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This paper (a companion to an article published this Journal lxvii [2016]) considers a twelve-year campaign by some Church of England clergy to discredit Nonconformists as irrational enthusiasts. It began in 1668–9, to discourage concessions to Nonconformists through ‘comprehension’ and to prove the loyalty of men suspected of lukewarm attachment to the Church. Congregationalists responded by accusing the conformists of Socinianism. But Presbyterians were less willing to differ from churchmen, and claimed that orthodox Protestants did not disagree about reason. Any differences were exaggerated for polemical advantage, and the controversy drove conformists and Nonconformists further apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The numerous surviving formulary volumes compiled by ecclesiastical administrators and lawyers in pre-Reformation England are valuable but neglected adjuncts to the period's surviving church court records. Using material in a fifteenth-century volume originally compiled by a lawyer of the courts at York, this article demonstrates the utility of such volumes to supplement and complement the surviving court books and papers. In particular it draws attention to two cases taken to the Council of Constance. These add to evidence of England's acceptance of that assembly's jurisdictional claims, and illustrate England's integration into the court structures of the broader Catholic Church. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper claims the heraldry of the twelve tribes of Israel as a distinct iconographic invention in post-Reformation England. It is argued that the theme became popular during the reign of King James, a period usually regarded as iconophobic. Little-studied examples of church wall-painting are understood in relation to analogous bible illustrations and writings which have been ignored by historians of this period. The depictions of the twelve patriarchs themselves, part of a ‘Laudian’ beautification of Burton Latimer church in the 1630s, during the incumbency of Robert Sibthorpe allows exploration of the shifting meanings of this Reformation subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper adopts an exegetical approach to Bede's narrative of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria in the Historia ecclesiastica ii. 9–14. HE ii. 12–13, which is loosely based on passages in the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great, diverge significantly from the latter in order to explore biblical parallels. Bede's description of Coifi's ride to the pagan shrine at Goodmanham in order to throw a lance into it is an inversion of the account of the piercing of Christ's side in John xix.34: just as water flowed from Christ's side so the piercing of the shrine led to the baptism of the Northumbrians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines a document among William Worcester's papers at the British Library. It is argued that the document, a selective list of archbishops of Canterbury and bishops of Bath and Wells, was intended to form the basis for a glazing scheme to be commissioned by John Stafford, archbishop of Canterbury. It is suggested that this may have been intended for Croydon Palace in Surrey. An analysis of the list provides information not only about Stafford's interests in this commission but his artistic patronage in general. The document is set alongside the commissions of Stafford's episcopal contemporaries to draw wider conclusions about episcopal patronage of the visual arts in the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the scheme of imagery designed in about 1638 by Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor, for the chancel of East Knoyle parish church in Wiltshire. While Wren's close association with Lancelot Andrewes and the Laudian circle makes this scheme understandable as 'Laudian', its particular combination of picture and text accommodated a broader range of beliefs. The study of the theological content of the scheme, and of its intended manner of reception, sheds new light on the function of imagery within the pursuit of the 'beauty of holiness', drawing attention to the role it could play in establishing an active understanding of the liturgy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statutes of the Gilbertine order, established by Gilbert of Sempringham in the second half of the twelfth century, underwent modification during the following century as a consequence of two legatine visitations, in 1238 and 1267. This paper examines these new regulations in the context of growing episcopal concern for the internal discipline of nunneries and considers the possible inter-relationships between the `self-regulating' and internally-disciplined Gilbertine order and the synodal legislation of reforming bishops and their episcopal visitation of non-Gilbertine nunneries, particularly in Yorkshire. It suggests that the visitation by Ottobuono Fieschi of the Gilbertines in 1267 and his legatine council of London in 1268 informed the outcomes of both, leading to a convergence of Gilbertine legislation with the wider legislation that applied to all nunneries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between gender, religion, authority and influence in the Victorian Church of England, using the example of the ecclesiastical response to the rise of Anglican religious communities for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Anglican sisterhoods occupied equivocal and disputed space within the Victorian Church of England, proclaiming their loyalty to the Church but unfettered by any ecclesiastical legislation or tradition that would have compelled them to obey the bishops. In a society that assumed that obedience to lawful authority was a natural attribute of godly women, their ambiguous and improvised relationship with the church hierarchy created enormous tension us well as considerable hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lyon hopes to persuade her reader that there was a sharper - more critically engaged, more often overtly conflicted - edge to these perennial tales than what Margaret Aston, writing half a century ago, perceived as an emerging sense of the medieval past. Lyon considers that the dissolution of religious houses in England and Wales between 1536 and 1540 was made the "dissolution of the monasteries" only at a distance from the events themselves. Of course, Lyon is right to note that dissolutions first seen as a sequence of episodes by both public (Holinshed) and private (Wriothesley) chroniclers were not presented as a fully-formed performance until staged in the annals of England that commanded a popular, print audience after 1603. [Extracted from the article]

The question in 1898 of the recognition by Cambridge University of St Edmund's House, a Roman Catholic foundation, might initially seem to involve questions irrelevant in the modern university. It can, however, be seen to raise issues concerning modernity, the place of religion in the university and the role of the university itself. This article therefore sets this incident in university history in wider terms and examines the ways in which the recognition of St Edmund's House was a chapter in the history of liberalism, in the history of Roman Catholicism, in the history of education and in the history of secularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines some documents from the Archive of Pusey House in Oxford, England which depict the conversion of Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Roman Catholic Church. Details of the correspondence between Hopkins and Henry Parry Liddon; Examination of the journals of Liddon which describe Hopkin's time in Oxford.

Discusses the history of exclusion from communion during post-reformation in England. Reasons for exclusion; Grounds for exclusions in 1604.

Focuses on England's 1907 Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act. Event that triggered the act's development; Provisos secured by the bishops in the House of Lords; Opposition from the Church of England.

This article argues that as a part of the Tory reaction (1680–5) England's church courts were revived and utilised in the prosecution of religious dissent. The records of the church courts in three deaneries in and around London demonstrate that the numbers of prosecutions in the courts increased significantly in the early 1680s after the defeat of the Exclusion Bill and that the vast majority of these prosecutions were for religious offences. This brief flowering of persecution sought to 'exclude the excluders' and to remove political and religious dissidents from positions of secular power and from parish vestries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship by Barbara Harris, James Daybell and others has recently highlighted the role played by elite women as custodians of dynastic memory in early modern England. The Dissolution of the Monasteries interrupted the commemorative process and constituted a threat to the mausoleums of the elite. Moving or rebuilding tombs represented, to some extent, a decision to remake or even to rewrite the family's history, a process which it is often assumed was at this time controlled by men. This article, however, through the example of the Howard family, demonstrates that women were equally involved; it investigates why this was so and the mechanics of the processs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Bede did not know the year of Augustine's death, he possessed papal letters which provide sufficient information to deduce it with some confidence. The early epistles from popes which Bede quoted or referred to in the 'Historia ecclesiastica' associated journeys by delegations sent by the early Church in Kent to Rome with the request for, and collection of, the pallium for the new bishop of Canterbury. In this light the likely purpose for the otherwise unexplained visit of Mellitus to Rome in 610 becomes clear: he had come to ask Pope Boniface IV for the pallium for Laurence, following the death of Augustine on 26 May 609. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While historians are familiar with the destruction wrought on the nation's cathedrals during the Civil War, the rather different fate experienced by Westminster Abbey – an important symbolic building that tied together royal and religious authority – has been strangely neglected. This article argues that the Abbey played an important and distinctive role in the religious and cultural politics of the nation during the 1640s and 1650s. It uncovers the Abbey's role in helping to legitimise successive non-monarchical regimes and ultimately explains how efforts to ‘reclaim’ the Abbey at the Restoration formed part of broader efforts to renegotiate and reinterpret the nation's past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1846 a new, greatly expanded, edition of Sir Henry Spelman's History and fate of Sacrilege (1643, published in 1698) appeared, edited anonymously by ‘two priests of the Church of England’. These priests were John Mason Neale and his friend and apparent assistant Joesph Haskoll. The monograph-length introductory essay and other editorial contributions show, as well as vast learning, an aspect of Neale's multi-faceted achievement hitherto unnoticed, that of a stringent critic of great families and other lay people who possessed former church property (Spelman's definition of ‘Sacrilege’) and, more widely, of political and economic conditions in mid nineteenth-century England. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is based on the sermons of the moderate Puritan minister Richard Culverwell, preached in his parish of St Margaret Moses, London, from the mid-1620s to the early 1630s, and recorded in detail by one of his leading parishioners, the fishmonger John Harper. It uses this material to discuss the reception of demanding Calvinist divinity, and to contribute to scholarly debates on the nature and impact of the Laudian regime in London. Although Culverwell continued to preach a Calvinist message, his sermons show a process of adaptation to changing times, and reveal the constraints and tensions that he was facing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Roman Catholics and Puritans declined to swear the ex officio oath, they cited not only legal but also religious arguments. They appealed to their consciences and noted that Scripture disallowed the taking of the Lord's name in vain and the swearing of oaths against truth, justice or judgement. They then argued that the ex officio oath violated these biblical standards. Such arguments were powerful because they rested on the same theory of oath-taking that buttressed the Elizabethan regime's own use of oaths. The Elizabethan authorities could question the application of this theory, but they could not challenge the theory itself, for to do so would risk undermining the very mechanism that they used to enforce the Elizabethan settlement: oaths. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article consists of a detailed study of a series of extraordinary diplomas issued by King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ during the 990s. These diplomas restore lands and rights to churches which had earlier been despoiled by the king and his advisors and their wording indicates that they were intended as a conscious gesture of penitence. As such, the documents were of central political importance and it is argued that they can be fruitfully mined for evidence of Æthelred's own thoughts and feelings in these years; these diplomas might well be considered to preserve Æthelred's own ‘voice’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses and presents instructions given by John Clerk, bishop of Bath and Wells, England, to the clergy in his diocese concerning changes in the liturgy of the Church of England during the English Reformation, following English King Henry VIII's break with the Roman Catholic Church. It examines the policy of Henry VIII's chief minister Thomas Cromwell and comments on efforts to eliminate mentions of papal power and incorporate the doctrine of royal supremacy into the liturgy. The author suggests that the document may be dated to the summer of 1535.

An important way in which the late medieval papacy exercised its authority over the English Church was by granting dispensations, special graces that allowed exceptions to canon law in certain instances, notably permitting marriages between close kin. In 1533 the Dispensations Act forbade Henry VIII's subjects to petition the papacy for favours. But dispensations did not disappear after the break with Rome. The archbishop of Canterbury's Faculty Office continued to issue almost all those previously available from Rome. This article explores the transition to this new office, noting how Cardinal Wolsey's legatine activity in the 1520s prepared the way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The statute 4 Henry VIII, c. 2 denied benefit of clergy for particular crimes to certain offenders, and also modified due process in handling pleas of sanctuary. The statute's possible renewal in the parliament of 1515 triggered a confrontation between the crown and leading churchmen. The passage of the act through the parliament of 1512 illuminates this important episode. The law that was enacted is shown to have differed substantively from the measure that had been proposed. Extensive amendments reveal in what ways the bill provoked controversy. Positions adopted in 1512 may well have rehearsed those assumed three years later. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The statistical analysis of religion in England and Wales usually commences with the mid-nineteenth century. This article synthesises relevant primary and secondary sources to produce initial quantitative estimates of the religious composition of the population in 1680, 1720, 1760, 1800 and 1840. The Church of England is shown to have lost almost one-fifth of its affiliation market share during this period, with an ever increasing number of nominal Anglicans also ceasing to practise. Nonconformity more than quadrupled, mainly from 1760 and especially after 1800. Roman Catholicism kept pace with demographic growth, but, even reinforced by Irish immigration, remained a limited force in 1840. Judaism and overt irreligion were both negligible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article comprises a close analysis of churchyard extensions, closures and new cemetery provision in the English midland counties of Leicestershire and Rutland. It provides a graphic outline of these changes, and so extends cemetery history to rural as well as urban areas. The main periods of change examined are the 1850s, 1880–1900 and from the 1960s to 2010. Such a chronology, and its detailed processes and problems, has not hitherto been available for any region. This highlights the effects of these changes on senses of ‘community’, and their links to processes of secularisation, church viability and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Histories of the English Christmas tend to downplay the role of religion in the development of the modern festival. This article examines the place of religion in the popular celebration of Christmas, as well as the provision of worship offered by the Protestant Churches during the festive season. It argues that although some churchmen viewed Christmas pessimistically as part of a broader battle between sacred and secular, the Churches played an important role in the expansion of the urban public culture of Christmas in the late nineteenth century, whilst the doctrine of the incarnation provided a religious framework for the celebration of childhood and domesticity that the festival had come to embody. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The early nineteenth century saw a turn in Anglican Evangelicalism towards respectability and regularity. The same period paradoxically saw renewed controversy with some High Churchmen while others were more inclined to cooperate with the Evangelical movement. A case study of the early episcopal career of Henry Ryder illuminates this phenomenon, showing that while there were important divisions in doctrine between Evangelicals and High Churchmen, Evangelical innovations in practice proved more radical and controversial and provoked a divided response among their High Church brethren. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The contrast between institutional and popular (or folk) religion is used by some social historians to rebut the sociological secularisation thesis. This article uses a re-examination of religion in the north Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes to consider how some elements of popular religion change with the decline of institutional religion. It concludes by suggesting that, far from enduring despite the decline of the Christian Churches, popular religion is doubly vulnerable to secularisation: it is directly eroded by secularising forces and it is indirectly undermined by the decline of the Churches. Without an institutional core, a popular religious culture cannot be sustained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Medieval funerals combined the accumulation of merit for the soul of the deceased with social display. During the late medieval period funerary practice became more elaborate, formalised and expensive, a reflection of its eschatological and social importance. An extended funeral lasting several weeks, comprising a vigil, procession, liveried mourners, a hearse, heraldic elements, almsgiving and a feast, developed. Several of these elements were repeated a week, a month and a year after death. The late medieval higher clergy shared the same funeral culture as the wealthy laity but with significant differences, particularly greater liturgical sophistication and more generous charity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the mindset and episcopal policy of George Ridding, first bishop of the new diocese of Southwell from 1884 until his death in 1904. Ridding's intellectual formation was rooted in Liberal Anglicanism, and is analysed here through his 'Broad Church' understanding of the Church of England as a comprehensive national Church. His commitment to this ideal is demonstrated through his episcopal charges and speeches, and through elements of the policy of diocesan management that he adopted. A brief evaluation of this policy identifies limitations, as well as continuity with the earlier movement of diocesan reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of the Church of England in the permissive reforms of the 1960s has been neglected. This article examines the Church's part in the campaign for the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council played a key role in setting up the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, and in later campaigns culminating in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. In advocating the separation of crime and sin, senior Anglicans were promoting the secularisation of the criminal law, but many church members opposed this reorientation of Church and State. The importance of the Church of England in homosexual law reform suggests that existing narratives of secularisation and the permissive society need to be revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The act of comforting soon-to-be executed martyrs was a collective and participatory affair in early modern England, but it was Catholics' consolation of dying priests that resonated with a sacramental and doctrinal meaning all its own. This article seeks to highlight the late medieval traditions as well as contemporary Tridentine practices that infused such acts of comfort, particularly as they were negotiated in a time of Catholic persecution and upheaval. Of prime importance in instructing consolers, however, was Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual exercises, which, as this essay argues, provided a guidebook for behaviour and an answer to suffering for priests and followers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the triple biography of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Becket and Thomas More, published by Thomas Stapleton in 1588 and generally regarded as a work of pious hagiography. By focusing on the circumstances in which the book was written and published, the article demonstrates its polemical significance at a time of rapid political change in Catholic/Protestant relations in both England and Europe. Conceived as a Catholic alternative to the history of the Christian past produced by Foxe, Stapleton's book also addressed contested issues within Catholicism: how to deal with the Elizabethan regime, and the status to be accorded to recent martyrs. In answering these questions, Stapleton's views reflect the complexity of Catholic thought at this time, and its fluidity in response to the shifting political circumstances of the late 1580s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on how the prevalence of a standard canon law in the medieval Church could cover immense differences in practice, especially when mortuary custom was at issue. According to the author, a mortuary was an offering given to the parish church when a person died, and this custom was widespread in the northern area. She examines the truth or otherwise of what the parishioners said about the custom. She also concludes that in many parts of the diocese of Durham and Carlisle in England, mortuaries were a heavy burden for some people.

The work of the English Deist Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Marcion in his time, received much negative criticism in England and abroad, especially in Germany. His views aroused comments in books, dissertations and journals. Only in the first half of the twentieth century was he to be praised by theologians such as Adolf von Harnack and Emanuel Hirsch, who likewise disparaged the Old Testament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul's Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with on historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledon's celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Perkins, usually described as an Elizabethan Puritan, was significant in ways that are only beginning to be recognised by historians. His writings, published in numerous editions in England and on the continent and translated into Latin and half a dozen vernacular languages, made him the most prominent English theologian of his clay. This article contends that his career was devoted not to bringing about changes in the Established Church but to making that Church's teachings better known and appreciated. Perkins should be seen as a leading apologist for the Elizabethan Church of England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the seventeenth century several attempts were made to change fundamentally the character of the Church of England founded by Elizabeth I. The innovations introduced by Laud in the 1630s precipitated a civil war and brought to power godly governments which restructured the Church on a Presbyterian model. The amateur theologian, Edward Fisher, opposed this new godly establishment, arguing for the continued celebration of Christmas, and against sabbatarianism and sacramental examination and suspension. His tracts in support of 'Elizabethan Protestantism' proved popular in the 1650s and helped to cement attachment to a more inclusive vision of the English Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the parish ministry of John R. W. Stott as a case study of the resilience of evangelical churches in England in the postwar period. It situates Stott's experience at All Souls in the context of the debates over the reasons for the resilience of conservative Protestantism in the western world, and argues that closer attention to particular historical facts is necessary in order to understand this phenomenon properly. The article suggests that in England in the 1960s secularisation theory became a part of the story it was trying to tell, as it generated anxiety among Christian leaders, like Stott, who were committed to reversing the decline in church attendance in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profiles scholar Robert Barnes of the English Reformation. List of evangelical wills which contained his name; Issues contested in his theology; Sermons for which Barnes was criticized by a conservative priest in London, England in 1537.

Anglican exegesis in the later seventeenth century of Revelation's prophecies demonstrates that apocalyptic ideas continued to hold currency in England after the mid-century period with which they are most often associated, promoting the very civil and ecclesiastical authorities they had previously been used to oppose. Present in the writings of prominent Restoration scholars and churchmen like Henry More, Gryffith Williams and Gilbert Burnet, as well as lesser-known authors, Anglican apocalyptic interpretation dispels the traditionally-held opinion that such convictions lost their power and validity with the decline of radical fortunes, and confirms that apocalyptic thought was not simply a language of disaffection on the political and religious margins of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offering a new interpretation of the sermon 'De ordinatione beati Gregorii anglorum apostoli', a text preserved in Eadmer's 'personal manuscript' (Corpus Christi (College, Cambridge, MS 371), this article argues that the cult of St Gregory the Great was promoted by Archbishop Lanfranc (1070-89) and Archbishop Anselm (1093-1109) in order to undermine the pretensions to apostolic rank of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury. It draws attention to the existence of a hitherto unrecognized but major conflict over apostolic authority that took place in England after the Norman Conquest; a conflict that involved the king as well as Canterbury's most important churchmen. In so doing, this essay contributes, more generally, to our understanding of the roles that the cult of saints and its rhetorical structures played in battles over status and rank order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several issues concerning ritual humiliation in the marketplace as a part of penance from the 13th through the 17th century among churches in England. Explanations on its continuation after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215; Association of shaming with medieval churches; Penance in the early modern market place.