‘For to the most parte of men, lawfull and godlie appeareth whatsoever antiquitie hath received’, complained John Knox in his 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women – and indeed for Knox and his fellow Protestants, the question of historical pedigree was troublesome. Catholic polemicists frequently posed some form of the question, ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’, and contrasted this problem with their own historical continuity, unbroken since the apostle Peter. Knox’s homeland of Scotland saw comparatively little sixteenth-century theological debate, but as in Reformation disputes on the continent, in Scotland historical superiority was claimed by Catholic and Protestant alike. A useful means of legitimation for either side, as Knox had said, was to demonstrate greater similarity to the primitive Church than one’s opponent. The appeal to superior historical precedent was particularly central to one Scottish debate, the printed theological exchange between Quintin Kennedy and John Davidson, and here it was slightly unusual in that these authors focused on the general council, rather than the papacy or episcopacy, as the means of historical legitimation.

This paper explores the religious politics of remembering and visually depicting the recent past in early modern England. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the commemoration of a series of critical moments in the reigns of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth, and her Stuart successor, King James I, became a powerful bulwark of both Church and State. The story of the nation’s providential rescues from Catholic treachery and oppression, pre-eminently the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, evolved into an enduring myth which fused Protestantism with patriotism – a myth which, moreover, engendered its own highly emotive iconography. By the 1630s, however, the celebration of these same anniversaries grew increasingly contentious: as the theological complexion of the episcopal hierarchy gradually shifted, such events became the victims of a species of ecclesiastical amnesia. Caroline clerics began to take deliberate steps to discourage retrospection, to control the memory of historical milestones which were now regarded as a source of embarrassment. Here I want to suggest tentatively that this trend can be traced into the realm of pictorial representation. In the process, we may learn something more about the relationship between the Calvinist strand of the Reformation and the graphic arts.

When the prosecutors of William Laud were seeking damning evidence against the Archbishop, they seized upon the fate of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in the 1630s. They produced a catalogue of abuses, occasions on which Laud had attacked, impugned, or banned the volumes. In his report of the trial, Prynne gave these cases of Foxe-hunting an important position, directly after the accusation that Laud had hindered the distribution of Bibles. The prominence given to Foxe, and the close association with the Bible, were typical of the ways the martyrologist was handled in the early seventeenth century, and tell us much about the regard in which he was held within the English Church. His Book of Martyrs had attained the status of a quasi-biblical text. His works, invoked with an almost scriptural reverence, were appealed to as an unquestionable authority on matters of ecclesiastical history and Protestant tradition.

Before returning home to his royal master, the ambassador of Poland went to say farewell to the reigning Pope, Pius V. They met in St Peter’s Square, where the ambassador asked for a relic to take back with him to Poland. In reply, the pontiff bent down and took earth from the square with both his hands and placed it in a handkerchief, before handing it to the understandably bemused Pole with the reassurance that this was no ordinary earth but that mixed with the blood of Christian martyrs (nobis notum omnino erat, Vaticanum pulverem Martyrum sanguine plenum esse). The earth then proceeded to bleed, staining the handkerchief to the wonder and amazement of all present.

The abbesses of Fontevrault recognized the work of their founder, Robert of Arbrissel, in a number of different ways. It has been suggested by modern scholars that the first abbess of the Order, Petronilla of Chemillé, was dissatisfied with the vita written by Baudry of Dol and commissioned a new one from a Fontevrist canon who has long been thought to have been Robert’s personal chaplain. However this second vita may have been produced for other reasons, and it may not have been originally written to further the cause of his canonization.

Edmund Calamy is celebrated as the biographer of Restoration Nonconformity. His account of the sufferings of the ministers ejected from their livings following the Restoration religious settlement is well known to historians of Dissent. As a biographer he was responsible for rescuing many details and even the names of ejected ministers which would otherwise have been lost. His account remains therefore the pre-eminent source for the study of the early history of Nonconformity. In addition to the biographical details about individual ministers, he included much incidental information on the organization and structure of early Dissent. Nevertheless, the significance of his work went beyond the biographical accounts. Modern religious Dissent dates from the Restoration of Charles II and the passing of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which saw about 2,000 ministers, preachers, and teachers suffer the loss of their livelihoods for their refusal to conform. The Great Ejection was, however, more than just an historical event. As A. G. Matthews, the compiler of the outstanding revision of Calamy’s list of ejected ministers, wrote:

The Dutch Reformed Church acquired its modern past fairly recently, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, during the first years of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands. From 1819 to 1827 the four volumes of Ypeij and Dermout’s History of the Dutch Reformed Church appeared, some two and a half thousand pages all together. The work has not fared well. Its garrulous verbosity, weak composition, and old-fashioned liberalism have been rightly denounced. Only the four accompanying volume with notes, more than a thousand dense pages full of facts and quotations, have been admired for their scholarship. Protestant academic ecclesiastical history prefers to trace its origin to the founding in 1829 of its scholarly journal, the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, by the two first occupants of the newly founded chairs for Church history at the universities of Leiden and Utrecht.

During the early and mid-nineteenth century the Church of England underwent a wide-ranging series of institutional reforms. These were intended to meet the pastoral challenges of industrial society, acknowledge the changing relationship of Church and State, and answer the more pertinent criticisms of its radical and dissenting antagonists. Particularly during the 1830s, the constitutional adjustments of 1828–32, the accession of a Whig administration, and widening internal divisions appeared to place the Church in a newly perilous position. The reforms were consequently enacted in a highly charged and febrile atmosphere. Each measure was closely scrutinized by concerned and sometimes panic-stricken Anglicans,’ seeking to establish whether it would strengthen the Church or was in fact a manifestation of threatening forces. In such circumstances, the legitimation of reform assumed crucial importance. As ever, the prospective reformer required a legitimation which would appeal to the widest possible constituency. Among allies, it could serve to embolden waverers, doubters, and often the reformer himself. If possible, it should engage the sympathies of potential opponents. It was also essential that the legitimation would not so constrain the reformer that the initiative’s practical effectiveness was blunted.

We begin in Trinity College, Cambridge, in May 1839. It is 10 o’clock at night and three undergraduates named Neale, Webb, and Boyce are trying to persuade one of their dons, Archdeacon Thorp, to become senior member of a new society. They refuse to leave until he agrees. The Cambridge Camden Society is born. J. M. Neale becomes President, Benjamin Webb Secretary, and E.J. Boyce Treasurer. Within a year they are joined by another Trinity man with influence in a much wider sphere, Beresford Hope. By 1843 the membership list includes two archbishops, sixteen bishops, thirty-one peers and M.P.s, seven deans or chancellors of dioceses, twenty-one archdeacons or rural deans, sixteen architects, and seven hundred ordinary members. In 1845 the society goes national, moves to London, and becomes the Ecclesiological Society.

In the providence of God, St Bartholomew’s Day, 1862, fell on a Sunday, just as it had two hundred years before. On that earlier Sabbath, some 2,000 ministers were ejected from their livings because they could not conscientiously swear their ‘unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained and prescribed’ in the new Prayer Book, or meet some of the other requirements of the new Act of Uniformity. Rejected by the Established Church, many of these men continued to fulfil their callings outside her pale and thereby gave a major, new impetus to Dissent. As the bicentenary of ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’ approached, Victorian Nonconformists resolved to make the most of’the opportunity which God’s providence has brought round to them’. In this retrospective year, historical claims became powerful weapons in the struggle between Church and Dissent; and the past became contested territory which both sides sought to appropriate in order to add legitimacy to their present positions.

‘Civilization’ was a major keyword in the Italian Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Indeed Catholic Christian civilization was seen as synonymous with true civilization itself insofar as the post-classical era was concerned. The concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was closely allied to that of cristianità, as distinct from cristianesimo (Christianity). The terms cristianità and chrétienté, like English ‘Christendom’, had originally had primarily geographical connotations, but in post-Revolutionary Catholic thought they acquired connotations of a Christian order of society under the leadership of the Church, the evils of the modern world being presented as consequences of its breakdown. The allied discourse on ‘Christian civilization’ itself in the Italian Catholic world, as in the French one, was in large measure reactionary in character, associated with Counter-Revolutionary ideology and with opposition to liberalism. It asserted that a return of society to the Church was a precondition of social order. Thus the myth of a lost universal order offered a paradigm for the future.

I know well the double danger of giving a mere dry summary of events, or of going into endless disquisitions. … But I do think both may be avoided if we seriously believe that our business is to study our records earnestly and devoutly; because they have a meaning in them which we may be helped to draw out; not because we must put a meaning into them.

Although over 160 years have passed since John Keble’s Assize sermon on National Apostasy, the study of the Oxford Movement continues to absorb the attention of historians. Within the last decade, for example, two major biographies of Newman have appeared, together with a careful examination of the relationship between Tractarianism and the Anglican High Church tradition. In an essay on ‘The Oxford Movement and its reminiscencers’, Owen Chadwick commented concerning the historiography of Tractarianism that ‘too many have made it an industry’: the industry, however, still seems to be productive.

James Cooper, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Glasgow University and a prominent High Churchman, once remarked that one of the main reasons for the Catholic revival in the Church of Scotland in the late nineteenth century was the renewed study of the history of the Scottish Church. The Catholic revival, or Scoto-Catholic movement, found expression in the formation of the Scottish Church Society in 1892. The High Churchmen who formed the Society considered that a Catholic position was no novelty in the Kirk. According to Henry J. Wotherspoon, one of the leading theologians of the movement, the Presbyterian was from the first ‘the High Catholic of Puritanism’, and it followed that the material for a catholic revival lay at hand in the traditions of the Church. In its classic form and confessional position, he said, Presbyterianism

Towards the close of the first decade of the twentieth century there emerged an organized movement within the English Catholic Church which can be distinguished as Social Catholicism. The Catholic Social Guild (CSG), which was founded at the Catholic Truth Society Conference in September 1909, largely represented Social Catholicism in England and, as such, constitutes the focal point of this paper. This small body comprised laypeople, secular priests, and members of religious orders. Of the lay component a significant number of middle-class converts to Catholicism were prominent; whilst at parish level working men and women were recruited largely through schemes of social study. Social Catholicism represented a novel phenomenon not only because of its essential focus upon addressing some of the more intractable social problems of the day but also because it embodied an inherently different social rationale from that of more mainstream Catholic endeavour in this field. Looking back to the Church of medieval times, Social Catholicism perceived an ideal Church which, through its social precepts and actions, had exerted an exemplary socio-economic influence. Moreover such an historical precedent might embody the answer to the ‘social question’ – a multiform modern problematic – provided the Catholic Church could transform its past experience of a pre-modern social engagement into initiatives of theoretical and practical relevance to the modern situation.

The Second Vatican Council (1962-5) called for religious orders to renew themselves in a two-fold return to the sources of their Christian life, jointly to the Gospels and to the inspiration of each institute’s founder, a process to be combined with a movement to bring the religious life into line with the ‘tenor of the times’.

Thirty years after the issuing on 28 October 1965 of Perfectae Caritatis, the conciliar decree on the religious life, it seems particularly relevant to look at how far this renewal has been enacted since the Council. Furthermore, given the theme of this volume it seems especially apt to examine the role which that call for the rediscovery of the founder’s spirit has played in one such renewal.