Abstract: Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds.), England's Wars of Religion, Revisited. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. £95.00.It is a mark of John Morrill's enduring influence over historical interpretations of the civil wars of the mid seventeenth century that what he terms a ?throwaway line', delivered at the end of his 1983 Royal Historical Society lecture, should have gone on to shape scholarly debate for the next thirty years. The English civil war ?was not the first European Revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion'. This collection demonstrates that, even if the formulation offered by Morrill ought to be subjected to criticism, the idea that religion was ?a motivating force' as well as ?a language of legitimation' (p. 19) now seems uncontroversial. Glenn Burgess, in an introductory survey, and Morrill, in a reflective final essay, usefully remind us of the all-important context in which the thesis was first presented. All of the essays are illuminating on an important debate, even if some contribute less directly than others to the issues most closely associated with Morrill's body of work. Excellent essays by Ronald Asch and Robert von Friedeburg put the English civil war into a European context, by focusing respectively on sacral monarchy and confessional confrontation. These two essays pre-empted what is now an established vogue for investigating European interactions, driven with gusto in recent years by scholars of print cultures. Some readers may wonder why an approach that was not central to Morrill's intellectual development has been privileged over his pioneering arguments in favour of an integrative 'British' account of the wars; Morrill himself notes this point. Since the publication of the book, new studies have emerged - in edited collections such as that by Robert Armstrong and Tadgh O hAnnrachain, in monograph studies by, amongst others, Hunter Powell, and in work on the Westminster Assembly - that demonstrate how religious interests were cross-border and complicated 'national' politics. Consideration of the British angle would undoubtedly have enriched the collection.The best of these essays go beyond the limitations of Morrill's original formulation, by blurring the boundaries around categories of analysis and offering original interpretations of motivation and mobilisation, perception and self-identification. Puritan-parliamentarians are represented by two superb studies of Oliver Cromwell by Rachel Foxley and Blair Worden, and an incisive reassessment of Simonds D'Ewes by Sears McGee. Making a useful distinction between personal motivations and the more complicated business of justifying war, Foxley expertly unpicks the seeming paradox that a man so clearly driven by religious imperatives as Cromwell nonetheless recognised widely-held doubts about the legitimacy of raising the sword for solely spiritual ends. Interpretations of 'liberty' are at the heart of both Foxley's analysis and Blair Worden's elegant essay, which details Cromwell's role in turning 'civil and religious liberty' into the 'catchphrase' beloved of later Whig historians (p. 231). McGee uses the well-known figure of D'Ewes to question Morrill's characterisation of religion as the 'critical divide' between royalists and parliamentarians. D'Ewes was committed, not to further reformation, but to the recovery of an Elizabethan church polluted by 'impious bishops' such as Matthew Wren (p. …

Abstract: This thesis investigates the role that the Church played in the political, spiritual and economic colonization of Sardinia in the high Middle Ages. By using Robert Bartlett’s conception of the European “center” and “periphery,” it shows that Sardinia represents an unusual case of a territory that was culturally both central and peripheral. Within this ambiguous cultural setting, and using papal letters, political treaties, chronicles, monastic documents, and onomastic evidence, the thesis examines the way Pisa, Genoa and the Roman pontiffs used Rome’s spiritual and cultural authority to strengthen their own political and economic claims in Sardinia. Specifically, by focusing on the archbishop of Pisa and the bishops and archbishops of Sardinia, it shows that the personnel of the Church, which are not commonly considered agents of colonization in Sardinia, were in reality fundamental to bringing Sardinian society closer to being a political and cultural extension of the Italian mainland. It also, however, investigates the ways in which local Sardinian rulers at times strongly resisted ecclesiastical pressures to conform to the norms of Rome, or used the spiritual prestige and cultural tools offered by the Roman Church to negotiate political advantages for themselves. In this way, the thesis finds that foreign cultural colonization in Sardinia was at times less effective than is generally assumed, and that in certain situations the personnel of the Sardinian Church could offer the means for resistance to foreign colonization. Finally, the thesis draws comparisons between Sardinia and other examples iii of political, economic and spiritual colonization within Europe, to show how Sardinia is both part of a wider medieval European pattern, and simultaneously a unique case in the study of medieval colonization.

Abstract: Late Antiquity is often assumed to have witnessed the demise of literature as a social force and its retreat into the school and the private reading room: whereas the sophists of the Second Sophistic were influential social players, their late antique counterparts are thought to have been overshadowed by bishops. Literature and Society in the Fourth Century AD argues that this presumed difference should be attributed less to a fundamental change in the role of literature than to different scholarly methodologies with which Greek and Latin texts from the second and the fourth century are being studied. Focusing on performance, the literary construction of reality and self-presentation, this volume highlights how literature continued to play an important role in fourth-century elite society.

Abstract: Thomas Izbicki presents a new examination of the relationship between the adoration of the sacrament and canon law from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The medieval Church believed Christ's glorified body was present in the Eucharist, the most central of the seven sacraments, and the Real Presence became explained as transubstantiation by university-trained theologians. Expressions of this belief included the drama of the elevated host and chalice, as well as processions with a host in an elaborate monstrance on the Feast of Corpus Christi. These affirmations of doctrine were governed by canon law, promulgated by popes and councils; and liturgical regulations were enforced by popes, bishops, archdeacons and inquisitors. Drawing on canon law collections and commentaries, synodal enactments, legal manuals and books about ecclesiastical offices, Izbicki presents the first systematic analysis of the Church's teaching about the regulation of the practice of the Eucharist.

Abstract: In considering the spectrum of relations that bishops of the Christian Church had with high-ranking officials of the late Roman state, the letters of Augustine of Hippo have a special place. These letters have been used not only to debate the nature of the relationship between bishops and representatives of the imperial state, but also the moral aspects of the holding and exercise of secular power. This new investigation of the corpus of these letters focuses on problems of identifying the correspondents, their precise positions of state power, and the chronology of the events. The resulting picture reveals that the bishop of Hippo had no prior social or political connections with any of the men of imperial power and that his relations with them had to be carefully cultivated in each individual case, often with quite variable results. The presence of a consistent and substantial hiatus in status and power between Augustine and high-ranking imperial officials must be taken into account in any analysis of the significance of the content of the letters. As a generalization, it might be said that a more precise knowledge of context is always important to historical understanding.

Abstract: Historians and anthropologists are confronted with a persistent problem for which there is no clear solution: the conceptual tools which we use to attempt to understand cultures are themselves products of (often) the very cultures we are attempting to understand. Take “religion”. Boyarin ([2004]. “The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion.” Representations 85: 21–57) has argued that the very concept of “religion” as we know it was a product of the fourth and fifth centuries, as bishops and emperors constructed Christianity as a religion (the true one, of course), and in counterdistinction constructed “Judaism” and “Hellenism” (or paganism) as “false” religions. For Boyarin, Judaism only becomes a “religion” when Christian authorities define it as one. The same could be said for the jumble of texts, beliefs and rituals that the English, upon arriving in India, lump together under the name “Hinduism”, which they turn into a religion. Building, defining an...

Abstract: A number of cases of the bishops of Constantinople exiled over a period until as late as the close of the 6th century prove the fact that the rulers would always make an effort to remove the deposed bishops from the City, even though relocating the latter to specific destinations did not always have to be the case. In the 4th century, the bishops could withdraw to suburban districts or settle at their own estates, and it was not until the 5th century that depositions of the metropolitan bishops would involve, in principle, being deported to a specific place of exile. The purpose behind banishing a bishop from the City and putting him under supervision at a certain location was to prevent him from exerting any influence on the faithful in Constantinople. It should be also noted that sending a person into exile was a form of punishment, especially when the destination was a remote location exposed to harsh weather conditions or the threat of sudden incursions by bands of nomads or brigands. Results of an analysis of the accessibility of exile destinations provide substantial evidence for an overwhelming proportion of inland urban localities. Although many of such places would be located along or near various roads, they were generally situated far from the coast or the main routes to Constantinople.

Abstract: From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century American Catholic bishops were mainly guided by two priorities in their work on behalf of migrants arriving in the United States: providing for the pastoral and material needs of their flock and advocating for fellow Catholics. In the second half of the twentieth century the primary rationale behind the bishops’ migration-related activities began to shift. Although pastoral and institutional considerations remained important, a universal moral ethic—a “social mission”—became more pronounced as the guiding force behind the Church’s work with migrant populations.

Abstract: I. Introduction: The Harley FamilyLady Brilliana Harley ( c. 1598-1643) is known for her successful defense of Brampton Bryan Castle against Royalist siege in the late summer of 1643 while her husband, Sir Robert Harley, served in Parliament. The Civil Wars came to Harley's doorstep when her neighbors trained their cannons at her walls, but she had been politically engaged for years, tracking and interpreting events of the Thirty Years' War and the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640 on the international, national, and local levels. Her politics were shaped by her sense of the Harley family identity: they were members of the gentry who were seriously committed to public service, and they formed part of a dedicated Puritan minority in the county of Herefordshire.1 When her oldest son, Edward, or Ned, left Brampton Bryan for Oxford University in the fall of 1638, Harley was eager to ensure that he would perpetuate this identity. As she explains in a letter written just after his departure: "You are now in a place of more varietyes then when you weare at home; thearefore take heede it take not vp your thoughtes so much as to neglect that constant saruis you owe to your God" (25 October 1638, Lewis 7).2 The letters run steadily from 25 October 1638 to 20 July 1639, and again from 18 October 1639 to 19 December 1640, when Ned left Oxford to join his father in London, although Ned's replies are lost. As Jacqueline Eales and others have shown, the letters create a sense of political community grounded in Puritan values.3 More specifically, Harley's letters demonstrate her participation in a coherent intellectual community in which "female puritan piety," constructed in part through letter-writing, has ideological significance, as Johanna Harris argues.4In addition to these rhetorical dimensions, the letters also record a wide array of material goods sent from Brampton Bryan to Oxford and, occasionally, from Oxford back home. While critics tend to overlook or dismiss this dimension of the letters, I argue that material goods are essential to understanding how Harley tries to fashion her family identity during a tumultuous time in England's history.5 As David Harris Sacks asserts, to understand early modern material culture is to understand "a world of things in motion" as goods, ideas, and people move from place to place, creating change ( 22). Harley certainly does set "things in motion," conveying both material items and ideological influence to her son and others in her kin network in order to shape their beliefs. The goods and the letters that contextualize them carry out this formative function in multiple ways. They build affective ties, evoke life at Brampton Bryan, visually indicate gentry status, and highlight local strains resulting from the Bishops' Wars. Indeed, these mounting religio-political tensions threatened the family, making Harley especially keen to reinforce the family identity. Overall, goods are essential both to Ned's identity as a politically engaged Puritan man of the gentry and to Harley's identity as an elite, pious, and politically astute gentlewoman.The Harleys and the Herefordshire GentryIn the Harleys' home county of Herefordshire, as in early modern England in general, a family's elite status was determined not only by blood, but also by material factors. Land ownership, along with responsible stewardship and treatment of tenants that balanced largesse and thrift, was crucial. With their identity rooted in property, the gentry elite then accrued local power by holding political office, and they also exercised considerable influence in local reli- gious matters.6 The Harley family, established in Herefordshire for some 300 years, fit this pattern, and Sir Robert Harley, baptized 1 March, 1579, was no exception.7 Early in his career, he was recognized for his public service: for example, he was made a Knight of the Order of the Bath at James's coronation in 1603, and he was appointed as justice of the peace for Herefordshire in 1604. …

Abstract: IntroductionAs a historian of her own times, Lucy Hutchinson was shrewd enough to acknowledge that the warfare which comprises a major part of the memoir of her husband Colonel John Hutchinson was not simply an English Civil War. When she dealt with the first reverberations of the conflict which was then about engulf her family, she wrote:about the yeare 1639 the thunder was heard afarre of ratling in the troubled ayre, and even the most obscured woods were penetrated with some flashes, the forerunners of the dreadfull storme which the next yeare was more apparent.In writing this Lucy dated the beginning of the fall of the Stuart monarchy to 1639 - the year of the first Bishop's War.2 No doubt she and John, who seem, according to her account of the period some two years later, to have read newsbooks and discussed contemporary affairs together, were well aware that the trouble had begun two tumultuous years preceding the almost farcical first war in the four nations. The warning signs had been there even earlier when Charles I stage-managed his belated Scottish coronation in a way which symbolically turned the clock back to before the early-fourteenth-century Declaration of Arbroath by openly giving precedence to officials of the Church of England over the men of the Kirk. Serious trouble had begun in 1637 when the attempt to introduce a new prayer book, based upon the English Book of Common Prayer, into Scotland had provoked violence. This policy had firstly caused riots, and then secondly inspired the drafting of, and even more importantly, the mass subscription to a National Covenant creating a bond between the Scottish people and God in defence of the Kirk against the king's aggression. The king's provocative reaction in not seeking a compromise and being openly aggressive had pushed the Scots further. By the summer of 1639 the storm Lucy had alluded to had actually been underway for some time: by then Scotland had formed a new political structure and an executive which had not only circumvented the king in church and state but was able to manage a war effort to challenge him militarily. Mutual aggression led to the first war in the British Isles since the Nine Years' War and was later named by the victors after the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud and his fellow Episcopalians both sides of the border: as the Bishops' War.Lucy's broad vision was not limited to her understanding that the war which broke out in England in 1642 had origins which lay beyond England's border; like her contemporary fellow historian, the royalist politician Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, she acknowledged that the war was an affair which absorbed the entirety of the British Isles. In her background narrative, Hutchinson spent some space in her text dealing with the three initial conflicts within the archipelagic-wide war which preceded the direct involvement of her husband and herself. The First Bishops' War of 1639 was brief and involved the English forces being chased ignominiously out of Scotland and a more serious fight between Scottish covenanters and anti-covenanters outside Aberdeen at the Bridge of Dee, which ironically occurred during the peace negotiations being held at Berwick upon Tweed. A second Bishops' War in 1640 was a more deadly and involved the Scottish Army of the Covenant invading England, defeating the king's forces and occupying northeast England for a year. The third war in the sequence sprang from the rebellion in Ireland which began on the night of 22 October 1641 and involved a rapidly developing crisis for the Dublin administration. An alternative national Irish government was established in Kilkenny which managed a structured war-effort that challenged armies sent from England, Wales and Scotland. It was this latter war which more than any other formed the backdrop to the Lucy and John's decision to throw themselves into the coming war against their king. The war in Ireland created an atmosphere of fear in Britain where the newly invigorated press and rapidly spreading rumours inspired a genuine fear that there was an imminent threat of an invasion by Roman Catholic forces from Ireland. …

Abstract: Preface List of illustrations Introduction The Starting Point. Part 1: Structures Introduction 1. Brett Edward Whalen The Papacy 2. R.N. Swanson Bishoprics and Parishes 3. R.N. Swanson Manning the Church: Priests and Bishops 4. James D. Mixson Religious Life and Religious Orders Part 2: Forming the Mindset Introduction 5. Ian Christopher Levy The Study of Theology in the Middle Ages 6. Peter D. Clarke Canon Law 7. Cary J. Nederman Social and Political Thought 8. Andrew Reeves Education and Religious Instruction Part 3: Catholicism in Practice Introduction 9. Nicolas Bell Liturgy 10. D. Bornstein Administering the Sacraments 11 Thomas M. Izbicki Sin and Pastoral Care 12 Simon Yarrow Pilgrimage 13 Robert W. Shaffern Death and the Afterlife in the Middle Ages 14 Chistopher Tyerman Violence and Holy War in Western Christendom15 Alixe Bovey 'From Material to Immaterial Things': Gothic Art and Immaterial Culture 16 Alexandra Gajewski Building Christendom: Patrons, Architects and Centres of Innovation in Medieval Europe Part 4: Challenges Introduction 17 Jonathan Elukin Christianity and Judaism Christians and Jews18 Peter Biller Heresy and Dissent 19. Catherine Rider Magic and Superstition Part 5: Shaping a Catholic Society Introduction 20. R.H. Helmholz Jurisdiction and Discipline 21. A.T. Brown Economic Life 22. Kim M. Phillips Gender and Sexuality 23. Alexandra Barratt Literature Afterword Index

Abstract: The impact of Elizabeth Bishops maternal loss on the symbolic order of her poetry is well established. Victoria Harrison (1993) pays attention to the various appearances of Bishop's mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, in unpublished drafts such as "A mother made of dress-goods" and "Swan-boat ride" and in the short story "In the Village." Susan McCabe approaches Bishop in light of Freud's thinking about the fort-da game and Lacan's meconnaissance to argue that the lack of close parental relationships, particularly with her mother, was fundamental to Bishop's writing: "Bishop's vision and language ... are molded by the events of loss" (1994, 8). Marilyn May Lombardi finds in Bishop's elegiac works "the uncanny power to evoke the absent mother and the inexpressible pain of her loss" (1995, 19). Dissenting from the view that Bishop was grief-stricken by early trauma, Diana Fuss does acknowledge that Bishop's mother's death was formative in other ways, writing perceptively about "One Art" as "not a lament over loss but a desire for it" (2013). Most recently, Sandra Barry has argued that Bishop's mother "hovers over, haunts, and inhabits published poems" as well as peripheral works, proposing that "Gertrude was time. Gertrude was voice. Bishop learned about ebb and flow, now and then, sound and silence from her mother" (2014,108,109). Important as it is to investigate Bishop's poetic representations of the maternal, such approaches often downplay the ways her work is informed by literary models. Barry's sweeping statement, for example, renders invisible how Bishop's conception of time also is shaped by her readings of other poets' work--as an essay, published in her college years, entitled "Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry" (1934) suggests. Attributing the development of Bishop's sensibility and aesthetic primarily to her mother (or her childhood, or her lesbianism, or her alcoholism) is symptomatic of a problematic separation of the lyric "I" from lyricism itself in many critical approaches to Bishop. In "Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal" Bonnie Costello contends that critics like Harrison have focused too much on the influence of real-life history in Bishop's poems, oversimplifying the complex influence on her work of literary history: "Bishop's critics have celebrated her subversive relationship to 'the Western tradition' rather than emphasizing the many ways in which that tradition, by no means unitary, might haunt her and shape her, or recognizing how the 'I' of her poems might emerge as a site of cross-identifications and cultural yearnings rather than as a coherent self" (2003, 335-56). Rather than viewing Bishop's poems as "cloaks" for personal experience, Costello encourages us to consider them as "masks" instead, "designed for symbolic expansion, and engagement with the 'generality' (to use Adorno's word) of language" (343). Costello's corrective position is especially compelling. But I wonder if it is nonetheless in danger of perpetuating the same separation of the lyric "I" from lyricism. Countering what she sees as the exclusion of tradition from the conversation about autobiography, Costello seeks to exclude autobiography from the conversation about tradition. Offering my own corrective to her corrective, I thus argue that Bishop's poetics produce "site[s] of cross-identification" among literary history, cultural pressure, and experience. "The Bight" is in this regard a particularly rich site for investigation. A canonical Bishop poem in which the maternal can be detected, "The Bight" has also formed the basis of significant critical discussion about Bishop's relationship with Charles Baudelaire and the symboliste aesthetic, but these two critical strands have taken too little account of one another. It is my contention that the maternal presence in "The Bight" is intimately connected to the poem's engagement not simply with Baudelaire but with the seven-hundred-year-old tradition of danse macabre that Baudelaire reimagined, and that exploring this connection will provide a corrective illustration of how Bishop's literary-historical engagement and her exploration of maternal themes coalesce into sophisticated literary forms that exploit a vast range of musical, tonal, and symbolic effects. …

Abstract: The role of the bishops of Hispania in the construction of churches in the late antique period has been highlighted by a traditional historiography which considered the religious unification under the Catholic creed by the Third Council of Toledo in the year 589 c.e. as the starting point of an active period of construction characterized by close collaboration between the church and the Visigothic monarchy. The principal objective of this paper is to call into question this hypothesis by presenting in an orderly fashion the documentary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence regarding the sixth and seventh centuries. Conclusions force to reconsider not only the role of the bishops, actually often recorded as responsible for consecration rather than for construction, but also of the private patronage and that of the church-monarchy alliance.

Abstract: This thesis extends recent scholarly interest in the practical processes of Late Antique Roman law and on the integration of the episcopate into Roman power structures in the fourth century, the first century of imperial patronage of Christian communities. It confirms the "minimalist" model of Roman governance and provides a non-medieval example of the persecution of minorities as a contingent effect of competing claims to authority.This thesis argues that fourth-century elite Roman men disputing episcopal status via the Roman courts led to a transformation of episcopal polity, and that this development has been obscured by a subsequent paradigm shift in the norms concerning episcopal use of Roman law towards the end of that century.This paradigm shift identified by this thesis has three important aspects:1. With the change in imperial dynasty from the Valentinians to Theodosians, imperial favour moved from non-Nicene to Nicene bishops. Disparity of access to imperial favour during the fourth century required Nicene-identified bishops to invent tools to succeed in spite of their poor position. After the Theodosian-Nicene takeover, the Nicene-identified bishops retained these tools while also inheriting the legal framework that the non-Nicene bishops had crafted during their mid-century period of patronage.2. The power structures through which imperial favour was granted also changed. The typical fourth-century use of Roman law to resolve inter-episcopal disputes was different from that which would become established as a more enduring precedent in the Theodosian era. 3. The episcopal rhetoric used in claiming imperial favour changed from a focus on affirming one's own privilege to a focus on the proscription of others. The terminology of orthodox versus heretical is significant but must be understood as relational: even once heretics were proscribed by law, orthodoxy remained a status granted by the emperor. The methodology of this thesis argues for the importance of interpreting the relevant fourth-century sources in the context of their own time and norms, rather than in the light of the significantly different fifth-century practice as previous scholarship has done.This thesis first discusses two case studies before the paradigm shift: in Chapter One, Athanasius of Alexandria, as an example typical of the fourth century, and in Chapter Two, Priscillian of Avila, as an example at the cusp of the transition in the 380s who still demonstrates conformance with earlier practice. The thesis then describes the transition to the Theodosian-Nicene mode with an extended focus on Ambrose of Milan. Chapter Three shows Ambrose, contemporary with Priscillian, refusing to engage with existing episcopal legal practices and inventing a new strategy to survive the threat of Roman law. Chapter Four shows how Ambrose further refined this strategy in other conflicts and in doing so created a new place for bishops within the power structures of the Roman Empire.

Abstract: The overarching objective of this paper is to provide a political analysis cum critique of the “Church of the Poor” (COP) discourse of the 1991 Second Plenary Council of the Philippines (PCP II). The entire discussion begins with two incontrovertible facts about the Philippines: first, the majority of its people are Catholic (at least nominally) and second, a significant fraction of its population are living below the poverty line. The convocation of PCP II that consequently pronounced the Philippine Church’s preferential option for the poor was discerned by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) in the light of the impoverished condition among so many Filipinos. Has the Philippine hierarchy (CBCP), remained consistent in its thrust 20 years after PCP II? This is what the paper seeks to analyze and discuss.

Abstract: List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Growing Up in the Cities of the Gods 2. Education in an Age of Imagination 3. The System 4. Moving Up in an Age of Uncertainty 5. The Apogee 6. The New Pannonian Order 7. Christian Youth Culture in the 360s and 370s 8. Bishops, Bureaucrats, and Aristocrats under Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius 9. Old Age in a Young Man's Empire 10. A Generation's Legacy Bibliography Index

Abstract: In the second part of a circular letter to be attached to copies of the text intended for transmission to named individuals, including amongst others Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, and bishops Heahstan of London, Wulfsige of Sherborne, and Warferth of Worcester, King Alfred calls on its recipients to play their part in what he sees as an urgently needed revival of learning in England. He first studied and then rendered into English, that book which is named in Latin Pastoralis , and in English Hierdeboc , "Shepherd's Book", that is to say the Regula . The only manuscripts containing Old English "literary" texts to have survived from the last part of the ninth century are two copies of Alfred's Hierdeboc , and a fragment of an anonymous Old English Martyrology , while a second Martyrology fragment is in a hand of the end of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century. Keywords: England; King Alfred; Pastoralis ; Plegmund; Wulfsige of Sherborne

Abstract: Though Eastern Christians generally regard the Western part of the Church to have split from Orthodoxy permanently in 1054, there have been calls by some to modify the date of this as regards the Anglo-Saxon Church. These Orthodox lay scholars and bishops argue that the Anglo-Saxon Church was more closely aligned with the Orthodox East rather than the Roman Catholic West, as evidenced by the canonisation of St Edward the Confessor and advocacy for the canonisation of King Harold II. This article questions these assertions by looking at the evidence provided by Anglo-Saxon connection to the Western Church, as well as the migration of Anglo-Saxons to Byzantium following the Battle of Hastings, as described in the Jatvarðar Saga. It concludes by discussing what implications these findings have for the Orthodox Church in its canonisation of a technically non-Orthodox saint.

Abstract: A new era in Western constitutional history begins with the Germanic invasions of the fifth century because political and legal unity disappears when the West Roman Empire collapses in 476, replaced by the diversity of the different Germanic kingdoms. European historians since the nineteenth century have tended to consider this period as the first chapter of the history of the European nations because some states and territories are still named after the Germanic people that settled in them, and because the new kings tried to become the supreme political authority creating a “national” law for their brand new kingdom. Nevertheless we are still far from the “nation-state” constitutional model. Germanic kings had strong difficulties to consolidate their power over the strong majority of their Roman subjects and over the heads of the most important families of their own “nation”, that did not accept easily the principle of monarchical authority as it went against the Germanic collective governing tradition. The alliance that Germanic kings established with the catholic bishops consolidated their power over their Roman subjects, but did not solve the problem of a Kingship that remains elective and patrimonial, a situation that will lead to the feudal era. On the other hand, by the end of the sixth century, the pope Gregory I develops the idea that the Roman church, as the heir of the Roman state tradition, is superior to kingdoms, opening the way to papal supremacy and the reestablishment of the imperial idea.

Abstract: This article is an exploration of the interconnected legal ties between Christians and Zoroastrians in the early Islamic era. Drawing from the writings of the Christian authors Ishobokt, Simeon, and Henanisho, Payne describes how East Syrian bishops appropriated laws of marriage, inheritance, and property from Iranian jurisprudential traditions as a means of transferring wealth intergenerationally and extending their judicial authority. Payne thus explores the ways in which the Christians of Iran were influenced by the Iranian legal system and culture and in the seventh century CE.

Abstract: Hagiographic texts – including the lives of saints, accounts of relic translations, miracle collections, and deeds of abbots and bishops – are plentiful and rich sources for investigating the Carolingian world. The recognition that hagiography offers a great deal of information about the author's time has led scholars to use these texts to shed light on a variety of topics. Hagiography's similarity to history as well as literature means that scholarship on history and literature can contribute to our understanding of hagiography and the world that produced it. Works comparing earlier versions of saints' lives with their Carolingian-era revisions and investigating hagiography alongside works of other genres have contributed to some of the biggest debates in Carolingian history: the reform of the church, monasticism, and society; the renaissance of learning, the impact of doctrinal controversies, and views of kingship and reactions to political change.

Abstract: Magna Carta can be read as a historical, constitutional or legal document. But it was first and foremost a religious document. It was sealed by King John in 1215 ‘from reverence for God and for the salvation of our soul and those of all our ancestors and heirs, for the honour of God and the exaltation of Holy Church and the reform of our realm’. The king was acting on the advice of two archbishops and nine bishops. The Charter itself was in many ways the work of Archbishop Stephen Langton. Langton had in his Parisian exile been among the most famous lecturers on the churches’ Old Testament. Moses had commanded in Deuteronomy, that if a king were chosen, After [the king] has sat down on the throne of his kingdom he will write out for himself the Deuteronomy of this law in a book, taking an exemplar from the priests of the levitical tribe; and he will have it with him and will read it all the days of his life so that he might learn to fear the Lord his God and observe his words and ceremonies which are written in the law and so that his heart may not be raised into pride over his brothers nor veer to the right or to the left. (Deuteronomy 17:18–20, Latin) The law, argued Langton, was written down in Deuteronomy to prevent the king from demanding more power than had been agreed. Langton had in particular studied Saul's acclamation as king over Israel: ‘Samuel declared to the people the law of the kingdom and wrote it in a book and deposited it in the presence of the Lord’ (1 Samuel 10:25). What had been true in ancient Israel was to be true in medieval England. Langton was trying in his contributions to the Charter to realise in England a biblical, covenantal kingship. The Charter would soon be known as the Great Charter of Liberties. It is in the form of a covenant of liberties: a covenant between God, the king and the people, laying down the principles on which the king would reign.

Abstract: (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)ArticlesSincere thanks to Margot Fassler, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John Van Engen, Mae Kilker, and Eric Bugyis, as well as to the Church History readers for their insightful comments on this article.Beginning in the years following the Norman Conquest, a new desideratum increasingly directed the agendas of many English monastic houses: obtaining the papal privilege of full exemption from the sacramental and juridical control of their local diocesan bishop.1 Several notable Continental houses had secured this privilege earlier--first Fleury in 997, then Cluny in 998 and, completely, in 1024--and they undoubtedly served as models for subsequent bids for independence made in England.2 Like Fleury and Cluny, the English houses that sought exemption already had enjoyed a certain degree of freedom from external lay and episcopal interference through the receipt of earlier immunities from secular rulers and bishops. But with the expansion and diversification of the juridical and liturgical roles of bishops in the Western church in the tenth and eleventh centuries,3 and with the encroachment of some newly implanted Norman bishops on the independence of wealthy abbeys in England after the Conquest, many houses increasingly turned to the papacy over against their diocesan bishop for protection and to secure the privilege of exemption. The first English abbey to seek papal intervention in its claims to independence was Bury St. Edmunds; it achieved full, exempt status in 1071, but over the course of the twelfth century six others followed suit--St. Albans, St. Augustine's, Battle, Evesham, Glastonbury, and Malmesbury. Essential to a successful campaign for exemption were making frequent trips to Rome, enlisting powerful allies at the papal court, presenting documents witnessing to ancient rights, and offering gifts and other material incentives. But another important component, which tends to be neglected or undervalued in the scholarship on monastic exemption, was demonstrating an abbey's venerability and spiritual excellence, particularly through the cult of its patron saint. An abbey had to prove that it was a sacred site worth protecting and defending from all external intrusion, hence the concern to elevate its saint through building new churches and shrines in his or her honor, translating relics, and engaging in a variety of scriptorial productions, like writing and refashioning uitae and miracle collections.When St. Albans made its first bid for papal privileges in 1122 before Calixtus II (1119-1124), the tack it took closely followed those of communities on the Continent and in England that had succeeded earlier. The abbey made its claims to independence under the aegis of its patron saint, who was widely regarded as venerable. St. Alban was hailed as "the glorious protomartyr of the English [gloriosi Anglorum prothomartyris]" in both bulls issued to the abbey, Ad hoc nos and Religione ac pietate .4 But St. Albans' initial campaign ultimately was not a complete success. As generous as Calixtus's bulls were in confirming the liberties that the abbey had received from earlier royal charters, they did not grant exemption from the abbey's diocesan, the bishop of Lincoln. As a result, during the 1120s, the abbot at the time, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119-1146), redoubled the abbey's efforts to enhance its prestige, which included constructing a new shrine to St. Alban and translating his relics in 1129. But, as I will detail in this article, certain events transpired at the abbey in the 1130s that motivated Geoffrey to rethink the abbey's campaign for exemption through the patronage of St. Alban alone. Over the course of this period, a close friendship developed between Geoffrey and a local holy woman, Christina of Markyate (ca. 1095-ca. 1155). As their friendship deepened, Geoffrey became more convinced by and dependent upon Christina's visionary and intercessory powers; he entrusted her with the direction of his own spiritual advancement, often conferred with her about the management of the abbey's affairs, and increasingly envisioned her as a saintly advocate for the abbey, in consort with its first patron, St. …

Abstract: In the answer to the demands of bishops attending the synods of bishops on the Eucharist and on the word of God the Congregation for the Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has prepared the Homiletic directory , signed on June 29, 2014 and officially presented on February 10, 2015. This article examines the stages of the preparation of the document in the context of other similar documents of the Holy See, and then discusses the nature and structure of the Homiletic directory . This is the first analysis of the document, which is waiting for the official translation into Polish as well as for the in depth theological commentaries to this document.