The Ecclesiastical History Society’s fiftieth anniversary conference provides an opportunity both to celebrate the achievements of the society and to reflect on the current state of the discipline. In asking whether church historians have lost the plot, I do not mean to question colleagues’ reason and sanity, but to wonder whether those of us who work in this field might have forgotten some of the objectives and principles that once distinguished our endeavour. Has ecclesiastical history lost its sense of purpose, its place at the heart of historical enterprise, to the extent that it has become not just marginalized and peripheral, but essentially irrelevant both to academic study and wider society?

From the vantage point of Constantinople in AD 440, under the rule of the orthodox Theodosian dynasty, Nicene Christianity may have appeared unassailable. Many of the most challenging of the heresies that had emerged in the century since Constantine’s conversion seemed to be receding. Even the devastating Christological controversies that had erupted in the early 430s may (understandably, if wrongly) have looked, with Nestorius’s deposition and the Formula of Reunion (433), to be under control. And yet Constantinople retained its confessional diversity, with members of numerous Christian sects – penalized by law theoretically, but often still visible and vocal in practice – living alongside members of the mainstream Nicene church.

The reimposition of a Nicene hierarchy over the major churches of Constantinople had happened only from the 380s onwards. It had been a process fraught with difficulties – not least the survival in large numbers of groups polemically labelled as Arian, and the persistence of their intellectual, theological and historical traditions, even as their hopes of political or theological hegemony faded. From this milieu had come the Eunomian Philostorgius (c.368–439), and his highly sectarian – and anti-Nicene – Church History of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Somewhere around the 620s, there began to appear in the Byzantine world references to works allegedly by Dionysius the Areopagite, that is, the judge of the court of the Areopagus converted by Paul the apostle according to the account in Acts 17. The corpus of works consisted of two works, on the heavenly and earthly church respectively, the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; a treatise called the Divine Names; a short treatise called the Mystical Theology; and ten letters, addressed to various people, arranged hierarchically, from a monk called Gaius, through lesser clergy, bishops (or ‘hierarchs’) such as Polycarp and Titus, to the apostle John. Although they were initially cited by Monophysite theologians who rejected the Council of Chalcedon, there was little resistance to the acceptance of this body of texts; gradually in the course of the sixth century these works came to be regarded as genuinely belonging to the apostolic period.

By the time of the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, Christian writers had already developed a complex methodology of historical writing, one that was not merely concerned with preserving the history of past events, but which viewed contemporary and past events through the lens of the biblical narrative of history, from creation to the ultimate end as prophesied in the eschatological books of the Bible. In this model, the history of the world could be traced from creation to follow the story of God’s revelation of himself to humankind through the prophets, through inspired Scripture and, most importantly, through Christ.

Bede (d. 735) is renowned as the first Englishman to write seriously about the history of the church in England. But the Ecclesiastical History of the English People was not the only work of his to address the history of the church, and his interest in the past extended far beyond that book’s temporal and spatial boundaries. He saw the Anglo-Saxon church as part of a universal church whose origins lay in the pre-Incarnation past. The above quotation from his commentary On the Tabernacle, a work interested in the religious institutions of the Israelites, portrays Jews from before the Incarnation as Bede’s fellow members of that church.

We live in an age wary of admitting that any institution has an essence, and this has posed a dilemma for the study of monasticism. Until relatively recently, historians of monasticism zealously sought out its timeless and immutable inner qualities rather than its many varieties. While acknowledging the changes in external form and circumstances, Adolf von Harnack’s Monasticism: Its Ideals and History (1881), Dom Morin’s L’Idéal monastique (1912), James Hannay’s The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (1903) and Herbert Workman’s The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal (1913) nevertheless pursued the stable qualities of monasticism which had survived the tides of time. Even in 1957 Jean Leclercq could still presume that monasticism had an ‘essence’, in a classic work translated into English under the title The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. To our twenty-first-century ears, such a monolith of a title, suggestive of the existence of a metahistorical ‘monastic ideal’, seems out of date. This essay approaches the subject of monastic historiography via an examination of Carolingian reflection on the monastic past, arguing that the significance of the ninth-century monastic programme lies in its effort to distil the entire received monastic heritage into a coherent and precise statement about the fundamental purpose of the monastic life. So we ask the question: when Eigil described Boniface and Sturm as spending a day away in a ‘sweet discussion about the life and manners of monks’, what exactly did he think they were talking about?

In the conclusion to his masterly biography of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), H. E. John Cowdrey notes the paradox that the pope so lionized by modern historians, to the extent that the age of reform bears his name, was largely forgotten in the twelfth century and made little impact on Christian thought, spirituality or canon law. Cowdrey is not alone in his observation that Gregory ‘receded from memory with remarkable speed and completeness’; when he was remembered, it was as a failure and as one who brought decline upon the church. For Cowdrey, the answer to this conundrum lay in the fact that Gregory VII was in fact far closer to the ideals of the sixth century than of the twelfth; he was a Benedictine monk and shared the worldview and oudook of Gregory the Great (590–604) rather than those of the so-called lawyer popes Alexander III (1159–81) and Innocent III (1198–1216). Yet within a century of Gregory’s death he was presented by Cardinal Boso as a model pope, who had overcome a schismatic emperor and the problems which his interference had precipitated in Rome. For Boso, writing for the instruction of the officials of the papal chamber, the very policies set out by Gregory VII were to be pursued and emulated. Far from being a peripheral and contradictory figure, with more in common with the distant past than the near future, Gregory was the perfect guide to the beleaguered Pope Alexander III, who was also struggling against a hostile emperor and his antipope.

The medieval papacy was an institution steeped in its own history and traditions, but how far did the popes’ recollection of their predecessors’ ‘blessed memory’ influence their own political decision-making? Through access to earlier letter registers, combined with their memories of experiences at the curia before election to the papal throne, popes could potentially delve into their own institutional history when making contemporary political decisions. In 1977 James Powell suggested that, in negotiations with Emperor Frederick II (1220–50) over his Holy Land crusade vow, Pope Honorius III (1216–27) had reached decisions based on his memory of the negotiations between Pope Clement III (1187–91) and Frederick II’s grandfather, Emperor Frederick I (1155–90).

In contrast with their larger competitors, the Franciscans and Dominicans, the Carmelites seemed to eschew the Holy Land after its loss to the Mamluks in 1291. At first sight, the apparent lack of interest on the part of Carmelites in crusading and the Holy Land is surprising. Founded on Mount Carmel as an eremitical and contemplative community in the first decade of the thirteenth century, by the 1240s the Carmelites had begun to spread westward via Cyprus to England, France and Sicily, where they adapted their original Rule in order to become mendicants. In 1291 they left the Holy Land altogether, but unlike the Franciscans, who negotiated a return in the 1330s through their custody of the Holy Places, and the Dominicans, who maintained missions in Mongol and Turkish territories, the Carmelites seemed to show little interest in returning to their original homeland. Nor have they been generally associated with preaching the crusade in the systematic fashion of the larger mendicant orders. In fact, one could be excused for assuming that the order willingly lost touch with its geographical roots.

This essay is concerned with the ways in which the English Reformation changed the understanding of the crusade movement from that held in the Middle Ages. The papally inspired crusade movement was not an attractive subject to sixteenth-century Protestant scholars. As Christopher Tyerman has remarked in his study, England and the Crusades, it was not until 1639 that ‘Thomas Fuller published his Historie of the Holy Warre, the first, and one of the more interesting histories of the crusades written by an Englishman’. The only earlier post-Reformation English work which had touched on this subject was Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turks (1603). Its first book was entitled ‘The Generall Historie of the Turks before the Rising of the Ottoman Familie’, and inevitably contained some account of crusading activity, though that was incidental to its main theme. Knolles’ book proved popular and a second edition was published in 1610, showing that there was a public for works of this kind.

It is well known that Martin Luther found ultimate authority sola scriptura. The evangelical endeavour which he initiated and exemplified focused on the return to the gospel and the rediscovery of a church modelled according to scriptural lines. For the Reformers, the truly catholic church was that church which adhered most closely to the church established by Scripture. The early church, being chronologically closest to that established in Scripture, was more authentic, not yet affected by innovation. But how were the details of that church to be discovered? Scripture was not always informative on practical questions of church life and ecclesiastical order, and for these an appeal to church history was necessary. Drawing particularly on Scott Hendrix’s study of Luther’s attitude towards the papacy, and the studies by John Headley and others of Luther’s view of, and appeal to, church history, this essay explores the ways in which Luther used his knowledge of church history to define and support his developing critique of the papacy. It focuses on his early writings to 1521, but will also consider the later work Von den Consiliis und Kirchen (1539), a testimony to Luther’s growing interest in the history of the church.

Polydore Vergil (c.1470–1555) was a controversial critic of the church of his day. As this essay will show, his radical solution to its problems was based upon his reading of the church’s history. An Italian cleric on English soil for much of his life, Vergil is most famous for his Anglica Historia (1533), the first Tudor history of England. However, he was also responsible for another great (although now neglected) work, De Inventoribus Rerum (‘on the inventors, or discoverers, of all things’). Consisting of eight volumes, it is an example of early encyclopaedic technique from original Latin and Greek sources, including the Bible, Josephus and Eusebius, as well as observation from contemporary life, in which ‘invention’ is depicted as a category of historiography and a means of examining scientific and cultural history. The first three books were published in 1499 in Venice and deal mainly with scientific phenomena. The other five books, with which we are concerned here, consider the origins of Christian institutions (initia institutorum rei Christianae) and were published much later, in 1521, although Vergil continuously revised the entire De Inventoribus Rerum until his death. The topics covered range from early church history, baptism, clerical and religious orders, penance, prayers and simony, to heresies and schisms, martyrs and the triumph of Christianity. An extremely popular work, with over forty editions in Vergil’s lifetime, it was, nonetheless, censured for its criticisms of the church. Indeed, the purpose of Books IV–VIII was to demonstrate what was initiated by Christ and what the true nature of the church was, not by examining its doctrine but by seeking the origins of its practice.

The late medieval prophetic tradition played a significant role in how John Bale (1495–1563), England’s first Protestant church historian, formulated his ideas about the nature of revelation, which would become a contentious issue in the course of the Reformation. It is the goal of this essay to examine this first-generation evangelical’s views, which will bring us closer to understanding prophecy and its legitimacy in Reformation-era Europe. In an influential essay, Richard Southern illustrates the important role of the prophetical tradition in premodern historical writing: ‘Prophecy filled the world-picture, past, present, and future; and it was the chief inspiration of all historical thinking.’ But while its significance is easy to pinpoint, the varied nature of prophetic revelation does not make for easy delineations or definitions. Southern names four types of prophecy in the Middle Ages: biblical (Daniel, Revelation); pagan (sibylline); Christian (such as that of Hildegard of Bingen); and astrological (stars and celestial events). Of course, even these are not clearly distinct categories; Southern notes that Merlin is ‘half-Christian, half-pagan’. Lesley Coote points out that the ‘subject of political prophecy is king, people and nation’, separating this from theological, apocalyptic prophecy, though she also asserts that the two are closely related. Bernard McGinn remarks that in the later Middle Ages, prophecy is ‘seen as a divinatory or occasionally reformative activity – the prophet as the man who foretells the future, or the one who seeks to correct a present situation in the light of an ideal past or glorious future’.

Competing confessional claims to the early church played a hugely significant part in the revival of the writing of ecclesiastical history during the period of the European Reformations. This question of Christian origins led rival religious groups to contest vigorously the right to claim to be the early church’s legitimate heirs. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works of ecclesiastical history would, moreover, strive to attain and preserve the rigorous standards set by Renaissance humanist scholarship and, in turn, exploit any perceived weaknesses in the work of their opponents in this regard. This essay examines a seventeenth-century Irish example of such ecclesiastical history-writing: Cambrensis Eversus (‘Cambrensis Refuted’), written in Latin, largely for a continental audience, by a County Galway priest-scholar, John Lynch (1599/1600–73), and published in St Malo in 1662. The work is ostensibly a reply to the twelfth-century works of Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–1223) on Ireland, which had attained a new importance in the confessional controversies of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cited afresh by scholars as evidence of the depraved nature of the medieval Irish (and, by extension, of medieval Irish Catholicism) and the need for their moral and religious reform. This had a particular resonance in the Reformation period: if medieval Catholicism could be proved to have been in a state of decay, then this would further legitimize the argument that it was in need of reform and would underscore the correctness of the Protestant return to a purer and more authentic early Christianity.

On the eve of the 1689 Revolution in England, Gilbert Burnet was best known as an ecclesiastical historian. Although he had had a noteworthy career as a Whigleaning cleric, who had gone into exile at the start of James II’s reign and had entered the household of William of Orange in the Hague, Burnet’s reputation had been based on his magisterial History of the Reformation. This had appeared in its first two volumes in 1678 and 1683, and had rapidly become the standard work on the religious changes of the Tudor age. Soon after the Revolution, Burnet also became notable as the chief propagandist of the new regime. He produced a steady stream of works justifying William’s usurpation of James’s throne, and played a major part in organizing such pro-Orange events as the fast days marking William’s war with Louis XIV. This essay explores a key intersection of these two roles. It suggests that Burnet’s explicitly pro-Williamite understanding of church history gave rise to a new division of the past, and effectively invented the Restoration era as a distinct period of British history, running from 1660 to 1689.

John Wesley’s sermon ‘Of Former Times’ (1787) provides just one example of his belief in the historical importance of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. In its conclusion he noted that ‘[n]o “former time” since the apostles left the earth has been “better than the present”’. In another sermon he argued explicitly that religious progress in the eighteenth century was greater than during the Reformation. Undecided about a more suitable comparison, he could not choose between the apostolic age and the rule of Constantine the Great. In these arguments the early Methodists understandably afforded little time to the Middle Ages, which were seen as a dark period between the light of early Christianity and the brightness of their own movement. Yet this essay will argue that, despite this general approach to the history of the medieval church, there is an early Methodist medievalism worth recovering and that it can be best understood in the context of eighteenth-century religious polemic and debate.