The categories of shepherd and hireling are conventional elements of what may be called biblical and ecclesiastical pastoral, the legacy of John’s Gospel chapter 10 and the basis of a perennial polemical dichotomy. Preaching at Manchester in 1582 on a text redolent of arable husbandry (Luke 10 v. 2—‘the harvest truly is great but the labourers are few’) the vicar of Warrington strayed out of the cornfield into this pastoral vein: ‘Wee must understand that our Savior speaketh not of false Hierlings but of true Pastoures, not of those which beare an ydle name and title of Pastoures.’ John 10 had inspired a literary motif running back to Chaucer and Langland which, in what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘the old rustic language’ of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), revived in the May eclogue. ‘Piers’, a good (and, according to Spenser’s commentator ‘E.K.’, protestant) pastor rebukes ‘Palinode’ (a papist, or at least a traditional clerical type) for condoning the Maytime sports of the country people, and in the person of Palinode all hirelings:

Well is it seene, theyr sheepe bene not their owne,
That letten them runne at randon alone.
But they bene hyred for little pay
Of other, that caren as little as they,
What fallen the flocke, so they han the fleece,
And get all the gayne, paying but a peece.

The Victorian liberal Roman catholic historian lord Acton thought that the history of the world was one of the growth of liberty. By liberty, he meant national independence and freedom of speech and worship, the liberties of nineteenth-century liberalism: and in his conception of the past, he drew on the whig interpretation of English history as a conflict between a progressive tradition and a reactionary one: between churches, parties and classes representing either freedom or authority. The classic statement of the idea is the whig lord Macaulay’s in 1835:

Over the last half century, a number of sociologists on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to define the contemporary role of the ministry. Among the ideas which emerged from their work, three are relevant for our purpose here. The first was that a number of roles which well-intentioned if not always well-qualified clergy had tried to play in the past had been lost or were being lost to rival professions, few of whose members were in holy orders: doctors and psychiatrists, marriage guidance counsellors and social caseworkers, solicitors and schoolteachers. Sociologists detected a sense of what was called ‘role uncertainty’ among the English clergy, and a feeling that in future they should be trained in new skills such as counselling. Allied to this disquiet was another concern, that the administrative and organizational side of the minister’s work was threatening to swamp the more important traditional roles of priest, pastor, and preacher. A third suggestion was that in an increasingly secular society the status of the ministry was declining. For centuries, it was argued, the clergy had enjoyed a unique place in society because of their sacerdotal functions and special skills, but this was now changing: the value of the Christian ministry in the eyes of the laity was falling behind that of more ‘useful’ professions such as medicine and the law.

There are good reasons for historians’ preferring to write history proceeding from the earlier in time to the later. Why, after all, should they ignore time’s one-way arrow? On occasion, however, it is useful to reverse the normal procedure.

The history of North African Christianity, and especially the history of the tradition of dissent in it, is a case in point. The literature of the Donatist schism of the fourth and fifth centuries is comparatively rich. It is tempting, having crystallized an image of Donatism on the strength of it, to find the same image displayed again during the Vandal or the Byzantine period, periods for which our information is very much more fragmentary. The assumption that there is such a continuity may work in either or both of two ways. It may distort the real bearings of scanty material by the concern to fit it into the pattern; also, or alternatively, it may prevent the historian from noticing affinities with movements which seem at first sight to lack the features singled out as a qualification for entry into the pattern.

There is nothing new in the observation that cloth workers are frequently to be found in heterodox movements. The participation of weavers and other textile artisans in popular heresy on the continent has been amply demonstrated, extending from the popular response to Gregory VII’s denunciation of simony and married clergy, and the first stirrings of the heresy of the Free Spirit in the Rhineland, to Flagellants, Taborites, Storchites, and the militant Anabaptism of the sixteenth century. In England, Professor Dickens has noted the local Lollard tradition existing in the textile villages of south-west Kent where Edward III had settled John Kemp and his Flemish artisans in 1331, Cranbrook, Tenterden, and Benenden becoming notable centres of dyed broadcloth manufacture. In explaining the connection between textiles and the survival of Lollardy, Professor Dickens has stressed the mobility of the textile worker, while centres of rural industry had a relatively independent status in the medieval scene, which may well have led to relatively in dependent thinking. Regular mobility is best typified by the middleman who usually operated on a fairly local level, regional self-sufficiency in wool supply not really being broken down until the mid-sixteenth century.

With the promulgation of the five books of the Decretals by Gregory IX in 1234, that part of the law of the Church which regulated the Christian—Jewish relationship was to all intents and purposes authoritatively finalized. Christendom thenceforward had its norms: for episcopal legislators in the diocesan and provincial councils which carried universal law into the localities; for academics to analyse, expound, and pass on in their teaching and writing to form the outlook of successive generations of ecclesiastical leaders; for lay governments to accept or reject in detailing their policies towards Jews. The papacy had defined its position. Basic principles and their application in practice had been made clear in official tones. The law of the Latin Church had come of age, and with that, medieval ecclesiastical Jewry law had received formulation at the highest level. There had been nothing previously to match the authority of the Gregorian codex.

This paper will centre on the relationships of women to men and women to women which form the backbone of the history of the Benedictine convent of Le Murate in Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Le Murate started in a quiet way with one pious woman deciding to live virtuously by herself, but under no rule, in a house on the Ponte Rubaconte in 1390, and expanded to become perhaps the largest female convent in Florence in 1515, situated on Via Ghibellina, with 200 enclosed women and their servants living under the Rule of St Benedict. I want to examine the relations between these nuns and the outside world and look at how the male government of the outside world, secular and ecclesiastical, both at an individual level and in a more collective, formal way, tried to restrain and weaken this group of females, even to the point of forbidding them to earn their own livelihood. I would like to posit that religious life on a large scale and in a large city offered opportunities for the exercise of power by women not available to those of the female sex who stayed within the structure of the family and who were, therefore, in direct competition with men at every stage. Daughters, sisters, wives, and widows were legally and socially subject to their male relatives, in varying degrees. Nuns were not, and were permitted a measure of self-government. Just how irksome, worrying, and unacceptable to men it was for women to take their own decisions will become clear later. Barred by their sex from an active life in the hierarchy of the Church, and barred by their Order from an active life in the community, nevertheless in the Renaissance these enclosed Benedictine nuns devised strategies for obtaining access to power and money unparalleled by their secular counterparts. Le Murate exerted a strong attraction on women, both the powerful and famous and the more ordinary. Due to the increasing politicization of Florentine society, it secured, in addition, the patronage of the two most important Florentine political families during the period, the Medici and the Soderini. It was this seeming capacity to mobilize support from every sector of the population, regardless of sex, social group, income, political hue, or place of origin, which enabled the convent to prosper.

Although the great majority of first-generation western settlers in the crusader states must have come from rural areas, most of them lived in towns when they reached the levant. This presented no problem: there was plenty of space in the towns of Outremer, for the Franks either slaughtered their Moslem inhabitants or, more commonly, expelled them. Initially, therefore, the towns of Frankish Syria were inhabited only by Franks and native Christians. The crusaders did not pursue a similar policy in the countryside because they were conscious of the need to keep an adequate labour-force. Native Christian peasants presented no problem in any case, while the Moslem peasants, who were probably the more numerous, were left undisturbed by their new rulers.

In the history of the invasions which marked the end of the Roman empire in the west, the Armorican peninsula of northwestern Gaul holds a distinctive place. It witnessed the only substantial settlements by people whose homeland lay within the Roman empire, and who had been subject to Roman civil government for several centuries. These settlers crossed the English Channel probably between the late fourth and early seventh centuries. Establishing new communities in the sparsely populated areas of western Armorica, they brought with them their own language, social patterns and Christian organisation, and a strong sense of affinity with the Celts of Wales and Cornwall from whom they derived.’ Whilst the Britons were establishing themselves as Bretons, the Franks were asserting their hold over the remainder of northern Gaul. A few of them settled in the eastern approaches to the peninsula, in the Roman civitates of Rennes and Nantes. Culturally and politically, only this part of Armorica was attached to Merovingian Gaul, having as its kings the descendants of Clovis, and as its bishops members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy.

Conventional wisdom on the Nestorian controversy has long held that the dispute was over Christ rather than Mary, that the attribution of the title Theotokos (or God-bearer) to the Virgin became a battlefield not because the status of Mary was a lively issue but because of its implications for the doctrine of the Incarnation. Associated developments in Marian piety have been seen as a consequence of the approval of the title at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) rather than its cause. The confidence with which this has been repeated reflects, one may suspect, both a prejudice that Christology was a more worthy subject for debate than Mariology and a presumption that theological debate among bishops must be more important than developments in popular piety where lay women played a leading role. We may therefore be grateful to a series of recent writers who have called the conventional wisdom into question and argued that the main cause of the controversy, as it developed in Constantinople, was a development in Marian devotion during the preceding quarter century.

The very phrase ‘elite and popular religion’ is laden with potentially misleading polarities. In talking about elite religion or popular religion, are we contrasting notions of orthodoxy with heterodoxy or superstition, or the religion of the clergy with the religion of the laity, or the religion of the rich with the religion of the poor, or the religion of the polite and educated with the religion of the unwashed and unlettered, or the religion of the thinking individual over against the religion of the undifferentiated multitude, or the disciplined and liturgically-based official religion of the institutional Church with something more charismatic, less structured – or some permutation of any of the above?

The Christian missions to the Muslims in the Near East during the Central Middle Ages have already attracted much attention from historians, but as yet no real attempt has been made to analyse the relationship between those who advocated peaceful conversion by means of preaching and teaching, in other words a programme of missionary work, and the crusaders, who sought to defeat the enemies of the faith in battle. In the past, historians have tended to portray advocates of missions as opponents of the crusades and it has been suggested that by the late thirteenth century, as a result of a series of Christian defeats in the Near East. the missionary ideal had won a great deal of support and that this was one of the factors which contributed towards the decline of the crusading movement. The aim of this paper is to challenge this thesis. The first step towards this reappraisal will be to examine the attitude of certain prominent supporters of a policy of peaceful conversion towards the crusades.

As Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza has undergone political transformation from twenty-nine-year-long Israeli occupation to national authority rule, the fifty thousand Christians who make up two per cent of the total Palestinian population in these territories are also witness and party to this transformation. The Israeli-Palestinian accords which made possible this transformation came about, in part, because of the changes that have occurred in the attitudes of both Palestinians and Israelis since 1967 and 1948. But the present period is best characterized as one of transition. The peace process moves on slowly; the political system is in the creation stage; the economy and culture are evolving into new patterns; and society, as a consequence, is witnessing changes and developments in its structure and in its relationships. A transition period has its problems but also its challenges, promises, and hopes. The Palestinian Christians are not immune to the problems and yet they are hopeful, as are other Palestinians, that they will overcome the difficulties and problems. The distinction of religion for Palestinian Christians reflects itself in certain trends of thinking about and reacting to social, cultural, and political issues. A survey conducted in 1995 on a sample of all Palestinians, including a subsample of 340 Christians, shows that Palestinian Christians are in general agreement with other Palestinians on many of the issues of concern to all. Yet the responses given by the Christians point to a certain worldview: this is illustrated in the tables and comparisons presented here and which are all based on the results of the 1995 survey.

‘The medieval drive to association’. That phrase comes from a monograph by Susan Reynolds. It is to be found in a chapter on guilds and confraternities. And it is representative of the quasi-biological vocabulary to which historians of those institutions seem especially prone. ‘How appropriate is this talk of drives? What, in this context, is the force of ‘medieval’? My ultimate purpose is to address those questions from a Byzantine perspective; to ask in effect whether evidence of confraternities from the eastern Roman empire between approximately 400 and the Ottoman conquest will sustain talk of a Byzantine ‘drive to association’. The enquiry is, however, worth a preliminary approach on a broader front. This is partly because the historiography of European confraternities shapes the questions that must be put to the Byzantine sources. It is also because, unusually, a Byzantine perspective may illuminate problems arising from the western material. Finally it is because the comparative history of confraternities may, by implication, have a modest contribution to make to the larger question of the differences between eastern and western Christianity. Much energy has been expended on accounting for the ‘parting of the ways’ - less, perhaps, on measuring the distance between them.

This present study is a note added to what has already become an extensive bibliography concerning Origen’s doctrinal relation to Judaism in general, and the extent and significance of his awareness of Jewish exegetical procedures in particular. Among that list of previous studies on the theme, special reference ought to be made to the seminal work Origen and the Jews, by Professor Nicholas de Lange, which demonstrated Origen’s knowledge of rabbinic traditions in his exegeses. This present study will offer, firstly, a general contextual discussion of the question of Origen’s dependence on Jewish tradition, and, secondly, a small test-case analysis of his attitude to the Jewish question from observing his New Testament exegesis of those passages directly concerning the issue. From the latter some interesting biases will emerge that throw some light on his personal attitudes.

A Headline in the Daily Telegraph once read: ‘Vicar is “act of God” victim’. The article explained:

How children should be brought up is an everlasting question that vexed our forefathers just as much as ourselves. The most obvious difference between most of the thinking and writing that goes on about it today and that of the early modern period is that a largely secular approach has replaced a fundamentally and deeply religious one. So it is natural that the historian of this period should ask how and in what ways Protestantism changed things in this respect. What emerges in facing this issue, in a peculiarly acute form, is the common historical problem of relating prescription to practice. Patrick Collinson has remarked upon the ‘stark contradiction’ between ‘the austere severity of the conduct books and what little can be glimpsed of the real world outside these texts’. It is this contradiction that my paper addresses. I shall approach it as follows. First I will explore the conduct-book advice about parental duty and practice and about children’s obligations to their parents. This provides what we may call the Puritan way of upbringing. I shall relate this to some material from personal sources, like diaries and autobiographies, about what may actually have happened in the home. I will then turn to schooling, which, in its new scale and intensity, can be seen as a crucial social development in Elizabethan and Stuart England, fired in large part by the Protestant evangelizing impulse and its concomitant propaganda of social order. The burgeoning grammar schools, it will be argued, were the principal public instrument of a new and purposeful construction of masculinity.

The household has been a compelling metaphor for the Christian Church since biblical times. In his epistle to the Ephesians (3: 15), St Paul wrote of ‘the whole family’ of Christ’s followers ‘in heaven and earth’; in Galatians 6: 10, he equated the congregation of the elect with ‘the household of faith’. But these were merely variations on a more ancient theme. In the Old Testament too the language of kinship is deployed to describe the community of God’s chosen people, the Jews, while the idea of the family as the basic building block of human society and the state has its roots in the fourth century BCE, in Aristotle’s celebrated treatise on Politics. The interrelated tropes of the household as a microcosm and nursery of the Church and commonwealth continued to be invoked throughout the medieval period and they proliferated in the wake of the religious upheavals inaugurated by the Reformation. Expressions of these commonplaces abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. A long succession of Protestant ministers compared families with ‘seed-plots’ and ‘seminaries’ in which the tender plants of godly religion and good citizenship were nurtured, and with ‘[bee]hives, out of which swarm the materials for greater assemblies’.

The first half of a recently published book describes Waldensianism in the Cottian alps c. 1500. The author decides to pass over both the Waldensian preachers, whom I shall call ‘Brothers’, and their literature. He argues that there is insufficient trial evidence about the Brothers, and that in any case their ‘ascetic detachment from society’ would have made it unlikely that they would have had much influence among peasant Waldensians. Their books were only uncertainly Waldensian, he says, and there is little evidence of their actual use. In the resulting picture of Waldensianism as a popular, rural, lay movement asceticism plays no special part, though there is some question of a Waldensian sense of moral superiority.

The church has always experienced great difficulty in ministering to those dwelling in the remotest parts of its parishes. In this paper I shall look briefly at how the sixteenth century church coped with the problem, and attempt to answer two questions: what facilities for worship were available in outlying districts, and what was the impact of the reformation changes upon them?

Chapels abounded in England on the eve of the reformation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that wherever he lived a parishioner could, without an unreasonably arduous journey, reach a place where mass was sung or said. Quite apart from matters of spiritual and moral discipline, it was important for very practical reasons that he should be able to get quickly to church. Disaster could take hold in villages and townships if the entire population had set off on a long hike to a remote parish church and was unlikely to return for some hours. Moreover, the length of the hike determined the extent of the diversion of labour from other pursuits, notably in the fields at harvest time: indeed, this was to influence government rulings on the number of saints’ days to be observed by the laity.