris, Carnotensis ecclesiae minister humilis’. This protocol from the last known letter to come from John of Salisbury’s hand attests his continuing devotion to the memory of the blessed martyr of Canterbury and his pride in having once belonged to his household. John had made an important contribution to the beginning of the cult of Saint Thomas the Martyr.

In the debate over the state of cathedral schools and their displacement as centres of learning by the rising universities, the case of Chartres has, for nearly a century, excited the most attention. Much has been written on, first, whether the activity of several prominent intellectuals of the twelfth century such as Thierry, William of Conches and Gilbert of Poitiers was primarily at Chartres or at Paris; and, secondly, whether the thought of ‘Chartrian’ masters is old-fashioned or open to the profound changes which effected twelfth-century scientific learning. These changes resulted largely from the introduction of works translated from Greek and Arabic during that century. In this paper I try to clarify the situation at Chartres itself by summing up the evidence from the manuscripts known to have been in the cathedral library in the twelfth century of the degree to which this ‘new science’ was received there, and how it was assimilated.

Of the numerous criticisms and expressions of grievance directed at the Church in Germany on the eve of the Reformation, the most devastating was the charge of inadequate pastoral care. Reformers of all complexions bewailed the poor state of the parish clergy and the inadequate manner in which they provided for the spiritual needs of their flocks. At the very least, the parish clergy were ill-educated and ill-prepared for their pastoral tasks; at the very worst, they exploited those to whom they should have ministered, charging for their services, treating layfolk as merely a means of increasing their incomes, and, above all, resorting to the tyranny of the spiritual ban to uphold their position. The popular propaganda of the early Reformation fully exploited such deficiencies, exposing the decay in root and branch of a system of pastoral care depicted as no more than an empty shell, a facade of a genuine Christian cure of souls. The attack on the traditional Church was highly successful, successful enough to provoke an ecclesiastical revolution, and almost a socio-political revolution as well. It was, indeed, so successful that generations of historians of the Reformation have seen the condition of the pre-Reformation Church largely through the eyes of its critics and opponents. This negative image was matched by an idealized view of what succeeded it: where the old Church had failed the Christian laity, indeed, so much that they had virtually fallen into the hands of the Devil, the new Church offered solutions, a new way forward, a new standard of pastoral care and concern that created a new ideal, the Lutheran pastor, who cared for his flock as a kindly father, a shepherd who would willingly give up his life for his sheep.

Castle CAMPS in the twentieth century is a small, and in the nineteenth century was an entirely agricultural, village close to the borders of Cambridgeshire, Esssex, and Suffolk. It has a United Reformed church which was formerly Congregational and whose members at the close of the nineteenth century included the village shopkeeper. That was not unusual. What is less usual is that he was a Jew.

Lecture dcs philosophes, lectio philosophorum: la formule, comme telle, ne semble pas se trouver chezjean de Salisbury. En revanche, on rencontre chez lui une allusion à la lecture des lois: lectio legum aut etiam canonum. Cependant, la lecture glosée et commentée des textes philosophiques était une pièce importante dans I’enseignement de son maître Guillaume de Conches.

All too often neglected and overgrown, holy wells still dot the AA English countryside. Many more are merely a distant memory: names recorded by dead antiquarians, folklorists, and topographers and since forgotten, sites marked on Ordnance Survey maps soon to be obliterated by the encroaching urban and industrial world. Despite the heroic efforts of a group of local historians, this aspect of British heritage is in rapid decline. Those which have survived represent only a tiny fraction of the vast number that were scattered across the rural landscape on the eve of the Henrician Reformation. Wells were an integral part of the late medieval geography of the sacred, a matrix of ancient holy places where ordinary people could approach and invoke the divine. Casual weekend visits by ramblers and picnicking families are almost all that remains of the thriving culture of pilgrimage to such hallowed spots.

In June 1799 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland issued a Pastoral Admonition to its congregations denouncing the missionaries of the newly formed Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home (SPGH). They were, it alleged, ‘a set of men whose proceedings threatened] no small disorder to the country’. In issuing this warning the Assembly brought to public attention for the first time the work of two of the most prominent Scottish leaders of the Evangelical Revival, Robert and James Alexander Haldane. The Haldane brothers, two of the moving spirits behind the offending organization, were wealthy Presbyterian converts to an undenominational activism already much in evidence south of the border. For a decade spanning the turn of the century their religious enterprise challenged Scottish ecclesiastical conventions, provoking strong contemporary reactions and leading to a marked divergence in subsequent historical assessment. From ‘the Wesley and Whitefield of Scotland’, at one extreme, they have been described less fulsomely as the source of a movement which, though it alarmed all the Presbyterian churches, proved to be short-lived, dying away ‘among its own domestic quarrels’, ‘marred by bitterness of speech, obscurantism and fanaticism’. Contemporaries seem to have found it little easier to agree on the leaders’ personal qualities. In 1796 Thomas Jones, the minister of Lady Glenorchy’s Chapel in Edinburgh, commended Robert Haldane to William Wilberforce as ‘a man of strickt honour integrity religion prudence and virtue’, who being ‘possessed of a fortune from £50,000 to £60,000 … thinks it is his duty… to employ a considerable portion of it in promoting the cause of God’. By 1809 Haldane’s former friend and colleague, Greville Ewing, had become so disenchanted with his methods that, having referred to him scornfully as ‘the POPE of independents’, he accused him bitterly of ‘the greatest effort [he had ever seen] from any motive whatsoever, to ruin the comfort, and the usefulness, of a minister of the gospel’. Though his brother, James, appears to have inspired a more universal affection, the forcefulness of both personalities ensured that mere neutrality would never be easy.

The confluence between speculative thought and universities on the one hand and broad-based heretical movements on the other hand was a predominant theme in Bunny Leff’s great and monumental Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, notably in the case of Wyclif, Hus, and the popular propagation of their ideas. The first arm of this theme, university learning, seems to have no place in the history of Catharism. Where are there equivalent Cathar masters? In a university setting we do have Catholic theologians’ discussion of dualism, but is this more than a footnote in the history of Catharism? Take for example the University of Paris, its theology faculty, and the bachelor’s exercise of lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, where the question of there being one or several principles of things arose in the first distinction of the second book, and take three 1250s commentators. Tackling this question during his bachelor years (1252-6), St Thomas states five arguments in favour of plurality of principles, citing one logical and three natural works of Aristotle. He postpones naming the proponents of plurality until his response. Here he combines Aristotle’s survey of them in the first book of the Metaphysics and the Church’s experience of dualist heresy in a list: early natural philosophers, Empedocles and Pythagoras, and the heresy of the Manichees. Such a sentence commentary, showing us a formal proposition, one among several philosophical dualisms which were being ventilated in the theological schools of Paris, seems remote from the inquisitor’s register through which we see Cathar perfects and their followers living out theological dualism in fortified villages down south in Languedoc.

Thomas Müntzer’s name is inseparably interwoven with the early history of the German Reformation. This reformer was active during the third decade of the sixteenth century and this mainly in Thüringen, an area in the eastern part of the German Empire belonging to the electorate of Saxony. As such it was to come early under the influence of the Lutheran reform movement initiated in Wittenberg.