Toleration Implies disapproval or disagreement coupled with an unwillingness to take action against those who are viewed with disfavour in the interest of some moral or political principle. It is an active concept, not to be confused with indifference, apathy or passive acquiescence. In this paper I reexamine, in the light of this strong definition of toleration, the contrast commonly drawn for the world of classical antiquity between a tolerant paganism and an intolerant Christianity. Toleration implies a degree of acceptance as well as a degree of disapproval. In evaluating the attitudes of pagans to other pagans in antiquity we must satisfy ourselves, first, that ancient polytheistic systems were as open and inclusive as is often assumed, and second, that where mutual acceptance might be said to have prevailed, this was not merely casual acceptance, but entailed compromise between competing gods and rituals. Again where religions can be seen to have been seriously at variance with each other, as were the sundry pagan cults with Judaism and Christianity, where therefore toleration was at least in principle a possible option, we must ask how far pagan authorities and (in so far as this can be discerned) ordinary pagans were inclined to choose that option.

The history of North African Christianity in antiquity is a peculiar blend of the local and the universal. Whether we consider the ‘catholic’ or the ‘dissenting’ traditions represented in it, we find ourselves at the intersection of two worlds. It was not only the ‘Catholicism’ of Optatus, Augustine and Aurelius and their friends and successors that linked the African Church with the Great Church across the seas. Professor Frend long ago drew attention to the similarities between the ecclesiologies of the Donatist and of other western schismatic churches. More recently we have been given a portrait of another such ‘dissident’ Church by M. Meslin in his impressive study of the Arian communities of the Danubian lands. As these developed in the course of the later fourth century, after earlier flirtation with the idea of an imperial Church cast in some ‘Arian’ mould, they came to bear many of the same features of ‘dissent’ which distinguished the Donatists. Donatism was no mere aberration; it was the local expression of a permanent religious option. But unlike the other ‘dissenting’ churches of the Roman world, Donatists did not adopt their dissenting posture as a mere response of defeated men driven into a corner by a hostile imperial and ecclesiastical establishment. It had a long pre-history in the African tradition of Christianity.

In that much discussed panegyric, the Life of Constantine, Eusebius tells how the emperor, having heard that there were ‘many churches of God in Persia and that large numbers were gathered into the fold of Christ, resolved to extend his concern for the general welfare to that country also, as one whose aim it was to care for all alike in every nation.’ He goes on to give what purports to be a letter from Constantine to the Sasanid shah, Shapur II; in this, not only does the emperor neatly explain away his predecessor Valerian’s humiliating capture by the Persians in 260 as divine punishment for his persecution of Christians but he presumes to draw a lesson from this for Shapur as well: by protecting his own Christian population Shapur will experience the beneficence of Constantine’s Deity.

This sentiment might well have been voiced by any abbot contemplating the ambivalent relationship between his house and its patrons. They expected material, as well as spiritual returns on their investment, and these might well conflict with the best interests of the monastery. Ambivalence, though, was equally reflected in the attitude of religious houses towards their benefactors, as this brief survey of baronial patronage in England, between the late eleventh and the mid thirteenth centuries, indicates.

No real doubt seems to have been held by baronial patrons that benefactions were necessary to their wellbeing in the afterlife, but they were largely guided by the maxim that ‘it is the thought which counts’, judging from the limited extent of their grants, whether on their own behalf or for the souls of deceased kinsfolk. Could things have been otherwise? They were imbued from infancy with the concept that the integrity of the fief must prevail over all other considerations. Inevitably such conditioning was reflected in their response towards things spiritual as well as towards temporal claims on their loyalties.

The track to be explored in this paper was laid down when I realised how relatively unexamined the actual working out of Christian ideas about war within the medieval period is. Recent years have seen appear a notable book about the development of ideas on the Just War, and a great deal of work on the role of the military aristocracy and on its ideals, but upon the coming together of Christianity and actual events there seemed to me very little, at least in the period which interests me most. The one series of events which has attracted attention within what one can call loosely the twelfth century is, of course, the Crusades, but I decided to put them rather at the edge of my focus since they raised special questions, and to invite a scholar who has devoted much time to their elucidation to give a paper upon a crusading theme later in the conference. Yet when one turns for guidance for the history of western Europe there is only one book which stands out, La Guerre au Moyen Age by Philippe Contamine which appeared in the Nouvelle Clio series as recently as 1980, and it, as one would expect from its author’s earlier achievement, is strongest when it deals with the period of the Hundred Years War. Nonetheless it is a remarkable achievement, and one to which I am deeply indebted. But given the fact that the subject is still so unmapped, only two approaches seemed feasible to me, one where I would try to look at a series of specific wars and see what the Church did about them, or one where I would look at a source or group of sources, and see what it, or they, had to say about war and the Church.

On 14 November AD 565, Justinian died and his nephew Justin was raised to the throne in a well managed senatorial coup. He was already of middle age and had spent the latter part of his life building up useful connections at court which served him well when the critical moment came: his rival, cousin and homonym was far more glamorous, being a military man, but he was not on the spot and Justin was easily able to have him removed. We are told that the murder was engineered by Justin’s empress, Sophia, the niece of Theodora, a lady who emerges as a figure as powerful and in many ways more interesting than her aunt. From the first the reign was a partnership; Sophia is shown in a novel way together with her husband on Justin’s coins, and is named with him in the headings to decrees preserved on papyri. So Justin at least acquiesced in her prominence, even if he did not like it, and it was natural for poets and historians to give as much attention to the empress as to the emperor. When the loss of the Mesopotamian border fortress of Dara to the Persians in 573 drove Justin out of his wits Sophia very naturally took control, even though nominally the government had to be put into the hands of a man (Tiberius, appointed caesar in AD 574 and augustus in 578); yet her influence had been strong from the beginning, and we shall see that if it is right to see her driving force behind the harsh persecutions of monophysites in the 570s, we must also seek her initiative in the religious policy of the late 560s.

Hubert de Burgh was the most powerful man in England during the minority of Henry III, the real ruler of England for most of the decade of the 1220s. In his climb to power, in his exercise of it, and perhaps most of all, in his sudden disgrace and persecution, his biography is dramatic and compelling. One of the factors in his rise and fall was the religious motivation for his acts, a factor which is all too often neglected in modern biography and history. No one doubts that Hubert de Burgh was a Christian, though his lord, king John, flirted with disbelief; but no one has really considered what effects Hubert’s Christianity may have had upon his actions. Nor how strong it was by comparison with other motivations.

For nearly six hundred years the significance of Wyclif’s theory of dominion and grace has been in dispute, although it is generally agreed that his chief claim to fame as a political figure rests upon it. It has recently been described as his main contention, and there can be no doubt that it was a thesis of which he was inordinately proud. It became a major feature in both the papal condemnation of 1377 and that of the Blackfriars Council five years later; it looms even more largely in the forty-five Wycliffite propositions condemned at Prague in 1403, at Rome in 1413, and subsequently by the Council of Constance in 1415. Hus’s defence of the theory was an important factor in bringing him to the stake. But if Wyclif’s contemporaries had little hesitation in recognising a destructive potential, modern scholars have been far more cautious in assessing its political value. Neither R. L. Poole nor Workman could reach a firm judgement.

The Pentecostal sermon attributed to Peter in Acts announces Joel’s prophecy fulfilled:

The gift thus overrides sex, rank, and social status; it is often overlooked that the company on whom the Spirit falls in Acts 2 includes, beside the restored Twelve, ‘women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers’, and Acts in this respect agrees with Paul that in Christ ‘there is no Jew nor Greek, there is no slave nor free man, there is no male and female; you are all one person in Christ Jesus.’

Once upon a time, probably in the first half of the seventeenth century, David Curiel, a prominent member of the Amsterdam Sephardi community, was attacked by a German robber. Although seriously wounded, Curiel managed to overcome his attacker with the help of his Christian neighbours. The robber was tried and sentenced. After his execution, the States of Holland sent Curiel a letter expressing their regret at the incident and inviting him to witness the medical lesson on the corpse of the robber in the anatomical theatre of Leiden University. This legend has been handed down in at least five different manuscripts, preserved in Jewish libraries. It was probably read at the feast of Purim, which, of course, commemorates an earlier attack on the Jews and the spectacular destruction of their enemy.

Everyone is familiar with the notion of an ‘Age of Faith’. It is the idea that, at some time in the past, everyone believed what religious authority told them to believe. In this paper I propose to test the truth of this idea, in one period, and one region.

Historians of west-European Christianity in its late medieval and early modern phases have recently been much concerned with the relations of the church and the devil. Our subject here, the church and the world, may seem by comparison, and notably for the period immediately preceding the reformation, a well-worn topic; inspired by the achievements of historical demography, we may be tempted to abandon it for more promising researches into the relations of the church and the flesh. This is indeed what I shall be doing here, at least to the degree that ‘flesh and blood’ can be considered as falling under the last heading. Yet, since it may be argued that ‘flesh and blood’ formed, for the average western Christian of this time, a major constituent of his ‘world’ or social environment, I do not feel that I am stretching a point in offering, within the present context, some comments on the subject indicated in my title. I am concerned with the connections of the Church and the ‘world’, meaning by that the complex of human relations it lives in. I am particularly concerned with the structure of one such society, that of western Europe in the immediately pre- and post-reformation age. And I am finally interested in pursuing or criticising some socio-historical arguments about what happened to European Christianity in and after the sixteenth century.

The Christian interpretation of fatal persecution was a complex one with distinct ecclesial themes merging with Jewish elements from apocalyptic and biblical literature, as well as Hellenistic motifs such as the constancy of the Socratic martyr. The New Testament understanding of the term ‘martyr’ is predominantly that of legal witness, although some specific senses of blood-witness are emerging already in the first century and have become common by the second. Varying reactions can be traced in the literature of different parts of the Church: for example, in Rome, Alexandria, Asia, Africa, or Palestine. This paper looks primarily at the Egyptian interpretation as a microcosm of the general development of the role of martyrs, and does so by reference to the writings of the theologians whose works cover the main phases of that process. It highlights the distinction that existed between the sophisticated literary interpretation of martyrdom, and the forms of popular devotion that flourished among the non-literate peasantry. The tension between the two approaches, witnessed in both Origen and Athanasius, is demonstrably resolved by the time of Cyril, who represents the harmonious synthesis of both traditions in the new conditions of Christian political ascendancy in fifth-century Byzantine Egypt. The peculiar circumstances of the Egyptian Church, in particular the unusually radical separation that existed there between town and country (and the class and cultural divisions reflected in that), as well as the specific challenge posed to Christianity by the enduring vitality of the old Egyptian religions in the countryside, both left their marks on the specific form of martyr devotion in Christian Egypt, but the most noteworthy aspect is arguably the subtext of the theological encomia of martyrdom that seems to have the definite concern of subjugating the popular devotion to martyrs, confessors, and ascetics to the interests of the Church hierarchies.

Toleration is a Victorian subject, a monument to Victorian liberalism. ‘To us who have been educated in the nineteenth century’, proclaimed F. A. Inderwick in his book on the Interregnum, ‘any declaration inconsistent with religious toleration would be abhorrent and inadmissible’. His sentiment would not have seemed controversial to a generation raised on such best-selling works as Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England and Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism. It may be that the Victorians, enquiring into the origins of the toleration which they had achieved, were prone to congratulate the past on becoming more like the present. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when interest in the subject was perhaps at its peak, we can also detect, in the statements on toleration of a Creighton or a Figgis, a fear that the present might become more like the past: that materialism and religious indifference might destroy the moral foundations of toleration, and foster a new barbarism which would persecute Christians afresh.

In York Monthly Meeting, women ministers were to become dominant by the end of the eighteenth century, having been outnumbered by men since the beginning of the century. The Meeting for Ministers and Elders appears to have degenerated between 1726 and 1768 under the stewardship of Nathaniel Bell and Daniel Peacock. At the same time, female influence in the Meeting suffered a hiatus, the Meeting ceasing to send female representatives to the Quarterly Meeting in about 1718. This situation continued until 1783, when women once again began to feature strongly in the Meeting of Ministers and Elders; they were appointed to the positions of elder and minister and resumed sending representatives to Quarterly Meetings. From 1706 to 1775, York Meeting had 7 male ministers, of whom 4 were itinerant. There were 5 female ministers; 3 made more than one journey in the ministry. From 1775 to 1860 there were 11 male ministers, 2 being itinerant. There were 20 female ministers, of whom 11 made regular journeys in the ministry.

This communication treats of a small detail of a large subject. The claim to a power of deposing secular rulers is a major theme in the history of the papacy. As a theory, it epitomises the whole political logic of the mediaeval papacy: the deposing power was the primum caput of papal hierocracy and its origins lie deep in early papal centuries. As a political doctrine put into practice, it had profound effects at several points in the history of mediaeval Europe, particularly in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while its shadow lay banefully over many a governmental decision and politico-religious controversy of more modern times.

Hobsbawm recently reminded young historians prone to methodologising that they would be well advised always to begin with a problem. He meant to imply—and very properly—that experimentation with methods becomes vapid and useless unless it is seen clearly for what it is: a means to an end. I propose to experiment with a method, so I want first to emphasise that I do have a problem. It is this: why, within a common framework of Christian theology, belief and practice, did the rituals for the inauguration of rulers, in early Byzantium on the one hand, and in the early medieval western kingdoms on the other, diverge as they did? What has this divergence to tell us about the differences not just between types of political power but between the two societies? These questions relate, of course, to a mere subsection of the whole vast subject of ‘liturgies eastern and western’ which Brightman long ago promised to survey. Unfortunately, even his work was left only half-complete: the further task of systematic comparative analysis seems hardly to have been begun. But that would surely be a lifetime’s work. In this paper, I confine myself to a small though significant area of the field, a single type of ritual; and I cover a limited time-span, the period down to about 1000 AD.

Students of historiography have become increasingly gloomy in their evaluation of the Greek founding fathers of historiography. All the limits, the shortcomings, and the failures of conventional history writing – the histoire événementielle of French terminology – have been laid at the door of Thucydides. Herodotus has escaped obloquy, either because he offered a promise of variety, curiosity, humour and sensitiveness which Thucydides spoiled, or because (as Professor Seth Benardete says in a very recent book) ‘his foundations are not those of modern historiography’. Thucydides has become the great villain of historiography in so far as he identified history with political and military events. Professor Moses Finley and I may in the past have said some unkind words about Thucydides – so did the late Professor Collingwood. But we are now made to look like mild apologists of Thucydides by Hermann Strasburger. This most penetrating interpreter of ancient historians has treated Thucydides’s approach to history as the survival of a prehistoric mode of thinking, for which war was the most important event. According to Strasburger, Thucydides excluded das Humanum from history and therefore derived his scale of values from ‘prescientific and ultimately precivilised, prehistoric strata of thought’. Strasburger tries to show that some hellenistic historians, such as Agatharchides and Posidonius, showed more interest in the business of peaceful coexistence than Thucydides ever did, but he is under no illusion about their ultimate success. Thucydides’s historical approach prevailed: deviationists were silenced. The Romans inherited from the Greeks a type of historical writing for which war was the central theme. What Thucydides did not know was not history.

I know the historical sociology of religion only as an outsider; as an historian of medicine helped by that literature to a better understanding of early industrial society and perhaps to a clearer vision of what the social history of medicine ought to be. To read a recent review of the social history of religion, such as A. D. Gilbert’s Religion and Society in Industrial England, Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914, is to recognise how underdeveloped by comparison is the social history of medicine. Historians of medicine have the equivalent of church histories, of histories of theology and, of course, biographies of divines, but we lack the quantitative and comprehensive surveys of the chronological and geographical patterns in lay attendance and membership, and in professional recruitment and modes of work. For as long as medicine was generally only a transaction between an individual and his medical attendant, few statistics were produced and there is little national data. Yet there are very few local studies of how diseases were handled and how the various kinds of practitioner interacted with each other and with their various publics, so it will be some time before we shall be able to generalise on such matters.