Across the British empire, public worship was important for sustaining a sense of community and connectedness. This was most evident in special acts of worship, when the peoples of imperial territories, and sometimes of the whole empire, were asked at times of crisis and celebration to join together in special days or prayers of petition or thanksgiving to God. These occasions, ordered by a variety of civil and ecclesiastical authorities, were an enduring feature of all colonial societies from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Although these special acts of worship have considerable potential for deepening our understanding of various themes in the history of the British empire, they have yet to receive sustained analysis from scholars. This article is concerned with the fundamental task of considering why and how special prayers and days of fasting, humiliation, intercession and thanksgiving were appointed across the empire. By focusing on the causes of, and orders for, these occasions, it indicates reasons for the longevity of this practice, as well as its varied and changing purposes.

‘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.

On 28 January 1077 at the castle of Canossa in the northern Appenines King Henry IV was absolved from his excommunication by Pope Gregory VII. Henry’s reconciliation with the Church represented the successful conclusion to what had been a hazardous mission for both him and his small entourage, one which had involved a difficult journey through the alpine passes in winter. It culminated in the king, having abandoned his royal garb for simple woollen clothing and with bare feet, standing for three days before the gates of the castle of Canossa, ceaselessly weeping and imploring divine mercy.

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.

While most scholars agree that fraternities played a major role in the religious and social experiences of late medieval folk in town and village, little has been said about the characteristics which allowed these voluntary associations to fulfil so major a role. Were religious fraternities cherished as venues for more rigorous personal participation in which lay men and women could shoulder duties and tasks beyond those demanded by the Church, or did they act as agents for expression of a vernacular piety which was somewhat removed from Latin liturgy and sacramental ritual? In this paper I shall examine a sub-group of fraternities, those dedicated to Corpus Christi, and through their response to an addition to the calendar shall attempt to assess the aims and means of spiritual expression offered by such groupings.

For centuries it has been believed that at the famous council of Lyons, held in 1274 to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, the leading role defending Latin theological views in the debates that presumably took place was played by the great Franciscan theologian, Bonaventura. Recently, however, this view has been seriously called into question, and a re-evaluation of his role and that of other leading protagonists would seem to be in order. Far from being the ‘soul of the union,’ and the man who ‘crushed the Greeks in theological debate,’ as has been generally believed, Bonaventura’s part in the union seems to have been very limited. It is the purpose of this paper not only to put in clearer light and in its true context the work of Bonaventura with regard to the Greeks at the council, but also to indicate, if only rather briefly, the parts taken by other mendicants, the Franciscans John Parastron and Jerome of Ascoli, and the Dominicans, Albertus Magnus, William of Moerbeke, and their minister general, Peter of Tarentaise. Our aim, then, is to ascertain the relative importance of their respective roles in the preparations for, and the proclamation of, religious union.

I begin this paper with some broad generalisations about the history of anglicanism in relation to healing. I shall contend that in East and Central Africa over the last hundred years there were simultaneously present and interacting with each other a number of tendencies which in Europe had developed over a much longer period. Thus in some ways the religious history of colonial Africa is an intensification and telescoping of the religious history of Europe.

I am assuming, then, that in England by the end of the 17th century anglicanism had come to repudiate ‘enthusiasm’ and the visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit, partly for reasons of social control. I am assuming that this more or less closed the door on spiritual healing within 18th century anglicanism and produced the characteristically ‘cool’ anglican tone. Wesley brought back into the Church of England a universe of spirits and spiritual healings and exorcisms but all this went off into early methodism and out of the 19th-century Anglican church. In this 19th-century church, before it reached out into Central African mission, a number of superficially contradictory developments took place. There was an interaction of church and medical ‘establishments’ which led to anglican involvement in public health programmes and to an intellectual commitment to the ‘divine’ origins of modern medical science. At the same time there was a revival, particularly in the countryside, of communal rituals designed to create feelings of solidarity despite the realities of class division.

Provincial and diocesan legislation provided a coherent system of religious education at a time when opportunities for study were few. It is true that in content little was new, but there was much in the way of reiteration, development and expansion, with particular attention to the practical details of implementation.

Mediaeval education is often discussed in terms of clerical education on the one hand, and of lay education on the other. In this context they are one. The priest had first to learn before he could teach, and what was taught can roughly be summed up as faith, morals, and knowledge of the Church’s law. It remains true that some things were more appropriate for the clerical than the lay ear.

‘From the earliest days of Christianity, the domestic community has served as a unit of worship’. In the later medieval period, the home certainly played an important part in the religious observances of many laypeople. By the fifteenth century in England, chapels in private houses were increasingly common, even if they were simply small rooms adapted for the purpose. The practice of informal prayer and private devotional reading did not require special accommodation. We know that individuals prayed in their bedrooms, while Italian women were encouraged to have a bedroom image of the Virgin and to conduct themselves properly in her presence. Italian preachers also thought that children should join in holy play-acting at home, and that they should set up and decorate toy altars. The garden, too, could furnish a setting for the spiritual life. Agnes Paston gives us a haunting glimpse of the life and death of a pious layman in 1453:

It is the aim of this paper to ask questions rather than to answer them. The area with which I am concerned is a strip of central Syria extending from the Euphrates in the north to Baalbek (ancient Heliopolis) in the south. This region has a large number of village-remains from late antiquity, some of them exceptionally well preserved. These remains have yielded a large number of inscriptions, of which a significant proportion bears a date. They are being collected in the volumes of the Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. Seven volumes have appeared.

The inscriptions start in the early empire and continue to the end of the sixth century. They thus start in pagan times and cover the whole development of Syrian Christianity. Only a few of the Christian inscriptions come from the great cities of Syria, for example Antioch, Aleppo [Beroea], the ancient Apamea, or Horns [Emesa]. They do not therefore throw light on the development of urban Christianity, which at Antioch especially was of great importance, and of long standing. The development reflected by the inscriptions is the conversion of the countryside.

The Great Persecution in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire was relatively short and sharp. Eusebius in both his Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine contrasts the eight long years of repression suffered by the East, first under Diocletian and Galerius and then under Maximian, with the persecution of ‘scarcely two years’ duration’ endured by the Western Christians. In the West, indeed, the persecution of Valerian 257-60 seems to have been longer and perhaps more costly in human lives, and that of Decius more dangerous to the Church.

Twenty years ago, Olive Anderson called for more detailed study of how the role of women changed in the nineteenth century, pointing out that only such careful investigations ‘can show how far the conventional stress upon feminism has been well judged’. She noted the contemporary strength of the churches as ‘the great arbiters of public attitudes toward social issues’ and argued that the beliefs and practices of popular religion (‘the religion of the unsophisticated laity in general’) were ‘full of change and diversity’.

It is becoming ever clearer how English canonists, by their intense and early activity in collecting current papal decretal letters, made a vital contribution to the law of the Church in the second half of the twelfth century. Dr Charles Duggan has recently produced a fascinating study of these decretal collections and has shown how they reflect the interest and activity of four bishops in particular: Richard of Dover, archbishop of Canterbury (1174-84); Roger, bishop of Worcester (1164-79); Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161-84); and Baldwin of Ford, bishop of Worcester (1180-4) and archbishop of Canterbury (1184-90). These were all foremost papal judges-delegate, concerned to preserve the pope’s letters for the practical purposes of legal reference. Their collections often consisted of a core of letters directed to themselves. Copies of letters directed to other bishops were added to these as obtainable, and also letters copied from other decretal collections then in circulation. An interesting question arises from Dr Duggan’s work. Although particular decretal collections may in this way be associated with particular bishops, is it likely that the bishops themselves were personally responsible for the work of selection and compilation ? Would they have had time? Since they had trained clerks in their familia, would they not more probably have left all this to them, especially to their legal experts? And so we find ourselves looking past the bishops into their households.

On 6 December 1616, Marco Antonio De Dominis, the Roman catholic archbishop of Spalato, on the Dalmatian coast, arrived in England. According to Arthur Wilson, he was ‘old and corpulent, unfit for Travel, being almost at his journies end by Nature’, yet he soon began to speak out vigorously against the faith and practices of Rome. Finding himself warmly welcomed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, he accepted several appointments in the church of England—including those of dean of Windsor and master of the Savoy—and became a prominent anti-Roman controversialist. Then, after five and a half years in England, De Dominis, like a wandering star in the Ptolemaic system, ‘went Retrograde, placing himself again in the Roman Calendar.’ What moved De Dominis to undertake so arduous a physical and spiritual journey as that which led him to England, and why, having found an honoured place among ideological allies, did he leave it to go to the very citadel of the ecclesiastical power he had attacked?

In this paper I wish to deal with a rather specialised topic. But this specialised topic may partly explain what was in fact the official attitude of the Byzantine Church, of its patriarchs, bishops and monks, over the centuries, towards Greek philosophy and science. May I suggest that Greek philosophy and science were, and still are indeed, one of the component factors and inspirations of our renaissance and post-renaissance western civilisation?

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must explain the title of this paper, so that the limitations or strict boundaries of this paper, and also its precise contents, its scope or design may be fully realised.

The Pilgrimage of Grace has received much attention: besides the massive study of the Misses Dodds, both professor Knowles and professor Scarisbrick have devoted many detailed pages to it, and its importance as a challenge to the Henrician régime is not in question. What continues to perplex generations of scholars is why an outbreak of this kind should have occurred in the autumn of 1536, and whether the explanations for it should be primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) sought in the fields of administrative, economic, social or religious history. If religion is the key, is the Pilgrimage best understood as a rebellion by ‘conservative’ catholics who disliked the recent religious innovations, or of progressives who sought for further and more far-reaching reforms? Is it a heretical or schismatic movement or neither? The problem was clearly stated in a paper to this society by professor Dickens, and it has been the subject of local studies and detailed papers ever since. These studies have focused attention on the importance of regional differences in the Pilgrimage. They have shown clearly that our understanding of it will not be advanced further unless we are prepared to attend to these differences, and to the whole structure of local politics which accompanied them.

Calvin’s reformed Geneva had as its motto post tenebras lux; the city set on a hill found an identity not only in maintaining the precarious miracle of political independence but in the God-given task of preserving truth and shedding light. In the sixteenth century the republic bore witness to its salvation through a corporate life of ordered righteousness, by printed propaganda and through a stream of missionaries and martyrs. Sympathisers also poured into Geneva but while many sixteenth-century exiles from France and French-speaking territories had quickly assumed important office in the Genevan church and the economic and political life of the republic, those who arrived after 1685 found themselves for the most part trapped in second-class employment enjoying second-class civil rights. Briefly, the central change was that Calvin’s city had depended for its survival on the commitment and capital of newcomers—like Calvin himself—while eighteenth-century Geneva had bred and trained its own clergy and men of affairs. In 1769 Jacob Vernet wrote of the hereditary right of the Genevan citizen to his rôle in the city’s life.

Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, full of evangelical religion and American republicanism carried out a Clapham-inspired scheme in ways the men of Clapham did not always like; and again as this population was overwhelmed by new uprooted peoples from all over west Africa, brought in from the slaveships before they had ever seen the transatlantic plantations. The new population responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and rarely with prolonged resistance, to missionary preaching; and, with those same missionaries appointed to superintend their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, adopted the norms and characteristics of their Nova Scotian and Maroon predecessors. Contemporary British sources do not suggest that at the time Sierra Leone was regarded as a huge success; people in England tended to think of the appalling loss of missionary life in the white man’s grave, and the enormous expense of the Sierra Leone mission; besides, they heard stories which suggested that the serpent still dwelt in their west African garden. Nonetheless, here was the first part of Africa, one of the very few parts anywhere in the world, where there was a mass movement towards the Christian faith, where a whole non-Christian people became Christian.

Methodist historians have naturally tended to emphasise the reasonableness and sobriety of their founder and his followers, the social as well as the spiritual benefits they produced. The elements of irrationality and what some will see as religious hysteria in the movement have been played down. Non-methodists have been less reticent. Methodist ‘enthusiasm’ was a popular target in the eighteenth century and the charges made, however one-sided and exaggerated, had a solid basis in fact. They were to be repeated with varying degrees of distaste and disapproval by writers such as Southey; or in more balanced accounts like that of Lecky. Even the sympathetic Alexander Knox who had known Wesley personally, perceptively remarked that ‘he would have been an enthusiast if he could’. Ronald Knox suspected that the rational controls in Wesley’s mind were only superficial: he was easily swayed on supernatural phenomena ‘when the evidence supported views which he wanted to be true’. A taste for religious excitement and credulity about the supernatural were often even more marked among his followers, especially the ordinary membership.