The text with which this study is concerned is not the text of the canons of the council of Westminster of 1175. It is the text printed long ago by Wilkins from the single manuscript source, Cotton Claudius A IV folios 191v–92, where it has the heading Concilium Ricardi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi. Wilkins gave it the heading Canones condlii . . . and assigned it to 1173, an impossible date, since Richard was not then archbishop. This part of Claudius A IV is a decretal collection, put together from various sources not before, and probably not long after, 1185. Our text, copied as one item in the collection, consists of thirty-seven imperative propositions, all quite short and almost all negative; they all condemn something or forbid something: ‘Christians shall not be usurers’, ‘Lepers shall not in future live among the healthy’, and so on. There is little sign of any attempt at arrangement; related topics may appear more or less widely separated.

The Maxim my country right or wrong is unquestionably difficult and perhaps impossible to justify; certainly no Christian can easily regard the nation as the supreme object of loyalty. Yet during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars intensive efforts were made in press and pulpit, through the courts and through informal social pressure, to enhance patriotism. Patriotism almost certainly became stronger and more widely diffused. How did the denominations respond to this dilemma? My aim is to suggest some links between denominational affiliation and attitudes to nationalism. The topic is an important one; at this time religion usually set the terms of the debate about loyalty.

There is still a remarkable book to be written about a phenomenon as yet little recognised or understood: the sudden appearance in England of a serious and scholarly interest in religious experience as a subject worthy of study in itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Possibly the two best-known landmarks of the movement were William James’s Gifford Lectures and dean Inge’s Christian Mysticism, which popularised mystical theology beyond the circles to which it had been for the most part confined, within the roman catholic church. Dean Inge had many harsh words for the popish mysticism associated with monasticism, and pervaded by an easy familiarity with the ‘supernatural suspensions of physical law’ of roman catholic hagiography. He passed these strictures on French and Belgian treatises and seminary textbooks, but he might have found materials as outrageous in English, in the writings of the mid-nineteenth century ultramontanes who had striven to reproduce in native dress the religious forms of Italy, France and Spain, and to recreate in England a foreign and professedly ‘supernatural’ culture which accepted mystical experience as an ordinary fact of life.

One of the most important intellectual problems which the Church faced in the Middle Ages was to reconcile warfare with the Christian message. But the presence of, and the necessity for, war affected not merely the intellectual attitudes and social message of medieval ecclesiastics. The institutional Church faced obvious practical problems when confronted with external warfare or civil disturbance. On the one hand the ruler might well, indeed usually did, require churches with extensive property and wealth to contribute to the burden of defending the community. On the other hand churches might well, especially if the ruler’s authority was weak, face the need to defend themselves against the aggression of their neighbours. Churches therefore needed a military potential, whether or not the state laid this obligation upon them. Even the Church’s attempts to control warfare, the Peace and Truce of God movements, tended to embroil it in military activity, since exhortation and spiritual sanction often needed the backing of force to convince a recalcitrant laity of the virtues of bridling its internal violence.

‘Victorian Britain was not only the first urbanising society,’ Michael Wolff has recently reminded us, ‘. . . it was the first “journalising” society,’ also. Recent research, resulting from professor Wolff’s victorian periodicals project, shows that there were upwards of eighteen thousand periodicals of differing title, published during the victorian period. Of course, these periodicals varied greatly both in duration and in influence, but the average ‘run’ of a victorian periodical was about twenty-eight years, and most victorians would have agreed with professor Wolff’s verdict that the magazines were one of the major new characteristics of their age. ‘We look for our monthly and weekly magazines,’ wrote one correspondent to the British Controversialist in 1862, ‘as readily as we look for our daily food.’ ‘Periodical literature,’ agreed another, ‘is essentially an outgrowth of modern times.’ They were both contributing to a debate, in a monthly periodical, on the question, ‘Does the present multiplicity of periodicals retard rather than foster intellectual progress’?

The years 1945–9 were a time of profound political and social transformation for Palestine. Few other periods in its history match these changes, which left no community unaffected. The overwhelming Palestinian-Arab Christian and Muslim community was reduced from a majority to a minority, subject to the rule of a staunchly nationalistic Jewish and Zionist state. The events of 1948–9 were particularly devastating. A large number of Palestinians became refugees, including approximately fifty to seventy per cent of the Palestinian Christian population. Nearly half of the Christian community of Jerusalem had lived and had their businesses in the more modern and developed western sector of the city until Israeli occupation; their property was sequestered after they fled or were compelled to leave. Most of them were forced to seek refuge in the Old City, in monasteries and other Church buildings. Many others were forced to flee elsewhere, some leaving the former Mandate territory altogether.

As well-known, humour - by juxtaposing like with unlike - can make a serious point, concisely and memorably, and this quip, too, has a serious import. To begin with, the source for this joke was an Oratorian priest As will become clear, this is of more than passing significance - aside, that is, from the fact that their founder, St Philip Neri was well-known for his use of humour to mortify the spirit of his favourite disciples. For my principal concern in this paper is with ecclesiastical erudition (something of an Oratorian speciality during this period) and its relationship to the shape, content, and practice of Christian worship.

The fortified convent of Saidnaiya (often called Sardeney by medieval Western writers) is situated on a rocky outcrop some twelve miles to the north of Damascus. It claims to have been founded by Justinian, but it is not mentioned in the De aedificiis of Procopius, and its origins are uncertain. The earliest surviving description of it may be that given by Burchard of Strasbourg, the ambassador of Frederick Barbarossa to the court of Saladin, who visited Saidnaiya in c. 1175:

Religious Dissent was shaped by the law. The Act of Uniformity (1662) set out the terms of conformity, and those who could not accept those terms risked prosecution. A great many were convicted under the earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean recusancy statutes, but new laws, such as the Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670) and the Five Mile Act (1665), were also passed. Anthony Fletcher's essay, published in 1984, remains almost the only study of enforcement, in which he argued that the impact of the penal laws on Dissent has been exaggerated because the Conventicle Acts were not systematically enforced. A range of contemporary accounts will be used to suggest that their impact was greater than has been appreciated because of the enforcement of other statutes and the harassment of ejected ministers and their supporters.

On 27 February 380, the emperor Theodosius – newly elevated the previous year to take control of the East amid the political and military turmoil unleashed by the debacle at Adrianople -addressed an edict from his current headquarters at Thessalonica to the people of Constantinople. The text famously proclaimed the religion to be followed by ‘all the peoples’ who fell under his rule as that handed down at Rome from the apostle Peter, now maintained by the pontifex Damasus and bishop Peter of Alexandria, ‘that is,… we should believe in the single godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and holy trinity’. Those who subscribed to this doctrine, Theodosius ordered, were to ‘embrace the name of Catholic Christians’, while all the rest were branded heretics, whose places of assembly were denied the name of churches, and who would be smitten ‘first by divine vengeance, and afterwards by the retribution of our own punishment, which we shall enact in accordance with the judgement of Heaven’.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant missionaries considered themselves exemplars of the Christian home. They devoted considerable energy to writing about domesticity and to constructing model homes in the mission field. In spite of their good intentions there was often a large gap between their ideals and the realities of life on mission stations. By means of a case study of a Pentecostal faith mission in Katanga, Belgian Congo, this essay demonstrates how models of the Western Christian home were unsustainable and examines the manner in which missionaries coped with unfulfilled domestic dreams. It shows how Western notions of the Christian home were undermined by the harshness of the tropical environment, the disparity in numbers between male and female missionary vocations, and the persistence of African notions of domesticity. The missionaries endured the material and emotional deprivations of life in the bush through faith in a providential God and by constructing intimate but tense relationships with African Christians. The essay begins with a discussion of some of the most pertinent scholarship on missionaries and domesticity.

In the course of the past century the centre of gravity of the Christian world has shifted completely. Europe, once the centre, is now at best an outpost on the fringe of the Christian world, some would say an outpost likely to be overwhelmed. The great majority of Christians, and the overwhelming majority of practising Christians are, and are clearly going to be, Africans, Americans or Asians. And of these, the most startling expansion—the greatest Christian expansion since what were for Europe the Middle Ages—has been in Africa, where Christians have been increasing in geometrical progression, doubling their numbers every twelve years or so, for over a century. The greater part of African Church history, however, has still to be written. Hagiography we have in abundance, and hagiography, like mythology, is a valid literary genre; but (again like mythology) it is a poetic, not a scholarly category. Of missionary history we have a little, though very little in proportion to the vast resources which the missionary society archives supply; but missionary history is only one specialized part of African Church history; by far the greater part of African Christian life and African Christian expansion goes on, and has long gone on, without the presence, let alone the superintendence, of the European missionary.

Before returning home to his royal master, the ambassador of Poland went to say farewell to the reigning Pope, Pius V. They met in St Peter’s Square, where the ambassador asked for a relic to take back with him to Poland. In reply, the pontiff bent down and took earth from the square with both his hands and placed it in a handkerchief, before handing it to the understandably bemused Pole with the reassurance that this was no ordinary earth but that mixed with the blood of Christian martyrs (nobis notum omnino erat, Vaticanum pulverem Martyrum sanguine plenum esse). The earth then proceeded to bleed, staining the handkerchief to the wonder and amazement of all present.

Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,
But God now thunders in an awful strain!
Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,
Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:
But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,
The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see the Hand.
’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,
’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!

In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.

Hagiographical narrative is often examined through the well-established text-critical principle according to which the earliest text is necessarily the most skeletal in outline, the least wondrous in plot, and therefore the most historically believable. According to this view, to the bare bones of truth, fanciful narrative and miraculous tales are added with time, as the tale grows in the telling. The development of the Legend of St Alexios has been viewed as a case in point. The idiosyncratic life-story of this fourth-century ascete has been described as evolving from a nucleus of ‘fact’, essentially coinciding with the early Syriac Life, to a romanced complexity with the Byzantine version influencing the later versions in all major romance languages. Consequently, critics have isolated and, to a large extent, derided the ‘miraculous’ element in the plot, while failing to articulate an understanding of the role of miracles in Alexios’s Life.

Disciples of Christ do not consider how things will proceed in the sight of judges. For thus he forewarned us, saying, ‘But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you’.

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

In the middle of the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville, travelling through Macedonia, came across the grave of Aristotle. In a place called Strages, he writes, ‘there is an altar upon his tomb, and there they make solemn feast ilk a year, as he were a saint. And upon his altar they hold their great counsel and assembly; and they trow that, through inspiration of God and him, they shall have the better counsel’.

In the thirteenth century the tomb of Plato was said to exist in a church at Konia in Asia Minor. There was a spring and a river of Plato nearby, for it was believed that ‘the plain of Konia was once a sea, which Plato caused to disappear’. In the chapel of the Panagia Portaitissa in the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos one may still see among the rows of saints and prophets painted on the walls the figures of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and even Thucydides. At the lowest level of enlightenment in the Byzantine world the ancient philosophers were revered as magicians or prophets. But among educated people Plato and Aristotle were universally admired for their literary merits, if for no other reason. It was they who, in their differing ways, had set the style and standard of literacy for all Greek Christian writers, philosophers, and theologians.

The Sunday school was an art form. Its classical age has been explored by T. W. Laqueur and its totality by P. B. Cliff. Like those of great art, its creative moments were the simultaneous issue of evolution, system, and individual genius. Those moments were intensest in their Nonconformist aspect, for Nonconformists, though often thwarted, were born educationists. Their buildings reflected this: theological colleges, for instance, which grew from overgrown houses to imitations of Oxford, and eventually to Oxford itself; or proprietory schools, strait-jacketed between the financial constraints and social aspirations of an enlarged middle class trying to reconcile Manchester’s values with those of Thomas Arnold. And there were the Sunday schools themselves, complexes of hall, parlour, and classroom, enfolding the chapel, reflecting the activity, mentality, and spirituality of a particular society, encompassing therefore a concept of the Church, and designed with considerable ingenuity to meet the needs of a rounded yet carefully graduated community. By the turn of the twentieth century they housed daily activities for all ages. Their influence reached far. Fuelled by the Word proclaimed from the pulpit, and empowered by the decisions of representative meetings taken in hall or vestry, the Sunday school broke chapel bounds to teach more people than could be met with in chapel pews.

In his recent and excellent book The Coming of Christianity Henry Mayr-Harting has some interesting things to say about lay society and the monastic ideal. Taking as his sources those two fundamental guides to seventh-century history, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and the Penitential of Theodore of Tarsus, he shows how the Christian pattern of holiness, as demonstrated especially in the monastic life, could be observed also in the lives of Bede’s heroic kings. ‘The King’ he says, ‘was a kind of Christ, and his life should show forth the virtues of his prototype as they were cultivated in monastic circles. Oswald demonstrated his generosity and charity, . . . Sigbert of the East Saxons demonstrated his meekness, . . . Oswin of Deira demonstrated his humility . . . The Ecclesiastical History presents a gallery of exemplary kings, each of whom had many virtues, but each of whom is brought forward in a narrative of great care and skill to illustrate the particular virtue in which Bede regarded him as pre-eminent.’