In December 1807, representatives from thirty-five French female religious communities wrote to Napoleon, reminding him that their associations were ‘essentially religious’. They stated that any attempt to secularize them would bring about their death and they announced their wish to remain subject to the authority of the Church in all that concerned their spiritual lives and interior regimes. These women, whom Napoleon had called to Paris especially, thereby warned the Emperor that although he may have been responsible for the official revival of their communities, he could not assume control over every aspect of their existence.

Although the principal relationship observable in an early medieval manuscript illustration is that between the artist and his or her text, the interests of the reader, and in many cases the first owner or commissioner of an illustrated book, could to some degree determine the extent and the elaboration of the illustrations, and, possibly, aspects of the iconography. The incidence of women in the illustrations of Christian books of the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, therefore, is a potentially fruitful source for examining the attitudes towards women’s role in the Church in the early Middle Ages. It may be possible to see, firstly, whether the prominence of women in the New Testament, and in the Gospels in particular, is enhanced and elaborated in ninth- and tenth-century visual interpretations of these Christian texts, or, secondly, whether there are any other innovations in Carolingian or Ottonian illustrations which shed light on the religious work of women within the Church. But to what extent is this potential realized? Are omissions as significant as inclusions? Can we conclude much from the relative dearth of pictures of women in Carolingian books, as opposed to the greater number of women portrayed in Ottonian books? It is the purpose of this paper to examine this phenomenon and its context and thereby to suggest some preliminary explanations.

From 1879, evangelical missions aimed specifically at Jews began providing free medical services to the newly arrived immigrant community in London's East End. This article focuses on three specific medical missions to Jews belonging to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Jews and the Mildmay Mission to the Jews. It considers the particular attractions of these medical missions in terms of what they were able to offer the immigrant Jew that existing state and voluntary medical services did not provide, alongside the cost and possible risk posed by attendance. The article questions whether the popularity of evangelical medical missions within the Jewish East End is as surprising as it may first appear, if the limited health care options available to the nineteenth-century poor are considered in conjunction with the additional obstacles facing Jewish immigrants, such as cultural and religious differences, anti-Jewish prejudice and most notably the language barrier.

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.

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.

Of all the dark legends which have arisen out of the British experience of the First World War, perhaps none is more compelling than the fate of more than three hundred British, Dominion and Colonial soldiers who were tried and executed for military offences during the course of the conflict. Controversial at the time, these executions were the subject of much debate and official scrutiny in the inter-war period and, even today, the subject continues to have a bitter and painful resonance. Led by the Shot at Dawn Campaign, pressure for the rehabilitation of these men continues and the case for a millennium pardon was marked in June 2001 by the opening of an emotive memorial to them at the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield. However, this paper is not concerned with the justice of the proceedings which led to the deaths of these men. Whether due legal process was followed or whether those executed were suffering from shell shock are difficult and probably unanswerable questions which I will leave to legal and to military historians. Instead of investigating the circumstances of the condemned, this paper turns the spotlight onto the circumstances and attitudes of men whose presence at military executions was as inevitable as that of the prisoner or the firing squad; namely, the commissioned chaplains of the British army.

There were several possibilities open to a man entering the secular clergy in the later middle ages. Among these were careers as a royal, papal, or episcopal servant, as a teacher or scholar, or as the rector or vicar of a parish church. If he did not set his hopes high, he could join the ranks of the chaplains of his diocese, helping the incumbents of the parish churches with the administration of their benefices and with the cure of souls, serving chapels and perpetual chantries, and serving oratories in noble and gentry households. Whatever his ambitions and aspirations, however, the secular priest’s situation depended entirely upon the charity and good will of those in a position to exercise patronage: family and friends, the beneficed clergy, the bishop and his familia, and the established, landed families of the area. And whether the possibilities became opportunities in the form of the patronage desired depended to a large extent upon the social position of the priest’s family, the proper connections, and the extent of his education. These were the realities faced universally by the clergy of the universal church, but each region had its own particular system of patronage, varying with the needs and structure of society. As a case in point, the lives and success of the clergy of the northern English diocese of Carlisle, despite the mission and aims held in common with the clergy of the entire church, were dictated to a degree by the rural nature of the diocese and its location on the Anglo-Scottish border.

The Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses are the finest sculptured monuments to survive from early eighth-century Northumbria. For what audiences were they designed: clerics, monks or lay people? Of the two monuments, it is likely that the Bewcastle Cross is the earlier. Its designer wished to commemorate a number of benefactors of his or her community, whose names were inscribed on a panel of runic inscriptions on the west face (they are, unfortunately, now largely illegible: see figs 1 and 2). He or she was the first to introduce a number of highly significant theological ideas into Northumbrian sculpture. The Ruthwell designer, who did not set out to commemorate any individuals, expanded and developed theological ideas found in embryo on the Bewcastle Cross (figs 3 and 4). The Bewcastle and the Ruthwell Crosses, both, are best understood in terms of the theological and liturgical interests of Bede’s scholarly circle, in particular of Bishop Acca of Hexham, Bede’s bishop and patron; and of Bede’s friend and correspondent Bishop Pehthelm of Whithorn. Hexham lies east of Bewcastle, and Whithorn west of Ruthwell: I would date Bewcastle within the episcopacy of Acca, i.e. between 709 and 731; and Ruthwell a little later, say between 732 and 740 (the year Acca died). In this period the abbot of Wearmoudi-Jarrow was Hwætberht (abbot 716–c.750). Hwætberht was known as ‘Eusebius’ to his scholarly friends, presumably because of his interest in Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine and the cult of the Cross. Rosemary Cramp and Richard Bailey have convincingly related the beautiful cross-slab at Jarrow to the abbacy and patronage of Hwœtberht. In his account of King Oswald’s victory, in the sign of the Cross, at Heavenfield, Bede implies that the Cross was, for the Northumbrian aristocracy and the clerics associated with them, the primary symbol of the Christian Faith.

In December 1853 Horace Mann, summing up his report on the census of religious worship conducted on 30 March 1851, offered some of the more famously sweeping generalizations in English religious and statistical history:

Studies of nineteenth-century urban religion have often been conducted with very little reference to the surrounding countryside. Even Obelkevich in his stimulating study of rural religion in Lincolnshire suggested that there, ‘In the Church of England, though the ideal and model of the village parish church continued to inspire town churchmen, towns and villages largely remained in separate compartments. Only through Methodism did the towns have much effect on village religious life. . . . The circuit, the key unit of Methodist organization, brought preachers and people from towns and villages into regular contact with each other and made it possible for the financial and human resources of the town chapels to contribute to the life of the outlying village chapels’. But the methodist exception is significant, not so much in a denominational sense (although the methodist form of organisation was in theory the best for this purpose) but because it is an example of a situation in which the money and men available in any one particular place were not sufficient to carry out what the church concerned wished to do there. It was therefore necessary to tap the resources of other places to help. In large towns such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and in some of the smaller industrial towns as well, the necessary resources often had to be found within the town or not at all; and to that extent the study of urban religion on its own is understandable. But in many parts of the country rural evangelism was felt to be as urgent a priority as urban evangelism. The church of England sought to overcome the consequences of rural neglect; and all nonconformists, not only methodists, attempted to involve town members in the life of country chapels. Thus in less exclusively industrial parts of the country than Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Black Country, a genuine conflict of priorities between town and countryside could arise.

‘The church in town and countryside’ is a fruitful theme. But for early medievalists it is an especially challenging one. We first have to establish our right to participate at all. There is a classic tradition of interpreting western history, and the history of western Christianity too, in terms of an opposition between town and countryside: but according to exponents of this tradition, from Marx and Engels through Weber and Troeltsch to some contemporary historians, the early middle ages present a dull, townless void between antiquity and the eleventh or twelfth century. We have to begin then, by affirming that there were towns in the early middle ages. To justify this, we must do more than point out continuity in the terminology used by late classical and early medieval writers. We need to show that places existed which functioned as towns. Biddle has given a useful archaeologist’s list of functional criteria: defences, a planned street-system, a market, a mint, legal autonomy, a role as a central place, a relatively large and dense population, a diversified economic base, plots and houses of ‘urban’ type, social differentiation, complex religious organisation, a judicial centre.

Perhaps I can best introduce my paper, explain its nature and state my objective in writing it, by describing it as another step towards completing the second part of a study of which my book The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland was the first part.’ The study which concluded with the Statute of Kilkenny of 1366 needs extending chronologically by at least a century. More importantly, the nature of the analysis itself needs to be deepened. The ‘Two Nations’ book began with asking a fairly simple and limited question: what was the relationship of the ecclesiastical and civil powers within the English-settled parts of Ireland—in short, English law and the Irish Church. But it ended raising a more complex and more fundamental question about the overall effects on the Church of the establishment in Ireland of an English colony which was not coterminous with the country as a whole and whose strength and influence declined in the later middle ages. There may have been a more or less satisfactory answer in the book to the restricted question. There was, at best, no more than a tentative beginning to an answer to the more fundamental one.

When one realizes how small a percentage of eighteenth-century pulpit literature consists of sermons to, or about, children, one may wonder whether the much-vaunted new ‘awareness of childhood’ ever influenced preachers in the Augustan age. The most prominent minister to address the theme being Philip Doddridge of Northampton, the influential Dissenter, it seems worth investigating how he and his contemporaries chose to represent children.

In March 1851, both archbishops and twenty bishops of the Anglican Church issued a public statement in which they asserted the ‘undoubted identity of the English Church before and after the Reformation’—and we do not have to look far for an explanation of this manifesto; in 1850 the steady trickle of Anglican recruits to Roman Catholicism had been complemented by the so-called ‘Papal Agression’ which re-established Roman Catholic titular sees in England. Undoubtedly, historical conscience played a large part in secessions to Rome, as more and more Anglicans came to feel that the whole constitution of the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana had been fundamentally changed by the abrogation of papal authority in the sixteenth century, and in these circumstances all shades of Anglican opinion were bound to welcome any historical argument which tended to show that the pre-Reformation Church had not been unconditionally subject to Rome, and that its acceptance of the canonical ius commune and papal authority had been free, selective, and discriminating.

It has come to our knowledge, not without grievous amazement and displeasure of heart [Bishop Grandisson wrote to the clergy of Exeter Cathedral and of other collegiate churches in his diocese before Christmas 1360] that for these past years and some years preceding, at the most holy solemnities of Christ’s Nativity, and the feasts of St Stephen, St John the Apostle and Evangelist, and the Innocents, when all faithful Christians are bound to busy themselves the more devoutly and quietly in praise of God and in Church Services, certain Ministers of our aforesaid Church, together with the boys, not only at Matins and Vespers and other hours, but also (which is more detestable) during the solemnity of the Mass have rashly presumed, putting the fear of God behind them, after the pernicious example of certain Churches, to associate together within the Church itself and play certain foolish and noxious games, unbecoming to clerical honesty.

Despite its attendant manifestations of renewal, the process of the re-Christianisation of the Peloponnese during the ninth and tenth centuries has not generally been viewed in the context of a renaissance. The remarkable upsurge in church-building in the province from the end of the tenth century onwards, the approximate beginnings of which are marked by the appearance of a large church on the Spartan acropolis, has had its causes ascribed to movements other than the re-vitalisation of religious life in the area. It is true that the great period of church-building in the Peloponnese occurs at a later date than the comparable flourishing in Hellas, where the famous churches of Skripou, of Gregory the Theologian at Thebes, and of John the Baptist in Athens were all built in the ninth century. The late date of this architectural activity has doubtless been one factor which has led some historians to hold an unnecessarily complicated and even untenable view of the impulses which lay behind it.

Cranmer’s condemnation for treason was almost as great an embarrassment to John Foxe as it had been to the Archbishop himself. Obedience to lawful authority was axiomatic to both, as to all the orthodox reformers of die first generation. Against Catholic accusations that all Protestants were natural subverters of established order, they argued that the good Christian would be least a traitor to his Prince. Preaching upon the text ‘Render unto Caesar’ in November 1550, Hugh Latimer had declared,

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.

We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?