A hundred years ago, in 1895, London theatre audiences were treated to an interesting exchange on what we would now call the reception of early Church history. The play was Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and in it the Reverend Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism are discussing marriage, not entirely hypothetically. Dr Chasuble ‘(with a scholar’s shudder)’ observes, ‘The precept as well as the practice of the Primitive Church was distinctly against matrimony’, and Miss Prism replies ‘(sententiously), That is obviously the reason why the Primitive Church has not lasted up to the present day’.

The Formula by which the Council of Chalcedon in 451 defined the Person of Christ is a classic case of the deliberate adjustment and interpretation of the past to suit a present need. The assembled bishops at their fifth session gave their assent to a document which not merely prescribed a theological position in the face of the doctrines of Eutyches and Nestorius, but justified doing so in the face of historically-based objections to the enterprise.

By virtue of its basic pattern of belief, the Church is committed to looking back as well as forward. In his introductory letter for the Conference which has produced this volume, Andrew Martindale reminded us that ‘doctrine, dogma, and revelation are all pinned to time and place’. Most of all are they rooted in Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre, the site of the death and Resurrection of the Lord. It is true that, in particular since the Reformation, the theology of the Passion and Resurrection have often been discussed without reference to their historical location. Other Christians in other times, confident that the Holy Sepulchre discovered under Constantine was indeed the authentic place of Christ’s Resurrection, desired to reach out to and to grasp its historical and geographical reality, for these embody the very time and place of their redemption.

Retrospection is a recognized characteristic of reform movements. An appeal to the past legitimates ideological concerns which seek to replace a state of affairs considered decadent and decayed. Reforming rhetoric depends on the past as a means of proving its value and credibility. Such preservation of the past as a key organizing principle in transforming events is necessarily selective and often has a tendency towards schematization and simplification. Not only does the reforming agenda determine what aspects of the past are remembered, and hence what aspects are buried, but it also determines who is responsible for the act of remembering itself. ‘Different groups of people remember things in different ways.’ The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which the Anglo-Saxon past was perceived and utilized during the tenth-century monastic reform movement. It will be shown how, under an influence which was heavily Benedictine in inspiration, the collective memory of monks created a picture of the Anglo-Saxon past which was ‘all of a piece and all monastic’. The past was closely linked to the exercise of power. It will thus be shown how this monastic view of the past competed with an alternative tenth-century view and was ultimately to triumph over its competitor.

St Symeon the New Theologian is, without question, one of the most original and intriguing writers of medieval Byzantium. Indeed, although still largely unknown in the West, he is surely one of the greatest of all Christian mystical writers; not only for the remarkable autobiographical accounts he gives of several visions of the divine light, but also for the passionate quality of his exquisite Hymns of Divine Love, the remarkable intensity of his pneumatological doctrine, and the corresponding fire he brings to his preaching of reform in the internal and external life of the Church. He was a highly controversial figure in his own day. His disciples venerated him as a saint who had returned to the roots of the Christian tradition and personified its repristinization. His opponents, who secured his deposition and exile, regarded him as a dangerously unbalanced incompetent who, by overstressing the value of personal religious fervour, had endangered the stability of that tradition. The Vita which we possess was composed in 1054, in an attempt to rehabilitate Symeon’s memory and prepare for the return of his relics to the capital from which he had been expelled when alive. This paper will investigate how he himself understood and appropriated aspects of the earlier tradition (particularly monastic spirituality), hoping to elucidate why he felt himself inspired to reformist zeal, and why many of his contemporaries (not simply his ‘worldly opponents’ as his hagiographer would have us believe) regarded him as unbalanced. It will end by attempting some reflection on what the controversy reveals on the larger front about how the Church ‘selectively looks back on itself, so to paraphrase our president’s description of the conference theme, and whether the model of tradition and its reception exemplified in this Byzantine writer can offer anything to the dialogue between history and theology which the doctrine of Tradition (Paradosis) inevitably initiates.

The period from the earlier decades of the eleventh century to the middle of the twelfth is characterized by a number of great debates on subjects which arose out of some of the most significant aspects of the institutions of the time. There was the struggle, that between kingdoms and priesthood, or empire and papacy as it has sometimes misleadingly been called, reflected in the huge folio volumes simply entitled Libelli de Lite. At a rather rarer, theological level, there was a great argument about the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, which had implications both for the status of the clergy (in particular their links with their lay patrons), and for relations between those churches which looked to Rome for their guidance and those which, if they focused anywhere, looked to Constantinople. Somewhat between these two levels, people argued about the right relationship between secular and regular clergy, while within the monastic family there was dispute about the best way in which men, and to a much lesser degree women, could make their route heavenwards. A great deal no doubt was said about all these issues at the time which has now evaporated, but much was written down, the residue which survives making up a series of the most sustained discussions in the West on any kind of subject since the great theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries.

When Eusebius set out to write an Ecclesiastical History he claimed to be ‘the first to undertake this present project and to attempt, as it were, to travel along a lonely and untrodden path’. The claim was justified: there had been little room for religious history, even the history of pagan religions, in the works of classical historians and their imitators. Following the rules laid down by Thucydides, they concentrated on the political life of the present and its military consequences; they preferred oral to written sources, provided the historian had either been present at the scene of action or had heard reports from eyewitnesses. Both in method and in content Eusebius was an innovator. Since his starting point was ‘the beginning of the dispensation of Jesus’ he was entirely dependent on written sources for more than three hundred years; and, innovating still more, he introduced documents such as letters and imperial edicts into his narrative. Far from being political and military, his subject matter was primarily the history of the apostles, the succession of bishops, the persecutions of Christians, and the views of heretics. He was widening the scope of historical writing and using the techniques previously employed in the biographies of philosophers. It is not surprising that, once his work had been translated into Latin and extended by Rufinus and Jerome, it became the starting point for writers on ecclesiastical history for generations to come.

How did the medieval Church cope with the existence, both in its past and its present, of dissent and heresy within its own body? The churchmen who were engaged in writing anti-heretical treatises in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did not view the Church’s doctrinal history as a process of interplay between new, and possibly heterodox, ideas which defined and refined those ‘orthodox’ doctrines which became acceptable to the Church. Still less did they conceive of it in terms of Bauer’s ‘competing orthodoxies’, one of which eventually became dominant. For these polemicists, the Pauline injunction – Oportet et haereses esse in its Vulgate form (I Corinthians 11.9) – was interpreted as meaning that there must always be heresies among them. Heresy had existed as a separate entity from the inception of the Church; indeed, it was viewed almost as God-given, part of God’s scheme and the natural life of the Church, one of the four temptations sent to test and mould her. Moreover, although the heresies which had troubled the Church at various times sometimes seemed to be only distinctly related, polemicists held firmly to the conviction that all of these apparently distinct heresies were in fact offshoots of the one heresy. Their understanding of the Church’s doctrinal history, therefore, was of the intermittent manifestation, in a variety of guises, of this ‘heresy’ and its subsequent detection and repulsion by the Church. In looking back on this long history, polemicists were able to use past heresies to identify contemporary sects as heretical. At this level retrospection offered a means of combating the appeal of the ascetic and evangelical groups which were springing up during this period, many of which displayed an alarming potential to evade the control of the institutional Church. The retrospective example of the great heresies – the Arians and the Manicheans, for instance – thus provided a simple but effective method of warning the laity away from groups which the clerical and episcopal hierarchies found suspicious or threatening.

The origins of the Humiliati have long been a subject of discussion amongst historians. In the twentieth century the first person to grapple with the problems was Antonino de Stefano, who was quickly followed by Luigi Zanoni, later by Herbert Grundmann and Ilarino da Milano, and more recently by Michele Maccarrone, Brenda Bolton, and Maria Pia Alberzoni. The modern writers have accepted de Stefano’s view that the Humiliati first emerged in northern Italy in the late twelfth century. The earliest references, dating from the 1170s, describe both a small group of lay men and women devoted to the religious life (humiliati per deum), and an association of clerics living in community at the church of San Pietro Viboldone. Although they initially sought papal approval, those who ‘falsely called themselves Humiliati’ were condemned in 1184 by Lucius III, not because they were guilty of doctrinal error but because they refused to stop preaching without authority or holding private meetings, probably also because of their rejection of oath-taking. In spite of this setback the Humiliati flourished, and by the end of the twelfth century three distinct elements were recognizable: married or single lay men and women living a religious life while remaining in their own homes, male and female monastics living in common under a rule, and clerics living in some sort of canonical communities. In June 1201 these groups were brought back into the Church under the auspices of Innocent III. He gave approval to the three groups or ‘orders’ which recent research has revealed were already distinct before curial intervention, but which were now organized into one framework along Cistercian lines. It was a fortunate decision. Although groups described as ‘Humiliati’ were expelled from Cerea in 1203 and Faenza in 1206, the Order of the Humiliati went on to enjoy spectacular success, becoming a major presence in the religious, economic, and administrative life of northern Italy in the thirteenth century.

Gordon Leff once suggested that a distinctive feature of late medieval ecclesiology was ‘a new critical historical attitude to the church’. He argued that the recognition of a disparity between the apostolic and the contemporary Church is discernible equally in the thought of various thinkers such as Dante, Marsilius, and Wyclif, and in the popular movements of the Franciscan Spirituals and the Waldensians. One of the important characteristics in this new criticism was historical interpretation of the Bible. Concomitant with this, biblical studies had been experiencing a shift: Holy Scripture was no longer perceived as a mystified unity of divine words but as a record of historical events written by human authors. And yet, Holy Scripture had been considered by the most learned men in the medieval world to be ‘the most difficult text to describe accurately and adequately’. Among the historical critics of the Church, too, could perhaps arise a concern with biblical hermeneutics: what is the most appropriate way to recover the truly historical vision of the apostolic Church as found in Scripture?

During the 1370s Wyclif wrote to defend a monarchy which made extensive use of bishops and other clergy in the royal administration and yet was faced with aristocratic factions encouraged by bishops like Wykeham and Courtenay who espoused papal supremacy, if not out of conviction, at least as a very convenient weapon to support their independence against royal absolutism. At first sight Wyclifs attempts to define the right relationship between royal and episcopal, temporal and spiritual, power seem as confused as the contemporary political situation. His works contain such a wide range of theories from orthodox two swords dualism to a radical rejection of ecclesiastical authority well beyond that of Marsilius and Ockham that it seems as if his only interest was in collecting every anti-hierocratic idea available for use against the papacy. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a much more coherent view of episcopal power can be detected beneath his tirades if it is appreciated that his continual demand for a great reform, a reformatio regni et ecclesiae, is inseparably linked to his understanding of the history of the Christian Church, and that in this way Wyclif anticipates Montesquieu in requiring a time factor as a necessary ingredient in constitutional arrangements.

This paper arises out of an art historian’s interest in the frescoes of ‘Queen Theodolinda’s chapel’ in the cathedral of Monza, executed c. 1444 by the brothers Zavattari. Although these paintings have aroused intense regional interest, outside Italy they are possibly less well-known than they deserve to be. They call forth the questions of how and why Theodolinda – a ‘barbarian’ queen who lived in the late sixth and early seventh centuries – could have come to assume such a central role for the church of Monza. The interpretation and re-interpretation of her story – perhaps the projection of the present back into the past? – offers an appropriate topic for the theme of ‘The Church Retrospective’.

For students of the Reformation one of the main conceptual problems is undoubtedly the distance between the mind-set of our age and theirs. We look at the Reformation as a new beginning, the moment when the Church fragmented into competing Churches, and one of the fundamental developments of the Early Modern Age: a term which in itself presents a view of progress and change as one of the determining characteristics of the age.

Contemporaries, however, had a very different perception; they saw the movement for evangelical reform as one of renovation and renewal. They believed that they were attempting to recover what was best in the past of the Church, which had since become hopelessly corrupted. With others of their contemporaries they despised innovation. One can surely only understand Martin Luther if one recognizes the depth of his conservatism; that his personal crusade was to a large extent fuelled by a sense of moral outrage and indignation at what the papacy had done to his Church.

‘Antichrist’, wrote William Tyndale in 1528, ‘is not an outward thyng, that is to say a man that should sode[n]ly appeare with wonders as our fathers talked of him. No, verely, for Antichrist is a spirituall thing. And this is as much to say as agaynst Christ, ye one that preacheth against Christ.’ Such a definition of Antichrist marked a departure from the traditional medieval legend, which was based upon the prophecy of a single future figure of evil. This new image of Antichrist as a permanent and spiritual presence in the world is a central feature of English Protestant polemic, informing interpretations of both biblical prophecies, and the history of the Church. It was not history which engendered right understanding of Scripture, but Scripture that offered the means of interpreting the past. The Bible offered paradigms for the understanding of history because it was the embodiment of divine truth, which was irreproachable and immutable. In the words of John Bale, ‘yet is the text a light to the chronicles, and not the chronicles to the text’.

Readers of the second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or any of the subsequent editions of that massive history of the persecutions inflicted on the Church, popularly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, would have found a coherent, lucid description, filled with circumstantial and often dramatic details, of the ordeals of James Bainham. According to this account, James Bainham, a member of the Middle Temple and the son of a Gloucestershire knight, was accused of heresy in 1531, arrested, and transported to Lord Chancellor More’s house in Chelsea. There he was tied to a tree in More’s garden and whipped; subsequently he was taken to the Tower and racked in More’s presence. Eventually, after repeated interrogations and under the threat of burning, Bainham abjured and did penance at Paul’s Cross. Yet Bainham’s conscience tormented him and, a little over a month after his release, he prayed for God’s forgiveness before an evangelical congregation, meeting secretly in a warehouse in Bow Lane. A week later, Bainham stood up on his pew in St Austin’s church, clutching a vernacular New Testament and William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man to his chest and tearfully declared that he had denied God. He prayed for the congregation’s forgiveness and exhorted them to die rather than to submit as he had done. If this defiance was not sufficiently public, Bainham sent letters proclaiming his doctrinal convictions to the Bishop of London and others. Rearrested and re-examined, he was inevitably condemned to death as a relapsed heretic.