Regional identity in medieval Durham depended crucially on St Cuthbert. The property and privileges of the diocese were presented as possessions of an originally Celtic community which had carried the miraculously incorrupt body of the saint from Lindisfarne to a final home in Durham. Tradition added other holy abbots, bishops and kings, remembered as obedient to the Roman tradition after the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Durham story included the expulsion at the Conquest of married guardians of Cuthbert in favour of proper monks, a change corroborated by miracle stories and holy lives, such as that of Godric in the dependent cell of Finchale. Increasing possessions were given to the saint; miracle stories showed him punishing violators of his shrine. Relics, including the head of King Oswald and remains of Bede, linked the priory with these traditions. These ideas had penetrated the local identity; the notion of the Haliwerfolc, the community of the liberty of St Cuthbert, the lands belonging to the saint, remained strong in the late Middle Ages for people ‘between Tyne and Tees’. Nonetheless, in the 1570s Christopher Watson attempted a history which denigrated Cuthbert’s life and miracles and those of other Durham saints.

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.

By the time Augustine read the Life of Antony in 386, the biography had already become an international best seller in the Roman Empire. Translated twice into Latin and read in places as far off as Milan and Syrian Antioch, the Egyptian Life also proved to be a significant influence upon hagiographical writing in the late fourth century, the most notable example being the Lives of St Jerome. Consequently, scholars have often taken it to represent the dominant paradigm for sainthood in fourth-century Christianity and the centuries that followed. But is this assumption tenable? The Life of Antony would in all likelihood be read only by the educated elite or by ascetic circles in the Church, and was hardly accessible to the ordinary Christian. More importantly, hagiographical discourse in the fourth century was not restricted to biographies, but pervaded all sorts of Christian literature. This is certainly the case with the writings of St John Chrysostom (c. 349—407), who often presents the Christian monk as a saintly figure in his monastic treatises and his voluminous homilies. Indeed, what emerges from his writings is a paradigmatic saint who is significantly different from that portrayed in the biographies, and yet equally influential among his lay and ascetic audiences. To be sure, Chrysostom’s monastic portraits share some common features with that provided by Athanasius’s Life. Nevertheless, there are also stark differences between the two, and these are the focus of this paper.

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.

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 1530 Richard Whitford published A Werke for Housholders, for ‘them that have gydyng and governaunce of any company for an order to be kepte bothe in them selfe | and in them that they have in rule and charge’. The work swiftly went through at least seven editions in as many years; Tudor householders clearly found something of value in its advice. Its author was many things: a Bridgettine monk, a humanist, a prolific author of works in the vernacular, and a survivor who went on writing and publishing even after the dissolution of his monastery. He died in 1543. His books provide some important insights into vernacular humanism and late medieval monasticism, and the often unappreciated relationship between the two, which was demonstrated by his reflections on household piety. This essay argues that Whitford’s Werke for Housholders was rooted in his monastic experience, closely linked to Syon’s pastoral role, and that ideas about the early modern ‘godly household’ should perhaps be adjusted in the light of this connection.

By the time of the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, Christian writers had already developed a complex methodology of historical writing, one that was not merely concerned with preserving the history of past events, but which viewed contemporary and past events through the lens of the biblical narrative of history, from creation to the ultimate end as prophesied in the eschatological books of the Bible. In this model, the history of the world could be traced from creation to follow the story of God’s revelation of himself to humankind through the prophets, through inspired Scripture and, most importantly, through Christ.

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.

‘It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale.’ I This line from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit encapsulates the common view that the nineteenth-century Sabbath was a tedious, gloomy and tiresome institution that embodied the full weight of Victorian Britain’s old-fashioned, sombre and somewhat hypocritical evangelical piety. Taking such contemporary portrayals at face value, historian John Wigley, whose thirty-year-old monograph remains the only full treatment of the subject, depicted the Victorian Sabbath as ‘a day which had a funereal character, notorious for its symbols – the hushed voice, the half-drawn blind and the best clothes’. Sabbatarianism, he argued, ‘appeared to consist of a perverse reluctance to enjoy oneself on Sundays and a determination to stop other people enjoying themselves too’.

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.

There is a fundamental question that any historical analysis of the relations between Christianity and Judaism must face. What is the relation between the hostility that Christians have directed at Jews and their faith as Christians? It is a hard question to answer for both conceptual and evidential reasons. The conceptual problem is that historians may be misled by some of the theological categories which are so deeply embedded in the languages of Western culture. Let me give an example close to home. At the first conference of the Society, C. N. L. Brooke spoke of the Christian religion and of the Church with a capital ‘C’. Similarly, several titles of the volumes of Studies in Church History and many of the contributions in them have used ‘the Church’ as if there was such a thing as the universal Christian Church. Indeed, the style sheet for Studies in Church History states that a capital is required for ‘the Church’ where the universal Church is implied and gives as an example the sentence, ‘The Church preaches tolerance’—an assertion that may seem passing strange in the context of this year’s conference.

British Anglo-Catholic and high church Anglicans promoted a new set of foreign missionary initiatives in the Pacific and South and East Africa in the 1860s. Theorizing new indigenizing models for mission inspired by Tractarian medievalism, the initiatives envisioned a different and better engagement with ‘native’ cultures. Despite setbacks, the continued use of Anglican sisters in Hawai‘i and brothers in Melanesia, Africa and India created a potent new imaginative space for missionary endeavour, but one problematized by the uneven reach of empire: from contested, as in the Pacific, to normal and pervasive, as in India. Of particular relevance was the Sandwich Islands mission, invited by the Hawaiian crown, where Bishop T. N. Staley arrived in 1862, followed by Anglican missionary sisters in 1864. Immensely controversial in Britain and America, where among evangelicals in particular suspicion of ‘popish’ religious practice ran high, Anglo-Catholic methods and religious communities mobilized discussion, denunciation and reaction. Particularly in the contested imperial space of an independent indigenous monarchy, Anglo-Catholics criticized what they styled the cruel austerities of evangelical American ‘puritanism’ and the ambitions of American imperialists; in the process they catalyzed a reconceptualized imperial reformism with important implications for the shape of the late Victorian British empire.

This essay is inspired by an intriguing late sixteenth-century Catholic liturgical object, the Bosworth Hall burse. It commemorates a vision of the crucified Christ seen by the missionary priest (and later martyr) John Payne in Douai in 1575, which apparently dispelled a moment of doubt about the real presence in the consecrated eucharist. The incident is situated in the context of the heated Catholic and Protestant controversies about the doctrine of transubstantiation in post-Reformation England and against the backdrop of similar medieval miracles designed to counter disbelief, including the Mass of St Gregory and the miracle of Bolsena of 1263. The essay illuminates the persistence and transformation of anxieties about the sacred in the sixteenth century, considers the part they played in private and public crises of faith, and explores the mechanisms by which they were resolved. It also investigates how the memory of Payne's miraculous vision was crystallized in a material object.

The brief but bitter campaign to expose the hidden homosexuality of Anglican bishops in the mid-1990s was framed as a contest about hypocrisy, with bishops – whether suspected of homosexuality or not – condemned as hypocrites, and the Church of England as hypocritical. However, the activists behind this ‘outing’, and the media which covered the story with such enthusiasm, were similarly attacked for hypocrisy. A neglected moment in recent ecclesiastical history, it reveals the ongoing importance of hypocrisy in debates about the nature of faith and the authority of the church. Still more, it sheds light on how contemporary assumptions about authenticity both intensified the perceived importance of hypocrisy and increased the chances of being accused of acting hypocritically.

It would seem that in the assessment of the forces prevalent on the eve of the Reformation too little attention has been paid to the determined steps which a number of cardinals initiated in 1511 when they took it upon themselves to convoke a general council at Pisa. The cardinals and the ensuing council have never had a good press. In fact there seems a unanimous condemnation of their initiative: they were labelled schismatics paradoxically because they tried to prevent a schism; they had proved themselves, so it was alleged, as mere instruments of French expansionist policy and had acted against the interests of papacy and Church prompted as they were by personal considerations and animosity against Julius II. It seems almost ‘heretical’ to question this general verdict.

Religion in Yugoslavia is a divisive, not a unifying force. The country is a federation of republics inhabited by six different nationalities which are historically identified with three great religious confessions, catholicism, orthodoxy, and islam. The pattern is complex and dense, the assumptions and reflex actions of the human beings who make up these communities are deeply rooted in centuries of history, and nationalism and religion are proving tougher than ideology. My paper therefore must start by describing this mixture, this macédoine, if one may borrow a culinary expression which itself derives from one of the component territories of these lands.

Bishop Casartelli of Salford wrote in his diary for 13 October 1906, ‘Deo Grattas! The magnificent Catholic Demonstration … organised by our new Catholic Federation, has been a wonderful success … 40,000 or more from every part of the Diocese. Extraordinary enthusiasm.’ His joy was understandable, for the Catholic Federation had been founded only a few months before. The aim had been to start something altogether different from the many specific Catholic societies already in existence. It was to be a

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.

There are problems with this topic. Zinzendorf himself would certainly have considered it a non-subject, as he would certainly have regarded the counsel of his contemporary Wesley to ‘gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can’ as unspeakably bourgeois, an adjective I have no recollection of Wesley’s applying to himself. The severer kind of economic historian might also regard what I have to say as a non-treatment of a non-subject, for I cannot present you with a profit-and-loss account of Zinzendorf’s transactions; I know no more about his income than he did, which was not very much; and although I shall refer later to the successive valuations of Zinzendorf’s property which that remarkable scholar Otto Uttendürfer dredged up from the Herrnhut archives sixty years ago, I attach no great importance to them. They seem to me the same kind of artificial enterprise as the annual revaluations for borrowing purposes which were made of the empty Centre Point building in its earlier years. Moreover, the straightforward introduction to the theme which I enjoyed not long ago is not readily available to historians in the West. It is to work first in the archive of Francke’s Orphan House at Halle, and then move on to that of the Renewed Church of the United Brethren at Herrnhut. Francke’s Orphan House, one of the biggest buildings of eighteenth-century Europe, has the Thatcherite principle of cost-effectiveness written all over it, and is clearly based on the Prussian barracks. The whole community at Herrnhut combines baroque lavishness with simplicity in a way not easily put into words, but most movingly experienced in the Grosse Saal in which the Brethren now hold their services. A visit to the Moravian settlement at Zeyst in the Netherlands, however, may sufficiently illustrate the point.