Among the signal insights of twentieth-century scholarship was the recognition that early Christianity accorded personal importance to the plebs. First, Eric Auerbach analysed the humble speech forms of early Christianity, contrasting them with the literature of learned pagans. The point was developed by Ramsay MacMullen in an important essay entitled ‘Sermo humilis’. Arnaldo Momigliano applied these insights to the theologians, historians and hagiographers of the fourth and fifth centuries. He showed how Augustine, Jerome, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret of Cyr succeeded, as pagan intellectuals had not succeeded, in ‘abolishing the internal frontiers between the learned and the vulgar’. Finally, Peter Brown, in a series of brilliant works from The Cult of the Saints to his revised biography of Augustine, supplied a means of discerning in the practice of universal baptism the ‘antidote’ to the exaggerations of fourth-century ascetical elitism. Augustine imparted to the Western Middle Ages a confidence in the power of sacramental grace as efficacious not only for the ascetic few, but as communicating to the many a capacity for growth in charity, purity, and prayer. Such a perspective on the religion of the many bids adieu to Gibbon’s story of ‘philosophy’ collapsing into ‘barbarism and religion’; to Hume’s account of the superstitious and the credulous; and to Henry Hart Milman’s Romantic brand of Liberal Anglicanism as marked by ‘condescension’ towards ‘popular religion’ occluding ‘the thought processes of the average man’; a habit of mind to which Peter Brown surprisingly appended the name of Newman.

The epidemic of bubonic plague that spread in Russia between 1770 and 1772, claiming about 100,000 lives, was perceived as a divine punishment by many ordinary Russians. In 1771, Moscow witnessed popular riots, which were partly caused by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to allow Muscovites to venerate the icon of the Mother of God placed above the St Barbara Gates in the Kremlin and which was believed to have miraculous powers against epidemic. In order to stop the spread of the infection, the Moscow authorities established sanitary cordons around the city. In such an atmosphere of social crisis the Old Believers, a conservative current of Russian religious dissent, articulated popular fears and proposed a solution to these. The Old Believer merchants had received permission from the government to set up quarantine hospitals and cemeteries on the borders of the city. This led to the emergence of two Old Believer centres in Moscow in the suburb of Lefortovo: Rogozhskoe, that belonged to the priestly Old Believers, and Preobrazhenskoe, belonging to a branch of the priestless Old Believers, the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy).

In the earlier Middle Ages, Brittany enjoyed a mixed reputation as a region in which to lead a life of ascetic discipline and dedication to God. The (eleventh-century?) Life of Me wan describes Samson and his disciples leaving Britain for a life of spiritual exile. They headed for Brittany because, according to the hagiographer, the region was not only a ‘desert’ where life would be harsher than elsewhere, but also because the ferocity of its inhabitants made it crueller. Others were not so sure whether this was an advantage. Abelard’s tribulations as abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys are well known: though himself originating from Bretagne gallo, he complained that the Bretons of Bretagne bretonnante were a barbarian, lawless race, and that the monks of Saint-Gildas were dissolute and uncontrollable. Abelard’s comments echo a long tradition of French, or Frankish, castigation of the Bretons, stretching back at least to the ninth century. This criticism often expresses more than hostility to a gens whose language made them incomprehensible and hence ridiculous: amongst the tensions it reflects are problems of Christian discipline and ecclesiastical authority which the Frankish church was unable fully to resolve. In exploring behind the Bretons’ bad reputation, it is worthwhile investigating both the ascetic practices of early medieval Brittany and the reactions to those practices of the Frankish church. In so doing, I hope to elucidate my juxtaposition of ‘Celtic asceticism’ and ‘Carolingian authority’ by showing how Breton ascetic traditions were modified under the impact of Carolingian political circumstances.

This essay offers a reconsideration of the idea of ‘The Great Century’ of Welsh literature (1435–1535) and related assumptions of periodization for understanding the development of lay piety and literature in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Wales. It focuses on the origins of these ideas in (and their debt to) modern Welsh nationalist and Protestant and Catholic confessional thought, and their significance for the interpretation of Welsh literature and history. In addition, it questions their accuracy and usefulness in the light of contemporary patterns of manuscript production, patronage and devotional content of Welsh books of poetry and prose produced by the laity during and after this ‘golden age’ of literature. Despite the existence of over a hundred printed works in Welsh by 1660, the vernacular manuscript tradition remained robust; indeed, ‘native culture for the most part continued to be transmitted as it had been transmitted for centuries, orally or in manuscript’ until the eighteenth century. Bardic poetry’s value as a fundamental source for the history of medieval Ireland and Wales has been rightly acknowledged. However, more generally, Welsh manuscripts of both poetry and prose must be seen as a crucial historical source. They tell us much about contemporary views, interests and priorities, and offer a significant window onto the devotional world of medieval and early modern Welsh men and women. Drawing on recent work on Welsh literature, this paper explores the production and patronage of such books and the dynamics of cultural and religious change. Utilizing National Library of Wales Llanstephan MS 117D as a case study, it also examines their significance and implications for broader trends in lay piety and the nature of religious change in Wales.

From 1879, evangelical missions aimed specifically at Jews began providing free medical services to the newly arrived immigrant community in London's East End. This article focuses on three specific medical missions to Jews belonging to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Jews and the Mildmay Mission to the Jews. It considers the particular attractions of these medical missions in terms of what they were able to offer the immigrant Jew that existing state and voluntary medical services did not provide, alongside the cost and possible risk posed by attendance. The article questions whether the popularity of evangelical medical missions within the Jewish East End is as surprising as it may first appear, if the limited health care options available to the nineteenth-century poor are considered in conjunction with the additional obstacles facing Jewish immigrants, such as cultural and religious differences, anti-Jewish prejudice and most notably the language barrier.

Of all the dark legends which have arisen out of the British experience of the First World War, perhaps none is more compelling than the fate of more than three hundred British, Dominion and Colonial soldiers who were tried and executed for military offences during the course of the conflict. Controversial at the time, these executions were the subject of much debate and official scrutiny in the inter-war period and, even today, the subject continues to have a bitter and painful resonance. Led by the Shot at Dawn Campaign, pressure for the rehabilitation of these men continues and the case for a millennium pardon was marked in June 2001 by the opening of an emotive memorial to them at the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield. However, this paper is not concerned with the justice of the proceedings which led to the deaths of these men. Whether due legal process was followed or whether those executed were suffering from shell shock are difficult and probably unanswerable questions which I will leave to legal and to military historians. Instead of investigating the circumstances of the condemned, this paper turns the spotlight onto the circumstances and attitudes of men whose presence at military executions was as inevitable as that of the prisoner or the firing squad; namely, the commissioned chaplains of the British army.

On the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross, 3 May 1606, Henry Garnet was hung, drawn and quartered in St Paul’s churchyard, London. In his last dying speech Garnet adapted the liturgy from the office hours of the day and he proclaimed in Latin: ‘We adore thee, O Christ and we Bless thee, because by thy Cross, thou hast redeemed the world. This sign shall appear in heaven, when the Lord shall come to judgment’. Finally, beseeching God to let him always remember the cross, he crossed his arms upon his chest and was turned off the scaffold.

The Revd Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., after two months’ residence in Glasgow wrote that though repulsive to live in yet there are alleviations, the streets and buildings are fine and the people lively. The poor Irish among whom my duties lay are mostly from the North of Ireland…. They are found by all who have to deal with them very attractive; for though always very drunken and at present very Fenian, they are warm hearted. … I found myself very much at home with them. [Their horrific lives gave] a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation of our race, of the hollowness of this country’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw.

George Fox, chief among the founders of Quakerism, died in 1691, leaving a huge mass of papers for publication together with funds to support the project. In the event, some of his papers were never published and were lost, and little was known about them until the discovery in 1932 of an annotated list of all Fox’s papers, which had been compiled in the 1690s, and which included references to two unknown books, a ‘Book of Miracles’ and a ‘Book of Examples of God’s Judgements on Evildoers’. The finder was Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), who is best known in non-Quaker circles as a New Testament scholar, and the skills he needed for the analysis of New Testament documents were invaluable in handling the Fox corpus. He was able to gain an idea of the contents of these lost books, particularly the ‘Book of Miracles’, and his partial reconstruction of it, published in 1948 with a comprehensive introduction, is still an important source for any study of the miraculous element in early Quakerism.

The early medieval period has been traditionally cast as the nadir of medicine in the West. Such an image stemmed in part from the negative perceptions of ‘superstitious’ charms and incantations, in which medicine was seen to be detrimentally affected by Christian and pagan influences alike. This outdated view has been revised substantially, and the intersections between medicine and religion are now understood to reflect a complex, multivalent approach to healing. However, this re-evaluation of early medieval medicine, and especially of recipe literature, has concentrated primarily on Old English material. As a result, the substantial corpus of early medieval Latin continental recipes found outside the established canon of classical and late antique texts has largely been overlooked. This article seeks to redress this imbalance, offering the first systematic investigation into the ways in which Christian elements appear in these comparatively understudied pharmaceutical writings. The article's findings have significant implications for our understanding of Latin recipe literature and of the evolution of medical knowledge in early medieval Europe.

From the seclusion of Upper Silesia a suspended priest published his protest against the powerful bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi of Trier. The peasants’ poverty was compounded by exploitation. Virgins were robbed of their purity. The superstitions of the common folk were fanned into flames of fanaticism. Guilty alone for this massive oppression was bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi of Trier. As defender of the oppressed, the priest Johannes Ronge emerged, who had been exiled to the Silesian mining hamlet of Laurahuette a scant six months before.

The occasion of Ronge’s open letter was the display of Christ’s seamless robe at Trier in the autumn of 1844. Thrice previously the sacred garment had been shown for the edification of the faithful. In 1585 it was put on display to prompt giving toward the restoration of the churches of Trier. After the Thirty Years War, in 1651, the robe was again presented to the public eye. Having been returned to Trier from the safety of Augsburg following the Napoleonic threat, the tattered relic was again exposed to the view of Catholics in 1810.

This paper wishes to draw attention to a phenomenon which is of equal importance to the historian of art as to the ecclesiastical historian. In correlating facts which are largely known, it tries to explain the emergence of a new type of illustrated bible at the end of the eleventh century, chiefly in France and in Italy. These giant bibles, usually in more than one volume, were obviously not made for an individual reader who studied the bible in private. Their large size, as well as the richness and content of their decoration, indicate that they were conceived as visual symbols of the authority, the history, and the structure of the Church as an institution, as revealed in the Old and the New Testament. The origin of this new type of illustrated bible is closely connected with the Reform of the eleventh century, and it appears first in the diocese of Rheims, though its example was followed rapidly throughout western Europe.

Spiritual healing has always been at the core of the religious activities of Nigerian Prophetic Churches. The idea that healing-prayer succeeds where Western medical treatment fails is common among these Churches. This paper examines the notion and nature of healing in ‘The Brotherhood of the Cross and Star’, a prophetic movement in South-Eastem Nigeria.

Christianity has been identified as both the cause and the catalyst of social change in Africa. The emergence of independent Churches founded by Africans in protest at some of the features in Mission Christianity clearly constitutes an important part of the history of the Church in Africa, particularly in Nigeria. Broadly, independent Churches in Nigeria, (which date back to the 1880s) are of two kinds. The first type are those which seceded from mission churches (but retained their liturgies and church government) in protest agains the refusal of the latter to allow Africans any significant say in church government. These are the ‘African Churches’. The second type, with which the BCS could in someways be idenified, are the ‘aladura’ (literally “those who pray” or praying) Churches. These are pentecostal and lay stress on divine healing, prediction and the acquiring of spiritual power. They are mostly founded by individuals who claim to have received a divine call to prophetic ministry and are often referred to as ‘spiritual’ or ‘prophetic’ churches by virtue of this stress on spiritual and or prophetic power.

Of the many problems confronting post-reformation English catholics, that of national identity was among the most acute. For the nation at large, to be English was to be protestant, and to be papist was to be an alien.’ That catholics owed primary allegiance to the pope, to Spain, to France, was an axiom throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the exile of the catholic Stuarts at the revolution of 1688 merely varied the form in which the national tradition expressed itself. In his last public utterance William III equated ‘a Popish Prince, and a French Government’, judicial proclamations spoke of ‘papists and disaffected persons’, and George I’s first parliament declared that catholics

Eighteenth-Century Europe is remarkable for the number of medically qualified men whose fame rests not on medicine, but on their achievements in other fields. The poets Oliver Goldsmith in England and Johann Schiller in Germany come to mind, as do the author Tobias Smollett and the French political activist Jean Marat. Another is the subject of this paper, Thomas Seeker, who in later life was successively bishop of Bristol, Oxford, and archbishop of Canterbury.

Seeker’s undoubted pastoral sensitivity was reflected in his sermons and in the visitation charges which Richard Watson said deserved ‘as much attention as the best’ of those published in the eighteenth century. This, coupled with his own reticence, has tended to overshadow, if not totally eclipse, his earlier years of training as a physician, and his contribution to medicine. His biographer, Beilby Porteus, said of him ‘he chose always rather to talk of things than persons; was very sparing in giving his opinion of characters... Of his own good deeds or great attainments he never spoke, nor loved to hear others speak’.

The views of clergymen towards virtually any activity under the sun, and many over it, are preserved in an inexhaustible seam of sermons published between the Restoration of Charles II and the end of the Seven Years’ War. Thousands were listed by Sampson Letsome in his The Preacher’s Assistant, which appeared in 1753, and in an updated sequel by J. Cooke in 1783. Nor were these all-inclusive.

Faced with this mass of evidence, historians are forced to be selective. They can concentrate on the works of certain preachers, on precise dates or on particular genres of sermon, such as those preached at Assizes or funerals. The authors of this paper have studied three types. One of them is working on the Jeremiad in the years 1660–1720, Jeremiads being sermons preached during, immediately after, or on the anniversary of such national disasters as the plague in 1665, the fire of London in 1666 and the hurricane of 1703. War featured in them as one of the many visitations of Providence held to be afflicting the nation. The other addressed himself specifically to fast and thanksgiving-day sermons published during the wars of 1739 to 1748 and 1756 to 1763. These were delivered expressly to comment on military setbacks and failures, and to celebrate victories.

IN July 1935 Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, was the setting for an international gathering that attracted thousands of the eminent and the curious, many of them churchmen. ‘Similar ‘house-parties’ had been held every year since 1930. At free periods during the day, recalled Beverley Nichols, an enthusiast on his first visit, ‘the High Street seemed afire with shining faces’; last thing at night attenders could enjoy a ‘lemonade and biscuit’ party in the Toynbee Room. The main business, however, consisted of sessions where those present listened to testimonies of changed lives, of how people had ‘surrendered’ and were now ‘all out for God’. These were the main annual meetings of the Oxford Group.

The traditional reputations of Hoadly and Law could hardly be more sharply contrasted. Hoadly’s latitudinarianism, his promotion on the bench for political reasons, his neglect of diocesan duties have long made him a favourite example for castigating the hanoverian episcopate. Law has been much more fortunate. Almost universally cited as a happy exception to the lax theology of his age; credited with a religious appeal to men of all parties; and praised for his literary style and powers of argument, Law has enjoyed a generally uncritical press, despite the difficulties of reconciling the early, orthodox controversial and devotional writings with his later and mystical works. Of the confrontation between Hoadly and Law over the Bangorian sermon, the prevailing opinion has been that of dean Hook: ‘Law’s “Letters” have never been answered, – may indeed be regarded as unanswerable’. Some, indeed, have suggested that Hoadly failed to reply directly to Law either through fear or inability to do so. Overton, however, with his customary fairness, allowed that Hoadly ‘was a very able controversialist and not afraid of any antagonist’. Hoadly claimed that others had replied to Law (who had not attempted to answer them), and that all of Law’s most important points had been answered in Hoadly’s Answer to the Representation.

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

Martyrs were the heroes of the Early Church. For a long period after the reign of Constantine until Benedictine monasticism took over their mantle, their lives and exploits provided a focus for the idealism of Christians in Western Europe. They represented the victory of human steadfastness and loyalty in defence of the faith triumphing over irreligious tyranny and the powers of evil. In the East, however, where Constantine had emphasized as early as 324 his complete rejection of the persecutions of his pagan predecessors, it was not long before memories of the past were transformed to meet other pressing needs of the day. Threatened first by Germanic and Slav invaders and then by the armies of Islam, Byzantine cities sought the protection of martyrs and the heavenly hierarchy that led from them through the Archangel Michael to the Virgin herself. In Nobatia, the northernmost of the three Nubian kingdoms that straddled the Nile valley between Aswan and a point south of Khartoum, the military martyrs, George, Mercurius, Theodore, and Demetrius seconded the endeavours of Michael and the Virgin to preserve the kingdoms and their Christian religion.