This paper offers three considerations: a) the Jewish ascetical tradition in the life of Jesus and the primitive Gospel tradition; b) the Alexandrian system offered by Clement and Origen, which through developing monasticism did so much to set the tone of ascetical doctrine throughout the ancient Christian world; and c) what relation, if any, survived between Jesus and his great Alexandrian disciples in this matter, after the lapse of a century and a half. It is thus a study in continuity and discontinuity.

Viewers of the recent television series ‘The Voyage of Charles Darwin’ must have been amused at the portrayal of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, at the famous meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, at which Wilberforce condemned the evolutionary doctrine of Darwin’s Origin of Species. This Wilberforce is the vaudeville villain of the Victorian stage, saturnine and leering in his initial triumph, and with more than the suggestion of horns and tail, as he stalks off scowling darkly after his discomfiture by T. H. Huxley. In the vulgar mythology of the television screen, Huxley and Wilberforce are not so much personalities as the warring embodiments of rival moralities, Huxley, the archangel Michael of enlightenment, knowledge, and the disinterested pursuit of truth; Wilberforce, the dark defender of the failing forces of authority, bigotry and superstition. The picture has the stark contrast and attractive simplicity of traditional legend. As a debate, it dramatizes a great conflict of principle. With its Victorian setting, only the stock conventions of melodrama can do it justice, and so it lives on in the popular mind as the best known symbol of the nineteenth century conflict of science and religion.

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.

Town and countryside are contrasting, even opposed ideas: one of those doublets which have dominated European thought since antiquity. Our vocabulary of ‘politics’ and ‘civilization’ bears ample testimony to the deep hold that the prejudices of the townsmen of antiquity have established over our language and our thinking. Sometimes, even in antiquity, those prejudices would be turned on their head: the town, the exclusive milieu of culture, refinement and rational human behaviour, could become, as for instance in the eyes of a Jewish rabbi of the third century the seat of iniquity, set up to extort and to oppress. Whatever the attitude one took to the town, the dichotomy of town and countryside became almost a category in the Kantian sense in terms of which modern Europeans have come to perceive the world around them. With Max Weber it became a fundamental category of sociological understanding, with Rostovtzeff of historical analysis, especially of the ancient world in its decline; and in the hands of William Frend—the Rostovtzeff of ecclesiastical history—it showed its power to illuminate, even to transform, the study of ancient heresy and schism. ‘The church in town and countryside’ might be thought to extend the franchise of a notion which has already had too wide and at times, as some would have it, perhaps even a baleful, influence. But both the value of the notion of town and country as an interpretative tool for the ecclesiastical historian, and its limitations, its liability to obscure and to distort, will, I hope, become clearer in the course of discussion.

A tradition existed, and perpetuated itself, amongst the relatively humble Congregationalists of Cambridgeshire that Francis Holcroft, their evangelist, was working on old-established foundations when he gathered in his church in the 1650s and 1660s. Calamy said that he ‘fell in with the Old Brownists’. Robert Browne, the arch-separatist, spent nine years evangelising in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, after taking his degree in 1572-3 and spending a little while in the model puritan household of Richard Greenham, rector of Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, before leaving for the continent in 1581. The Brownists were not the only separatists who might have existed in the diocese of Ely in the late sixteenth century; the Family of Love is known to have taken firm root there, and a portion of the Letter Book of bishop Cox of Ely, is taken up with the examination of nearly seventy of its adherents in October, 1580.

This article explores the role of Chinese Christian women in the internationalization of Chinese education in the early twentieth Century. In particular, it examines the changing relationship between Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary Louise Barnes, and Zeng Baosun, the great granddaughter of Zeng Guofan. Zeng Baosun was born in 1893 in Changsha, educated at the CMS's Mary Vaughan School in Hangzhou, and became the first Chinese woman to graduate from the University of London, before returning to China to establish a Christian school for girls in Changsha (Yifang) in 1918. Although an extraordinary example because of her elite family background, Zeng's story highlights how Chinese women used the networks to which their Christian education exposed them on a local, national and international scale to play an important role in the exchange of educational ideas between China and the West during the early twentieth century. The story of the relationship between Zeng and Barnes also reveals the changing power dynamics between foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians in the process of indigenizing the church in China: the roles of teacher and pupil were reversed upon their return to Changsha, with Zeng serving as headmistress of her own school and Barnes as a teacher.

When Anglican missionaries helped to constitute the Chinese Anglican Church (Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui) in 1912, they had a particular expectation of how the church would one day become self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating. The first constitution crafted by missionary bishops presupposed an infant church that would require the step-by-step guidance of its parent association. However, the intended trajectory was superseded by the zeal of Chinese Christians and drastic changes in the national government of China. The constitutional basis of the Chinese Anglican Church had to be restructured fundamentally again and again due to political upheaval in republican China, the Japanese occupation and the Communist revolution. This article explores the difficulties of crafting and implementing church constitutions in China in the first half of the turbulent twentieth century. Focusing on the South China diocese, wider questions are posed about the formation of canon law in an age of extremes.

This essay focuses on a surprisingly underexplored manuscript of the London puritan woodturner, Nehemiah Wallington. His ‘Coppies of profitable and comfortable letters’ anthologizes printed correspondence of martyrs and Reformed clergy alongside Wallington's own pious exchanges with ministers, neighbours and friends. Since Wallington's agonies of doubt about his religious estate are well known to early modern historians, his piety provides a particularly valuable lens through which to explore how clergymen and laypeople attempted to address the pastoral obstacle of religious uncertainty. This remarkable manuscript provides insights into clerical status within puritan spirituality, shedding light on the role of Protestant ministers as physicians of the soul, who conceived of themselves as indispensable experts in the diagnosis and cure of the spiritual afflictions of their lay devotees. Wallington and others, seeking resolutions for their doubts and scruples, affirmed the particular authority of these clergy as pastoral specialists. This essay presents evidence of sustained clericalism within Protestant piety, a tendency which acted in tension with a concurrent trend of spiritual individualism. Furthermore, it advances an argument for the significant role which epistolary counselling played in Protestant pastoral ministry to those afflicted by religious doubt.

This article explores the tension between missionary hopes for mass conversion through Christian education and the reality of operating mission schools in one colonial context: Hong Kong. Riding on the wave of British imperial expansion, George Smith, the first bishop of the diocese of Victoria, had a vision for mission schooling in colonial Hong Kong. In 1851, Smith established St Paul's College as an Anglo-Chinese missionary institution to educate, equip and send out Chinese young people who would subsequently participate in mission work before evangelizing the whole of China. However, Smith's vision failed to take institutional form as the college encountered operational difficulties and graduates opted for more lucrative employment instead of church work. Moreover, the colonial government moved from a laissez-faire to a more hands-on approach in supervising schools. The bishops of Victoria were compelled to reshape their schools towards more sustainable institutional forms while making compromises regarding their vision for Christian education.

Perhaps the most striking features of the history of Renaissance Venice are its highly commercialised economy and its precocious sense of secular state sovereignty. These characteristics owed much to the city’s independence of and isolation from rural and seigneurial influences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the high level of business activity and the confident awareness of statehood could also be related to the weakness of ecclesiastical influence in economic and political affairs. This was the case long before the spectacular conflict of 1606 when Venice was placed under the Interdict. The location of the Cathedral had always been a telling symbol of the place of the Church in Venetian life. It stood at San Pietro di Castello in an isolated area of the city. It is easy to overlook the fact that the centre of religious life, Saint Mark’s, was the Doge’s private chapel: a constant reminder of the intimate relationship between religious and political power, a material manifestation of the divine favour attached to Venice’s wealth and authority, both of which were unmistakably worldly.

Early medieval thinkers often conceived of God in legal terms, especially when they interpreted contemporary disasters as God's ‘just judgement’. Modern scholars have emphasized the importance of these ideas for motivating early medieval reform and legislation and for interpreting history itself. This article explores how these ideas were used in Carolingian legislation and history writing and argues that God's judgement was not as straightforward a theme as it first appears. God's judgement, for example, was not nearly as important for Carolingian historians as it had been for their predecessors. Similarly, in both legal and historical texts, there was great variety in how God's judgement or punishment was expressed, both in how that punishment fell and on whom (whether on the audience or on their enemies). Across these works, however, it is clear that God's judgement was almost never referred to apart from his continuing mercy and help towards to the audiences of these texts. This shows the importance of the various aspects of God's character for early medieval churches and their attitudes to law and history.

In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The prime minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.

From its inception, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) has been expressly areligious, aiming to promote the health of the American people during specific crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as responding to endemic issues such as heart disease, opioid addiction and obesity. However, some Christian nationalists perceive this areligious advocacy of science as a challenge to the moral authority of Christianity and the Bible. Protests against public health guidelines have utilized religious language to defend what participants see as their civil and God-given rights, deepening the divide between science and religion. Yet historically, public health advocates have built relationships with religious community leaders and employed educational campaigns to bridge this gap. Drawing on an analysis of USPHS history, Christian nationalist ideology and recent COVID-19 protests, this article argues that public health has historically used specific strategies to ensure a more favourable response and compliance, and makes the case that it should do so again.

Egeria’s account of her journey to the holy places has been an invaluable source for study of many aspects of fourth-century Christianity, from liturgy and topography to clerical practice. Dr David Hunt, in his analysis elsewhere in this volume, discusses the part played by monks in Egeria’s ‘scriptural vision’. This paper looks at her account of worship in Jerusalem, and particularly at those worshippers who were neither ordained clergy nor committed to life as monks or nuns, whom we can call the ‘laity’ Egeria herself distinguishes between these groups, and is concerned to differentiate the parts played by each in worship. We shall consider here how much can be discovered about the composition, organization, and spirituality of these lay people, how Egeria herself contributed to the account, and how much is special to Jerusalem.