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.

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.

Probably the oldest existing institution of its kind in present-day Dissent, though now but a shadow of its former self, is that which has long gone under the name of ‘The Exeter Assembly’. This body, composed of ministers only, and in the main of ministers of Presbyterian congregations in the county of Devon, first met at Tiverton on 17 and 18 March 1691, with fifteen ministers present. The inaugural meeting was followed by regular meetings held twice a year, usually in May and September. Save for three short breaks (1717-21, 1728-33, and 1753-63), the Assembly’s minutes, or for the years 1691-1717 a contemporary copy transcribed by the Assembly’s scribe and published in 1963 by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society, have been preserved for the whole period from 1691 to the present time.

Perhaps the most striking features of the history of Renaissance Venice are its highly commercialised economy and its precocious sense of secular state sovereignty. These characteristics owed much to the city’s independence of and isolation from rural and seigneurial influences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the high level of business activity and the confident awareness of statehood could also be related to the weakness of ecclesiastical influence in economic and political affairs. This was the case long before the spectacular conflict of 1606 when Venice was placed under the Interdict. The location of the Cathedral had always been a telling symbol of the place of the Church in Venetian life. It stood at San Pietro di Castello in an isolated area of the city. It is easy to overlook the fact that the centre of religious life, Saint Mark’s, was the Doge’s private chapel: a constant reminder of the intimate relationship between religious and political power, a material manifestation of the divine favour attached to Venice’s wealth and authority, both of which were unmistakably worldly.

This essay focuses on a surprisingly underexplored manuscript of the London puritan woodturner, Nehemiah Wallington. His ‘Coppies of profitable and comfortable letters’ anthologizes printed correspondence of martyrs and Reformed clergy alongside Wallington's own pious exchanges with ministers, neighbours and friends. Since Wallington's agonies of doubt about his religious estate are well known to early modern historians, his piety provides a particularly valuable lens through which to explore how clergymen and laypeople attempted to address the pastoral obstacle of religious uncertainty. This remarkable manuscript provides insights into clerical status within puritan spirituality, shedding light on the role of Protestant ministers as physicians of the soul, who conceived of themselves as indispensable experts in the diagnosis and cure of the spiritual afflictions of their lay devotees. Wallington and others, seeking resolutions for their doubts and scruples, affirmed the particular authority of these clergy as pastoral specialists. This essay presents evidence of sustained clericalism within Protestant piety, a tendency which acted in tension with a concurrent trend of spiritual individualism. Furthermore, it advances an argument for the significant role which epistolary counselling played in Protestant pastoral ministry to those afflicted by religious doubt.

The vision of the otherworld seen by St Fursa (c. 590 — c. 649) and recorded in a Vita and in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History achieved a high level of popularity in England and France during the thirteenth century, especially through its inclusion in preaching aids for the friars and the pastoralia (the various guides and manuals for priests on the care and confession of their congregation) produced before and after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. This essay will discuss how compilers of this material altered, rearranged and summarized Fursa’s vision, and what these changes reveal about shifting attitudes towards sanctity in the thirteenth century. In some of these redactions, Fursa’s sainthood was sidelined or ignored completely. In others, the point at which Fursa is described as a saint varies and the emphasis of the vision shifts from a reward for a saintly life to the purgation of a sinful priest. It will be suggested that these modifications to Fursa’s role in the vision were linked to the genre and audience of the redactions and to other thirteenth-century theological preoccupations, including debates over the sinfulness of usury and the emergence of the doctrine of purgatory.

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.

In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The prime minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.

The transformation of eremitic communities into Augustinian priories was a notable feature of early Augustinian growth; during the twelfth century no less than about 50 houses of the order began in this way. The popularity of the eremitic way of life had increased considerably during the eleventh century and, once established, a hermit often inspired others to join him, thus becoming the unwitting instigator of a religious group which needed formal organization. The Rule of St. Augustine was the constitution most frequently adopted in these circumstances. This was because it provided a general framework for community life rather than a set of detailed instructions and could therefore be assimilated more easily by an established group.

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.

Egeria’s account of her journey to the holy places has been an invaluable source for study of many aspects of fourth-century Christianity, from liturgy and topography to clerical practice. Dr David Hunt, in his analysis elsewhere in this volume, discusses the part played by monks in Egeria’s ‘scriptural vision’. This paper looks at her account of worship in Jerusalem, and particularly at those worshippers who were neither ordained clergy nor committed to life as monks or nuns, whom we can call the ‘laity’ Egeria herself distinguishes between these groups, and is concerned to differentiate the parts played by each in worship. We shall consider here how much can be discovered about the composition, organization, and spirituality of these lay people, how Egeria herself contributed to the account, and how much is special to Jerusalem.

This article explores the role of Chinese Christian women in the internationalization of Chinese education in the early twentieth Century. In particular, it examines the changing relationship between Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary Louise Barnes, and Zeng Baosun, the great granddaughter of Zeng Guofan. Zeng Baosun was born in 1893 in Changsha, educated at the CMS's Mary Vaughan School in Hangzhou, and became the first Chinese woman to graduate from the University of London, before returning to China to establish a Christian school for girls in Changsha (Yifang) in 1918. Although an extraordinary example because of her elite family background, Zeng's story highlights how Chinese women used the networks to which their Christian education exposed them on a local, national and international scale to play an important role in the exchange of educational ideas between China and the West during the early twentieth century. The story of the relationship between Zeng and Barnes also reveals the changing power dynamics between foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians in the process of indigenizing the church in China: the roles of teacher and pupil were reversed upon their return to Changsha, with Zeng serving as headmistress of her own school and Barnes as a teacher.

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.

THE main sources for the boy bishop’s feast are available in print. These include sections in ceremonial- and service-books, cathedral statutes, councils’ decrees, compotus, that is, accounts of the gifts and offerings of money the boy bishop received, as well as his expenses, household books that include registrations of the expenses for the annual entertainment of the boy bishop and his retinue, as well as two sermons the boy bishop delivered. Chambers, in his Medieval Stage, first published in 1903, dedicated a detailed description to the feast. A short reference to the feast appears in most research works on medieval schools and a number of articles have also been published on the subject. I’ll thus refer to the origins of the feast, but describe it only briefly, disregarding variations between places, and then turn to the subject of my paper: the boy bishop’s feast, as reflecting the image of childhood, attitudes towards childhood, and medieval educational conceptions. These are expressed in the feast itself and more clearly in the sermons written by adults to be delivered by the boy bishop.

The Revolution of 1688 began for the clergy of the Church of England an era of grave crisis. It was not merely that the deposition of James II had posed for many of them a critical question of conscience. More serious were the effects of the Toleration Act of 1689 which quickly showed themselves in diminished attendances at church, and in a marked decline in the authority and status of the parish priest. By its literal provisions the act permitted dissenters a bare liberty to worship in their own way; but, as interpreted by successive administrations and by the great majority of the laity, it effected an ecclesiastical revolution. Although various statutes required all Englishmen to attend their parish-church each Sunday, and though the act merely permitted them to go to a meeting-house instead, it was widely held after 1689 that church-attendance was voluntary. The ecclesiastical courts continued to exercise their traditional jurisdiction in matrimonial, probate, and faculty causes, and over the clergy; but their coercive authority over the morals and religious duties of the laity became virtually impossible to enforce.

Early medieval thinkers often conceived of God in legal terms, especially when they interpreted contemporary disasters as God's ‘just judgement’. Modern scholars have emphasized the importance of these ideas for motivating early medieval reform and legislation and for interpreting history itself. This article explores how these ideas were used in Carolingian legislation and history writing and argues that God's judgement was not as straightforward a theme as it first appears. God's judgement, for example, was not nearly as important for Carolingian historians as it had been for their predecessors. Similarly, in both legal and historical texts, there was great variety in how God's judgement or punishment was expressed, both in how that punishment fell and on whom (whether on the audience or on their enemies). Across these works, however, it is clear that God's judgement was almost never referred to apart from his continuing mercy and help towards to the audiences of these texts. This shows the importance of the various aspects of God's character for early medieval churches and their attitudes to law and history.

When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1661, almost the last item to be added was the General Thanksgiving. ‘On Saturday, 14 December’ (only a week before the Book was signed), ‘between the hours of 8 and 10 a.m., the Reverend Father the Lord Bishop of Norwich [Edward Reynolds] introduced and delivered into the hands of the Lord President a form of a certain prayer conceived by him at another time concerning thanks to God for general mercies to be used publicly.’ So the Proceedings of the Upper House of Convocation, which then tail off with the tantalizing words: ‘After this prayer had been read aloud and some discussion held thereon, the Reverend Father, etc.’ The normal procedure in 1661 for additions to the Prayer Book, as opposed to alterations, was to entrust their compilation to a committee whose chairman duly introduced the new form, when completed, into the House of Bishops. There is, however, no trace of such a committee’s being appointed to devise a general thanksgiving. By 14 December the section of the manuscript text headed Thanksgivings was already written out in full, and no space was left for further additions. Reynolds would seem to have acted on his own initiative.

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.

Of all the signs and wonders, real or imaginary, in the history of Christianity one of the most celebrated is the ‘Vision of Constantine’ – a vision or dream in which Constantine, meditating an attack on his rival Maxentius in AD 312, was instructed to entrust his fortunes to the Christian God and the sign of the cross, the experience which, supposedly, converted the emperor to the Christian faith.

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.