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.

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.

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 However, the intended trajectory was superseded by the zeal of Chinese Christians and drastic changes in the national government of China.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.

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.

Hanc autem donationem feci eis pro salute memorati domini mei illustris Regis Henrici et pro salute anime mee et Berthe uxoris mee, et omnium antecessorum et successorum nostrorum. Thus briefly Rannulf de Glanville explains his foundation of Leiston abbey, and we have no reason to doubt his word. This motive is completely conventional and occurs in virtually every contemporary monastic foundation charter, which underlines its validity rather than detracting from it. Perhaps there is no need to look further; but Glanville’s is not the only voice to be heard on the foundation of Leiston abbey, and the founder does not answer all the questions we should like to ask. Did he perhaps have other motives? How did he go about choosing a religious order? To these questions we have to find our own answers. We can arrange facts in a suggestive series, and then ascribe more or less simple intentions which explain them. The shortcomings of such a method are obvious, though the results can be plausible and are often the only ones available. The unreliability of the answer is our penance for the temerity of the question.

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.

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.

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.

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.