We are all familiar with the idea that the Church is in the world but not of it, and that too great a preoccupation with earthly things may compromise the Church’s other-worldly objectives. One thinks of the extravagance of a Renaissance pope such as Leo X, reputed to have said, ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’: or of an ancien régime prelate like the Archbishop of Mainz, who arrived for the coronation of the Emperor Joseph II with a retinue of fourteen sumptuous carriages: or, in our own time, the Vatican’s reported links with some of the shadier elements in the world of international finance. Yet, it is equally obvious that lack of adequate material resources can act as a serious impediment to the Church’s mission to go forth and teach all nations. Excessive poverty, like excessive wealth, brings its own problems. As the adage has it, not money itself but the desire for money is the root of all evil. Excessive poverty and the desire for money are the themes which I wish to pursue in this paper, in the context of the Scottish Catholic Mission in the eighteenth century, and more specifically as they relate to the so-called Jansenist quarrels which divided the Mission in the 1730s and 1740s.

It is unusual for a period of Christian renewal to begin with a massacre, yet that is what happened when the crusaders entered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of the count of Toulouse, boasted that they rode through moslem corpses heaped up in the Haram al-Sharif with blood ‘even to the horse bridles’ This should not obscure the fact that the crusading movement was motivated partly by a growing devotion to the humanity of Christ in the western church in the late eleventh century, or, as the author of the Gesta Francorum expressed it, a desire to ‘follow in the footsteps of Christ, by whom they had been redeemed from the power of hell’. It was this sentiment which led the crusaders to seek to restore the shrine churches of Jerusalem and in the eighty-eight years of their rule they filled the city with fine churches and monasteries closely resembling those which were being built in the west at the same time. It should be emphasised that the crusaders were seldom concerned to rebuild existing churches in Frankish style: their primary interest was to restore churches which had been ruined by war and persecution in the centuries of moslem rule. The pilgrim Saewulf, who visited the east four years after the Latin conquest, reported that ‘nothing has been left habitable by the Saracens, but everything has been devastated . . . in all. . . the holy places outside the walls. . . of Jerusalem’.

Noli pater
Father do not allow thunder and lightning,
Lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.
We fear you, the terrible one, believing there is none like you.
All songs praise you throughout the host of angels.
Let the summits of heaven, too, praise you with roaming lightning,
O most loving Jesus, O righteous King of Kings.
(Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, 85)

Early medieval attitudes to the natural world were distinctly ambivalent. At one level the natural world represented the marvel of God’s creative power; filled with beauty, it supplied everything necessary for human existence, meriting praise, as in the hymn sung by the herdsman from Whitby, Cædmon:

On 29 June 824, a woman named Dhuoda went to Aachen to be married in the imperial palace. She herself tells us about the wedding, yet it is characteristic of the Carolingian age that we know far more of the groom, Bernard of Septimania, than of the bride. His career and connections can be pieced together from a wide range of sources, but she is only known from the manual of moral and spiritual advice which she composed in 841–3 for her absent fifteen-year-old son William. Bernard’s life can be reconstructed as a coherent narrative, but Dhuoda’s only emerges from a few tattered snapshots, without even a family album to contain them. Famous as she is as the only lay woman among the tiny handful of women writers known to us by name from the early Middle Ages, Dhuoda’s isolation must be stressed. Not merely her personal sense of loneliness, powerfully conveyed, nor even the difficulty of placing her within any secure literary context, but also her historiographical isolation mark her out, for we know all too little about the women of the early medieval aristocracy to which Dhuoda belonged. We can neither sketch with any precision the lifestyle of Dhuoda’s peer group, nor assess whether she is typical of it – or exceptional. The married women of the Carolingian aristocracy remain largely occluded from our sight, chronicled only in disjunct fragments of evidence which do not permit of any extended or systematic analysis. When we can find them, aristocratic women more often appear enveloped within the bonds of family and kinship than independent individuals within political contexts. But there remains the unsettling image of the young Dhuoda, briefly translated out of her familial and domestic setting into the shadowy corridors of imperial power: and the scene prompts questions about the place of wives and marriage within the Carolingian polity.

The late medieval prophetic tradition played a significant role in how John Bale (1495–1563), England’s first Protestant church historian, formulated his ideas about the nature of revelation, which would become a contentious issue in the course of the Reformation. It is the goal of this essay to examine this first-generation evangelical’s views, which will bring us closer to understanding prophecy and its legitimacy in Reformation-era Europe. In an influential essay, Richard Southern illustrates the important role of the prophetical tradition in premodern historical writing: ‘Prophecy filled the world-picture, past, present, and future; and it was the chief inspiration of all historical thinking.’ But while its significance is easy to pinpoint, the varied nature of prophetic revelation does not make for easy delineations or definitions. Southern names four types of prophecy in the Middle Ages: biblical (Daniel, Revelation); pagan (sibylline); Christian (such as that of Hildegard of Bingen); and astrological (stars and celestial events). Of course, even these are not clearly distinct categories; Southern notes that Merlin is ‘half-Christian, half-pagan’. Lesley Coote points out that the ‘subject of political prophecy is king, people and nation’, separating this from theological, apocalyptic prophecy, though she also asserts that the two are closely related. Bernard McGinn remarks that in the later Middle Ages, prophecy is ‘seen as a divinatory or occasionally reformative activity – the prophet as the man who foretells the future, or the one who seeks to correct a present situation in the light of an ideal past or glorious future’.

The image of the minister of the word current amongst English evangelical protestants and puritans was both exalted and ambiguous. Ministers were ‘the lord’s ambassadors, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the dispensers of God’s mysteries, the builders of God’s church and the chariot and horsemen … of a Christian kingdom.’ However, the qualities and qualifications necessary successfully to fulfill that role were onerous in the extreme. To be a true minister it was necessary firstly and essentially to preach, which in turn entailed the mastering a large range of scholarly skills, involving knowledge of the original languages, of logic, rhetoric, church history, and theology. But it was necessary also for a true minister to be personally godly, first because he had to lead his flock toward a Christian life not merely through exhortation but also through example and, second, because his own spiritual condition, the integrity of his calling both as a Christian and as a minister, vitally effected the efficacy of his ministry. After all, the deeper his own understanding of the word—always as much a function of spiritual insight as formal learning—and the more completely his own character had been made over by the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit, the more effectively he could communicate his saving message to his flock.

In medieval narrative the First Crusade and the founding of the Latin kingdom were perceived as Gesta Dei per Francos – God’s own deed. Having no doubt that the success of the First Crusade was a miracle, God’s intervention in history, the chroniclers’ rendering of events was accordingly replete with miracles, such as the discovery of the Holy Lance in Antioch and the saints’ taking an active role in the battle against Kirbogha of Mosul in 1098. Even in the more level-headed historical narratives, military success was seen as a miracle and failures were attributed to the sins of the participants who were not pure enough to merit a miracle. Thus the miraculous intervention of God in history became the logical consequence of the prowess and religious behavior of the crusaders, an almost expected outcome of natural events.

Catechizing played an important part in domestic religious education in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in the better documented early modern period. However, its significance has been neglected in comparison with family prayers (often deemed to be an expression of patriarchy), Sunday observance or even private prayers. This article analyses the incidence of catechizing across religious denominations in Britain from 1740 to 1870, and within selected overseas missionary families. Drawing on a wide range of personal memoirs, the article analyses the range of contexts and relationships within which catechizing could occur. These included not only household worship (which could be conducted by women) but also relationships between siblings. It demonstrates that catechizing could provide opportunities for asking questions and spending ‘quality time’ with parents and / or children, rather than embodying an alienating form of rote-learning. The article therefore challenges many stereotypes relating to family domestic education, relating to themes such as patriarchy, denominational difference and adult-child interaction.

The Jewry Oath (juramentum Judaeorum, Judeneid) was the judicial oath demanded from Jews involved in legal litigation when summoned to appear in a Christian court both as plaintiffs and defendants. The special formulae which were created for the Jews, who could not use the Christian formulae, usually included two parts: a ceremony and a verbal part. The ceremony could be long and elaborate, but was usually short and simple. The swearing Jew was asked to lay his right hand on a scroll of the Torah, the Pentateuch, or from the later thirteenth century, though more rarely, even on the Talmud. Sometimes more specific instructions were given, and the hand had to be laid on the page of the Ten Commandments, or even specifically on the commandment prohibiting the taking of the name of the Lord in vain (Exodus 20. 7). The verbal part included an invocation of God, a judicial declaration regarding the nature of the obligation corroborated by the oath, and a list of maledictions which would be inflicted in the case of perjury. The oath itself could be taken in a synagogue or at its gate, but usually it was conducted in the court itself on a Jewish holy book kept there specially for that purpose.

In 1675 there appeared in London a rather interesting, if somewhat neglected, work entitled The Present State of the Jews: (More particularly relating to those in Barbary.) Wherein is contained an exact Account of their Customs, Secular and Religious. One of its more enigmatic features (to which we shall return) was its frontispiece, which featured an illustration not of a Barbary Jew, but of a muscular American Indian holding a spear, to which was attached a banner proclaiming the book’s short title. Its author, Lancelot Addison, was described on the title-page as ‘one of his Majesties Chaplains in Ordinary’, having received that designation in 1671, shortly after returning from eight years in the western part of what was then called Barbary, as chaplain to the British garrison in Tangier. It was largely, although, as we shall see, not exclusively, on the basis of his experiences there between 1662 and 1670 that Addison later wrote his book on The Present State of the Jews, with which we will here be primarily concerned.

Historians tend to approach books primarily as vehicles for ideas, sources for the thought of the individuals and groups who wrote and read the words on the pages inside. They rarely pause to consider their significance as physical artefacts and items of material culture. This paper brings the format, appearance, and practical function of Bibles, prayer books, and other small devotional works to the very centre of our attention. It suggests that close scrutiny of the diminutive size and artistically crafted covers of some of the copies that survive yields fresh insights into the shape and texture of piety in late medieval and early modern England. The following investigation is heavily indebted to the findings of researchers in the specialized field of the history of bookbinding, a field once light-heartedly described as ‘a humble auxiliary discipline … not entirely useless and undoubtedly innocuous’. Yet, as we shall see, situated against the backdrop of developments in Tudor and Stuart embroidery and jewellery, domestic furnishing and female fashion, decorated bookbindings provide us with a unique and interesting reflection of the values and preoccupations of pre- and post-Reformation society.

What did it mean to live with the Bible in post-Reformation England? The increased availability from 1560 of printed vernacular Bibles to own and keep in the home marked a profound change in where and how people experienced Scripture. Most authors have concentrated on the impact of this cultural shift on the textual practices of household religion, especially Bible reading or study in the context of daily prayers and associated instruction. More recent research has examined interactions with the Bible as object, especially the common practice of annotating specific passages, recording information or otherwise marking the pages. A turn in humanities disciplines over the past decade towards visual and material culture has emphasized the connotative role of Bibles as signifiers, with important studies of their display function within female piety, as part of the conventional vocabulary of provincial portraits or as staged properties in Renaissance drama. Yet despite these contributions there is still an overwhelming focus in the existing literature on the use of religious books in relation to the textual and oral practices of domestic devotion - on readers and reading practices – and a good deal of generalization about the locations for such practices, derived from a particular conceptual model of the country house with clearly defined internal arrangements and designated room functions.

The historiographical background to this paper is provided by a recent dramatic change of perspective in the study of the Reformation in Ireland. Traditionally the failure of Protestant reform has been explained in ways that amounted to determinism. In its crudest expression, this involved the self-sufficient premise that the Catholic faith was so deeply ingrained in the Irish as to be unshakable. More subtly, it assumed a set of equations, of Protestantism with English conquest and Catholicism with national resistance, that acted to consolidate the faith. In the 1970s, these simplicities were questioned. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Canny argued that religious reform had made sufficient headway in its initial phase to suggest that the replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism was at least within the bounds of possibility, and raised a fresh question; why did this not happen? That the debate which followed was inconclusive was due in part to an inability to shake off an old habit of circular thought, so that the issue has remained one of deciding whether Protestantism failed because Catholicism succeeded, or Catholicism succeeded because Protestantism failed. Both Dr Robinson-Hammerstein, when she observed that ‘Ireland is the only country in which the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the Head of State’, and Dr Bottigheimer, when he insisted that the failure of the Reformation must ‘concentrate our attention on the nature and limits of political authority’, implied that what needs to be explained is how actions were deprived of their effect. The alternative possibility is that the actions themselves were inherently ineffectual. The premise of this paper is that the failure of Protestantism and the success of Catholicism were the necessary condition, but not the sufficient cause, of each other, and its object is simply to recall attention to the existence of very practical reasons why the Church of Ireland should have evolved as it did in the hundred years or so between the first and second Acts of Uniformity, that is, from an inclusive Church, claiming the allegiance of the entire community, to one that excluded all but a privileged minority.

Odo of Sully, Bishop of Paris (1200-8), decreed in his statutes that each parish priest within his diocese should have a book called a manuale, which should contain the ordo of service for extreme unction, the catechism, baptism, and everyday things. His prescription is the earliest mention in the episcopal legislation that a parish priest should have one particular book dedicated to the liturgy for all the services associated with pastoral care. But codices concerned with the sacerdotal rites for the cura anitnarum have a history which goes back to the late ninth and tenth centuries. These early ritualia were often combined with the monastic collectar, as in the mid-tenth-century Durham Collectar. There are also some examples from the late tenth and eleventh centuries of ritualia made for the secular clergy. Odo of Sully was thus providing his powerful support to an existing practice rather than instituting a new form of service book. This paper investigates further the context in which these early examples of ‘parish’ rituals were compiled, beginning with the Carolingian background.

The title of this paper, ‘Segregation in Church’, may sound like an appendix to the theme of this year’s conference on Women in the Church. I hope to persuade you otherwise. For although my topic focuses on the ostensibly narrow question of the physical position of the sexes at worship, it is related to much broader issues. Ancient rules about impurity and the protection of holy rites and holy places; the fear of sex and the threat of sexual encounters intruding into divine offices; the elevation of virginity and the Virgin Mary; these are all matters that had to do with the seemingly simple question of the individual’s place at public prayer.

The Carolingian Liturgical Experience’ may well seem, and indeed is, a recklessly broad topic for a single paper. ‘Experience of the Liturgy in the Carolingian Period: some questions and not many answers’ might be truer but not necessarily better. So I stay, uneasily, with my original title.

This article explores the links between the assertion of British imperial identities and the anti-Catholic discourse and practices of a network of evangelical societies which existed and flourished in Britain and in the dominions from the halcyon days of the empire to the late 1920s. These bodies shared a broad evangelical definition of Protestantism and defended the notion that religious beliefs and their political implications formed the basis of a common British heritage and identity. Those who identified themselves as Britons in Britain and in the dominions brought forward arguments combining a mixture of pessimistic interpretations of British history since the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act with anxieties about ongoing Irish Catholic immigration and an alleged global papist plot. They were convinced that Protestantism was key to all civil liberties enjoyed by Britons. Inspired by John Wolffe's pioneering work, the article examines constitutional, theologico-political and socio-national anti-Catholicism across Britain and its dominions.