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.

‘It is possible that no breed of men and women can be so safely assessed as the nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. No other breed, certainly, left more voluminous accounts of themselves to posterity.’ If the volume of documentation is a guarantee of safe assessment then Moorhouse’s bold assertion is particularly applicable to the subject of missionary motivation in Britain in die nineteenth century. Statements of motive, explicitly requested by directors of missionary societies, prayerfully considered and copiously detailed by candidates, and lovingly preserved by missionary-society archivists, might comprise the most voluminous extant documentation on religious motivation (Moorhouse’s boldness is infectious). Furthermore, this vast corpus of primary source material has been thoroughly ransacked by postgraduate students of history and sociology, so that the motives of English and Scottish missionaries for the whole of the nineteenth century have now been explored.

The systematic study of religious Fundamentalism is now well under way. The first of six promised volumes under the auspices of the Fundamentalism Project of the University of Chicago, making a global examination of such movements in many religions, was published in 1991. Collections of papers evaluating specific aspects of Fundamentalism have been issued, and the theological method of the contemporary British movement has been scrutinized. Its American equivalent is the subject of one of the most illuminating of post-war works on the history of Christianity in the United States. Yet the history of the British movement has been allowed to remain in obscurity. Although, as will be seen, there are understandable reasons for the neglect, the growth of interest in world-wide Fundamentalism makes study of its British expression timely. More certainly than some of the other forms of defensively-minded traditional religion elsewhere that are now being labelled ‘Fundamentalist’, the British movement is entitled to the name invented by its counterpart in America. It arose at the same time, looking to some of the same men for leadership, and displayed similar traits. So an attempt is made here to present an overview of the Fundamentalists in Britain.

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.

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.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the practice of religion will be influenced by the social conditions prevailing in any given locality.’ The debate on this statement is largely concentrated for present purposes into a consideration of activities between c1100 and c1250 in two distinctive societies: Westminster abbey and its environs and, in contrast, the city and diocese of Worcester. The essential function of Westminster abbey was, of course, intercessory, and while this role was shared with Worcester cathedral, the latter church had also a wide-ranging pastoral responsibility. In this sense, no exact equation can be made, yet the richness of the records which both churches accumulated presents adequate material for a valid comparison in other respects. It is not intended, and is, indeed, impossible to make an arbitrary definition of Westminster as town and Worcester as countryside. Elements of both were contained in Westminster and Worcester alike.

The theme of the environment is one of the most popular and pressing themes of the present time. Somewhat late in the day we have become aware that we have been blindly secreting around ourselves conditions in which it is increasingly difficult for human or any other life to be lived. We have managed to build up a technological and economic order based on machine production and the possession of material goods which inescapably determines to a greater or lesser degree die lives of all the individuals born into it, reducing a great many of them to a state bordering on panic or hysteria. Indeed, we are told that the only real issue before us in this respect is whether uncontrolled technological destruction or uncontrolled population will be the first to tear the fabric of our civilisation to pieces. In spite of this, in the name of a ‘war on want’ or of developing ‘underdeveloped’ countries, or simply of progress or evolution or efficiency we go on methodically trying to apply on an even more diorough and extensive scale-on a global scale - exactly the same techniques and habits which have brought about the bleakness of our own world - a bleakness which one might describe as resulting at least in part from a desanctification of nature.

A good deal has been written about the response of the mission churches to the guerilla war in Zimbabwe. Much less has been written about their experience of it. Yet it has been persuasively argued that the real significance of the war for the churches lay not at the level of institutional pronouncements upon it but at the level of the participation of churchmen in the sufferings of local rural communities. The war was an embarassment to institutional spokesmen. In the early colonial past the leaders of the catholic and protestant churches in Southern Rhodesia had legitimated war, providing chaplains for the white columns that defeated the Ndebele in 1893 and suppressed the risings in 1896 and preaching the duty of the representatives of Christian civilisation to overthrow barbarism. By the 1960s some churchmen had come to condemn violence—both the institutional violence of the Rhodesian state and the revolutionary violence of the nationalist and liberation movements. As guerilla war spread in the 1970s, hardly any church spokesmen could move beyond this position. It became clearer and clearer that the majority of their African rural flocks supported the guerillas and even clearer that African rural Christians were suffering terribly in the violence of civil war. But no-one was able to articulate a theology appropriate to such a crisis.

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.

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.

A major trend in the recent historiography of medieval and renaissance Italy has been towards the reassertion of the fundamental importance of the countryside and of agriculture. This is not so much to deny the unique position occupied by the cities in Italian life as to remind us of some essential features of those cities and of the men who ruled them. Towns were more typically market centres for their localities than entrepôts of long-distance commerce; while many members of both the higher and the lower urban social strata carried with them throughout life a status ultimately derived from the status they or their forebears occupied or had occupied in rural life. Conversely, the members of, say, the Florentine urban patriciate around the year 1400 were almost to a man landlords in the surrounding countryside. They were also of course the men who made the laws, levied taxation and generally controlled the government of the countryside as of the town. At every level of life we have to postulate an intimacy of relations between town and country which the conditions of modern urban life can make it an effort even to imagine.

John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s from 1504 or 1505 until his death at the age of 52 in 1519 was a man, according to the brief biography of him written a couple of years after his death by his friend Erasmus—it remains the best sketch of his character—whom neither the smiles of fortune (he was born well-to-do, and was early on the path of ecclesiastical preferment) nor the impulse of a far different natural bent (he was high-tempered, self-confessedly prone to incontinence and luxuriousness, to indulgence in sleep, to jests and raillery, was not even free from the taint of avarice) could divert from the pursuit of a gospel life. His defects he counteracted by philosophy and sacred studies, watching, fasting and prayer, in a life that was both chaste and charitable. His large patrimony went, in the first decade of the sixteenth century, to the foundation of St Paul’s School, ‘specially to increase knowledge and worshipping of god and our lorde Crist Jesu and good Cristen lyff and maners’. There a limited number were to be taught by a High Master and a Sur-Master, with a chaplain, who were to devote their whole time to the school. Delighting in the purity and simplicity of children, Colet saw that ‘a nation’s chief hope lay in having the rising generation trained in good principles.

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.

Joan of Arc died at the stake in Rouen in 1431. She became a canonized saint of the Catholic Church only in 1920. It is well known that the wheels of the Vatican grind slowly, but 500 years is a long period to wait for sanctity, even by Roman standards. Obviously, in a short communication such as this, there is no time to explore the rich afterlife which Joan enjoyed between her death and her canonization. Rather, the more modest purpose of this paper is to show how her achievement of canonical status was preceded by a well-orchestrated campaign conducted by French Catholics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If Joan was finally reclaimed as a Catholic saint and martyr, it was primarily because she was successfully represented as the very epitome of a heady blend of religion and nationalism that was one of the more distinctive and powerful forces of the era of the belle époque and the First World War.

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.

In August 1841 George Spencer, great-grandson of the third Duke of Marlborough and second Bishop of Madras, entertained two house guests in his residence at Kotagherry. Both were seeking admission into the Anglican ministry. One was an Indian, a former Roman Catholic priest who had begun to question the catholicity of the Roman communion, had joined himself for a while to the American Congregational mission in Madura, but had eventually reached the conclusion, in Spencer’s words, that ‘evangelical doctrine joined to Apostolic Government were only to be met with in indissoluble conjunction with the Church of England’. Bishop Spencer, while keen to employ the Indian as a catechist, felt it premature, ‘in a matter of such importance’, to receive him as a presbyter, even though the validity of his orders was unquestionable. The Indian is not named in the records, and it would appear that he never became an Anglican priest.

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

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.

The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.