This account of Henry II’s pilgrimage to Rocamadour comes from Robert de Torigny, a well-informed contemporary, hence the significance of the details which he included. From Domfront, on the frontiers of Normandy, the king travelled hundreds of kilometres to the south.

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.

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.

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.

The wide span of years which I have boldly claimed in my title is intended to enmesh and hold together for our inspection the first great age of the medieval city, the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the medieval Church first faced the problem of evangelism in growing mercantile communities, and the age when it deployed in the cities and towns of Europe a new army of missionaries in the persons of the friars. The missionary techniques of the friars are familiar and comparatively well documented; the evangelism of the tenth and eleventh centuries is scarcely documented at all. In recent years the dramatic nature of urban history in this early period has been becoming increasingly apparent; and it was in the conviction that the Church’s hand in it could not wholly escape detection that I chose the title for this lecture. Many aspects of this problem have been traced with the closest care; but I justify the breadth and cloudiness of my theme by a conviction that it has rarely been looked at quite from this point of view.

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.

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.

It has been said that Innocent III shared the popular belief existing at the beginning of the thirteenth century that the world would end in 1284. Perhaps this is the reason why throughout his pontificate he was eager to resolve the divisions facing mankind. These divisions were reflected in the deviations of the heretic, the beliefs of the infidel and the schism of the eastern church. In the first of these Innocent was meeting success, albeit in varying degrees, for example in Languedoc. The second and third needed his further attention. He was of the opinion that a renewed crusading effort in both east and west would be able to achieve mass conversions amongst Jews and Muslims. To this end the fourth crusade of 1204, mounted mainly by the Cistercians, came into being.

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.

At present, roman catholics number just under 7% of the total population of Sri Lanka. The dominant religious groups in the country are the Sinhalese buddhists and the Tamil hindus with 65% and 25% respectively of the population. The remainder consists of muslims (around 7%) and a few protestants. Here, unlike sub-Saharan Africa, European religions were introduced into a context dominated by other world religions with long literary and intellectual traditions. Furthermore, religion enters so intimately into the culture of various groups in the island that it is difficult to demarcate an area of thought or activity which can be clearly labelled as ‘religious’.

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.

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.

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.

No One would accuse Martin Luther of being philo-Semitic. Even his first, so-called pro-Jewish pamphlet to the Jews is tentative in the extreme and conditional on their accepting Christianity in its purer Protestant form. But even he could not disguise his admiration for the Jews in two areas. The first was sheer survival.

The advent of the welfare state has been seen by some historians as a decisive blow for British traditions of voluntarism, echoing some of the concerns raised in the lead up to the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS). This article examines the practice of Hospital Sunday in England in the post-war period. In doing so it evidences the effect of the nationalization of the voluntary hospitals in 1948 on the relationships between clergy, their congregations and health care. It argues that much greater attention needs to be paid to the continuities evident in Christian-inspired social action in the NHS in the long 1950s and after. Attending to the role of such Christian social action allows historians both to extend our knowledge of the importance of Christianity to social life in the period and to deepen our understanding of the operation of the welfare state.

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.

It has long been a truism that the chantry priest, rather than the monk, friar, or member of a large collegiate church, is the most significant figure if we wish to understand how organised religion affected the lives of most citizens of most medieval English towns. Miss Wood-Legh, in her recently published and long-awaited Perpetual Chantries in Britain, has however been the first to provide a detailed demonstration of the sustained interest taken by founders, prelates, parishioners, and corporate bodies in the effective administration and continued welfare of the perpetual chantry. Miss Wood-Legh justifiably describes her work as the ‘first detailed study in English of the chantry as an institution’ and its publication ought to lead to a long-overdue investigation of the exact social and economic, as well as religious, role of the medieval chantry. The hope expressed by Professor Hamilton Thompson almost sixty years ago, ‘that the student of chantry history may possess a more complete and compact apparatus for his work than is at present within his reach’, has been largely unfulfilled, not least in York itself.

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?