Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses are not perhaps the book of the millennium, but they have some claim to being one of the books of the half-millennium. Few books in Church history can have had as much effect as this single-page broadsheet. Through this text, or so it is sometimes represented, Western Christianity was cut in two. The Ninety-Five Theses heralded the new age of print, with its capacity to transform culture in ways which have a strong resonance with our own ‘age of information’. The theses, it was said, were known throughout Germany in a fortnight and Europe in a month. With some justice, the theses have been described as the publishing event of the sixteenth century, and the first media sensation of the modern era.

Professor John Morrill, quoted above, has rightly identified a set of historiographical contradictions about the Stuart Church in a series of important articles. Historians have until recently paid little attention to the positive and popular elements of conformity to the national Church of England in the period before the civil war. The lack of interest in conformity has led to a seventeenth-century version of the old Whig view of the late medieval Church: the Church of England is presented as a complacent, corrupt, and clericalist institution, ‘ripe’ – as the English Church in the early sixteenth century was ‘ripe’ – to be purified by reformers. However, if this was the case, how does one account for the durable commitment to the Prayer Book demonstrated during the 1640s and 1650s and the widespread – but not universal – support for the ‘return’ of the Church of England in 1660?This paper contributes to the larger exploration of the theme of ‘the Church and the book’ by addressing in particular the continued use by clergy and laity alike of one ‘book’ – the Book of Common Prayer – after its banning by Parliament during the years of civil war and the Commonwealth.

For ministers of Word and sacraments in a reformed Church, books were part of their stock-in-trade. By the late seventeenth century books were widely available, and theological books were the staple of the publishing trade. Possession of books distinguished the inventories of deceased clerics whose wills were proved in consistory courts from their lay neighbours, but books were still too expensive for poorer clergy to buy.

The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.

Drawing on official documents filed at the First Historical Archives in Beijing, and on missionary correspondence located at the Archivio storico ‘de Propaganda Fide’ in Rome, this paper will focus on printed manifestations of popular Christianity during the mid-Qing period. It will argue that, following the exclusion of foreign missionaries after the imperial edict of 1724, tendencies towards inculturation accelerated. Early nineteenth-century sources reveal that the Christian villagers were well aware of the fact that they had preserved but a fraction of what the foreign priests had introduced several generations earlier, yet the sheer memory of their ancestors’ faith was sufficient to provide the religious and social cohesion which characterized Christian life during the eighteenth century. While developing into a syncretic expression of a belief originally introduced by European missionaries, popular Chinese Christianity absorbed elements of other religious systems, mainly popular Daoism and Buddhist millenarianism, as well as ‘Confucian’ patterns of social morality. The spiritual writings memorized and passed from generation to generation in semi-literate rural communities played an important part in the formation of a new, Christian expression of popular religiosity.

In the process often characterized by Welsh historians as ‘the remaking of Wales in the eighteenth century’, the clergy played a central role in the literary and national revival. While the national and international contexts of these cultural movements are of paramount importance, particularities also count, and need to be integrated into the larger picture. An examination of the special flavour of the careers of several literary-minded clerics and other writers in the deeply rural county of Cardiganshire offers a means of throwing light on some of these broader themes, and of illustrating the importance of literacy, culture, and learning to relatively humble middling sorts within a particular community notorious for its isolation, poor communications, monoglottism, and slow-moving economy.

The evangelical Francis Close, rector of Cheltenham and Dean of Carlisle, pithily observed in 1844 that ‘Romanism is taught Analytically at Oxford [and] Artistically at Cambridge … it is inculcated theoretically, in tracts, at one University, and it is sculptured, painted, and graven at the other’. The two forces to which he was referring – the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Camden Society – emerged within a few years of each other, in 1833 and 1839 respectively. Although they were very different in the ways in which they achieved their ends, they were essentially products of the same Zeitgeist, and their influence combined to bring about radical changes to the conduct of church services and church affairs generally within the Church of England. The most significant and fundamental change was the reinstatement of the celebration of Holy Communion as the central act of Christian worship. Like the crucial doctrine of apostolic succession, which was the keystone of Tractarian philosophy, this sacrament provided a direct link with Christ, being a re-enactment of the ceremony which he instituted at the Last Supper. For the service was not simply, as it was for Protestants, a commemoration of that event; it was a renewal of Christ’s sacrifice and was accompanied by a belief in the Real Presence. This is reflected in the terminology used. The Book of Common Prayer calls the service ‘Holy Communion’, which emphasises that part of the service where the people take part and share ‘the Lord’s Supper’. High Churchmen invariably referred to ‘the Holy Eucharist’, ‘Eucharist’ meaning ‘thanksgiving’, thus stressing the sacrificial aspect of the service which might be, in the more advanced ritualist churches, celebrated without the active participation of the congregation, as it had been before the Reformation. Further evidence of this attitude is the use of the word ‘altar’, with its sacrificial overtones, rather than the more domestic ‘Lord’s table’.

The nineteenth century, saw the heyday of Protestant missionary activity in the Indian subcontinent. South Asia – even then with one fifth of the world’s population – was such a magnet for Christian missionaries that it was estimated that one-third of all such ‘labourers in foreign lands’ were operating there. This was despite the deliberate policy of the East India Company to discourage missionary activity in India (used throughout this paper in the old sense of ‘undivided India’) as liable to foment unrest and therefore upset the economic health of the country which from the Company’s perspective was of paramount importance, not its spiritual well-being. This antipathy was the reason, for instance, why William Carey and colleagues founded their famous pioneering mission in 1798 not in Calcutta in the Company’s territory but further up the Hooghly river in the tiny settlement of Serampore then under Danish rule.

The greatness of John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine has been acknowledged many times since it was first published in 1845. Its international repute was secured by the beginning of the twentieth century; for example, the future Archbishop of Uppsala, Nathan Söderblom, writing on the modernist movement, described it and its author in 1910 as ‘the most significant theological work, written by England’s foremost theologian, and together with Leo XIII, the most important man in the Roman Catholic Church during the last century’. This estimation is confirmed by the impact Newman’s book has had on twentieth-century theology. One recent observer has judged that it is ‘significant, less for its positive arguments … [than] for its method of approach to the whole problem of Christian doctrine in its relation to the New Testament’. In other words, Newman’s book touches on a central topic of modern theology.

The description ‘Broad Church’ popularized by W.J. Conybeare in his famous article on ‘Church Parties’ in 1853, whilst claiming as distinctive the watchwords ‘Charity and Toleration’ and ‘the desire of comprehension’, made no specific reference to philology. Yet philology was not a minor fad for the Broad Church. Though its connections with theology are not obvious today, it provided a vital tool for those theologians who were seeking to defend the authority and integrity of the Bible in a context in which, as they saw it, the emergence of critical historical and scientific approaches to the natural world had the potential to undermine the sacred canon, and to relegate it to a position of relative importance only in the human story of religion. Their study of philology therefore merits renewed attention by historians, as a contribution to the reception of the Bible as book in the Victorian Church.

The explosion of the periodical press in mid-nineteenth-century Italy provoked a substantially new form of literary engagement on the part of clergy and lay militants. Following the 1848 revolutions, which in Italy had brought about the temporary collapse of the papal monarchy, Italian clericals identified the periodical press as a dangerous and even ‘nefarious’ force and as the most powerful instrument of their liberal opponents. The remedy, so the founders of the Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica, among others, asserted, was to combat the liberals with their own weapons: to counter the ‘bad press’ with the ‘good press’. An extensive but mainly local and in many instances, ephemeral Catholic periodical press did in fact develop in Italy from the mid-nineteenth century, asserting Catholic and essentially conservative values against secular ones. In united Italy much of this press was clericalist and ‘intransigentist’, demanding the restoration of the papacy’s temporal power and resisting compromise with the new order, although part of it was liberalizing and ‘conciliatorist’, seeking to reconcile Catholics to the new order. The two great survivors from this proliferation of Catholic periodicals, both intransigentist, were La Civiltà Cattolica (1850+), and the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano (1861+). The former was unusual in aiming at a national circulation and was a pioneer in the development of commercial distribution networks. Over the decades, its editorial team or ‘college’ of Jesuits, subject to a collective discipline, sought to combine lively polemic with information, erudition, and entertainment in an attractive and readily marketable product. This college, alongside the faculty of the Collegio Romano (alias Gregorian University), has constituted the main intellectual force of the Jesuits in Italy; indeed, it has substantially been the intellectual vanguard of hard-line clericalist Catholicism there. It has generally enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Vatican, and has contributed to the papacy’s teaching. The concern with social and political order which marked the periodical from its inception was a characteristic feature at least up to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-38), after which the papacy became more detached from political matters.