Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

In the Lancet for 26 November 1904, there was a brief and caustic account of ‘curious psychological phenomena...in connexion with the religious upheaval in progress’ in Wales, in which ‘the chief instigator of this tumult’ [that is, Evan Roberts] is quoted as saying to a journalist who interviewed him for the Western Mail: ‘When I go out to the garden I see the devil grinning at me but I am not afraid of him. I go into the house, and when I go out again to the back I see Jesus Christ smiling at me.’ The Lancet also cited a description of the young revivalist by the same journalist: ‘His restlessness is marvellous, he is walking about all day with the springiness of a man treading on wires, his arms swaying unceasingly’; and referred to accounts of the revivalist lying on the floor at meetings for long intervals ‘weeping and writhing in agony’. The Lancet commented that if among the friends of the preacher there were any medical practitioners it would be a kindness on their part to point out to him ‘ the peril which menaces his intellectual equilibrium’. This judgement was shrewd for towards the end of 1906 Evan Roberts had broken down, and he never sufficiently recovered from the intense and prolonged nervous excitement of the revival period, but lived in retirement as a near recluse in England from 1906 to 1925, and thereafter in South Wales until his death in 1951. It is a sad story of a young former miner and blacksmith from the background of deep piety in the Welsh calvinist methodist chapel at the village of Loughor in Glamorgan, who was preparing himself for the ministry at a denominational preparatory school prior to theological college training - a man sincere, sensitive and deeply religious, earnestly praying for a revival of religion in Wales - who was caught up by the wave of intense religious emotion which the revival released and who found himself shining before the world in excited newspaper reports throughout Britain and Europe in a blaze of glory, fanned by journalists and religious publicists, as brief as it was excessive.

Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Randolph Churchill may never have uttered these emotive words during his visit to Ulster in 1886—they appeared in a public letter to a Glasgow Liberal unionist—but they undoubtedly expressed the belligerence and self-righteousness of the Ulster protestant resistance to the prospect of home rule for Ireland. Joseph Lee has observed correctly that ‘Orangemen did not need to be told that they were right or that they would fight’, but after 1886 it was not only Orangemen who made such claims, nor even opportunist tory politicians like Churchill, but protestant churchmen and solid middle class citizens and farmers who would previously have distanced themselves fastidiously from Orangeism. In this paper we shall examine the encouragement and support given by protestant churches and churchmen—Presbyterians in particular—to the movement to resist home rule by force in the period 1912–14.

In 1245 the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order gave reluctant approval to the establishment of a house of studies at Paris, and in so doing sanctioned a major breach with the traditions and practice of the Order. The new house grew rapidly. Accorded papal protection in 1246, it was already necessary to move to a more extensive site a year later. By 1250 student monks had been admitted to the new buildings of the Chardonnet, and, though its constitution continued to be the subject of capitular legislation, the new house was fully established, under the jurisdiction of the abbot of Clairvaux, but as a centre of studies for the whole Order. In January 1256, ten years after the decision of the General Chapter, Guy, abbot of l’Aumône, became the first cistercian to incept in theology and to receive the licence to teach.

Although there were both urban and rural monastic communities in the Frankish kingdoms in the Carolingian period, far more is known about the landed monasteries in the countryside regarding both their internal organisation and the relationship between them and the rural community in which they lived and over which they were the lords. The statutes of Adalhard of Corbie for example provide information concerning the monastery both within the monastic community and on its estates, and show us the abbey as the centre of an agricultural region. The monasteries in the towns on the other hand are much less well-documented and the evidence for Carolingian towns themselves is both sparse and difficult to interpret. If a town is understood to be ‘a concentration of population larger than the neighbouring agricultural settlements in which there is a substantial non-agricultural population which may be concerned with defence, administration, religion, commerce or industry’, there are not very many Carolingian centres for which enough evidence survives to justify their being called towns. Valenciennes for example, described recently as une ville carolingienne, is mentioned in the sources occasionally as a portus and seems to have succeeded Farrars in importance in the region sometime in the eighth century. In the time of Charles the Bald it had a mint, and Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Lothar I and Lothar II are all known to have issued charters from a royal palatium at Valenciennes. There were several churches and the abbey of St Salvius in the settlement, and it is likely that some trading activity went on. But other than that Valenciennes was a settlement which carried on some sort of economic activity, very little is known. The abbey of St Amand, a rural monastery nine miles from Valenciennes, achieved a far more influential and important position in the kingdom than the town of Valenciennes ever did.

It is well known that the church of England, in the time of Charles I, showed a special interest in the eastern church. Archbishop Laud patronised Greek and oriental scholarship. As its chancellor, he enriched Oxford University with Greek and oriental manuscripts and made plans to print them. He projected a Greek press at Oxford and achieved one in London. He obliged the king’s printers to print three Greek texts. He also provided the learned press at Oxford with Arabic type. He then sent qualified scholars to the Ottoman empire in search of more manuscripts. Meanwhile he endowed the study of the Hebrew and Arabic tongues.

Episcopal control proved to be a very mixed blessing for the mediaeval universities of northern Europe. When tempered with understanding and restraint, episcopal power was a most benevolent force which could serve to promote the best interests of nascent university structures. In so many instances, episcopal aid was a veritable sine qua non of university survival. For example, it is hard to imagine that the fifteenth-century Scottish universities could have survived at all without the sustained, enlightened treatment that they received at the hands of their episcopal sponsors. In this sense, the term ‘episcopal control’ bears misleading connotations. For the Scottish bishops had no thought of effecting a permanent episcopal stranglehold over the universities they had brought into being. On the contrary, they freely gave of their wealth and energies in the realization that adequate endowments and organizational maturity would inevitably bring full independent status to these university guilds. To this extent, the bishops who founded the universities of St Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451), and Aberdeen (1494–5) are truly representative of the magnanimous and liberal episcopal outlook which pervaded the university scene in northern Europe towards the close of the mediaeval period. This contrasts strikingly with earlier episcopal attitudes. For in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries episcopal authority had all too often been channelled in a direction aggressively antithetical to the growth of the corporate independence of the university guilds. The notorious efforts of the bishop of Paris and the chancellor of Notre Dame to stifle the independence of the Parisian masters is but an extreme example of the kind of complete divorce that could arise between the academic guild and the ecclesiastical authorities.

Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, however impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could.. .The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

When Christian missionaries penetrated sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century, three main persecutions of their converts caught the attention of Europe. The earliest took place in Madagascar between 1837 and 1857, when several hundred converts attached to the London Missionary Society were killed. The last of the three occurred in the Buganda kingdom of East Africa and culminated on 3 June 1886 when some 26 Baganda Christians were burned on a single pyre. Both these persecutions took place in autocratic and expanding kingdoms whose modernising rulers had initially welcomed missionaries for their skills. In both kingdoms the missionaries converted younger members of the ruling class. In both, the deaths of the modernising rulers precipitated traditionalist reactions in which converts were killed more to discourage and control Christianity than to extirpate it. Both persecutions were bounded in time. Both failed, leading only to further Christian expansion, the capture of power by Christian modernisers, and their use of the authoritarian political institutions to create overtly Christian kingdoms.

My motives in choosing this subject are: to respond to the invitation of our chairman; to expound the conviction that the persistence of French Catholicism through the crises of the Reformation was largely the result of the voluntary association of French Catholics; and to try to discover whether there was anything in Catholic theological or pastoral teaching of the period which might have given these associations a theoretical perspective, or grounded them in some kind of associative conception of the Church. I add that, despite the very considerable importance of the subject, one might even claim its decisive importance for the outcome of the wars of religion in Europe as a whole, it has (with some shining exceptions) not received very much attention from historians, and that in England essential texts and studies are hard to come by.

To begin, as is natural, by considering the sedes episcopales of early England is to realise how little we know of its significant places—even to use the word ‘town’ is to beg a question. It is certain that some sedes were established at major centres of authority. Bede used metropolis to describe London and Canterbury and by that he meant the capital of a kingdom. Gregory the Great was probably wise in selecting London as the seat of an archbishop, an intention in which he seems to have persisted even after he was informed of English conditions. Not only was it the capital of a kingdom but it had geographical advantages which Canterbury could not rival. Even though Canterbury was established as the archbishops’ sedes there are indications that already from the seventh century they were using London as a meeting place, and perhaps as a dwelling place, at least on occasion. No major council of the early English church was held at or near Canterbury. York’s position in the north probably resembled that of London in the south. Our view of it has been transformed by Phillips’s excavations, which have shown that the great headquarters building of the legionary fortress was maintained and used, at least in part, until well after the conversion period.

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

Everyone has his favourite squibs to illuminate the animosity of the devotees of the Christian application of modern knowledge towards the partisans of religious revival. R. B. Aspland, the unitarian, summed them all up succinctly in the early nineteenth century in his case against Wesleyanism. ‘Wine’, he declared, ‘is the beverage of the gentleman, spirits of the herd. So with religion’. Something of this edge had been there from the beginning, long before attitudes had been struck and the French Revolution had become a divider of spirits everywhere. Much of the fascination of the Turretini correspondence is provided by the conscious sense of intellectual superiority of the Swiss fathers of rational orthodoxy. ‘We are here much occupied with the scandalous affairs of Toggenburg’, writes Jean Gaspard Escher with an almost audible turn of the nose. ‘These are mountain people rather like Vaudois, Miquelets or Camisards’, and their murderous politics were of the Ulster variety. Neither the Toggenburgers, nor the Vaudois or Camisards were part of the history of religious revival, but they were very like Protestant minorities from Central Europe who were; the Salzburgers, for example. ‘The majority of these men’, writes Escher of the latter, ‘can neither read nor write; their fundamental doctrine is that worship is due to God alone and that salvation is by Jesus Christ. This doctrine fills them with a horror of popery: . . . they are ill-instructed in the other articles of religion. They know by heart some fine passages of scripture and some Lutheran hymns to which they hold’. Pastorally, if not confessionally, the mountain men were a different cup of tea from the practitioners of polite learning; but as late as 1800 it was possible to turn American methodists and baptists out in droves to vote for the deist Jefferson, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the fate of the revivalist and that of the men of enlightenment was more closely linked at an early stage than the text-book categories usually suggest.

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.

In, a book of 1567 on the lives and actions of past popes and cardinals written by Girolamo Garimberto, in the section on avarice, is to be found this judgement on Cardinal Francesco Armellini (1470–1528). ‘He truly is to be considered rich who is content to live with what he has, while he who is unhappy with what he has accumulated may be considered poor; and measured in these terms one can say that Francesco Armellini was very poor indeed.’ Given his posthumous, and indeed his contemporary reputation, of which this passage is entirely typical, Francesco Armellini would appear to be an ideal figure through which to approach the general subject of the Church and wealth in this period.

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.

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.

In the 1830s a small group of Anglican clerics, mainly resident tutors and fellows of Oxford University, initiated a campaign for the revitalization of their Church, which they perceived to be threatened by secular forces. The inspiration for this was derived from the pre-Reformation roots of Anglicanism, specifically from a study of the fathers of the Early Church, supplemented by the post-Reformation Caroline divines of the seventeenth century. One of the main vehicles for propagating these ideas was the series known as the Tracts for the Times, which ran to ninety tides issued between 1833 and 1841, and from which this growing Oxford Movement derived its more popular title of’Tractarian’.

The subject of religion and finance is seriously neglected within the historiography of the church during the modern period. This essay explores the pioneering ‘Financing of American Religion’ project and suggests possible fruitful avenues of research into the financing of British religion. By way of a case study, it analyses the size of the religious voluntary sector as a whole and then, within that, the individual finances of a range of Anglican voluntary organizations, all home missionary organizations within the diocese of London. Historians of religion have shown a certain reluctance to grapple with the columns of figures and minutiae of detail contained in cash books, general ledgers and annual reports. This essay serves as a brief taster of the wealth of material contained in such sources.