Following the fall of Constantinople to French, Flemish and Venetian forces at the conclusion of the Fourth Crusade, an unprecedented number of relics and other holy objects poured into the West between 1204 and c.1240. Sent as personal and diplomatic gifts, most holy objects moved in the open, with letters of authentication and identification, and not (as has often been suggested) as sacred theft. This article traces the work of translation, carried out by clerics, chaplains, monks, and laymen and women, and the mechanisms of appropriation that gave meaning to these objects in their new devotional contexts. Relics were demanding things; they needed to be enshrined, venerated, described and contextualized, and their movements needed to be accounted for and included within a broader Christian narrative that served to anchor the crusade movement to the apostolic past and to Christ's material presence in the West. Moreover, the materiality of the relics that moved from Constantinople was an important part of their significance and shaped devotional practices and connections, bridging differences between Greek and Latin culture and fostering conceptions of the material that facilitated other acts of Christian translation in the centuries to come.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical change in the attitude of missionary societies to medicine as an aid to evangelism. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century the talents of the medical doctor were seldom sought and, when they were, it was most often to provide protection for missionaries in areas of particular health hazard. In 1852 it was calculated that there were only thirteen European medical missionaries, and in the period 1851-70 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) recruited seven doctors out of a total of three hundred and seven new missionaries. Suitably qualified applicants were not encouraged. In 1842 the CMS informed a surgeon of their willingness to employ him as a catechist on the clear understanding that medicine ‘was only to be an occasional occupation’. James Henderson, an Edinburgh trained doctor, could find no openings as a medical missionary in 1858. In 1861 Henry Venn, the CMS secretary, told an applicant, who was contemplating medical training, that it was inadvisable to devote time to medicine or surgery because when a candidate ‘attempts to qualify himself by medical studies, it very seldom answers any good purpose’. As late as 1875, J. K. Mackenzie, MRCS (London) and LRCP (Edinburgh), applied to the London Missionary Society (LMS) and ‘was treated altogether ... as if I had come up to ask for a special favour, or a situation, at their hands’.

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

The monastic community at Durham was founded by bishop William of St Calais in 1083. Its arrival from Jarrow and Wearmouth was accompanied by an act of aggression, when the secular clerks previously in residence were presented with the ultimatum of either becoming monks or leaving. All but one chose to leave. This action can be seen as setting the tone for the community’s attitude to the world outside the see. In their historical writings, particularly Symeon’s Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, written between 1104 and 1109, the Durham monks were self-assertive and defensive.

The present communication derives from an attempt to make an edition of the list of relics of Reading Abbey to be found in one of the abbey’s cartularies, British Museum MS Egerton 3031, fols 6v–8r. This is a list of no less than 242 relics, a collection which must have been formed between the founding of the abbey in the 1120s and the writing of the cartulary in the 1190s. It can be supplemented by a much shorter list of 24 relics made by the Dissolution commissioner, Dr London, which however only adds one relic not present in the twelfth-century list, a bone of St Osmund of Salisbury, canonised in 1457. If we add the ‘head’ of the apostle Philip, given by king John, and added to the cartulary in a slightly later hand, we can be fairly safe in saying that the abbey acquired all but two of its relics in the first seventy years of its existence, and the list, which is very full and comparatively early as such lists go, has much to tell us of how such collections were made.

Since a countless multitude of misshapen spirits, far and wide, was being tortured in this alternation of misery as far as I could see and without any interval of respite, I began to think that this might be Hell, of whose intolerable torments I had often heard tell. But my guide who went before me answered my thoughts, ‘Do not believe it,’ he said, ‘this is not Hell as you think.’ … As he led me on in open light … [we came to] a very broad and pleasant plain … [where] there were innumerable bands of men in white robes, and many companies of happy people sat around; as he led me through the midst of the troops of joyful inhabitants, I began to think that this might perhaps be the kingdom of Heaven of which I had often heard tell. But he answered my thoughts: ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not the kingdom of Heaven as you imagine.’

A no ser por el Clero, y en especial por el Episcopado español’, declared Vicente de Lafuente a century ago, ‘España sería un pais sin historia, pues la historia sin escribir no es historia’. Lafuente himself was a layman—though it did not always show—with conventional views regarding the ‘democratic tyranny’ of his age which a spell as rector of Madrid university during the student and other troubles of the mid-1870s served only to reinforce. He found it odd that he rather than an ecclesiastic should have written the first ecclesiastical history of Spain. A committee of churchmen had been formed in Rome for the purpose in 1747, but it is too soon to report on the outcome of that venture. Lafuente’s history, though more than a century old, is still the only full-scale work of its kind by a Spaniard—’and since that time there is not a single chronicle that I can discover; though (like John of Salisbury in his day) I have found in church archives notes of memorable events which could be of help to any future writers who may appear’. In presenting some of these notes here, in the context of the theme of this conference, I find myself altogether less daunted by the notion of nationalism, which a self–respecting medievalist is expected fastidiously to eschew, than by the problem of how to evaluate the testimony of so many witnesses, clerical and lay, medieval and modern.

Gregory IX is rarely associated with the affairs of the Holy Land. In fact, he is most widely known for initiating the conflict between imperial and papal authority which was to occupy European society for most of the thirteenth century. After all, the conflict with Emperor Frederick II had been among the defining features of Gregory’s pontificate. In September 1227, barely six months into office, he excommunicated Frederick, and in 1241 he died after a failed attempt to try Frederick before a general council. Consequently, the period of concord between 1230, when peace was made with Frederick in the Treaty of San Germano, and March 1239, when the Emperor was excommunicated for a second time, has been described as an interlude, a breathing space, allowing both Frederick and Gregory to muster the means and arguments for their final show-down.

Explicating John Donne's ‘doubt wisely’, this essay argues for the theological and psychological sophistication of Richard Hooker's distinction of wise from unwise doubt and shows why this led him to support compulsory adherence to the Church of England. Framed by consideration of how his ideas were adopted by Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643), it explores Hooker's thinking on what is certain in itself and where we can properly doubt. If true, the revealed character of God and the consequent acknowledgement of God as faithful to his elect, is true by necessity, or definition, and may be held with certainty of adherence: whatever my emotional state, adhering is proof that I have not denied my faith and am therefore sincere in my profession. It is wise to doubt the absolute importance of issues such as the right definition of Christ's presence in the sacrament, the God-given character of any specific Church order, and assumptions about the spiritual state of any other baptized person. We cannot, however, be doubtful about the Church to which allegiance is commanded by law. For Hooker, legal enforcement of conformity is a pastoral good: it enables the unsure to establish a practice likely to offer them some anchorage for fluctuating convictions and ‘affections’.

Following the Reformation, Catholic families seeking to educate both sons and daughters in their faith faced many challenges. The penal laws proscribed the creation of Catholic schools in England and forbade parents to send children abroad for education. However, such was the determination to provide Catholic schooling that families were prepared to break the laws and meet the expense of fees and travel. The convents established schools for several reasons. For some orders it was part of their religious purpose to educate girls, others saw it as a means of educating future members, and all needed to secure their convents financially and be self-sufficient. Schooling provided varied significantly. This article, drawing mainly on manuscript sources from convents and some of the families with daughters attending convent schools, considers the scope of the provision of girls' education in the ‘exile’ period and offers some preliminary insights into the experience of pupils.

THE subject of this paper is the child in art about the year 1300. Some years ago, while studying the Tuscan painter Simone Martini (active c. 1310-44), I noticed that he painted what seemed to be an unusually large number of scenes involving children; and I was curious to know whether this was as special or as interesting as at first appeared. As my knowledge increased, the subject broadened to involve the more general issue of change. Around 1300, images of children become more lively, more human, and more probable. Simone’s painting forms a part of that change; and the question was ‘What happened and why?’ Other scholars have commented on this general problem; but although it is possible to criticize their approaches, the issue of ‘change’ remains. Moreover, although the analysis and explanation of change are exercises common to all historians, the special problem of the visual arts is the integration of the world recorded by texts and documents with that recorded by the visual sources. The connections are often obscure; and, in order to clarify the issues, this paper will begin with some description.

In the summer of 1304 the leaders of the Spiritual Franciscan party in Italy, Fra Angelo Clareno and Fra Liberato, were gathered with their followers in Perugia. They had recently returned from exile in the east. Benedict XI was dead and western Christendom awaited the outcome of what was to be one of the most crucial papal elections in the later Middle Ages. It was to be a trial of strength between the pro-and anti-French parties, accompanied by much political manœuvring, rumour and bargaining. In the interval, while the political groups were mustering their forces, there appeared a set of prophecies of the popes, called the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus, which can with some confidence be ascribed to the little group at Perugia. Seldom in history can the gap between hope and political reality have been wider. The Spiritual Franciscans were thinking in terms of heilsgeschichte, and for them the crisis of all history was at hand, while cardinals Napoleone degli Orsini, Nicholas of Prato, and others were laying down the tortuous lines of the intrigues which resulted in the election of Clement V and the removal of the papacy to Avignon. It is only through these prophecies that we can discern the high expectations and pent-up emotion with which this moment was approached by some at least. Though the moment passed and salvation drew not nigh, there was some powerful force of attraction in these prophecies: they were seized on immediately, quickly disseminated and imitated. Why was this?

In the spring of 1802, the Roman catacombs of Priscilla were the scene of excavations in search of Christian antiquities and martyrs’ bodies. Excavations of this kind had been going on in Rome since the late sixteenth century, though they had been temporarily interrupted during the occupation by French revolutionary troops in the last years of the eighteenth century. On 25 May, the fossores, or diggers, who worked under the authority of a religious dignitary, the Custodian of the Relics, hit on an elaborate tomb. The profuse symbols on the slab were (erroneously) believed to indicate martyrdom: arrows, an anchor and a lash for the instruments of torture, a luxuriant palm for the martyr’s eventual triumph and reward in heaven. From the garbled inscription ‘LUMENA PAX TECUM FI’, the name of Filumena, or Philomena, could be deduced.

Between 29 April 1689 and 24 March 1690 a number of Dissenting ministers in northern Lancashire conducted a series of meetings at which they examined the eighteen-year-old Richard Dugdale. A gardener by trade, Dugdale had been exhibiting what he and his family claimed were evidences of demonic possession. The Dissenting ministers involved were all convinced of the supernatural origins of Dugdale’s strange behaviour, and over the course of the year regularly prayed and fasted in an attempt to exorcise the young man. These meetings ended as abruptly as they began in March 1690, when the ministers claimed to have successfully exorcised him. Seven years after the final meeting a narative of these events was published by two of the Dissenting minsters involved, a step that provoked a hostile exchange of pamphlets. These pamphlets, commonly referred to as the Surey Demoniack pamphlets, form the basis of this article.

The Vita Herluini, composed by Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster, has long been recognised as the most important source for the foundation and early history of one of the greatest of the Norman religious houses. It formed the basis of Porée’s account several years before it was first edited in its entirety by Armitage Robinson. The significance of the text is more than local or hagiographical, for it covers a crucial period in Norman ecclesiastical development. When Herluin first determined to adopt the monastic habit, the reconstruction of religious life in the duchy was far from complete. When Gilbert wrote the Vita, some time after the elevation of Anselm to the see of Canterbury, Norman prelates, many of them sons of Bec, were urgently engaged in the reformation of the church in William the Conqueror’s new kingdom. Gilbert Crispin’s interpretation of the religious vocation was very different from that of the founder. He wrote as a man experienced in ecclesiastical government and as a theologian of moderate distinction; he had grown to maturity in the cloister and had experienced no crisis of conversion. His outlook was certainly coloured by his own experience and preoccupations. The Vita is the interpretation by a man raised in a flourishing and learned community of the motivation of an uneducated knight who had experienced spiritual rebirth in a world where religious values were far less certain. The form and emphases of the Life are perhaps worth some consideration.

With the revival of Roman and the development of canon law in the twelfth century a doctrine of supreme and universal jurisdiction began to be expounded with increasing vigour by the papacy. By the thirteenth century those learned in Roman and canon law began to distinguish in more subtle ways between jurisdiction on the one hand and holy orders on the other; between the capacity to make law and to discover law; between legislating and adjudicating; and, most importantly, between ruling and owning. Jurisdiction had become one of a cluster of terms used to define aspects of rulership, authority, prelacy, and imperium. It combined the idea of rightful administration with the legitimate and authoritative use of coercive force.

It may be debated how far the liturgy of the medieval Church (in particular the Mass) can be considered as ‘drama’, but its theatrical impact and organization are undeniable. Staged within a distinct space, the principal act of the Church’s worship had its own text and directions, which through contemplation and allegory summarized Christ’s terrestrial experiences and various aspects of the Christian faith. The Mass and other liturgical celebrations were events to be visualized, both externally and internally. It has been said of medieval plays that their

The system by which medieval nuns and monks administered their monastic households has long been known to historians. Headed by a prioress, prior, abbess, or abbot, a group of officers executed the daily running of a monastery’s internal affairs by what is called the obedientiary system. But our evidence about the heads of the houses, their monastic officers, and their incumbent duties comes almost exclusively from the numerous accounts and studies of male houses. Knowledge about the officers and administration of female convents has been inferred largely from what we know about the male monasteries, and from a lone description of the officers and their duties found among the records of the convent of Barking Abbey.

Disagreement between Jews and Christians about the meaning of the words of the Hebrew Bible is as old as the emergence of a Christian sect in Judea. The perennial debate on hermeneutics was not a simple bandying of words between two competing parties. What was discussed really mattered, for it gave expression to the essence of what separated Jew from Christian.

In the early seventeenth century, when Europe was divided along religious lines and works of polemical theology circulated widely, most Englishmen seem to have been convinced that their nation was part of a protestant community of nations with certain common interests. This attitude had its roots in the recent past, when the government of queen Elizabeth had aided—albeit adroitly—the Dutch and French Calvinists and had maintained close relations with several protestant states, particularly in the Rhineland. When the ‘Invincible Armada’ from Spain had been thwarted in its intended object, the English were thankful to Providence for the events which had preserved protestantism on the island. The common cause among protestant states thus came to be thought of, by statesmen and ordinary citizens alike, as an effort to safeguard the political autonomy of the protestant states, particularly against the great Hapsburg monarchy in Spain and Austria, and to preserve the protestant faith against the revived Roman Catholicism of the counter-reformation. Religion and national identity were so closely linked that English ‘papists’ had constantly to struggle against a suspicion that they were unpatriotic or disloyal.