The example of co-existence between Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain should, in theory, be an inspiration to those who hope for a successful multi-faith society today. On the other hand, the expulsion in 1492 of Jews who refused baptism, and of Muslims who adopted a similar attitude, from Castile in 1502 and Aragon in 1610, implies that the Spanish example should rather be seen as a warning of the consequences of failure. The question of interfaith relations will be considered here mainly from the point of view of Christians who attempted to cope with the proximity of the other two ‘religions of the book’. It will, however, be possible to look at the feasibility of the long-term existence of Jewish and Muslim communities in Spain, and at the problems faced by converts from these two faiths to Christianity.

Hagiographical narrative is often examined through the well-established text-critical principle according to which the earliest text is necessarily the most skeletal in outline, the least wondrous in plot, and therefore the most historically believable. According to this view, to the bare bones of truth, fanciful narrative and miraculous tales are added with time, as the tale grows in the telling. The development of the Legend of St Alexios has been viewed as a case in point. The idiosyncratic life-story of this fourth-century ascete has been described as evolving from a nucleus of ‘fact’, essentially coinciding with the early Syriac Life, to a romanced complexity with the Byzantine version influencing the later versions in all major romance languages. Consequently, critics have isolated and, to a large extent, derided the ‘miraculous’ element in the plot, while failing to articulate an understanding of the role of miracles in Alexios’s Life.

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.

Until the pioneer work of Dr G. R. Owst in the 1920s and 1930s English sermon literature was a neglected field. Even today Owst’s two general studies remain largely isolated monuments, the starting-point of those who would pursue the sermon, but not, perhaps, so influential in related fields as their intrinsic worth and astonishing thoroughness would appear to merit.

As Owst pointed out, James Gairdner’s four-volume work on Lollardy failed to take account both of unpublished material in episcopal registers and of an extensive sermon literature in manuscript. It was by means of the sermon that Owst himself was able to recreate much of the social background of fourteenth and fifteenth-century England. A prominent element in that background was Lollardy.

The Sunday school was an art form. Its classical age has been explored by T. W. Laqueur and its totality by P. B. Cliff. Like those of great art, its creative moments were the simultaneous issue of evolution, system, and individual genius. Those moments were intensest in their Nonconformist aspect, for Nonconformists, though often thwarted, were born educationists. Their buildings reflected this: theological colleges, for instance, which grew from overgrown houses to imitations of Oxford, and eventually to Oxford itself; or proprietory schools, strait-jacketed between the financial constraints and social aspirations of an enlarged middle class trying to reconcile Manchester’s values with those of Thomas Arnold. And there were the Sunday schools themselves, complexes of hall, parlour, and classroom, enfolding the chapel, reflecting the activity, mentality, and spirituality of a particular society, encompassing therefore a concept of the Church, and designed with considerable ingenuity to meet the needs of a rounded yet carefully graduated community. By the turn of the twentieth century they housed daily activities for all ages. Their influence reached far. Fuelled by the Word proclaimed from the pulpit, and empowered by the decisions of representative meetings taken in hall or vestry, the Sunday school broke chapel bounds to teach more people than could be met with in chapel pews.

Since Independence in 1957 the Anglican Church in Malaysia has disavowed any inclination towards Malay evangelism in concert with a general climate of Christian opinion which sees such efforts as not only legally difficult, if not actually illegal following enactments in a number of states, but also politically impossible and threatening to the stability of the nation. This is the background to the claim in a Singapore Anglican history written in 1963 that ‘In the Peninsular… no missionary work among the Muslim Malays was considered and their faith always has been respected.’

Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,
But God now thunders in an awful strain!
Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,
Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:
But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,
The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see the Hand.
’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,
’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!

In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.

Across the British empire, public worship was important for sustaining a sense of community and connectedness. This was most evident in special acts of worship, when the peoples of imperial territories, and sometimes of the whole empire, were asked at times of crisis and celebration to join together in special days or prayers of petition or thanksgiving to God. These occasions, ordered by a variety of civil and ecclesiastical authorities, were an enduring feature of all colonial societies from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Although these special acts of worship have considerable potential for deepening our understanding of various themes in the history of the British empire, they have yet to receive sustained analysis from scholars. This article is concerned with the fundamental task of considering why and how special prayers and days of fasting, humiliation, intercession and thanksgiving were appointed across the empire. By focusing on the causes of, and orders for, these occasions, it indicates reasons for the longevity of this practice, as well as its varied and changing purposes.

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

Before returning home to his royal master, the ambassador of Poland went to say farewell to the reigning Pope, Pius V. They met in St Peter’s Square, where the ambassador asked for a relic to take back with him to Poland. In reply, the pontiff bent down and took earth from the square with both his hands and placed it in a handkerchief, before handing it to the understandably bemused Pole with the reassurance that this was no ordinary earth but that mixed with the blood of Christian martyrs (nobis notum omnino erat, Vaticanum pulverem Martyrum sanguine plenum esse). The earth then proceeded to bleed, staining the handkerchief to the wonder and amazement of all present.

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.

A gravestone in a Teignmouth cemetery displays the following inscription:

That unassuming epitaph bears testimony to one of the most remarkable figures in the story of Victorian missionary expansion. The missionary movement from both Britain and North America depended for its regular income on the enthusiasm of the small-scale contributor, but the munificence of the wealthy was essential to the financing of special projects or the opening up of new fields. The role of, for example, the jam manufacturer William Hartley as treasurer of the Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, or of the chemical manufacturers James and John Campbell White in providing much of the finance for the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia Mission, is relatively well known.

On 1 March 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain. Ten years later the Moorish inhabitants of Castile were offered the alternative of conversion or emigration. The fate of the Moors in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon was deferred until the reign of the emperor Charles V. But though he kept the inquisition out of Aragon for forty years, he did not succeed in reconciling his Morisco subjects with their Christian brothers. Philip II failed much more notably. For his policy stimulated the great Morisco revolt of 1568–70. Thereafter they were scattered round the kingdom in a forced diaspora. In 1582 their expulsion was proposed in the council of state. Finally in 1609–10 the government of Philip III, chastened by the twelve years truce in the Netherlands, set about the expulsion of all the three hundred thousand or so Moriscos who remained.

For centuries it has been believed that at the famous council of Lyons, held in 1274 to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, the leading role defending Latin theological views in the debates that presumably took place was played by the great Franciscan theologian, Bonaventura. Recently, however, this view has been seriously called into question, and a re-evaluation of his role and that of other leading protagonists would seem to be in order. Far from being the ‘soul of the union,’ and the man who ‘crushed the Greeks in theological debate,’ as has been generally believed, Bonaventura’s part in the union seems to have been very limited. It is the purpose of this paper not only to put in clearer light and in its true context the work of Bonaventura with regard to the Greeks at the council, but also to indicate, if only rather briefly, the parts taken by other mendicants, the Franciscans John Parastron and Jerome of Ascoli, and the Dominicans, Albertus Magnus, William of Moerbeke, and their minister general, Peter of Tarentaise. Our aim, then, is to ascertain the relative importance of their respective roles in the preparations for, and the proclamation of, religious union.

In the year 1206, as Saint Francis was walking near the church of San Damiano, just outside the walls of Assisi, he was suddenly overcome by an urge to enter the dilapidated sanctuary. Upon entering, in the words of his first hagiographer,

For Lord Macaulay the defiance offered by the seven bishops to James II marked a turning-point in English history. It was the story of men who would not stand by as a ‘harsh and inexorable prince’ destroyed constitutional liberties, established a military despotism, and imposed Catholicism by force. The great whig historian was not much given to praise of the clergy in general or bishops in particular, but even he could not withhold his admiration from an archbishop of Canterbury ‘who was ready to wear fetters and lay his aged limbs on bare stones rather than betray the interests of the Protestant religion and set the prerogative above the laws.’ Macaulay’s account of the seven bishops is, however, closely bound up with his view of James II as one of the great villains of English history, and recent historians, while enjoying the rich texture of Macaulay’s prose, find it difficult to accept the version of classical whig historiography. In their work James appears as not so much a tyrant as a peculiarly maladroit politician, not so much an absolutist with wide-ranging ambitions as an obstinate man of narrow religious perspectives. His little army was quite incapable of imposing Catholicism by force on a fiercely protestant nation. James’s aim was as simple as it was injudicious: to achieve civil emancipation for the small minority of his catholic co-religionists by a process of political manoeuvre and manipulation. Now, if this re-interpretation be correct, it is time to extend the process into ecclesiastical history and look afresh at the motives and policies of the seven bishops. I would suggest that what emerges is something quite different from the traditional heroic version but nonetheless an instructive study in the clerical mind of the late seventeenth century.

On 6 December 1616, Marco Antonio De Dominis, the Roman catholic archbishop of Spalato, on the Dalmatian coast, arrived in England. According to Arthur Wilson, he was ‘old and corpulent, unfit for Travel, being almost at his journies end by Nature’, yet he soon began to speak out vigorously against the faith and practices of Rome. Finding himself warmly welcomed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, he accepted several appointments in the church of England—including those of dean of Windsor and master of the Savoy—and became a prominent anti-Roman controversialist. Then, after five and a half years in England, De Dominis, like a wandering star in the Ptolemaic system, ‘went Retrograde, placing himself again in the Roman Calendar.’ What moved De Dominis to undertake so arduous a physical and spiritual journey as that which led him to England, and why, having found an honoured place among ideological allies, did he leave it to go to the very citadel of the ecclesiastical power he had attacked?

Retrospection is a recognized characteristic of reform movements. An appeal to the past legitimates ideological concerns which seek to replace a state of affairs considered decadent and decayed. Reforming rhetoric depends on the past as a means of proving its value and credibility. Such preservation of the past as a key organizing principle in transforming events is necessarily selective and often has a tendency towards schematization and simplification. Not only does the reforming agenda determine what aspects of the past are remembered, and hence what aspects are buried, but it also determines who is responsible for the act of remembering itself. ‘Different groups of people remember things in different ways.’ The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which the Anglo-Saxon past was perceived and utilized during the tenth-century monastic reform movement. It will be shown how, under an influence which was heavily Benedictine in inspiration, the collective memory of monks created a picture of the Anglo-Saxon past which was ‘all of a piece and all monastic’. The past was closely linked to the exercise of power. It will thus be shown how this monastic view of the past competed with an alternative tenth-century view and was ultimately to triumph over its competitor.

It is the aim of this paper to ask questions rather than to answer them. The area with which I am concerned is a strip of central Syria extending from the Euphrates in the north to Baalbek (ancient Heliopolis) in the south. This region has a large number of village-remains from late antiquity, some of them exceptionally well preserved. These remains have yielded a large number of inscriptions, of which a significant proportion bears a date. They are being collected in the volumes of the Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie. Seven volumes have appeared.

The inscriptions start in the early empire and continue to the end of the sixth century. They thus start in pagan times and cover the whole development of Syrian Christianity. Only a few of the Christian inscriptions come from the great cities of Syria, for example Antioch, Aleppo [Beroea], the ancient Apamea, or Horns [Emesa]. They do not therefore throw light on the development of urban Christianity, which at Antioch especially was of great importance, and of long standing. The development reflected by the inscriptions is the conversion of the countryside.

This paper is an attempt to offer a preliminary study of a Christian tradition of allegorizing the zodiac which is found in certain literary texts and artistic representations. What prompted the investigation from the artistic point of view was an examination of the twelfth-century baptismal font in the church of St Peter at Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, which is decorated with a mixture of selected signs of the zodiac and scriptural images (plate i). It raises the question of how early was the tradition in which the zodiac was linked with baptism in Christian thought, and what other connections there might be. So the question I should like briefly to illustrate here is the connection between Christian decorations which feature the zodiac, particularly in the medieval period, and an allegorical tradition which goes back to the early Church.