Veneration of the saints was an important element of medieval piety and was pervasive throughout all levels of medieval society. In the early centuries of Christianity there was no formal process for declaring someone a saint and many cults were purely local affairs. However there were a number of saints who enjoyed an international cult. These were often major figures from the early days of Christianity, such as the apostles, the most famous perhaps being Peter, whose cult was centred in Rome at the heart of the western Christian establishment. For those cults that developed an international dimension, it is possible to view the transmission of the cult as creating a network or networks of individuals linked by their devotion to that particular saint. At one level this concept of a network is more metaphorical than actual. Individuals, unknown to each other, could share a common veneration for a particular saint. They were linked by their shared knowledge of the saint’s story, which provoked a common reverence. Indeed the actual transmission of the saint’s story can be considered to create a network of sorts as it passes from person to person, either by word of mouth or through the movement of written texts. A network of this sort can be considered to span both time and space.

The monastery founded in the fifth century by St Sabas, in the Kidron Valley a few kilometres south-east of Bethlehem, has been described as ‘the crucible of Byzantine Orthodoxy’. The original cave cell occupied by Sabas himself grew into a monastic community of the laura type, in which monks lived during the week in individual cells practising private prayer and craft work, but met for communal liturgy on Saturdays, Sundays and feast days. The laura, which differed from the coenobium in the greater emphasis placed on individual meditation, prayer and work, was the most distinctive contribution of the Palestinian tradition to early Christian monasticism. The first laura had been founded in the Judean desert in the fourth century by Chariton, and cenobitic monasteries had been in existence in Palestine both in the desert and on the coastal strip since the same period. Nevertheless, partly as a result of an extensive network of contacts with other foundations, both laurae and cenobitic monasteries, partly through Sabas s own fame as an ascetic, and partly through a burgeoning reputation for theological orthodoxy, St Sabas became the representative institution of Palestinian monasticism in the period between the fifth century and the Persian invasion of 614. The monastery’s capacity to withstand the Persian and Arab invasions of the seventh century, and to adapt to the cultural changes brought by Arabicization, ensured not only its survival but also its continued importance as a disseminator of monastic practice throughout the early Middle Ages. In 1099, when the first crusaders conquered the Holy Land, it was almost the sole survivor of the ‘golden age’ of Palestinian desert monasticism of the early Byzantine period. The monastery continued to prosper under crusader rule. It was an important landowner and its abbot was in the twelfth century a confrater of the Knights Hospitaller. Moreover, it is clear both from varied genres of external documentary sources – for example, pilgrimage accounts and hagiographies – and from the surviving manuscripts produced in the monastery between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, that the monastery’s spiritual life also flourished in this period. The role of St Sabas and Palestinian monasticism within the broader scope of Byzantine monastic reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries suggests that the continuing function of the monastery at the centre of a wider network of practices and ideals across the Orthodox world engendered a revival of early monastic practices in a period more often associated with decline and the struggle to preserve the integrity of monastic life.

‘Wonder not at our coming here, for unto you, Englishmen, God gave such a wondrous martyr, that he filleth nearly all the world with miracles.’ This admiring assertion, attributed to an archbishop and primate from the Nigros Monies – possibly Stephen, archbishop of Tarsus, which lies at the foot of. the Taurus Mountains in Armenia – provides a good introduction to the theme of this book, for it links Iceland, Canterbury and the eastern Mediterranean in a remarkable manner. The quotation comes from a lost life of St Thomas written in Latin by Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide in Oxford, who died in 1174; but it is known only from its transmission through one of the longest texts in Old Norse, the Thomas Saga Erkibyskups, compiled in Iceland through the thirteenth century from English Latin sources. This Anglo-Icelandic example, however, is only one part of an extraordinary phenomenon which saw the cult of the ‘wondrous martyr’ established, and not only at the official level, across the whole of the West, from Norway to Sicily and from Portugal to Poland, before the end of the twelfth century. The English martyr was probably depicted among the array of saints on the West front of Trondheim cathedral; his mosaic image stands next to that of St Silvester in the apse behind the high altar in Monreale; the headquarters of the Portuguese Templars at Tomar had a chapel with a reliquary containing fragments of his brains and blood; and French monks from Morimond brought the cult to Sulejów in the diocese of Gneisno in 1177.

While the Franciscan and Dominican Orders were greatly to influence the spiritual and intellectual life of the later Middle Ages and beyond, the religious community of the contemporary of Saints Francis and Dominic, Durán of Huesca, quickly disappeared from the scene. Yet at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Roman Curia had spent a great deal of time in dealings with Durán and his followers, the Catholic Poor. The papal chancery spilt a fair amount of ink writing to or about Durán, at a time when the affairs of Francis, Dominic and their followers bothered it very little. For Rome, the Catholic Poor were a very exciting prospect. For they had been Christians who had (from the papal viewpoint) slipped into heresy as followers of Valdes, but had then decided to return to the fold. In an age when western Europe was overwhelmingly Catholic, but the perceived threat of heresy was enormous, Durán and the Catholic Poor were great news for the church. That they managed to re-establish themselves within the church was very much a matter of Durán's successful use of international religious networks. That it was the friars who were ultimately to flourish but not the Catholic Poor was in significant measure due to the former’s ability and the latter’s inability to combine the effective use of international networks with an equally positive approach towards the local networks they needed in order to succeed.

In the first decades of the twelfth century, a wandering preacher was reported to have ‘advised’ the young men of Le Mans to marry the prostitutes of the town in order to save these ‘unchaste women’ (feminae quae minus caste vixeruni) from their lives of sin: ‘On his advice many of the young men married the unchaste women for whom he bought clothes to the value of four solidi, just enough to cover their nakedness.’ At the end of the same century, something very similar occurred in Paris, where another preacher was praised for encouraging the scholars and burghers either to marry prostitutes or to donate towards their dowry fund:

Almost all the public prostitutes, no matter where the athlete of Christ went, abandoned their brothels and flocked to him. He himself led most of these women to marriage.
Others, however, who were unable to remain chaste on account of fear of weakness, he gave a not insubstantial sum of money as dowries and reformed them with legal marriage. To this goal the Parisian students collected two hundred and fifty silver pounds and the burghers over a thousand.

The year 1198 witnessed the start of an unlikely alliance between a new pope and a long-established monastic order. It would have been considered unlikely because relationships between secular and regular branches of the church were often uneasy and sometimes even tense. 1198 was indeed a chance for a new beginning. In Rome on 8 January, the cardinals raised one of their fellows, the thirty-seven-year-old Lotario dei Conti di Segni, to the Chair of St Peter as Innocent III. In Burgundy, on 14 September, the Cistercian Order was beginning its second century of existence at Cîteaux. It was time, not only for a celebration of the hundredth anniversary but also for a radical reassessment of the motives of the foundation. Guido de Paray, presiding over the annual General Chapter by right as abbot of Cîteaux, read out to the assembled abbots a letter received from the new pope in Rome. Surely the coincidence of these two events could bring forth fruit in some form or other? For his part, Innocent, while stressing his youth and inexperience, earnestly begged the Cistercians to remember him in their prayers. By so doing he would be better enabled to fulfil the pastoral office to which he had recently been called. In a phrase that he was later to use to cities of the Patrimony, he reminded the order that, although Christ’s yoke was easy and the burden light, it was, nevertheless, of vital importance that it be taken up. Mary’s spiritual contemplation was to be just as vital as Martha’s activity! In return for their prayers, the pope made a personal threefold promise to the abbots. He stated his intention to watch carefully over their progress, to be ‘powerfully’ at hand for them in their necessities and, lastly, to provide a safeguard by his apostolic protection against the attacks of all those who were ill-intentioned. ‘These things we shall pursue the more willingly when we feel that we are supported by your prayers and merits. For it is right that the universal Church should pour forth its prayers for us and mitigate our inadequacy by its supplications’

At the end of the twelfth century a group of German pilgrims founded in Jerusalem the Order of the Teutonic Knights, which soon became the third major military order together with the Templars and the Hospitallers. In the mid thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights were already an international order and they had houses both in the Levant, in Europe and in the Baltic regions. In order to achieve such a result the Teutonic Order created an efficient administrative network, which was based on communication between local administrative centres and the central houses of the order.

In the early twentieth century, the city of Geneva added to its existing tourist attractions with one of the most peculiar items of civic commemoration in Europe. The Reformation Wall is a queasy monument to Geneva’s glorious past, in which the tensions and prejudices of a very particular view of the sixteenth century are frozen into stone. As one moves towards the centre of the monument, one draws closer to the Genevan fount of Reformed Christian truth. Luther and Zwingli are commemorated, tersely, at the wall’s outermost extremes. Further in, a series of friezes celebrate the deeds of Reformed Protestants in France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. The monument’s centre, however, is the set of four larger-than-life statues, fixing the viewer with their stern gazes. Three of the figures are obvious. John Calvin himself, of course, stands to the fore. The wall is at heart a memorial to him, to the man who wished to be buried in an unmarked grave, and it was begun on the quatercentenary of his birth. He is joined by Guillaume Farel, the Frenchman who first established the Reformed Church in Geneva and persuaded Calvin to join him in his ministry there; and by Theodore de Béze, Calvin’s successor, biographer and systematizer.

This is a ‘work-in-progress’ essay. I am making an inventory of eighteenth-century Scottish Catholic correspondence with ARCANE, a database management system which, once the letters are processed, will enable me to give a material representation of this correspondence and of the networks, both human and epistolary, which it reveals. My hypothesis is that links of all kinds – the correspondence itself to start with – enabled the Scottish Catholic community to weather the penal laws in the eighteenth century. What the mission needed most was money and priests; both came from outside Scotland, which is why I have decided to deal with the continental network first.

In recent years, much historical interest has been paid to the evangelical (and often by extension the Nonconformist) international and transatlantic religious networks which communicated ideas and personnel from and to various parts of Britain, the Continent and North America during the eighteenth century. Historians of the Evangelical Revival have looked at individuals, most notably the dynamic and much-travelled George Whitefield, whose criss-crossing the Atlantic exemplified the international reach of the revival, and also at the many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of less colourful personalities who created, and moved through, the international evangelical world. In addition, attention has been given by Susan O’Brien (and others) to the vibrant publishing and book distribution networks which enabled the Evangelical Revival to have a truly international impact (mirroring – perhaps beating – the Enlightenment republic of letters). In particular, O’Brien has emphasized the ways in which the transatlantic movement of letters, books, pamphlets, tracts and journals was a vital way by which what David Hempton has recently termed the ‘Empire of the Spirit’ was able to expand.

The benefits of using an international lens to understand both the complexity and the essence of religious movements have been well demonstrated in a number of important recent studies. In fact it has become quite unusual to write about early modern puritanism and Protestantism without taking at least a transatlantic, if not a global, perspective. Philip Benedict’s important book, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (2002) has shown that only by looking at Calvinism as an international movement taking root in France, the Netherlands, the British Isles, the Holy Roman Empire, eastern Europe and New England can one properly identify the distinctive aspects of Calvinist piety and begin to answer bigger questions about Calvinism’s alleged contribution to the emergence of modern liberal democracy. He shows, for example, that while no post-Reformation confession had a monopoly of resistance to unsatisfactory rulers, Calvinists, because of their deep hostility to idolatrous forms of worship and unscriptural church institutions, were generally speaking more unwilling than others to compromise with or submit to religious and political institutions antithetical to their interests. Similarly, although Benedict is sceptical about the supposed connections between Calvinism and capitalism and Calvinism and democracy, he does show that Calvinism was a midwife of modernity through its routinization of time, its promotion of literacy, and its emphasis on the individual conscience.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, state, society and church were almost identical units in Norway, and with the exception of guilds, minor rural fellowships and small groups influenced by Moravian piety, there was no civil society, in the sense of a sphere between family, market and public affairs.

In June 1829 John Angell James, minister of Carr’s Lane Congregational Church in Birmingham, wrote to his friend William Wilson Patton, minister of a Presbyterian congregation in New York, thanking him for his congregation’s interest in the spiritual welfare of the British churches.

Between the years of 1811 and 1861, Andrew Reed (1787–1862 served in the East End of London as minister of New Road Independent Chapel, Stepney, which was rebuilt on a nearby site in 1829 and renamed Wycliffe Chapel. There were only sixty members of the church on Reed’s arrival, but the congregation grew during his ministry to regularly number two thousand in the 1840s and 1850s. Alongside his preaching and pastoral work, Reed conducted an extensive ministry at an exacting pace, becoming involved in a range of philanthropic projects, as well as organizations for evangelism and overseas mission, a number of which he founded. He also contributed to the development of Congregationalism as an English denomination, and was engaged in moves for general union amongst Evangelicals. In addition to his wide-ranging work in Britain, Reed maintained an extensive international network of relationships through organizational activities, regular correspondence and personal visits. His work offers insights into how broader trends and patterns were played out at an individual and local level. Although his ecclesiology was rooted in English Independency, Reed was no isolationist. Indeed the extent of his international involvement takes this study well beyond the particular, to demonstrate the wider significance of both personal and institutional religious networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. His work also shows how sustainable structures could be created from dynamic personal networks, but that such a process was often fraught with difficulties. The following discussion will concentrate upon four broad areas of Reed’s international relationships.

In this essay we will turn our attention to a rather distinctive phenomenon of Norwegian history; the rise and activity of the network of so-called women’s mission groups. From its outset in the first half of the nineteenth century, this movement was part of the international call for female participation in the new cause of propagating the Christian message overseas. But in Norway the movement underwent a self-development that gave it a distinctive role, not only in the missionary movement but also in the sociopolitical formation of modern Norwegian society as a whole and in the creation of international links.

The Swedish branch of the missionary movement and sewing circles in the Church of Sweden are two sides of the same coin. They started at about the same time, in the 1830s and in the 1840s, and they depended on, and still depend on, each other. Over the years, thousands of Church of Sweden sewing circles have had foreign mission as their purpose. The sewing circles’ money raising and knowledge were and are of great significance for Swedish foreign mission.