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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

An episode unique to the late ninth-century Life of Gregory the Great by John the Deacon reports a famine that occurred in the year of Gregory’s death; a hostile party blamed the lavish generosity of the late pope for Rome’s suffering. The fury of the people was roused and they set out to burn Gregory’s books. However, the deacon Peter, Gregory’s familiarissimus, intervened to dissuade them, telling the people that Gregory’s works were directly inspired by God. As proof he asked God to take his life, and promptly dropped dead. This episode is not found in the earlier accounts of Gregory’s life: the brief account in the mid seventh-century Liber pontificalis, the early eighth-century Life by an anonymous monk of Whitby, and the mid eighth-century account by Paul the Deacon. Doubtful as John the Deacon’s account of the exchange between Peter and the mob may be, it does tell us something about the status of Gregory and his works in the mid 870s, when Pope John VIII commissioned the new hagiography. Gregory the Great became one of the most widely read authors of the Middle Ages, and even in his lifetime some of his works were eagerly sought after. With his popularity and influence Gregory not only added to the body of Christian literature, but also made a lasting contribution to the debate over what kinds of works it was appropriate for Christians to read. This essay will survey his works and discuss his ideas on reading and literature, and on the establishment of a Christian literary canon. The influence of Gregory’s works and ideas will be examined in relation to one particular medieval nation - Anglo-Saxon England. As the instigator of the Anglo-Saxon mission, Gregory enjoyed a great reputation as an author in Anglo-Saxon England, where his ideas on literature and society had a lasting impact.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These words were written twenty years ago, for a conference at the Library of Congress in 1980 on ‘Literacy in historical perspective’. Since then, these themes have been addressed in several lectures and research papers at conferences, and I would stand by the main ideas expressed in that passage. Monks had indeed given extraordinary prestige to books and in particular to the illuminated liturgical book, which is a medieval invention. By the thirteenth century such books were being adapted for lay use and ownership, typically in Books of Hours. However, it is mistaken to say that lay use ‘began’ then, as the aristocracy – particularly in Germany – had been familiar with prayer books for centuries. In the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen was said to have learned only the Psalter ‘as is the custom of noble girls’. A Psalter for lay use dating from c.1150, which belonged to Clementia von Zähringen, has been preserved. It contains a full-page portrait of a lady – presumably Clementia herself – at folio 6v between the end of the Calendar and the Beatus page beginning the Psalms. This book has 126 folios in its present state (possibly one folio is missing at the end) and it measures 11 cm X 7 cm, no larger than a woman’s hand. The biography of Marianus Scotus, the eleventh-century Irish hermit who settled at Regensburg, describes how he wrote for poor widows and clerics ‘many little books and many Psalter manuals’ (‘multos libellos multaque manualia psalteria’). The diminutive form ‘libellos’ and the adjective ‘manualia’ emphasise that these manuscripts were small enough to hold in the hand, like Clementia von Zähringen’s book.

The trial of Henry Sherfield, the puritan recorder of Salisbury, before Star Chamber in February 1633 was one of the most famous in that court’s last years; and his offence, ‘unlawfully, riotously and prophanely’ smashing the window in St Edmund’s church which contained pictures of the Creation, is one of the best-known cases of puritan religious protest in the years preceding the Civil War. But the background to the trial, and in particular the local tensions which lay behind it, have never been thoroughly explored. Yet Sherfield’s case, like the contemporary churchales controversy in Somerset, provides an example of that important amalgam of local and national issues which shaped the English Revolution. It also illuminates the social and political conditions which moulded Puritanism in an urban setting.

Guibert of Nogent gives a number of examples of a change for the better (bonae mutationis exempla) in the lives of his contemporaries. He evidently considered conversion to be a subject of strong topical appeal to his readers, as well as a matter of importance in itself, and he gives as many examples as he can. He has a double sense of the word conversio in mind. He often refers to the decision to enter a monastery which was the common meaning of the term in his day, but he also understands by it something closer to the larger sense of‘conversion’. Evrard of Breteuil, he says, turned from his pride to examine the wretched state of his soul, and began to look about him for a way of life in which he might live more worthily. He followed the example of Theobald of Champagne, who came to dislike the profession of arms: inter ipsa rudimenta militiae arma despiciens, and made himself self-supporting as a charcoal-burner. One Simon, count of Valois, ‘enriched the religious life of our day by the outstanding example of an unexpected conversion’: mirabili nostri temporis religionem inopinae mutationis claritate ditavit. Such a conversion was often—as Guibert relates it—sudden and irreversible in the change of direction it brought about. For St Bruno, his conversionis initia was something to which he, and others, could later look back with certainty as the moment when he began to live a different kind of life.

The confraternities of late-medieval Europe have been seen as associations which were in some ways almost independent of the Church, and drew their special dynamism from the fact that the parish was supposedly in decline and had ceased to provide an adequate religious service to the lay community. However true this may have been north of the Alps, the problem when this proposition is applied to southern Europe, and particularly Italy, is that very little is known about the late-medieval parish to ascertain whether confraternities were really syphoning off the adherence of the local inhabitants. So often our impressions about the state of the Italian church derive from the sporadic visitations of local bishops or the ribald stories of a Boccaccio or Franco Sacchetti, later repeated and taken almost at face value by such influential writers as Burkhardt. But we may also be in danger of seeing late-medieval religion filtered through sixteenth-century eyes and taking for granted the correctness of the criticisms of the Council of Trent or for that matter following Luther’s gripes that confraternities had become no more than beer-drinking clubs.

It was a ghetto, undeniably,’ concluded the American political journalist, Garry Wills, when recalling from the safe distance of 1971 his ‘Catholic Boyhood’. ‘But not a bad ghetto to grow up in.’ Wills’s ghetto was defined by the great body of shared experiences, rituals, relationships, which gave Catholics a strongly felt common identity, and separated them from their Protestant and Jewish neighbours who knew none of these things. Wills talked about priests and nuns, incense and rosary beads, cards of saints and statues of the Virgin, but in this essay said very little about Catholic organisations (apart from a brief reference to the Legion of Decency). In many European countries, by contrast, any reference to the ‘ghetto’ from which many Catholics were seeking to escape in the 1960s and ’70s inevitably focused on the network of specifically Catholic organisations which was so characteristic of central and north-west European societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans even have a pair of words to describe this phenomenon, Vereins- or Verbandskatholizismus, which can be defined as the multiplication of organisations intended to champion the interests of Catholics as a body, and to meet the special needs, spiritual, economic or recreational, of every identifiable group within the Catholic population. So when in 1972 the Swiss historian Urs Altermatt wrote a book on the origins of the highly self-conscious and disciplined Swiss Catholic sub-culture, the result was an organisational history, as stolid and as soberly objective as Wills’s book was whimsical and partisan. Its purpose was to determine how it came about that so many a Catholic ‘was born in a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools (from kindergarten to university), read Catholic periodicals and newspapers, later voted for candidates of the Catholic Party and took part as an active member in numerous Catholic societies’, being also ‘insured against accident and illness with a Catholic benefit organisation, and placing his money in a Catholic savings bank’.

On the second day of the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, King James I rebuked Dr John Reynolds of Oxford in words which are almost painfully familiar. A Scottish presbytery, pronounced the royal theologian, ‘as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil,’ and there followed what a Scot later remembered as ‘that unkoth motto,’‘no bishop, no king.’ The king’s bon mot so perfectly epitomises an important principle of Stuart policy that it may seem an act of pedantry to ask whether in fact the proposals which provoked it included the extirpation of bishops. But Dr Barlow, author of the Summe and substance of the conference, seems to have appreciated that Reynolds had spoken of no such thing. The king was ‘somewhat stirred,’ he explains, ‘thinking that they aymed at a Scotish presbytery.’

8 February 1782. This day being appointed as a Fast on the present Troubles and Wars abroad, I went to Weston church this morning at 11 O’clock and there read Prayers proper on the occasion—but there was no sermon after.

8 March 1789. I read prayers and preached this afternoon at Weston Church. Also read with the greatest pleasure a Prayer composed on the occasion on the restoration of his Majesty’s Health, which I received this morning.

In offering special prayers upon occasions of national importance Parson Woodforde was following an old tradition. One earlier phase of this tradition which is worth close scrutiny is the Hundred Years War, which affected all sections of the English population, civilian as well as military, clerical as well as lay.

In the spring of 999 the Emperor Otto III went on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Monte Gargano in southern Italy. His pilgrimage was not widely recorded; it was not referred to in any of the works produced in the Empire in the next half century, and only briefly mentioned in three South Italian works. But Otto’s pilgrimage was described more extensively in the eleventh-century vitae of two saints: the anonymous Greek Vita Nili and Peter Damian’s Vita Beati Romualdi. This article will make a case-study of the way in which the authors of these vitae used Otto’s pilgrimage to help construct the sanctity of their own subject, and of how far this reflects the degree of unity, and of diversity, between the Greek and Latin traditions of the Church in southern Italy in the first half of the eleventh century.

The continuity of English ecclesiastical history is so strong that one is always faced with the problem of when to begin. Paradoxically enough, so far as the diocese of York is concerned, 1499 seems to be a good choice to begin any examination of the Elizabethan clergy. In that year one of the last appropriations of a benefice by a monastic house took place. After this only three more similar appropriations are recorded. This concluded a process which had lasted more than two centuries and was to influence the status of the parish clergy in local society until Queen Anne’s Bounty and after. In 1710 the commissioners found that 5,597 benefices out of a total of nearly 10,000 livings in England and Wales were not worth more than £ 50 a year. A further examination revealed that of these 5,597 livings 2,122 had a yearly value of less than £30, and a further 1,200 were valued at less than £ 20 a year.