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.

In 1854 the Congregation of Rites suppressed the feast and cult of the ‘blessed’ Pons de Léras. At its suppression the cult of ‘Saint’ Pons had been formally part of the liturgy of the diocese of Lodève for a little over a century: there are no records of any earlier popular devotions. The inclusion of Pons in the liturgy of the diocese was the work of Mgr Jean-Georges de Souillac (1732–50), the penultimate pre-revolutionary bishop of Lodève, and the composition of a liturgical office for the feast of the blessed Pons de Léras (18 September) was the work of Souillac’s successor Mgr Jean-Félix-Henri de Fumel (1750–90). It is difficult to see a pre-eminent piety at work in this distinguished patronage. Even the most assiduous of recent local historians of the Lodèvois, who makes it plain that he would be glad to see the cult re-instated, is quite clear that the eighteenth-century proclamation of the ‘blessed’ Pons was une affaire d’État et non pas d’Église, owing nothing to papal approval, which was never sought, and confined solely to Lodève.

Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. Besides Foxe’s comments, it also contains material, sometimes no longer extant in other records, which Foxe claimed to draw from the original accounts of the heresy trials, and, for the early sixteenth century, memories of observers, and it is some of this material which I wish to consider today. Because Foxe is noted as a propagandist, his reliability has sometimes been questioned, so the first task of the historian is to subject his excerpts from documents and his other source-material to a more than usually careful scrutiny. In cases where the original sources are still extant, these can be used to reach some estimate of his accuracy in general; in cases where they are not, other records can sometimes serve as a cross-check.

‘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.

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.

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.

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 immediate occasion of this paper was my discovery, when I began to catalogue the sixteenth-century visitation books of the diocese, that what Gibbons and some of the eighteenth-century registry clerks had thought of as libri cleri for visitations were in fact lists of those summoned to diocesan synods. Professor Cheney has pointed out that there is an unusual quantity of evidence for the existence and working of the Ely synod in the fourteenth century, but I do not think that he would have expected, certainly I did not, to find it surviving and working in the sixteenth century. When this fact emerged, it seemed worth while to look again at the medieval evidence of the synod’s working, to see whether the continous existence of the institution could be traced, and to discover how it was being used. The sources quoted are almost entirely the diocesan records in my own care: I have not yet explored even the capitular records, and this is therefore no more than an interim report.

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.

Archbishop Pecham’s register is not only interesting as the first surviving Canterbury register, but also because an attempt has been made in it to abandon the older chronological arrangement for some sort of classification of documents in order to facilitate rapid consultation. The scheme adopted is unique among English registers, being that used by the Curia, for the letters are divided into ‘littere directe pape et cardinalibus,’ ‘littere regi,’ ‘littere episcopis’ and ‘littere communes.’ This order, however, is not rigidly followed, for there is a special section of’littere directe domino pape,’ and many letters to bishops are included among the ‘littere communes.’ Nevertheless, the arrangement was probably due to John of Bologna, the Italian notary brought by Pecham to England. To make consultation even easier, each leaf on which they occur has the heading ‘littere communes’ followed by the year of the archiepiscopate. There is also a rough sub-classification, not very systematically followed.

This essay will explore a few of the myriad competing tensions of motive, ideology and practicality that were created by, and existed during, the time of the Crusades. The First Crusade was launched in 1095 when Pope Urban II called for the liberation of Jerusalem from the Muslims of the Near East. Four years later, the knights of Western Europe captured the holy city and established a series of territories in the Levant. Over time the Muslims began to fight back and by 1187, under the leadership of Saladin, they defeated the Franks (as the settlers were known) and recovered Jerusalem. The particular focus here is on the Third Crusade (1187—92), the campaign called in the aftermath of this seismic event. Popular history books often characterize this as the great clash between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, and between Christianity and Islam. They describe battles and sieges; they might also highlight the divisions between Richard and Philip Augustus, and the failure of the crusade to recover Jerusalem. Such points are certainly central to a discussion of the Third Crusade but they are symptomatic of more detailed treatments of the expedition that have not, to date, placed the subject in a fuller context. One aspect of this broader approach is to emphasize the diversity of participants within the Christian and Muslim forces, to take the crusade beyond the Richard and Saladin binary.

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.

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.

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.

With these words, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon recalled how in a village in the Auvergne he had found a group of women venerating a dog as a saint. He then went on to describe how he had preached against the cult and persuaded the local lord to demolish the dog’s woodland shrine. Thanks to a detailed study by Jean-Claude Schmitt, this encounter between educated friar and unorthodox peasants has become a famous example of interaction between elite and popular religion in the Middle Ages. But it is only one of many such encounters that Stephen describes under the heading of ‘Superstitio’, or Superstition. Part of the interest of these tales for the modern reader is that they provide a window on to some of the unorthodox religious practices of the Middle Ages. Even more interesting, however, is the way in which Stephen links these practices to a clear but flexible idea of the relationship between elite and popular 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 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.

From 1869 until the founding of the diocese of Singapore in 1909, the missions and chaplaincies in Singapore and what is now West Malaysia were within the jurisdiction of the diocese of Labuan, which itself had been founded as a legal fiction in 1855 as the stock onto which the bishopric for Rajah James Brooke’s Sarawak could be grafted. Although the diocese and the bishopric were constitutionally distinct, as succeeding bishops were often reminded by the rajahs of Sarawak, the bishops looked at the whole area of their spiritual leadership, and regarded the staffing of it as one problem—or opportunity. G. F. Hose himself, bishop of Labuan 1881–1908, and of Sarawak 1882–1908, had served in the Straits Settlements from 1868, and had been archdeacon of Singapore for his predecessor, Bishop Chambers. For sixty-two years the St Andrew’s Church Mission in Singapore, the base for work among Asians, had as superintendent two priests, W. H. Gomes, 1872—1902, and Richard Richards, 1902–34. Both had previously worked in Borneo, for more than fourteen and twelve years respectively. In the opposite direction Bishop Hose transferred to Kuching in 1898 A. F. Sharp, who had worked for six years in Singapore.

Luigi (Alvise) Gonzaga (1568–91), heir to the principality of Castiglione delle Stiviere, renounced his succession in 1585 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, in the course of which he died of plague, evidently contracted while ministering to the sick. He was beatified with extraordinary rapidity in 1605, four years before Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. Admittedly the figure of the ‘angelic youth’ Luigi, as presented in the life written by the promoter of the cause for his canonization, Virgilio Cepari, and finally published in 1606, was more conventional and more calculated to seize the popular imagination than the uncharismatic Loyola, who enjoyed a very limited cult initially and was slow to deliver miracles. But, more significantly, the beatification was a matter of dynastic politics: it was promoted not only by the Jesuits but also, and more insistently, by the Gonzaga dynasty, supported by the Holy Roman Emperor and by allied dynasties. A phase of bureaucratization of canonization processes, already under way, was intensified shortly after Luigi’s beatification. Moreover, the criteria for sainthood would seem to have shifted somewhat in the first half of the seventeenth century. Luigi was not canonized until 1726, under Benedict XIII. In 1729 the same pope pronounced him the patron of students in Jesuit educational institutions and apparently also of students more generally. This provided the basis for the cult of Luigi in the nineteenth century as the patron of ‘Catholic youth’, that is both adolescents and young adults. This development was linked to a novel understanding of adolescence as a specific age group and also to the Church’s battle against secularism. Thus the cult acquired a new relevance long after the princely world that had pressured for Luigi’s canonization had passed away. The legal history of canonization processes substantially explains the delay in Luigi’s canonization, but this delay is also partly explicable by the very complexity and ambiguity of Luigi’s image as both child and man, which served in the long term to give ever new life to his cult.