During the Liturgical Revival of the Victorian period, the worship of the Church of Scotland changed more radically than at any time since the seventeenth century. Those who favoured reform felt that the largely unstructured and didactic character of Presbyterian services no longer appealed to many sections of society. The upper classes, for example, were turning in increasing numbers to the worship of the Episcopal Church. In addition some reformers wished the liturgy of the Kirk to reflect more clearly the doctrinal basis of the Reformed tradition. The innovations which were pioneered in this period included a change in the posture of the congregation for prayer and for singing, the introduction of prayers read by the minister instead of being delivered extempore; the use of set forms such as the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Doxology; the singing of hymns as well as psalms; the use of organs to accompany praise; the observance of the main festivals of the Christian year, and the greater frequency of holy communion.

John Wesley’s version of evangelical Christianity was distinguished by its insistence on the universal availability of salvation (‘Free Grace’), an insistence which rapidly led to the definition of Wesleyan theology as ‘Arminian’ in contradistinction to the Calvinist evangelicalism of Whitfield, Toplady, and others. Controversy was violent in the 1740s, and flared up again in the 1770s. It was against this background that John Wesley founded the Arminian Magazine in 1778. It was to function in defence of Arminianism, and to consist of ‘tracts on the universal love of God, wrote in this and the last century’, together with ‘Original Pieces’. This might seem an unlikely place for women to speak, or even to be spoken about, but Arminianism was not defended solely by means of tracts. By the year of Wesley’s death (1791), besides significant amounts of poetry and short anecdotes (the latter characterized by Wesley in 1781 as ‘bits and scraps’, with which he would scorn to fill up the Magazine), there are also fifteen letters written by women, and eleven accounts of women’s lives (slightly outnumbering both letters from and accounts of men). Later years show an even greater preponderance of women’s ‘Lives’. Leaving on one side the value of this source to the historian, this paper seeks only to analyse women’s opportunities to speak publicly in their own voice in the Arminian (later Methodist) Magazine under John Wesley’s editorship and later.

One of the places in which medieval churchmen tackled questions of discipline and diversity was in their writing on magic. Magic appeared in many different kinds of ecclesiastical writing, including canon law, theology, and the records and manuals of the inquisition. Some of these sources have been well studied; in particular, historians have often attempted to trace the medieval origins of the early modern witch-hunts in theology and inquisition records. However, many other texts have received little attention, among them the pastoral manuals written from the thirteenth century onwards, which instructed priests on how to preach and hear confessions. In contrast to academic theology and inquisitors’ manuals, which catered for specialist readers, pastoral manuals were aimed at any Latin-literate cleric, perhaps especially at students in England’s secular and religious schools. Because they reflect what this wider audience might be expected to encounter, they offer a broader perspective than do the specialist texts on why medieval people employed diverse ritual practices, and why churchmen labelled some of these practices as ‘magic’ and sought to discipline them.

Richard Hooker, in justifying the formula of the baptismal rite of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, objected to the Puritan preference for referring to godparents as witnesses ‘… as if they came but to see and to testify what is done’, adding,

In choosing this subject (on which many speakers have touched in talking to this Society) I started by intending to be more precise in my topic, as well as to introduce the question of church reform. The scholarship I had in mind was classical scholarship and all that went with it in eloquence, enjoyment and understanding of ancient authors. Against this I wished to pit those proponents of a religious life who rejected antiquity and all it stood for. Not of course all of either kind, but some representative examples drawn from the later Middle Ages. In the event the task I had chosen proved much more intricate that I had supposed it would be, the emerging picture more blurred. This, as we all know, is a fairly familiar phenomenon. And as for reform it figures, I am afraid, rather incidentally in what follows.

To our daughter Immena whom we give to God and to be clothed as a nun (sanctimonialis)… for the fear of God, and so that souls fighting for Christ can receive a remedy for their sins through our intermission …’. An aristocratic couple decide to give two of their children (a boy, as well as this girl) to the religious life, and their intention is recorded in a private charter. Lands which have been set aside for the economic support of Immena and her brother are listed at length; then the document concludes with the statement that the two donors, Count Rodulf and Aiga, his wife, ‘requested this concession to be made in the month of November in the tenth year of the reign of our most serene lord Louis, Emperor Augustus’ (that is, the Emperor Louis the Pious, AD 823). A girl is being given to God. Her entry into this new way of life is solemnized by a ceremony in which she will be dressed in clothes appropriate for her withdrawal from the ‘profane’ world: she will almost certainly be veiled in black or purple—although at this time that was a matter for debate in ecclesiastical legislation. The charter may also be interpreted as recording a ‘rite of passage’ which seems to signal Immena’s ‘aggregation’ into a new sacred community, and her separation from the social world of her kin.

It has always been recognized that during the fifteenth century the vigorous and affluent commercial towns of the Low Countries served as centres of artistic excellence, especially in respect of painting and of manuscript production and illumination. That the region was no less fertile a generator of practitioners and composers of music—especially of music for the Church—has also long been appreciated. If for present purposes the Low Countries be defined—rather generously, perhaps—as the region coterminous with the compact area covered by the six dioceses of Thérouanne, Arras, Cambrai, Tournai, Liège, and Utrecht (see map), then it was an area if not packed with great cathedrals, yet certainly thickly populated with great collegiate churches, which sustained skilled choirs and offered a good living and high esteem to musicians who composed; the area also sustained a catholic and generous patron and consumer of artistic enterprise of all sorts, sacred and secular music included, namely, the House of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and its Habsburg successors. From the end of the fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth, the region produced church musicians in such numbers that it became the principal area of recruitment for those princes of the south of Europe who were seeking the ablest men available to staff their household chapels. The Avignon popes of the 1380s and 1390s, the dukes of Rimini and Savoy, and the Roman popes of the mid-fifteenth century, and from the 1470s onwards the fiercely competitive dukes of Milan and Ferrara, the popes, cardinals, and bishops of the Curia, the king of Naples, the prominent families and churches of Florence and Venice, all alike recruited from the North; and though many of the ablest, like Ciconia, Dufay, Josquin, Isaac, and Tinctoris, were lured south to spend their lives in the sunshine, many more remained at home to maintain the Low Countries tradition.

Throughout Europe in the late middle ages there was a perceptible interest in the way of life and ideals believed to have been followed in the early centuries of Christianity. There was little that was new in this interest; reform movements within the Church from the eleventh century onwards had frequently followed such a path. Accompanying this interest however was a desire by laymen to live in a pious and holy fashion; not to enter the coenobitic life rejecting the world as they might have done in earlier centuries but to live a religious life while remaining attached to the outside world. Perhaps the best known manifestation of this spirit was in the emergence of the Brethren of the Common Life in Northern Europe in the fifteenth century; another manifestation of the same kind can be found in the lower echelons of English society in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the widespread appearance of men who vowed to adopt the lifestyle of the desert fathers while performing labouring functions useful to society – as hermits, following the rule of Saint Paul the first hermit.

From 1869 until the founding of the diocese of Singapore in 1909, the missions and chaplaincies in Singapore and what is now West Malaysia were within the jurisdiction of the diocese of Labuan, which itself had been founded as a legal fiction in 1855 as the stock onto which the bishopric for Rajah James Brooke’s Sarawak could be grafted. Although the diocese and the bishopric were constitutionally distinct, as succeeding bishops were often reminded by the rajahs of Sarawak, the bishops looked at the whole area of their spiritual leadership, and regarded the staffing of it as one problem—or opportunity. G. F. Hose himself, bishop of Labuan 1881–1908, and of Sarawak 1882–1908, had served in the Straits Settlements from 1868, and had been archdeacon of Singapore for his predecessor, Bishop Chambers. For sixty-two years the St Andrew’s Church Mission in Singapore, the base for work among Asians, had as superintendent two priests, W. H. Gomes, 1872—1902, and Richard Richards, 1902–34. Both had previously worked in Borneo, for more than fourteen and twelve years respectively. In the opposite direction Bishop Hose transferred to Kuching in 1898 A. F. Sharp, who had worked for six years in Singapore.

Kings and princes who were classed as ‘innocent martyrs’ or ‘passion-sufferers’ because they were thought to have been murdered in Christlike circumstances were known in many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. This paper is about six Anglo-Saxon saints of this type, who are also distinguished by their youth. All of them were thought to have been boys or teenage males when they were martyred. To date, work on these saints has concentrated on questions concerning the origins of their cults, and their relationship to the institution of kingship. The purpose of this paper, however, is to draw attention to the ways in which certain religious communities redefined their sanctity in the late tenth and eleventh century, and to make some tentative suggestions about the possible uses to which these cults were put in this milieu.

Alcuin of York’s famous lament to Abbot. Æthelbald of Wearmouth-Jarrow at the end of the eighth century could serve as a neat summary of the traditional scholarly picture of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monasticism: a movement in near-terminal decline with falling standards in religious observance and monasteries increasingly coming under secular control. The bishops of Worcester have been seen by many scholars as taking a leading role in the fight-back against this creeping secularization. It was not, however, that they played a key role in the drafting of conciliar legislation or that they produced texts condemning the lax standards of Anglo-Saxon monasticism. Rather, successive bishops of Worcester have been seen, since the eighteenth century at least, as challenging secularization through the property strategies they adopted. In order to challenge lay lordship, secularization and declining monastic standards the bishops of Worcester in the eighth century were, in Brooks’ words, ‘attempting, with mixed success, to persuade lords to bequeath their family monasteries to the see of Worcester’. This allowed the bishops to have greater control over the monasteries in tbeir diocese than existing legislation would otherwise have permitted. The bishops could directly intervene in the affairs of these monasteries and impose their own abbots and staff. As Thacker argues, the bishops of Worcester were attempting to ensure ‘independent proprietary monasteries were brought under their control and put in the charge of priests from the episcopal familia.

Amongst the many questions concerning the Jews of thirteenth-century England, by no means the least interesting turn upon the hardening of Christian-Jewish relations, the collapse of the wealth of the Jewish community, and the eventual expulsion of the Jews in 1290. Quite when and why did these processes originate and evolve? By which authority, Church or King, were they most keenly sponsored? Robert Stacey has provided answers to many of these questions, nominating the years 1240 to 1258 as ‘a watershed in Anglo-Jewish relations’ and showing the diversity of religious and financial pressures underlying Henry Ill’s attack on the Jews. Whilst in no way challenging Stacey’s basic approach, the purpose of the present essay is to extend his concept of a watershed back by a decade or so to the regime which governed England between 1232 and 1234. At the same time I shall suggest that the misfortunes of the English Jewry need to be viewed in the wider context of Jewish-Christian relations throughout northern Europe, in particular with an eye to the anti-Jewish legislation of Capetian France.

Now that the statutes formerly ascribed to Winchelsey and Reynolds have been shown to derive from other sources, those of John Stratford, issued after the Second Council of London (1342), are seen to stand out as the most significant body of provincial legislation in the later Middle Ages. Their relative importance is enhanced by the paucity of such legislation in this period in comparison with the considerable volume produced in the course of the thirteenth century.

On investigation, Stratford’s constitutions appear significant in the corpus of medieval ‘administrative’ canon law. Not only do they show signs of the friction existing between the lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions and experienced both by Pecham and Winchelsey, but also of the recurring clerical concerns, frailties of conduct, and malpractices of church courts and officials alike. Provincial legislation springs partly from local imperfections, and partly from more general circumstances. Political considerations may have been critical in the decision to issue constitutions. There is justification, therefore, for first examining the political context in which these constitutions arose.

One purpose of canonization, particularly for founders of religious orders, is to present a paradigm for emulation. The legacy of Charles de Foucauld (1858—1916), a Catholic hermit who lived and died in French Algeria as a witness for Christianity to Islam, has been in some dispute. There are nineteen different congregations and associations in the Foucauldian spiritual family, only one of which came to fruition during his lifetime. His beatification in 2005 has sparked a debate about the nature of his vocation, and consequently about which of his characteristics should be emulated. This raises the question of whether he was a monk or a missionary. Careful consideration of his life is an essential prerequisite for answering these questions.

At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.

Luigi (Alvise) Gonzaga (1568–91), heir to the principality of Castiglione delle Stiviere, renounced his succession in 1585 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, in the course of which he died of plague, evidently contracted while ministering to the sick. He was beatified with extraordinary rapidity in 1605, four years before Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. Admittedly the figure of the ‘angelic youth’ Luigi, as presented in the life written by the promoter of the cause for his canonization, Virgilio Cepari, and finally published in 1606, was more conventional and more calculated to seize the popular imagination than the uncharismatic Loyola, who enjoyed a very limited cult initially and was slow to deliver miracles. But, more significantly, the beatification was a matter of dynastic politics: it was promoted not only by the Jesuits but also, and more insistently, by the Gonzaga dynasty, supported by the Holy Roman Emperor and by allied dynasties. A phase of bureaucratization of canonization processes, already under way, was intensified shortly after Luigi’s beatification. Moreover, the criteria for sainthood would seem to have shifted somewhat in the first half of the seventeenth century. Luigi was not canonized until 1726, under Benedict XIII. In 1729 the same pope pronounced him the patron of students in Jesuit educational institutions and apparently also of students more generally. This provided the basis for the cult of Luigi in the nineteenth century as the patron of ‘Catholic youth’, that is both adolescents and young adults. This development was linked to a novel understanding of adolescence as a specific age group and also to the Church’s battle against secularism. Thus the cult acquired a new relevance long after the princely world that had pressured for Luigi’s canonization had passed away. The legal history of canonization processes substantially explains the delay in Luigi’s canonization, but this delay is also partly explicable by the very complexity and ambiguity of Luigi’s image as both child and man, which served in the long term to give ever new life to his cult.

In A View of Popishe Abuses which enlarged upon the corruptions remaining in the English church, already itemised by protestant radicals in An Admonition to the Parliament of 1572, the writer dwelt at some length upon the iniquities of cathedral foundations.