This article examines the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) and its missions in the Highlands and Britain's American colonies. Constituted in 1709 and operating as an auxiliary arm of the Church of Scotland, the SSPCK aimed to extend Christianity in ‘Popish and Infidel parts of the world’. It founded numerous Highland charity schools, and from 1729 sponsored missions to Native Americans in New England and Georgia. Missions were increasingly important in British overseas expansion; consequently, historians have viewed the society as a civilizing agency, which deployed religious instruction to assimilate ‘savage’ heathens into the fold of Britain's empire. This article suggests that the SSPCK was equally concerned with Christianization: missionaries focused on spiritual edification for the salvation of souls, indicating a disjuncture between the society's objectives and the priorities of imperial expansion. It also challenges the parity assumed by historians between the SSPCK's domestic and foreign missions, arguing that the society increasingly prioritized colonial endeavours in an attempt to recover providential favour. In doing so, it sheds new light on Scottish ideas of mission during the first half of the eighteenth century, and reassesses the Scottish Church's role in Britain's emerging empire.

This article considers preaching during plague epidemics in early modern Germany, tracing how preachers and priests engaged with the crisis that befell their towns. It does so by discussing three important features of preaching during plague epidemics to illustrate the arrangements made during outbreaks of plague and what they can tell us more broadly about preaching during times of crisis. First, it shows the changes and continuities in personnel during plague epidemics. Second, it considers the contents of the sermons and how plague was a continuous feature of many early modern sermons. Third, the article discusses spaces and how they were used for preaching during outbreaks of plague. The article shows the malleability of sermons and how Protestants and Catholics adapted recurring themes to illustrate divine punishment and mercy.

Nineteenth-century North American religious history is filled with divinely inspired people who received and recorded new revelations. This article presents Joseph Smith Jr and Ralph Waldo Emerson as charismatic prophets who promoted the idea of continuing revelation. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority, it will contrast their forms of new sacred writing with one another to show how both had experienced encounters with the divine. The second part will then explore how different conceptualizations of revelation led to opposing concepts of religious authority, with consequences for the possibility of institution-building processes. While Smith would reify revelation in hierarchy, Emerson eventually promoted extreme spiritual individualization by rejecting the idea of an exclusive institution as the centre of revelatory authority.

The Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8 was not merely ‘the echo of dead themes’, as was alleged by A. J. P. Taylor. Disputes between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, which lay at the root of the crisis, were still at a height in the 1920s and 1930s. Anglo-Catholic confidence was shown in their vast Congresses, commencing in 1920 (and lasting until the 1960s), and in the celebrations and publications which marked the centenary of the Oxford Movement in 1933. Such confidence naturally caused Evangelicals and Broad Churchmen to look to their defences. Moreover, while in England anti-Romanism was less marked than before 1914, in Scotland it reached a high (if belated) peak in the 1920s in reaction to Irish Catholic immigration.

Books for children have existed for centuries. Their contents range from instructional manuals to flights of fancy. In children’s literature, a variety of narrative forms have emerged, developed, flowered, and faded, but one genre, Bible stories for children’s use, has remained in existence as long as print itself.

Iconoclasm, rather than liturgical formulation, usually springs to mind when one reflects upon the events in Zurich in the mid-1520s. Indeed, historians of the Swiss Reformation have hardly interested themselves in liturgy, and one searches in vain the most recent and comprehensive treatment of Zwingli’s theology for a discussion of the subject. Ignored by both historians and theologians, the study of liturgy in the Swiss Reformation cuts the figure of the unknown guest at a party who everyone assumes is being entertained by someone else. The consequence has been that liturgy has not been allowed to inform our understanding of Swiss religious change; historians have preferred to leave it in the safe keeping of liturgists who, for the most part, have attended to the history of worship as a separate and distinct act of the community controlled by the clergy. This, surely, can only form part of the picture, for liturgy was perhaps the most inclusive act of the Church: worship was experienced by all levels of society, even if the people brought and took away a panoply of varied levels of comprehension and acceptance. As the central, public act of the Church, the early liturgies of the Reformation articulated the tangled web of convictions, needs, and requirements of communities in transition. Liturgies cannot be separated from either the beliefs which created them or the physical space in which they were performed. The ordered rhythm of words and actions in a particular locality was intended to engage the intellect and senses, drawing out responses at once emotional and cognitive. If we can glimpse something of the experience of worship, whether positive or negative, we shall have an insight into the mental world of the early Reformation.

The cultivation of the heart and the moulding of the will…’—these words symbolize the work of the Society for Promoting Female Education in China, India, and the East. This society existed from 1834 to 1899. It was run entirely by women, for educating and evangelizing girls and women in distant lands.

The Church Fathers inherited from their social and intellectual environment a long tradition of debate about the physical, moral, and intellectual capacities of women. It would be an oversimplification to say that the uniform teaching of ancient philosophers and rhetoricians was that women were in every respect naturally inferior to men. Plato, for one, defended the view that moral goodness is the same for women as for men; the fact that they perform different tasks—the duties of a citizen in the case of a (free) man, and of a good wife, directing her household in obedience to her husband, in the case of a woman—does not mean that the same moral qualities of justice and temperance are not required of both. In his Republic, a radical programme for the restructuring of traditional society, Plato advocates equal access to education for women and an equality of opportunity for the intellectually able, regardless of sex, to rise to leading roles in the administration of the State. He continues to believe that most women will be inferior to most men at important tasks; but ‘it was something to have it said that sex is not relevant to natural ability and moral capacity’, and it is possible to detect the influence of subsequent philosophers who agreed with Plato in forming ‘an increasing belief in the competence and trustworthiness of women’ in financial and political affairs, even if the belief was to have little practical effect in changing socially-accepted roles.

That English literature is suffused with religion is news to no one; the English language is throughout history part of the structure of the Church or churches. But there is a way in which Church history and English literature have been missing each other for a good many years. This is in part because, until recently, religion in literature has been the preserve of relatively small groups of enthusiasts with partisan views. Their work has appeared unattractive or irrelevant to a largely secular mainstream that has been preoccupied with the ‘political’ (as opposed to the religious) in early modern literary studies (this is especially so with regard to the drama). But we now have an account of Church history that is more sophisticated and variegated, more attuned to confessional variety and its politics, local and national. This is crying out for engagement with literary studies in ways that literary scholars would find compelling, not least in offering many solutions to the kinds of questions they have come to ask. To some extent the dialogue has already begun, and indeed several exemplary studies are cited in what follows. Nonetheless, we are at the beginning of what may well be a long and extremely fruitful interdisciplinary encounter.

These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.

The consequential implications for those who adopted a life of apostolic poverty in the twelfth century can in turn raise many complex questions. This paper makes little attempt to resolve the questions raised. Rather it is hoped that in discussing them suggestions will be forthcoming which will help either to achieve some degree of clarification or raise further and perhaps more searching questions in the minds of others.

In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.

How should an ascetic die? Aaron the presbyter knew how. He had always led an exemplary life. Born in Armenia, probably during the first quarter of the sixth century, he entered a Monophysite Syrian monastery in early youth. He there distinguished himself for his humility, his unremitting labour in the monastery’s vineyard and guest-house, and his abundant zeal for the ascetic life. Frequently he would stand up all night. Only in old age did he consent to the luxury of a rug-covered plank as his bed.

The earliest Christian monasticism falls within the definition of voluntary religious societies since it was not the product of institutional reform in the Church directed by bishops or councils. The founders of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism undertook their task voluntarily and without episcopal constraint. As the founders of voluntary and at first unofficial associations, they deserve our attention. I shall examine some aspects of the sources for the life of one, Pachomios of Tabennesi (c.292–346).

Waldensians figure high among the protagonists in accounts of medieval pacifism. The two areas on which these accounts usually concentrate correspond to two broad areas in the sect’s history—the genesis of abhorrence of killing during the formative early years, and the perseverance (or decline) of this position during the later centuries of an underground and only slowly changing movement—and they are also the two themes of this paper. The first theme poses a question. Is the received account of the genesis of this position satisfactory?

The service of God in Church and State’: in medieval England these two usually separate activities were combined in the parliamentary attendance of the clergy. Two methods were employed in summoning the clergy: parliamentary abbots and the bishops were called by individual writs of summons; the lower clergy were called indirectly.

The writ of summons to each bishop of England and Wales included a mandate, called, from its opening word, the premunientes clause, ordering the bishop to cause to appear in parliament the head of his cathedral chapter, one proctor for the cathedral clergy, all the archdeacons, and two proctors for the diocesan clergy. After 1340, obedience to the premunientes clause was not enforced by the crown, so technically the command to the lower clergy to be present in parliament was episcopal, not royal. It is not the intention to discuss here the theoretical and constitutional issues involved but to describe the execution of the premunientes clause between 1340 and 1400 as far as the limitations of the sources allow.

In April 1799 Francis Wollaston, rector of Chislehurst, published a pamphlet warning his parishioners and the public at large of the activities of certain seditious societies whose purpose was that of disseminating Jacobin principles; ideas already responsible for plunging France into chaos. His enquiries, he announced, had confirmed his worst suspicions:

Wollaston’s message, an ecclesiastical variant of the more general concern to engage in active defence of the established order, received its definitive form the following year at the hands of Bishop Samuel Horsley. In an important passage in his second visitation charge to the clergy of Rochester diocese the bishop referred to the emergence of an ecclesiastical subculture consisting of religious conventicles, Sunday schools and itinerant preachers. In Horsley’s eyes these ecclesiastical excrescences were merely the outward manifestations of a more sinister and worrying development, the appearance of associations designed to defray the costs of the current spate of unauthorized ‘religious’ activity.

With the possible exception of the ‘wireless’, the cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s, when attendances began to decline and cinemas to close because of the competing power of television. On the eve of the Second World War, television was still in struggling infancy, while the number of cinemas had grown from some 3,000 in 1914 to about 5,000 in 1939, some of the recent ones having been built on a palatial scale. The introduction of sound films in 1929 enhanced the cinema’s popularity, and by 1939 annual attendances exceeded 1,500 million. Still higher figures were reached for a few years from 1945.

On 16 January 1641 Anna Temple wrote from Broughton, Oxfordshire, to her daughter in Sussex:

God is exceeding good to us every way, both body and souls, and hath done wonderful things among us already, and gives us hope of more, and that we shall see idolatry and superstition rooted out; and God’s ordinances set up in the purity and power of them. Altars begin to go down apace and rails in many places, and yours must follow if it be not down already. Let us labour to be thankful and continue our prayers, hold up our hands that Israel may prevail.