Augustine’s view of the saeculum continues to be contested ground; his textual and terminological ambiguities, his own intellectual developments, and possible contradictions have fed contrasting interpretations. Understanding Augustine’s view of the saeculum — that which exists as part of the created order, which is neither in itself sacred and identified with a specifically Christian status nor profane reflecting antichristian or pagan institutions and mores — is obviously critical to unravelling his political theology, which has largely been the focus of discussions since the magisterial work of R. A. Markus in 1970, but it has another purpose too. It contributes to a chapter in the history of science by clarifying the evolution of a view of the natural world which would influence medieval and early modern developments.

Noli pater
Father do not allow thunder and lightning,
Lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.
We fear you, the terrible one, believing there is none like you.
All songs praise you throughout the host of angels.
Let the summits of heaven, too, praise you with roaming lightning,
O most loving Jesus, O righteous King of Kings.
(Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, 85)

Early medieval attitudes to the natural world were distinctly ambivalent. At one level the natural world represented the marvel of God’s creative power; filled with beauty, it supplied everything necessary for human existence, meriting praise, as in the hymn sung by the herdsman from Whitby, Cædmon:

Saints’ interactions with the natural world (with beasts and birds as well as the elements) as represented in hagiographical literature constitute an integral part of a much wider theme concerning Christian perceptions of nature and the place of humankind in it. While being in line with the general Christian ideas on creation, hagiographical accounts of the saints’ relationship with nature may reveal different aspects of such ideas and perform diverse narrative functions in various traditions and texts. This paper will look at the Anglo-Saxon hagiographical tradition which was enriched in its development by Irish, Continental and Eastern influences. Thus analysis of Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives is an essential part of a broader study of medieval hagiographical literature, both Eastern and Western.

In Bede’s dialogue on the book of Genesis, a pupil asks his master, ‘Why did [God] bless man and the animals, but not the trees or the plants?’ And the master replies: ‘He blessed these things in order to increase their generation. [But] trees do not have the sense of perceiving or understanding … Therefore he did not say to the trees: Come forth and multiply.’ This dialogue raises important issues about the benediction of different elements of the natural world. While God did not bless the trees and the plants at the Creation, nevertheless during Bede’s time liturgical compilers were producing a body of material for just such a purpose. By the tenth century, benedictional texts for trees, fruits, nuts, seeds and herbs from different liturgical traditions were routinely included in the service-books of the western Church, petitioning God to multiply their number or else to bestow physical or spiritual well-being on those who used them.

Robert the Monk was present at the famous Council of Clermont in 1095, at which Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade by announcing that there would be a major expedition against the pagans to assist the Christians of the East. According to Robert, Urban reminded his listeners of the journey of the Children of Israel from Egypt; a journey in which God’s bounty several times saved Moses and his followers from famine and thirst. The report of another eyewitness at Clermont, Baldric (or Baudri) of Dol, reinforces the hkelihood that the Book of Exodus was in the thoughts of those who listened to Urban.

In the late twelfth century, the practice of hawking and falconry was symbolically ambiguous, associated powerfully with the secular life yet also open to mystical interpretation. This paper suggests that the authors of St Thomas Becket’s miracle collections, as well as his contemporary biographers, appropriated this ambiguity as a means of reconciling some of the contradictions of Becket’s career. Henry II was himself an avid enthusiast for hunting with birds, and records show a marked increase in the number of transactions involving birds of prey, and the number of falconers employed to handle them, during his reign (1154–1189).

On 6 August 1221 Dominic ‘migrated to Christ’ in the Dominican convent in Bologna. He had no bed of his own and he had lent his only tunic to someone. As he slept in the convent, he was lying on a borrowed bed and dressed in borrowed clothes.

This was the story later told by Moneta of Cremona, the friar who had lent his bed and clothing to the dying holy man. Moneta features in another story, collected by a friar who was commissioned by a general chapter of the Order in 1256 to collect miracles and tales illustrating the wonderful early progress of the Order. Progress included the entry of important men. At Bologna there was ‘Master Moneta, who was then famous throughout Lombardy for his lecturing in the arts’. The Dominican friar Reginald was preaching with great success in Bologna. Fearing the power of Reginald’s sermons, Moneta tried to keep his students away from them. But he failed to protect himself.

In Biblical history and Christian literature alike, caves or grottoes, those works of nature,’as if cut painstakingly but elegantly in the rocks or the cliff side without any tool’, have always played their significant part. Had not Benedict of Nursia, father of western monasticism, spent three years in eremitical solitude in just such a grotto beneath Monte Taleo in the Simbruini range of the Apennines? It was no surprise then that it was to this, the Sacro Speco or Holy Cave, that Innocent III (1198–1216) came in person during the summer of 1202. Drawn to Subiaco in no small part by his reading of Book II of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, in which his distinguished papal predecessor had described Benedict’s Life and Miracles, Innocent’s visit was notable on several counts.

In seeking aspects of the pre-Reformation Church which might be expected automatically to invoke connections with God’s bounty, tithes and tithing are obvious candidates. In an essentially agricultural society, where the overwhelming majority of the population worked on the land, God’s bounty in providing crops and food animals, and tithing as the response to the moral and theological imperative to acknowledge that bounty, surely ought to be almost a commonplace. Tithes had biblical origins as a divine precept, and an obligation which Christians were deemed to have inherited from the Jews.

The natural world offered Renaissance men and women an abundance of raw materials which could be used to protect and to heal. Healers and wise women used particularly potent plants, gemstones and animal parts, in conjunction with magical ritual and Christian prayer, as preventative and cure. Pertaining largely to an oral and unlettered culture, much of this natural lore has been lost. Fortunately, the Renaissance demand for vernacular translations of classical works brought about a revived interest in botany, whilst cheap print and a wider reading public fostered the proliferation of a new genre of self-help manuals and books of secrets, and it is within these works that some of the oral traditions have been captured in ink. Whilst it may be true that many of the new authors of the Renaissance used print to disparage and demystify many of these popular beliefs, it is often only through the disapproving lens of the vernacular manual that we are able to catch glimpses of folk beliefs in practice. This paper will examine one such tradition: the use of the Rose of Jericho as birthing aid.

At the southern foot of the Palatine Hill in Rome, a little more than one hundred metres due west of the triumphal arch erected by the emperor who is associated more than any other with the Christian conversion of the Old World — Constantine the Great – there stands another arch. Relocated from its original position at the eastern foot of the Palatine, more or less directly across from the biggest remaining ruin in the forum — that of the Basilica of Maxentius — it formed the monumental entrance to one of the most important botanic gardens in sixteenth-century Europe — the Orti farnesiani, which were given their definitive shape between 1565 and 1590. I propose that this second arch has reason to be considered as occupying a similar symbolic significance for the conversion of the New World.

The idea that divine beings, holy people and magical creatures leave behind permanent marks of their immortality on the surface of the earth is common to many cultures and spiritual systems. Throughout history curious hollows, cavities, and coloured stains on stone and rock have been explained as tangible evidence of the presence and intervention of deities, saints, prophets, angels and demons. The folk motif of the miraculous impression of a foot, hand or limb finds frequent expression within Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Footprint shrines and cults abound in the Middle East, India, south-east Asia and China, from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and Qadam Sharif in Delhi to Phra Sat in Thailand. Variously revered as the footmark of Buddha, Siva, Adam and St Thomas the Aposde, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most compelling emblem of the polyvalency of this intriguing phenomenon and its capacity to range across the full spectrum of religious traditions.

The story of music in the Elizabethan Church is, in many ways, an embodiment of the relationship between two larger, competing and often contradictory discourses: those of Renaissance and Reformation. As Alexandra Walsham noted in the introduction to Providence in Early Modern England, published in 1999,

The religious beliefs of seafarers have not received a great deal of attention over the years. Contemporaries of early modern English seafarers stereotyped them as superstitious and irreligious, prone to turning to God only in times of danger. The Puritan William Perkins preached about ‘the Mariner, who is onely good in a storme’. The association of seafarers, irreligion and superstition was also reflected in popular literature. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Qveene, wrote of ‘the glad merchant, that does vew from ground / His ship far come from watrie wildernesse, / He hurles out vowes, and Neptune oft doth blesse’. These stereotypes have coloured the historiography of maritime religion, which has drawn a division between ‘superstition’ and religion in seafaring culture. However, recent work on religion and provi-dentialism on land shows this to be a faulty paradigm.

Few human communities are as exposed to risk as those who make a living from the sea. More prone to the unpredictability of the natural world than those who Live on land, sailors, fisherman and their families have always been gready conscious of the fragility of life and of human powerlessness before the elements. Because the capriciousness of the sea is beyond the normal control of seafarers, during the historic past and no doubt long before, recourse was made to supernatural methods of management. By the later Middle Ages in Christian Europe, the most important form was invocation of divine protection through the intercession of the saints of the Church, by a process of vow and exchange.

Reconstructing the relationship of the inhabitants of early modern Ireland with the natural world and its Creator is both a difficult and a straightforward task. At one level those who lived in Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, had much in common with other contemporary Europeans, and they shared similar ideas about the existence of God, his actions in creating the world and how that world worked. At another level the relationship between the inhabitants of early modern Ireland and the natural world is rather different from that observable in other places. In terms of pilgrimage, the inhabitants of Ireland before the Reformation in the early sixteenth century had litde interest in visiting corporeal relics, and body parts of saints were in short supply in Ireland by comparison with other European countries. Rather, the devout preferred to visit places in the natural world that had reputed associations with a saint, such as a well created by a saint or a cave where he had lived. Why this should be so is difficult to explain, but it certainly created an experience of the natural world which, though not unique to Ireland, was certainly more intense there. In turn, this affected local religious experiences as they were reshaped through the process of religious change in the early modern period, giving a particular hue to the local forms of religious devotion practised by both Catholics and Protestants. This essay aims to reveal something of the distinctive traits of local religion that formed as a result of the conscious interaction of the inhabitants of Ireland with God’s creation.