Browse

The importance of the medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis. The monastic superiors of late medieval England ruled over thousands of monks and canons, who swore to them vows of obedience; they were prominent figures in royal and church government; and collectively they controlled properties worth around double the Crown’s annual ordinary income. As guardians of regular observance and the primary interface between their monastery and the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective functioning and well-being of the monastic order. This book provides the first detailed study of English monastic superiors, exploring their evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual chapters examine the election of late medieval monastic heads; the internal functions of the superior as the father of the community; the head of house as administrator; abbatial living standards and modes of display; monastic superiors’ public role in service of the Church and Crown; their external relations and reputation; the interaction between monastic heads and the government in Henry VIII’s England; the Dissolution of the monasteries; and the afterlives of abbots and priors following the suppression of their houses. This study of monastic leadership sheds much valuable light on the religious houses of late medieval England, including their spiritual life, administration, spending priorities, and their multi-faceted relations with the outside world. It also elucidates the crucial part played by monastic superiors in the dramatic events of the 1530s, when many heads surrendered their monasteries into the hands of Henry VIII.

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.

This volume revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England as the ‘Archpriest Controversy’. We argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The published texts which form the core of the arguments involved in this debate survive, as do several caches of manuscript material generated by the dispute. Together they tell us a good deal about the aspirations of the writers and the networks that they inhabited. They also allow us to retell the progress of the dispute both as a narrative and as an instance of contemporary public argument about topics such as the increasingly imminent royal succession, late Elizabethan puritanism, and the function of episcopacy. Our contention is that, if one takes this material seriously, it is very hard to sustain standard accounts of the accession of James VI in England as part of an almost seamless continuity of royal government, contextualized by a virtually untroubled and consensus-based Protestant account of the relationship between Church and State. Nor is it possible to maintain that by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the fraction of the national Church, separatist and otherwise, which regarded itself or was regarded by others as Catholic had been driven into irrelevance.

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-16th century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their reintroduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of changes imposed from above, the laity is revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents — a division later translated into competing protestant views. This book integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws on hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records — especially churchwardens' accounts.

The question of teaching evolution in public schools is a continuing and frequently heated political issue in America. From Tennessee's Scopes Trial in 1925 to recent battles that have erupted in Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and countless other localities, the critics and supporters of evolution have fought nonstop over the role of science and religion in American public life. This book explores the ways in which the evolution debate has reverberated beyond the confines of state legislatures and courthouses. Using extensive research in newspapers, periodicals, and archives, the book shows that social forces such as gender, regionalism, and race have intersected with the debate over evolution in ways that shed light on modern American culture. It investigates, for instance, how antievolutionism deepened the cultural divisions between North and South—northerners embraced evolution as a sign of sectional enlightenment, while southerners defined themselves as the standard bearers of true Christianity. Evolution debates also exposed a deep gulf between conservative Black Christians and secular intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois. The book also explores the ways in which the struggle has played out in the universities, on the internet, and even within the evangelical community. Throughout, the book shows that evolution has served as a weapon, as an enforcer of identity, and as a polarizing force both within and without the churches.

The study explains how Arabic-Islamic scholars, i.e. Muslim scholars writing in Arabic, portrayed medieval Western or ‘Latin-Christian’ Europe between the seventh and the early fifteenth century. At the end of the period of investigation, Western Europe had not only emerged as a dynamic sphere at the brink of becoming active on a global scale, but also as a discernible though roughly defined and multiple phenomenon in Arabic-Islamic sources. Tracing this double process is the main objective of the present study. Chapter 1 questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords ‘ignorance’, ‘indifference’, and ‘arrogance’. Chapter 2 lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter 3 deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters 4 to 8 analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on certain themes, i.e. the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths and the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter 9 provides a concluding re-evaluation.

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

When Martin Luther mounted his challenge to the Catholic Church, reform stimulated a range of responses, including radical solutions such as those proposed by theologians of the Anabaptist movement. But how did ordinary Anabaptists, men and women, grapple with the theological and emotional challenges of the Lutheran Reformation? Anabaptism developed along unique lines in the Lutheran heartlands in central Germany. Here, the movement was made up of scattered groups and did not centre on charismatic leaders as it did elsewhere; ideas were spread more often by word of mouth than by print; and many Anabaptists had uneven attachment to the movement, recanting and then relapsing. Historiography has neglected Anabaptism in this area, since it had no famous leaders and does not seem to have been numerically strong. Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief challenges these assumptions, revealing how Anabaptism’s development in central Germany was fundamentally influenced by its interaction with Lutheran theology. By doing so, it sets a new agenda for understandings of Anabaptism in central Germany, as ordinary individuals created new forms of piety which mingled with ideas about brotherhood, baptism, the Eucharist, and gender and sex. Anabaptism in this region was not an isolated sect but an important part of the confessional landscape of the Saxon lands, and continued to shape Lutheran pastoral affairs long after scholarship assumed it had declined. The choices these Anabaptist men and women made sat on a spectrum of solutions to religious concerns raised by the Reformation. Understanding their decisions, therefore, provides new insights into how religious identities were formed in the Reformation era.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews’ former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created room for cultural innovation and change. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, becoming heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, this book demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as “Jewish” accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary’s collapse, leaving profound effects on Austria’s cultural legacy. By examining the role Jewish difference played in the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, this study reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost when articulated using the terms of Jewish difference.

Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839–1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Throughout this period, Jews remained little more than an afterthought in imperial politics. Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet—as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. This book charts this dramatic reversal, following the changing position of Jews in the empire over the course of half a century.

The Greek Christians expelled from Anatolia between 1912 and 1924 often spoke about earlier times when they ‘lived well with the Turks’. They yearned for the days when they worked and drank coffee together, participated in each other’s festivals, and even revered the same saints and miracle-working shrines. Historians have never given serious regard to such oral traditions, given the refugees had been victims of horrific ‘ethnic’ violence that appeared to reflect deep pre-existing animosities. This book considers the rationality of such unlikely nostalgic traditions, which happen to be common among refugees from dismembered multi-ethnic societies. It claims that intercommunality, a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural difference, normally played a stabilizing function within societies like the Ottoman Empire. Along with a genuine longing for lost homelands, the refugees were nostalgic for moral environments in which religious communities claimed to have lived in accordance with their respective religious and ethical values. Although these traditions depicted worlds that were implausibly pristine, the intention was to counter the dominant but spurious national narrative, which reviled Turks as irredeemable barbarians and dismissed these refugee histories of coexistence as pure fantasy. Drawing largely from an oral archive containing 5,000 interviews, the book investigates the mentalities, cosmologies and value systems of these ordinary Anatolians, and shows how their popular perspectives pose serious challenges to the historiography. The book also examines the role of political violence in destroying this Ottoman society, and the way it effectively transformed these Anatolians into Greeks and Turks.

The Reformation was about ideas and power: but it was also about real human lives. This book provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between c. 1530-1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism. Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, it explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. It examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food and tears. This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal. The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. The book shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.

What did early-modern Britons know about Muslim peoples and societies, Islam as a theology, and Islamic lands? This book explores interactions between Britain and the Islamic world from 1558 to 1713, showing how scholars, diplomats, traders, captives, travellers, clerics, and chroniclers developed and described those interactions. Queen Elizabeth I initiated diplomatic and commercial relations with the Islamic world. The early trading Companies received her royal charter, taking Britons to Islamic states in North Africa and the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. We end with the Peace of Utrecht of 1713, by which time the British had become masters of the sea routes that made future empire possible. During this period Britons met Muslims for the first time since the Crusades and re-examined their understanding of Islam. These encounters brought about changes in British national identity and Britain's international role. This book illustrates the wide range of interactions and exposures, sources and texts, people and objects, that were instrumental in that process. It examines Islam and Muslims in English thought, and how British monarchs dealt with supremely powerful Muslim rulers. It documents the importance of diplomatic and mercantile encounters, and shows how captives spread unreliable information about Islam and Muslims. It investigates observations by travellers and clergymen who reported meetings with Jews, eastern Christians, Armenians and Shi'ites. And it traces how trade and the exchange of material goods with the Islamic world shaped how people in Britain lived their lives and thought about themselves.

The purpose of this book is to explore the relationship between British Jewry and Zionism from 1936 to 1956, during a, if not the, crucial period in modern Jewish history, encompassing both the shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel. The book attempts to provide an answer to what, at first sight, appears as a contradiction, the undoubted prominence Zionism had reached among British Jews by the end of the period under investigation on the one hand and its diverse expressions, ranging from aliyah to making a donation to a Zionist fund, on the other. The main argument put forward in this book is that the ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry is best understood as a particularly complex, but not untypical variant of the nineteenth- and twentieth‐century trend to reimagine communities in a national key. The book explores the relationship between British Jewry and Zionism on three levels, the transnational Jewish sphere of interaction, the British‐Jewish community, and the place of the Jewish community in British state and society. The introduction adapts theories of nationalism so as to provide a framework of analysis for diaspora Zionism. Part I addresses the question of why British Jews became Zionists, Part II how the various quarters of British Jewry related to the Zionist project in the Middle East, Part III Zionist nation-building in Britain, and Part IV the impact of Zionism on Jewish relations with the larger society. The Conclusion modifies the original argument by emphasizing the impact that the specific fabric of British state and society, in particular the Empire, had on British Zionism.

This is the first book to examine one of Europe's largest Protestant communities in Hungary and Transylvania. It highlights the place of the Hungarian Reformed church in the international Calvinist world, and reveals the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society. Calvinism attracted strong support in Hungary and Transylvania, where one of the largest Reformed churches was established by the early seventeenth century. Understanding of the Hungarian Reformed church remains the most significant missing element in the analysis of European Calvinism. The Hungarian Reformed church survived on narrow ground between the Habsburgs and Turks, thanks to support from Transylvanian princes and local nobles. They worked with Reformed clergy to maintain contact with western co-religionists, to combat confessional rivals, to improve standards of education and to impose moral discipline. However, there were also tensions within the church over further reforms of public worship and church government, and over the impact of puritanism. This book examines the development of the Hungarian church within the international Calvinist community, and the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society.

This book evaluates the role of the Catholic Church in mediating conflict situations, with the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ acting as a case study. Until surprisingly recently the only accounts of the Irish Catholic Church during this period were written by Irish priests and bishops and were commemorative, rather than analytical, in intent. During the conflict, these individuals often worked behind the scenes, acting as go-betweens for the British government and republican paramilitaries, with the aim of bringing about a peaceful solution. In addition, this study explores the impact of the English Catholic Church on the conflict and provides a broad analysis of key themes in the history of the Catholic Church during the ‘Troubles’. It argues for an entangled approach to this history, maintaining that we must study the actions of the American, Irish, and English Catholic Churches, as well as that of the Vatican, to uncover the full impact of the Church on the conflict. A critical analysis of previously neglected state documents alongside Irish and English Catholic Church archival material changes our perspective on the role of a religious institution in a modern conflict. Author-conducted interviews with leading priests, women religious, bishops, former paramilitaries, community organizers, and politicians add colour and nuance to the debate.