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 name controversy, I confess, is the name of a disease; but necessary … to be known first, to make a readier way for the cure; and he that cares not which way disputes about religion go, brands himself with the palpable neglect of his faith and religion. Not as though all were equally interested in the study of controversies, but that everyone may be ready to give an answer to every man that asks him a reason of the hope that is in him.

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the German Volkskunde tradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

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 attitude of the Limousin pope Clement VI to the early stages of the Hundred Years War between France and England occasioned conflicting verdicts. These varied predictably according to the nationality of their authors. One of the pope’s biographers, the Frenchman Jean la Porte, hailed him as a creator of concord, a lover of peace. By contrast the Englishman William of Ockham accused Clement of being ‘schismatic’, in the sense that he deliberately provoked hostilities between the two countries and favoured one side against the other. The German Conrad of Megenberg tried to adopt a via media. Replying to Ockham he claimed that he had himself seen Clement sending out cardinals to conduct peace negotiations between the kings of France and England. On the other hand, he was driven to admit Clement’s partiality, excusing it somewhat feebly on the grounds that the Holy See had always adhered more to France than to other nations, so one read. Some impression of the truth of these differing judgements can be gleaned from the registers of Clement’s correspondence, from the political collationes he delivered both as pope and earlier as Pierre Roger, the trusted counsellor and official of Philip VI, Valois, and from contemporary accounts of a peace conference over which the pope presided at Avignon in 1344.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.

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.

I have recently read through almost all the surviving medieval registers of the diocese of Lincoln, while collecting material for a book on the church in medieval Lincolnshire society. As may be imagined, a good many interesting patterns are emerging from this and other sources; this short note results from the examination of one such pattern.

John Buckingham, who like so many other bishops of the fourteenth century, had been a civil servant, ruled over the see of Lincoln, with conspicuous industry and attention to detail, for the twenty-six years between 1362 and 1398. His career is the subject of a doctoral thesis, on which Miss Alison McHardy is now engaged, and I do not propose to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider in detail one or two incidents in his episcopate which are, I believe, of some relevance to the theme of this conference.

If the English Reformation can be seen as an extended transaction between the laity and the clergy, then its outcome is surely well described, in Claire Cross’s phrase, as the ‘triumph of the laity’. While most Elizabethan Protestant divines were more than happy about the spiritual aspects of that triumph, they were altogether less enthusiastic about its impact on the standing of the clergy. Certainly the independence, status, and thus the material wealth of the clergy were subjects of concern for many Elizabethan Protestants. Presbyterians, moderate Puritans, conformists, both ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, all were much exercised by the problem of the status and financial independence of the clerical estate. But while they may have shared a common concern with the question, the different priorities and values which divided Elizabethan Protestant divines amongst themselves inevitably coloured their attitude to church property and clerical status. In particular the issue provided a central strand in the polemical exchange between Presbyterians and conformists, as each tried to label the other as the clergy’s own worst enemy in its protracted, indeed interminable, negotiations with lay society for improved pay and conditions.

By the mid-nineteenth century, two generations after the revolution and the creation of an independent state, Americans were still unsure of the ultimate limits and character of their nation. If there was too much evident optimism over the country’s prospects to write of the nation’s suffering a crisis of identity, it is equally clear that the major questions of the 1840s and 1850s—territorial expansion, the future of slavery, and massive immigration—provided issues the precise resolution of which would fundamentally affect the future direction of the Union. Over the first two of these the evangelical protestant community, the dominant and most influential opinion-forming religious group in American society, found itself seriously divided; indeed by the eve of the civil war the slavery question had split all the major evangelical denominations. In contrast, this same community appeared to show much more cohesion and unanimity in defending the nation’s evangelicalism against the swollen tide of foreign immigrants, three million of whom poured into American ports between 1845 and 1854, the vast majority victims of Irish famine and refugees from the European revolutions of 1848. The immediate danger to American nationality, as evangelicals defined it, lay not in the immigrants’ poverty and foreignness, but in their Catholicism. The Lutheran minister, Frederick Anspach, likened the American nation to a virgin who should ‘sacredly guard her honor’ against catholic vampires who ‘would convert her into a courtezan for the Pope.’

This article examines the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish education debates in the context of intra-Presbyterian relations in the aftermath of the 1843 ‘Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland. The debates of this period have been characterized as an attempt to wrest control of Scottish education from the Church of Scotland, with most opponents of the existing scheme critical of the established kirk's monopoly over the supervision of parish schools. However, the debate was not simply between those within and outside the religious establishment. Those advocating change, particularly within non-established Presbyterian denominations, were not unified in their proposals for a solution to Scotland's education problem. Disputes between Scotland's largest non-established churches, the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and within the Free Church itself over the type of national education scheme that should replace the parish schools severely hampered their ability to express common opposition to the existing system. These divisions also placed increasing strain on the developing cooperation in Scottish Dissent on ecclesiastical, political and social matters after the Disruption. This article places the issue of education in this period within this distinctly Dissenting context of cooperation, and examines the extent of the impact these debates had on Dissenting Presbyterian relations.

‘Now firmly established as a modernist novelist’, D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) remains a controversial writer, especially for the ambiguity of his attitudes to fascism and feminism. This essay considers the role played by the then forty-one-year-old bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, in offering evidence for the defence in the Old Bailey trial in 1960 which acquitted Penguin Books of obscenity in publishing Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In taking part in the trial Robinson acquired notoriety (or credit). His public admiration for Lawrence’s writing placed him at odds with the two postwar archbishops, Geoffrey Fisher (Canterbury) and Cyril Garbett (York). In the words of Mark Roodhouse in a pioneering article, ‘for ecclesiastical historians the Lady Chatterley trial not only reveals changing social attitudes but also growing division within the Church of England between “two Christianities” over the way to respond to these changes’. Robinson did not receive further advancement in the Church.

The second quarter of the nineteenth century has long been recognized as a formative period for public discussion of the relationship between science and religion, particularly in emerging sciences such as geology, where new evidence raised questions about the interpretation of the Bible. Recent scholarly studies of scientific publishing, theologies of nature and links between missionaries and scientific endeavour have drawn attention to various ways in which the relationship between religion and science was understood during the period. A common theme has been the key role of clergymen in public discourse. A lacuna in this literature, however, has been analysis of colonial sites in which these debates took place. In colonies such as New South Wales, for example, public discussion of these issues was dominated by Anglican clergyman-scientists. Yet they have attracted little attention from scholars.

Much of the best recent scholarship on the implementation of the Tudor Reformations has chosen as its leitmotif the themes of obedience, conformity and acquiescence, collaboration even. The revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s overthrew convincingly the notion of widespread popular enthusiasm for religious change. But given that change was successfully imposed, part of revisionism’s legacy has been a somewhat optimistic assessment of the capabilities of the Tudor state. Whether allied to the cause of religious reform, or that of religious reaction, Tudor governments were apparently remarkably effective at enforcing their will, largely because of their ability to co-opt the energies and loyalties of locally-based elites and sub-elites. In terms of this volume’s twin themes, it appears to be a case of discipline successfully exerted; diversity effectively curtailed.

It is certain that the unrest of Europe of the past twenty years will be dispelled. It is even likely that our whole civilisation will be advanced.’ So wrote A. E. Lawrie, Rector of Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, in October of 1914. He was spending a three-month leave of absence as chaplain to an army hospital behind the lines in France. He added that the death of a particular soldier ‘spoke so loudly of Another Cruel Death, that one could not but link the two together—the spirit of self-indulgence will be trodden underfoot and exchanged for the spirit of self-discipline.’

This article explores the place of education within the early Quaker movement in England. It examines how Quaker attitudes towards human nature shaped their views on the role of nurture in the creation of a community of believers, and probes the theological assumptions that underpinned this, notably their repudiation of conventional Protestant ideas about original sin and predestination. It also traces the evolution of Quaker views on spiritual direction in domestic and institutional settings against the backdrop of the transformation of the Society of Friends from a radical evangelical sect to a more sober and disciplined movement in the later seventeenth century. Particular attention is paid to the part that education played in ensuring that Quakerism was passed down to the next generation, once the heady excitement of its initial conversionary phase had waned.

The relationship between the two co-ordinates of this essay, ‘gender’ and ‘the clerical profession’, might be interpreted in a number of ways. It could, for instance, be taken to mean the manner in which clergy articulated and encouraged differences in gender roles. For it is certainly true that the most commonly quoted conduct books of the period – and especially those which prescribed roles for women – were written by the clergy. Clerics like James Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister in London, in his popular Sermons to Young Women (1765) advised his presumed audience:

Modern historians have long argued that the early medieval Franks thought themselves to be the chosen people or new Israel, especially as they gained a great empire under the Carolingian dynasty in the late eighth century. The Opus Caroli of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans has often been cited as one of the clearest expressions of this self-conception as God's elect. A massive work attacking the legitimacy of the Byzantine empire in the context of the iconoclasm dispute during the early 790s, it does indeed contest the Byzantine claim to be the Christian empire. But Theodulf's repeated statement that ‘We are the spiritual Israel’ is best understood not as an assertion of ethnic election, but as a reference to the Christian tradition of Scripture exegesis which should (he argues) underpin both the Frankish and the Byzantine understanding of images. The Carolingian claim to empire rested on the Frankish championing of the universal Church, and its traditions of orthodoxy and correct biblical interpretation.