Evidence of devotion to the Virgin Mary in the restored Catholic Church of the reign of Mary Tudor survives in numerous religious texts published from 1553 to 1558. These sermons, catechetical texts, primers, and books of devotion and polemic were written to aid the restoration of early modern Catholicism in England after twenty years of religious tumult. By considering how these texts treat devotion to Mary, it is possible to answer two questions. First, was the cult of the saints in Marian England, particularly that of the Virgin, ‘one of [t]he abiding casualties of the preceding reformations’, as Ronald Hutton has argued from the few gilds and pilgrimage centres restored during this period? Secondly, does devotion to the Virgin present any clues as to the nature of the Marian Church? Did it hark back to the Church of the 1520s? Did it embrace much evangelical belief and eschew much traditional religion, as Lucy Wooding argues in her recent monograph? Or was it akin to the Catholic Reformation in Europe? In order to answer these questions, it would be useful to begin by evaluating two texts that possessed semi-official status in the Marian Church, the use and frequent printing of which were encouraged by the likes of Cardinal Pole: Bishop Edmund Bonner of London’s catechetical work, A Profitable Doctryne, and the Wayland Primer, both printed in 1555.

The second quarter of the nineteenth century has long been recognized as a formative period for public discussion of the relationship between science and religion, particularly in emerging sciences such as geology, where new evidence raised questions about the interpretation of the Bible. Recent scholarly studies of scientific publishing, theologies of nature and links between missionaries and scientific endeavour have drawn attention to various ways in which the relationship between religion and science was understood during the period. A common theme has been the key role of clergymen in public discourse. A lacuna in this literature, however, has been analysis of colonial sites in which these debates took place. In colonies such as New South Wales, for example, public discussion of these issues was dominated by Anglican clergyman-scientists. Yet they have attracted little attention from scholars.

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in the Records of the Scottish Church History Society: ‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’s History, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).

‘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.

Modern historians have long argued that the early medieval Franks thought themselves to be the chosen people or new Israel, especially as they gained a great empire under the Carolingian dynasty in the late eighth century. The Opus Caroli of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans has often been cited as one of the clearest expressions of this self-conception as God's elect. A massive work attacking the legitimacy of the Byzantine empire in the context of the iconoclasm dispute during the early 790s, it does indeed contest the Byzantine claim to be the Christian empire. But Theodulf's repeated statement that ‘We are the spiritual Israel’ is best understood not as an assertion of ethnic election, but as a reference to the Christian tradition of Scripture exegesis which should (he argues) underpin both the Frankish and the Byzantine understanding of images. The Carolingian claim to empire rested on the Frankish championing of the universal Church, and its traditions of orthodoxy and correct biblical interpretation.

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.

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.

On Thursday, 1 May 1755, the small churchyard in Harbury, Warwickshire, was the scene of an extraordinary incident. An unnamed member of the local community claimed to have met and had a long conversation with an apparition, which emerged from amongst the tombstones. The precise details of this encounter no longer survive, but it clearly had a powerful impact upon the inhabitants of this sleepy rural village. The interest excited by the appearance persuaded Richard Jago, Vicar of Harbury, to put the episode to a useful didactic purpose. Just a few days later Jago based his Sunday sermon upon this event, which had quickly become the focus of intense curiosity.

The relationship between the two co-ordinates of this essay, ‘gender’ and ‘the clerical profession’, might be interpreted in a number of ways. It could, for instance, be taken to mean the manner in which clergy articulated and encouraged differences in gender roles. For it is certainly true that the most commonly quoted conduct books of the period – and especially those which prescribed roles for women – were written by the clergy. Clerics like James Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister in London, in his popular Sermons to Young Women (1765) advised his presumed audience:

In the early thirteenth century the papal cardinal legate in France, Robert of Courson, painted the business of lending in wholly Utopian colours. Should the pope decree, he said, that lending must cease and all men must earn their sustenance by the sweat of their brow, ‘Thus would be removed all usurers, all factious men and all robbers; thus would charity flourish and the fabric of the churches again be builded; and thus would all be brought back again to its pristine state.’ The prospect that acting to eliminate lending would so smoothly result in social perfection, one might expect, should have propelled the Catholic Church, led by the popes, to have made a frontal assault on lending, especially that carried on by Jews. It did not. Only more than four centuries later, in 1682, did the papacy decide to end a policy of actually condoning Jewish lending, and only then did it irrevocably close down the Jewish loan banks in the Papal State.

The root and branch bill was debated in the house of commons between 27 May and 27 July 1641. The original bill introduced by Sir Edward Dering was short, simply abolishing bishops, deans and chapters with all their dependents. But after the house had wrestled for two months with the business of replacing episcopacy with a new form of church government the bill had grown to more than forty pages. No complete copy of it, as it stood when it was dropped in August, has survived, but its main provisions can be reconstructed from the commons journals and parliamentary diaries. A new system of government was to be set up in two stages: its final form would be determined by a synod of divines, which it was intended should meet in the autumn of 1641 and work fast enough for the new jurisdiction to be established by 1 March 1642; in the meanwhile parliament would take all ecclesiastical jurisdiction into its own hands and proceed with the redistribution of the church’s financial resources. This paper is concerned with the first of these two stages, the commons’s interim programme of action to fill the vacuum left by root and branch. The speeches of MPs on three topics that dominated the June and July debates—church courts, ordination and deans and chapters— strikingly reveal their concern to use a period of temporary control over the church for reform and renewal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sentence of excommunication was the ultimate spiritual deterrent available to the medieval Church. It was designed to be completely terrifying, and to the devout mind it probably was. In theory, it cut the offender off not only from his hope of eternal salvation but, as many a person found to his cost, from all contacts which made mortal life bearable, or indeed possible. But theory, as father Logan has shown us, is not the same thing as practice. The effectiveness of the sentence was limited both by the character of the person afflicted and, to some extent, by his social position. A king could get away with a good deal, and, for lesser men, the existence of the writ de excommunicato capiendo tacitly acknowledged the fact that a royal prison might be a more effective inducement to repentance than the terrors of the Church’s ban. To some extent the Church itself had asked for trouble by cheapening the sentence. Many a modern librarian must wish for a suitably unpleasant punishment for those who borrow books and fail to return them, but when we find a bishop of Lincoln ordering the excommunication, after trina monitio, of all those who have failed to return a book borrowed from Master John of Dersingham, we may wonder whether a sledgehammer were not being used to crack a nut.

John XXII’s excommunication, in 1318, of Robert Bruce certainly does not fall into the category of excommunication for trivial causes, whatever one may think of the rights of the case, but the way in which the pope attempted, and Bruce frustrated, the execution of the sentence provides an interesting example of the difference between theory and practice in matters of ecclesiastical administration. The pope started from the assumption that Bruce was a lawful and distinguished subject of the king of England who had regrettably defected from his allegiance.

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.

One of the most significant aspects of the religious literature written in England in the critical half-century before the Long Parliament was the considerable contribution made by lay writers. Whatever belief one chooses, Anglicanism, Puritanism, mysticism, skepticism, rationalism, deism, a lay representative can be found who espoused it. Whatever type of writing one selects, devotional books, spiritual biographies, polemics, ecclesiastical histories, legal studies, a search of the Short Title Catalogue would readily bring to light a layman who produced such works. From the pietist John Norden to the firebrand William Prynne, to the contemplative moderate Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, the age abounds with a rich variety of lay religious opinion.