pre-Reformation Church Research Articles

Rebuilding St Andrew Undershaft: A Study in Executorial Discretion in Early Tudor London

Using a case study of the early sixteenth-century rebuilding of the London parish church of St Andrew Undershaft, this article focuses on the hitherto unrecognised role played by the executors of London mercantile testators in pre-Reformation church building. Drawing on the rare sets of extant accounts kept by executors in the course of their duties (which would once have been ubiquitous), the details of several ecclesiastical rebuilding projects can be revised, including that of St Andrew’s. It will be argued that this realisation possesses important implications for our understanding of late medieval ecclesiastical building projects, and that executors—sometimes acting on the instruction of the testator but also (more significantly) on their discretion—should be considered a profoundly influential force in shaping the infrastructure of the pre-Reformation City.

Sounds of Children in Worship: Materiality and Liturgical-Ritual Spaces

Bringing together concepts from the fields of material religion and liturgical studies, this article explores how adults and children manage sound-related affordances during worship. The concept of affordances—the possibilities an environment offers a person—is made sensitive to socialization and is related to the concept of liturgical-ritual space. Liturgical-ritual space comes into being through people’s participation in an environment and is therefore defined as a type of lived-in space. The analysis of children’s acoustic participation in two pre-Reformation church buildings shows how sounds made by children contribute to the creation of a liturgical-ritual space. It also brings to light tensions in how adults experience and interpret the sounds that children make. Attention to sound highlights the relationship between people and the material environment and shows that sound matters in Protestant worship with children, not only for the cognitive messages it may convey but for its affective qualities as well.

Medieval fragments from Glasgow's archives

A group of medieval fragments recovered from the bindings of Glasgow's archival documents has been known to researchers for over a century through their inclusion, to a greater or lesser extent, in catalogues compiled by earlier scholars. This study adds to their work by providing a full physical description and transcription for each of the eighteen fragments that can be located; one fragment remains lost. One of these, containing homilies by St Gregory the Great, has only recently been uncovered. Each transcription is compared with other contemporary sources, of known origin, that most closely align with the reading in the fragment. This comparison shows that while most of the liturgical fragments follow the Sarum Rite, others contain variants found in the related liturgies of Hereford and York. The partial identification of some Rites leads to speculation regarding the use of the original books in Glasgow's pre-Reformation churches.

Thomas Becket, William Warham and the Crisis of the Early Tudor Church

England's first Tudor monarchs were formally devoted to the cult of St Thomas of Canterbury. In popular memory, however, Thomas was a champion of law and custom, an opponent of untrammelled royal power, and – especially among the clergy – a martyr for ecclesiastical ‘liberties’. This suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was considerably less ‘monarchical’ than is sometimes supposed. In the 1530s Thomas became a powerful symbol of resistance to Henry VIII's royal supremacy. However, the fact that he could be portrayed as a patron of the clergy's sectional interests helps to explain how opposition was weakened and divided.

A Church Without Bishops: Governance of the English Catholic Mission, 1594–1685

The Catholic community in early modern England was not only a persecuted minority but full of factions, each playing off the other, expressing themselves in a war of words, and even, on occasion, canvassing for support in the very establishment that was trying to eliminate them. To a large extent, these tensions were focused around the vexed question of what sort of ecclesiastical government should fill the vacuum left by the Reformation and the extinction of the Marian hierarchy. Various canonical solutions were tried: rule by archpriest, vicar apostolic and chapter of secular clergy. Each of these resulted in ongoing disagreements between secular and regular clergy, between those who viewed the English Catholic community as being in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church and those who thought circumstances required something new and creative. Added to this was a complex web of canonical jurisdictions, often without clear definition, and Rome's reluctance to act decisively and offend the Elizabethan or Stuart regime. This article, originally delivered as the Lyndwood Lecture, outlines the key personalities and events and examines the central issues that were at stake in this ‘church without bishops’.

A la recherche d’un patrimoine liturgique : anglicanisme, gallicanisme et tridentinisme

In common with other churches of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Church of England identified its own worship with that of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and of the early Church. In the aftermath of Queen Mary’s restoration of Catholicism, the Church of England’s liturgical identity was also dominated by a severe Puritan reaction against all Catholic forms. In the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, however, an ‘avant-garde’ of clergy emerged committed to greater ceremonialism in worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. The Laudian high churchmanship that emerged from this beginning was a movement in tension, looking simultaneously to the Patristic Church, the pre-Reformation Church in England (with a strong strain of ‘gothic survivalism’) and the even more risky world of the continental baroque. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Church of England was conscious of affinities with the Gallican, nationalist tradition in the French Church, but at either end of this period the Tridentine baroque would also prove seductively fascinating to many Anglicans. The use of the chancel screen was frequently a touchstone of this debate. While the Gallican tradition was effectively submerged within Roman Catholicism by the French Revolution and the First Vatican Council, the tension between the ‘Gallican’ and ‘Tridentine’ tendencies within Anglican high churchmanship remains alive to this day. In the nineteenth century, influential Anglican converts to the Church of Rome brought with them their contrasting convictions about the appropriate architectural setting for the liturgy. The architect A. W. N. Pugin, firmly committed to liturgical Gallicanism, advocated medieval music, architecture and Sarum ceremonial, while John Henry Newman and his fellow Oratorians insisted on an ultramontane liturgy and architecture. Through the creation of the Anglican Ordinariate within the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican tradition continues to bear witness to the diversity of the Catholic tradition.

Sacred vessels: British church ship models

What is the significance of ship models hanging in British churches today? What is their function and what can they tell us about maritime culture, trade, and art in the context of the church through the ages? My doctoral research will examine the purpose and prevailing contemporary interpretation of ship models in Scottish churches and how these have altered from pre-Reformation church practice to the present day. Through a chronological study of the geographical spread of the practice of hanging ship models in churches, and by examining the folklore of the sculpture within a church context, my research explores the societies and individuals that commissioned these unique forms of sculpture and for what purpose, how the public’s interpretation of ship models in churches has developed and how the historical value placed on them has changed in recent years.

Nearly 500 years and still Counting: The Reformation in Recent Scholarship and Debates

The sixteenth-century Reformation remains important to historians and theologians. Over the past 15 years new and revised accounts have appeared, both textbooks and more speculative pieces. Digitization of key texts is impacting the discipline. The ‘cultural turn’ has opened up Reformation history beyond ideas, politics and economics to include gender, the emotions, architecture and the arts (including music). It has identified psychological needs that the reformers had to address. Literary scholars have joined in Reformation studies. The vitality of the pre-Reformation church is now generally recognized; the question of how far the Reformation adumbrated ‘modernity’ remains controversial. New fronts in intellectual history are opening up in historiography, and biblical scholarship and exegesis.

‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery’: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625)

Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.

Pay Back Time? Tithes and Tithing in Late Medieval England

In seeking aspects of the pre-Reformation Church which might be expected automatically to invoke connections with God’s bounty, tithes and tithing are obvious candidates. In an essentially agricultural society, where the overwhelming majority of the population worked on the land, God’s bounty in providing crops and food animals, and tithing as the response to the moral and theological imperative to acknowledge that bounty, surely ought to be almost a commonplace. Tithes had biblical origins as a divine precept, and an obligation which Christians were deemed to have inherited from the Jews.

Evolving restoration principles in a changing world

Evolving restoration principles in a changing world

Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel

The fierce debates about the Eucharist during the Reformation era highlight a central tension between individuals’ desire to secure confessional purity and their instinct to protect the communal nature of Christian worship. Preserving confessional coexistence required balancing these forces, often by expelling nonconformists or driving them underground. Instead, civic leaders in sixteenth-century Wesel demanded that residents of all confessions attend communion together. This policy emerged as a result of leaders’ fear of unmanageable disorder in the face of waves of Calvinist immigrants, even as the town was still reeling from struggles between Lutherans and Catholics. In practice, this policy preserved the sacral communalism of the pre-Reformation church, while leaving individuals latitude to express confessional difference in informal but visible ways.

Training in Superstition? Monasteries and Popular Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England

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.

"Syren Strains": Victorian Women's Devotional Poetry and John Keble's The Christian Year

“Syren Strains”:Victorian Women's Devotional Poetry and John Keble's The Christian Year F. Elizabeth Gray (bio) Ye whose hearts are beating high With the pulse of Poesy, Heirs of more than royal race, Framed by Heaven's peculiar grace, God's own work to do on earth, (If the world be not too bold), Giving virtue a new birth, And a life that ne'er grows old— Sovereign masters of all hearts! Know ye who hath set your parts? He who gave you breath to sing, By whose strength ye sweep the string, He hath chosen you, to lead His Hosannas here below;— Mount, and claim your glorious meed; Linger not with sin and woe. —— John Keble, "Palm Sunday"1 John Keble seems to have had very little to say about women, and, at first glance, very little to say to women. He taught no female students. His Lectures on Poetry were delivered and published in Latin, unintelligible to most Victorian women,2 and briefly mention only one woman poet, Sappho. Whenever discussing poets—and Christians—Keble uses exclusively the masculine pronoun. However, as Isobel Armstrong and more recently Cynthia Scheinberg have persuasively argued, the Tractarian poetic theory espoused and demonstrated by Keble contributed in important ways to the expressive poetics within which nineteenth-century women could both claim poetic identity and also maneuver to critique the cultural construction of their subjectivity.3 At a fundamental level, Tractarianism's emphasis on feeling and perception in poetry could provide a potent sanction for women to write. The importance of investigating the "distaff side" of Tractarian poetics, and Keble's particular [End Page 61] role in its development, has become central to an understanding of female poetics; as Emma Francis argues, "Without a proper appreciation of Keble we will continue to misunderstand several aspects of the role and the extent of the legitimation of the Victorian woman poet."4 The subtle and fascinating refractions of Tractarian thought in the work of pre-eminent Victorian devotional poet Christina Rossetti have been meticulously traced by scholars including Kachur, Arseneau, Schofield, and D'Amico.5 William Michael Rossetti commented that his sister "thought nothing of Keble as a poet," a suggestive comment in light of her transformations of Keble's Christian Year in the "Some Feasts and Fasts" section of her 1893 Verses.6 In this article I address less familiar women poets to assess how and why they copied Keble's poetic model and developed it for their own ends. One aspect of Tractarian poetic theory that remains relatively neglected, and one that has particular significance in assessing the resonance of Tractarian poetics for women, is its concern with issues of originality and imitation. The Oxford Movement dedicated itself to returning the Church of England to the history and tradition that, it believed, had been lost since the Middle Ages; this dedication took form in Tractarian poetics in the various literary changes rung on Keble's famous dictum, "Don't be original!"7 This dictum implicitly linked originality—stylistic as well as doctrinal—with heresy. Theologically, the Tractarians sought assiduously to follow the doctrines of the pre-Reformation Church. In terms of rubric, Tractarians insisted that appropriate language with which to discuss religious matters was the same as that authorized and exemplified by the Fathers, in the orthodox, patristic formulations passed down through the Church. And poetically, orthodoxy and correctness was to be ensured by following approved models. Appropriate subject matter, according to Keble, was to be found in the moral lessons taught by Nature (through the process Keble called Analogy) and in the emotional responses of the religious and sincere heart. Furthermore, appropriate examples of treatment were to be found in the works of certain poetic fathers, including Gray, Collins, Cowper, and Wordsworth: departures from proven poetic quality were not encouraged. "Primary poets," writes Keble, "do not strain after novelty."8 Keble disparages ambition, effort, and affectation, stating that true poetry is "not in high-wrought subtlety of thought, nor in pointed cleverness of phrase" (Lectures, 2:201). Echoing Keble, John Henry Newman also considered the question of originality in "Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1829), arguing that true...

Penance and the Market Place: a Reformation Dialogue with the Medieval Church (c. 1250–c. 1600)

During the later Middle Ages the ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally abandoned ritual humiliation in the market place as an integral part of penance imposed by sentence in its courts, although intermittently this punishment continued into the early sixteenth century. In the early decades of the ecclesia anglicana of Elizabeth, however, several jurisdictions reintroduced shaming in the market place as a consistent part of a disciplinary regime. Although constituting no more than an episode, as public penance had again declined by the 1580s, the reintroduction of penance in the public forum reveals much about the character of the Anglican Church in the first decades after the settlement of 1558, but also reflects back on the pre-Reformation Church.

Pastoral Theology and Spirituality in the Pre-Reformation Church

The dominant thought of the Pre-Reformation Church was based on Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. This classical tradition was concerned with the active and contemplative lives. The great theologians of the West, Augustine, Gregory the Great and Aquinas, adapted this perspective when seeing the Christian minister as one who blends these two experiences in his or her prayer and pastoral ministry. Jacob was seen as an ideal who married both the active Lea and contemplative Rachel. This was done in the rhythmic life of prayer and service achieved by Benedict and the friars in the latter Middle Ages.

Peculiar Practices: The Jurisdictional Jigsaw of the Pre-reformation Church

Peculiar Practices: The Jurisdictional Jigsaw of the Pre-reformation Church

Monastic charitable provision in Tudor England: quantifying and qualifying poor relief in the early sixteenth century

Monastic charitable provision in the later Middle Ages through to the Dissolution has often been described as inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality. It has been accused of ineffectiveness because of its allegedly indiscriminate nature. This article suggests that in fact the religious houses and hospitals of England were providing a greater amount of poor relief in a more assiduous manner than has previously been allowed. The core of evidence comes from the 1535 national tax assessment of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This contains details of the charitable provision carried out by most monasteries and hospitals as recorded by Crown commissions. After allowances have been made for the bias in the survey, a statistical analysis is carried out which indicates that an upward reassessment should be made of the quantity of monastic charity. Qualitative evidence from both the Valor Ecclesiasticus and from other contemporary sources also suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was providing genuinely beneficial poor relief.

The Early Tudor Reformations in the Irish Pale

This paper highlights striking commonalities between the pre-Reformation Church in England and that in the Pale around Dublin, and argues that the eventual failure of the Tudor reformations in the Pale was not inevitable. It shows that while the Henrician Reformation encountered very considerable opposition at first, the Pale's secular and ecclesiastical elites subsequently endorsed a moderated religious settlement wherein papal authority was abrogated. They acquiesced in the first Book of Common Prayer. However, the crown's deputies were loth to enforce religious change and Protestantism won very few adherents as late as 1553.

Bishop Lightfoot and the Northern church

IT is always a surprise to discover one’s prejudices. Some time ago while attending a meeting at Ushaw College, Durham, I was surprised to see the extent to which the College and its chapel reflected the sense of being in continuity with the Church of Bede and Cuthbert. But why was I surprised? Because I had always associated that continuity with the Church of England and the magnificent cathedral church of Durham. I have no hesitation in regarding the Presbyterianism of Northumberland as part of that continuing tradition, because I regard the pre-Reformation Church as part of all our traditions. So the only reason to be surprised to find the same sense at Ushaw is an underlying prejudice that Roman Christianity represented an alien intrusion into the indigenous Church - a proposition that only has to be articulated for its incoherence to become apparent, for where did the indigenous Church come from, except originally from Rome?