‘Antichrist’, wrote William Tyndale in 1528, ‘is not an outward thyng, that is to say a man that should sode[n]ly appeare with wonders as our fathers talked of him. No, verely, for Antichrist is a spirituall thing. And this is as much to say as agaynst Christ, ye one that preacheth against Christ.’ Such a definition of Antichrist marked a departure from the traditional medieval legend, which was based upon the prophecy of a single future figure of evil. This new image of Antichrist as a permanent and spiritual presence in the world is a central feature of English Protestant polemic, informing interpretations of both biblical prophecies, and the history of the Church. It was not history which engendered right understanding of Scripture, but Scripture that offered the means of interpreting the past. The Bible offered paradigms for the understanding of history because it was the embodiment of divine truth, which was irreproachable and immutable. In the words of John Bale, ‘yet is the text a light to the chronicles, and not the chronicles to the text’.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Hungarian society underwent two dramatic changes. Firstly, Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman armies advanced into the northern Balkans, causing the collapse of the Hungarian kingdom after the battle at Mohács in August 1526. Hungary subsequently became divided into three parts, with the Ottomans controlling the central and southern counties, the Habsburgs governing Royal Hungary from the Croatian coast to the mountains of Upper Hungary, and a series of native nobles elected to rule over the Transylvanian principality, which included the counties of the eastern Hungarian plain. Secondly, the spread of Protestant ideas about religious reform brought confessional division to Hungary. The initial reform was to a large degree driven by a desire to purify the Catholic Church, whose spiritual credentials were badly discredited by the Ottoman invasion. By 1570 German- and Hungarian-speaking towns and most Hungarian magnates and nobles had abandoned the Catholic Church. German-speakers and nobles in western Hungarian counties on the whole adopted Lutheranism. Calvinism meanwhile came to dominate religious life in the eastern counties, and also received broad support within Transylvania, although some Hungarian towns and Szeklers in Transylvania instead embraced anti-Trinitarianism. Confessional loyalty across Hungary was decided by a variety of factors including patterns of communication and trading networks, the pre-Reformation structures of ecclesiastical organization, and feudal, regional, and family ties. Linguistic barriers were also crucial in determining adherence to a particular religion, with Lutheranism widely supported by German-speakers whilst Calvinism was almost exclusively the preserve of Magyar-speakers. It seems clear that some sense of linguistic or ethnic community assisted both Protestant Churches to reinforce attachment to their confessions.

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.

Theodred, bishop of London, who also held episcopal authority in Suffolk and Norfolk, drew up a statement in the 940s of how he intended to leave his property after his death. Despite his German name, he was probably a native of Suffolk, for he bequeathed a number of Suffolk lands to close relatives living in the region. His most generous bequests were to his cathedral church of St Paul in London, but he made a substantial grant of four estates in Suffolk to the church of St Edmund. Theodred’s will provides one of the earliest datable references to the existence of a religious household charged with maintaining the cult of St Edmund. King of the East Angles, Edmund had died in 869, having been defeated in battle by a Danish army which went on to conquer his kingdom. Later generations remembered him as a martyr, although contemporary sources said little about the circumstances of his death. A community of St Edmund was well established at Bury by the middle years of the tenth century, inspiring not only the generosity of the local bishop, but also his confidence in the efficacy of the congregation’s prayers. Theodred bequeathed land to the church of St Edmund as the property of God’s community there, for the good of his own soul. Exactly when a religious congregation first assembled to preserve the memory of the martyred king, and when it erected a wooden church to house his shrine remains, however, debatable.

In a famous eucharistic vision, recorded in the Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen saw what she calls the ‘image of a woman’ (‘muliebris imago’) approaching the Cross so that she was sprinkled by the blood from Christ’s side. In the Eibingen miniature which accompanies this vision, the woman is shown not only sprinkled with Christ’s blood but catching it in a chalice. Below the Cross an altar bearing a chalice is shown and the same woman stands beside it, her arms outstretched in prayer. Hildegard says in the text that the woman ‘frequently approached’ the altar and there ‘devotedly offers her dowry, which is the body and blood of the Son of God’. The illustration shows nothing of the vested priest who is described in the text approaching the altar after the woman to celebrate the divine mysteries; but it appears that the woman herself is celebrating the mysteries of Christ’s passion which are recalled in the Eucharist and pictured around the altar. The interpretation of this vision says that the woman is Ecclesia, the Church, the Bride of Christ.

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.

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.

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.

Anglican missionaries, serving under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), were the first Europeans to settle in New Zealand. Within months of arriving in the country in 1814, they began to convert the language of the indigenous Māori into a written form in order to produce religious texts that would assist with Māori education and conversion. The CMS missionaries also established schools for Māori which later grew into a de facto state education system until the colonial government accelerated its plans for a secular school regime from the mid-1840s. Despite the sometimes awkward religious and cultural entanglements that accompanied missionary proselytizing in this era, the mission schools established by the CMS flourished in the succeeding decades, elevating Māori literacy levels and serving as a highly effective tool of Anglican evangelization. This article traces the arc of the CMS mission schools from their inception in 1814 to their demise in the early 1860s, a period during which the British, and later New Zealand, government's stance towards the mission schools went from ambivalence, through assistance, to antipathy.

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.

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.

This article considers the evolving relationship between Protestant children, pedagogy and the missionary movement across the British world. From the 1840s, children were a central focus of missionary society philanthropy. By the time of the 1910 World Missionary Conference, missionary and denominational thinkers were consistently highlighting their strategic importance and the need for clear policy that was focused on children's education. This article traces the ways in which this emphasis developed, and the impact that it had among the children involved. It argues that the children's missionary movement was educational at heart, wherein philanthropy and pedagogy went hand in hand. In particular, over the long nineteenth century all the players consistently emphasized the importance of nurturing a ‘missionary spirit’, a notion that was primarily religious in intent but which in practice moved from pragmatic philanthropy to a more formalized emphasis on education and identity formation. The article introduces representative ways by which this was articulated, drawing on examples from a range of British world contexts in which different communities of Protestant children were engaged educationally and philanthropically in very similar ways.

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,

Several studies of the history of Protestant Christianity in South Korea have argued that the religion's rapid growth was chiefly because of the successful translation of the gospel into Korean language and thought. While agreeing that the foundation laid in this respect by early Western missionaries and Korean Christians was a necessary prerequisite for evangelization, this article challenges the use of a translation theory, such as has been developed by Lamin Sanneh, to describe the way that Christianity took root in Korea, both on the basis of conceptual discussions in the field of mission studies and also on historical grounds. It draws on research for A History of Korean Christianity (2014) to examine the years of initial rapid growth in Protestant churches in Korea – 1895 to 1910. Its findings suggest that rather than ‘translation of the gospel’ a more historically accurate description of what took place is ‘reinvention of the Church’.

Since June 2014 the Chaldean Catholic Church has faced an existential crisis. The recent attacks of the terrorist forces of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the northern Iraqi provinces of Duhok, Erbil, Mosul and Sulaymaniya have resulted in increasing levels of persecution and forced displacement. This essay reflects on a more secure period in Chaldean history, during which the community made a strong contribution to the development of the modern state of Iraq, established in 1921. Although proportionally small in size, the essay will show that the Chaldean community contributed in ways which far outweighed their numbers, especially in the sphere of inter-communal relations.

In his De civitate Dei, Augustine stated that anyone who wants to lead a good and Christian life must necessarily have lived in sin in his life up to then. It is quite conceivable that Augustine had his own course of life in mind when writing these words; he never made a secret of his own sinful youth, as is clear from the Confessiones. None the less, his statement is expressed in the form of a general rule.

Many medieval saints’ lives seem to accord with Augustine’s statement. The saint repents after a life of sin and henceforth leads a model Christian life until the day of his death. Thus the eventual victory of Christianity over the forces of evil was demonstrated.

However, there are also many vitae that follow a different pattern. The saint is sometimes supposed to have been perfect in every respect from childhood onward. He was born a saint rather than becoming one through a process of ‘spiritual maturation’. Stories about such precocious saints have not escaped notice in modern scholarship. Following E. R. Curtius, the phrase puer senex is sometimes used to denote the topos; in hagiography, expressions such as as quasi senex and cor gerens senile are used.

Motives are the inner springs of action, the invisible causes which are apprehended only in their visible effects. The latter, when collected and classified as numerical data, are known as statistics, through which at least one aspect of the former can be explored and analysed. Thus, while we cannot ask them to reveal such fundamental questions as to what moved men to enter or leave the monastic life, we can legitimately seek an answer in quantitative terms to what is preliminary and, as such, vital to our understanding of the problem of religious motivation: what do statistics disclose with regard to the force of religious motivation and to its rise and decline among the black monks in England in the two centuries between the first catastrophic onslaught of the Black Death and the dissolution (AD 1350–1540)? This question encompasses a vast field and, for the purposes of this present study, our attention must be limited to the three cathedral priories of Ely, Norwich and Worcester.

There is little direct evidence about the education of girls in classical times and Late Antiquity. Our conception of what provision was available has to be based chiefly on an examination of the material relating to the education of adult women and to the early training of little girls of four or five years of age. For the second half of the fourth century we are fortunate in possessing the testimony of three Christian writers on the subject of the education of mature women: Palladius, Gerontius of Jerusalem, and Jerome. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of their limitations. All three writers deal with women of a narrow social class, members of the wealthy Roman aristocracy, who were attempting to live a disciplined and austere monastic life, the majority of them against the incongruous background of their family mansions on the Aventine Hill, which was then a fashionable residential district. They were perhaps in the tradition of those earlier learned and cultivated aristocratic Roman ladies, recalled by Cicero, and exemplified by the daughter of his friend Atticus, who provided her with a tutor even after her marriage, and by Hortensia, the daughter of the orator Hortensius, who was trained by her father in public speaking, and who even made a speech in the Forum against a tax assessment. For information about the early training of little girls in fourth-century Rome we are indebted to the letters of Jerome, but this evidence, as we shall see, has certain limitations.

Two difficulties confront us when we examine the evidence provided by our three Christian writers: in the first place, none of them describes the educational process by which these ladies achieved so high a degree of cultivation and learning; secondly, the advice which Jerome gives about the training and education of little girls is intended for child oblates, consecrated to God even before their birth, and is, in any case, suspect, because much of it has been culled from an earlier writer.

THE main sources for the boy bishop’s feast are available in print. These include sections in ceremonial- and service-books, cathedral statutes, councils’ decrees, compotus, that is, accounts of the gifts and offerings of money the boy bishop received, as well as his expenses, household books that include registrations of the expenses for the annual entertainment of the boy bishop and his retinue, as well as two sermons the boy bishop delivered. Chambers, in his Medieval Stage, first published in 1903, dedicated a detailed description to the feast. A short reference to the feast appears in most research works on medieval schools and a number of articles have also been published on the subject. I’ll thus refer to the origins of the feast, but describe it only briefly, disregarding variations between places, and then turn to the subject of my paper: the boy bishop’s feast, as reflecting the image of childhood, attitudes towards childhood, and medieval educational conceptions. These are expressed in the feast itself and more clearly in the sermons written by adults to be delivered by the boy bishop.