The Pilgrimage of Grace has received much attention: besides the massive study of the Misses Dodds, both professor Knowles and professor Scarisbrick have devoted many detailed pages to it, and its importance as a challenge to the Henrician régime is not in question. What continues to perplex generations of scholars is why an outbreak of this kind should have occurred in the autumn of 1536, and whether the explanations for it should be primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) sought in the fields of administrative, economic, social or religious history. If religion is the key, is the Pilgrimage best understood as a rebellion by ‘conservative’ catholics who disliked the recent religious innovations, or of progressives who sought for further and more far-reaching reforms? Is it a heretical or schismatic movement or neither? The problem was clearly stated in a paper to this society by professor Dickens, and it has been the subject of local studies and detailed papers ever since. These studies have focused attention on the importance of regional differences in the Pilgrimage. They have shown clearly that our understanding of it will not be advanced further unless we are prepared to attend to these differences, and to the whole structure of local politics which accompanied them.

I begin this paper with some broad generalisations about the history of anglicanism in relation to healing. I shall contend that in East and Central Africa over the last hundred years there were simultaneously present and interacting with each other a number of tendencies which in Europe had developed over a much longer period. Thus in some ways the religious history of colonial Africa is an intensification and telescoping of the religious history of Europe.

I am assuming, then, that in England by the end of the 17th century anglicanism had come to repudiate ‘enthusiasm’ and the visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit, partly for reasons of social control. I am assuming that this more or less closed the door on spiritual healing within 18th century anglicanism and produced the characteristically ‘cool’ anglican tone. Wesley brought back into the Church of England a universe of spirits and spiritual healings and exorcisms but all this went off into early methodism and out of the 19th-century Anglican church. In this 19th-century church, before it reached out into Central African mission, a number of superficially contradictory developments took place. There was an interaction of church and medical ‘establishments’ which led to anglican involvement in public health programmes and to an intellectual commitment to the ‘divine’ origins of modern medical science. At the same time there was a revival, particularly in the countryside, of communal rituals designed to create feelings of solidarity despite the realities of class division.

The Great Persecution in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire was relatively short and sharp. Eusebius in both his Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine contrasts the eight long years of repression suffered by the East, first under Diocletian and Galerius and then under Maximian, with the persecution of ‘scarcely two years’ duration’ endured by the Western Christians. In the West, indeed, the persecution of Valerian 257-60 seems to have been longer and perhaps more costly in human lives, and that of Decius more dangerous to the Church.

Methodist historians have naturally tended to emphasise the reasonableness and sobriety of their founder and his followers, the social as well as the spiritual benefits they produced. The elements of irrationality and what some will see as religious hysteria in the movement have been played down. Non-methodists have been less reticent. Methodist ‘enthusiasm’ was a popular target in the eighteenth century and the charges made, however one-sided and exaggerated, had a solid basis in fact. They were to be repeated with varying degrees of distaste and disapproval by writers such as Southey; or in more balanced accounts like that of Lecky. Even the sympathetic Alexander Knox who had known Wesley personally, perceptively remarked that ‘he would have been an enthusiast if he could’. Ronald Knox suspected that the rational controls in Wesley’s mind were only superficial: he was easily swayed on supernatural phenomena ‘when the evidence supported views which he wanted to be true’. A taste for religious excitement and credulity about the supernatural were often even more marked among his followers, especially the ordinary membership.

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.

Provincial and diocesan legislation provided a coherent system of religious education at a time when opportunities for study were few. It is true that in content little was new, but there was much in the way of reiteration, development and expansion, with particular attention to the practical details of implementation.

Mediaeval education is often discussed in terms of clerical education on the one hand, and of lay education on the other. In this context they are one. The priest had first to learn before he could teach, and what was taught can roughly be summed up as faith, morals, and knowledge of the Church’s law. It remains true that some things were more appropriate for the clerical than the lay ear.

Some attribute their pauper condition to a wrong disposition; others lay their misfortunes to a cruel fate; but it is evident that the passion for drink is at the bottom of ninety per cent of the vagrancy of England’ wrote Josiah Flynt, the brother of the American temperance campaigner Emma Willard.

Scholarly fashions have rightly reacted against the division of the renaissance into ‘two cultures’, the Christian and the pagan, and tend now to emphasise more the positive side of the relationship between religion and humanism. The early humanists themselves were at pains to defend their activities by stressing the contributions that poetry and classical studies could make, the divine origins of poetry and the moral value of many pagan writings. Yet these very defences were necessitated by a series of assaults, mostly by churchmen, on the activities of these early humanists. The old misgivings about the value and permissibility of the study of pagan authors inevitably came to the fore again with the revival of such studies. And the humanist stance was developed specifically in response to such criticisms. Mussato defended his profession against the pulpit denunciations of Giovannino of Mantua: Petrarch against the claims of a doctor of Avignon that medicine, not poetry, was the handmaid of philosophy: Salutati against successive strictures by Giuliano Zonarini, Pellegrino Zambeecari, Giovanni of Sanminiato and Giovanni Dominici.

‘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.

Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, full of evangelical religion and American republicanism carried out a Clapham-inspired scheme in ways the men of Clapham did not always like; and again as this population was overwhelmed by new uprooted peoples from all over west Africa, brought in from the slaveships before they had ever seen the transatlantic plantations. The new population responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and rarely with prolonged resistance, to missionary preaching; and, with those same missionaries appointed to superintend their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, adopted the norms and characteristics of their Nova Scotian and Maroon predecessors. Contemporary British sources do not suggest that at the time Sierra Leone was regarded as a huge success; people in England tended to think of the appalling loss of missionary life in the white man’s grave, and the enormous expense of the Sierra Leone mission; besides, they heard stories which suggested that the serpent still dwelt in their west African garden. Nonetheless, here was the first part of Africa, one of the very few parts anywhere in the world, where there was a mass movement towards the Christian faith, where a whole non-Christian people became Christian.

It is becoming ever clearer how English canonists, by their intense and early activity in collecting current papal decretal letters, made a vital contribution to the law of the Church in the second half of the twelfth century. Dr Charles Duggan has recently produced a fascinating study of these decretal collections and has shown how they reflect the interest and activity of four bishops in particular: Richard of Dover, archbishop of Canterbury (1174-84); Roger, bishop of Worcester (1164-79); Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161-84); and Baldwin of Ford, bishop of Worcester (1180-4) and archbishop of Canterbury (1184-90). These were all foremost papal judges-delegate, concerned to preserve the pope’s letters for the practical purposes of legal reference. Their collections often consisted of a core of letters directed to themselves. Copies of letters directed to other bishops were added to these as obtainable, and also letters copied from other decretal collections then in circulation. An interesting question arises from Dr Duggan’s work. Although particular decretal collections may in this way be associated with particular bishops, is it likely that the bishops themselves were personally responsible for the work of selection and compilation ? Would they have had time? Since they had trained clerks in their familia, would they not more probably have left all this to them, especially to their legal experts? And so we find ourselves looking past the bishops into their households.

In this paper I wish to deal with a rather specialised topic. But this specialised topic may partly explain what was in fact the official attitude of the Byzantine Church, of its patriarchs, bishops and monks, over the centuries, towards Greek philosophy and science. May I suggest that Greek philosophy and science were, and still are indeed, one of the component factors and inspirations of our renaissance and post-renaissance western civilisation?

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must explain the title of this paper, so that the limitations or strict boundaries of this paper, and also its precise contents, its scope or design may be fully realised.

Usually it is those of the mainstream in religion who impose upon those going against the flow discipline, doctrine and uniformity in place of flexibility. Before Christian orthodoxy and heresy had achieved clear definition, however, there were against-the-flow innovators who opposed flexibility. By requiring greater rigour and regularity in Christian practices they highlighted questions of authority and what manner of people might exercise it. The Church’s own self-definition and status as an institution evolved in response to such things.

The charges with which I shall deal in this paper were almost certainly a tissue of nonsense. Indeed a recent – hostile – account dismisses them as containing motifs presque folkloriques rappellant la legende de Sylvestre II. The folklore is itself interesting however, and so are the circumstances in which it could be delivered solemnly as fact to auditors at a general council by a powerful group including doctors of law and even a cardinal.

The circumstances in which the charges were brought were as follows: In 1409 popes Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were tried by the council of Pisa, with the intention of deposing them to end the schism. First, 37 charges were brought against them, giving a fairly detailed and damning account of the recent behaviour of both in failing to keep their oaths to end the schism. Some members of die council must have felt that these charges were not adequate, however, because on 17 May 1409 the council gave permission for new charges to be added if necessary. Ten new charges were indeed prepared and heard from May 27–30, so we have the full account of the evidence of the witnesses. Among these charges are accusations of witchcraft against each pope.

This paper considers women’s participation in the congregations of Civil War and Interregnum England. In particular it is concerned with the idea of whether women sectaries in the 1640s and 1650s had a different idea of church polity from their brethren, or whether, within the confines of the sects, they continued to play the role traditionally assigned to women in Christianity: that of the spiritually inspired, the example of holiness rather than the leader. In short, did women even in the sects remain outside the church polity?

In the city of the Laodikaians lived a devout, pure, and blameless priest. To this priest one night the local governor came in urgent haste, pressing him to rise up and baptize his child, whose breath was already beginning to fail. Leaping up right away, the priest ran into the church. But while he was preparing the water and the holy oil the child died, before it could be baptized.

Taking the child, the priest placed it in front of the font and said to the attendant angel, ‘To you, my fellow servant, angel of God, I say: by the authority that Christ gave us to bind and loose in heaven and upon earth, restore the soul of the child in the body until I shall baptize it, lest it depart unenlightened into that age. For my Master and yours knows that I was not careless, but when I was called, I ran straight away.’ When the priest had spoken, the child returned to life. He then baptized it, kissed it, and said, ‘Go, child, into the kingdom of heaven.’ And immediately the child fell back asleep in the Lord.

Twenty years ago, Olive Anderson called for more detailed study of how the role of women changed in the nineteenth century, pointing out that only such careful investigations ‘can show how far the conventional stress upon feminism has been well judged’. She noted the contemporary strength of the churches as ‘the great arbiters of public attitudes toward social issues’ and argued that the beliefs and practices of popular religion (‘the religion of the unsophisticated laity in general’) were ‘full of change and diversity’.

The precise nature of Wyclif’s connection with the production of the first English bible is shrouded in mystery, a subject for the fierce controversy and debate that is possible only where ignorance and uncertainty prevail. To begin with, there is an almost total absence of reliable contemporary evidence. The first statements explicitly attributing authorship to Wyclif do not occur until the generation after his death. Of these, the earliest is that of the chronicler Henry Knighton, whose contacts with early lollardy might make him appear to be a more reliable source than most. Writing perhaps in the mid-1390s, Knighton referred back to the year 1382 as the time when Wyclif translated the gospel, which Christ had given to the clergy and doctors of the church, into the tongue, not of the angels, but of the Angles.