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.

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.

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.

Persecution is self-explanatory, but toleration, when one starts to consider it, blurs like the recollection of a dream. To what, in the first place, does toleration refer: to deviant opinions, deviant practices, or to potentially subversive organisations? Genuine toleration has probably always been very rare—and probably still is. In the sense of complete religious liberty, it was not generally accepted until varying dates in the nineteenth century. Then it had more to do with materialism and indifference than with any generous spirit of tolerance. If, in the sixteenth century, toleration was not entirely unknown—both in theory and in practice—it must be attributed to something more compelling than ‘a disposition to be patient with the opinions of others’—in the OED’s rather engaging definition. For one thing, toleration was not then regarded as a particularly desirable virtue, and therefore not widely entertained as an ideal. The ideal was rather that God, in his mercy and wisdom, should reunite the Church, or churches. This was expressed, for example, in the preamble to the edict of Nantes in 1598, though one could discount it as propaganda.

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

The writer of the History of the Patriarchs preserves an interesting tradition concerning the attitude of the monks of the monastery of Metras towards the Monophysite patriarch Benjamin (619–661/5)’ during the reign of the emperor Heraclius. ‘The inmates,’ we are told, ‘were especially powerful.’ They were Egyptians (Miswrani) by race, all natives, and there was no stranger among them. Therefore, Heraclius could not make their hearts pliant, and therefore they received Apa Benjamin when he returned from Upper Egypt, because they kept the orthodox (that is, Monophysite) faith and did not deviate from it’. Other monasteries might bow to ‘Heraclius the heretic’, but not they.

The Lord did not say, “I am custom”, but “I am Truth”.’ So, allegedly, Pope Gregory VII, in words that – among medievalists at least – have become almost as well known as the Scriptural text to which they refer, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14.6). The Gregorian dictum embodies the paradox at the centre of the movement for Church Reform in the eleventh century, a paradox which continues to shape historiographical discussion of the period. On the one hand, Gregory and his circle presented themselves as uncompromising fighters for the truth of their vision of the Church, prepared to dismiss any appeal to established practice, however venerable; on the other, and in the same moment, however, they themselves appealed explicitly to past precedent in broadcasting their manifesto. In the comment attributed to Gregory, the authority of ‘the blessed Cyprian’ (mediated in turn by Augustine) is invoked to sanction the rejection of custom. To ‘custom’, then, the reformers opposed not ‘truth’ as a timeless absolute, but a notion of truth embedded in a tradition of moral language. Like many revolutionaries, they saw themselves as restoring their society to a pristine state from which it had fallen away – deaf to the accusation of their opponents that such ‘reform’ was in fact irreparably destructive of the peace of the community. In part because eleventh-century questions about the moral, and in particular the sexual, behaviour of the priesthood continue to be relevant in modern churches, modern scholars continue to take sides over Reform, depicting Gregory VII either as faithful restorer or as demonic innovator. This interpretative deadlock suggests, perhaps, that we should look again at the reformers’ paradoxical notion of truth as it emerges through their use of inherited language. My suggestion is that crucial to the truth of Reform in the eleventh century was its reassertion of a very ancient rhetoric of gender.

The twentieth century saw the opening of wider spaces in which the settled historic Christianity of the UK could encounter other faiths. By the time Michael Ramsey became archbishop of Canterbury in 1961, developments both in England and in the international Anglican Communion made the task more present and more urgent. Ramsey was enabled by the expansion of air travel to visit more of the countries of the former empire in which Anglicans still worshipped, as Geoffrey Fisher before him had begun to do. Added to this was his willingness to intervene in international affairs, whether the war in Vietnam or the apartheid regime in South Africa. As such, there were new opportunities for Ramsey to come into contact with leaders of the other world faiths, and with local conflicts in other nations that had religious elements to them.

This article explores the reasons why dialogue has been such a key part of religious education by examining several texts from the medieval period: Gregory the Great's Dialogues, Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogue against the Jews and three hagiographical narratives from tenth-century Spanish manuscripts. It will argue that when read or listened to, the dialogue of the text was meant in turn to cue an internal dialogue, a response within the self, and a transformation. While meditative religious reading of all kinds was thought of as producing this inner reflection and debate, the dialogue format was an especially effective didactic tool for inculcating in beginners a mode of internal reflection and questioning, inspired by an outside source. Finally, although the content and even the message of the dialogue that is written or overheard may be fixed and clear, its effect on those who read or hear it remains open and provisional. It is up to readers or listeners to draw their own conclusions and absorb their own lessons from it.

The Reformation in Ireland has traditionally been seen as an unmitigated failure. This article contributes to current scholarship that is challenging this perception by conceiving the sixteenth-century Irish Church as part of the English Church. It does so by examining the episcopal career of John Bale, bishop of Ossory, County Kilkenny, 1552–3. Bale wrote an account of his Irish experience, known as the Vocacyon, soon after fleeing his diocese upon the accession of Queen Mary to the English throne and the subsequent restoration of Roman Catholicism. The article considers Bale's episcopal career as an expression of the relationship between Church and state in mid-Tudor England and Ireland. It will be shown that ecclesiastical reform in Ireland was complemented by political subjugation, and vice versa. Having been appointed by Edward VI, Bale upheld the royal supremacy as justification for implementing ecclesiastical reform. The combination of preaching the gospel and enforcing the 1552 Prayer Book was, for Bale, the best method of evangelism. The double effect was to win converts and align the Irish Church with the English form of worship. Hence English reformers exploited the political dominance of England to export their evangelical faith into Ireland.

Recent studies of martyrdom in early Christianity look beyond the traditional perception of martyr acta and passiones as historical documents that can help us to reconstruct the past. While previously these texts had been deemed worthy of attention on account of their proven authenticity or historical veracity, now they are all valued as important sources that have much to tell us about the communities and environments in which they were produced. This approach does not deny the historical value of the sources, but rather it appreciates that they are a special kind of historical document. Texts and sermons about holy men and women never were created as objective accounts. Every textual portrait of a martyr reveals a prior judgement that inscribes meaning and purpose into seemingly meaningless events to present condemned criminals as religious heroes, horrific tortures as divine gifts, and public deaths as cosmic dramas. Consequently, the various methods of representation that were used to construct depictions of the martyrs are significant elements in their own right, whether they are rhetorical devices, scriptural allusions, artistic embellishments or miraculous occurrences. These are the very details that make martyrs; they turn death into martyrdom, and the dead into martyrs.

History supplanted nature as the most important apologetical language among English polemical divines during the mid-eighteenth century, but not for the reasons usually adduced. The triumph of history over nature owed everything to the power of orthodox patronage and to nature’s demonstrable apologetical efficacy, and nothing to natural theology’s supposed failure sufficiently to prove God’s existence. Put another way, by the late 1720s orthodox apologists had come to believe that the popular argument from design in nature applied equally to history. Moreover, the argument from design in history appears to have been an apologetical strategy which accorded more closely with the disposition of an increasingly orthodox episcopate during the mid-century period. Little evidences the mid-century historical turn — a shift either missed or ignored by most historians — more clearly than the second generation (1730–1785) of the Boyle lectures, a series of public sermons founded by Robert Boyle in order to defend Christianity from the attacks of unbelievers. For whereas the first generation of lecturers founded their defences of Christianity on natural theology, the second built on Christianity’s historical record.

One of the striking features of crusading in the aftermath of the fall of Acre (1291) was the sudden profusion of treatises written to offer advice on how the Holy Land could be recovered. In the years between 1290 and 1335, around thirty such proposals were written containing often detailed information about the Mamluks and practical recommendations on how they could be defeated and expelled from the holy places. This practicality distinguishes the ‘recovery treatises’ from other crusading literature. Prior to this period, non-descriptive writing on the crusades tended to be theological, dealing with the justification of crusading or the morals of participants. After the brief flurry of proposals written in the decades prior to 1335, similar works were rare until the treatises outlining plans for crusades against the Ottomans written in the mid-fifteenth century by such authors as John Torzelo and James Tedaldi. However, a few new proposals dealing with the crusade to the Holy Land were written during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This is striking, given the great obstacles posed to such a crusade by the twin scourges of war and plague in Europe, and the greater immediacy of the Ottoman threat. It is possible that these later works were influenced by recovery treatises written between 1290 and 1335, since some of the latter survive in copies made during the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries which were held in European libraries, notably that of the dukes of Burgundy. These copies, and the new treatises on the subject, illustrate that the idea of a crusade to recover Jerusalem continued to exert an appeal on later generations at certain times during the period.

With these words, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon recalled how in a village in the Auvergne he had found a group of women venerating a dog as a saint. He then went on to describe how he had preached against the cult and persuaded the local lord to demolish the dog’s woodland shrine. Thanks to a detailed study by Jean-Claude Schmitt, this encounter between educated friar and unorthodox peasants has become a famous example of interaction between elite and popular religion in the Middle Ages. But it is only one of many such encounters that Stephen describes under the heading of ‘Superstitio’, or Superstition. Part of the interest of these tales for the modern reader is that they provide a window on to some of the unorthodox religious practices of the Middle Ages. Even more interesting, however, is the way in which Stephen links these practices to a clear but flexible idea of the relationship between elite and popular religion.

Why choose this subject? First, because I think there is a general historiographical problem about nationality in early-modern Europe, which has been rather abandoned and is perhaps worth another look. Second because, on the Catholic side of the subject, there is a problem of actuality concerning Ireland and a rather different one concerning Holland. Third, because there is a specific and limited issue in the history of English Catholicism. I shall really be concerned with a simple problem raised by Arnold Oskar Meyer in his England and the Catholic Church under Queen Elizabeth: how far the internal conflicts among English Catholics, generally known as the Archpriest controversy, are to be explained as an outbreak or resurgence of ‘nationalism’, a conflict of ‘national’ and ‘Catholic’ tendencies. There have been good reasons for objecting to Meyer’s view that this was the case: his conceptions of national character, of ’puritanism’, were by present standards shaky, and he weakened his personal position by becoming more closely involved with the Third Reich than he perhaps need have been. The recent historiography of the subject has been largely a history of attempts to find an alternative: in the international competition of France and Spain; in the constitutional hostility of gentry and clergy; in the geographical determinism of Braudelian routes; in the ecclesiastical choice between a traditional and a missionary church. Many of them have been made by myself; most recently Christopher Haigh has added another, connected with the continuity or discontinuity of Elizabethan Catholicism with its pre-Reformation predecessor.