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.

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.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, special prayers, fasts and thanksgivings were an important means by which the Established Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland responded to natural occurrences. Although war prompted the largest number of special religious observances in this period, environmental calamities – instances of plague, famine, drought, earthquakes and storms — led civil and ecclesiastical authorities to order prayers, or to call national fast days, requiring subjects to cease work and attend worship on a specific day. Natural blessings, such as seasonable rain, successful harvests and the abatement of plague, were also marked by prayers, and sometimes by days of national thanksgiving. In Reformation England, the appointment of special observances can be traced back to 1541, when Henry VIII ordered Archbishop Cranmer to organize prayers in response to drought. Henry’s successors developed the practice of ordering special prayers and days in response to natural events and man-made calamities. In Scotland, national fasts were observed at the appointment of the church courts from 1566; they were not regularly under the control of the Crown until the Restoration period.

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,

In the midst of the nervous excitement of the autumn of 1640 a Londoner called Roger Quatermayne, a puritan and, as we might say, barrackroom lawyer, was investigated by Archbishop Laud and other Privy Councillors for the offence of holding religious meetings in circumstances which were politically as well as ecclesiastically suspect, since it was thought that Quatermayne and his friends had made treasonable contact with the Scottish army, then at war with its king and in occupation of English soil. Quatermayne, charged with holding a conventicle, asked the archbishop to inform him ‘what a Conventicle is.’ Laud replied: ‘Why, this is a Conventicle, … when ten or twelve or more or lesse meet together to pray, reade, preach, expound, this is a conventicle.’ Laud’s definition may appear uncontroversial, particularly if to his ‘ten or twelve or more or less’ is added the formula of the 1664 Conventicle Act, ‘over and above those of the same Household’. But Quatermayne objected: ‘My Lord, I do not so understand it.’

Reconstructing the relationship of the inhabitants of early modern Ireland with the natural world and its Creator is both a difficult and a straightforward task. At one level those who lived in Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, had much in common with other contemporary Europeans, and they shared similar ideas about the existence of God, his actions in creating the world and how that world worked. At another level the relationship between the inhabitants of early modern Ireland and the natural world is rather different from that observable in other places. In terms of pilgrimage, the inhabitants of Ireland before the Reformation in the early sixteenth century had litde interest in visiting corporeal relics, and body parts of saints were in short supply in Ireland by comparison with other European countries. Rather, the devout preferred to visit places in the natural world that had reputed associations with a saint, such as a well created by a saint or a cave where he had lived. Why this should be so is difficult to explain, but it certainly created an experience of the natural world which, though not unique to Ireland, was certainly more intense there. In turn, this affected local religious experiences as they were reshaped through the process of religious change in the early modern period, giving a particular hue to the local forms of religious devotion practised by both Catholics and Protestants. This essay aims to reveal something of the distinctive traits of local religion that formed as a result of the conscious interaction of the inhabitants of Ireland with God’s creation.

In the 1830s a small group of Anglican clerics, mainly resident tutors and fellows of Oxford University, initiated a campaign for the revitalization of their Church, which they perceived to be threatened by secular forces. The inspiration for this was derived from the pre-Reformation roots of Anglicanism, specifically from a study of the fathers of the Early Church, supplemented by the post-Reformation Caroline divines of the seventeenth century. One of the main vehicles for propagating these ideas was the series known as the Tracts for the Times, which ran to ninety tides issued between 1833 and 1841, and from which this growing Oxford Movement derived its more popular title of’Tractarian’.

Focusing on the ‘translatability’ of Christianity in Africa is now commonplace. This approach stresses that African Christian practice is thoroughly inculturated and relevant to local cultural concerns. However, in exclusively emphasizing Christianity's indigeneity, an opportunity is lost to understand how Africans entered into complex relationships with North Americans to shape a common field of religious practice. To better illuminate the transnational, open-faced nature of Christianity in Africa, this article discusses the history of a twentieth-century Christian faith healing movement called Zionism, a large black Protestant group in South Africa. Eschewing usual portrayals of Zionism as an indigenous Southern African movement, the article situates its origins in nineteenth-century industrializing, immigrant Chicago, and describes how Zionism was subsequently reimagined in a South African context of territorial dispossession and racial segregation. It moves away from isolated regional histories of Christianity to focus on how African Protestantism emerged as the product of lively transatlantic exchanges in the late modern period.

The subject of religion and finance is seriously neglected within the historiography of the church during the modern period. This essay explores the pioneering ‘Financing of American Religion’ project and suggests possible fruitful avenues of research into the financing of British religion. By way of a case study, it analyses the size of the religious voluntary sector as a whole and then, within that, the individual finances of a range of Anglican voluntary organizations, all home missionary organizations within the diocese of London. Historians of religion have shown a certain reluctance to grapple with the columns of figures and minutiae of detail contained in cash books, general ledgers and annual reports. This essay serves as a brief taster of the wealth of material contained in such sources.

In the earlier Middle Ages, Brittany enjoyed a mixed reputation as a region in which to lead a life of ascetic discipline and dedication to God. The (eleventh-century?) Life of Me wan describes Samson and his disciples leaving Britain for a life of spiritual exile. They headed for Brittany because, according to the hagiographer, the region was not only a ‘desert’ where life would be harsher than elsewhere, but also because the ferocity of its inhabitants made it crueller. Others were not so sure whether this was an advantage. Abelard’s tribulations as abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys are well known: though himself originating from Bretagne gallo, he complained that the Bretons of Bretagne bretonnante were a barbarian, lawless race, and that the monks of Saint-Gildas were dissolute and uncontrollable. Abelard’s comments echo a long tradition of French, or Frankish, castigation of the Bretons, stretching back at least to the ninth century. This criticism often expresses more than hostility to a gens whose language made them incomprehensible and hence ridiculous: amongst the tensions it reflects are problems of Christian discipline and ecclesiastical authority which the Frankish church was unable fully to resolve. In exploring behind the Bretons’ bad reputation, it is worthwhile investigating both the ascetic practices of early medieval Brittany and the reactions to those practices of the Frankish church. In so doing, I hope to elucidate my juxtaposition of ‘Celtic asceticism’ and ‘Carolingian authority’ by showing how Breton ascetic traditions were modified under the impact of Carolingian political circumstances.

As is well known, western medieval apocalyptic literature owes a considerable debt to Byzantine apocalyptic literature, which itself built on Roman and Jewish sources. The classic studies are now Evelyne Patlagean’s ‘Byzance et son autre monde’, published in 1981; Paul Alexander’s The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition, published posthumously in 1985; and Jane Baun’s edition and commentary of three Middle Byzantine apocalyptic texts that appeared in 2007. In addition, Paul Magdalino has recently published several articles on the theme. On top of this, numerous studies connect specific Byzantine apocalypse traditions to particular political events, most notably the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Byzantine eschatology has been even more thoroughly studied, and, with the subtitle ‘Views on death and the last things’, was the subject of a recent (1999) Dumbarton Oaks symposium.

On the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross, 3 May 1606, Henry Garnet was hung, drawn and quartered in St Paul’s churchyard, London. In his last dying speech Garnet adapted the liturgy from the office hours of the day and he proclaimed in Latin: ‘We adore thee, O Christ and we Bless thee, because by thy Cross, thou hast redeemed the world. This sign shall appear in heaven, when the Lord shall come to judgment’. Finally, beseeching God to let him always remember the cross, he crossed his arms upon his chest and was turned off the scaffold.

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ The carrying out of this injunction has been interpreted differently in different ages. Professor Rupp reminded us in an early book that sixteenth-century Puritans and Protestants were not Victorian Christians in period costume. Calvin and Knox would have been hounded by the Lord’s Day Observance Society if their views on Sunday games had been known to Victorian evangelicals. During the years 1770–1870 there was an increasing strictness and rigidity with regard to ‘the world’. First of all there was the question did the world belong to God or the devil. Most evangelicals in 1770 would have said that it belonged to God, but by Victorian times they were not so certain. Abner Brown, speaking of one parson’s wife, says: ‘When her fine manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “ Satan’s earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ On the other hand Lord Mount Temple when censured by friends for attending the Queen’s fancy-dress ball replied: ‘This is God’s world by right, and not the devil’s. Our business is to subdue it to its lawful king, and not to abandon it to the enemy.’ With regard to pleasures and amusements there was a growing strictness; I was able to give an example of this with regard to the Venn family in John Venn and the Clapham Sect.

The traditional reputations of Hoadly and Law could hardly be more sharply contrasted. Hoadly’s latitudinarianism, his promotion on the bench for political reasons, his neglect of diocesan duties have long made him a favourite example for castigating the hanoverian episcopate. Law has been much more fortunate. Almost universally cited as a happy exception to the lax theology of his age; credited with a religious appeal to men of all parties; and praised for his literary style and powers of argument, Law has enjoyed a generally uncritical press, despite the difficulties of reconciling the early, orthodox controversial and devotional writings with his later and mystical works. Of the confrontation between Hoadly and Law over the Bangorian sermon, the prevailing opinion has been that of dean Hook: ‘Law’s “Letters” have never been answered, – may indeed be regarded as unanswerable’. Some, indeed, have suggested that Hoadly failed to reply directly to Law either through fear or inability to do so. Overton, however, with his customary fairness, allowed that Hoadly ‘was a very able controversialist and not afraid of any antagonist’. Hoadly claimed that others had replied to Law (who had not attempted to answer them), and that all of Law’s most important points had been answered in Hoadly’s Answer to the Representation.

The epidemic of bubonic plague that spread in Russia between 1770 and 1772, claiming about 100,000 lives, was perceived as a divine punishment by many ordinary Russians. In 1771, Moscow witnessed popular riots, which were partly caused by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to allow Muscovites to venerate the icon of the Mother of God placed above the St Barbara Gates in the Kremlin and which was believed to have miraculous powers against epidemic. In order to stop the spread of the infection, the Moscow authorities established sanitary cordons around the city. In such an atmosphere of social crisis the Old Believers, a conservative current of Russian religious dissent, articulated popular fears and proposed a solution to these. The Old Believer merchants had received permission from the government to set up quarantine hospitals and cemeteries on the borders of the city. This led to the emergence of two Old Believer centres in Moscow in the suburb of Lefortovo: Rogozhskoe, that belonged to the priestly Old Believers, and Preobrazhenskoe, belonging to a branch of the priestless Old Believers, the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy).

On 20 January 1574, at about 7.00 p.m., Alexander Nyndge, one of the sons of William Nyndge, a gentleman of Herringwell, Suffolk, suddenly went into violent paroxysms. Edward Nyndge, Alexander’s brother, intervened. Edward was a Cambridge graduate and a former fellow of Gonville and Caius, and his University education had apparently prepared him for just such an emergency. He immediately declared that Alexander was possessed by an evil spirit and summoned the villagers to come and pray for his brother’s recovery. As the praying continued, Alexander’s convulsions grew worse; a half dozen men had to hold him in his chair. Meanwhile the onlookers were praying extemporaneously. Suddenly someone invoked both God and the Virgin Mary. Edward pounced on this remark and admonished the crowd that such prayers offended God. The evil spirit, in a voice ‘much like Alexanders voice’, chimed in, endorsing the propriety of the prayer. But ‘Edward made answere and said thou lyest, for ther is no other name under Heaven, wherby we may challenge Salvacion, but thonly name of Ihesus Christe’. This point settled, Edward proceeded to organize his brother’s exorcism.

On his way to one of the early meetings of the church service society, Story met Charteris on the street, who asked what were their aims. He replied, ‘To restore the ring in marriage, the cross in baptism, and the denial of the cup to the laity’. Charteris fled in horror.

Before discussing the renaissance of public worship in the church of Scotland it is necessary to look at the background. The lineage of reformed worship can be traced from Diebold Schwarz’s translation of the Hagenau Missal into German in 1524 through Bucer and Calvin, both of whom desired weekly communion, to the Scottish Book of Common Order (1564). When the civil authorities forbade weekly communion, Bucer and Calvin did not prepare an order of service for Sunday morning, but rubricated the order for communion as to how it should end when there was no celebration of the supper: that is, the eucharist was the norm for public worship.

In the Lancet for 26 November 1904, there was a brief and caustic account of ‘curious psychological phenomena...in connexion with the religious upheaval in progress’ in Wales, in which ‘the chief instigator of this tumult’ [that is, Evan Roberts] is quoted as saying to a journalist who interviewed him for the Western Mail: ‘When I go out to the garden I see the devil grinning at me but I am not afraid of him. I go into the house, and when I go out again to the back I see Jesus Christ smiling at me.’ The Lancet also cited a description of the young revivalist by the same journalist: ‘His restlessness is marvellous, he is walking about all day with the springiness of a man treading on wires, his arms swaying unceasingly’; and referred to accounts of the revivalist lying on the floor at meetings for long intervals ‘weeping and writhing in agony’. The Lancet commented that if among the friends of the preacher there were any medical practitioners it would be a kindness on their part to point out to him ‘ the peril which menaces his intellectual equilibrium’. This judgement was shrewd for towards the end of 1906 Evan Roberts had broken down, and he never sufficiently recovered from the intense and prolonged nervous excitement of the revival period, but lived in retirement as a near recluse in England from 1906 to 1925, and thereafter in South Wales until his death in 1951. It is a sad story of a young former miner and blacksmith from the background of deep piety in the Welsh calvinist methodist chapel at the village of Loughor in Glamorgan, who was preparing himself for the ministry at a denominational preparatory school prior to theological college training - a man sincere, sensitive and deeply religious, earnestly praying for a revival of religion in Wales - who was caught up by the wave of intense religious emotion which the revival released and who found himself shining before the world in excited newspaper reports throughout Britain and Europe in a blaze of glory, fanned by journalists and religious publicists, as brief as it was excessive.

Of the many problems confronting post-reformation English catholics, that of national identity was among the most acute. For the nation at large, to be English was to be protestant, and to be papist was to be an alien.’ That catholics owed primary allegiance to the pope, to Spain, to France, was an axiom throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the exile of the catholic Stuarts at the revolution of 1688 merely varied the form in which the national tradition expressed itself. In his last public utterance William III equated ‘a Popish Prince, and a French Government’, judicial proclamations spoke of ‘papists and disaffected persons’, and George I’s first parliament declared that catholics