The aged Bishop Polycarp was burnt to death in the arena at Smyrna in the afternoon of 23 February 155 (or 156), in front of a hostile crowd. The terrible story was lovingly recorded, copied and passed round the churches; it is probably the first non-biblical record of a martyrdom, and survives by itself and in Eusebius’ History. As Polycarp entered the arena Christian eyewitnesses heard a voice from heaven, saying in Greek, for all to understand, . The first word means ‘be strong’; the last shares a root with two other Greek words, which means courage, and which means a male person, a man. We shall consider later how Polycarp’s contemporaries understood this; centuries later, about the 1880s, an Anglican academic clergyman, Joseph Lightfoot, who was soon to be a bishop himself, translated Polycarp’s story into English. He found an apt English idiom: ‘Be strong, Polycarp,’ he wrote, ‘and play the man.’

This essay focuses on repentance, with respect to one particular aspect of the work and witness of the Methodists as exemplified in the writings of their founders, John and Charles Wesley (1703–91 and 1707–88 respectively). A predominant motif of their preaching and hymn-writing came from the experience of working with condemned prisoners in Oxford and London gaols, an experience which became paradigmatic for the evangelical conversionist stance of the movement. The metaphors of imprisonment and freedom were realities arising from the physical conditions of the few, pressed upon a general population perceived to be languishing in spiritual stupor and captivity as the kairos of Gospel revelation called all those under sentence of death to repentance: This is the time, no more delay; This is the Lord’s appointed day’.

Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries toiling in the vineyard in Ottoman Armenia found the native women receptive to many of their ideas - until the subject of Mary came up. An American missionary recorded the following encounter in 1877:

Bishop Julian of Toledo is remembered primarily as a key actor in the processes of king-making and -unmaking that went on in the Visigothic kingdom of the 670s. In the early part of the decade Julian’s Historia Wambae Regis legitimated King Wamba’s hold on the throne in opposition to a rebellion. The text also provides us with the first reference to unction in the early medieval West, while Julian’s actions in putting the same king through penance when he appeared to be on the brink of death in 680 and then insisting that the king could not resume his royal duties when he recovered have long attracted the attention of scholars of penance and conspiracy theorists alike. As the Bishop of Toledo, capital of the Visigothic kingdom, Julian was the main ecclesiastic in Visigothic Spain, presiding over four councils of Toledo (from the twelfth in 681 to the fifteenth in 687). Perhaps as a result of his historical significance in a poorly documented era, Julian’s plentiful writings about the end of time have been largely ignored; after all, they seem not to deal with ‘historical’ events. This is a shame, since Julian’s Liber prognosticum futuri saeculi was the most widely disseminated work of late seventh-century Spain: hundreds of manuscripts survive and there are well over one hundred references to the work in medieval library catalogues. The great success of the Prognosticum can be attributed to the contents of its three books, which deal with the origins of human death, the fate of the soul after death, and the fate of the body at the resurrection, and thus address a series of theoretical and practical issues connected to death and its aftermath.

My subject has been under discussion recently, for example by Ludwig Bieler in the 1966 Spoleto Settimane and at a more popular level by Brendan Lehane in his Quest of Three Abbots. But for me the question was raised fourteen years ago, when I was editing the Latin works of St Columban, and Aubrey Gwynn showed me much kindness in correspondence. He mentioned inter alia the comments of Bishop Galvin, then nearing the end of his long life as a missionary to China. Galvin first went out as a young priest in 1912 to serve a mission in Hanyang. Returning on furlough in 1918, he made a celebrated appeal to the members of Maynooth College for the conversion of the Chinese, as a result of which he was joined by Father John Blowick in founding the Irish Congregation of St Columban, popularly known as the Maynooth Mission to China. Soon appointed Vicar Apostolic, Galvin later became Bishop of Hanyang, and stayed in his diocese under a series of trials, persecution, and house arrest, until he was expelled from the country in 1952. He told a friend that he would never have survived his experiences had it not been for a constant memory of Columban’s example, and he felt that he had enjoyed the saint’s companionship for forty years. Though not an academic scholar, Bishop Galvin is entitled by the circumstances of his life to judge the spirituality of Columban, and he criticized my original statement that his patron was ‘a monk, not a missionary’.

Eighty years have gone by since F. E. Warren published his work on The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. Two years before that date Warren had published the full text of a very puzzling Irish missal which had been in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, probably for some three hundred years. Since Warren wrote, the manuscript has been transferred from the library of Corpus Christi College to the Bodleian Library, where it is kept in a box which contains the missal and its satchel of leather. Its class-number is C.C.C. 282. In 1892 an English Jesuit scholar, H. Lucas, made a careful collation of Warren’s readings with the manuscript text; a note in his handwriting, which records a few minor errors, is preserved in the box with the manuscript.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

When Gladstone decided, some time in 1885, that the only way to achieve ‘social order’ in Ireland was to concede Home Rule, he was disappointed to find that among his most implacable and vociferous opponents were the Irish Presbyterians. In vain he was to remind them that their ancestors had been United Irishmen in the 1790s, the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. His appeal to them to ‘retain and maintain the tradition of their sires’ fell on deaf ears.

It seemed to Gladstone as it has seemed to Irish nationalists and to some historians that the Irish Presbyterians had turned their political coats, that the grandsons of the United Irishmen had repudiated the principles of their grandfathers. Lecky, in his monumental History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, writing in the context of the Home Rule crisis, expressed his magisterial opinion that ‘the defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments… are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination’.

The study of church history, in a degree perhaps unparalleled among the various branches of historical study, combines both the analysis of flux and change and also the continuities and constants that somehow remain through the vicissitudes and disasters of human history. Without needing to have any prefabricated pattern imposed upon it, in Marxist or other style, church history discloses startling continuities, so that to talk about Constantine or Origen or Augustine is somehow not to indulge in antiquarianism but to be talking about issues which (despite vast changes in the intellectual framework within which the debate proceeds) remain alive for the living community of the church now. The sweat drips from our brows as we make die effort to preserve impartiality and detachment. My subject is Constantine’s conversion and the shift that this brought to the intellectual and religious history of Europe. If we put the story back into its historical context and try to look at it with the eyes of a contemporary, the shift may not seem exactly the kind of shift that at first the modern historian thinks he sees.

It is a truth widely recognized, though perhaps insufficiently emphasized, that late-medieval England contained large numbers of unbeneficed clergy. The difficulty of studying such men lies in their elusiveness; they made little impact on the obvious source for a study of the English Church during this period, the bishops’ registers (apart from their appearances in the ordinations lists), for these are essentially concerned with benefices and benefice-holders. There is, however, one class of material which tells us much about the unbeneficed, namely the assessments made in connection with clerical poll-taxes. Levied in the years 1377, 1379, 1380, and 1381, these poll-taxes demanded what was virtually a clerical census on each occasion. The resulting returns are a boon to church historians and provide an unparalleled amount of information about the unbeneficed clergy, described in these documents as ‘chaplains’ and ‘clerks’. If we are to have a realistic picture of the late-medieval Church, the unbeneficed should receive more attention. Moreover, it is suggested that an examination of this class can throw light on the relationship between the Church and wealth during this period.

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.

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

Let us contemplate Thomas Cranmer, Primate of All England, sitting on an altar to preside over the trial of Anabaptist heretics. The time is May 1549; the altar, unceremoniously covered over to support the judge, is that of the Lady Chapel in St Paul’s Cathedral in London; several of the heretics on trial have denied the Catholic doctrine of the incarnation, and one will later be burned at the stake. In a compelling paradox, an archbishop tramples an altar of Our Lady in the course of defending the incarnation. One witness in the crowd of onlookers was a pious and scholarly Welsh Catholic, Sir Thomas Stradling, who later wrote down his reactions to the occasion. He interpreted it as the uncannily accurate fulfilment of an eleventh-century prophecy to be found in a manuscript in his own library: Cranmer, he pointed out, went on to be punished for his blasphemy first by the 1549 rebellions and then by his fiery death at the stake.’

Writing in the 1820s, during the Greek war of independence, of his tour of the Peloponnese Sir William Gell noted that there was ‘a saying common among the Greeks, that the country labours under three curses, the priests, the cogia bashis, and the Turks; always placing the plagues in this order’. This kind of sentiment is a commonplace of the sources, both Greek and non-Greek, relating to pre-independence Greece and it is clear that anti-clericalism was deeply rooted, and not only among the intelligentsia, but among virtually all classes of Greek society. The prevalence, and indeed, the virulence of anti-clerical attitudes in Greece during the pre-independence period must call into question the view still advanced by authorities on this period that the church played a central role in the forging of the Greek national movement. Sir Steven Runciman, for instance, has written that ‘Hellenism survived, nurtured by the Church, because the Greeks unceasingly hoped and planned for the day when they would recover their freedom’, while Douglas Dakin has written that ‘so closely knit was the national existence of the Greeks with their Church that in their liberation movement there was no hostility to the Greek patriarchate comparable to that which the Italians displayed towards the Papacy’.2 Views of this kind also constitute the common currency of Greek historiography. D. A. Zakythinos, for instance, has written that ‘it is universally admitted that die Church saved the Greek Nation during the dark years of slavery’. But he goes on to say that earlier and more recent historians, the ‘healthy minded’ among them, as well as those having ‘certain special political tendencies’, do not subscribe to such a view in toto. He quotes the founding father of modern Greek historiography, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, to the effect that ‘the ancestral religion did not cease to constitute one of the principal moral mainsprings of Hellenism, but it did not itself alone constitute Hellenism’.