In 1971 and early 1972, as a final-year Cambridge undergraduate, I turned to the study of the English Reformation, under the able supervision of Felicity Heal, while attending the lectures of a wonderfully rackety and quirkily learned Fellow of Selwyn College, the late and much lamented patron of the Cambridge Footlights, Harry Porter. The course was entitled ‘Thought and Religion in England 1500 to 1650’, and it was fairly cutting-edge by the standards of its day: a genuine effort to reach across the divide then standard between the history and divinity faculties. It also tried to integrate England with mainland Europe – what in those days, we would routinely call with sublime and literal insularity ‘the Continent’.

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.

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studies of martyrdom in early Christianity look beyond the traditional perception of martyr acta and passiones as historical documents that can help us to reconstruct the past.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approach does not deny the historical value of the sources, but rather it appreciates that they are a special kind of historical document.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.

Recent students of the Counter-Reformation in Italy have not neglected the subject of sanctity. For example, one such student, Peter Burke, has dealt with it in a general and theoretical way, while others, such as Gabriella Zarri, have concentrated on certain classes of saints, in her case female saints and beatae. Scholars, however, whose interests are in the particular rather than the general, have tended to prefer to study the lives and times of individual saints, and the perceptions of them by their contemporaries. A different approach altogether has been to study a particular aspect of sanctity, such as hagiography or canonization. Similarly, some scholars have concentrated on the salient aspects of the contribution that particular individuals made to the work of the Church militant, for example church reform in the case of Charles Borromeo or the repression of heresy in that of Michele Ghislieri.

This article treats the early medieval cult of St Alban of Verulamium. It explores how, and how far, the cult extended in Britain, France and Germany. As well as crossing geographical boundaries, Alban's relics were also shared among different cultures: British, Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian. The article argues that this resulted in differing appreciations, interpretations and applications of Alban's cult, and that the Gallic contribution to the cult's survival was particularly important.

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 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’.

This article draws on wedding sermons published in England between the 1580s and the 1740s. The main interest of these sermons lies in the ways in which doctrine based on the scriptural texts, especially those cited in the Form of Solemnization of Matrimony, was refracted through the prism of the various concerns and priorities of preaching clergy. Their exposition of marriage duties was often enriched by personal experience. Yet the number of wedding sermons published in England between the 1580s and the 1740s was small compared with the quantity of those reaching print after delivery at a funeral, another of the foremost rites of passage. It seems likely that many fewer of them were preached at weddings in the first place. Wedding congregations probably made a less receptive audience. The already limited publication of wedding sermons underwent a long-term eighteenth-century decline.

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.

‘Where is the Church of Scotland to be found?’ asked the leading Evangelical R. S. Candlish on 20 May 1843 at the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. ‘She will not be found basking under the smiles of the great, but she is to be recognised once more, as in days of old, by her sufferings and her tears.’ In 1843 the Disruption of the Church of Scotland brought the birth of a new church, the Free Church of Scotland, as nearly a third of the ministers and nearly half the lay membership left the national Church of Scotland. They went out in part over a long-standing dispute concerning church patronage, but, more fundamentally, they left in protest against what they perceived as the refusal of the State to recognize the Church’s independence in spiritual matters. The new Free Church claimed to be not merely a secession or schism, but rather the true national Church of Scotland, a claim its adherents based on their willingness to suffer for the principle of the headship of Christ in the Church. They were the Church of the martyrs of the Scottish Reformation and of the Covenants, willing to lay down their fortunes, even their lives, for ‘the Crown rights of the Redeemer’. The true Church of Scotland, asserted the Free Church minister James Mackenzie, in 1859, ‘began in 1843, when die old Church, the Church of Knox, of Melville, of Henderson, and of the martyrs, left its connexion with the State, and stood out before the world free, bearing the banner which our brave fathers bore.’

One of the most significant aspects of the religious literature written in England in the critical half-century before the Long Parliament was the considerable contribution made by lay writers. Whatever belief one chooses, Anglicanism, Puritanism, mysticism, skepticism, rationalism, deism, a lay representative can be found who espoused it. Whatever type of writing one selects, devotional books, spiritual biographies, polemics, ecclesiastical histories, legal studies, a search of the Short Title Catalogue would readily bring to light a layman who produced such works. From the pietist John Norden to the firebrand William Prynne, to the contemplative moderate Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, the age abounds with a rich variety of lay religious opinion.

On 13 September 1862, when Abraham Lincoln was awaiting an opportune moment to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, he received at the White House a delegation from a meeting of Chicago Christians of all denominations. In pressing hard the case for immediate emancipation of the slaves, they assured the president that such action would be in accordance with the will of God. In a characteristically wry, tongue-in-cheek reply, Lincoln observed that:

The immediate occasion of this paper was my discovery, when I began to catalogue the sixteenth-century visitation books of the diocese, that what Gibbons and some of the eighteenth-century registry clerks had thought of as libri cleri for visitations were in fact lists of those summoned to diocesan synods. Professor Cheney has pointed out that there is an unusual quantity of evidence for the existence and working of the Ely synod in the fourteenth century, but I do not think that he would have expected, certainly I did not, to find it surviving and working in the sixteenth century. When this fact emerged, it seemed worth while to look again at the medieval evidence of the synod’s working, to see whether the continous existence of the institution could be traced, and to discover how it was being used. The sources quoted are almost entirely the diocesan records in my own care: I have not yet explored even the capitular records, and this is therefore no more than an interim report.

Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. Besides Foxe’s comments, it also contains material, sometimes no longer extant in other records, which Foxe claimed to draw from the original accounts of the heresy trials, and, for the early sixteenth century, memories of observers, and it is some of this material which I wish to consider today. Because Foxe is noted as a propagandist, his reliability has sometimes been questioned, so the first task of the historian is to subject his excerpts from documents and his other source-material to a more than usually careful scrutiny. In cases where the original sources are still extant, these can be used to reach some estimate of his accuracy in general; in cases where they are not, other records can sometimes serve as a cross-check.

In the early thirteenth century the papal cardinal legate in France, Robert of Courson, painted the business of lending in wholly Utopian colours. Should the pope decree, he said, that lending must cease and all men must earn their sustenance by the sweat of their brow, ‘Thus would be removed all usurers, all factious men and all robbers; thus would charity flourish and the fabric of the churches again be builded; and thus would all be brought back again to its pristine state.’ The prospect that acting to eliminate lending would so smoothly result in social perfection, one might expect, should have propelled the Catholic Church, led by the popes, to have made a frontal assault on lending, especially that carried on by Jews. It did not. Only more than four centuries later, in 1682, did the papacy decide to end a policy of actually condoning Jewish lending, and only then did it irrevocably close down the Jewish loan banks in the Papal State.

The root and branch bill was debated in the house of commons between 27 May and 27 July 1641. The original bill introduced by Sir Edward Dering was short, simply abolishing bishops, deans and chapters with all their dependents. But after the house had wrestled for two months with the business of replacing episcopacy with a new form of church government the bill had grown to more than forty pages. No complete copy of it, as it stood when it was dropped in August, has survived, but its main provisions can be reconstructed from the commons journals and parliamentary diaries. A new system of government was to be set up in two stages: its final form would be determined by a synod of divines, which it was intended should meet in the autumn of 1641 and work fast enough for the new jurisdiction to be established by 1 March 1642; in the meanwhile parliament would take all ecclesiastical jurisdiction into its own hands and proceed with the redistribution of the church’s financial resources. This paper is concerned with the first of these two stages, the commons’s interim programme of action to fill the vacuum left by root and branch. The speeches of MPs on three topics that dominated the June and July debates—church courts, ordination and deans and chapters— strikingly reveal their concern to use a period of temporary control over the church for reform and renewal.

The aim of this paper is to examine the evidence from a number of charity schools, for attitudes towards the childhood of the ‘poorer sort’ in the early eighteenth century. Conventionally it has been claimed that lack of affection, and even brutality, characterized the relationship between parents, especially fathers, and their children. Lawrence Stone, in particular, has promoted the view that, as a result of the very high mortality rate among children until the late eighteenth century, parents did not invest much affection in them in order to insulate themselves from the sorrow resulting from their likely deaths before reaching adulthood. This view was also taken by Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt. They pointed out the formality of address seen in letters between children and parents of the upper classes, and suggested that cruelty to children and flogging was commonplace at all levels of society. These views have been challenged by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that, when examined carefully, the evidence suggests that, from the sixteenth century at least, nearly all children seem to have been wanted, loved, and cared for. She claims that the majority of children were not subject to brutality, and that physical punishment was used relatively infrequently and as a last resort. Pollock suggests that from the eighteenth century onwards parents were much concerned with ‘training’ a child in order to ensure that he or she absorbed correct values and beliefs and would grow into a model citizen.

Christian teaching places man’s origin in paradise, a rural setting, and the end of mankind in the celestial city of Jerusalem. Thus both town and country have potentially positive connotations to the believer. Yet just as the angel could fall to become satan, so town and country could acquire evil reputations, depending on the behaviour of human beings in these settings (after all, the fall of man took place in paradise).

Christian writings draw in many respects on human experience, including the setting of man in society. At times in history town and country were experienced as different settings of life. Certainly there existed a notion of a superiority of urban over rural existence in classical Greek times; in contrast, Roman civilisation was more geared towards rural life. Both Hellenic and Roman thought contributed a great deal to the shaping of early Christianity. I am concerned here primarily with medieval attitudes towards town and country, but it is a fact that these were, partly at least, based on earlier tradition.

Kant went up to the Albertina at the age of sixteen in 1740, and his career as student there, tutor to three families (the last being that of the Keyserlings) and back to the Albertina as a teacher, spanned the reigns of three kings in and of Prussia, through the near disasters and triumphs of Frederick the Great, and including the predatory partitions of Poland, but narrowly escaping the near collapse of Prussia in the Napoleonic wars. He had been saturated in the pietist tradition at home, at the Collegium Fridericianum, and in his student days. It has been alleged that pietism lingered on in Königsberg longer than elsewhere, not least because of the presence of Franz Albert Schultz, pupil of Francke and Wolff, army chaplain, pastor, school reformer and founder, settler of immigrants and university teacher, and of Martin Knutzen, a young and brilliant natural philosopher, and one of Kant’s most influential teachers at the Albertina. Kant never lost his respect for pietists at their best, characterised by serenity and cheerfulness, neither discontented by persecution, nor stirred to enmity by controversy.