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’.

This study discusses relations between the Church and the emperor in the last two centuries of the Byzantine empire's existence, in the Palaiologan period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries). It questions the accepted view that the Church rose in importance and status as imperial power and authority declined. According to this view, expressed by Steven Runciman and accepted by historians since, a strong Church was the legacy of the Byzantine empire to the Ottomans. In this article the ceremonies of the late Byzantine court, as represented by the mid-fourteenth-century text of Pseudo-Kodinos, are examined for indications of continuity in the emperor's dominant role in the Church in this later period. Gilbert Dagron's contrary perspective is considered. It is then argued that the writings of two late Byzantine churchmen, Symeon of Thessalonike and Makarios of Antioch, who insist on a lesser role for the emperor in the selection and the making of a patriarch, provide evidence for the contemporary performance of the promotion of a patriarch as described by Pseudo-Kodinos. While the two churchmen tried to show that the emperor was subject to the Church, practice shows something different.

The Annual Letters of the college of the English Jesuits at St Omer record the visit to the college in 1608 of the town’s fourth bishop, the Franciscan Jacques de Blaze. He was taken on a tour of inspection. In a frequently-quoted passage the Letters recall that he was impressed by all that he saw, ‘but most of all by a certain little house, equipped with a printing press and all the accessories of printing, which we have lately fitted up, and very handsomely too’. In 1660, apparently with the assistance of the college press, Thomas Geubels published the Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Iesu by a former provincial superior of the English Jesuits, Fr Henry More. According to More’s account Robert Persons had established the printing house to produce books which might ‘both feed piety, and expose the ravings of heretics’.

The penitentials in use in the frankish lands in the eighth and ninth centuries were designed as handbooks to aid the priest in the administration of private or secret penance, being at their most simple, tabulations of various misdemeanours associated with particular vices stipulating the penances to be performed.

In the early centuries of the Christian church however, penance seems to have been performed in public, involving both confession and an act of contrition before the assembled congregation. It was, moreover, then undergone only in cases of severe crimes, usually one of three capital sins of homicide, perjury and adultery. The ritual of penance is described fully by Basil the Great, from whom we also learn that the physical act of the laying on of hands by the bishop was the outward sign of reconciliation. This severe form of penance was gradually mitigated and its rarity lessened as it became associated with the increasingly more common practice of death-bed confession and penance, as well as with the lenten period of fasting and contrition, both of which practices are particularly evident in the church in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries. Both the bishop and, in the case of the absence of the bishop, the priest, were now empowered to reconcile the penitent.

Uniformity was at the heart of the Carolingian reforms, and it is apparent more than anywhere else in the liturgical reforms pursued by the Carolingians. It is logical to assume that the early Carolingian reformers’ stress on liturgical uniformity was, at least in part, a reaction to the diversity of Merovingian practice. This paper offers some preliminary observations on liturgical diversity and attitudes towards unified liturgical practices in Merovingian Gaul.

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.

Such is the opening sentence of the tract known in the only surviving manuscript as Tractatus de Regibus. The text owes much of its material to Wyclif’s De Officio Regis, though the prologue does not derive from this source, and is undoubtedly of lollard origin; its date cannot be later than the early fifteenth century. The sentiments of the first part of the sentence are typically Wycliffite, though not exclusively so. The interesting part of it is the last clause, and particularly the word herfore. I want in this paper to investigate the implications and validity of this word. The meaning of the word is superficially clear: ‘for this reason are men considered heretics’—most modern writers would use ‘therefore’.

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.

Novelty in this paper refers to a new idea or institution. I shall not distinguish between religious, social and political novelties, since medieval churchmen did not do so. The church concerned herself with every aspect of Christian life: any change in men’s way of living affected her either directly or indirectly and generally the former.

I shall begin by quoting four examples of attitudes to novelty. My first two come from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. One will illustrate an attitude to new ideas, the second to a new institution. The distinction is artificial, but convenient. Men normally think up ideas in order to justify or criticise institutions. First listen to an anonymous opponent of Manegold of Lautenbach. Manegold contributed an extremist theory to papal polemic in the gregorian reform movement in order to explain and justify Gregory’s action in declaring the emperor Henry IV deposed and absolving subjects from their oath of allegiance (1085).

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.

A Paper on life after death in the early church should probably begin with the underworld: Sheol in the Hebrew Bible, Hades, in Greek mythology, with parallels in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. It should reflect on the universally connected theme of judgment and its importance for theodicy, and address the wide variety of beliefs discernible in the New Testament and its background, especially in the apocalyptic literature. It should consider the so-called intermediate state, and the supposed distinction between the Greek concept of the immortality of the soul and the Hebrew idea of resurrection: which takes us full circle, since the latter notion assumes the picture of shades in the underworld brought back to full-bodied living – as indeed the traditional Anastasis icon of the Eastern Orthodox tradition makes dramatically clear, Christ springing up from the grave and hauling Adam up with one hand and, often though not invariably, Eve with the other.

This paper explores the religious politics of remembering and visually depicting the recent past in early modern England. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the commemoration of a series of critical moments in the reigns of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth, and her Stuart successor, King James I, became a powerful bulwark of both Church and State. The story of the nation’s providential rescues from Catholic treachery and oppression, pre-eminently the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, evolved into an enduring myth which fused Protestantism with patriotism – a myth which, moreover, engendered its own highly emotive iconography. By the 1630s, however, the celebration of these same anniversaries grew increasingly contentious: as the theological complexion of the episcopal hierarchy gradually shifted, such events became the victims of a species of ecclesiastical amnesia. Caroline clerics began to take deliberate steps to discourage retrospection, to control the memory of historical milestones which were now regarded as a source of embarrassment. Here I want to suggest tentatively that this trend can be traced into the realm of pictorial representation. In the process, we may learn something more about the relationship between the Calvinist strand of the Reformation and the graphic arts.

In exile in a remote and desolate place, Nestorius was still bitter about the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) some twenty years after the event. He remembered it as a travesty of a tribunal: ‘I was summoned by Cyril, who had assembled the Council […]. Who was judge? Cyril. Who was the accuser? Cyril. […]. Cyril was everything.’ In view of his condemnation, and in identifying Cyril’s activities on the occasion with roles usually played out in a court case, Nestorius recognized the basic pattern of proceedings of the council as that of a trial. Yet, in taking over all the major roles in such a trial simultaneously, Cyril had made a mockery of all proper judicial procedure. Minimum standards of proper procedure had been violated, and Nestorius, in his outburst against Cyril’s misconduct, expects his audience to recognize the fact and share his expectations of due process. However, his frustration with the council runs deeper than a mere dispute over correct procedure. Nestorius is even more deeply angered by the apparent lack of proper examination of his theology. Even if he is not explicit on the point, it seems obvious that he had expected the council to be something altogether different from a trial, something more closely resembling a philosophical dialogue or substantive doctrinal debate. In fact, the emperor’s letter of invitation had expressed a similar expectation, in that it had called for an open-ended discussion of theological difficulties and admonished the participants of the council to aim for an amicable consensus.

The size of books has always mattered – for manuscript books as well as printed books. It makes a great difference to the fate of its contents and eventual influence whether the page is in a heavy folio or a portable pamphlet. Differences of format affected authority and influence and had a direct bearing on the circulation of ideas, the critical lift-off that could take place when vocalization took the silent word into mouths and minds away from the lettered page. This may seem self-evident, but even so, given the recognized role of the book in the Reformation (or reformations) of the sixteenth century, some reflections on this aspect seem worthwhile. The revelatory quality of the book in this period is here approached first by looking at the role of small lap books, and then by considering the challenge in England to the accepted order of books, when the great lectern book of Scripture was first laid open for general reading in church naves.

The interaction of gender and religion affects a developing as much as a developed church. A missionary church raises appropriate issues not merely as they affect those spreading the message, but as they affect the receivers, both immediately and in a later period of establishment. This paper deals with such matters as they appear in the history of the Anglican Church in Sarawak, where the missionary activity began in 1848.

In the early ninth century, the Frankish Church was unashamedly, triumphantly, rich. The Franks were assured that God loved them. Thanks to the intercessions of churchmen, God had promoted the expansion of the Frankish Empire: in a world of social relations organized and expressed through the exchange of gift and countergift, it seemed only fair that God, or rather his Church on his behalf, should share in the profits. ‘Give tithes to the Lord’, Smaragdus urged a young Carolingian king: ‘He subjected many realms to you, and commanded powerful peoples to serve you’.

In 1863, when a London printer, called Collingridge, produced a handbook for the aspiring author, he made it clear that one particular class of aspiring author was of dominant commercial importance: