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Problems of the Church Historian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The members of some newly formed academic societies peer forward into the future with a nice mixture of enthusiasm and uncertainty: enthusiasm for a subject in which they are so fanatically interested that they have dared to found yet another society; uncertainty whether the world at large will admit that the subject exists, whether it will be accorded proper academic respectability. We share, I hope, this enthusiasm; but we have no grounds for uncertainty. It was the study of the Church’s history, from within, which did more than anything else to lay the foundations for the critical study of historical sources, most notably in the work of Mabillon and the Maurists. The study of the Church’s history, and most particularly the history of its founder, rocked the world in the nineteenth century, and played a large part in providing the intellectual grounds both for modern belief and for modern disbelief. The Church’s history has, in the past, provided the locus classicus of the problem of historical bias: is it possible, the question has been asked times out of number, for historians of different persuasions to agree in the study of the early Church, or of the Reformation? The question is a real one; we cannot confidently say more than that they can, without much difficulty, talk the same language; that true scholars nowadays will not think of not talking the same language. And this fact reveals the extraordinary power of reconciliation which the study of the Church’s history has had. It does not always reconcile; the common pursuit of truth did little to foster good relations between Coulton and Gasquet. But this spirit of reconciliation is clearly a feature of our age. It is part of a much larger movement, of which we are all witnesses. I have seen with my own eyes a Jesuit father give a public lecture in Winchester College; I have not seen, but millions of my fellow-countrymen have, Catholic and Anglican metropolitans sitting side by side in cosy amity in a television studio. We all know how limited, in terms of visible reunion, is the significance of these events; but the movement towards reunion among Protestant churches and towards better relations among all the sane branches of the Christian family is one of the striking historical phenomena of our age; and a movement (if I may strike a personal note) of hope and joy. Beyond doubt the study of the Church’s history and the dominance of the historical outlook over the last century and a half have much to do with this.
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References
Page 1 of note 1 This lecture was written for an occasion, and I have made no attempt to alter its character or to provide it with more than a skeleton of footnotes. Some historians dedicate almost the whole of their scholarly effort to the study of the Church; but I do not wish to confine the label ‘Church historian’ to these, nor would I count myself among them. By ‘Church historian’ I simply mean a historian who has more than a passing interest in the problems raised by the history of the Church. To some of these my selection of problems will appear arbitrary. I have certainly made no attempt to catalogue problems; and there are many scarcely touched on here, such as the problems of miracles and of the supernatural, on which large books can be (and have been) written.
Among recent general discussions, I have found special interest in the late Norman Sykes’s Man as Churchman, Cambridge 1960, ch. 1.
I am grateful to A. & C. Black for permission to quote from Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery, and to Messrs Hodder & Stoughton for a similar permission to quote from Paul Sabatier’s Life of St Francis, translated by L. S. Houghton.
My wife and Dr R. A. Markus kindly read this lecture at various stages, but neither is to be held responsible for its errors and idiosyncrasies.
Page 3 of note 1 English translation by W. Montgomery, 2nd ed., London 1911, 4f.
Page 4 of note 1 English translation by L. S. Houghton, London, 1926 edn., xxxi-xxxiv (slightly adapted).
Page 5 of note 1 C. Hill, Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament, Oxford 1956.
Page 6 of note 1 Sabatier, P., ‘L’originalité de S. François d’Assise’, in Franciscan Essays British Society of Franciscan Studies, 1 (1912), 1–17 Google Scholar.
Page 6 of note 2 Little, G., Franciscan Papers, Lists and Documents, Manchester 1943, 179f Google Scholar.
Page 9 of note 1 Maitland was not, of course, a Church historian in any narrow sense of the term, but clearly falls within my definition, above, p. 4.
Page 9 of note 2 Oxford 1918; cf. N. Abercrombie, The life and mark of Edmund Bishop, London 1959 (with a Foreword by Professor Knowles).
Page 9 of note 3 See Galbraith, V.H., Journal of the Warburg ana Courtauld Institutes, XVI (1953), 81–99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
Page 10 of note 1 My knowledge of Wolfram I owe to Mr Hugh Sacker of University College, London, and to his unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Tolerance Idea in Wolfram’s Willehalm’, Frankfurt-am-Main 1955. [See now also his Introduction to Wolfram’s Parzival, Cambridge 1963.]
Page 11 of note 1 The literature on the theology and law of marriage is especially copious; for the period with which I am here particularly concerned, see especially Esmein, A., Le mariage en droit canonique, 2 vols, revised ed. by Génestal, R., Paris 1929-35Google Scholar; Dauvillier, J., Le mariage dans le droit classique de l’Eglise, Paris 1933 Google Scholar; and, more generally, Smith, A.L., Church and State in the Middle Ages, Oxford 1913, 57–100 Google Scholar; provisional bibliographies may be found in the ecclesiastical and theological dictionaries. The only general survey of the whole subject in English known to me is Joyce, G.H., Christian Marriage, London 1933 Google Scholar. From the point of view of social history, a particularly interesting example of recent studies is L. Stone’s investigation of marriage in the English upper classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘Marriage among the English Nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 111 (1961), 182-206.
Page 13 of note 1 De nugis curialium, IV, 3, trans. James, M. R., Cymmrodorion Record Series 1923, 166 Google Scholar.
Page 15 of note 1 As a sample, a rough count of the twelfth-century marriages recorded in vols. X, XI, XII (pts i and 2) of the revised ed. of the Complete Peerage produced the following figures: cases in which husband and wife are only known to have married once, 63; cases in which husband or wife or both are known to have married more than once, 55. In these 55 cases 18 husbands had two wives each, and one three; 31 wives had two husbands, 4 wives had three husbands and one four. The information relates solely to the baronial class; and even so, it is based on scanty indications, so that the number of second and third marriages may be seriously under-estimated.
Page 15 of note 2 See Iris, Origo, The Merchant of Prato, London 1957 Google Scholar.
Page 16 of note 1 It is, indeed, difficult to see any substantial effect of the romantic ideal on marriage customs before the nineteenth century, and on this ground it has been denied that marriage was affected at all by it in the Middle Ages. This is unduly sceptical, just as it is unduly sceptical to deny that medieval romances have something to teach us about medieval marriage. They have much to tell us, so long as we do not erect general theories out of them, and so long as we do not read them in the light of twentieth-century notions of romance; just as Romeo and Juliet has much to tell us of sixteenth-century notions of love and marriage, so long as we remember the same provisos.
Page 16 of note 2 Cf.Sacker, H., Germanic Review, xxxvi (1961), 25f Google Scholar.
Page 17 of note 1 See Borst, A., Die Katharer, Stuttgart 1953, especially 208-13, 231-9 (on the organisation of the Cathar bishoprics)Google Scholar.
Page 17 of note 2 Peter the Venerable, Ep. 4:21 (PL, CLXXXIX, 346-53, esp. 352); on the marriage, cf. Cambridge Historical Journal, XII (1956), 4 and n.
Page 18 of note 1 SirRunciman, Steven, The Medieval Manichee, London 1947, 129, 174 Google Scholar.
Page 18 of note 2 L. Stone, art.cit., is an interesting example of what can be done in a period for which some generalisation is beginning to be possible, i.e. the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.