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This text provides a comprehensive study of music and musicians at the medieval collegiate church of St Omer. The author, Andrew Kirkman, examines various aspects of the church's musical activities, including the training of young singers, the production and repair of liturgical and musical books, and the interaction between human voices, bells, and organs. Although no musical sources from St Omer have survived, Kirkman's analysis of the church's archives sheds light on the social, political, and ecclesiastical structures of the institution. The text emphasizes the cultural significance of music in the church and its role in religious ceremonies. While there are some minor errors and omissions, the overall study is valuable and engaging for researchers interested in medieval music. [Extracted from the article]

"Love spells and lost treasure: Service magic in England from the later Middle Ages to the early modern era" by Tabitha Stanmore is a groundbreaking book that expands the source base on English magic. Stanmore examines the practice of "service magic," which was magic done in the service of others. She argues that service magic was a common and accepted practice, condemned by the church but viewed as useful or necessary by most people. The book provides statistical analysis and explores the social dynamics and perceptions of magic in different contexts, including popular society and the social elite. Stanmore's work raises questions for further research, such as the relationship between service magic and self-interested magic, the comparison with continental material, and the connection between service magic and witchcraft. While the book has strengths, such as its rich source base and nuanced analysis, it also has weaknesses, including garbled Latin texts and unnecessary quarrels with other scholars. Overall, "Love spells and lost treasure" offers valuable insights into the history of English magic. [Extracted from the article]

"The Visitation of Hereford Diocese in 1397" is a book edited by Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick that provides a detailed record of visitation proceedings in late medieval England. The book contains nearly 1,400 individual responses from over 250 parishes and vills, offering valuable insights into the social and religious life of the time. The responses reveal failings in the clergy's cure of souls and also shed light on the sins and sexual misconduct of both clergy and laity. The editors note that while there are accusations of various offenses, there is an absence of accusations of heresy and sodomy. The book is considered an important resource for understanding popular religious experience during this period. [Extracted from the article]

In July 2007, a disastrous flood struck Gloucestershire, in the southwest of England. The Grade I listed church of St Michael and All Angels in Tirley was inundated, resulting in its interior and churchyard being extensively damaged. Despite the disastrous flooding and the distress caused, Tirley's church congregation, supported by the local community, the insurance company and many historic building professionals, resolved to renew their church. Their traumatic experience has presented opportunities to make the building more fit for purpose and more resilient to future flood events. It has deepened a sense of belonging and the valuing of heritage in the community and has ensured the historical continuity of the church and its many stories. Proactive planning will play a major part in facing up to future climate change-related challenges at Tirley church. New research is being planned to examine the effectiveness of existing flood mitigation measures, the overall condition of the building fabric and the church site. The anticipated outcome of this work is a bespoke Flood Impact and Protection Management Plan which will include a set of recommendations, which can be adopted to bolster flood resilience of this historic church, as well as other churches dealing with similar challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the maintenance of National Heritage Anglican churches in Malaysia. A field survey is presented, describing the current defects of selected Anglican churches in Malaysia and proposing maintenance practices against the identified defects. The neglect in maintaining Anglican churches is alarming. The survey revealed that, aside from routine housekeeping, the majority of the churches surveyed had little to no regular maintenance. As the studied Anglican churches are Malaysian's National Heritage, the study adopted AHP and ANP to determine the relative importance of building discipline and space type inside a church, ensuring that the maintenance shall not neglect the values of these entities. Collectively, the in-situ survey results, the maintenance practices recommended by past literature, and the relative importance of building discipline and space type were used to propose a maintenance plan. Instead of generalising areas inside a church, different areas within a church are weighted differently in terms of importance levels, especially due to the fact that churches have a substantially different occupancy rate than conventional buildings. With the proposed hierarchy, priority might be given to the most vital areas first. In addition, church assets differ from those of other types of buildings, and their features should not be addressed in the same way. The research gives an improved asset hierarchy for churches based on the findings of multicriteria decision-making analysis. With this hierarchy in place, building custodians or maintenance personnel may find it easier to prioritise maintenance activities at churches, especially when financial is often limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article considers attacks on reredoses in the late Victorian Church of England with the objective of placing such controversies within the context of anti-idolatry and anti-ritualism campaigns of the period. By doing so it seeks to rectify the lack of focus in the historiography on how the ritualist controversy affected discussion of changes to church architecture. In particular, by using local newspapers, it extends consideration of the reredos issue beyond the two main cases, namely those of Exeter and St Paul's cathedrals. It argues that the reredos cases provide a powerful tool for considering how the Church of England moved towards a more 'catholic' position on ornamentation during this period, showing how it became impossible for the more Protestant members of the Church to prevent what they saw as the 'Romanization' of ecclesiastical spaces. This was part of a broader process by which ornamentation was coming to be accepted on purely aesthetic terms, and not as a challenge to the theology of the Church of England. It further assesses the significance of the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 in relation to cases involving church fabric, arguing that the introduction of the bishops' veto had only limited practical effects on such disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The earliest standing fabric of the church of St Leonard, Southminster, is the early-12th-century nave, but the place-name betrays earlier origins. It was almost certainly the minster of Denesige mentioned in the will of Bishop Theodred of London of 942 x 951, but the former may have been founded in the early 8th century, when an earlier bishop of London, Ingwald, was granted a substantial amount of land in the Dengie Peninsula in eastern Essex in which Southminster is situated. Though test-pitting at Southminster has failed to reveal Anglo-Saxon pottery, metal detecting has revealed a number of sceattas nearby. Moreover, neighbouring Asheldham, which has produced middle Saxon ceramic, may have been a 'home farm' of Southminster. The latter was one of a number of 'directional' minsters in Essex and Kent named from their compass direction in relation to a parent minster. It is suggested that these were founded as a form of 'outreach' near to what were already community foci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This new biography of Huldrych Zwingli by one of the world's leading experts on the history of the Swiss Reformation is a welcome and important contribution to the fields of early modern European history and theology. This includes John Calvin, whom Gordon claims was much more heavily influenced by Zwingli than he, Calvin, ever admitted. Gordon asserts that the only work by Zwingli that can be considered systematic was his I Commentary on True and False Religion i (1525), and he therefore dedicates an entire chapter in the middle of the biography to it. [Extracted from the article]

Ward Clavier does acknowledge the "fictive elements" in what is sometimes presented as an automatic or natural conservatism, and that the gentry's historical culture was "not fixed and inflexible", but the discussions of this culture are rather nebulous. This wide-ranging and vigorously argued account of the political and religious culture of the gentry of Flintshire and Denbighshire (north-east Wales) crosses the historiographical divide of the Restoration, to fruitful effect. The Reformation in Wales is not presented as a rupture, although the Protestant Welsh gentry had close links of kinship and friendship with neighbours who practiced the Catholic "old faith". [Extracted from the article]

The article describes an exhibition at the Augustinermuseum Freiburg about the St. Blasien Monastery on the occasion of the 300th birthday of Prince Abbot Martin II Gerbert. Under his leadership, the St. Blasien Monastery was a center of spiritual, intellectual, and cultural life. The exhibition presents 177 art objects and exhibits, including the Adelheid Cross, which is considered particularly valuable. The exhibition catalog provides an overview of the history of the monastery and the impact of Benedictine life. The volume also includes contributions on the medieval reception of the Benedictine Rule, church music maintenance, and book production. The exhibition also showcases the downfall of the St. Blasien Monastery and the renewal of Benedictine monasticism in St. Paul and Kloster Beuron. The catalog offers extensive documentation and is available at an affordable price. [Extracted from the article]

The central role of the Church of England is mission and ministry and the strategy of the Church's Cathedrals and Church Buildings Division is to support buildings for mission. Over three quarters of the Church of England's 15,700 church buildings are listed, although the Church is not a heritage organisation. Discussions on conservation of church heritage focus on the buildings: conservation of historic interiors is rarely explicitly mentioned, which is not surprising given the uneasy relationship the Church of England has with religious imagery. The implicit nature of discussions makes it difficult to unpick the impact of conservation of historic church interiors as part of the whole, which in turn has implications on the allocation of resources to their conservation. This paper discusses the current research project that is exploring conservation for mission of the Church's historic interiors. It interrogates the real questions asked by parishioners: 'How does the conservation of a monument help the mission of a church?', 'How does maintenance of a mechanical church turret clock aid mission?' Development of this discourse centred around objects in situ will help to strengthen the relationship between objects and buildings conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to "renew" the historical building heritage and, therefore, the possibility of introducing innovative technologies and components capable of ensuring its optimal performance pose the difficult question of assessing whether technological intervention for sustainable performance adaptability should be considered a "threat," while acknowledging that it efficiently helps to safeguard an existing historical building in the long-term and to preserve its cultural value over time. This article presents the case study for the diagnostics, evaluation and maintenance of the Church of S. Giovanni Battista in Florence, designed by G. Michelucci after the catastrophic event of 2015 that partly destroyed its roof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite drawing being the first-hand work of the architect, there has not been enough discussion about where architectural drawings and models belong, and the ways in which they move and develop between sites of production, storage, and revision. It is often assumed that the mobility of drawings in the Renaissance period implied the possibility of action at a distance, allowing the architect to be absent from the fabrication site. Earlier Medieval practices of incised stone drawings and plaster drawings traced on floors determined the immobility of drawings, which made them integral parts of the building and assured the presence of the architect. However, an alternate reading is possible, which is that immovable drawings and the presence of models freed the architect, because the tools that guide construction were, in fact, in situ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the history of the Methodist population in the town of Cane Hill in Washington County, Arkansas with focus on its former church, referred to today as the Methodist Manse. Topics covered include the findings of an in-depth archaeological investigations undertaken before the restoration of the Federal-style brick structure built in 1834, the unusual attributes of the Manse, such as its extended foundation, and evidence about the fire at the church.

Sustainability commonly denotes an integration of economic, societal, and environmental domains giving rise to the concept of livable built environment. Progressively, environmental consideration in low carbon repair appraisal for heritage buildings has become increasingly critical and this paper supports this expanding area. This paper gives insight on how 'Green Maintenance' concept and methodology was adopted to appraise low carbon repair works for laterite stones of St Paul's Church, located at the Historical City of Melaka, Malaysia. Subsequently, this paper also highlights the common techniques and materials for laterite stones repair. This has been achieved through quantification of embodied carbon expenditure expended in laterite stones repair within 'cradle-to-site' boundary of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), using formulaic expression and calculation procedure of 'Green Maintenance' model. The calculation procedures of the model were adopted to enable the evaluation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, in terms of embodied carbon expenditure, expended from laterite stones repair for selected case study. The results revealed that stone replacement is considered as the most sustainable repair technique, mainly due to its high longevity of repair and low embodied carbon expenditure, in terms of generated Environmental Maintenance Impact (EMI) of 'Green Maintenance' modelling. However, it may lead to a further discussion in term of philosophical context. As guidance, the EMI model relays the true value of CO2 emissions, contextualised within the longevity of repair and minimal intervention that allows low carbon repair appraisal within livable built environment domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than four decades, a variety of theologians from different backgrounds and different points of departure have argued that the language we use in reference to God and humanity should be inclusive of different genders and that exclusive language has harmful consequences. Yet, it persists because of, in part, the argument that inclusive language, specifically in reference to God, is forced and awkward and also because it is considered as an existential concern to only a minority. This article examines the persistence of gender-exclusive language in theology as an unfinished dimension of church reformation. This includes the language of theological imagery, metaphors, grammar, theological research, books used to teach theological students, academic papers at conferences, sermons, devotional texts, liturgies and church hymns. In reference to a justification of gender-exclusive language made by theologian Klaus Nürnberger in one of his recent (2016) publications, this article will provide an overview of the issues involved in debate about theology, language and gender in order to illustrate that exclusive language and its effects have become normalised, and therefore it is invisible. Therefore, the time has come for a status confessionis about gender-exclusive language. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article brings theological discourse into discussion with linguistic studies, gender studies, hermeneutic studies and theological anthropology. It also explores the relationship between religion and religious language in general. It impacts systematic theological conceptions of 'God' and challenges metaphysical descriptions of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the postmodern crisis faced by Christian churches, highlighting the efforts of Saint Francis of Assisi to repair damaged churches. Christianity in the postmodern West has reportedly been undergoing a major upheaval which include declining membership and participation. Topics include repairs of church buildings, Christian spirituality, and tradition as a source of Christian theology.

This article provides the main outcomes obtained downstream from a survey concerning the damage to 64 three-nave masonry churches in Abruzzi resulting from the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. First, they are classified according to the typological, structural, and architectural features. Next, the main failure mechanisms observed in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 earthquake are identified and analyzed, taking into account both the global structural response and the local mechanisms involving specific parts of the churches. Damage related to the local mechanisms is classified by means of scores based on both the severity and extension of the revealed cracks. The single scores are combined to define an index measuring the global damage of each church. Such indices are therefore associated with six damage levels, the frequencies of which are organized into damage probability matrices. These matrices can be used in order to quantitatively evaluate the damage scenarios that the studied population of buildings revealed after the seismic event, as well as to predict the damage level that could be expected on similar churches for future earthquakes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the views of Swedish government authorities on the heating of historic churches in Sweden between 1918 and 1975. Particular focus is given to how this relates to the conservation of art objects in these churches. Additional topics discussed include insights on the maintenance of Church buildings in Sweden, medieval and early modern churches in Sweden and insights on various heating systems used in Sweden in the 20th-century.

The paper presents results of long-term monitoring of structural displacements in the historical presbytery in St. Ann’s Church in Ząbkowice Śląskie (Poland), which was carried out from 2009 to 2013. The monitoring involved periodic HDS 3D (High-Definition Surveying 3D) laser scanning coupled with analysis of the status and scope of conservation work completed. The church was built at the turn of the 14th century. Following a long period of neglect, conservation work was initiated to restore this valuable historical monument. Recognition of the historical value of the building meant that conservation work was preceded with a HDS 3D laser scan of the whole interior of the church. Data from scanning provided geometry information, which formed basis for a numerical analysis (FEM) conducted prior to repair work. It was decided that the oldest and most damaged part of the church – its presbytery – would be monitored in the years following repair work in order to observe conservation effects. Methods used for strengthening and consolidation of cracked brick walls and vaults of the presbytery involved application of steel tie rods, as well as C-FRP (Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer) and C-FRCM (Carbon Fibre Reinforced Cementitious Matrix) technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Ottoman period, the wood replaced the marble in the interior decoration of the Orthodox churches. In outward appearance, the churches were imposed to be poor and humble and for that reason the faithful followers emphasized in the enrichment of the interior decoration of their churches, therefore, the carved wooden furnishing constituted a key operating supplement of the churches. The population growth and the economic development of Greeks in the early 19th century provided the basis for a period of prosperity in the construction and repair of churches in Thessaloniki. Only seven of the twelve post-Byzantine churches built or repaired in the old part of Thessaloniki in the last period of the Ottoman occupation, survive today. In this study, an attempt of evaluation and record of the wooden interior decoration that has survived and continues to remain in these churches has been made. In five of these churches and in one monastery survives wooden decoration which includes iconostasis, despotic thrones, pulpits, icon stands and ceilings. Although, this decoration that exists today is quite limited, it corresponds to various decorative techniques of wood utilization. The condition of these wooden artworks is relatively good, they are still in use in a safe and dry environment of a church interior and they are under protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the reconstruction of the church that was dedicated or consecrated around 1088. We have used the documents found in the monastery, mainly descriptions from the 16th and especially the 18th century, and other information provided by some monks from Silos in the 17th century. To this, we must add the reinterpretation of the archaeological remains, together with the information in the Memoriae Silenses. From all this, we propose the chronology of the church and its relation with the general plan of the Romanesque monastery. Based on archaeological information from the north wall of the church and the foundations of the tower, together with the descriptions from when the building was demolished in 1761 and information from coins, we are able to conjecture about the date and characteristics of the building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores behavioural norms and consequences of their transgression during Mainline Protestant and Catholic church services in the Northeastern United States. We utilize Erving Goffman's essay "On Face-Work" as our primary theoretical orientation. Based on fieldwork conducted at twelve different churches in two Northeastern states, we found multiple types of social disruptions, sanctions, and attempted repairs occurring in services. Our findings highlight the normative complexity of religious services and have implications for a variety of collective endeavours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the fluidities and stabilities of urban materiality by looking at the ongoing emergence of a 300-year-old church in central Manchester. The notion of assemblages is utilised to investigate how places, such as the building featured here, are simultaneously destroyed and altered by numerous agencies, and stabilised by repair and replacement building material. By examining the vital properties of stone and the particular non-human agents that act upon the stony fabric of the building, I explore some of the processes that render matter continuously emergent. I subsequently consider the consequences of these material transformations by looking at how they promote the enrolment of two human processes of spatial (re)ordering, the forging of connections between the city and sites of stone supply, and the changing and contested process of repair and maintenance. I argue that by acknowledging complexity, historical depth and geographical scale, non-human and human entanglements, and ambiguity, we might write accounts that do justice to the emergence, contingency and unpredictability in a world of innumerable agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]