Following in the tradition of Montesquieu and Gibbon, Wolfgang Liebeschuetz has recently again argued that one of the two most revolutionary aspects of Christianity in its history since Constantine has proved to be religious intolerance. The Byzantine state certainly made many efforts to enforce orthodoxy, and the question arises whether Byzantium was therefore a ‘persecuting society’, to use the now-familiar formulation of R. I. Moore. In a telling aside, Paul Magdalino asked in the course of an important discussion of eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium whether it became ‘even more of a persecuting society than before’ (my italics). Another strand of scholarship however has seen a contrast in this respect between western and eastern Europe, and several recent authors have argued for a comparative degree of toleration in Byzantium, or at least for a limitation on the possibilities of real repression. However this desire to find a degree of toleration and religious freedom in earlier societies clearly derives from our own contemporary concerns, and despite recent attempts to claim the Emperor Constantine as the defender of religious toleration, I agree with those who argue that it is misguided to look for an active conception of religious toleration in this period. This paper starts from the position that Constantine himself, and successive emperors after him, inherited an existing assumption that religious conformity was the business of the state, and looks at some of the less obvious ways by which the Byzantine state attempted to promote and enforce orthodoxy.

To speak with authority in the early Church was to speak from the Scriptures. While early Christianity may not have been a ‘religion of the book’ in the same way it is today, it was unquestionably a religion of text, and the refrain ‘we have learned from the holy Scriptures’ is a chorus in the early Christian witness. Here stood the authority of divine fulfilment. To confess merely Christ might be to proclaim a man, perhaps a prophet, perhaps a deity; but to confess ‘the scriptural Christ’ was to proclaim the Messiah foretold in divine writ, the revealed Saviour, and to find in that revelation the character and substance of the confession newly made. Nonetheless, while the text of the Old Testament might be of common heritage (though even this faced the challenge of a Marcion, who wished to do away with it), the emerging textual tradition of the Christian era provided a challenge: which text? what scripture? If the Christ of the Church is the ‘Christ of the scriptures’, determining the content of those scriptures – or those texts accorded scriptural authority in their receipt and influence -becomes critical. More than this, subverting the potential influence of texts deemed unsuitable stands as an essential task. To approach the era authentically, scholarly reading of the rise of a New Testament canon in the early Church must be combined with an understanding of the means and methodologies of its necessary correlate, textual exclusion. I shall argue here that this was accomplished through an exegetical method of subversion more intricate and nuanced than is often perceived.

Usually it is those of the mainstream in religion who impose upon those going against the flow discipline, doctrine and uniformity in place of flexibility. Before Christian orthodoxy and heresy had achieved clear definition, however, there were against-the-flow innovators who opposed flexibility. By requiring greater rigour and regularity in Christian practices they highlighted questions of authority and what manner of people might exercise it. The Church’s own self-definition and status as an institution evolved in response to such things.

The death of Constantine in AD 337 brought forth a struggle between leading bishops of the eastern and western empire which proved crucially important in the development of ecclesiastical politics. Athanasius of Alexandria was one of several controversial bishops who, having been deposed during Constantine’s reign, were re-instated by the new emperors after the change of regime which followed his death. As with other cases, Athanasius’s restoration was fiercely contested within the Church, where many bishops felt that an imperial edict of repeal could not overrule a just and final deposition by an ecclesiastical synod. He therefore found himself quickly ejected from Alexandria by rival ecclesiastical powers. The numerous theological and polemical writings which Athanasius produced following this period became enormously influential. Historians still widely follow his version of events, seeing the struggle among bishops which his restoration sparked as centred on an ‘Arian versus orthodox’ theological battle, whereby western supporters of Athanasius fended off eastern attacks against the divinity of Christ. This approach is dangerous. Although the Alexandrian’s writings are both detailed and prolific, they can hardly be called disinterested. Throughout his histories, bishops whom he attacks most fervently as Arians are precisely those who contested his own legitimacy as a bishop.

On 27 February 380, the emperor Theodosius – newly elevated the previous year to take control of the East amid the political and military turmoil unleashed by the debacle at Adrianople -addressed an edict from his current headquarters at Thessalonica to the people of Constantinople. The text famously proclaimed the religion to be followed by ‘all the peoples’ who fell under his rule as that handed down at Rome from the apostle Peter, now maintained by the pontifex Damasus and bishop Peter of Alexandria, ‘that is,… we should believe in the single godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and holy trinity’. Those who subscribed to this doctrine, Theodosius ordered, were to ‘embrace the name of Catholic Christians’, while all the rest were branded heretics, whose places of assembly were denied the name of churches, and who would be smitten ‘first by divine vengeance, and afterwards by the retribution of our own punishment, which we shall enact in accordance with the judgement of Heaven’.

The pathologically pious heresy-hunter Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis from 365 to 403, might be reckoned a champion of uniformity in the Church. Notoriously he promoted the campaign against Origen in Palestine, and in his Panarion attacks Origen’s theology at length. Never the brightest of the Fathers, he was confused by the question of the image of God in man. He comes to it when considering the sect of Audians, who were anthropomorphites; that is, they held God to have a bodily form which the human body replicates. According to Genesis 1: 26–7, God made man, male and female, in (after, according to) the image and likeness of God When Epiphanius gets to the detail of the Audian argument, it is plain that they argued from the use in Scripture of bodily language about God’s eyes, hand, feet, and other organs, and from the Lord’s appearances to Moses and the prophets, to demonstrate his bodily shape. Epiphanius can refute this in detail, but is aware of other suggestions about wherein what is ‘in the image’ consists, and regards none as wholly coherent with orthodox faith and Scripture. He mentions the theories that it is the soul that is in the image, or that it is virtue, or that it is the grace received in baptism, or that it applied to Adam only before his sin.

Augustine of Hippo is especially appropriate for the theme of this volume. He is acknowledged as a Father and Doctor of the Church, that is, as an authoritative Christian writer from the early centuries of the Church, and as a major theologian. Patristics, the study of the Fathers, used to be where it all started in terms of Church teaching: wherever possible, doctrines and practices were traced back to the Fathers. In the last half-century of early Christian studies there has been much more emphasis on ecclesiastical history, on the intellectual and political detail of a specific historical context. So patristics is where it all starts in that we can see Church leaders working out their responses to problems and tensions that recur through the history of the Church. In the case of Augustine, there is an unusual range of evidence from his own sermons and letters and theological treatises, and from records of Church councils in Roman Africa from the years when he was bishop (395 to 430). On the older model of patristics, Augustine was taken as the source for some of the most extreme forms of Church discipline. His writings were conflated to produce coherent ‘Augustinian’ doctrine. Phrases and sentences, images and speculation, were taken out of context to be used for purposes he never envisaged. On the newer model of early Christian studies, we can trace Augustine’s reflections about when and how to discipline people who appear to be rejecting the fundamental Christian principles, love of God and love of neighbour.

In exile in a remote and desolate place, Nestorius was still bitter about the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) some twenty years after the event. He remembered it as a travesty of a tribunal: ‘I was summoned by Cyril, who had assembled the Council […]. Who was judge? Cyril. Who was the accuser? Cyril. […]. Cyril was everything.’ In view of his condemnation, and in identifying Cyril’s activities on the occasion with roles usually played out in a court case, Nestorius recognized the basic pattern of proceedings of the council as that of a trial. Yet, in taking over all the major roles in such a trial simultaneously, Cyril had made a mockery of all proper judicial procedure. Minimum standards of proper procedure had been violated, and Nestorius, in his outburst against Cyril’s misconduct, expects his audience to recognize the fact and share his expectations of due process. However, his frustration with the council runs deeper than a mere dispute over correct procedure. Nestorius is even more deeply angered by the apparent lack of proper examination of his theology. Even if he is not explicit on the point, it seems obvious that he had expected the council to be something altogether different from a trial, something more closely resembling a philosophical dialogue or substantive doctrinal debate. In fact, the emperor’s letter of invitation had expressed a similar expectation, in that it had called for an open-ended discussion of theological difficulties and admonished the participants of the council to aim for an amicable consensus.

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.

In 1054, the Benedictine monk Berthold of Reichenau took up the task of continuing the world Chronicle compiled by his friend and teacher Hermann of Reichenau. The key event recorded for this year is the death of Hermann himself, with Berthold highlighting the monk’s great learning, his good-natured dealings with others, but above all the particular devotion to reading and writing which he pursued despite great physical disability. Even on his deathbed, we are told, Hermann’s mind was focused on matters textual. Throughout the night he was caught up in a kind of vision or ecstasy, during which he was able to read – and re-read – the lost letter, much beloved by the early Fathers, of Cicero To Hortensius. Running back and forth through the text, he displayed the same ‘memory and knowledge’ of the pagan author that one might expect of a Christian reader in recalling the Lord’s Prayer. He was also able to set forth the remaining part of his own unfinished work, his poetic dialogue On the Eight Principal Vices, as if he were ‘composing’ and at the same time ‘reading repeatedly’ both the sense and words of the text. As Berthold claims, his master had always ‘affected such great knowledge of both worldly and spiritual letters, that all those who came from everywhere were held stupefied and in wonder’.

The conquest of southern Italy by the Normans during the eleventh century incorporated what had hitherto been a peripheral region more fully within the mainstream of Western Europe. However, notwithstanding this, in a number of respects the development of the Church in Norman Italy followed its own idiosyncratic pattern, rather different from the trends that prevailed in other parts of contemporary Latin Christendom. This distinctive evolution can be clearly observed in south Italian monasticism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

If we set out to explore ‘discipline and diversity’ in the medieval Church, canon law presents itself as a possible starting point: canon law was first of all disciplinary law. Its history can be, and has been, told as an interplay of moral decline and reform, as a conflict between discipline and diverse customs, as a struggle between one eternal order and a multitude of transgressions. However, the imposition of norms is never a unilateral process; the success of a given set of norms is often shaped by an interplay between enforcement and subversion. In the present article, I want to explore this theme for a crucial phase in the history of medieval incest legislation and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over marriage.

So wrote Walter Daniel of his erstwhile friend and mentor, Ailred, in his Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, some time after Ailred’s death in 1167. This was written in an attempt to demonstrate his abbot’s sanctity with the clear hope that as a result he might eventually be canonized. It is hard, therefore, to understand why this image of the abbot who, if we are to believe Walter, governed ‘over one hundred monks and five hundred laymen’, s is so at odds with the instructions to abbots contained within the generally moderate Rule of Benedict, which governed the lives of all Cistercian monks. The Cistercians interpreted the Rule more rigidly than the Benedictines, but even for them there should be no ostentatious exhibitions of pious self-starvation since a monk must exhibit mediocritas or moderation in all he did. Moreover, regulation of eating must not be at the expense of life itself. In order to resolve Walter’s anomalous portrait of his abbot I will first seek the source of the textual representation of the ascetic Ailred and then, very briefly, consider its relationship to what we can surmise about Ailred’s actual practices in order to hypothesise about what kind of influences helped to form them. In the process, I will suggest that the extreme form of monastic disciplina, exemplified by the literary model of Ailred, causes us to question Foucault’s notion that: ‘Discipline produces practiced bodies, docile bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).’

Medieval canon law has generally had a bad press. Its professionalization in the period c. 1140 to 1234 can easily be caricatured as the emergence of a rigid, centralized, and authoritarian system which paid small heed to the needs of the people it was supposed to serve. This conclusion is readily sustained by perusal of the Liber Extra, the Gregorian Decretales of 1234, which enshrined the legal developments of the period, from about 1140, which followed the establishment of Gratian’s Decretum as the principal authority for the teaching and practice of canon law. The genesis of the Liber Extra is well known. Pope Gregory IX commissioned Raymond of Peñafort to compile an authoritative collection of papal decretals and conciliar legislation to supplement Gratian’s Decretum, and it drew, principally but not exclusively, on the so-called Quinqe compilationes antique which had been compiled for teaching purposes in Bologna between c. 1189–91 and 1226.’ And when the work was completed, it was authorized by the bull Rex pacificus, which ordered that ‘everyone should use only this compilation in judgements and in the schools (ut hac tantum compilatione universi utantur in iudiciis et in scholis); and a copy was duly dispatched to the canon law school in Bologna. The image of centralized, authoritarian lawmaking could not be clearer; and that perception is reinforced by an examination of its structure, where the individual extracts are organized systematically under Titles, which define the subject matter. Such a compilation, like the Quinque compilationes themselves, was the result of an analytical method, which totally obscured the processes of consultation which had preceded many of the decisions, as well as depriving them, in many cases, of their historical context in terms of the identity of the pope, the recipient, the litigants, and the local circumstances. What emerged was a disembodied code, shorn of the nuances and hesitations which had characterized the decisions which it enshrined.

One of the places in which medieval churchmen tackled questions of discipline and diversity was in their writing on magic. Magic appeared in many different kinds of ecclesiastical writing, including canon law, theology, and the records and manuals of the inquisition. Some of these sources have been well studied; in particular, historians have often attempted to trace the medieval origins of the early modern witch-hunts in theology and inquisition records. However, many other texts have received little attention, among them the pastoral manuals written from the thirteenth century onwards, which instructed priests on how to preach and hear confessions. In contrast to academic theology and inquisitors’ manuals, which catered for specialist readers, pastoral manuals were aimed at any Latin-literate cleric, perhaps especially at students in England’s secular and religious schools. Because they reflect what this wider audience might be expected to encounter, they offer a broader perspective than do the specialist texts on why medieval people employed diverse ritual practices, and why churchmen labelled some of these practices as ‘magic’ and sought to discipline them.

The medieval Church had strict disciplinary rules about how Sunday should be observed, but in England there was considerable diversity in interpreting and honouring them. The medieval English Sunday is a vast and challenging subject, yet despite this, and the controversy excited by the Sunday Trading Act of 1994 which allowed shops to open, it has excited little recent attention.

The discipline of Sunday was laid down in the Third Commandment (Exod. 20: 8–11), where Christians were ordered to keep holy the Sabbath day and told ‘In it thou shalt not do any work.’ This was reinforced in canon law, in episcopal mandates, in commentaries, in theological treatises, in sermons, in pastoralia, and in popular literature. The Sunday Christ, the image of Christ surrounded by craftsmen’s tools, which enshrined the idea that Sunday working with such implements crucified him anew, adorned the walls of many late medieval English parish churches. Secular rulers, starting with Wihtred of Kent (695), included Sabbath-keeping in their legislation. Diversity occurred in the varying interpretations of the law on Sunday observance, and in the patchiness of its enforcement. The questions to be addressed here are, firstly, what actually constituted Sunday? Secondly, what were people supposed to do on Sundays, and did they do it? Finally, how well observed was the work prohibition as applied to Sunday trading?