On 14 February 1608, William Crashaw, who three years earlier had been vicar of St John’s Church in Beverley, preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cross. He took as his text a verse from Jeremiah—‘We would have cured Babel but she would not be healed; let us forsake her, and go every one to his own country.’ Yet Crashaw was no schismatic. His own career, beginning with his fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, had always been within the mainstream of the Established Church. In his will he set out the positions he had held as ‘the unworthy and unprofitable servant of God’. He had been ‘Preacher of God’s word first at Bridlington then at Beverley in Yorkshire. Afterwards at the Temple since then pastor of the Church at Agnes Burton in the diocese of York, now Pastor of that too great parish of White Chapel in the suburbs of London.’ There was much else besides; he had been one of the official editors of William Perkins, a writer of numerous works, whose sermons and catechisms were much sought after, one of the founders and shareholders in the New Virginia Company, with good connections at Court. At Paul’s Cross Crashaw condemned Brownists ‘who forsake our Church, and cut off themselves and separate themselves to a faction, and fashion, or as they call it, into a covenant or communion of their own devising’, just as much as those who ‘be such as refuse public places in the Church, and commonwealth, and retire themselves into private and discontented courses and will not be employed for the public’. In common with mainstream puritans he deeply disapproved of schismatics and was not above attacking them with the same vehemence he normally reserved for papists. It is ‘unthankful’ he wrote, to desert our Church. ‘There is indeed a true ministry of the word amongst us… We have the word truly preached.’ When Crashaw referred to the forsaking of Babel he had something very different in mind, for the solution this early seventeenth-century cleric offered concerned the Church’s ministry.

On 17 September 1523 a very wealthy widow, Dame Joan Thurscross, made her will in Hull. Her benefactions included £30 for new vestments to her parish church of St Mary’s, £35 to hire a priest for seven years to sing for her soul, the souls of her three husbands, of her parents, and of her son, £4 to the building works at the White Friars’, £12 for a priest to perform an obit in St Leonard’s convent in Grimsby, where she had been born, small presents to her god-daughter and other nuns at Sixhills, £20 for mending the causeway between Beverley and Anlaby, thirteen white gowns for thirteen poor women, and silver masers or standing pieces for Sixhills Nunnery, Kirkstall Abbey, and the Charterhouse of Hull. It is impossible to read this very individual will and not recognize the bequests, however conventional in themselves, as being the carefully thought out intentions of the testatrix. With its emphasis upon Masses for the dead and stress on die necessity of good works it furnishes a poignant example of late medieval piety.

Popular and elite are imprecise terms, but it may be possible to give them a closer definition by relating them to categories in the work of John Henry Newman. In 1877, Newman was growing old. He was republishing his Anglican writings, both to preserve what they contained of value and to draw what poison remained. A particular difficulty attached to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published forty years before, in 1837, which classically defined the peculiar merit of the Church of England as occupying a middle way or via media between Romanism and popular Protestantism. The work contained some sharp attacks on Rome, which Newman had retracted even before his Roman conversion. There remained, however, a particular matter which had long been an obstacle to his submission to Rome, his conviction that the honours which Roman Catholics paid to the Virgin and saints derogated from the unique worship due to Christ, which Newman combined with a fastidious distaste for the more ‘unmanly’ and sentimental or sugary aspects of modern Catholic devotion.

One day early in the thirteenth century a wandering scholar broke his journey at the Benedictine monastery of Prüfening near Regensburg in Bavaria. Of the books this scholar was carrying, one Liebhard, a monk of the monastery, was especially fascinated by a copy of Peter the Chanter’s Distinctiones Abel, a dictionary of the Bible for the preacher’s use and a prominent example of the recently developed literary genre of biblical distinctiones. Unfortunately, soon afterwards the scholar resumed his interrupted journey, and was not willing to leave the book behind at Prüfening, so Liebhard was unable to copy the full text but could only take down excerpts, which he later completed with texts from other sources. The result, which he called Horreum formicae (the ant’s harvest), still extant in at least two manuscripts, combines the approach of the masters of the Parisian schools with that of monastic theology. It is, therefore, an excellent example of a process ongoing throughout the whole twelfth century: the transfer of knowledge from the centres of learning in the north of France (Laon, Chartres, Paris) and of Italy (Bologna) towards the periphery of medieval Europe, resulting in the reception and critical discussion of new concepts and ideas, a process most readily visible in the distribution of books. This paper offers a preliminary sketch of this process with special emphasis on medieval Bavaria and Austria.

This paper offers three considerations: a) the Jewish ascetical tradition in the life of Jesus and the primitive Gospel tradition; b) the Alexandrian system offered by Clement and Origen, which through developing monasticism did so much to set the tone of ascetical doctrine throughout the ancient Christian world; and c) what relation, if any, survived between Jesus and his great Alexandrian disciples in this matter, after the lapse of a century and a half. It is thus a study in continuity and discontinuity.

English monasticism survived the Reformation only in exile. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many monks came to England as pastors to the Catholic community (indeed all members of the English Benedictine Congregation, revived at the beginning of the seventeenth century, took an oath promising to work in England after ordination), but they lived alone or in small groups and except during the early Stuart period there were no organised religious communities in England which could properly be called monastic. This state of affairs was to change dramatically in the years of the French Revolution when the English communities on the continent were repatriated and a number of French religious made their way to England as émigrés. The English communities (including those now represented by the abbeys of Ampleforth in Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset, formerly at Dieulouard in Lorraine and Douai in Flanders respectively) managed to settle in England without too much opposition. These monks had been trained for circumspect behaviour on the mission and were not noticeably ‘monastic’ in either appearance or behaviour; the complete Benedictine habit was not used at Downside, for example, until the late 1840s and working in parishes away from their monasteries remained the normal expectation of most English Benedictine monks until well into the present century. The same could not be said of the community of Saint Susan at Lulworth in Dorset which provided between the years 1794 and 1817 the setting for the first experiment in fully observant monastic life in England for two hundred and fifty years.

This paper examines the transformation of a Protestant Geneva Bible into a widely used Catholic one. This surprising metamorphosis occurred in two stages: first, the publication in Paris in 1566 of a French Bible for Catholics by René Benoist, a member of the Paris Faculty of Theology; second, the marketing of this Bible as a product of the Louvain Faculty of Theology by the famous Antwerp printer, Christopher Plantin. While the relationship between the Paris and Antwerp editions is known to French specialists, the origin of the Antwerp edition has been (understandably) misdescribed in several English reference works. The relationship between the two editions seems worth rehearsing here for it touches on more general issues of Catholic attitudes towards vernacular Scripture, the migration of texts across confessional lines, and the power of printers.

At some time in the 1320s, the Sienese master Simone Martini painted an altar-piece celebrating the Hermit friar Agostino Novello. Agostino, who had died at the convent of San Leonardo al Lago, near Siena, in 1309, is shown surrounded by illustrations of four of his posthumous miracles (see plates 1 and 2, pp. 198 and 200, below). Of these, three were performed on behalf of children. The exception, at upper right, shows the deliverance of a knight who, riding in a desolate mountainous landscape, has fallen beneath his horse. Top left, we see the rescue of a child from mauling by what is presumably a wolf. Below, a child falls into the street from a wooden balcony when one of its slats gives way; not only does he suffer no injury from the fall, but Agostino seizes the falling slat in mid-air and prevents it from hurting him. Bottom right, an infant suffers head injuries when he falls from his cradle, but his aunt kneels to make a vow to Agostino, and in the lower register we see the fulfilment of the vow: robed as a little Augustinian friar and carrying a taper, the child is carried by his nurse to give thanks, followed by his mother and his aunt, who carries another taper.

Perhaps our most learned and knowledgeable informant concerning both the heretics and their persecutors is the great inquisitor, hagiographer and Dominican historian Bernard Gui (1261–1331), who has been immortalized as the personification of evil by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. In his manual for inquisitors, Gui issued the following caveat concerning the conduct of inquiries into heresy:

One of the ways in which medieval Christians thought about the links between this life and the afterlife was by telling ghost stories – a topic which has attracted the attention of several historians. In these stories, a dead person often appears to a living relative or friend and asks them to give alms or to perform other good works on their behalf, in order to speed up their passage to heaven. The dead person usually appears spontaneously, although sometimes this occurs after relatives have said prayers for them. This paper, however, will examine a group of stories about less spontaneous apparitions. These are stories in which two people agree that whichever of them dies first will come back and tell the other about the afterlife. They have sometimes been mentioned in studies of medieval ghost stories, but they have not been examined in their own right.

Viewers of the recent television series ‘The Voyage of Charles Darwin’ must have been amused at the portrayal of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, at the famous meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, at which Wilberforce condemned the evolutionary doctrine of Darwin’s Origin of Species. This Wilberforce is the vaudeville villain of the Victorian stage, saturnine and leering in his initial triumph, and with more than the suggestion of horns and tail, as he stalks off scowling darkly after his discomfiture by T. H. Huxley. In the vulgar mythology of the television screen, Huxley and Wilberforce are not so much personalities as the warring embodiments of rival moralities, Huxley, the archangel Michael of enlightenment, knowledge, and the disinterested pursuit of truth; Wilberforce, the dark defender of the failing forces of authority, bigotry and superstition. The picture has the stark contrast and attractive simplicity of traditional legend. As a debate, it dramatizes a great conflict of principle. With its Victorian setting, only the stock conventions of melodrama can do it justice, and so it lives on in the popular mind as the best known symbol of the nineteenth century conflict of science and religion.

In the seventh century Christians in the Latin West turned with a novel concern to the issues of death and the afterlife. This is a period that has been characterized as marking the ‘rise of the other world’, a development that was rooted in a belief in the imminence of Doomsday and an increasing preoccupation with sinfulness. This shift to a more metaphysical mentality can be noticed in a number of areas ranging from changes in burial and liturgical practices to literary works and the rise in power of the monasteries as intercessory places of prayer.

When asked to address the issue of the afterlife in African Christianity, my immediate reaction was to doubt whether there is much stress on the afterlife in contemporary African Christianity. This brought the response: ‘Well, deal with that; a Christianity from which the afterlife has been displaced.’ What follows is an attempt to do just that.

There are problems with this topic. Zinzendorf himself would certainly have considered it a non-subject, as he would certainly have regarded the counsel of his contemporary Wesley to ‘gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can’ as unspeakably bourgeois, an adjective I have no recollection of Wesley’s applying to himself. The severer kind of economic historian might also regard what I have to say as a non-treatment of a non-subject, for I cannot present you with a profit-and-loss account of Zinzendorf’s transactions; I know no more about his income than he did, which was not very much; and although I shall refer later to the successive valuations of Zinzendorf’s property which that remarkable scholar Otto Uttendürfer dredged up from the Herrnhut archives sixty years ago, I attach no great importance to them. They seem to me the same kind of artificial enterprise as the annual revaluations for borrowing purposes which were made of the empty Centre Point building in its earlier years. Moreover, the straightforward introduction to the theme which I enjoyed not long ago is not readily available to historians in the West. It is to work first in the archive of Francke’s Orphan House at Halle, and then move on to that of the Renewed Church of the United Brethren at Herrnhut. Francke’s Orphan House, one of the biggest buildings of eighteenth-century Europe, has the Thatcherite principle of cost-effectiveness written all over it, and is clearly based on the Prussian barracks. The whole community at Herrnhut combines baroque lavishness with simplicity in a way not easily put into words, but most movingly experienced in the Grosse Saal in which the Brethren now hold their services. A visit to the Moravian settlement at Zeyst in the Netherlands, however, may sufficiently illustrate the point.

A frequent criticism of the Society of Jesus, and one which Martin Grene, the Jesuit apologist whose An Account of the Jesuites Life and Doctrine was published in 1661, was especially eager to refute, was the possession of immense wealth. Grene’s rebuttal began with a distinction between an individual Jesuit and a Jesuit institution. The former was forbidden to accept any financial compensation for his apostolic services. What he did, he did freely. Grene stressed that the work was done by the Society gratuitously and simply for the love of God. The Jesuits sought no reward but relied on the providence of God ‘who exciteth devout people to supply their [the Jesuits’] necessity out of pure charity’. The alms of the faithful supported the Society and, through its dependence on charity, the Society hoped to avoid all semblance of avarice and simony.

The papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae of 1850 set up a hierarchy of bishops with ordinary power to replace the vicars apostolic who had ruled the catholic church in England since 1688. It stated explicitly that the new bishops were to have all the necessary powers to rule their dioceses in the same way as titular bishops elsewhere, and it spoke clearly about the resumption of the ‘common law of the church’ in England. Yet the commitment of the Roman authorities to a fully independent hierarchy was not wholehearted. The church in England was to remain under the aegis of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda), whose normal brief was to look after missionary territories not stable enough to have properly constituted hierarchies. According to the bull, the English bishops were to send regular reports on the state of their dioceses to Rome, and were to be diligent in informing Propaganda ‘of everything which they shall think profitable for the spiritual good of their flocks’.

In his excellent study of medieval Italian society, Hyde makes a thought-provoking comparison of ‘the Italians of the age of Dante’ with the humanists of a later generation. The former he sees as distinguished by ‘a sense of continuity with the past and with other parts of the Catholic world’ from the humanists who ‘concentrated on what was close at hand, digging deep rather than spreading wide, so that their world revolved around central Italy.’ It is not my intention here to dispute this assertion, but to use it to stimulate reflection on the nature of Italian self-awareness in the early renaissance period, in the light of a further contrast between Hyde’s two ages which he does not himself emphasise.

Bishop Casartelli of Salford wrote in his diary for 13 October 1906, ‘Deo Grattas! The magnificent Catholic Demonstration … organised by our new Catholic Federation, has been a wonderful success … 40,000 or more from every part of the Diocese. Extraordinary enthusiasm.’ His joy was understandable, for the Catholic Federation had been founded only a few months before. The aim had been to start something altogether different from the many specific Catholic societies already in existence. It was to be a

In 1232 Germanus II (1223-40), the Nicaean Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Pope Gregory IX and to the cardinals of the Roman Church requesting discussions on the reformation of peace between the Greek and Roman Churches. In response to this request the Pope sent two English Franciscans and two French Dominicans, at least one of them proficient in Greek, as his representatives to Nicaea. After their return the friars presented a detailed account of the mission to the Pope, which was copied into the Liber Censuum. The extant documentation of the mission allows us to examine the ideas of the Greeks and Latins about unity and schism in the Church. And it shows us that there was no prospect of a union of the Churches because each had a fundamentally different conception of the nature of ecclesiastical authority.