History

This book offers a new approach to the study of lay religion as evidenced in collections of miracle narratives in 12th-century England. There are a number of problems associated with the interpretation of this hagiographical genre and an extended introduction discusses these. The first issue is the tendency to read these narratives as transparent accounts of lay religion as if it were something susceptible to static, ‘ethnographic’ treatment in isolation from wider social and political activities. The second issue is the challenge of explaining the miraculous as a credible part of cultural experience, without appealing to reductionist notions of a ‘medieval mindset’. The third issue is the problem of how to take full account of the fact that these sources are representations of lay experience by monastic authors. The author argues that miracle narratives were the product of and helped to foster lay notions of Christian practice and identity centred on the spiritual patronage of certain enshrined saints. The six main chapters provide fully contextualized studies of selected miracle collections. The author looks at when these collections were made, who wrote them, the kinds of audiences they are likely to have reached, and the messages they were intended to convey. He shows how these texts served to represent specific cults in terms that articulated the values and interests of the institutions acting as custodians of the relics; and how alongside other programmes of textual production, these collections of stories can be linked to occasions of uncertainty or need in the life of these institutions. A concluding chapter argues the case for miracle collections as evidence of the attempt by traditional monasteries to reach out to the relatively affluent peasantry, and to urban communities in society, and their rural hinterlands with offers of protection and opportunities for them to express their social status with reference to tomb-centred sanctity.

According to traditional interpretations, the Reformations in England and Scotland had little in common: their timing, implementation, and very character marked them out as separate events. This book challenges the accepted view by demonstrating that the processes of reform in the two countries were, in fact, thoroughly intertwined. From England's Declaration of Royal Supremacy in 1534 to Scotland's religious revolution of 1559-61, interactions between reformers and lay people of all religious persuasions were continual. Religious upheavals in England had an immediate impact north of the border, inspiring fugitive activity, missionary preaching, and trade in literature. Among opponents of the new learning, cross-border activity was equally lively, and official efforts to maintain two separate religious regimes seemed futile. The continuing religious debate inspired a fundamental reconsideration of connections between the countries and the result would be a redefinition of the whole pattern of Anglo-Scottish relations.

The period between 1857 and 1957 saw a transformation in Anglican sexual understanding, in which sub- and superordination declined as the structuring principle of sexual relations. In this period the established church negotiated substantial new normative interpretations of marriage, sexuality, citizenship, and priesthood. The book reveals the importance of the gendering of ecclesiastical political spaces to Anglican sexual policy, how the introduction of female voices into the previously exclusively male spheres of power transformed understandings of gender. It also delineates the impact of the Anglo-Catholic revival on Anglican sexual culture, in particular, the significance of catholic sacramentality on understandings of the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual. Finally, it exposes a surprisingly dynamic and dialogical relationship between theology, feminism, and the new sexual sciences that resists the teleologies of secularization that dominate the histories of sexuality and Christianity in Britain. The story of Anglican sexual politics told in this book firmly rebuts contemporary notions of the Church as an inevitably reactionary institution. In contrast, it reveals the Church’s historic capacity to renegotiate gender and sexual ideologies, and shows how it was often at the forefront of sexual change in British society.

This collection of original articles addresses the often conflicting roles of values, interests, and identity in contemporary Jewish politics. The book focuses particularly on the interplay of politics and Jewish history. There are two conceptions of Jewish politics in the contemporary era. According to the first, Jewish politics consists of the activities of Jewish organizations in pursuit or defense of manifest Jewish concerns. In contrast, the second approach conceives Jewish politics more broadly, and thus includes within its purview the activities and responses of individual Jews (not just those of organizations) in pursuit of any goals, issues and policies, not only those of intrinsically Jewish concern.

This book studies the only religion England has ever given the world, that of modern pagan witchcraft, which has now spread from English shores across four continents. The book examines the nature of that religion and its development, and offers a microhistory of attitudes to paganism, witchcraft, and magic in British society since 1800. Village cunning folk and Victorian ritual magicians, classicists and archaeologists, leaders of woodcraft and scouting movements, Freemasons and members of rural secret societies, all appear in the pages of this book. Also included are some of the leading figures of English literature, from the Romantic poets to W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Robert Graves, as well as the main personalities who have represented pagan witchcraft to the world since 1950.

This book examines how numerous northern civilians understood the Civil War as a contest permeated with religious significance. From the war's outset, many religious Northerners asserted that God was directing the conflict to chasten his chosen nation and bring about the destruction of slavery. Convinced that the Union was sacred and had to be preserved so that America could fulfill its God‐ordained purpose in world history, many ministers and laypersons wholeheartedly supported the northern war effort and broadcast their political views at church. Overflowing with Christian patriotism, individual congregations and entire denominations frequently alienated members who disagreed with them politically. Some disgruntled Democrats formed their own assemblies where they could avoid political preaching, but these churches oftentimes suffered from partisanship as well. A minority of churchgoers lamented that war and politics had caused people to lose interest in spiritual matters, and some feared that the church had forsaken its divine calling to preach the gospel. The enthusiasm of clergy and laity to sanctify the Union and fuse religion and politics during the Civil War demonstrates that religious Northerners tended to look to the American nation rather the church as the primary means through which God would accomplish his will in the world. Ultimately, this consuming desire to Christianize the Union by infusing it with spiritual significance contributed to the secularization of religion rather than the transformation of the state into a Christian republic.