In December 1853 Horace Mann, summing up his report on the census of religious worship conducted on 30 March 1851, offered some of the more famously sweeping generalizations in English religious and statistical history:

‘The church in town and countryside’ is a fruitful theme. But for early medievalists it is an especially challenging one. We first have to establish our right to participate at all. There is a classic tradition of interpreting western history, and the history of western Christianity too, in terms of an opposition between town and countryside: but according to exponents of this tradition, from Marx and Engels through Weber and Troeltsch to some contemporary historians, the early middle ages present a dull, townless void between antiquity and the eleventh or twelfth century. We have to begin then, by affirming that there were towns in the early middle ages. To justify this, we must do more than point out continuity in the terminology used by late classical and early medieval writers. We need to show that places existed which functioned as towns. Biddle has given a useful archaeologist’s list of functional criteria: defences, a planned street-system, a market, a mint, legal autonomy, a role as a central place, a relatively large and dense population, a diversified economic base, plots and houses of ‘urban’ type, social differentiation, complex religious organisation, a judicial centre.

Studies of nineteenth-century urban religion have often been conducted with very little reference to the surrounding countryside. Even Obelkevich in his stimulating study of rural religion in Lincolnshire suggested that there, ‘In the Church of England, though the ideal and model of the village parish church continued to inspire town churchmen, towns and villages largely remained in separate compartments. Only through Methodism did the towns have much effect on village religious life. . . . The circuit, the key unit of Methodist organization, brought preachers and people from towns and villages into regular contact with each other and made it possible for the financial and human resources of the town chapels to contribute to the life of the outlying village chapels’. But the methodist exception is significant, not so much in a denominational sense (although the methodist form of organisation was in theory the best for this purpose) but because it is an example of a situation in which the money and men available in any one particular place were not sufficient to carry out what the church concerned wished to do there. It was therefore necessary to tap the resources of other places to help. In large towns such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and in some of the smaller industrial towns as well, the necessary resources often had to be found within the town or not at all; and to that extent the study of urban religion on its own is understandable. But in many parts of the country rural evangelism was felt to be as urgent a priority as urban evangelism. The church of England sought to overcome the consequences of rural neglect; and all nonconformists, not only methodists, attempted to involve town members in the life of country chapels. Thus in less exclusively industrial parts of the country than Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Black Country, a genuine conflict of priorities between town and countryside could arise.

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.

Whatever Luther may have said about the priesthood of all believers, it took more than a century and a half for the idea to receive full-scale treatment, and Spener, who achieved this during his time as Senior of Frankfurt (1660-86), approached the goal indirectly through editing Arndt’s sermons (1675). To catch the public eye he republished the introduction separately later in the year under the title Pia Desideria, or heartfelt desires for an improvement of the true evangelical church pleasing to God, with some Christian proposals to that end. With a dedication to all the overseers and pastors of the evangelical church it was now a deliberately programmatic writing. In this tract Spener castigated every class of society for their responsibility for the lamentable state of the Church, making suggestions for improved clerical training and preaching, which might have been made at any period of Church history. The real sting came in an explicit appeal to Luther on how best to realize the priesthood of all behevers. To spread the word of God more richly among the people there should be private gatherings under clerical leadership for the exchange of views and Bible study; more radically, there should be private gatherings for the exercise of the obligations of the general spritual priesthood. The faithful should teach, warn, convert, edify each other. These gatherings should be cells for the renewal of the Church. They would also enable Spener, the expert catechist, to drive home his conviction that Christianity was a way of life, learnt by doing.

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.

On his embassy from Constantinople to the papal curia in 1339, the Greek Orthodox envoy Barlaam confided to Benedict XII his pessimistic belief that genuine union between the Churches was rendered impossible less by theological difference than by the shared history of relations between eastern and western Christendom:

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.’

One of the apparent pillars of consistency in the medieval Latin liturgy is the divine, alias daily, office. Although scholars convincingly postulate forms of the office that both antedate the specific provisions for it which bulk large in the Rule of Benedict and reflect an urban secular (the so-called cathedral office) rather than a monastic context, in terms of actual books out of which the office was performed, not a great deal survives until roughly the eleventh century. By that time, if not before, thought is clearly being given as to how to present the contents of the office - given that much of it consists in the recitation of psalms - in a way that, while clear, minimizes repetition. This can most readily be done in the long stretch of the weeks after Pentecost and the shorter stretch (sometimes very short indeed, depending on when Easter falls) of the weeks between the octave of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent or pre-Lent (that is, from Septuagesima on). Although the structure of the office in this, to use the current phrase, ‘ordinary time’, remains the same as in the more exciting seasons of Advent, Christmastide, Lent, and Eastertide (plus, of course, the individual feasts of the Proper of Saints), the content of the various services is not driven by a particular time or saint, and so there is a somewhat abstract quality about it quite lacking from the great seasons and occasions of the liturgical year.

My brothers should not grieve that my life has come to an end, because never was I so useful to them in the past as I will be in the future, providing they are willing to keep the commandments of God. As a matter of fact I, and all my brothers whose life has ended as mine has, will stay with them, and I will appear and give them much better advice than hitherto.

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.

The Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses are the finest sculptured monuments to survive from early eighth-century Northumbria. For what audiences were they designed: clerics, monks or lay people? Of the two monuments, it is likely that the Bewcastle Cross is the earlier. Its designer wished to commemorate a number of benefactors of his or her community, whose names were inscribed on a panel of runic inscriptions on the west face (they are, unfortunately, now largely illegible: see figs 1 and 2). He or she was the first to introduce a number of highly significant theological ideas into Northumbrian sculpture. The Ruthwell designer, who did not set out to commemorate any individuals, expanded and developed theological ideas found in embryo on the Bewcastle Cross (figs 3 and 4). The Bewcastle and the Ruthwell Crosses, both, are best understood in terms of the theological and liturgical interests of Bede’s scholarly circle, in particular of Bishop Acca of Hexham, Bede’s bishop and patron; and of Bede’s friend and correspondent Bishop Pehthelm of Whithorn. Hexham lies east of Bewcastle, and Whithorn west of Ruthwell: I would date Bewcastle within the episcopacy of Acca, i.e. between 709 and 731; and Ruthwell a little later, say between 732 and 740 (the year Acca died). In this period the abbot of Wearmoudi-Jarrow was Hwætberht (abbot 716–c.750). Hwætberht was known as ‘Eusebius’ to his scholarly friends, presumably because of his interest in Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine and the cult of the Cross. Rosemary Cramp and Richard Bailey have convincingly related the beautiful cross-slab at Jarrow to the abbacy and patronage of Hwœtberht. In his account of King Oswald’s victory, in the sign of the Cross, at Heavenfield, Bede implies that the Cross was, for the Northumbrian aristocracy and the clerics associated with them, the primary symbol of the Christian Faith.

This article discusses the impact of the educational method pioneered in the English public schools on the development of education in Anglican schools in the British empire, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of the First World War. It discusses how the focus of missionary activity changed from a desire for overt evangelism into a sense of the transmission of moral and ethical values though a system of education in the Christian virtues. An educational understanding of salvation began to supplant the doctrinal. This is connected with the thinking on ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ civilizations of the period. A central focus is on the preparatory work for, and discussions around, the Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 and the role played by Bishop H. H. Montgomery.

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.

If we set out to explore ‘discipline and diversity’ in the medieval Church, canon law presents itself as a possible starting point: canon law was first of all disciplinary law. Its history can be, and has been, told as an interplay of moral decline and reform, as a conflict between discipline and diverse customs, as a struggle between one eternal order and a multitude of transgressions. However, the imposition of norms is never a unilateral process; the success of a given set of norms is often shaped by an interplay between enforcement and subversion. In the present article, I want to explore this theme for a crucial phase in the history of medieval incest legislation and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over marriage.

This article examines the grounds on which the Anglican philosopher and theologian Eric Mascall opposed the ordination of women, in a series of influential publications from the 1950s to the 1970s. It explores their basis in Mascall's understanding of the Church, the Incarnation and the ontological status of the sexes. It also considers the particular atmosphere of the Anglo-Catholicism of the period, convulsed by ecumenical advance at the Second Vatican Council and (as Anglo-Catholics understood it) the danger of moves towards the Protestant denominations in England. Whilst Mascall allowed that women priests might one day be embraced by the worldwide church, acting together, the peculiar atmosphere of the period seemed to make it the least auspicious time to make what would be a unilateral and far-reaching decision. The article also situates Mascall's interventions in the context of a wider realignment of conservatives, both evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, within the Church of England.

This article examines how the House of Lords, as the ultimate appellate authority of the new kingdom of Great Britain, formed after the union of 1707, provided a degree of religious toleration for Scotland's episcopalian minority when they supported James Greenshields's appeal on 1 March 1711. Greenshields was a Scottish episcopalian minister who appealed to the Lords in February 1710 after he was imprisoned by the Edinburgh magistrates for using the English Book of Common Prayer to conduct a service for a private episcopalian congregation. The Lords’ decision confirmed that no law in Scotland proscribed the Prayer Book liturgy and provided a degree of legal recognition to the episcopalians who used it. This article examines the arguments that Greenshields and his supporters used to advance his appeal. In doing so, it sheds new light on the relationship between Scotland's established church, the nation's episcopalian minority and the new British state.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Sunday schools in Britain played a significant role, both disseminating and forming Christian faith. There was near universal attendance at the schools, and as a result there was widespread exposure to Christian teaching and hymnody. Despite this, their role as an educational arm of the churches is under-researched. This article considers the experience of the schools from the beginning of the century until the outbreak of the Second World War. It examines how and what Sunday schools taught during this time, and the extent to which they adopted pedagogical developments. The article also considers the responses of the schools to the various education acts passed in this period. In addition, it examines what the schools themselves, their scholars and the churches thought of their effectiveness, and reflects upon the tensions that arose between the schools and the churches. The article concludes that Sunday schools were an integral part of the churches’ educational reach in society and therefore deserve much more thorough examination by historians.

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.

We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

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.