Van Gennep's work on rites of passage can be viewed as part of the rise of anthropology in the period prior to the First World War, and has been very influential conceptually and on the practice of churches ever since. This article examines how his own historical work, taking baptism as an example of a rite of passage, compares with the practice of church history at the time. It then seeks to assess van Gennep's assumptions in comparison with the assumptions about the past used in church history writing today, acknowledging that the turn to plurality – that uniformity in doctrines, rituals and texts is subsequent to diversity – of recent scholarship is in several respects anticipated by van Gennep.

The anointing of kings emerged as a Christian rite of passage in the early Middle Ages, although the exact circumstances and sequence of events that led to the general emergence of the rite remain controversial. This article argues that royal anointing first became a recognized and repeated practice within two separate societies: seventh-century Visigothic Spain and the eighth-century Frankish kingdom. Whereas previous work has stressed the role of Christian clerics in the emergence of this rite, the article argues that royal anointing had its origins within lay elite political culture and spoke primarily to the needs, not of the clerics who performed it, but of the laypeople who received and beheld it.

The seventh-century Easter controversy raised questions of orthodoxy and the consequent authority of the clergy to minister rites. References to rites of passage are present in three of the most important sources written in early eighth-century Northumbria: the Vita Wilfridi and the Vitae Cuthberti. This article uses rites of passage to examine two debates, concerning Bishop Wilfrid's continental credentials and the relationship between the Vita Wilfridi and the Vitae Cuthberti. How the three authors use these important religious moments gives insight into the saintly image they wished to portray. The article argues that rites of passage in the Vita Wilfridi are designed to prove Wilfrid's continental (and thus orthodox) credentials but also show the extent to which this is a constructed image. In addition, it suggests that the rewriting of the first Vita Cuthberti was prompted by questions of orthodoxy raised in the Vita Wilfridi and subsequently weaponized in the febrile atmosphere of early eighth-century Northumbria.

The renunciation and abandonment of wealth are rarely described as Christian rites of passage. Yet, for many medieval commentators on Scripture, such as the Venerable Bede and his successors, they were necessary rites, preliminaries to entry into the kingdom of heaven and into the class of ‘the perfect’. This article explores Arnold van Gennep's description of rites of passage in conjunction with the discussion of poverty in the Western exegetical tradition, centred in particular on Jesus's statements about poverty in Luke. It focuses on Bede's models of renunciation and abandonment of wealth which influenced Latin theology at least until the Reformation. The renunciation and abandonment of wealth provide an excellent test case for exploring van Gennep's ritual framework and its utility within the discipline of ecclesiastical history.

Toward the end of the seventh century, Anastasius of Sinai took it upon himself to offer advice to lay Christians facing a new Umayyad world. For Anastasius, Christian identity needed simplification. In his Edifying Tales and Questions and Answers, he would de-emphasize theology, arguing that Christian identity was a more basic affair, involving baptism, the eucharist and the sign of the cross. For him, these were ‘rites of maintenance’, acts which sustained Christian identity in a fluid world of religious alternatives. Such actions warded off the demonic and drew a clear boundary between Muslim and Christian. This was important for Anastasius, who considered it his pastoral duty to offer uneducated Christians a tangible sense of their own identity (and superiority). His ritualistic simplification bears witness to an important shift in Palestinian-centred Christianity, as intra-Christian disputes were set aside in an attempt to maintain a ritualistic boundary between Christian and non-Christian.

This article addresses two specific problems. First, between c.950 and c.1200 there appears to be a mismatch between liturgical manuscripts and narrative sources on the Christian blessing of the wedding bedchamber and bed, with the former recording the ritual but the latter scarcely mentioning it. The second concerns the question as to whether the ritual was expected to take place at home or in the church. In order to shed light on the development of the ritual, where it took place and how frequently, the article is divided into four parts. A discussion of liturgical manuscripts for the blessing of the wedding bedchamber and bed is followed by an analysis of the prayers to establish why the wedding bedchamber and the bed warranted a blessing. We then turn to an evaluation of the sparse evidence for the priest's liturgical role at home weddings. Finally, the liturgical evidence is linked to historical and fictional evidence. The article concludes that ambiguity about where the ritual should take place allowed for discretion on the part of those involved, and that the great majority of the laity may have been ignorant of the ritual altogether.

The introduction of parochial registers in England in 1538 was a milestone in the recording of (some) liturgical and sacramental rites of passage. Limited evidence reveals an earlier and superficially similar system incorporating detailed recording of offerings and other receipts among parochial ‘altarage’ income in benefice accounts. The material is examined and contextualized, to establish its relationship with the system introduced in 1538 and its value for appreciating the experience of liturgical rites of passage in pre-Reformation England.

This article explores confirmation as a ritual of Christian initiation in the context of the English Reformation. It examines how this rite of passage, which was demoted from its traditional status as a sacrament, survived and evolved in the wake of the theological, liturgical and ecclesiological changes associated with the advent of Protestantism. It traces the permutations of the practice of laying on of hands that both united and fractured people within the Church of England and its evangelical outer rings between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It also considers the social history of a ritual that increasingly coincided with the transition from childhood to puberty, and its capacity to shed light on the formation of collective religious identity, bodily habitus and lived experience. Finally, it briefly discusses the Counter-Reformation of confirmation and its transformation into a marker of the confessional militancy of a minority faith.

By the 1640s, Prayer Book ritual had marked rites of passage in England for over eighty years. It formed a reassuring continuum with older Catholic rites and gave communality to parish religion. However, puritans disliked its ceremonial elements, which were banned by Parliament in the 1640s. Anecdotal evidence suggests that parishioners continued to demand old-style rites of passage, and some clergy to offer them. This has led historians to suggest that traditionalist practice was condoned by the regime. This article uses loyalist memories of antagonisms between puritan and non-puritan clergy and parishioners over baptism, as well as evidence from legal prosecutions and other sources, to complicate such presumptions, showing how, with opinion sharply divided on their practice, rites of passage led to clashes and confrontations within parishes and remained a focus for local antagonism.

This article draws on wedding sermons published in England between the 1580s and the 1740s. The main interest of these sermons lies in the ways in which doctrine based on the scriptural texts, especially those cited in the Form of Solemnization of Matrimony, was refracted through the prism of the various concerns and priorities of preaching clergy. Their exposition of marriage duties was often enriched by personal experience. Yet the number of wedding sermons published in England between the 1580s and the 1740s was small compared with the quantity of those reaching print after delivery at a funeral, another of the foremost rites of passage. It seems likely that many fewer of them were preached at weddings in the first place. Wedding congregations probably made a less receptive audience. The already limited publication of wedding sermons underwent a long-term eighteenth-century decline.

This article investigates the rites that marked the end of a clerical career in early modern Scotland. It discusses what would take place when a minister had accepted that he was too old for his charge. It explores the ways in which ministers described their aging bodies, the impact of age on their vocation and how parishioners observed them. The article argues that the bureaucratic machinery devised to address the challenges of clerical old age created personal and professional rites of passage.

This article considers, with particular reference to London, the impact of legislation during the second quarter of the nineteenth century on the churches’ practice of rites of passage in relation to births, marriages and deaths. It investigates the religious, political and social reasons for legislation relating to these rites which many contemporaries and subsequent historians considered an attack on the Church of England and evidence of advancing secularization. It shows that despite significant constitutional, social and religious changes during these years, religiously motivated politicians, sympathetic to the established church, achieved legislation introducing general registration of births, marriages and deaths, and providing for more satisfactory burial of London's rapidly growing population in the context of a high death rate. While satisfying some grievances of religious Dissenters, this protected the established church's interests, and evidence suggests that a high proportion of London's population continued to access its rites of passage for baptism, marriage and burial.

The 1836 Marriage Act has received surprisingly little attention from historians of Dissent, despite its significance in permitting non-Anglicans to conduct legally recognized marriages according to their own ceremonies in Dissenting places of worship. The Clandestine Marriages Act (1753), better known as the Hardwicke Act, had limited valid marriages to the rites of the Church of England. Only Jews and Quakers were exempt. By the early nineteenth century the Anglican marriage service was objectionable to Unitarians because of the references to the Trinity. The struggle to change the Marriage Act was initiated by the Freethinking Christians, who engaged in a controversial and highly visible public protest during the marriage service. They successfully engaged the broader Unitarian movement in their campaign, who through the medium of the Unitarian Association undertook a remarkable, though largely fruitless, struggle to change the law until joined by the rest of Dissent in the early 1830s.

The Marriage Act 1836 marked an important change in the rites required for a valid marriage, allowing couples to marry in a register office or registered place of worship. For some, however, these unfamiliar rites did not constitute a marriage at all, and in the early 1850s a particular controversy emerged regarding Anglican clergymen who ‘remarried’ couples who had already been legally married under the 1836 Act. This article examines three cases of such ‘remarriages’ and how two of the clergymen involved subsequently found themselves facing prosecution. It analyses the circumstances in which a rite might become a ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the law and traces the impact of these cases on the development of a new provision governing when an additional religious ceremony could take place and, more unexpectedly, on the form of register office weddings.

This article investigates how the SPCK, the Church of England's major nineteenth-century publishing house, encouraged what it saw as correct participation in church-administered rites of passage, by the mass production of tracts. SPCK's elaborate editorial policy meant that the tracts provide a rare glimpse into what can be assumed to be the Church of England's officially sanctioned voice, giving the tracts a significance beyond their survival as ephemeral religious literature. The article discusses tracts relating to marriage, baptism, churching and confirmation, the audience for which was mainly, although not exclusively, working-class adherents of the Church of England. It highlights the tangle between theological ideas and social expectations, as well as the echoes of some other theorists – from Malthus to Freud – which found their way into the Church of England's thinking at different times during this period.

Chinese Anglicans and missionaries wrestled with the relationship between Christian rituals and culture. Missionaries entered China with preconceived notions about rites of passage, but quickly realized the difficulties of implementation. For example, with the backdrop of Western imperialism, clergy reported ‘unworthy adherents’ misusing their certificates of admission to churches only to gain extraterritorial legal privileges. Another question was how far traditional Chinese wedding customs could be integrated into Christian marriage. Students at Anglican schools wondered whether God would ‘mind’ if they believed Jesus in their hearts, but did not receive baptism because of parental opposition, because, to them, both faith and filial piety mattered. The complexity of the Chinese social and cultural context made it impossible to prescribe set formats for rites of passage. Instead, clergy and Chinese Anglicans reshaped rites of passage by referring to loosely formulated guidelines, using case-by-case discretion, and adjusting to their surroundings.

Arguably, the ‘first’ or ‘solemn’ communion, later also called ‘profession of faith’, was a rite of passage for generations of French eleven- or twelve-year-old children. It remained virtually unchanged, under these different names, until the early 1970s, when it gradually fell into decline. Friends, relatives, and even state school teachers, were customarily given small religious images with a commemorative inscription on the reverse, stating the communicant's name as well as the date and place of the ceremony. This article analyses a small private collection of such ‘popular’ objects and discusses the evolution in their representations of lived religion in a secular country where a strong Roman Catholic tradition has given way to a post-Christian society.

This article examines the priest's sick call in Irish folklore. The sick call normally involved the hearing of the dying person's confession; the administration of extreme unction, the last sacrament that a Roman Catholic was expected to receive; and (if possible) the reception of holy communion, viaticum, food for the journey. Drawing from the large body of stories in the Schools’ Collection (gathered in 1937–8), the article shows how the greatest concern in the popular mindset was ensuring that the priest arrived in time to perform his duties. However, all manner of difficulties awaited him in the exercise of this ministry, from diabolical apparitions to the wiles of other humans, including other priests, who purposefully attempted to thwart his path. In this sense, Irish folk tales dramatize the administration of this sacrament into a rite of passage.

Whether death is a passage or a terminus, an obituary can be an important accompaniment for the survivors. Victorian funerals were improved by sermons setting the deceased in the eye of eternity. Today's funerals prefer eulogies. The Congregational City Temple's Joseph Parker (1830–1902) was second only to the Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle's Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) in popular estimation. Parker's father-in-law, Andrew Common (1815–96), bank manager, chapel deacon and active Liberal, was a type found nationwide. Parker and Common are placed in context, with Parker's commemoration of Common in the Evangelical Magazine as a prime focus for this article, balanced by his earlier extempore graveside appreciation of Common's kinsman Robert Teasdale (1809–83). What might be gleaned about their attitudes to life and death? Were these particular instances representative? Was the piece in the Evangelical Magazine a sermon slipping insensibly into eulogy, the occupational hazard of any preacher at such a moment?