During the first half of the sixteenth century, Hungarian society underwent two dramatic changes. Firstly, Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman armies advanced into the northern Balkans, causing the collapse of the Hungarian kingdom after the battle at Mohács in August 1526. Hungary subsequently became divided into three parts, with the Ottomans controlling the central and southern counties, the Habsburgs governing Royal Hungary from the Croatian coast to the mountains of Upper Hungary, and a series of native nobles elected to rule over the Transylvanian principality, which included the counties of the eastern Hungarian plain. Secondly, the spread of Protestant ideas about religious reform brought confessional division to Hungary. The initial reform was to a large degree driven by a desire to purify the Catholic Church, whose spiritual credentials were badly discredited by the Ottoman invasion. By 1570 German- and Hungarian-speaking towns and most Hungarian magnates and nobles had abandoned the Catholic Church. German-speakers and nobles in western Hungarian counties on the whole adopted Lutheranism. Calvinism meanwhile came to dominate religious life in the eastern counties, and also received broad support within Transylvania, although some Hungarian towns and Szeklers in Transylvania instead embraced anti-Trinitarianism. Confessional loyalty across Hungary was decided by a variety of factors including patterns of communication and trading networks, the pre-Reformation structures of ecclesiastical organization, and feudal, regional, and family ties. Linguistic barriers were also crucial in determining adherence to a particular religion, with Lutheranism widely supported by German-speakers whilst Calvinism was almost exclusively the preserve of Magyar-speakers. It seems clear that some sense of linguistic or ethnic community assisted both Protestant Churches to reinforce attachment to their confessions.

During the autumn of 1566 a series of Calvinist churches or temples were erected across the Southern Netherlands. These buildings attracted the attention and curiosity of contemporaries because of their unusual appearance and the speed with which they appeared. The polygonal ground plan of these buildings as well as the use of the term ‘temple’ led some observers to associate them with the Temple of Solomon. The English merchant Richard Clough commented that in Antwerp the Reformed had ‘layd the fondasyonss of syche tempelles more lyker the tempell of Salomon then hoder wysse’. Another observer also described these round churches as being built in the style of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. These comments suggest that Calvinists were perceived (at least by some) as linking their reformation of religion with an appropriation, possibly a recreation, of Jerusalem in the West. The purpose of this paper is to examine this contention, setting the architecture against the tradition of medieval conceptions of the architecture of the Temple, and of Calvin’s and Calvinists’ ideas of the role and use of space in the Reformed religion.

For some Christians in all ages, the biblical Holy Land has possessed far more than historical significance. It has also provided an ideal, a vision, and even a model of the future, a godly society that might be established in some other time and place. This paper looks at England in a period when these aspirations held greater urgency and plausibility than at any other - the English Revolution. It focuses on two strands within that Revolution, the Diggers and Fifth Monarchists, both inspired by the vision of the Holy Land, but in dramatically different ways. Or so it would seem. The two groups are rarely considered together, yet it is possible by doing so to identify unexpected elements of commonality as well as difference.

Some years ago I was invited to spend a day in an elementary school in Columbia, South Carolina. The day began, as I imagine every day began, with the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. The children then sang a song, a ditty really, which began as it ended with the simple refrain: ‘I am special’. Later I was shown some of the work the class had been doing. Across the back of the room were pinned up the children’s attempts to answer a question that had been exercising me, namely what was special about the United States. Some of the responses were fairly predictable. America was special, one seven-year-old wrote, because it was a democracy. Others singled out freedom or liberty as their country’s unique virtue. One brave soul boldly asserted that America was special because Americans were rich, while another thought the secret had something to do with happiness.

For English-speaking Protestants in the early nineteenth century, the Holy Land lived in the Bible. In that Land God had done his mighty works, and every name recalled an episode in the history of salvation. Its placenames were as real and resonant to believers as those of their own home district. Chapel-names like Mizpah and Shiloh were not just ‘somewhere in the Old Testament’, as they are to modern readers. Filtered through the anachronism of its readers’ imaginations, and haloed with devotion, the Holy Land was indeed holy.

During a visit to Palestine in 1853, A P. Stanley, then canon of Canterbury, sent missives to friends as he went along, describing his reactions to the Holy Land. Goldwin Smith, a fellow at University College Oxford, enthused, ‘You have nothing to do but to piece together your letters, cut off their heads and tails, and the book is done.’ Sinai and Palestine (1856) became his most popular work. When the Prince of Wales decided to visit Palestine in 1862 he asked the canon to accompany him: Stanley had been Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford in the late 1850s, and he was the nephew of a peer. Although his position in the social order excelled that of many other Eastern travellers at mid-century, Stanley serves well to evoke the kind of encounters between religiously-minded Britons and the Holy Land which were experienced in the era before modern tourism.

The overthrow of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War opened a new chapter in the history of the Holy Land. New and particular local tensions arose, especially in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration between Jews and Arabs. In the post-war settlement, the British Mandate in Palestine gave rulership to a Christian power - and one with its own established Church - for the first time since the thirteenth century. Within the Christian community itself, the rise of an ecumenical movement also changed perspectives, challenging the rivalries which were particularly evident at that central shrine of Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre. The visit of Archbishop Lang of Canterbury to Palestine and Jerusalem in 1931 illustrates the primate’s own personal responses to the experience of the Holy Land, while also reflecting the need for tact and diplomacy in dealing with a particular set of circumstances in which the presence of the leader of the Anglican communion might be seen as intrusive, even threatening, to the religious modus vivendi already established there between Christians.

The years 1945–9 were a time of profound political and social transformation for Palestine. Few other periods in its history match these changes, which left no community unaffected. The overwhelming Palestinian-Arab Christian and Muslim community was reduced from a majority to a minority, subject to the rule of a staunchly nationalistic Jewish and Zionist state. The events of 1948–9 were particularly devastating. A large number of Palestinians became refugees, including approximately fifty to seventy per cent of the Palestinian Christian population. Nearly half of the Christian community of Jerusalem had lived and had their businesses in the more modern and developed western sector of the city until Israeli occupation; their property was sequestered after they fled or were compelled to leave. Most of them were forced to seek refuge in the Old City, in monasteries and other Church buildings. Many others were forced to flee elsewhere, some leaving the former Mandate territory altogether.

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.