Ecclesiastical History Research Articles

Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church by Ian Forrest

Reviewed by: Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church by Ian Forrest J. A. T. Smith Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2018) xiii, 502 pp. Trustworthy Men is Ian Forrest’s second book, after The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (2005), and, in many ways, it picks up where Forrest left off in his previous study. In The Detection of Heresy, Forrest argues that viri fidedigni, trustworthy [lay]men, played a prominent role in the prosecution of heresy because they were the initial source of reports of theological errancy. In Trustworthy Men, Forrest once again examines the relationship of the viri fidedigni and the bishops with whom they worked, but this time he widens the scope and examines all aspects of the episcopal-fidedignus relationship, spiritual as well as material. Forrest, self-consciously interdisciplinary in approach, insists on a synthetic narrative that joins social history, ecclesiastical history, economic history, and most importantly, the history of ideas. The idea at the center of Forrest’s book is trust and its determination by personal credibility in the absence of direct knowledge. The viri fidedigni, or trustworthy men, as prominent members of the community, were first to be called upon by English bishops to report on and provide testimony as synodal witnesses about a wide variety of local issues during visitations or inquests (i.e. inquisitions), from transfer of willed property to the maintenance of the church and the quality of the parish priest. These men, therefore, were instrumental to the day-to-day governance of the Church at a time when episcopal governments were itinerant and needed to depend on local knowledge to exercise judgment in matters of faith and conduct. Trustworthy men allowed bishops to negotiate geographic distance as well as local culture. Forrest terms this dynamic the “social church” with an emphasis on the complex nature of interaction, which, though fundamentally hierarchical in nature, was not a one-way or top-down system. Trustworthy men benefited as [End Page 216] much from the bishops’ dependency on the information that they supplied as did the bishops themselves. Therefore, while the picture provided reaffirms a view of medieval society in which most social capital is held exclusively by men and the well-to-do, it is also one that depicts power as geographically distributed among parishes and arising out of a collaboration between a multitude of lay people and their episcopal leaders, and not as emanating from a few urban centers and a handful of very powerful bishops. Forrest highlights how this system reinforces the power of a social elite and separates the merely faithful from those who are both faithful and trustworthy, i.e. those who have enough social capital to raise an issue for formal consideration or whose collective testimony could establish sufficient truth about a situation. The book is divided into four parts and fourteen chapters—three chapters in each of the first three parts and five chapters in the final. The three chapters of Part I, Late Medieval Cultures of Trust, address three different medieval cultures of trust: faith in God, trust in legal relationships, and trust in personal ones. In many respects, the first chapter is the most tenuously related to the rest of the book. While the people involved may be people of faith, the book is largely about the cultivation of trust as a necessary component to governance and not about religious faith as such. That is, a person’s greater faith did not necessarily confer greater trust unless that faith corresponded with other worldly measures of trust. Part II, Identifying the Trustworthy Men addresses the important question, “How and when do institutions trust the people?” (92). It begins with a systematic survey of the rise of and application of the term fidedignus in the legal sphere followed by a description of how bishops interpreted the term. The section finishes with a series of case studies of those local elites in which Forrest establishes that, as one would expect, the fidedigni were usually older, from the same families one generation to the next, local office-holders, landholders, and wealthier...

Creating an »Orthodox« Past: Georgian Hagiography and the Construction of a Denominational Identity

In the early Middle Ages, Georgia consisted of two kingdoms. The western part was called Egrisi by the local inhabitants, and Lazica by the Byzantines and to the east of the Likhi range of mountains was Kartli, known as Iberia to outsiders. Egrisi was ruled from Constantinople for much of this period with vassal overlords, but Kartli was harder to control and its leaders often played the Byzantine and Persian Empires off against each other in order to maintain some autonomy over their territories. Until the early seventh century Kartli was under the religious jurisdiction of the Armenian Catholicos and officially non-Chalcedonian (miaphysite), but at the Council of Dvin in 610 the Kartvelians rejected Armenian ecclesiastical authority and declared an autocephalous Georgian Church. This new Church joined the Chalcedonian fold and accepted the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople.One of the defining events of Georgian ecclesiastical history is the arrival of the Thirteen (As)Syrian Fathers in Kartli in the sixth century. The vitae of these shadowy figures and their origins and doctrinal beliefs are still rigorously disputed today. The information given (or deliberately obscured) in eighth and ninth century accounts of the (As)Syrian Fathers is crucial for our understanding of how Kartvelian confessional identity evolved and was conflated with ideas of Kartvelian nationhood. This paper will explore the construction of Kartvelian national identity through the lens of ecclesiastical history and examine how past events, in particular the narrative of the (As)Syrian Fathers, were deliberately obfuscated in the quest to create an »Orthodox‹ past.

Opening the Canon of Martyr Narratives: Pre-Decian Martyrdom Discourse and the Hypomnēmata of Hegesippus

Scholarship on early Christian martyrdom has long relied on a canon of narratives published in collections of texts. This article probes the shortcomings of this canon through the test case of the "apocryphal" martyr narratives of Hegesippus, a later second-century writer known through Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. As seen in collections of martyr narratives published from 1901 to 2017, as well as Adolf von Harnack's programmatic surveys of the genre, texts were canonized based on historical reliability (especially through claims to eyewitness testimony), on being stand-alone texts, and on describing persecution by Roman imperial agents. Since most scholars now reject older paradigms of historical reliability and genre, and investigate discourses rather than events, Hegesippus's narratives—which were not eyewitness accounts, were embedded in a longer text, and involve Jewish persecutors—should enter the canon. The article concludes with two suggestions about how Hegesippus can enrich current scholarship. First, Hegesippus shows that the term martys did not unambiguously mean "martyr" until at least the third century. And second, Hegesippus's famous martyrdom of James the brother of Jesus features distinctively Pythagorean traits, constituting a different kind of philosophical martyr than the Stoic or Socratic martyrs of canonical narratives.

Paul and the Gift: A Mirror for Our Protestant Faces

Paul and the Gift:A Mirror for Our Protestant Faces Matthew J. Thomas John Barclay's Paul and the Gift is a monumental work, one that will represent a landmark for later generations of scholars who tell the story of how the Apostle's theology has been understood.1 In a book replete with valuable Pauline analysis and insights, there are three points in particular that have left an enduring impression on me, the first two of which I believe are major achievements. First, Barclay shows that while E. P. Sanders is right that grace is everywhere in Second Temple Jewish sources, it is not everywhere in the same way; as Barclay's study makes eminently clear, it is essential to understand how grace functions in different sources, not simply to note that it is present. Second, Barclay demonstrates that contrary to modern notions, ancient conceptions of gift do not imply noncircularity, and to project this onto Paul is anachronistic; the difference between wage and gift is not circular versus noncircular, but that gift implies (and creates!) relationship with the giver. The third point is a curiosity, and it is the one that I wish to reflect on here. No doubt the first two points will be rightly recalled by posterity as more significant, but it is the third that has recurred to me most often in the months since finishing Paul and the Gift. Imagine an academic volume of Church history, one that tells the story of Christian thought by examining key figures in the faith. Say that in [End Page 229] covering the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history, this volume engages precisely two figures, and that these two figures are Marcion and Augustine, those most commonly identified by later claimants as proto-Protestants. Imagine that this history then devoted the vast majority of its space to covering the five hundred years since the Reformation, featuring nine key players and a host of minor ones, and that apart from the occasional atheist, all of these were Protestants as well. Within the field of ecclesiastical history, to label such a volume as a Christian history at all would be impossible; it might be a confessional or denominational work of some sort, but with such a scope no one could regard it as actually representative of Christian thought. But if one does quite the same thing in the field of biblical studies, hardly anyone blinks an eye—for in its lengthy historical survey of Christian interpretation on Pauline grace, this is precisely the framework that Barclay's volume adopts. Modern academic biblical studies operates under an assumption of confessional neutrality, in which our judgments are thought to be characterized by a disinterested fairness to all sides. And Barclay himself is well-attuned to how this is often an illusion, with our standard evaluative standpoints actually reflecting smuggled-in theological assumptions. For example, in responding to common objections that Second Temple Jews diluted grace by including "recompense," Barclay astutely notes that such critiques take for granted a particular understanding of grace: "What is not considered is whether grace and recompense may be a perfectly normal combination in antiquity (gift to the worthy, gift as reward). As we have seen, this is not a self-contradiction; it simply entails that grace is not perfected as an incongruous gift, as espoused by Augustine and in the Protestant tradition" (169; italics original; see also 211). Barclay similarly defends Philo against his scholarly detractors by shedding light on the Protestant framework that underlies their judgments: If we rid ourselves of the assumption that divine grace is, by definition, given to the unworthy, an assumption that (for ideological reasons) makes one perfection of grace its defining characteristic, it is perfectly possible to hail Philo as a profound theologian of grace, even though he does not perfect its incongruity. As we have seen, there are good reasons why Philo finds God to give to the 'worthy,' reasons that have nothing to do with 'synergism,' 'legalism,' 'works-righteousness,' or other such categories. (238; italics original) [End Page 230] Likewise, Barclay pinpoints the confessional paradigm that leads to scholarly critiques of 4 Ezra's conception of grace according...

Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity by Jennifer Barry

Reviewed by: Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity by Jennifer Barry Alexander B. Miller Jennifer Barry. Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 224 pp. The rapid succession of emperors in the fourth century resulted in a proliferation of church councils, with opposing bishops cowed into submission or exiled. In this work, Barry does not attempt to untangle the theological debates. Rather, she asks why some bishops can wear the sentence of exile as a badge of orthodoxy while it is a badge of shame for others. This is a study in the discourse of exile, as it "constructs, contests, and preserves orthodox identity in both ancient and contemporary works" (introduction). In Barry's argument, the discourse of exile is a matter of tying a bishop to or distancing him from geographical "beacon[s] of orthodoxy" (chaps. 2–4) like Alexandria or Constantinople. Barry's introduction is a succinct overview of the classical and ecclesiastical histories of exilic discourse. Classical writers described exile as social death, reprieve from politics, and the exile of the res publica itself. Within the church, imperial persecution elicited both Tertullian's call for martyrdom and Cyprian's defense of the cautious bishop-in-hiding. Athanasius' case (chap. 1) introduces many of the themes for the remainder of the book. Barry helpfully reminds us that exile is a reference not only to punishment but also to a point of origin. When Alexandria was a bastion of orthodox worship (a "model city"), Athanasius's exile was painful, but he maintained a virtual presence (and authority) through correspondence. When Alexandria was overrun by "heretics" and "schismatics," Athanasius described the desert as a refuge for the persecuted church. Finally, when Athanasius fled from imperial censure into the desert, his language shifted to flight as ascetic anachoresis (withdrawal), not cowardice. In this scenario, Athanasius's desert is a heterotopia, a Foucauldian term for a counter-space that allows one to reflect on the ideal values of another space. The Life of Antony depicts the desert as an ideal city [End Page 242] juxtaposed against "Arian" Alexandria, but Athanasius's victorious return to Alexandria bearing the mantle of Antony ultimately proved his orthodoxy. In chapters 2 and 3, we learn that Gregory Nazianzen appealed to the ascetic memories of Athanasius and Basil to defend his own brief flight after ordination, and Chrysostom maintained authority through his epistolary network, imagined the city of Constantinople going into exile with him, and as his death in exile drew near, cast all of Christian existence as a state of exile in a strange world. These first three chapters yield the greatest reward. Barry's readings of Athanasius, Gregory, and Chrysostom are explicitly informed by critical and spatial theory, but by keeping close to the texts at all times, this remains a book about church history, not an exercise in theory. She impresses upon the reader that geography (whence and whither one is sent) is integral to the sentence of exile and its interpretation, rather than incidental. Through her attention to chronology and shifting doctrinal and political debates, Barry fruitfully parses the polyvalence of exilic discourse to account for the "victories" of both bishops who return to their orthodox sees and those who die in exile. In the second half of the book, Barry tests her theory that writers in the fifth century linked one's orthodoxy to association with "holy" cities and distance from suspect ones. Chrysostom's biographers lobbied for his posthumous return to Constantinople by pinning his exile on an imperial betrayal of the city's orthodoxy (chap. 4). Eusebius of Nicomedia, once exiled as an ally of Arius, died as archbishop of Constantinople, but his memory was bound to Nicomedia, its pro-Arian past, and his exile from it (chap. 5). Finally, Meletius of Antioch appears to have an orthodox record: he baptized Chrysostom, opposed the Arian party, and supported Gregory Nazianzen. Nonetheless, he found himself in a state of schism with Paulinus, the Alexandrian candidate for the see of Antioch, and the nearest sympathetic historians can place him after death is just outside of Antioch with the relics of St...

In saecula saeculorum

AbstractThis article offers a personal perspective on religious history after the institutionalisation of this field in the History Department at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2015. In essence and method, religious history is like history of religion(s). In German and Dutch, one can speak of Religionsgeschichte or religiegeschiedenis/godsdienstgeschiedenis. Different terms are in use in English and French, reflecting the different traditions in the disciplines of theology and history. History of religion(s)/histoire des religions is commonly associated with comparative studies of (non-Christian) religions, while religious history/histoire religieuse developed as a specialisation within general history (mostly concerned with Christianity and therefore close to what is known as church history or ecclesiastical history). While understanding religious history as general history with a focus on the religious factor in cultural, social, and political realities, various research traditions should be converged and integrated by means of conceptual exchange, cross-disciplinary approaches, and linked scholarly networks. Given the interest in global dimensions and long-term developments, computer-assisted research of digitalised sources is recommended for doing religious history today.

Between history and hagiography: Eadmer of Canterbury's vision of the Historia novorum in Anglia

ABSTRACTWritten between c.1093 and the end of the 1120s, Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia novorum in Anglia is one of the best-known sources for the study of Anglo-Norman political, ecclesiastical and cultural history. This article explores the identity of the text as it developed in Eadmer's own mind. While modern scholars have placed the Historia novorum within the development of English national historiography, Eadmer showed no desire for his work to be received in this way. Instead, Eadmer's Historia was profoundly influenced by his extensive experience in writing the lives and miracles of saints. The Historia novorum occupies a space between history and hagiography, which successfully redeployed Eadmer's experiences of writing the past through hagiography, in order to produce an innovative and unique example of the genre of medieval historiography.

How the Bad Guys Won

How the Bad Guys Won Peter Heinegg Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. By John W. O'Malley, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 307 pp. $24.95 Needless to say, the urbane, scholarly, serenely judicious Father O'Malley (now 91, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University, and perhaps best known for his Trent: What Happened at the Council, 2013) would never use the crude colloquialism “bad guys.” But his precise, immaculate account of the events leading up to the official definition of papal infallibility by Pius IX (1792‐1878) in the “Dogmatic Constitution” Pastor Aeternus (1870) shows that this was more than a dreadful theological‐philosophical mistake. It was the signal triumph of a period of deeply conservative Vatican ideology and control that would continue until at least the Second Vatican Council (1962‐1965) and is still far from over. The now canonized reactionary Pius X (1835‐1914) waged war, most notably in his blasts (e.g., in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 1907) against the secular hydra‐heresy he called “modernism”: any attempt to make any changes in church tradition (doctrine, liturgy, biblical interpretation), the kind of concessions to the Enlightenment that Pio Nono assailed in his ferocious‐ludicrous catalog Syllabus of Errors (1864). Vatican II reversed or qualified some features of this anti‐intellectual piety, but strains of it could still be found in the reigns (that telling term!) of Paul VI (1963‐1978), who famously condemned “artificial” contraception in 1968, and John Paul II (1978‐2005) and Benedict XVI (2005‐2013), who made life miserable for proponents of liberation theology and other innovative thinkers. For liberals like O'Malley, the more than a century and a half from Pius IX up until Pope Francis must seem like a long series of missed opportunities for real reforms in the overclericalized, overcentralized, and overdogmatized Roman Catholic Church. To be fair, there have been some promising moments, as in 1943 when Pius XII, silent about the Nazis, put in a good word, in Divino Afflante Spiritu, for “Wissenschaft”: the mostly Protestant‐devised contemporary methods of scriptural explication. On the other hand, the horrific revelations of priestly pedophilia—acts typically concealed under the aegis of unchallenged church authority—have made it increasingly hard to have an optimistic view of the twenty‐first‐century R.C.C. O'Malley knows all this, but barely adverts to it, sticking to his position of fair‐minded ecclesiastical historian. He begins by noting the irony that the major impulse for defining papal primacy and infallibility came, not from prelates, but from conservative Catholic laymen like the powerful, zealous journalist Louis Veuillot (1819‐1883), who saw it as a way to block the spread of post‐French‐Revolutionary culture. And before Veuillot and Co., there had been the influence of the far more gifted Joseph de Maistre (1753‐1821), whose On the Pope (1819) is still considered a classic of nineteenth‐century French literature. The Church in Pius’ day was beleaguered by anticlerical regimes in France, Italy, and Germany, but the same time it witnessed a Romantic resurgence in Catholic sentiment, as seen in all sorts of medieval revivals, personal conversions, and crucially, from O'Malley's perspective, edifying books like Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity, or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion (1802), a kind of grand aesthetic apotheosis, glorifying the Catholic faith and its artistic splendors. The book was hailed as a masterpiece, though nowadays it's often disdained by critics as showy and superficial. In any case, Catholics were building churches, going on pilgrimages, and praying in public with old‐fashioned fervor. Skeptics and unbelievers may have been ruling academia and making the headlines, and they are certainly better remembered today than the religious apologists they attacked; but southern Europe was still a very Catholic continent, as seen in the visions of Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes (1858) and the cult of the Immaculate Conception, which was formally endorsed by Pius IX in the apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus (1854). This was the first time an individual pope had ever defined an article of faith (repeated in 1950, when another passionate Mariolater, Pius XII, declared that Mary “was...

WRITING BEYOND TIME: THE DURABILITY OF HISTORICAL TEXTS

ABSTRACTWhen we think in terms of the durability of historical texts, some works instantly come to mind: Herodotus's, Thucydides's, and Polybius's war narratives, Plutarch's comparative biographies, Eusebius's ecclesiastical history, Augustine's City of God, Jean Froissart's chronicles, Francesco Guicciardini's history of Florence, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Jules Michelet's History of France, Leopold von Ranke's History of the Reformation, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages, Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean, and Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, among others. Historians instantly perceive them as durable texts, part of a canon of history and historiography. Surrounded as we are by the exaltation of innovation over tradition, and assuming the challenging concept of “writing as historical practice” proposed by the editor of this issue, In this article I examine the conditions that might be considered necessary for historical writing to achieve durability, propose what conditions of creation and reception enabled this longevity, justify why these and other historical texts have the potential for durability, and discuss what practical lessons we might obtain from this inquiry. I begin by making some distinctions among the three related concepts of durability, the classic, and the canon, and try to establish the specific conditions of the durability of historical texts, focusing on the effect of contemporaneity and the connections between the concepts of durability and the practical past.

Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation, written by Pedro de Ribadeneyra

Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation, written by Pedro de Ribadeneyra

Keeping the light on - Nursing history center in Ceará - NUDIHMEn.

To share the implementation of the Center for Documentation, Information, History and Memory of Nursing in Ceará - NUDIHMEn and its achievements in caring for, producing and preserving the history and the memory of Nursing in Ceará. It is an experience report regarding the work carried out in NUDIHMEN from 2009 to 2017. The NUDIHMEn holds a database of 1,454 newspaper articles, mapped data of 35 manuscript volumes of the Ecclesiastical History of Ceará about Nursing precursors, in addition to 23 minutes books from the Fortaleza Santa Casa (1879 to 1970), documentation belonging to the São Vicente de Paulo Nursing School, 8 scanned minutes books from the UECE Nursing Course, among other research resources. The NUDIHMEn provides records on Nursing history in Ceará for knowledge, socialization and scientific production of the community concerned.

Leadership for the Christian Empire: Emperors and Bishops in theEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius

The fifth-centuryEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius is an unusual example of a surviving minority source. Although scholars have mined his work for raw data on events between 320 and 425c.e., in contrast to other contemporary ecclesiastical historians, Philostorgius has received little attention. His work has suffered derision, being seen as nothing more than “Arian” polemic and thus as more partisan than its pro-Nicene counterparts. This essay analyzes Philostorgius's role as one of many competitive voices participating in the composition of historical works for the elite readership of Constantinople in the fifth century. Philostorgius'sEcclesiastical Historyconstituted an integral part of the historiography of late antiquity and early Christianity. His representation of the relationship between bishops and emperors reveals a distinctive theory of history which informs his entire work.

Nahashon Ngare Rukenya and the Moral Re-Armament in Kenya: The Turning Point and the Post Mau-Mau War Reconstruction (1959–1970)

Nahashon Ngare Rukenya (1930–1996) was initially a Mau-Mau leader during Kenya’s war of independence (1952–60). Mau-Mau rebels were a militant group that waged guerrilla warfare against British colonialism in Kenya; and was largely seen as anti-Christian, anti-Anglican and anti-Presbyterian. As political advisor to the Mau-Mau, especially in their military offensives, Ngare Rukenya was once waylaid by the colonial forces, captured and detained. His turning point as Mau-Mau leader came when a Christian sect called the Moral Re-Armament (MRA)—founded by an American missionary Dr Frank Buchman in 1938—visited various detention camps to deliver counselling and teaching services. In particular, the MRA taught about the equality of all humans as children of God. They preached peace and reconciliation amongst all people living in colonial Kenya, while using biblical references to support their theological and ecclesiastical positions. After listening to their argumentation—while at Athi River detention camp—Ngare Rukenya’s politics of “land and Freedom” (wiyathi na ithaka—the core theme in Mau-Mau politics), changed to peace, reconciliation and resettlement of post-war Kenya. It re-energised his lay Anglican Church leadership, a church seen as pro-colonialism; hence hated by the local populace. This article sets out to unveil the problem in reference to Ngare Rukenya: How did the MRA influence socio-political discourses and eventually play its role in post Mau-Mau war reconstruction in Kenya (1959–1970)? The article is set on the premise that without Ngare Rukenya’s contribution regarding peace, reconciliation and resettlement, Central Kenya (as epicentre of Mau-Mau rebel activities) would have experienced civil war after colonialism in 1963. Ngare Rukenya and the MRA represent a major turning point in the Kenyan ecclesiastical history. The materials in this presentation are largely gathered through oral interviews, archival researches and limited consultation of published works.

Charlotte Methuen, Andrew Spicer, and John Wolffe, eds., Christianity and Religious Plurality. (Studies in Church History 51.) Woodbridge, UK: Boydell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 454; 2 black-and-white figures. $80. ISBN: 978-0-9546810-3-6. Table of contents available online at https://boydellandbrewer.com/christianity-and-religious-plurality-hb.html

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsCharlotte Methuen, Andrew Spicer, and John Wolffe, eds., Christianity and Religious Plurality. (Studies in Church History 51.) Woodbridge, UK: Boydell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 454; 2 black-and-white figures. $80. ISBN: 978-0-9546810-3-6. Table of contents available online at https://boydellandbrewer.com/christianity-and-religious-plurality-hb.htmlNikolas JaspertNikolas JaspertUniversity of Heidelberg Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 93, Number 3July 2018 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697941 Views: 50Total views on this site Copyright 2018 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Pedro de Ribadeneyra's “Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England”: A Spanish Jesuit's History of the English Reformation, ed. and trans. Spencer J. Weinreich

<i>Pedro de Ribadeneyra's “Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England”: A Spanish Jesuit's History of the English Reformation</i>, ed. and trans. Spencer J. Weinreich

Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations, ed. Charles C. Rozier, Daniel Roach, Giles E.M. Gasper and Elisabeth van Houts

This volume, the fruits of a conference at Durham in 2011, makes an important contribution to studies of one of the greatest chroniclers writing in the early twelfth century. Edited by Charles C. Rozier, Daniel Roach, Giles E.M. Gasper and Elisabeth van Houts, the chapters, all of high quality, fall naturally into groups: those dealing with Orderic’s life and career at Saint-Évroul, and those analysing his writings, especially his masterpiece, The Ecclesiastical History. Orderic’s inclusion of moving autobiographical passages in his History has long attracted attention. He tells his readers that he was a son of Odelerius, a clerk in the household of Roger of Montgomery. He was educated first at Shrewsbury and then sent at the age of ten to the distant abbey of Saint-Évroul, where he spent the rest of his life as a Benedictine monk. Elisabeth van Houts discusses what can be learned about the author’s family background and the possible reasons why his father sent him away, and across the Channel, rather than somewhere closer to home. Charles Rozier considers his duties at Saint-Évroul, suggesting that he was probably librarian and cantor, and draws attention to his interest in liturgy, musical traditions and computus.

Introduction

The theme of this fifty-fourth volume of Studies in Church History is ‘The Church and Empire’, and the twenty-three articles included here explore the complex and ever-evolving relationship of ecclesiastical and imperial power within a range of historical contexts. The articles represent plenary addresses and a selection of the communications presented at two highly successful Ecclesiastical History Society conferences during my presidential year – a Summer Conference held at the University of Edinburgh in July 2016 and a Winter Meeting held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in January 2017. Both conferences attracted a large number of speakers and participants from across the world, and reflected the considerable scholarly interest in questions concerning the relations of Church and empire. These questions include the extent to which Christianity in the Western world became linked to the political power of large imperial states, the nature and extent of the connection of Christianity to the expansion of Western imperialism in the early modern and modern periods, and the manner in which the Church often came into conflict with imperial power, especially when Christians insisted on the spiritual independence of the Church and on maintaining an independent Christian moral witness against the wars of conquest, cruelty, racism, oppression and arrogance of power that too often have been associated with imperial rule.

Pedro De Ribadeneyra’s Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation, trans. and ed. Spencer J. Weinreich, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. xxvi+826, with 12 illustrations, £220, ISBN: 978-9-0043-2395-7

Pedro De Ribadeneyra’s Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation, trans. and ed. Spencer J. Weinreich, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. xxvi+826, with 12 illustrations, £220, ISBN: 978-9-0043-2395-7 - Volume 34 Issue 1

A geohistorical retrospective analysis of cultural heritage buildings: the case of Mosta Dome, Malta

Geohistorical retrospective analysis attempts to establish the location of industrial mineral extractive sites. This paper is based on a study of the Rotunda of Mosta, a feat in architectural engineering structures inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. It was designed and erected in local Lower Globigerina Limestone. This Neoclassical church is the third largest unsupported masonry dome in the ecclesiastical architectural history of Europe. According to oral tradition, the architect Giorgio Grognet de Vasse had opted to use limestone from Ta’ Vnezja in the limits of Mosta. A retrospective analysis of the geological fabric used in the construction of the church proves that the limestone was not from this area but from a locality in its close proximity, namely Ta’ Qali. Although the geology present at both sites was considered similar at the time of erecting the church and the respective relative suitability for use as dimension stone was known, the limestone at Ta’ Vnezja is lithologically different from Ta’ Qali. At both these localities quarries were sunk in their lithostratigraphic sub-formation namely the Middle Globigerina Limestone Member and the Lower Globigerina Limestone Member respectively.

Ariston of Pella’s Lost Apology for Christianity

The obscure 2nd century CE writer Ariston of Pella is mentioned in two accepted works: Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and John of Scythopolis / Maximus Confessor’s Notes on the Mystic Theology of the Areopagite. He is also mentioned in two other works but the attributions are currently regarded with suspicion: Moses of Chorene’s History of Armenia and the Chronicon Paschale. Upon further investigation, it appears that an 18th century theory regarding Ariston’s presence in the Chronicon Paschale as the author of a previously unknown Christian Apology is correct. Also, the investigation of the theory demonstrates that previous claims regarding the Chronicon material’s reliance upon Ecclesiastical History are incorrect. With these points established, it becomes clear that Ariston can be regarded as the author of a Christian Apology addressed to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, with an internal assigned date during the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 CE). This attribution sheds new light on Ariston of Pella and establishes a more reliable date for his floruit. In addition, it establishes a new Christian Apology from the time of the reign of Emperor Hadrian. It also contributes new information about Eusebius’ sources for Ecclesiastical History and further information about Aquila of Pontus, Emperor Hadrian and the Bar Kokhba Revolt.