The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.

Although Merovingian cities were not prepossessing they were important. Physically they straggled outside the Roman walls of the third century and divided increasingly into suburbs dependant on the great basilicas. Dijon, technically a castrum, was thought to be worthy of higher status, but its aspect was one of walls, fields, streams and mills. To be fair, urban centres throughout the middle ages possessed equally bucolic attributes. More important, the civitates were secular and ecclesiastical centres. The greatest of them could boast strong associations with the royal court, but even those with no such cachet were distinguished by the presence of a bishop. This last figure has attained considerable eminence in the eyes of historians and perhaps his authority has been exaggerated, nevertheless if his position was weaker than we have been taught, it was because of the strength and vigour of urban society; the reputation of the cities is not diminished. Not surprisingly they provided the backcloth for many of the dramas of sanctity and martyrdom recorded by the hagiographers.

Some may question the suitability of sermon material as a means of illuminating the thought and background of a specific period. If anything, preachers were even less original—though that is too modern a concept—than other categories of medieval author. Frequently the same material was recast and pressed into service on a variety of occasions; a practice familiar to preachers down the centuries, but one which effectively blurs the dates of initial ‘publication’ and the extent of an individual’s contribution.

Much of this criticism is applicable to the collection of twenty-five sermons which occupies the first part of Bodley MS 649. Yet, when all the customary quotations from classical and medieval authors have been abstracted, along with the time-worn exempla to be found in the works of Jacques de Vitry, Vincent de Beauvais, Jacques de Voragine, and a host of other compilators, acknowledged and unacknowledged, there remains a core of material which is both contemporary and in the manner of its handling, particular. As one reads the sermons there is an increasing awareness of atmosphere, the sense of a distinct historical period and its problems. A wealth of contemporary metaphor and apt proverbial phrase, the interpolation of arresting—albeit to our ears incongruous—passages in english, and the mention of specific events, together contribute to an impression of society which is both vital and convincing.

Perhaps the earliest use of trilinguis, to refer to the biblical tongues and the claim to proficiency in them, is in Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 401 A.D., where Jerome reminded Rufinus of his own status as a scholar, ‘Ego philosophus, rhetor, grammaticus, dialecticus, Hebraeus, Latinus trilinguis’. Erasmus who owed so much to Jerome in biblical studies and in his conception of renewal for the life of the Church and Christian society by such studies, would have omitted ‘dialecticus’ from Jerome’s roll-call of his own attainments. For Erasmus the ‘philosophia Christi’ based on trilingual learning was the ground of renewal in personal and public Christian life, of renewal in the Church, and of renewal in the respublica litterarum. As he saw it, disaster came upon the Church’s thinking when dialectics were introduced into theology, mastered it, and produced ‘some of the pseudo-theologians of our time whose brains are rotten, their language barbarous, their intellects dull, their learning a bed of thorns, their manners rough, their life hypocritical, their talk full of venom, and their hearts as black as ink’.

A visitor to the Greco-Roman world about the year 350 AD would have found himself confronted by one of the great ‘sea changes’ in the lives of its peoples. The structure of city, farm and village that had persisted for centuries would appear to be intact. The market-places of the towns would be lined with altars and statues of long-dead benefactors. Temples to the gods of Rome and perhaps to a native deity duly Romanised, would dominate the scene. Wherever one stood in the city the temples in the forum would be the landmark. Nearby, would be the amphitheatre and great bath-building, the social centres of the old community, and near the entrance to the town the triumphal arch, marking perhaps the unification of Roman citizen and native inhabitant into one community.

The expulsion of aliens from England in 1378 forms one episode in the history of the alien priories, a story which began with the norman conquest and continued into the fifteenth century. The alien priories—they may be defined as the english dependencies of foreign religious houses—had been subjected to interference from the english crown since 1295, when Edward I’s seizure of them on the outbreak of the anglo-french war became the precedent, both of occasion and method, for the future. By 1378 the priories had been in crown hands during four periods of hostilities: 1295 to 1303, 1324 to 1327, 1337 to 1360, and again from 1369.

‘He looked up at the pleasant plate-glass in the windows of the house of his friend the dean, and told himself how, in their college days, he and the dean had been quite equal—quite equal, except that by the voices of all qualified judges in the university he, Mr. Crawley, had been acknowledged to be the riper scholar. And now the Mr. Arabin of those days was the Dean of Barchester … while he, Crawley, was the perpetual curate of Hogglestock.’ The Last Chronicle of Barset is the story of a model clergyman, ‘a hard-working conscientious pastor’ and ‘still a scholar’ long after he had left university, who had never gained lucrative preferment. Yet this novel, as all those in the Barchester sequence, abounds with clerics of modest intellect and minimal spirituality whose benefices afforded extremely comfortable livelihoods. In short, the novel reminds us forcibly that a career in the Church was, in the nineteenth century, a gamble; the greatest rewards did not always go to the most deserving, but to those with the right connections through which they obtained the most lucrative positions.

Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.

Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, ecclesiastical discipline in an Anglican context has been very much a hot topic. Internationally, there has been intense debate over the decision by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America to ordain Gene Robinson, a continent yet avowedly homosexual priest, as one of its bishops, and over the decision of the diocese of New Westminster in Canada to authorize liturgical services of blessing for same-sex couples. The Windsor Report of 2004 was commissioned in order to formulate a Communion-wide response to these developments,1 and although ‘discipline’ is a word which is very seldom in its pages, it is, in effect, a study of the disciplinary framework which its authors believe necessary in order for the Anglican Communion to hold together. At a local level, the Church of England’s clerical discipline procedures are being thoroughly overhauled, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s 1996 report on clergy discipline and the ecclesiastical courts. This paper seeks to explore the themes of discipline and diversity in both an international and an English context. It attempts to shed a little more light on how the Anglican Communion, particularly in the former British Empire, got itself into its current position, as a loosely-federated assembly of provincial synods, without a central framework for handling disciplinary matters. Secondly, it examines how the Church of England has handled discipline in relation to its clergy since the mid-nineteenth century.

In about 1380 the choir of the Franciscan church of Florence, Santa Croce, was decorated by Agnolo Gaddi with scenes illustrating the legend of the Holy Cross. The emperor Constantine does not appear in these frescoes, although it was understood that it was his conversion that had moved his mother Helena to undertake her archaeological expedition to the Holy Land to discover the whereabouts of the Cross. It is, nevertheless, his unseen presence that links Gaddi’s cycle to the frescoes of the life and miracles of Saint Silvester, painted by Maso di Banco in the nearby Bardi di Vernio chapel a generation earlier. Here the emperor, afflicted with leprosy, recoils from the advice of his pagan priests that he should bathe in the blood of innocent children and is advised by the apostles Peter and Paul in a dream that to obtain a remedy he must send for the persecuted pope Silvester. Silvester shows Constantine portraits of the apostles, thus authenticating his vision, and cleanses him of his leprosy by baptism. The remaining frescoes illustrate miracles of the saint, notably his quelling of a dragon that had been terrorising Rome and his resuscitation of two magicians who had been overcome by it.

On 2 March 1865, the Revd Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was hanged from a willow tree close to his own church and mission station at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. John Hobbs, who had arrived as a Methodist missionary in New Zealand in 1823, reported on ‘the very barbarous Murder of one of the best Missionaries in New Zealand’ and noted that Völkner’s death marked ‘a New Era in the history of this country’. Völkner was the first European missionary of any denonomination to be killed in New Zealand since missionary work began in 1814.

Italian churchmen from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries saw parents as playing a crucial role in forming new generations in the Catholic faith and thus as an indispensable support to the clergy. They stressed the importance of conditioning from the earliest years. They therefore emphasized parental, and more particularly paternal, authority. On the other hand, another major preoccupation was to prevent violation of the wills of young people with regard to religious vocations and marriage. A balance therefore had to be struck between paternal authority and the legitimate desires of young people who had attained the age of discretion. The matter of the all-importance of conditioning raises the question of our writers’ views of infant human nature. They emphasized to varying degrees the tractability of unformed infant nature and the need to curb unruly instincts, but by and large the emphasis was on nurture rather than on vitiated human nature, on formation rather than on repression.

Religion was the ideological motor of politics in the first age of party. Though the distinction between the Whig and Tory positions on religious issues was often small compared to their internal divisions on other matters, religion was felt to be the only real justification for both parties. The Whigs stood for a cosmopolitan Erastianism embracing protestant dissent, the Tories for a stronger, national Church for which religious uniformity was still a worthwhile goal. The Church was inextricably caught up in these national political divisions, and its own internecine warfare between high and low church mirrored them exactly. It naturally followed from this that religious issues were the most passionately upheld by the Whigs and the Tories, and were those which had most impact on national politics. Hence the Tories put themselves out of office in 1704–5 by the zeal with which they tried to push the Occasional Conformity Bill through, even though it was certain to create a constitutional crisis which would paralyse the British war-effort against France. And the Whigs seized the opportunity to ‘roast a parson’ afforded by Henry Sacheverell’s high church ranting on the theme of ‘the Church in Danger’ by trying to impeach him. Their partial success only served to validate and refresh the ‘Church in Danger’ preaching they had hoped to silence, and they were crushed by an avalanche of outraged Toryism in the 1710 election. Since religious issues were the most keenly felt and constituted the central dynamic of the party battle, the translation of religious conflict from the nation at large to Westminster gives us a glimpse of the real strength of religion’s hold on the concept of party, and hence its influence in contemporary politics.

From time to time it has been pointed out that Wyclif had a quite exceptional grasp of papal-hierocratic theory. Although its bitter opponent, his extensive knowledge of the refinements of the theory, his almost intuitive appreciation of its most fundamental principles, indicate a depth of penetration into hierocratic ideology which many supporters of papal supremacy must themselves have envied. His effectiveness as an anti-papal writer during the polemics of the 1370s and 1380s lay less in the novelty and originality of his own system of thought, and in the consistency with which he repeated himself, but rather in his superior ability to detect the weakest points in his adversaries’ chain of argument. He not only knew exactly where to thrust between the links, but, more important, how to aim for the pivots of the system, so that the whole hierocratic theory might be turned on its head.

At present, roman catholics number just under 7% of the total population of Sri Lanka. The dominant religious groups in the country are the Sinhalese buddhists and the Tamil hindus with 65% and 25% respectively of the population. The remainder consists of muslims (around 7%) and a few protestants. Here, unlike sub-Saharan Africa, European religions were introduced into a context dominated by other world religions with long literary and intellectual traditions. Furthermore, religion enters so intimately into the culture of various groups in the island that it is difficult to demarcate an area of thought or activity which can be clearly labelled as ‘religious’.

‘How are your healing groups going?’ the present archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, enquired rhetorically in a charge to service chaplains in 1979. ‘The renewal of the Church’s ministry of healing’ the bishop of Selby has even more recently written, ‘is one hard obstinate fact that future historians will be unable to ignore when examining the Christian scene in the present century.’ The bishop, who is co-chairman of the Churches’ Council for Health and Healing, particularly singled out for praise the pioneers of this renewal: ‘individuals like James Moore Hickson, George Bennett and Dorothy Kerin’ as well as such later contributors as Leslie Weatherhead from the free churches, and more recently Cameron Peddie in Scotland and the American Dominican, Francis MacNutt. The bishop has further argued that ‘these powerful initiatives given to the healing movement by individual leaders were matched by the leadership of the Churches’, an assertion which is backed by citing the discussions devoted to the subject at the Lambeth conferences of 1908, 1920, 1930 and 1958. The first two of these conferences were presided over by archbishop Randall Davidson, who in the bishop of Selby’s book is presented as a crypto-champion of spiritual healing.

The wide span of years which I have boldly claimed in my title is intended to enmesh and hold together for our inspection the first great age of the medieval city, the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the medieval Church first faced the problem of evangelism in growing mercantile communities, and the age when it deployed in the cities and towns of Europe a new army of missionaries in the persons of the friars. The missionary techniques of the friars are familiar and comparatively well documented; the evangelism of the tenth and eleventh centuries is scarcely documented at all. In recent years the dramatic nature of urban history in this early period has been becoming increasingly apparent; and it was in the conviction that the Church’s hand in it could not wholly escape detection that I chose the title for this lecture. Many aspects of this problem have been traced with the closest care; but I justify the breadth and cloudiness of my theme by a conviction that it has rarely been looked at quite from this point of view.

From the vividly autobiographic Life of St Teresa famous images of conventual life in sixteenth-century Spain have been derived; both the dark impression of unreformed monastic existence and the heroic profile of reformed regulars. Before and after that era the social, not to say political prominence of certain figures, friars and nuns, in Spanish life is notorious, from the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs to that of Philip IV and beyond. Modern historical research has indeed highlighted the contribution to political and ecclesiastical development, to early Catholic reform above all, of key members of the regular clergy under the Catholic Monarchs. For monastics, as opposed to mendicants, in post-medieval Spain, the extensive and meticulous researches of Linage Conde have put all Iberian scholars in his debt. The fascinating origins of the essentially Iberian phenomenon of the Jeronymites have recently received new attention from J.R.L. Highfield, but further insights into the true condition of the religious life in the Iberian peninsula of the supposedly Golden Age are perhaps still possible, when unpublished material is consulted in the Roman archives and in those of Spain, such as Madrid, Simancas, Barcelona and Valencia. Considerations of space necessarily limit what can be suggested here, but the development of monastic life in Counter-Reformation Spain is arguably best considered in its extended not just in its stricter sense: for parallels and contrasts, as well as direct influences, were not confined by the normal distinctions between the eremitic and the monastic, the monastic and the mendicant, the old and the new orders, or even the male and female communities. Furthermore the intervention of Spanish royal authority in Portuguese affairs between 1580 and 1640, not least in ecclesiastical and regular life, provides a useful comparative basis for consideration of truly Iberian conditions.