Let them be forbidden access to this work, wrote Alan of Lille in his Anticlaudianus, who would only look for the image of sensuality and not the truth of reason . . . Do not allow those tasteless men, who cannot take their studies beyond the bounds of the senses, to impose their own interpretations on this book . . . lest the majesty of its secret meanings be profaned, like pearls cast before swine, when divulged to the unworthy. But what is this majestic secret significance which Alan wished to keep hidden from people so lacking in good taste as to want to probe it and misunderstand it? On the surface the Anticlaudianus, Alan’s most famous work, is an epic romance about a celestial journey and a great battle which is clearly being used as a moral treatise, a summa de virtutibus et vitiis. His long poem tells the story of how the goddess Nature, in council with the Virtues, seeks to make a new type of person, the homo perfectus. They realise that such a divine being cannot be created unless a soul is brought from God, whereupon Phronesis, the searcher after truth to whom the secrets of God are revealed, undertakes a journey to heaven in a chariot constructed by the seven liberal arts and drawn by the five senses. With the aid of Theology and Faith, Phronesis meets the heavenly host, the Virgin Mary, and eventually God himself, who has a soul made for her. She brings this soul, carefully sealed to keep it fresh, back to the waiting body, and the novus homo is complete. He then has to prove himself in a great pitched battle between the virtues and the vices.

It has been said that Innocent III shared the popular belief existing at the beginning of the thirteenth century that the world would end in 1284. Perhaps this is the reason why throughout his pontificate he was eager to resolve the divisions facing mankind. These divisions were reflected in the deviations of the heretic, the beliefs of the infidel and the schism of the eastern church. In the first of these Innocent was meeting success, albeit in varying degrees, for example in Languedoc. The second and third needed his further attention. He was of the opinion that a renewed crusading effort in both east and west would be able to achieve mass conversions amongst Jews and Muslims. To this end the fourth crusade of 1204, mounted mainly by the Cistercians, came into being.

This account of Henry II’s pilgrimage to Rocamadour comes from Robert de Torigny, a well-informed contemporary, hence the significance of the details which he included. From Domfront, on the frontiers of Normandy, the king travelled hundreds of kilometres to the south.

The title of this paper was inspired by a piece of ecclesiastical doggerel published in the Hensal-Cum-Heck Church Monthly for November 1895:

They may call me a Papist, and laugh at my creed,
‘Tis the Faith that will save in the hour of need;
Let them talk, let them laugh, but when death is at hand
The priest is the only true friend in the land.

It is not the only ritualist concept of priestly vocation; in a somewhat earlier tract on confession priests are described as ‘the spiritual police of Almighty God; they must hunt out, track, pursue, and arraign sinners, as the police pursue and apprehend thieves and rascals’. Although both concepts are to be found elsewhere in ritualist literature, and both would have been accepted by many ritualist priests as not being mutually exclusive, it would seem that the concept of the priest as ‘friend’ was the dominant one.

This paper considers the reward books given to children as Sunday-school prizes in the north-west of England between 1870 and 1914. From the titles presented and from the authors considered to be suitable, it was possible to select a number of books which were representative of these prizes. An examination of these stories showed that there were themes which were repeatedly stressed, and that those for boys and girls were noticeably different. In the light of what is already known about the organization and purposes of Sunday schools, the choice of a particular genre of books for prizes suggests that their contents were seen as one way of socializing children into appropriate attitudes and behaviour.

The early church architecture of Syria remains comparatively little known in western academic circles, yet there is no area of the early Christian world where the remains of so many churches of different types have been preserved. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to this architecture; it also offers bibliography for those who may feel moved to find out more. Within Syria itself, there were marked regional variations which allow the area to be divided into three districts on the basis of geography, architectural style and building materials. The first of these to be treated here is northern Syria, essentially the late Roman provinces of Syria I and Syria II with their capitals at Apamea and Antioch. The paper then turns to southern Syria, that is most of the province of Arabia with its capital at Bostra, before moving to the final area, comprising Jordan, the southern part of Provincia Arabia and the eastern, transjordanian half of Palestine III.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.

[He] is in the line of the great souls of the Middle Ages who spanned the whole compass of current knowledge. Bishop and doctor, William of Auvergne is one of the noble figures of the thirteenth century (F. Vernet).

William was chaplain to Queen Blanche, King Louis’ mother, and in an age of great bigotry he excelled in excessive bigotry (Ch. Merchavia).

In 1240 William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, was present at a form of hearing, trial, disputation, or inquisition between Christians and Jews to determine whether or not the Parisian Jews should have their copies of the Talmud destroyed. The Talmud was condemned. Some two years later the large quantity—probably twenty-four cartloads—of Jewish books which had been confiscated in 1240, and locked since then in the Dominican convent, was publicly burned. The consigning of the books to the flames is reminiscent of the burning of heretics and is one of the circumstances of the whole event which has led some commentators to see the trial as a form of Inquisition.

Scholars interested in those medieval clergy charged with the delivery of pastoral care have highlighted the flourishing of reforming movements in the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the period between the fall of the Carolingian empire and the beginnings of the so-called pastoral revolution is generally viewed as one of episcopal neglect. Focusing on case studies drawn from the Carolingian heartlands of north-east Frankia and Lotharingia, as well as what had been the more peripheral regions of northern Italy and southern England, this article offers a revised interpretation of the education of the local clergy in the post-Carolingian world. Exploring the ways in which higher churchmen sought to innovate on the texts they inherited from their Carolingian predecessors, it demonstrates how they paid considerable attention to the preparation and ordination of suitable candidates, to the instruction and monitoring of local clergy through attendance at diocesan synods and local episcopal visitations, and to the provision of suitable texts to support local churchmen in the delivery of pastoral care.

Medieval popes can scarcely have expected such spectacular results from a bull as Gregory EX achieved in 1237. His bull Cum hora undecima of 1235, a fundamental statement of the Church’s missionary function, gave specific licence to the Dominican William of Montferrat to preach, dispense the sacraments, absolve and excommunicate in the lands of schismatics and heretics of the East. Two years later, Philip, the Dominican provincial of the Holy Land, wrote to the pope announcing the conversion to Rome of the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius II, the anticipated conversion of the Nestorian catholicos in Baghdad and possibly also the conversion of the Coptic patriarch. It was a staggering return from a mission only two years old, and represented a triumph for the Dominican Order as well as for the papacy.

Between the years 850 and 859 forty-eight Christians were decapitated for offences against Islam in Córdoba, the capital of the Islamic Umayyad dynasty in Al-Andalus, Spain (756–1031). The majority of those executed had deliberately instigated their own deaths by making derogatory comments about the Prophet Muhammad, a known capital offence. The calculated nature of their behaviour, in action against rulers considered by their contemporaries to be fellow monotheists, and without the supernatural support of widely accepted miracles, strained the already fractured Christian community. While the Córdoban bishop and the metropolitan of Seville worked closely with the emirs to stop the would-be martyrs, Eulogius, a Córdoban priest and bishop-elect of Toledo, and his friend Paul Alvar composed martyrologies and apologies for the group. Written for prisoners preparing for martyrdom and for circulation amongst the religious communities surrounding the city, the works allow insight into a movement of martyrs composed of men and women, lay and religious, with Christian and non-Christian backgrounds. The works of Eulogius and Alvar reflect an intense preoccupation with public behaviour as an expression of identity in a religiously diverse society. This emphasis on the bodies of Muslims, Christians and martyrs in both hagiography and act draws attention to the movement’s motives by highlighting its relationship with the strictly ascetic monastic communities of Córdoba, where monks and nuns used their own bodies as means of preserving and articulating Christian culture in early medieval Spain.

The Ecclesiastical History Society’s fiftieth anniversary conference provides an opportunity both to celebrate the achievements of the society and to reflect on the current state of the discipline. In asking whether church historians have lost the plot, I do not mean to question colleagues’ reason and sanity, but to wonder whether those of us who work in this field might have forgotten some of the objectives and principles that once distinguished our endeavour. Has ecclesiastical history lost its sense of purpose, its place at the heart of historical enterprise, to the extent that it has become not just marginalized and peripheral, but essentially irrelevant both to academic study and wider society?

In devoting its attention to the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the Ecclesiastical History Society has self-evidently addressed a theme as fundamental as it is often distressing to the practitioners of both religions. For many historians of the English Church, as for many of this Society’s members themselves, that relationship presents the additional irony that it would have been almost impossible actually to encounter a Jew in this country during those three centuries which tend to interest them most. As it is, Edward I’s expulsion of all his Jewish subjects from his realm on 18 July 1290 (‘without any hope of ever remaining there’) not only aborted a still inconclusive experiment in religious co-existence, but for centuries relegated the lives of the Jews and Jewesses of Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet England to the obscurity of the historically irrelevant. No longer in 1991 does that seem at all so obvious; and one supposes that nothing would have surprised Henry III and Edward I more than that their treatment of the Jewish minority within their realm should now often seem more ‘relevant’ to the churches of the modern world than any other feature of their respective reigns. For that reason, above all, there must be every prospect that the relationship between Jews and Christians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England will soon be subjected to more detailed analysis than ever before. Nor, for similar reasons, has it ever been quite so obvious as it is today that the study of medieval Anglo-Jewry is too important to remain the exclusive preserve of historians who are themselves Jews.

The picture drawn by Chaucer in the Friar’s Tale is a little journalistic, not to say sensational, and it deals with only some aspects of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of his day, yet it leaves us in no doubt as to the importance of the courts, and of the way in which they were regarded in some quarters. Perhaps the picture was overdrawn, and true only of the half century or so within Chaucer’s own knowledge. On the other hand it has recently been demonstrated that these same courts furnished some at least of the excuses for royal and parliamentary action at the outset of the reformation, and there seems to be good reason for a closer look at them in this context. Most of all, however, for those whose principal interest is the quality of medieval life, it is desirable to consider the institution during the whole period for which there is some sort of continuous record of its working, that is, for the years covered by my title. There is no doubt that such a study should reveal a considerable section of the public and private life of the time, and while in the limits of this paper I can do no more than skim the surface of my material I hope that I shall persuade others to make further and deeper studies.

The National Mission of Repentance and Hope, launched by the archbishops of Canterbury and York and led by the bishop of London in the autumn of 1916, has not been regarded as one of the more successful episodes in the history of the Church of England. Hensley Henson, who can always be relied upon for a suitable comment, called it ‘a grave, practical blunder’, whilst a very different type of churchman, Conrad Noel, called it ‘the Mission of Funk and Despair’. Its treatment in the secondary sources is curious. Bell has a chapter on it in his life of Randall Davidson, but it says much about Davidson and little about the Mission. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Iremonger’s treatment in the life of Temple. S. C. Carpenter chose to omit the chapter on the National Mission from his life of Winnington-Ingram. Lloyd depends heavily on Bell; Wilkinson is more rounded, but the fullest account by Mews remains unpublished.

The Glorious Revolution encouraged Presbyterians to hope for comprehension within the Church of England. The failure of those hopes led them to co-operate more closely with their Congregational brethren. In London the earliest practical outcome of this increased co-operation was the Common Fund, which held its first meeting in June 1690. Controlled by managers drawn from both denominations, the Fund was established to offer financial help to poor ministers, congregations, and students who lived in the provinces. A scheme for uniting the two ministries, the Happy Union, set out in the ‘Heads of Agreement’, was adopted a year later on 6 April 1691, but within months this union had dissolved amidst bitter dissension. In less than four years all the schemes for co-operation between Presbyterians and Congregationals had collapsed in London. Nevertheless, co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents, and even the ideals of the Happy Union, continued in the provinces long after the failure in London. In part this was because the desire for a union between the two denominations was widely held throughout the country; indeed the earliest agreement was made by an Assembly of West Country ministers at Bristol in June 1690, nearly a year before the ‘Heads of Agreement’ were adopted in London. Moreover, in many localities following toleration, Presbyterians and Independents still came together in one meeting as a result of the earlier persecution and because of their loyalty to a particular minister. Where dissent was strong, such as in London and the major towns, separate congregations for Presbyterians and Congregational were likely; but where dissent was weaker, particularly in the countryside, congregations included members from both denominations. In these circumstances, members had to accept a minister who did not necessarily share their own denominational preferences. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century the majority of these joint congregations were to divide, as (in most cases) the smaller body of Congregational supporters withdrew to establish their own meetings. There had, however, been more than twenty years of co-operation in many areas in the period following the collapse of the Happy Union in London, and in a few cases such arrangements even continued until the early nineteenth century. There is evidence from at least two congregations, at Leicester and Chesterfield, of a formal agreement to settle the differences between the two denominations. The Happy Union and its failure in London has been the subject of a number of studies, but by contrast the continuing co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents in the provinces has received little detailed attention.

The controversy which concerns us now, as it once concerned the thirteenth-century participants, centres upon the king’s right to demand corrodies in monastic establishments for his own nominees. Thus it is necessary to begin by defining the term ‘corrody’ in the present context. In describing a corrody as ‘nothing more than an allowance consisting of a share in a common fund’, Professor Hamilton Thompson neatly encapsulated the multifarious forms which it could take; he also drew attention to its potentially disastrous effects when he noted that at least one person, who should have known better, believed that corrodies were so called because they were corrosive. The allowances or provisions were specified in a written agreement between the monastic chapter and the prospective recipient and might include board, lodging, items of clothing, and cash payments, or any one of these, or a combination of them; and so they were often entered on monastic officials’ expense accounts as annuities, pensions, or liveries (liherationes). Acting on their own initiative and often against episcopal injunctions, religious houses in financial straits made such grants to laymen, whose wives were sometimes included, in return for a lump sum or a donation of property. The corrodian who paid cash or bequeathed part of his estate provided an immediate and welcome boost in income for the community which received him, and he and his family gained security and comfort in their declining years. But the financial relief for the monastery which had guaranteed hospitality for life could, and did, turn into a liability when the beneficiaries lived longer than had been anticipated. In addition, outsiders, by virtue of their rights as founders and benefactors, made certain claims on religious houses, among which was the requisition of corrodies on behalf of relatives or retainers. It was this form of exploitation in which the King himself was the chief offender, and Henry III, in financial straits, would argue that he was in principle the patron of all religious establishments in the country.

The question posed in this paper is the extent and nature of the medical practice of the medieval waldensian brothers. What lies behind this is in part a historiographical development which gained impetus in the 1960s, principally in the works of Mollat. In these the the period of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries has been identified as crucial in several areas: a prise de conscience by many of the problems of material need, whether poverty or physical sickness or other disabilities, and the development of new ideas in some of these areas; a peaking of foundations of institutions of assistance, in particular hospitals for the sick, the outlines of which have become clear in Belgian and French work; the embodiment of the spiritual ideal of poverty in the apostolic religious movements which grew at this time. Mollat has juxtaposed these phenomena in order to suggest that one should look for interconnections between them, and it is in the spirit of his enquiry that the present question is raised. If we look at one of the two major evangelical heresies nurtured in the late twelfth cenury matrix described by Mollat, namely the movement of the waldensian brothers, shall we find an element which should be related to the wider interests and developments in assistance and, in particular, medical care which were displayed elsewhere at this time?

Tensions between public and private forms of religiosity have been endemic to Christianity since its institutionalization during the first four centuries AD. That process was in part characterized by the clerical curtailment of alternative routes of divine access which bypassed the structures of the Church and the controls which it operated: most notably, Scripture and sacrament. Acts had imagined the last Christian days as a spiritual age of prophecy, visions and dreams, but the rapid association of such phenomena with rigorist, schismatic or heretical groups – particularly the Gnostics, Montanists and Manichaeans – rendered them suspect if scripturally unassailable. Dreaming – ‘the paradigm of the open frontier’, ‘epiphany’s most open level’ – became strictly delineated by episcopally defined typologies which restricted access to the divine and necessitated arbitration, thus protecting the centrality and authority of the Church. Those typologies not only emphasized the relative rarity of divinely inspired dreams (as opposed to the physiological or demonic), they also stressed the special status of the recipient. They thus partook of a late antique professionalization of the holy by which an emergent spiritual elite attempted to exercise an unprecedented monopoly on the supernatural.