During the 1370s Wyclif wrote to defend a monarchy which made extensive use of bishops and other clergy in the royal administration and yet was faced with aristocratic factions encouraged by bishops like Wykeham and Courtenay who espoused papal supremacy, if not out of conviction, at least as a very convenient weapon to support their independence against royal absolutism. At first sight Wyclifs attempts to define the right relationship between royal and episcopal, temporal and spiritual, power seem as confused as the contemporary political situation. His works contain such a wide range of theories from orthodox two swords dualism to a radical rejection of ecclesiastical authority well beyond that of Marsilius and Ockham that it seems as if his only interest was in collecting every anti-hierocratic idea available for use against the papacy. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a much more coherent view of episcopal power can be detected beneath his tirades if it is appreciated that his continual demand for a great reform, a reformatio regni et ecclesiae, is inseparably linked to his understanding of the history of the Christian Church, and that in this way Wyclif anticipates Montesquieu in requiring a time factor as a necessary ingredient in constitutional arrangements.

When Anglican missionaries helped to constitute the Chinese Anglican Church (Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui) in 1912, they had a particular expectation of how the church would one day become self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating. The first constitution crafted by missionary bishops presupposed an infant church that would require the step-by-step guidance of its parent association. However, the intended trajectory was superseded by the zeal of Chinese Christians and drastic changes in the national government of China. The constitutional basis of the Chinese Anglican Church had to be restructured fundamentally again and again due to political upheaval in republican China, the Japanese occupation and the Communist revolution. This article explores the difficulties of crafting and implementing church constitutions in China in the first half of the turbulent twentieth century. Focusing on the South China diocese, wider questions are posed about the formation of canon law in an age of extremes.

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.

The coronation of Henry II’s eldest son, the younger Henry, in Westminster Abbey on 14 June 1170 was an event of the highest significance. The ceremony was performed by Roger, archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, in the presence of Henry II, but in the absence, and against the will, of the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and in defiance of the commands of the pope, Alexander III. The coronation itself has an intrinsic interest: the practice of crowning an heir in his father’s lifetime, though customary in France, and occurring at times in the German and Byzantine empires, was unusual in England.

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.

This article explores the tension between missionary hopes for mass conversion through Christian education and the reality of operating mission schools in one colonial context: Hong Kong. Riding on the wave of British imperial expansion, George Smith, the first bishop of the diocese of Victoria, had a vision for mission schooling in colonial Hong Kong. In 1851, Smith established St Paul's College as an Anglo-Chinese missionary institution to educate, equip and send out Chinese young people who would subsequently participate in mission work before evangelizing the whole of China. However, Smith's vision failed to take institutional form as the college encountered operational difficulties and graduates opted for more lucrative employment instead of church work. Moreover, the colonial government moved from a laissez-faire to a more hands-on approach in supervising schools. The bishops of Victoria were compelled to reshape their schools towards more sustainable institutional forms while making compromises regarding their vision for Christian education.

There is little direct evidence about the education of girls in classical times and Late Antiquity. Our conception of what provision was available has to be based chiefly on an examination of the material relating to the education of adult women and to the early training of little girls of four or five years of age. For the second half of the fourth century we are fortunate in possessing the testimony of three Christian writers on the subject of the education of mature women: Palladius, Gerontius of Jerusalem, and Jerome. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of their limitations. All three writers deal with women of a narrow social class, members of the wealthy Roman aristocracy, who were attempting to live a disciplined and austere monastic life, the majority of them against the incongruous background of their family mansions on the Aventine Hill, which was then a fashionable residential district. They were perhaps in the tradition of those earlier learned and cultivated aristocratic Roman ladies, recalled by Cicero, and exemplified by the daughter of his friend Atticus, who provided her with a tutor even after her marriage, and by Hortensia, the daughter of the orator Hortensius, who was trained by her father in public speaking, and who even made a speech in the Forum against a tax assessment. For information about the early training of little girls in fourth-century Rome we are indebted to the letters of Jerome, but this evidence, as we shall see, has certain limitations.

Two difficulties confront us when we examine the evidence provided by our three Christian writers: in the first place, none of them describes the educational process by which these ladies achieved so high a degree of cultivation and learning; secondly, the advice which Jerome gives about the training and education of little girls is intended for child oblates, consecrated to God even before their birth, and is, in any case, suspect, because much of it has been culled from an earlier writer.

A tradition existed, and perpetuated itself, amongst the relatively humble Congregationalists of Cambridgeshire that Francis Holcroft, their evangelist, was working on old-established foundations when he gathered in his church in the 1650s and 1660s. Calamy said that he ‘fell in with the Old Brownists’. Robert Browne, the arch-separatist, spent nine years evangelising in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, after taking his degree in 1572-3 and spending a little while in the model puritan household of Richard Greenham, rector of Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, before leaving for the continent in 1581. The Brownists were not the only separatists who might have existed in the diocese of Ely in the late sixteenth century; the Family of Love is known to have taken firm root there, and a portion of the Letter Book of bishop Cox of Ely, is taken up with the examination of nearly seventy of its adherents in October, 1580.

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.

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.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with an American Roman Catholic Archbishop with a substantial theological background, in the course of which I asked him to be frank about his impression of the American Episcopal Church. His reply was memorable: They appear not to want to say no to anything.’ This encapsulates the inherent difficulty in the idea of ‘inclusiveness’, or in the much-claimed virtue of ‘comprehensiveness’ which Anglicans and Episcopalians are wont to make. Two problems immediately present themselves. The first is that, without difficulty one can suggest views or actions of which it would be impossible for a church to be inclusive, at least with any semblance of loyalty to the New Testament. Then, secondly, the inclusion of disputed actions, such as the ordination of gay persons, presents a different order of difficulty from inclusiveness in relation to disputed beliefs. Churches characteristically have rules about who may, or may not be ordained into a representative ministry. Ordinands are ‘tried and examined’. But tolerance of diversity of belief is one thing: tolerance of diversity of practice another, as the churches of the Anglican Communion discovered when they simultaneously ordained women to the priesthood, but extended tolerance to the beliefs of those who asserted that the priesthood was reserved to males. The illogicality of that position is exposed by the discovery that those being received into the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church were publicly required to state that they accepted the ministry of the Church of England – a higher requirement than was imposed on newly ordained Anglican clergy. On the other hand, it was argued at the time, and the argument has force, that an acknowledged state of incoherence was preferable to overt schism.

From its inception, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) has been expressly areligious, aiming to promote the health of the American people during specific crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as responding to endemic issues such as heart disease, opioid addiction and obesity. However, some Christian nationalists perceive this areligious advocacy of science as a challenge to the moral authority of Christianity and the Bible. Protests against public health guidelines have utilized religious language to defend what participants see as their civil and God-given rights, deepening the divide between science and religion. Yet historically, public health advocates have built relationships with religious community leaders and employed educational campaigns to bridge this gap. Drawing on an analysis of USPHS history, Christian nationalist ideology and recent COVID-19 protests, this article argues that public health has historically used specific strategies to ensure a more favourable response and compliance, and makes the case that it should do so again.

Town and countryside are contrasting, even opposed ideas: one of those doublets which have dominated European thought since antiquity. Our vocabulary of ‘politics’ and ‘civilization’ bears ample testimony to the deep hold that the prejudices of the townsmen of antiquity have established over our language and our thinking. Sometimes, even in antiquity, those prejudices would be turned on their head: the town, the exclusive milieu of culture, refinement and rational human behaviour, could become, as for instance in the eyes of a Jewish rabbi of the third century the seat of iniquity, set up to extort and to oppress. Whatever the attitude one took to the town, the dichotomy of town and countryside became almost a category in the Kantian sense in terms of which modern Europeans have come to perceive the world around them. With Max Weber it became a fundamental category of sociological understanding, with Rostovtzeff of historical analysis, especially of the ancient world in its decline; and in the hands of William Frend—the Rostovtzeff of ecclesiastical history—it showed its power to illuminate, even to transform, the study of ancient heresy and schism. ‘The church in town and countryside’ might be thought to extend the franchise of a notion which has already had too wide and at times, as some would have it, perhaps even a baleful, influence. But both the value of the notion of town and country as an interpretative tool for the ecclesiastical historian, and its limitations, its liability to obscure and to distort, will, I hope, become clearer in the course of discussion.

‘Civilization’ was a major keyword in the Italian Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Indeed Catholic Christian civilization was seen as synonymous with true civilization itself insofar as the post-classical era was concerned. The concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was closely allied to that of cristianità, as distinct from cristianesimo (Christianity). The terms cristianità and chrétienté, like English ‘Christendom’, had originally had primarily geographical connotations, but in post-Revolutionary Catholic thought they acquired connotations of a Christian order of society under the leadership of the Church, the evils of the modern world being presented as consequences of its breakdown. The allied discourse on ‘Christian civilization’ itself in the Italian Catholic world, as in the French one, was in large measure reactionary in character, associated with Counter-Revolutionary ideology and with opposition to liberalism. It asserted that a return of society to the Church was a precondition of social order. Thus the myth of a lost universal order offered a paradigm for the future.

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.

Religion in Yugoslavia is a divisive, not a unifying force. The country is a federation of republics inhabited by six different nationalities which are historically identified with three great religious confessions, catholicism, orthodoxy, and islam. The pattern is complex and dense, the assumptions and reflex actions of the human beings who make up these communities are deeply rooted in centuries of history, and nationalism and religion are proving tougher than ideology. My paper therefore must start by describing this mixture, this macédoine, if one may borrow a culinary expression which itself derives from one of the component territories of these lands.

Race and recreation are two contemporary social problems which historically have had a close connection with religion. Religion has both sanctioned racial discrimination and provided the inspiration to overcome it. It has both opposed and encouraged particular forms of popular recreation. Sociologists and social historians are increasingly investigating the various combinations of these 3 Rs - religion, race, recreation. A great deal of work has been done on the relations between religion and race, quite a lot on race and recreation, especially in the form of sport, and a beginning has been made on religion and recreation. To my knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to bring these three elements together.

Autobiography and statistics appear at first sight to be incompatible sources in any study of religious motivation. The former rarely hint at the sociological factors governing religious commitment. The latter are difficult to interpret in terms of individual conviction. Yet the evangelical revival produced an abundance of both. John Wesley in the Arminian Magazine set a fashion which was followed by evangelicals of every brand who published spiritual autobiographies to edify the faithful. Wesleyan methodism also kept careful membership statistics on which scholars like A. D. Gilbert can base a sociological explanation of the rise and fall of denominational religion. Placed side by side the inward and outward evidence gave the impression that statistical success, in terms of ever increasing membership, depended on intense individual conviction in preacher and convert. The Liverpool minutes of 1820 are but the Wesleyan example of a general pattern. Nevertheless this recipe did not guarantee success. It would seem that the challenge to the individual conscience needed to be combined with a strong appeal to a sense of group or class solidarity for any lasting impression to be made. Unfortunately the places where evangelical religion was successful do not always coincide with available autobiographical sources.

It would seem that in the assessment of the forces prevalent on the eve of the Reformation too little attention has been paid to the determined steps which a number of cardinals initiated in 1511 when they took it upon themselves to convoke a general council at Pisa. The cardinals and the ensuing council have never had a good press. In fact there seems a unanimous condemnation of their initiative: they were labelled schismatics paradoxically because they tried to prevent a schism; they had proved themselves, so it was alleged, as mere instruments of French expansionist policy and had acted against the interests of papacy and Church prompted as they were by personal considerations and animosity against Julius II. It seems almost ‘heretical’ to question this general verdict.