The Life of Saint Waldef by Jocelin of Furness is the only surviving account of a man who would seem to have played a prominent part in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of the north in the middle years of the twelfth century, and who acquired a reputation for conventional sanctity. Apart from Jocelin’s account, written almost fifty years after his subject’s death, there are only a handful of contemporary references to Waldef. If the historian was limited to these Waldef would be a shadowy figure indeed, and the annals of the twelfth-century church would lose a man who appears, both in Jocelin’s narrative and the pages of modern historians, almost as a second-rank Ailred.

It has recently been observed that ‘the corpus of surviving lollard literature is regrettably small, and it is to be found in the volumes of Wyclif’s so-called English writings and a few other printed and manuscript works’. To one concerned to re-edit the vernacular lollard literature the position seems otherwise: the corpus is formidably large, the printed material inadequately represents the state of the texts so edited, and there are a large number of other works still in manuscript. The printed material, if grouped together, would extend to perhaps five bulky volumes, in all about 2400 pages; a rough estimate of the vernacular texts now known suggests that this is perhaps only a fifth of the evidence available. Moreover, the editors were ignorant of a large number of the manuscripts of the works they printed, and hence could not assess the circulation of the texts: to give an example, Arnold used only one manuscript of what I shall call the standard lollard sermon-cycle, with fitful reference to three others, whereas now thirty manuscripts are known, together with a further three containing a modified series based on the original set. It is also impossible from the existing printed editions to gain any picture of the views of the lollard authors: only extensive commentary will reveal the implications of remarks made and vocabulary used.

The bankruptcy in 1756 of the major French creditors of Antoine Lavalette, superior of the Jesuit missions of Martinique, resulted in the ‘Lavalette affair’ of 1756–62. During that period, Lavalette borrowed feverishly in an attempt to save his commercial enterprises in the Caribbean, his religious superiors sought to deal with his betrayal of his religious vocation and his mounting debts, and the Jesuits’ enemies gained court orders for the seizure of Jesuit property and the dispersal of the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus was then suppressed in most French territory by royal edict in 1764.

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:

The Christian tradition has been elaborated and developed over many centuries in the context of gender, which provides the bedrock and framework of social order, powerfully influencing men and women’s conduct of every aspect of their daily lives. The dynamic relationship between gender and religious experience – a relationship that may at times channel, control, confine, or liberate – is bound to be complex for the historian to unravel. This paper attempts the beginning of such an unravelling, albeit confined to the experience of women and to England. It focuses upon 1600 to 1900, to argue that the effective gender system – the patriarchy – of this period was being revised by men in a radical way which had major implications for the possibilities open for women to find the space they needed for their spirituality. We cannot of course speak of patriarchy as something given and permanent in Western Christendom, only of patriarchies; for, if we take the term to refer to men’s institutionalized dominance over women and children in the family and the subordination of women outside it, men were bound to need constantly to adapt and adjust their means of achieving this end over the centuries. The objective here is as follows: the paper begins by exploring how the meaning of gender and therefore the patriarchal system was revised between 1600 and 1900; it will then offer an outline, with illustrative examples, of the patterns of women’s spirituality in that period. It starts with the home and within the home with the privacy of the closet, besides the family world of the hall and parlour. It will also look at some women who, through visions or prophecy, sought a national platform.

Judging by the quantity of surviving texts – whether vitae or saints’ lives, libelli miraculorum or narratives of miracles for public reading in church, lectionaries or collections of liturgical readings, inventiones and translationes or accounts of relics found and later moved to a new location, popular receptivity to signs, wonders and miracles had reached a high point by the turn of the twelfth century. Whilst ordinary laypeople remained fascinated by supernatural phenomena, intellectuals were already beginning to challenge the preternatural in a process described by Chenu as the ‘desacralizing’ of nature. In the first book of his treatise, De Sanctis et eorum pignoribus (c.1120), Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, had contrasted the credulity of the faithful towards pseudo-miracles with the growing unease experienced by many scholars at inadequate written evidence for the authentication of relics. Andrew of Saint-Victor (d.1175), in an exposition on the literal interpretation of Scripture, found himself arguing for a natural explanation of events before any recourse to the miraculous. In the School of Pastoral Theology at Paris, Master Peter the Chanter (d.1197) vehemently criticized trial by ordeal as a flagrant tempting of God whereby a supposedly miraculous intervention was allowed to intrude into the regular legalistic operation of the courts. In the years immediately following the Chanter’s death, his former students, led by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and like-minded clerical associates, developed a significant agenda, emphasizing rationality and record keeping to sustain the faith of the Church within a new and more firmly pastoral context.

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.

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.

Religion historique et non religion cosmique, le christianisme entretient avec l’histoire universelle et avec son propre passé des rapports qui s’enrichissent et se compliquent d’âge en âge. Le radicalisme des réveils spirituels en révolte contre l’opacité de l’institution ecclésiastique tente régulièrement d’abolir le poids des siècles pour en revenir à la simplicité fervente des origines. Au sein de l’Eglise romaine, où la continuité historique constitue, plus qu’ailleurs, le critère de l’autorité, c’est la tâche de la critique d’érudition que de déchiffrer et d’interpréter les monuments de la tradition—Pères, conciles, papes—pour éclairer et justifier la doctrine du présent par le témoignage de l’antique, auquel on restitue, par là même, son lustre terni par le temps et sa puissance d’exemplarité. Le primitivisme si apparent dans la Réforme protestante n’est pas étranger non plus à la Réforme catholique et à la tridentinité.

In a preface to his Acts and Monuments, John Foxe explained why his ecclesiastical history was so deeply concerned with martyrs.

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.

Jacques De Vitry (c. 160-1240) was a most perceptive and sympathetic observer of all that the religious life meant to women at the beginning of the thirteenth century. He thus took care to address some of his preaching to particular groups of these women. In his Sermones vulgares, probably set down at some time after 1228, he put forward messages appropriate to each of these groups. He was uniquely qualified to do so.

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.

‘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.

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.

These sentences are taken from an anonymous sermon ‘On the Priesthood’, based on Genesis i, 16–20. The author of the sermon showed the priests their place in society: even though they did not belong to the intellectual elite, their profession and knowledge separated them clearly from the darkness of night in which the laity was imprisoned. In the course of the twelfth century, this passage from Genesis underwent an exegetical change and was used, from then onwards, to explain the political relationship between regnum and sacerdotium. What did remain was the notion of a fundamental difference between clergy and laity, and nowhere was this notion better expressed than in our sermon to the priests: quodcunque lumen estis, lumen estis tamen. In true medieval fashion, our author equated knowledge with the knowledge of the Word of God. He also stressed the fundamental difference between light and darkness, between the clergy and the laity. While theology emphasises that ordination makes the clergy by virtue of its office into the mediator between God and man, this was not the main concern of our author. Instead, he voiced the belief, widely shared by the clergy generally, that knowledge as such was the prerogative of the clergy. Such an attitude raises the question of how the clergy was able to achieve monopoly of knowledge, and how it reacted to attempts by the laity to challenge this monopoly. In what follows I propose to enquire into this phenomenon by looking at the linguistic scene in the medieval west.

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.

Too much of this world’s goods has traditionally been regarded as detrimental to Christians. But the experiences of a small, poor area like the Western District of the Scottish Roman Catholic Mission from the 1800s to the 1860s show that religion can become entangled with worldly questions of money through arguments over how to spend scarce resources. Scottish bishops in order to make the most effective use of the meagre funds they had (derived from grants from Rome, bequests and donations from laymen, and loans secured on church buildings) were forced to operate as bankers as well as pastors. Like bankers they had to provide stability and protect existing funds; at the same time they had to expand their credit basis laying out speculatively what they could to create new congregations, hoping that these new resource centres would, through their contributions, pay off the interest on the loans raised to erect their chapels. - Like all banking systems everything ultimately depended on credit and credibility, not only on trustworthiness, but also shrewd and cautious business management to keep the web of such monies as they had utilized to best advantage.