Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.

When the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, summoned protestant and catholic spokesmen to a conference at Poissy, in 1561, the religious situation in France was still remarkably fluid. Religious ideas of an innovative and reformist character had long had an appeal in French intellectual circles, but it was only recently that Protestantism in France had begun to take on the appearance of an organised religious movement. The persecution of Protestants had been severe at times, but neither systematic nor continuous, and the bulk of French Protestants was inclined to be conciliatory. Even the question of whether they could be considered heretics was still somewhat open, as the council of Trent had not yet concluded its sessions. Thus the time must have seemed propitious to the queen, then enjoying real political power in France for the first time, to attempt to reconcile the theological differences which were dividing her subjects, and to restore the religious unity of the realm.

For use on the first Sunday in Lent, the service books of the Greek Orthodox Church include a special office known as ‘The Synodikon of Orthodoxy’, which contains no less than sixty anathemas against different heresies and heresiarchs. Yet in this comprehensive denunciation there is one unexpected omission: no reference is made to the errors of the Latins, no allusion to the Filioque or the papal claims, even though more than a third of the anathemas date from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time when doctrinal disagreements between East and West had emerged clearly into the open. This omission of the Latins is an indication of the curious imprecision which prevails in the relations between Orthodoxy and Rome. It is altogether obvious that an estrangement has long existed between the Greek East and the Latin West. What is much less obvious is the precise point at which this estrangement evolved into a definitive schism, into a clear and final breach in sacramental communion. The division between the two halves of Christendom did not occur as a single event, accomplished once and for all at a specific moment in history: it was, on the contrary, a gradual, fluctuating, and disjointed process, stretching over a remarkably extended period.

It is perhaps debatable whether the Reformation itself had involved schism, or at any rate whether those who took part in it thought that it did. It is true that in 1555, on the insistence of John Knox when he was in Scotland on a visit from Geneva, some of the reforming party were prevailed on to give up attending ‘that idol’, the mass, and that before he left Scotland Knox administered the Lord’s Supper after the reformed model. It is true, too, that from this time or shortly thereafter Protestants began to gather together for worship, hardly in secret – for the government’s policy was not repressive – but at least without official recognition. These ‘privy kirks’, which existed before there was ‘the face of a public kirk’ and had their preachers, elders and deacons, were parallel to the congregations which English exiles were organising on the continent in the same years, and parallel, too, to the much more secret congregations which then existed in London. In the ‘First Bond’ of December 1557 a few notables renounced ‘the congregation of Satan’ and pledged themselves to work for the erection of a reformed Church, but, as they followed this with a supplication that the ‘common prayers’ should be read every Sunday in all parishes, it is evident that the aim was to reform the whole Church, not to separate from it.

The trial of Henry Sherfield, the puritan recorder of Salisbury, before Star Chamber in February 1633 was one of the most famous in that court’s last years; and his offence, ‘unlawfully, riotously and prophanely’ smashing the window in St Edmund’s church which contained pictures of the Creation, is one of the best-known cases of puritan religious protest in the years preceding the Civil War. But the background to the trial, and in particular the local tensions which lay behind it, have never been thoroughly explored. Yet Sherfield’s case, like the contemporary churchales controversy in Somerset, provides an example of that important amalgam of local and national issues which shaped the English Revolution. It also illuminates the social and political conditions which moulded Puritanism in an urban setting.

The separation of Methodism from the Church of England has become one of the famous chestnuts of ecclesiastical history; despite the allegations of excited high-churchmen and Tractarians at the time, it was not well described in terms of heresy or schism, and embodied a great many other things besides religious protest; moreover it was a separation which has never been quite complete. The case of Swedenborgianism is interesting not only in its own right, but as showing that the issue between the Methodists and the Church was not a bi-partite affair, that there were other possibilities within and between them both, and it illustrates the curious mixture of spiritual and social factors which underlay the religious fragmentation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In 1735 a great change took place in Cork society. Hitherto, wrote John Boyle, fifth earl of Cork and Orrery, ‘we trembled at a bumper and loath’d the Glorious Memory. We were as silent and melancholy as captives and we were strangers to mirth’. But now, he went on, ‘we sing catches, read Pastor Fido and talk love.’ The change was due to the death of Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross, and the advent of his successor, Robert Clayton. Browne, according to Harris, was ‘an austere, retired and mortified man’, but Clayton was a man of the world and given to social life. Browne had written treatises against drinking in memory of the dead (his inclusion of the toast to the memory of king William in his condemnation led to his being regarded by some as a Jacobite) and against the drinking of healths: the former was a blasphemous profanation of the Lord’s Supper, and the latter a pagan custom and a cause of intemperance. Under the more relaxed rule of Clayton glasses could be raised unaccompanied by troubled consciences.

In Irish Presbyterianism Henry Cooke is commonly regarded as the champion of orthodoxy. Was it not he who drove the Arians out of the Synod of Ulster in 1830? The purpose of this paper is not to examine the theological issues involved, but rather to try to discover the real cause of the schism.

The Reverend J. Smethurst (Moreton Hampstead) visited the North of Ireland during the autumn of 1821. The traditional picture is that of Cooke routing the Unitarian Smethurst in Killyleagh (where Cooke was minister) and pursuing him from place to place in his zeal for orthodoxy. This, however, fails to take into account an important aspect of Smethurst’s campaign. He writes,

From the seclusion of Upper Silesia a suspended priest published his protest against the powerful bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi of Trier. The peasants’ poverty was compounded by exploitation. Virgins were robbed of their purity. The superstitions of the common folk were fanned into flames of fanaticism. Guilty alone for this massive oppression was bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi of Trier. As defender of the oppressed, the priest Johannes Ronge emerged, who had been exiled to the Silesian mining hamlet of Laurahuette a scant six months before.

The occasion of Ronge’s open letter was the display of Christ’s seamless robe at Trier in the autumn of 1844. Thrice previously the sacred garment had been shown for the edification of the faithful. In 1585 it was put on display to prompt giving toward the restoration of the churches of Trier. After the Thirty Years War, in 1651, the robe was again presented to the public eye. Having been returned to Trier from the safety of Augsburg following the Napoleonic threat, the tattered relic was again exposed to the view of Catholics in 1810.

I hasten at the start to point out that I am not an ecclesiastical historian, but a historian of America who is interested in church history since the field in which I work - educational history - desperately needs to be studied in a wider historical context. Then, as now, educational ideas, and the functions people ascribe to education, cannot be dissociated from the political, social, and economic background. Of all the many factors bearing upon the evolution of education in New England from approximately the 1780s to the 1880s religion was in several ways of central importance. Most studies have been interested in the religious nature of the mass of colleges founded from 1780 to 1860. My interest here is entirely different. Although the rhetoric naturally changed in emphasis, it seems to me that right from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century religious forces in New England, but of course not just there, used schools and colleges as cardinal agencies in efforts to restrain secularism and a growing materialism.

In the last decade considerable attention has been paid to Methodism, revivalism, and the development of working-class consciousness in early nineteenth-century England. The purpose of this paper is to add a few footnotes and caveats to some of the assertions which have been made about these topics. The assertions on which I wish to comment can be divided into two groups. The first includes the view widely accepted by sociologists and social historians that in so far as working-class people resort to religion in periods of rapid social change, the religious style which they adopt tends to be of an highly emotional type. Hence the numerical success of Methodism in the lower if not the lowest regions of the social scale is attributed to the prominence which it gave the experiential dimension of religious commitment. On the other hand a religious system like Unitarianism which was theologically highly rational and stressed the intellectualist dimension is dismissed, almost on a priori grounds from having any popular appeal. K. S. Inglis after claiming that before 1850 the Unitarians were ‘uninterested in evangelizing the masses’, quotes G. M. Trevelyan to the effect that theirs was ‘a faith likely to be taken up by the mill-owner but not by his workmen’. According to E. P. Thompson ‘it seemed too cold, too distant, too polite and too much associated with the comfortable values of a prospering class to appeal to the city or village poor’. The first area in which I wish to submit new evidence is concerned therefore with the general relationship between working-class religion and reason and emotion.

In 1868, F. W. Farrar addressed the Church Congress in Dublin on the reasons why young men were increasingly alienated from the church: ‘the alienation of the most highly educated’, he declared, ‘is as much an intellectual as the alienation of the uneducated is a moral and social phenomenon’. The emphasis we have inherited on the intellectual difficulties in religious belief felt by Victorian doubters of the upper-middle classes has obscured the extent to which their alienation, like that of the uneducated, was part of a broader shift in attitudes. This change of attitudes could precede disengagement from institutional religious allegiance by many years, and had little to do with specific intellectual difficulties. Discussion in terms of ‘difficulties’ caused by geology, biblical criticism, and so on, may be the way doubters chose to explain their detachment from the Church, and only one cause among many of that detachment.

Africa has never been an absolutely dark continent to those who live elsewhere. From the days of the Phoenician traders of Carthage to the Afro-Arab mercantile empires of the fifteenth century Africa was always a source of what more literate peoples wanted. Long before modern Europeans began to explore the continent others had been there and taken their literary skills with them. In 1857 Richard Burton - the real Richard Burton - went on a journey to find the ‘reputed great Lake Tanganyika’ for the Royal Geographical Society. One hundred and thirty-four days’ journey into the interior he was the guest of an Arab dealer in slaves and ivory, of whom he said, ‘ He had read much, and, like an oriental, for improvement, not only for amusement: he had a wonderful memory, fine perceptions and passing power of language’. Arabic and Islamic culture penetrated into, and made a lasting impression on, many parts of Africa. Reading and writing sometimes accompanied this penetration and there are fascinating traces of attempts to reduce African languages to writing in Arabic script. Nevertheless, writing a history even of modern Africa requires a very different technique from that which is needed to write a history of Europe in the same period because it is far less concerned with documents.