The 1260 movement was the first widespread outbreak of popular fervour in medieval Italy to make flagellation the centre of its devotion. Together with subsequent movements it provided a general impetus to lay religious life by leading to the foundation of a large number of confraternities all over the country. In this paper I intend to describe this phenomenon and in this way examine the motivation, collective and individual, which led people to participate. I shall then outline briefly the devotional practices of flagellant companies and show how they came to institutionalise the spirit of this popular fervour.

The writings of the Early Church concerning childhood are not extensive, but in the works of a number of Eastern Christian authors of the second to fourth centuries it is possible to discern some ideas about childhood which raise important problems of Christian theology and theological anthropology. The theological problem is that of the question posed for theodicy by the sufferings and deaths of infants. It is harder to give a brief definition of the anthropological problem, but it is important to do so because to define the problem as the Eastern Fathers saw it is also to identify the set of conceptual tools—the anthropological paradigm—which they used to answer it. These are not, naturally, the concepts of modern anthropology and psychology. Applied to patristic thought, these terms usually refer to speculations about the composition and functioning of the human person or the human soul which belong to a discourse which is recognizably philosophical and metaphysical—by which is meant that it is (though influenced by other sources, such as the Bible) the discourse of a tradition descending ultimately from the anthropological terminology of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Patristic anthropology seeks to account for the history and experiences of the human person as a created being—fhe experience of sin and mortality in the present life, but also of eternal salvation and advancement to perfection in the image of God.

The celebration of the late medieval mass and other religious ceremonies was carefully delineated through the ecclesiastical regulations of the Catholic Church. This legalistic approach to worship was strongly criticized by both Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther before 1517. With the subsequent Reformation, Luther reacted against Catholic legalism which, he argued, ensnared the faithful and threatened Christian freedom. He was therefore particularly reluctant to specify what he considered to be the appropriate form, place and setting for his German mass. Luther utilized the concept of adiaphora to argue that such issues were matters of indifference as they were not fundamental for salvation. However, this stance was tempered by his realization that such Christian freedom actually did require direction to ensure that the Reformation message was not confused or lost.

The Reformation in the Low Countries fascinates both church historians and general historians. Religious change and political revolution went hand in hand. The history of the Reformation is an integral part of the history of the birth of the Dutch nation. Although well-researched, its attraction is renewed with each successive historiographical fashion.

Any discussion of the conciliar assemblies and decisions of the Church is likely to consider things from the centre—to enumerate those present, to distinguish the issues, arguments, and protagonists, and to emphasize the final decisions. Perhaps, indeed, to over-emphasize them, for there is a tendency to assume that what was decreed at Rome was rapidly implemented in the provinces. Often, of course, this was the case, and the speed with which the decisions of the Third Lateran Council were disseminated is striking testimony to the ability of the twelfth-century Papacy to publicize its policies. The Papacy developed rapidly, however, in the middle years of the twelfth century, and it is dangerous to assume that what was true of the pontificate of Alexander III can also be applied to that of Innocent II. It may therefore be useful to look closely at a major provincial dispute from the first half of the twelfth century, and to attempt to determine how decisively regional practice was affected by papal decrees in one particular instance.

There can be few English historians still maintaining a lively interest in their fields over half a century after the publication of a major work, but this is happily true of the Misses Madeleine and Ruth Dodds, with whom I corresponded not many months ago. Their extensive two-volume work The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracy disentangled with admirable system and discretion the huge deposit of evidence calendared (sometimes too summarily) in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. As a work of narrative history their book seems unlikely to call for major revisions, and it demands the warmest recognition from every student of Tudor history. Though its judgments are in general sober and well-grounded, its deep sympathies have possibly tended to encourage those who for various reasons wanted to idealise the Pilgrimage and overestimate its creative possibilities.

‘Cas III Aristarque, Abbé de qualité, et d’unmérite distingué, il sollicite un Evêché, désirant de servir utilement l’Eglise. R. Il ne peut désirer l’Episcopat dans la vue d’être élevé à une si haute dignité, sans se rendre coupable d’ambition ou de présomption; il ne peut le désirer dans le dessein d’être honoré et respecté, ou de devenir riche sans se rendre coupable d’ambition ou d’avarice. Ajoutons que ce n’est point assez d’avoir une intention pure pour pouvoir désirer sans péché l’Episcopat; il faut avoir toutes les vertus que l’Apôtre demande dans un Evêque’.

On at least three occasions during the pontificate of Innocent III, Gerald of Wales—failed bishop, celebrated story-teller, and inveterate and inventive pilgrim, made the journey to Rome.There, having already carried out his preliminary research, he was always eager to examine two of the most outstanding images in Rome at close quarters. These two images—the Uronica at the Lateran and the Veronica at St Peter’s—made such a deep impression upon him that his description and explanation of their importance was to form a central role in his Speculum Ecclesiae, which he wrote on his return home. He clearly saw them as a pair, having similar names and being held in equal reverence, although perhaps their authenticity sprang from different roots. His remarks would have greatly pleased Innocent, for this was precisely the approach which the pope aimed to achieve. He considered it essential that the long and damaging rivalry between the two great basilicas of the Lateran and the Vatican, which had existed for much of the twelfth century, should now be resolved. It was a rivalry which had brought scandal to the papacy and grave detriment to the Church. In thiscontroversy the Lateran had some advantages, both historically—as the cathedral of Rome and hence of the world—and in the popular appeal of its fabulous relics. A brief glance at a contemporary inventory shows the outstanding richness of this collection. Innocent’s aim was not to diminish the Lateran, but instead to raise the status of St Peter’s, so that both became co-equal seats of the pope-bishop of Rome. What Gerald of Wales had written confirmed Innocent’s own reading of the Liber Pontif¡calis, which was to form the basis for his important reform of the liturgy at this time. Nor was his approbation merely directed towards Gerald. It went to all observant pilgrims, particularly that small number of highly significant archbishops and metropolitans who came to Rome to collect their pallia on their appointments. That great show, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, saw almost all of them in attendance. ‘Here was a wonderful opportunity for Innocent to stress the underlying purpose of his artistic patronage, whereby Lateran and Vatican were to achieve coequal status whilst, at the same time, the Church’s real message was being strengthened.

The Byzantines took more kindly than the westerners of the middle ages to their eccentrics of the spiritual life. They never lost sight of the true meaning of the word monachos — a solitary, a man who lives alone with God. The ultimate and deepest purpose of the monastic life was, as Saint Basil himself had declared, the ‘salvation of one’s own soul’. The way of the monachos was a lonely one. For the many who were called it was perhaps only bearable in the gregarious circumstance of a community, a koinobion or coenobitic monastery; and Saint Basil believed that they were right. But in the Byzantine world it was always accepted that there would be a chosen few for whom even the koinobion was too gregarious. For them the communal monastery would be the primary school of askesis from which they would one day graduate to the harder and more rarefied discipline of an asketerion, a small group of monks living in a lavra or a skete under the supervision of a spiritual father.

The publication of Lux Mundi in 1889 has long been regarded as an important moment in the development of Anglican thought. Equally familiar is the distress which the new turn gave to H. P. Liddon, who could only regard the effort made by the Lux Mundi group to set the Catholic faith in its right relation to modern knowledge as capitulation to the snares of liberalism, and as ultimately fatal to the close coherence of Christian truth. The book represented a new grafting upon the stock of the English Catholic party, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered of the reasons why such a theology was produced within the post-Tractarian circle at Oxford. The new outlook involved a wholesale change from the deductive theology of the Tractarians with its imperatives against the world and all those things which liberalism accepted in the world, to an inductive theology which appealed to men for Christ by showing how the best and truest things led up to Him and found fulfilment in Him. At the same time religion appeared now as an interpretation of the world as well as of the Church, and the intense conservatism of Pusey and Keble was replaced by the radicalism of Scott Holland and Gore. The question is first why these new attitudes grew up amongst men who more than any others were conditioned against them by intense religious training, and, secondly, a question regarded by Prestige as inexplicable, how it came about that Liddon was so shocked by a publication which embodied tendencies which had been notorious for twenty years and of which, in a letter to Scott Holland in 1884, he had seemed quite clearly aware.

A Certificate From Northamptonshire, published anonymously in 1641, proclaimed that the current attacks being made on the bishops had a secret purpose behind them: the abolition of the requirement to pay tithe, whether to cleric or layman. ‘If the bishops and their courts were overthrown’, so the author claimed, the people would be freed from paying tithes, ‘which is the secret thing which our common free holders and grand jury-men do so much aim at’. The writer’s claims concerning the motives which led men to demand the abolition of episcopacy may have had some truth in them, but he was to be proved wrong about the consequences of such abolition; as, indeed, a better informed observer pondering the extent of lay involvement in the ownership of tithes might have been able to predict. Despite several close calls and a variety of imaginative proposals for abolition or reform, tithes remained and survived the demise of bishops, deans, and ecclesiastical courts, standing alongside glebe as one of the twin pillars of the maintenance of the parochial ministry.

The Birmingham congregation suggests what Manchester Catholicism might have looked like if Irish immigration had been a fraction of what it was.’ This remark of John Bossy points in the direction of a different view of the impact of Irish migration on urban Catholic congregations in England from that which has become familiar. The relationship between Irish and English Catholic population growth in Birmingham before 1850 was not straightforward and led consequently to an interesting pattern of social and religious interaction. What Birmingham illustrates in the period up to 1850 is the effect of relatively modest Irish immigration into an English Catholic congregation already well advanced in prosperity and organization. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Birmingham Catholicism was not over whelmingly Irish, but the reception of the Irish had significant demographic and social effects on the congregation. These can be used to highlight and illustrate urban Catholic population structure, industrial enterprise, and quasi-parochial organization.

In early 1642 a Scottish army under the command of Robert Munroe arrived in Ulster as part of a scheme to defeat the native Irish rebellion which had begun late in the previous year. The conquest was not to be purely a military one. As a contemporary historian of Presbyterianism, Patrick Adair, observed ‘it is certain God made that army instrumental for bringing church governments, according to His own institutions, to Ireland … and for spreading the covenants’. The form of church government was that of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and in June 1642 the chaplains and officers established the first presbytery in Ireland at Carrickfergus. Sub-presbyteries, or meetings, were created for Antrim, Down and the Route, in north Antrim in 1654, for the Laggan in east Donegal in 1657, and for Tyrone in 1659. Within these units the Church was divided into geographical parishes each with its own minister. This establishment of a parallel structure rivalling that of the Anglican Church, but without the king at its head, is what has been termed the ‘presbyterian revolution’.It supported the Presbyterian claim to be ‘the Church of Ireland’, a claim which was to bring it into conflict with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the late seventeenth century. In order to further underpin this claim the reformed church began to move out of its Ulster base by the 1670s. The Laggan presbytery ordained William Cock and William Liston for work in Clonmel and Waterford in 1673 and was active in Tipperary, Longford, and Sligo by 1676. Its advice to some Dublin ministers was to form themselves into a group who were ‘subject to the meeting in the north’. The presbytery of Tyrone also supplied Dublin.

In this paper I would like to explore theories of disease and practices of healing in late medieval and early modern Europe, and to focus on two diseases, leprosy and plague. Much of the discussion will be based on Italian evidence since in this period, and especially in the sixteenth century, Italy was in the forefront of European medicine. Physicians were more numerous in Italy than in most European countries, and available not only in cities, but in small towns and rural communities. But disease and healing were not the exclusive concern of the medical profession. The church had not forgotten that healing had theological overtones. Equally there were the governments of the Italian states deeply committed to legislation for public health and to the control of epidemics.

England was a rich prize for William the Conqueror to have won at the battle of Hastings. His conquest was followed by a major redistribution of the wealth of his new kingdom. By the end of his reign, a tenurial revolution had swept through the lay landholding community, leaving only a handful of Anglo-Saxons as tenants-in-chief. The Church had undergone considerable changes of personnel; only one bishopric was still in English hands (Worcester), and of the greater Benedictine houses only Bath and Ramsey were still ruled by English abbots. Domesday Book, the great survey of England made in 1086, although difficult to interpret, provides much information to enable an examination of ecclesiastical wealth, its nature, and its distribution, in the late eleventh century.

The anachronistic ascription of membership of the Moslem faith to the persecutors of Christians in the period before the Peace of the Church appears in Anglo-Norman hagiography in the late twelfth century, or early thirteenth, and in English lives later in the thirteenth century. It may be, at least in part, the result of the corruption in meaning of a derivative of the word Mahomet, found in Anglo-Norman as mahumez in the early twelfth century and in English by the end of the same century in the form of maumez, idols. The confusion in identification was made possible by the attribution of the rôle of the Roman officials to the Moslems—both groups martyred Christians in large numbers—and by an association of practices and qualities based on the opposition, real or alleged, of both Romans and Moslems to the Christian faith.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries Augustine of Hippo preached a number of sermons at the annual celebrations of martyr festivals. These festivals commemorated the martyr’s ‘birthday’: the day of the martyr’s death on earth and entrance into the eternal life of heaven. They were popular occasions, drawing in larger and more diverse crowds than ordinary services, and attracting a certain air of festivity and merriment in North Africa. Martyr festivals provided the ideal location for the discussion of the afterlife: eschatological hopes had long given meaning to martyrdom, exposing the order permeating chaos, pointing towards beauty amid human suffering, and revealing death as the gateway to true life.

The natural world offered Renaissance men and women an abundance of raw materials which could be used to protect and to heal. Healers and wise women used particularly potent plants, gemstones and animal parts, in conjunction with magical ritual and Christian prayer, as preventative and cure. Pertaining largely to an oral and unlettered culture, much of this natural lore has been lost. Fortunately, the Renaissance demand for vernacular translations of classical works brought about a revived interest in botany, whilst cheap print and a wider reading public fostered the proliferation of a new genre of self-help manuals and books of secrets, and it is within these works that some of the oral traditions have been captured in ink. Whilst it may be true that many of the new authors of the Renaissance used print to disparage and demystify many of these popular beliefs, it is often only through the disapproving lens of the vernacular manual that we are able to catch glimpses of folk beliefs in practice. This paper will examine one such tradition: the use of the Rose of Jericho as birthing aid.

It seems fitting to begin with a tribute to the late Henry Chadwick, whose thorough, even-handed, and ever readable work contributed much to our understanding of the theme of sanctity in the early Church. In particular, his address at a conference on ‘The Byzantine Saint’ held in Birmingham in 1980 exemplified his capacity to identify and constructively pursue the broad issues at stake. In speaking of the early saints and the content of their lives, Chadwick explains, ‘we are tempted either to tell the stories of their mortifications and then, as was said of Lytton Strachey, ostentatiously refrain from laughing, or we go in search of trendy non-religious explanations of the social needs that created them’. He goes on to acknowledge, as most would, the importance of sociological interpretations and their potential for the study of sanctity, but warns that ‘a stripping away of their religious motivation will leave the historian with a distorted picture’. It is along this route of keeping the religious or theological motivations and presuppositions of sanctity in mind, that the present essay will proceed. It focuses on the neglected concept of μετάνoια or ‘repentance’ (lit. a ‘change of mind’) which dominates much of the ascetic theology of the early Christian East, particularly as expounded by the influential fifth-century theologian Mark the Monk (or ‘the Hermit’ / ‘the Ascetic’).