‘The Church of Scotland has consistently upheld Scotland’s historic nationhood and identity’. The purpose of this paper is to consider the validity of this claim by examining the records of the general assembly of the church since 1946. The general assembly’s pronouncements on this theme take the form of deliverances on the reports submitted by the committee on church and nation.

The general assembly of 1946 declared their conviction that Scottish interests were being increasingly jeopardised by disregard of Scottish sentiment and the claims of Scotland as a nation. The remedy proposed was ‘a greater decentralising of authority and an increased measure of independence within the sphere of Scottish administration.’ The following year the call for decentralisation was placed with the context of ‘schemes of nationalisation’ and ‘the possible invasion of human rights and local independence by large-scale collectivism.’

A Term in many ways inappropriate to the Middle Ages’: so begins AA a recent medieval encyclopaedia article on ‘antisemitism’. It is the first worry of the medievalist. On the one hand, he or she hears the c’est la même chose cry of the non-medievalist when the latter looks at examples of medieval hatred of the Jews. On the other hand, he or she is acutely aware both of the modernity of racial thought and the way in which twelfth-or thirteenth-century texts, when discussing Jews, use religious vocabulary, not ‘racial’. Painful modern Jewish and Christian concern to examine the Church’s guilt pushes in the same direction as the medievalist’s anxiety about anachronism. The effect is to underline religion.

On 13 September 1862, when Abraham Lincoln was awaiting an opportune moment to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, he received at the White House a delegation from a meeting of Chicago Christians of all denominations. In pressing hard the case for immediate emancipation of the slaves, they assured the president that such action would be in accordance with the will of God. In a characteristically wry, tongue-in-cheek reply, Lincoln observed that:

The attitude of the Limousin pope Clement VI to the early stages of the Hundred Years War between France and England occasioned conflicting verdicts. These varied predictably according to the nationality of their authors. One of the pope’s biographers, the Frenchman Jean la Porte, hailed him as a creator of concord, a lover of peace. By contrast the Englishman William of Ockham accused Clement of being ‘schismatic’, in the sense that he deliberately provoked hostilities between the two countries and favoured one side against the other. The German Conrad of Megenberg tried to adopt a via media. Replying to Ockham he claimed that he had himself seen Clement sending out cardinals to conduct peace negotiations between the kings of France and England. On the other hand, he was driven to admit Clement’s partiality, excusing it somewhat feebly on the grounds that the Holy See had always adhered more to France than to other nations, so one read. Some impression of the truth of these differing judgements can be gleaned from the registers of Clement’s correspondence, from the political collationes he delivered both as pope and earlier as Pierre Roger, the trusted counsellor and official of Philip VI, Valois, and from contemporary accounts of a peace conference over which the pope presided at Avignon in 1344.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.

The aim of this paper is to examine the evidence from a number of charity schools, for attitudes towards the childhood of the ‘poorer sort’ in the early eighteenth century. Conventionally it has been claimed that lack of affection, and even brutality, characterized the relationship between parents, especially fathers, and their children. Lawrence Stone, in particular, has promoted the view that, as a result of the very high mortality rate among children until the late eighteenth century, parents did not invest much affection in them in order to insulate themselves from the sorrow resulting from their likely deaths before reaching adulthood. This view was also taken by Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt. They pointed out the formality of address seen in letters between children and parents of the upper classes, and suggested that cruelty to children and flogging was commonplace at all levels of society. These views have been challenged by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that, when examined carefully, the evidence suggests that, from the sixteenth century at least, nearly all children seem to have been wanted, loved, and cared for. She claims that the majority of children were not subject to brutality, and that physical punishment was used relatively infrequently and as a last resort. Pollock suggests that from the eighteenth century onwards parents were much concerned with ‘training’ a child in order to ensure that he or she absorbed correct values and beliefs and would grow into a model citizen.

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the German Volkskunde tradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

If the English Reformation can be seen as an extended transaction between the laity and the clergy, then its outcome is surely well described, in Claire Cross’s phrase, as the ‘triumph of the laity’. While most Elizabethan Protestant divines were more than happy about the spiritual aspects of that triumph, they were altogether less enthusiastic about its impact on the standing of the clergy. Certainly the independence, status, and thus the material wealth of the clergy were subjects of concern for many Elizabethan Protestants. Presbyterians, moderate Puritans, conformists, both ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, all were much exercised by the problem of the status and financial independence of the clerical estate. But while they may have shared a common concern with the question, the different priorities and values which divided Elizabethan Protestant divines amongst themselves inevitably coloured their attitude to church property and clerical status. In particular the issue provided a central strand in the polemical exchange between Presbyterians and conformists, as each tried to label the other as the clergy’s own worst enemy in its protracted, indeed interminable, negotiations with lay society for improved pay and conditions.

The name controversy, I confess, is the name of a disease; but necessary … to be known first, to make a readier way for the cure; and he that cares not which way disputes about religion go, brands himself with the palpable neglect of his faith and religion. Not as though all were equally interested in the study of controversies, but that everyone may be ready to give an answer to every man that asks him a reason of the hope that is in him.

This article explores the place of education within the early Quaker movement in England. It examines how Quaker attitudes towards human nature shaped their views on the role of nurture in the creation of a community of believers, and probes the theological assumptions that underpinned this, notably their repudiation of conventional Protestant ideas about original sin and predestination. It also traces the evolution of Quaker views on spiritual direction in domestic and institutional settings against the backdrop of the transformation of the Society of Friends from a radical evangelical sect to a more sober and disciplined movement in the later seventeenth century. Particular attention is paid to the part that education played in ensuring that Quakerism was passed down to the next generation, once the heady excitement of its initial conversionary phase had waned.

It is certain that the unrest of Europe of the past twenty years will be dispelled. It is even likely that our whole civilisation will be advanced.’ So wrote A. E. Lawrie, Rector of Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, in October of 1914. He was spending a three-month leave of absence as chaplain to an army hospital behind the lines in France. He added that the death of a particular soldier ‘spoke so loudly of Another Cruel Death, that one could not but link the two together—the spirit of self-indulgence will be trodden underfoot and exchanged for the spirit of self-discipline.’

This article examines the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish education debates in the context of intra-Presbyterian relations in the aftermath of the 1843 ‘Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland. The debates of this period have been characterized as an attempt to wrest control of Scottish education from the Church of Scotland, with most opponents of the existing scheme critical of the established kirk's monopoly over the supervision of parish schools. However, the debate was not simply between those within and outside the religious establishment. Those advocating change, particularly within non-established Presbyterian denominations, were not unified in their proposals for a solution to Scotland's education problem. Disputes between Scotland's largest non-established churches, the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and within the Free Church itself over the type of national education scheme that should replace the parish schools severely hampered their ability to express common opposition to the existing system. These divisions also placed increasing strain on the developing cooperation in Scottish Dissent on ecclesiastical, political and social matters after the Disruption. This article places the issue of education in this period within this distinctly Dissenting context of cooperation, and examines the extent of the impact these debates had on Dissenting Presbyterian relations.

‘Now firmly established as a modernist novelist’, D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) remains a controversial writer, especially for the ambiguity of his attitudes to fascism and feminism. This essay considers the role played by the then forty-one-year-old bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, in offering evidence for the defence in the Old Bailey trial in 1960 which acquitted Penguin Books of obscenity in publishing Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In taking part in the trial Robinson acquired notoriety (or credit). His public admiration for Lawrence’s writing placed him at odds with the two postwar archbishops, Geoffrey Fisher (Canterbury) and Cyril Garbett (York). In the words of Mark Roodhouse in a pioneering article, ‘for ecclesiastical historians the Lady Chatterley trial not only reveals changing social attitudes but also growing division within the Church of England between “two Christianities” over the way to respond to these changes’. Robinson did not receive further advancement in the Church.

Much has been made of the roots of Darwinian theory in the work of Thomas Malthus, who argued for the inevitability of strife, suffering and death following on the scarcity of resources and the tendency of populations to multiply without limit. It has been noted that a Malthusian pessimism about human nature re-emerged in the 1830s, darkening the political discussions surrounding the welfare of the poor, and informing the legislation of the Poor Laws in those crucial years in which Darwin formulated his natural selection theory. Historians have also focussed on the harshness of the social Darwinism that was taken up by theorists later in the century, in contrast to the more optimistic, Lamarckian evolution of Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin and others. Yet in the closing passage of Origin of Species, Darwin extended his famous metaphor of the entangled bank, offering a form of redemption through struggle toward higher forms of life.

Friendship is a commonplace of monastic life. What more congenial environment could be found for the formation and cultivation of friendships than the protective recesses of monastic cloisters? Here existed the time, charity and mutual concern so painfully absent in the outside world. In the cloister men could get to know each other and to experience each other in the fellowship of Christ. Under a mild and understanding abbot, they could discover, as Ailred of Rievaulx did in the twelfth century, that God is friendship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the subject of Anglican identity in the period from about 1800 to about 1870. This is a complex topic, and it will be possible here only to highlight a few themes. It will be suggested that the understanding of who was and who was not a ‘real’ Anglican underwent several important shifts during the period, until by the 1870s the definition had become increasingly narrow and exclusive. The result was not unity, but an atmosphere of increasingly narrow sectarianism, which had the effect of repelling those who were on the fringes of Anglican allegiance, and thus narrowing the base of lay support for the Church of England in the country at large.

Why choose this subject? First, because I think there is a general historiographical problem about nationality in early-modern Europe, which has been rather abandoned and is perhaps worth another look. Second because, on the Catholic side of the subject, there is a problem of actuality concerning Ireland and a rather different one concerning Holland. Third, because there is a specific and limited issue in the history of English Catholicism. I shall really be concerned with a simple problem raised by Arnold Oskar Meyer in his England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth: how far the internal conflicts among English Catholics, generally known as the Archpriest controversy, are to be explained as an outbreak or resurgence of ‘nationalism’, a conflict of ‘national’ and ‘Catholic’ tendencies. There have been good reasons for objecting to Meyer’s view that this was the case: his conceptions of national character, of ’puritanism’, were by present standards shaky, and he weakened his personal position by becoming more closely involved with the Third Reich than he perhaps need have been. The recent historiography of the subject has been largely a history of attempts to find an alternative: in the international competition of France and Spain; in the constitutional hostility of gentry and clergy; in the geographical determinism of Braudelian routes; in the ecclesiastical choice between a traditional and a missionary church. Many of them have been made by myself; most recently Christopher Haigh has added another, connected with the continuity or discontinuity of Elizabethan Catholicism with its pre-Reformation predecessor.

Kant went up to the Albertina at the age of sixteen in 1740, and his career as student there, tutor to three families (the last being that of the Keyserlings) and back to the Albertina as a teacher, spanned the reigns of three kings in and of Prussia, through the near disasters and triumphs of Frederick the Great, and including the predatory partitions of Poland, but narrowly escaping the near collapse of Prussia in the Napoleonic wars. He had been saturated in the pietist tradition at home, at the Collegium Fridericianum, and in his student days. It has been alleged that pietism lingered on in Königsberg longer than elsewhere, not least because of the presence of Franz Albert Schultz, pupil of Francke and Wolff, army chaplain, pastor, school reformer and founder, settler of immigrants and university teacher, and of Martin Knutzen, a young and brilliant natural philosopher, and one of Kant’s most influential teachers at the Albertina. Kant never lost his respect for pietists at their best, characterised by serenity and cheerfulness, neither discontented by persecution, nor stirred to enmity by controversy.