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 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.

In the city of the Laodikaians lived a devout, pure, and blameless priest. To this priest one night the local governor came in urgent haste, pressing him to rise up and baptize his child, whose breath was already beginning to fail. Leaping up right away, the priest ran into the church. But while he was preparing the water and the holy oil the child died, before it could be baptized.

Taking the child, the priest placed it in front of the font and said to the attendant angel, ‘To you, my fellow servant, angel of God, I say: by the authority that Christ gave us to bind and loose in heaven and upon earth, restore the soul of the child in the body until I shall baptize it, lest it depart unenlightened into that age. For my Master and yours knows that I was not careless, but when I was called, I ran straight away.’ When the priest had spoken, the child returned to life. He then baptized it, kissed it, and said, ‘Go, child, into the kingdom of heaven.’ And immediately the child fell back asleep in the Lord.

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?

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.

The precise nature of Wyclif’s connection with the production of the first English bible is shrouded in mystery, a subject for the fierce controversy and debate that is possible only where ignorance and uncertainty prevail. To begin with, there is an almost total absence of reliable contemporary evidence. The first statements explicitly attributing authorship to Wyclif do not occur until the generation after his death. Of these, the earliest is that of the chronicler Henry Knighton, whose contacts with early lollardy might make him appear to be a more reliable source than most. Writing perhaps in the mid-1390s, Knighton referred back to the year 1382 as the time when Wyclif translated the gospel, which Christ had given to the clergy and doctors of the church, into the tongue, not of the angels, but of the Angles.

The charges with which I shall deal in this paper were almost certainly a tissue of nonsense. Indeed a recent – hostile – account dismisses them as containing motifs presque folkloriques rappellant la legende de Sylvestre II. The folklore is itself interesting however, and so are the circumstances in which it could be delivered solemnly as fact to auditors at a general council by a powerful group including doctors of law and even a cardinal.

The circumstances in which the charges were brought were as follows: In 1409 popes Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were tried by the council of Pisa, with the intention of deposing them to end the schism. First, 37 charges were brought against them, giving a fairly detailed and damning account of the recent behaviour of both in failing to keep their oaths to end the schism. Some members of die council must have felt that these charges were not adequate, however, because on 17 May 1409 the council gave permission for new charges to be added if necessary. Ten new charges were indeed prepared and heard from May 27–30, so we have the full account of the evidence of the witnesses. Among these charges are accusations of witchcraft against each pope.

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.

Usually it is those of the mainstream in religion who impose upon those going against the flow discipline, doctrine and uniformity in place of flexibility. Before Christian orthodoxy and heresy had achieved clear definition, however, there were against-the-flow innovators who opposed flexibility. By requiring greater rigour and regularity in Christian practices they highlighted questions of authority and what manner of people might exercise it. The Church’s own self-definition and status as an institution evolved in response to such things.

In the midst of the nervous excitement of the autumn of 1640 a Londoner called Roger Quatermayne, a puritan and, as we might say, barrackroom lawyer, was investigated by Archbishop Laud and other Privy Councillors for the offence of holding religious meetings in circumstances which were politically as well as ecclesiastically suspect, since it was thought that Quatermayne and his friends had made treasonable contact with the Scottish army, then at war with its king and in occupation of English soil. Quatermayne, charged with holding a conventicle, asked the archbishop to inform him ‘what a Conventicle is.’ Laud replied: ‘Why, this is a Conventicle, … when ten or twelve or more or lesse meet together to pray, reade, preach, expound, this is a conventicle.’ Laud’s definition may appear uncontroversial, particularly if to his ‘ten or twelve or more or less’ is added the formula of the 1664 Conventicle Act, ‘over and above those of the same Household’. But Quatermayne objected: ‘My Lord, I do not so understand it.’

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.

Retrospection is a recognized characteristic of reform movements. An appeal to the past legitimates ideological concerns which seek to replace a state of affairs considered decadent and decayed. Reforming rhetoric depends on the past as a means of proving its value and credibility. Such preservation of the past as a key organizing principle in transforming events is necessarily selective and often has a tendency towards schematization and simplification. Not only does the reforming agenda determine what aspects of the past are remembered, and hence what aspects are buried, but it also determines who is responsible for the act of remembering itself. ‘Different groups of people remember things in different ways.’ The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which the Anglo-Saxon past was perceived and utilized during the tenth-century monastic reform movement. It will be shown how, under an influence which was heavily Benedictine in inspiration, the collective memory of monks created a picture of the Anglo-Saxon past which was ‘all of a piece and all monastic’. The past was closely linked to the exercise of power. It will thus be shown how this monastic view of the past competed with an alternative tenth-century view and was ultimately to triumph over its competitor.

This paper examines the transformation of a Protestant Geneva Bible into a widely used Catholic one. This surprising metamorphosis occurred in two stages: first, the publication in Paris in 1566 of a French Bible for Catholics by René Benoist, a member of the Paris Faculty of Theology; second, the marketing of this Bible as a product of the Louvain Faculty of Theology by the famous Antwerp printer, Christopher Plantin. While the relationship between the Paris and Antwerp editions is known to French specialists, the origin of the Antwerp edition has been (understandably) misdescribed in several English reference works. The relationship between the two editions seems worth rehearsing here for it touches on more general issues of Catholic attitudes towards vernacular Scripture, the migration of texts across confessional lines, and the power of printers.

At the time of the Lord Pope Benedict XII [1334-42] it happened that in a city near Avignon in which the [Franciscan] brothers had a convent, on a certain day while all the friars were in the choir celebrating the holy office, two friars belonging to a different order arrived and walked around. Then one of them saw the image of St Francis with the holy stigmata depicted on the wall, [and] he said to his companion: ‘Those friars minor want their saint to be like Christ’. And he took up his knife and said: ‘I want to efface those stigmata from that image so that he [St Francis] does not appear like Christ’. And having said this, he carried out the deed. And when he had expunged the five stigmata, they began to shed blood abundantly. Seeing this, greatly amazed, he said to his companion, ‘Aah! What shall I do?’ His companion replied: ‘You’ve really committed a mortal sin! I advise you to run quickly to a confessor and confess’. He did this. … The confessor counselled him that he should run to the pope and tell him everything about this and receive advice from him about what should be done. … When the pope heard this, he asked him if it was truly thus. The friar declared with an oath that it was thus. Then the pope said: ‘I particularly want to see this miracle’. And when he came to that place, he saw blood flowing abundantly from those holy stigmata in the image. Then, greatly amazed, the pope knelt down in front of the image: [and] raising his hands to heaven he said: ‘St Francis, forgive the sin of this miserable sinner, because I promise to you that I want to institute that the feast of your stigmata should be celebrated, and above all I want to enjoin your friars that throughout the whole order they must solemnly celebrate the feast of your stigmata’. And as soon as the lord pope had made this vow, the blood ceased to flow.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, special prayers, fasts and thanksgivings were an important means by which the Established Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland responded to natural occurrences. Although war prompted the largest number of special religious observances in this period, environmental calamities – instances of plague, famine, drought, earthquakes and storms — led civil and ecclesiastical authorities to order prayers, or to call national fast days, requiring subjects to cease work and attend worship on a specific day. Natural blessings, such as seasonable rain, successful harvests and the abatement of plague, were also marked by prayers, and sometimes by days of national thanksgiving. In Reformation England, the appointment of special observances can be traced back to 1541, when Henry VIII ordered Archbishop Cranmer to organize prayers in response to drought. Henry’s successors developed the practice of ordering special prayers and days in response to natural events and man-made calamities. In Scotland, national fasts were observed at the appointment of the church courts from 1566; they were not regularly under the control of the Crown until the Restoration period.

In The Jesuit, an early work by the popular novelist John Frederick Smith, three young English officers pass through Lisbon during the Peninsular War. While exploring a church they meet a mysterious Jesuit, who engages them in conversation about hostile British attitudes to his order. He tells them that ‘You paint a devil of your own creation, give it horns and attributes, then shudder at the phantom you have raised’. However, in the context of the novel, the threat from Jesuits is all too real. The villain of the story, the orders General in Spain, has no scruples about engaging in a sustained career of deception, manipulation, theft, abduction, rape and murder behind a façade of outward respectability and high religious office. He also exercises considerable power behind the vacant Spanish throne and even attempts unsuccessfully to make the future Duke of Wellington the unwitting agent of his nefarious purposes. The ‘devil’ Smith himself created was indeed a formidable one.

This paper considers women’s participation in the congregations of Civil War and Interregnum England. In particular it is concerned with the idea of whether women sectaries in the 1640s and 1650s had a different idea of church polity from their brethren, or whether, within the confines of the sects, they continued to play the role traditionally assigned to women in Christianity: that of the spiritually inspired, the example of holiness rather than the leader. In short, did women even in the sects remain outside the church polity?

As is well known, western medieval apocalyptic literature owes a considerable debt to Byzantine apocalyptic literature, which itself built on Roman and Jewish sources. The classic studies are now Evelyne Patlagean’s ‘Byzance et son autre monde’, published in 1981; Paul Alexander’s The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition, published posthumously in 1985; and Jane Baun’s edition and commentary of three Middle Byzantine apocalyptic texts that appeared in 2007. In addition, Paul Magdalino has recently published several articles on the theme. On top of this, numerous studies connect specific Byzantine apocalypse traditions to particular political events, most notably the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Byzantine eschatology has been even more thoroughly studied, and, with the subtitle ‘Views on death and the last things’, was the subject of a recent (1999) Dumbarton Oaks symposium.

Much has been written of the Marian devotions of King Louis IX of France. Louis, so we are told, would mortify his flesh on the vigils of the four principal feasts of the Virgin. Regular pilgrimages were made by the King to the great Marian shrines of France, most notably those of Chartres and Rocamadour. Day by day, in his own chapel, the King listened to matins, tierce and compline sung with the appropriate offices of Our Lady, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays the Mass itself was dedicated to the Virgin. When the King took communion, which he did on six principal feast-days each year, two of these feasts, the Assumption and the Purification, were those of the Virgin. Rather than listen to ribald or secular songs, Louis preferred the singing of the Ave Maria stella.