For just over a thousand years the Virgin Mary was central to any attempt to defend or explain Christian Orthodoxy. From the formulations at Ephesos and Chalcedon Mary formed part of the understanding of a God made Flesh and of a picture of redemption which was all-embracing in its promise and tantalizing in its accessibility. This essay shows just how wide and diverse were the medieval ways of thinking about Mary and the ways of exploring the possibilities inherent in the figure of the Mother of God. In liturgy and prayer, in homilies and devotional poetry, in a vast array of material forms Mary was made familiar, above all as mother, as intercessor and companion. Unlike the sacraments, among them the all-important Eucharist, Mary was rarely a subject of discipline or of scrutiny; she entered people’s lives early and seemingly effectively. She stood, however, as a boundary-marker of Christian identity, the quintessential barrier between Christians and Others. Mary did become a subject of discipline to people in the lands of conquest and disease outside Europe.

When John Edward of Brington in Northamptonshire abjured heresy in the ‘Greneyerd’ of Norwich cathedral close on Palm Sunday 1405, he was presented to the gathered crowds as a living example of the dangers of diversity in the Christian faith. Because heresy was feared as a fundamental challenge to doctrine, authority, and social harmony, the agents of Church and crown went to great lengths in the period between 1382 and the Reformation to advertise its depravity and illegality. The anti-heresy message was not, however, a simple one, and the judicial performances that constitute the Church’s propaganda campaign on this issue sometimes used highly equivocal rhetoric and images. In these performances heresy was capable of being represented as a minority sectarian problem, or one diffused throughout society. In truth it was both, and so the anti-heresy message had to encompass much more nuance than one might imagine. This essay focuses on the campaign against the lollards in late medieval England, in particular John Edward’s staged abjuration, which is recorded in a letter sent by the presiding bishop, Henry Despenser, to his archbishop, Thomas Arundel. This certification presents a compelling tableau vivant encompassing the penitent, the crowds, and the authorities of Church, crown, and city. In their efforts to stage-manage the abjuration of heresy, however, these authorities had not only to navigate the complexity of anti-heretical rhetoric and present it to a large audience, but, perhaps more importantly, had to overcome considerable rancour and division within their own ranks, to present a unified front against the threat of heresy. For they had to show diat there was a unity from which heretics were deviating. Edward’s abjuration, therefore, offered an important opportunity to demonstrate repentance, and to invite the clergy and people of Norwich to consider the dangers posed by their own tendencies towards disunity.

Few historians nowadays would endorse a simple causal connection between the Reformation and the rise of toleration. Indeed, reformations Protestant and Catholic have become almost synonymous with ‘confessionalization’ and ‘social disciplining’. Nonetheless, the transition from the persecuting society of the Middle Ages to something approaching a pluralist society was an early modern phenomenon which has attracted renewed attention in recent years. This transition was facilitated by the breakdown of the traditional understanding of heresy. The role of Protestantism in de-stabilizing the heresy discourse of mid-seventeenth century England has been expertly delineated by Ann Hughes in her study of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and the responses to it. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the Catholic understanding of heresy was entirely stable during this period. As I hope to show in this survey of Catholic heresiologies from the period 1520 to 15 50, controversialists encountered difficulties when they tried to conscript patristic and medieval heresy discourses into the sixteenth-century conflict. An instability at the heart of the traditional definition of heresy – over whether heresy is primarily a doctrinal error or a moral failing – seemed at first to provide a solution to these difficulties. Ultimately and ironically, however, it made their case vulnerable to a Protestant charge of subjectivism.

The Protestant Reformation was the largest and most sustained challenge to authority ever experienced within the western Church. It involved a repudiation of existing teachings and forms of worship, along with a rejection, even a demonization, of the clergy and ecclesiastical hierarchy. From the 1520s a number of evangelical Churches developed which were often as hostile to each other as they were to the Catholic Church, and, as a result of polemical public discussions over competing teachings and beliefs, it was no longer clear to many people what constituted the Church or who should exercise authority over religious life. Some were led to question whether there was any need for a Church which imposed dogma and religious discipline on all people within a community or country. It is the discussion on the role and powers of the visible Church which will be examined here, by focusing on the city of Augsburg, but doing so through two significant writings by Martin Bucer, the leading theologian of the Protestant Church in Strasbourg. Recent research has added to our awareness of Bucer’s understanding of the relationship between Church and community, and this contribution will provide insight into how the views of Bucer impacted upon the debate on religious separatism which was taking place in Strasbourg, Augsburg and elsewhere in Germany. They show that even after Bucer had persuaded the government of his own city to expel religious radicals, he continued to believe that support for separatist and spiritualist ideas constituted a substantial challenge to the establishment of disciplined Protestant Churches.

Much of the best recent scholarship on the implementation of the Tudor Reformations has chosen as its leitmotif the themes of obedience, conformity and acquiescence, collaboration even. The revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s overthrew convincingly the notion of widespread popular enthusiasm for religious change. But given that change was successfully imposed, part of revisionism’s legacy has been a somewhat optimistic assessment of the capabilities of the Tudor state. Whether allied to the cause of religious reform, or that of religious reaction, Tudor governments were apparently remarkably effective at enforcing their will, largely because of their ability to co-opt the energies and loyalties of locally-based elites and sub-elites. In terms of this volume’s twin themes, it appears to be a case of discipline successfully exerted; diversity effectively curtailed.

The special character of discipline and diversity in the London of the 1560s has never lacked commentators. Following Elizabeth I’s settlement of religion in the parliament of 1559 the new government had many factors to consider. Although convinced Roman Catholic clergy were no longer to be tolerated Elizabeth was anxious not to alienate leading Catholic laymen. Convinced Protestant clerics or potential ordinands, many of them returning from exile or else emerging from prudent seclusion in the British Isles, would either accept her Settlement and shoulder the burden of governing her Church or else, wanting more than it had offered them, move into increasingly militant revolt. These things have been intensively studied and altogether the government’s agenda, like that of many a government swept suddenly to power, can be described as ‘the imposition of discipline and the quashing of diversity’.

The history of post-Reformation Catholicism in Yorkshire can be divided into two distinct periods: pre- and post-1570. Only in the aftermath of the 1569 Northern Rebellion did the Elizabethan government begin to implement fully the 1559 religious settlement in the north, and to take firm action against those who persistently flouted religious laws by continuing to practise the traditional religion of their forefathers. In the Northern Province, serious efforts to enforce conformity and to evangelize did not begin until the arrival of Edmund Grindal as Archbishop of York in 1571. He was joined a year later by the Puritan sympathizer Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, as President of the Council of the North and together they spear-headed the region’s first real evangelical challenge to traditional religion. 1571 also saw the enactment of the first real penal law against Catholics, although only in 15 81 was the term ‘recusant’ coined. Grindal and Huntingdon formed a powerful team committed to Protestant evangelization and the eradication of Catholicism in the North, however, in Yorkshire, their mission was not entirely successful. The North Riding consistently returned high numbers of recusants in the Elizabethan period, and was home to some well-established Catholic communities. In the West and East Ridings recusancy was not so widespread, although religious conservatism persisted, and Catholicism remained a much more significant force across Yorkshire than elsewhere.

In June 1620 George Johnsoun was ‘scharplie rebukit for his hynous sin of disobediens to his parents in stryking of his mother’ and imprisoned for one week whilst the Session of St Cuthbert’s parish, Edinburgh, decided how to deal with him. The following week the Session ordained ‘george Johnsoun to ga to his parents everie mornyng and evening upoun his kneis and promeis with his grace never to do ye lyk in tymes cumyng’. The Session elders seem to have been aware both of the menace that George represented to his parents, his mother in particular, and of the extent to which he had become a disorderly troublemaker. They therefore required him to ‘[promise] to tak ane office man [with] him quher he so gets yair blissin’. The Session could thus monitor George’s behaviour and the fervency of his repentance, and guarantee that discipline was properly enacted. With this punishment the Kirk sent a clear message to the parishioners of St Cuthbert’s, and the whole Edinburgh Presbytery, that disobedience and disorder in the domestic sphere were entirely unacceptable. Perhaps more significantly, in this case the parish authorities publicly and explicitly declared and demonstrated that violence against domestic authority, particularly against one’s mother, was insupportable.

That English literature is suffused with religion is news to no one; the English language is throughout history part of the structure of the Church or churches. But there is a way in which Church history and English literature have been missing each other for a good many years. This is in part because, until recently, religion in literature has been the preserve of relatively small groups of enthusiasts with partisan views. Their work has appeared unattractive or irrelevant to a largely secular mainstream that has been preoccupied with the ‘political’ (as opposed to the religious) in early modern literary studies (this is especially so with regard to the drama). But we now have an account of Church history that is more sophisticated and variegated, more attuned to confessional variety and its politics, local and national. This is crying out for engagement with literary studies in ways that literary scholars would find compelling, not least in offering many solutions to the kinds of questions they have come to ask. To some extent the dialogue has already begun, and indeed several exemplary studies are cited in what follows. Nonetheless, we are at the beginning of what may well be a long and extremely fruitful interdisciplinary encounter.

In 1645, Parliament swept away the Anglican liturgy of the Church of England, replacing the Book of Common Prayer with a new Presbyterian alternative, the Directory. The Episcopal hierarchy of the Church had already been demolished, and it was expected that the national Church would be reformed along puritan lines. The campaign to impose Presbyterian discipline in England, and the concomitant struggle for a reformation of manners, has received much attention from historians. There is little doubt that nationally these new measures failed, with John Morrill asserting that ‘these ordinances were not only largely ignored but actively resisted’. Presbyterian classes were successfully erected in a handful of places, however, including Lancashire. This should not surprise us, given the county’s long reputation for Puritanism. Nine classes were created at Manchester, Bury, Whalley, Warrington, Walton, Leyland, Preston, Lancaster and Ulverston, and a Provincial Assembly met at Preston. The full minutes of Manchester and Bury classes, and the several extant sets of churchwardens’ accounts, offer a fascinating insight into the workings of this new system. The popular reaction to the new order is also demonstrated; people who travelled to banned services demonstrated where they stood on the liturgical divide, as did those who presented offenders for punishment. This essay, therefore, seeks to evaluate the efforts to erect Presbyterianism within a county where we might reasonably expect it could succeed. The outcome of this struggle will tell us much about the chances of a national Presbyterian Church of England’s survival.

The spectre of the seventeenth century loomed large in the eighteenth century. The Anglican orthodox were particularly aghast at the radical assault on the religio-political order during the previous century and feared a reprise during theirs. In 1734, for instance, Thomas Seeker (1693–1768) warned his audience at St James’s, Westminster, that Charles I’s execution was ‘a most peculiarly instructive example of divine judgments, brought down by a sinful people on their own heads’. In all his providential interventions in human affairs, God teaches ‘an awful regard to himself, as moral governor of the world; and a faithful practice of true religion’. And what drew his divine wrath upon Britain during the 1650s was the abandonment of’real religion’ for ‘hypocrisy, superstition, and enthusiasm’. Certainly Laud and his followers might have displayed ‘an over warm zeal, and very blameable stiffness and severity’, Seeker acknowledged. ‘But there was also, in the enemies of the church, a most provoking bitterness and perverseness; with a wild eagerness for innovation, founded on ignorant prejudices, which their heated fancies raised into necessary truths; and then, looking on them, as the cause of Christ, they thought themselves bound and commissioned to overturn whatever was contrary to them.’

Having lost northern Europe to the Protestants the Catholic Church tried to preserve control over what remained of the respublica Christiana. The attempt was twofold. First, it was political. The popes declared the entire Catholic world for their diocese. The government of the Christian peoples’, Pius V observed, ‘belongs to Us and We should see that they are governed with charity’. Second, the popes admitted that the Reformation had been the result partly of the religious and spiritual shortcomings of the Church itself and tried to make the requisite internal reforms. The Council of Trent defined Catholic doctrine and anathemized whoever disagreed with it. Seminaries were set up to train the clergy while the lay population was held under tight control. The Jesuits and the Office of the Holy Roman Inquisition were the main instruments of discipline. In this article I will explore the ways in which the Holy Office impinged on Maltese society during the time of the last eight inquisitors. Fortunately the archive deposits of the Inquisition in Malta are nearly complete and the recent opening of the Vatican archives has added further to our knowledge of the Maltese Holy Office.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) began his pastoral ministry in a village Baptist chapel in Cambridgeshire but became a national voice in Victorian England through his ministry in London. The huge crowds his preaching attracted necessitated the building of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, at the Elephant and Castle, which accommodated over 5,000 people. ‘By common consent’, says David Bebbington, Spurgeon was ‘the greatest English-speaking preacher of the century’. Spurgeon, like other nineteenth-century ecclesiastical figures, was involved in theological controversies, including the ‘Downgrade Controversy’, in which, in typically robust style, he attacked theological liberalism. In August 1887, he trumpeted: ‘The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture derided, the Holy Spirit degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin turned into a fiction, and the resurrection into a myth …’ The Downgrade controversy has not attracted nearly as much attention as debates provoked in the nineteenth century by Essays and Reviews (1860) and Lux Mundi (1889), perhaps because the latter affected Anglicanism rather than the Free Churches. But since as many people were attending Free Churches as Anglican churches, the issues raised in the Downgrade, as the most serious nineteenth-century Free Church dispute, are of considerable significance.

The Prayer Book revision controversy was among the most significant events in the Church of England during the twentieth century. The proposals to revise the 1662 Book of Common Prayer provoked considerable opposition from both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, and culminated with the House of Commons rejecting a revised book in 1927 and a re-revised version in 1928. This paper will argue that two issues, ecclesiastical authority and Anglican identity, were central to the controversy. It will then suggest that the aims and policy of the bishops’ revision led to the failure of the book. In taking this angle, it will analyse the controversy from a new perspective, as previous studies have focused on liturgical developments, Church parties and disestablishment. The controversy is bound up with the broader and ongoing problem of maintaining discipline and diversity within the Anglican Communion. The Anglo-Catholic -Evangelical tensions of the 1920s were a precursor to Liberal – Evangelical conflicts on issues such as the ordination of women and sexuality. Therefore, by examining the revision controversy from the angle of discipline and comprehensiveness, a longer perspective is given to later Anglican difficulties.

When the annual Methodist Conference assembled in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 14 July 1936, the retiring President appeared wearing the moderator’s gown presented to the Connexion the previous summer. In his Methodist Recorder column, W. F. Howard wondered: ‘Will the Protestant Truth Society discover some subtle Romeward predilection in this departure from our ancient wont and usage?’, but reassured his readers that ‘It is a simple Geneva gown,… black enough for John Knox himself.’

In the early years of the twenty-first century, ecclesiastical discipline in an Anglican context has been very much a hot topic. Internationally, there has been intense debate over the decision by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America to ordain Gene Robinson, a continent yet avowedly homosexual priest, as one of its bishops, and over the decision of the diocese of New Westminster in Canada to authorize liturgical services of blessing for same-sex couples. The Windsor Report of 2004 was commissioned in order to formulate a Communion-wide response to these developments,1 and although ‘discipline’ is a word which is very seldom in its pages, it is, in effect, a study of the disciplinary framework which its authors believe necessary in order for the Anglican Communion to hold together. At a local level, the Church of England’s clerical discipline procedures are being thoroughly overhauled, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s 1996 report on clergy discipline and the ecclesiastical courts. This paper seeks to explore the themes of discipline and diversity in both an international and an English context. It attempts to shed a little more light on how the Anglican Communion, particularly in the former British Empire, got itself into its current position, as a loosely-federated assembly of provincial synods, without a central framework for handling disciplinary matters. Secondly, it examines how the Church of England has handled discipline in relation to its clergy since the mid-nineteenth century.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with an American Roman Catholic Archbishop with a substantial theological background, in the course of which I asked him to be frank about his impression of the American Episcopal Church. His reply was memorable: They appear not to want to say no to anything.’ This encapsulates the inherent difficulty in the idea of ‘inclusiveness’, or in the much-claimed virtue of ‘comprehensiveness’ which Anglicans and Episcopalians are wont to make. Two problems immediately present themselves. The first is that, without difficulty one can suggest views or actions of which it would be impossible for a church to be inclusive, at least with any semblance of loyalty to the New Testament. Then, secondly, the inclusion of disputed actions, such as the ordination of gay persons, presents a different order of difficulty from inclusiveness in relation to disputed beliefs. Churches characteristically have rules about who may, or may not be ordained into a representative ministry. Ordinands are ‘tried and examined’. But tolerance of diversity of belief is one thing: tolerance of diversity of practice another, as the churches of the Anglican Communion discovered when they simultaneously ordained women to the priesthood, but extended tolerance to the beliefs of those who asserted that the priesthood was reserved to males. The illogicality of that position is exposed by the discovery that those being received into the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church were publicly required to state that they accepted the ministry of the Church of England – a higher requirement than was imposed on newly ordained Anglican clergy. On the other hand, it was argued at the time, and the argument has force, that an acknowledged state of incoherence was preferable to overt schism.