The anachronistic ascription of membership of the Moslem faith to the persecutors of Christians in the period before the Peace of the Church appears in Anglo-Norman hagiography in the late twelfth century, or early thirteenth, and in English lives later in the thirteenth century. It may be, at least in part, the result of the corruption in meaning of a derivative of the word Mahomet, found in Anglo-Norman as mahumez in the early twelfth century and in English by the end of the same century in the form of maumez, idols. The confusion in identification was made possible by the attribution of the rôle of the Roman officials to the Moslems—both groups martyred Christians in large numbers—and by an association of practices and qualities based on the opposition, real or alleged, of both Romans and Moslems to the Christian faith.

There can be few English historians still maintaining a lively interest in their fields over half a century after the publication of a major work, but this is happily true of the Misses Madeleine and Ruth Dodds, with whom I corresponded not many months ago. Their extensive two-volume work The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracy disentangled with admirable system and discretion the huge deposit of evidence calendared (sometimes too summarily) in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. As a work of narrative history their book seems unlikely to call for major revisions, and it demands the warmest recognition from every student of Tudor history. Though its judgments are in general sober and well-grounded, its deep sympathies have possibly tended to encourage those who for various reasons wanted to idealise the Pilgrimage and overestimate its creative possibilities.

The dead are the silent majority in the Church’s history – as they are, indeed, in humanity’s. The life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried and tested certainty, predicated on a soul which survives the death of the body. That raises issues about the nature and structure of the afterlife, its pains and delights. For the late medieval Church, the afterlife raised particular concerns and anxieties, its complex division into heaven, hell, and purgatory promising a future which had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were a major force in religious practice, with death as the threshold to something unknown until experienced.

The publication of Lux Mundi in 1889 has long been regarded as an important moment in the development of Anglican thought. Equally familiar is the distress which the new turn gave to H. P. Liddon, who could only regard the effort made by the Lux Mundi group to set the Catholic faith in its right relation to modern knowledge as capitulation to the snares of liberalism, and as ultimately fatal to the close coherence of Christian truth. The book represented a new grafting upon the stock of the English Catholic party, and no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered of the reasons why such a theology was produced within the post-Tractarian circle at Oxford. The new outlook involved a wholesale change from the deductive theology of the Tractarians with its imperatives against the world and all those things which liberalism accepted in the world, to an inductive theology which appealed to men for Christ by showing how the best and truest things led up to Him and found fulfilment in Him. At the same time religion appeared now as an interpretation of the world as well as of the Church, and the intense conservatism of Pusey and Keble was replaced by the radicalism of Scott Holland and Gore. The question is first why these new attitudes grew up amongst men who more than any others were conditioned against them by intense religious training, and, secondly, a question regarded by Prestige as inexplicable, how it came about that Liddon was so shocked by a publication which embodied tendencies which had been notorious for twenty years and of which, in a letter to Scott Holland in 1884, he had seemed quite clearly aware.

England was a rich prize for William the Conqueror to have won at the battle of Hastings. His conquest was followed by a major redistribution of the wealth of his new kingdom. By the end of his reign, a tenurial revolution had swept through the lay landholding community, leaving only a handful of Anglo-Saxons as tenants-in-chief. The Church had undergone considerable changes of personnel; only one bishopric was still in English hands (Worcester), and of the greater Benedictine houses only Bath and Ramsey were still ruled by English abbots. Domesday Book, the great survey of England made in 1086, although difficult to interpret, provides much information to enable an examination of ecclesiastical wealth, its nature, and its distribution, in the late eleventh century.

In the early twelfth century, the Byzantine monk James of the monastery of Kokkinobaphou composed six sermons on the early life of the Virgin Mary. Two copies of these sermons, known collectively as the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts, have survived: BN, MS gr. 1208 and BAV, MS gr. 1162. Based on a combination of internal and external evidence, scholars have dated the manuscripts to the second quarter of the twelfth century, and furthermore suggested that their production and decoration was undertaken during the lifespan of James. Both copies bear an extensive and almost identical narrative and typological cycle of illumination, which has been securely connected to the imperial environment of the Byzantine court of the twelfth century and was linked, more tentatively, with the Sevastokratorissa Eirene, a prominent patroness of the court, widow of the Seuastokrator Andronikos, the second son of the Emperor John II Komnenos (1118-43). The miniatures illustrating the text of James are renowned for their artistic quality and their iconographical peculiarities.

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries Augustine of Hippo preached a number of sermons at the annual celebrations of martyr festivals. These festivals commemorated the martyr’s ‘birthday’: the day of the martyr’s death on earth and entrance into the eternal life of heaven. They were popular occasions, drawing in larger and more diverse crowds than ordinary services, and attracting a certain air of festivity and merriment in North Africa. Martyr festivals provided the ideal location for the discussion of the afterlife: eschatological hopes had long given meaning to martyrdom, exposing the order permeating chaos, pointing towards beauty amid human suffering, and revealing death as the gateway to true life.

Any discussion of the conciliar assemblies and decisions of the Church is likely to consider things from the centre—to enumerate those present, to distinguish the issues, arguments, and protagonists, and to emphasize the final decisions. Perhaps, indeed, to over-emphasize them, for there is a tendency to assume that what was decreed at Rome was rapidly implemented in the provinces. Often, of course, this was the case, and the speed with which the decisions of the Third Lateran Council were disseminated is striking testimony to the ability of the twelfth-century Papacy to publicize its policies. The Papacy developed rapidly, however, in the middle years of the twelfth century, and it is dangerous to assume that what was true of the pontificate of Alexander III can also be applied to that of Innocent II. It may therefore be useful to look closely at a major provincial dispute from the first half of the twelfth century, and to attempt to determine how decisively regional practice was affected by papal decrees in one particular instance.

In early 1642 a Scottish army under the command of Robert Munroe arrived in Ulster as part of a scheme to defeat the native Irish rebellion which had begun late in the previous year. The conquest was not to be purely a military one. As a contemporary historian of Presbyterianism, Patrick Adair, observed ‘it is certain God made that army instrumental for bringing church governments, according to His own institutions, to Ireland … and for spreading the covenants’. The form of church government was that of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and in June 1642 the chaplains and officers established the first presbytery in Ireland at Carrickfergus. Sub-presbyteries, or meetings, were created for Antrim, Down and the Route, in north Antrim in 1654, for the Laggan in east Donegal in 1657, and for Tyrone in 1659. Within these units the Church was divided into geographical parishes each with its own minister. This establishment of a parallel structure rivalling that of the Anglican Church, but without the king at its head, is what has been termed the ‘presbyterian revolution’.It supported the Presbyterian claim to be ‘the Church of Ireland’, a claim which was to bring it into conflict with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the late seventeenth century. In order to further underpin this claim the reformed church began to move out of its Ulster base by the 1670s. The Laggan presbytery ordained William Cock and William Liston for work in Clonmel and Waterford in 1673 and was active in Tipperary, Longford, and Sligo by 1676. Its advice to some Dublin ministers was to form themselves into a group who were ‘subject to the meeting in the north’. The presbytery of Tyrone also supplied Dublin.

Augustine’s view of the saeculum continues to be contested ground; his textual and terminological ambiguities, his own intellectual developments, and possible contradictions have fed contrasting interpretations. Understanding Augustine’s view of the saeculum — that which exists as part of the created order, which is neither in itself sacred and identified with a specifically Christian status nor profane reflecting antichristian or pagan institutions and mores — is obviously critical to unravelling his political theology, which has largely been the focus of discussions since the magisterial work of R. A. Markus in 1970, but it has another purpose too. It contributes to a chapter in the history of science by clarifying the evolution of a view of the natural world which would influence medieval and early modern developments.

Throughout the modern period Catholic and Orthodox Christians alike have taken it for granted that forgiveness for sins committed after baptism is obtained first and foremost through confession to a priest and absolution by a priest, the humility of confession plus the power of the sacrament being deemed the most effective remedy for human weakness. Other elements in overcoming sin, such as regular religious observance and the avoidance of the occasions of sin, were not forgotten, but were put in second place. The falling away from sacramental confession in the Catholic Church today is doubtless a complex phenomenon, but one reason for the decline is the widespread perception that this remedy does not work, that a penitential discipline that places so heavy a reliance on the power of priestly absolution, without adequate attention to the other aspects of repentance and forgiveness, is ineffectual. It also represents what is arguably an impoverished and clericalized Catholicism. The aim of this paper is to explore those elements of penitential practice in the early middle ages that belong to a tradition at once richer and more flexible.

Somewhere around the 620s, there began to appear in the Byzantine world references to works allegedly by Dionysius the Areopagite, that is, the judge of the court of the Areopagus converted by Paul the apostle according to the account in Acts 17. The corpus of works consisted of two works, on the heavenly and earthly church respectively, the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; a treatise called the Divine Names; a short treatise called the Mystical Theology; and ten letters, addressed to various people, arranged hierarchically, from a monk called Gaius, through lesser clergy, bishops (or ‘hierarchs’) such as Polycarp and Titus, to the apostle John. Although they were initially cited by Monophysite theologians who rejected the Council of Chalcedon, there was little resistance to the acceptance of this body of texts; gradually in the course of the sixth century these works came to be regarded as genuinely belonging to the apostolic period.

The idea that divine beings, holy people and magical creatures leave behind permanent marks of their immortality on the surface of the earth is common to many cultures and spiritual systems. Throughout history curious hollows, cavities, and coloured stains on stone and rock have been explained as tangible evidence of the presence and intervention of deities, saints, prophets, angels and demons. The folk motif of the miraculous impression of a foot, hand or limb finds frequent expression within Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Footprint shrines and cults abound in the Middle East, India, south-east Asia and China, from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and Qadam Sharif in Delhi to Phra Sat in Thailand. Variously revered as the footmark of Buddha, Siva, Adam and St Thomas the Aposde, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most compelling emblem of the polyvalency of this intriguing phenomenon and its capacity to range across the full spectrum of religious traditions.

In his fascinating paper, Professor Momigliano drew to our attention the degree to which the aristocracy of the late Roman Empire accepted within its religious ethos beliefs and practices which we would be inclined to label as ‘popular’. In doing so, he raised the recurrent problem of cultural diffusion. How far, in a given period, were intellectuals willing to accept as normative the piety of the simple faithful? Conversely, how far did the more critical attitudes of scholars influence popular devotion? These are permanent questions which we may ask of the history of the church, but perhaps the problem was never so acute as in the medieval church. Its intelligentsia (the humanists of the twelfth century, the philosophers of the thirteenth) had received a long and exacting formal education. The ordinary faithful, conversely, were illiterate, cut off, we might think, from the very sources of christian spirituality, for they could neither read the Scriptures nor follow the latin liturgy. Critics of the medieval church have been inclined to see two religions rather than one: a philosophical, indeed over-rational, religion of the intelligentsia, and a set of popular superstitions. A valuable piece of evidence in assessing the truth of this estimate is to be found in the first book of the treatise on The Relics of the Saints written in about 1120 by Guibert abbot of Nogent. Its significance lies, not only in the useful information which it contains about popular practice, but in the fact that it was an attempt to assess it, made by one of the more learned and attractive men of the time. Although Guibert made little direct impact on the history of the age, he was in close sympathy with many of the leaders of the twelfth-century Renaissance, and was a fine scholar in his own right.

During the period of their emergence and growth, sects are generally discussed in terms of opprobrium, perhaps because most of those who have written about them have been people not only of other theological persuasions, but often people with vested professional interests in sustaining their own theology against that of others, or, occasionally, they have been men of decidedly rationalistic temper, eager to condemn all religion by reference to what they take to be the latest and most patent religious outrage to common sense. By the time a sect becomes a historical phenomenon it is likely that those still interested in it will discuss it with a measure of detached objectivity: for contemporary sects, only sociologists are likely to espouse the same canons of ethical neutrality and objectivity that are, perhaps so much more easily, endorsed by historians in their treatment of things past.

Religious Dissent was shaped by the law. The Act of Uniformity (1662) set out the terms of conformity, and those who could not accept those terms risked prosecution. A great many were convicted under the earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean recusancy statutes, but new laws, such as the Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670) and the Five Mile Act (1665), were also passed. Anthony Fletcher's essay, published in 1984, remains almost the only study of enforcement, in which he argued that the impact of the penal laws on Dissent has been exaggerated because the Conventicle Acts were not systematically enforced. A range of contemporary accounts will be used to suggest that their impact was greater than has been appreciated because of the enforcement of other statutes and the harassment of ejected ministers and their supporters.

‘Rescue us O Lord Pope from barbaric power and subjugation to laymen’ was the cry of despair from the clerics of Grandmont which reached Pope Innocent III about the year 1215. It indicated the growth of the appeal to Rome which took place in the Cannon Law of the twelfth century. Many other examples of an increase in papal authority occurred at this time. The extension of papal jurisdiction is one of two important developments of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christendom with which this paper will be concerned.

‘Victorian Britain was not only the first urbanising society,’ Michael Wolff has recently reminded us, ‘. . . it was the first “journalising” society,’ also. Recent research, resulting from professor Wolff’s victorian periodicals project, shows that there were upwards of eighteen thousand periodicals of differing title, published during the victorian period. Of course, these periodicals varied greatly both in duration and in influence, but the average ‘run’ of a victorian periodical was about twenty-eight years, and most victorians would have agreed with professor Wolff’s verdict that the magazines were one of the major new characteristics of their age. ‘We look for our monthly and weekly magazines,’ wrote one correspondent to the British Controversialist in 1862, ‘as readily as we look for our daily food.’ ‘Periodical literature,’ agreed another, ‘is essentially an outgrowth of modern times.’ They were both contributing to a debate, in a monthly periodical, on the question, ‘Does the present multiplicity of periodicals retard rather than foster intellectual progress’?

How far does the great religious controversy of the fifth century centred on the mystery of the Incarnation reflect popular religious ideas of the east Roman world? It is well known that factors that had little to do with theological speculation, such as the rivalry for prestige and leadership between Constantinople and Alexandria, played a large part in bringing the controversy between rival concepts of christology to their climax in the twenty years that separate the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. More discussion, perhaps, is needed concerning the contribution of articulate public opinion to the course of events, and in particular, to the persistence of the opposition to the Chalcedonian definition after 451.

There is still a remarkable book to be written about a phenomenon as yet little recognised or understood: the sudden appearance in England of a serious and scholarly interest in religious experience as a subject worthy of study in itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Possibly the two best-known landmarks of the movement were William James’s Gifford Lectures and dean Inge’s Christian Mysticism, which popularised mystical theology beyond the circles to which it had been for the most part confined, within the roman catholic church. Dean Inge had many harsh words for the popish mysticism associated with monasticism, and pervaded by an easy familiarity with the ‘supernatural suspensions of physical law’ of roman catholic hagiography. He passed these strictures on French and Belgian treatises and seminary textbooks, but he might have found materials as outrageous in English, in the writings of the mid-nineteenth century ultramontanes who had striven to reproduce in native dress the religious forms of Italy, France and Spain, and to recreate in England a foreign and professedly ‘supernatural’ culture which accepted mystical experience as an ordinary fact of life.