In a preface to his Acts and Monuments, John Foxe explained why his ecclesiastical history was so deeply concerned with martyrs.

William Perkins and William Bishop, two of the leading spokesmen for their respective religious traditions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, clashed in print over the status of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as a number of other issues. They were formidable adversaries. Perkins, the most widely-read English Protestant theologian of the day, helped to make Cambridge University a centre of Reformed thought and practice. Bishop, an Oxford-trained theologian with extensive experience and associations on the continent, eventually became the first Roman Catholic bishop in England since the death of the last surviving bishop of Mary I’s reign. Though discussions of the Virgin Mary were not major themes in the books of either writer, their views on this subject are significant in showing how the two traditions developed, in competition with each other, during this phase of the long English Reformation.

The problem could scarcely have been resolved more precisely. ‘Et tunc intravit lex romana in Sanctum Iohannem de la Penia XIo kalendas aprilis, secunda septimana quad-ragessimae, feria IIIa, hora prima et tertia fuit Tholetana, ora sexta fuit romana, anno Domini millesimo LXXIo et inde fuit servata lex romana.’

It has recently been observed that ‘the corpus of surviving lollard literature is regrettably small, and it is to be found in the volumes of Wyclif’s so-called English writings and a few other printed and manuscript works’. To one concerned to re-edit the vernacular lollard literature the position seems otherwise: the corpus is formidably large, the printed material inadequately represents the state of the texts so edited, and there are a large number of other works still in manuscript. The printed material, if grouped together, would extend to perhaps five bulky volumes, in all about 2400 pages; a rough estimate of the vernacular texts now known suggests that this is perhaps only a fifth of the evidence available. Moreover, the editors were ignorant of a large number of the manuscripts of the works they printed, and hence could not assess the circulation of the texts: to give an example, Arnold used only one manuscript of what I shall call the standard lollard sermon-cycle, with fitful reference to three others, whereas now thirty manuscripts are known, together with a further three containing a modified series based on the original set. It is also impossible from the existing printed editions to gain any picture of the views of the lollard authors: only extensive commentary will reveal the implications of remarks made and vocabulary used.

Revival, as this volume shows, has had many different meanings within Christian history, and has taken many different, forms. Institutional revitalization, for example, is one thing; popular revivalism is another. Of course, they may be intertwined, as they were in the case of the Franciscan Observance of the late Quattrocento. The ‘re’ of ‘revivalism’ is usually taken in a retrospective sense -that which previously existed is brought to life once more. Renaissance classicism is an obvious instance. With the Franciscan Observance, it is true, one does get a sense of the desire to restore, to re-institute, the idealized primitive poverty of the order in the days of St Francis. For the Observants, pristine Franciscanism would have been the equivalent of the early Church in the eyes of the Protestant reformers. Yet ‘revivalism’ can also be thought of as pertaining to remarkable occasions of religious intensity, moments of collective enthusiasm, moments, as Emile Durkheim puts it, of ‘general effervescence.’ But champagne is too light-headed and celebratory to do justice to the phenomenon. A better symbol of ‘revivalism’ would be the flames of Pentecost. Here I shall attempt to show how the Observance rose to prominence, and eventually triumphed within the Franciscan order, through the raging fires – creative as well as destructive – of popular, indeed populist revivalism.

Jacques De Vitry (c. 160-1240) was a most perceptive and sympathetic observer of all that the religious life meant to women at the beginning of the thirteenth century. He thus took care to address some of his preaching to particular groups of these women. In his Sermones vulgares, probably set down at some time after 1228, he put forward messages appropriate to each of these groups. He was uniquely qualified to do so.

Religion historique et non religion cosmique, le christianisme entretient avec l’histoire universelle et avec son propre passé des rapports qui s’enrichissent et se compliquent d’âge en âge. Le radicalisme des réveils spirituels en révolte contre l’opacité de l’institution ecclésiastique tente régulièrement d’abolir le poids des siècles pour en revenir à la simplicité fervente des origines. Au sein de l’Eglise romaine, où la continuité historique constitue, plus qu’ailleurs, le critère de l’autorité, c’est la tâche de la critique d’érudition que de déchiffrer et d’interpréter les monuments de la tradition—Pères, conciles, papes—pour éclairer et justifier la doctrine du présent par le témoignage de l’antique, auquel on restitue, par là même, son lustre terni par le temps et sa puissance d’exemplarité. Le primitivisme si apparent dans la Réforme protestante n’est pas étranger non plus à la Réforme catholique et à la tridentinité.

In his essay The origins of the French Reformation, Lucien Febvre exposes a number of weaknesses in common interpretations of the Reformation—that it had been brought about because of abuses in the church and especially because of Luther’s anger at these abuses. But what, asked Febvre, does one then make of those independently of Luther, who like Briconnet, bishop of Meaux, worked for reforms, often of a different kind to those advocated by Luther, or more especially of Lefèvre d’Étaples a mystical catholic whose biblical studies says Febvre ‘contained some very bold things’. So Febvre asked could this many sided movement ‘spring from nothing more than a revolt of healthy and honest minds and consciences against the nasty people and wicked spectacles around them?’ Why could not the ‘many pious Christians often supported by their princes and the officers of the princes put an end to the excesses which everyone deplored? No one noticed that if the Reformation in France had originated with Lefèvre and not with Luther the abuses theory would no longer be valid ... for Lefèvre had never campaigned against the morals of the clergy’. Febvre then went on to point out the evidence for the deep and increasing piety of the early sixteenth century in northern Europe—the many new churches and oratories, the deep sentiment attached to the Christ of the Passion and the Virgin of the Rosary.

Cranmer’s condemnation for treason was almost as great an embarrassment to John Foxe as it had been to the Archbishop himself. Obedience to lawful authority was axiomatic to both, as to all the orthodox reformers of die first generation. Against Catholic accusations that all Protestants were natural subverters of established order, they argued that the good Christian would be least a traitor to his Prince. Preaching upon the text ‘Render unto Caesar’ in November 1550, Hugh Latimer had declared,

The Life of Saint Waldef by Jocelin of Furness is the only surviving account of a man who would seem to have played a prominent part in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of the north in the middle years of the twelfth century, and who acquired a reputation for conventional sanctity. Apart from Jocelin’s account, written almost fifty years after his subject’s death, there are only a handful of contemporary references to Waldef. If the historian was limited to these Waldef would be a shadowy figure indeed, and the annals of the twelfth-century church would lose a man who appears, both in Jocelin’s narrative and the pages of modern historians, almost as a second-rank Ailred.

In March 1851, both archbishops and twenty bishops of the Anglican Church issued a public statement in which they asserted the ‘undoubted identity of the English Church before and after the Reformation’—and we do not have to look far for an explanation of this manifesto; in 1850 the steady trickle of Anglican recruits to Roman Catholicism had been complemented by the so-called ‘Papal Agression’ which re-established Roman Catholic titular sees in England. Undoubtedly, historical conscience played a large part in secessions to Rome, as more and more Anglicans came to feel that the whole constitution of the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana had been fundamentally changed by the abrogation of papal authority in the sixteenth century, and in these circumstances all shades of Anglican opinion were bound to welcome any historical argument which tended to show that the pre-Reformation Church had not been unconditionally subject to Rome, and that its acceptance of the canonical ius commune and papal authority had been free, selective, and discriminating.

There were several possibilities open to a man entering the secular clergy in the later middle ages. Among these were careers as a royal, papal, or episcopal servant, as a teacher or scholar, or as the rector or vicar of a parish church. If he did not set his hopes high, he could join the ranks of the chaplains of his diocese, helping the incumbents of the parish churches with the administration of their benefices and with the cure of souls, serving chapels and perpetual chantries, and serving oratories in noble and gentry households. Whatever his ambitions and aspirations, however, the secular priest’s situation depended entirely upon the charity and good will of those in a position to exercise patronage: family and friends, the beneficed clergy, the bishop and his familia, and the established, landed families of the area. And whether the possibilities became opportunities in the form of the patronage desired depended to a large extent upon the social position of the priest’s family, the proper connections, and the extent of his education. These were the realities faced universally by the clergy of the universal church, but each region had its own particular system of patronage, varying with the needs and structure of society. As a case in point, the lives and success of the clergy of the northern English diocese of Carlisle, despite the mission and aims held in common with the clergy of the entire church, were dictated to a degree by the rural nature of the diocese and its location on the Anglo-Scottish border.

Historians of the nineteenth-century Keswick holiness movement have long observed, though seldom analysed, its theological appropriation of the natural world. With annual conventions held from 1875 in the Lake District, home territory of Wordsworth and Southey, the movement’s love of nature was one of its most obvious ‘Romantic afFinities’ and marked it out from other streams of contemporary Evangelicalism, as David Bebbington has recendy shown. Yet much of the early theological inspiration behind the Keswick Convention was drawn not from the Lake Poets, but from the devotional writings of Victorian England’s best-known evangelical poet, Frances Ridley Havergal. The Keswick emphases upon absolute surrender to God and ‘entire consecration’ in his service, with a deep christocentric piety and a passion for spiritual transformation, pervade her teaching. Although Havergal’s brief career lasted only two decades, being cut short by her untimely death in June 1879 at the age of 42, her output was prodigious. Alongside indefatigable letter-writing and the production of numerous evangelistic booklets, she published several collections of poetry and hymnody in a short space of time, notably The Ministry of Song (1869), Under the Surface (1874), Loyal Responses (1878) and, posthumously, Under His Shadow (1879). Her popular hymns, such as ‘Take My Life’ and ‘Like a River Glorious’, became synonymous with Keswick spirituality.

The Elizabethan Settlement identified religious conformity with political allegiance. Not unlike the cuius regio eius religio of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg in the Holy Roman Empire, from 1559 onwards subjects in England had to subscribe to the two Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the first declaring the monarch as head of the state and the second determining worship under the monarch as head of the Church. In such an Anglican monarchy, there could be no legal space for the non-Anglican subject, let alone for the non-Christian. The few Marranos (Jews forcibly converted to Christianity) lived as Portuguese immigrants, at the same time that Protestant Dutch and Walloon traders congregated in stranger churches, and whilst they were allowed to worship in their own languages, they remained outsiders to the English/Anglican polity.

Judging by the quantity of surviving texts – whether vitae or saints’ lives, libelli miraculorum or narratives of miracles for public reading in church, lectionaries or collections of liturgical readings, inventiones and translationes or accounts of relics found and later moved to a new location, popular receptivity to signs, wonders and miracles had reached a high point by the turn of the twelfth century. Whilst ordinary laypeople remained fascinated by supernatural phenomena, intellectuals were already beginning to challenge the preternatural in a process described by Chenu as the ‘desacralizing’ of nature. In the first book of his treatise, De Sanctis et eorum pignoribus (c.1120), Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, had contrasted the credulity of the faithful towards pseudo-miracles with the growing unease experienced by many scholars at inadequate written evidence for the authentication of relics. Andrew of Saint-Victor (d.1175), in an exposition on the literal interpretation of Scripture, found himself arguing for a natural explanation of events before any recourse to the miraculous. In the School of Pastoral Theology at Paris, Master Peter the Chanter (d.1197) vehemently criticized trial by ordeal as a flagrant tempting of God whereby a supposedly miraculous intervention was allowed to intrude into the regular legalistic operation of the courts. In the years immediately following the Chanter’s death, his former students, led by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and like-minded clerical associates, developed a significant agenda, emphasizing rationality and record keeping to sustain the faith of the Church within a new and more firmly pastoral context.

Patriarchs at home, but brides of Christ in spirit: it is an intriguing fact that while puritan writers opposed any confusion of gender roles in everyday life, they were happy for men to adopt a feminine identity in spiritual experience. On one hand, seventeenth-century conduct books and sermons hammered home the divinely-ordained place of husbands and wives in marriage. William Whately (1583-1639) argued that wives should always have on their lips the refrain ‘Mine husband is my superior, my better’, and that