If you were a religious of the i ith or 12th centuries choosing the order in which you were to find your vocation, how did you distinguish order from order, monk from canon? How did you determine gradations of the ascetic life? If you were a founder or benefactor, planning to found a new religious house, how did you determine which order to favour? At a time when asceticism and the religious orders flourished as never before, choice must have been bewildering. There is a copious contemporary literature arguing the relative merits of this mode and that; and modern scholars have offered a remarkably wide variety of advice. Some have proceeded on the assumption that there must have been a fundamental difference and have pursued it as best they might; others, disappointed in the chase, have doubted if any true difference existed. Some have seen all such differences engulfed in the deeper stream of new impulses and modes which affected every approach to the religious life in this age; others have said that to lose track of such differences is to take a very superficial view of the meaning of the rules of St Augustine and St Benedict. It is very easy indeed to take an entirely sceptical view; and I propose to start by stating the case for saying there was no difference visible to all in every part of Europe – that no general statement of the difference stands up to close inspection. But to rest the matter there, I am sure, would be superficial and mistaken – and so in the second part of this paper I embark on the much more hazardous path of determining where the difference lay. I shall try not to add another definition to the scrap heap, but to show by looking at a number of local situations how it might have appeared both externally to a founder and at a deeper level to an educated man with some discernment of different approaches to the ascetic life and religious spirituality. Yet the ultimate abiding impression is of the strangeness of the central fact: at a time when men were seeking their own religious vocation in numbers never before approached in medieval Europe – and patrons lavishing resources on an unparalleled variety of new religious houses – it is especially difficult for us to observe in many cases where the differences lay.

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.

To its admirers, the Legenda aurea is a powerful expression of medieval belief. To the evangelical pamphleteers of early modern England, it was a symbol of all the failings of unreformed religion. For historians, it is a convenient shorthand for popular hagiography before the Reformation. These readings, however, understate the Legenda's often ambiguous place in early modern devotional life. This article seeks to complicate the Legenda's history in late medieval and early modern England. It argues that the concept and the act of translation rendered Jacobus's text more complex than the historiographical shorthand allows. Translation contributed to the Legenda's power as a devotional work, was a means by which it found its use, impact and wide audience, and was central to how reformers remembered both the text itself and its author. The translated Legenda was not the exception to the narrative of the long Reformation, but an emblem of it.

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.

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.

The political connotations of godparenthood and baptismal sponsorship in creating both vertical and horizontal bonds between individuals and groups in early medieval Europe have long been recognized. What follows offers a case study of sixth- and early seventh-century Visigothic Spain, asking whether the baptismal process could also serve to bring elite and popular together. Elites sought to mobilize those lower down the scale than themselves in opposition to other elites at the same time as having constantly to negotiate the elite position from which they gained their authority. In sixth-century Spain the definition and redefinition of baptismal practice in church council legislation by both Catholics and Arians was an important method for achieving this dual aim of distinction and control.

In a letter of exhortation on the ascetic life addressed to monks of the Bierzo region in north-western Spain in the late seventh century, the local spiritual leader Valerius invoked the saintly example of a ‘fragile woman’. Her name was Egeria, who, at the time when ‘the luminous shining light of our holy religion was finally kindled after long delay in this region of the west’, had fearlessly embarked on a monumental journey encompassing the ‘whole world’. The object of Egeria’s God-inspired Wanderlust had been the biblical holy places of Old and New Testaments, as well as the monastic heartland of Egypt, through all of which Valerius found in her a model of tireless zeal and thanksgiving to parade before his correspondents. It was especially her intrepid ascent to the summits of holy mountains which characterized this exceptional woman as a paragon of spiritual endeavour, and Valerius’ monks were to be encouraged, if not to climb every mountain, at least to reach their own heights of discipline and self-denial, to ‘blush’ at the fortitude of one who ‘transformed the weakness of her sex into an iron strength’.

It seems quite extraordinary that an important European country should apparently have wished to go down in history as the originator of calculated cruelty and violence against members of its civil population. Yet the writers of the famous sketches in Monty Python’s Flying Circus were far from being the first to introduce ‘the Spanish Inquisition’ as a cliché to represent arbitrary and yet calculated tyranny. By the late sixteenth century, Christian Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, had already formed the image of Spain which has become known as the ‘Black Legend’. Just as many Spaniards distrusted Italy, because Jews lived freely there, and France because Protestants were in a similar condition in that country, so Italian opposition to the forces of Ferdinand the Catholic and his successors, together with the ultimately successful Dutch rebels, created, with the help of growing knowledge of Spain’s atrocities against the inhabitants of the New World, a counter-myth, in which the Spaniards themselves appeared as heardess oppressors, but also, ironically, as crypto-Jews (marranos). Erasmus wrote that France was ‘the most spotless and most flourishing part of Christendom’, since it was ‘not infected with heretics, with Bohemian schismatics, with Jews, with half-Jewish marranos’, the last term clearly referring to Spain. Not surprisingly, there is also a Jewish story of what happened in Spain before, during, and after 1492, which may best be summed up, in general outline, in the words, written in 1877, of Frederic David Mocatta’s study of Iberian Jews and the Inquisition.

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.

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.

On a visit to Malta in 1838, Queen Adelaide expressed severe disappointment that the British colony did not possess a purpose-built Anglican place of worship. She determined to fund the building of one at her personal expense and within six years the grandiose neoclassical church of St Paul's, Valletta, was completed. This imposing structure occupied an ambiguous position in a colony where the British government was pledged to maintain Roman Catholicism. St Paul's was ostensibly intended for the existing Anglican population in Malta. However, the church was perceived by both evangelicals and Roman Catholics as a potential instrument of propagating Protestantism. In examining the basis for these perceptions, this article suggests that St Paul's was part of a larger effort, driven by high church clergy connected with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), to influence the Maltese towards greater sympathy with the Anglican tradition, while avoiding overt proselytizing. The concomitant establishment of the diocese of Gibraltar in 1842 was, it is argued, key to this enterprise. The analysis advanced here has important implications for our understanding of Anglicanism in an imperial context, the contribution of royal patronage to this process and the conflict between religious and governmental imperatives.

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’.

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.

Doubt is a promising subject of inquiry for historians. Its initial definition in the Oxford English Dictionary reads ‘[t]he (subjective) state of uncertainty with regard to the truth or reality of anything; undecidedness of belief or opinion’, which might be advocated as a necessary mindset for any historically inclined investigator embarking on research. Although not always articulated, historians constantly face the ‘state of uncertainty’ of knowledge of the past and the continuous need, therefore, to test the evidence. The compilers of the OED then, perhaps unwittingly, underscore the particular relevance of ‘doubt’ as a subject for ecclesiastical historians by further defining it as ‘uncertainty as to the truth of Christianity or some other religious belief or doctrine’. The prominent placing of this second definition acknowledges the reality that doubts about religious ideas and individual doctrines, if not faith itself, have long been conspicuous in human language, and not just when speaking about Christianity. Nonetheless, the means and the consequences of communicating doubt depend on, and are intensely revealing of, changing historical circumstance.

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.

In 1581, in his Answer to a seditious pamphlet, William Charke wrote

This was, of course, a partisan point of view. However, the extent to which it had won general acceptance among Englishmen of all social classes can be demonstrated by reference to the Armada crisis of seven years later. Not only did pamphleteers like Thomas Deloney appeal for patriotic effort,

That... all with one accord
On Sion hill may sing the praise
of our most mightly Lord

but recusant apologetic makes it clear that the catholics were fully aware of the prevailing opinion that papists could not be good Englishmen.