Students of historiography have become increasingly gloomy in their evaluation of the Greek founding fathers of historiography. All the limits, the shortcomings, and the failures of conventional history writing – the histoire événementielle of French terminology – have been laid at the door of Thucydides. Herodotus has escaped obloquy, either because he offered a promise of variety, curiosity, humour and sensitiveness which Thucydides spoiled, or because (as Professor Seth Benardete says in a very recent book) ‘his foundations are not those of modern historiography’. Thucydides has become the great villain of historiography in so far as he identified history with political and military events. Professor Moses Finley and I may in the past have said some unkind words about Thucydides – so did the late Professor Collingwood. But we are now made to look like mild apologists of Thucydides by Hermann Strasburger. This most penetrating interpreter of ancient historians has treated Thucydides’s approach to history as the survival of a prehistoric mode of thinking, for which war was the most important event. According to Strasburger, Thucydides excluded das Humanum from history and therefore derived his scale of values from ‘prescientific and ultimately precivilised, prehistoric strata of thought’. Strasburger tries to show that some hellenistic historians, such as Agatharchides and Posidonius, showed more interest in the business of peaceful coexistence than Thucydides ever did, but he is under no illusion about their ultimate success. Thucydides’s historical approach prevailed: deviationists were silenced. The Romans inherited from the Greeks a type of historical writing for which war was the central theme. What Thucydides did not know was not history.

How far does the great religious controversy of the fifth century centred on the mystery of the Incarnation reflect popular religious ideas of the east Roman world? It is well known that factors that had little to do with theological speculation, such as the rivalry for prestige and leadership between Constantinople and Alexandria, played a large part in bringing the controversy between rival concepts of christology to their climax in the twenty years that separate the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. More discussion, perhaps, is needed concerning the contribution of articulate public opinion to the course of events, and in particular, to the persistence of the opposition to the Chalcedonian definition after 451.

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.

In his fascinating paper, Professor Momigliano drew to our attention the degree to which the aristocracy of the late Roman Empire accepted within its religious ethos beliefs and practices which we would be inclined to label as ‘popular’. In doing so, he raised the recurrent problem of cultural diffusion. How far, in a given period, were intellectuals willing to accept as normative the piety of the simple faithful? Conversely, how far did the more critical attitudes of scholars influence popular devotion? These are permanent questions which we may ask of the history of the church, but perhaps the problem was never so acute as in the medieval church. Its intelligentsia (the humanists of the twelfth century, the philosophers of the thirteenth) had received a long and exacting formal education. The ordinary faithful, conversely, were illiterate, cut off, we might think, from the very sources of christian spirituality, for they could neither read the Scriptures nor follow the latin liturgy. Critics of the medieval church have been inclined to see two religions rather than one: a philosophical, indeed over-rational, religion of the intelligentsia, and a set of popular superstitions. A valuable piece of evidence in assessing the truth of this estimate is to be found in the first book of the treatise on The Relics of the Saints written in about 1120 by Guibert abbot of Nogent. Its significance lies, not only in the useful information which it contains about popular practice, but in the fact that it was an attempt to assess it, made by one of the more learned and attractive men of the time. Although Guibert made little direct impact on the history of the age, he was in close sympathy with many of the leaders of the twelfth-century Renaissance, and was a fine scholar in his own right.

The present communication derives from an attempt to make an edition of the list of relics of Reading Abbey to be found in one of the abbey’s cartularies, British Museum MS Egerton 3031, fols 6v–8r. This is a list of no less than 242 relics, a collection which must have been formed between the founding of the abbey in the 1120s and the writing of the cartulary in the 1190s. It can be supplemented by a much shorter list of 24 relics made by the Dissolution commissioner, Dr London, which however only adds one relic not present in the twelfth-century list, a bone of St Osmund of Salisbury, canonised in 1457. If we add the ‘head’ of the apostle Philip, given by king John, and added to the cartulary in a slightly later hand, we can be fairly safe in saying that the abbey acquired all but two of its relics in the first seventy years of its existence, and the list, which is very full and comparatively early as such lists go, has much to tell us of how such collections were made.

Manifestations of popular religion both in conscious and less conscious opposition to the official hierarchical church were frequent by the early thirteenth century. Such movements, generated by a new and exciting interpretation of apostolic life among the laity, often expressed particular social and economic needs. This evangelical awakening emphasised urban and fraternal Christianity and was welcomed by those in the towns who were untouched by the ministrations of the local clergy. Strong religious sentiment led them to practise a literal and christocentric piety through corporeal works of mercy and personal experience of poverty. Real spiritual devotion was no longer confined to monastic-enclosed communities but was centred on the domestic family unit, in which women too played a valuable rôle. Yet this spontaneous expression of lay piety represented a threat which could not be ignored. It was also a challenge which Innocent III met, during the seventeen years of his pontificate, by attempting to harness the untapped reserve of religious enthusiasm and vitality and to divert it into an orthodox channel which affected not merely acknowledged heretics but many of his own clergy.

Everyone is familiar with the notion of an ‘Age of Faith’. It is the idea that, at some time in the past, everyone believed what religious authority told them to believe. In this paper I propose to test the truth of this idea, in one period, and one region.

In the summer of 1304 the leaders of the Spiritual Franciscan party in Italy, Fra Angelo Clareno and Fra Liberato, were gathered with their followers in Perugia. They had recently returned from exile in the east. Benedict XI was dead and western Christendom awaited the outcome of what was to be one of the most crucial papal elections in the later Middle Ages. It was to be a trial of strength between the pro-and anti-French parties, accompanied by much political manœuvring, rumour and bargaining. In the interval, while the political groups were mustering their forces, there appeared a set of prophecies of the popes, called the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus, which can with some confidence be ascribed to the little group at Perugia. Seldom in history can the gap between hope and political reality have been wider. The Spiritual Franciscans were thinking in terms of heilsgeschichte, and for them the crisis of all history was at hand, while cardinals Napoleone degli Orsini, Nicholas of Prato, and others were laying down the tortuous lines of the intrigues which resulted in the election of Clement V and the removal of the papacy to Avignon. It is only through these prophecies that we can discern the high expectations and pent-up emotion with which this moment was approached by some at least. Though the moment passed and salvation drew not nigh, there was some powerful force of attraction in these prophecies: they were seized on immediately, quickly disseminated and imitated. Why was this?

The sentence of excommunication was the ultimate spiritual deterrent available to the medieval Church. It was designed to be completely terrifying, and to the devout mind it probably was. In theory, it cut the offender off not only from his hope of eternal salvation but, as many a person found to his cost, from all contacts which made mortal life bearable, or indeed possible. But theory, as father Logan has shown us, is not the same thing as practice. The effectiveness of the sentence was limited both by the character of the person afflicted and, to some extent, by his social position. A king could get away with a good deal, and, for lesser men, the existence of the writ de excommunicato capiendo tacitly acknowledged the fact that a royal prison might be a more effective inducement to repentance than the terrors of the Church’s ban. To some extent the Church itself had asked for trouble by cheapening the sentence. Many a modern librarian must wish for a suitably unpleasant punishment for those who borrow books and fail to return them, but when we find a bishop of Lincoln ordering the excommunication, after trina monitio, of all those who have failed to return a book borrowed from Master John of Dersingham, we may wonder whether a sledgehammer were not being used to crack a nut.

John XXII’s excommunication, in 1318, of Robert Bruce certainly does not fall into the category of excommunication for trivial causes, whatever one may think of the rights of the case, but the way in which the pope attempted, and Bruce frustrated, the execution of the sentence provides an interesting example of the difference between theory and practice in matters of ecclesiastical administration. The pope started from the assumption that Bruce was a lawful and distinguished subject of the king of England who had regrettably defected from his allegiance.

I have recently read through almost all the surviving medieval registers of the diocese of Lincoln, while collecting material for a book on the church in medieval Lincolnshire society. As may be imagined, a good many interesting patterns are emerging from this and other sources; this short note results from the examination of one such pattern.

John Buckingham, who like so many other bishops of the fourteenth century, had been a civil servant, ruled over the see of Lincoln, with conspicuous industry and attention to detail, for the twenty-six years between 1362 and 1398. His career is the subject of a doctoral thesis, on which Miss Alison McHardy is now engaged, and I do not propose to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider in detail one or two incidents in his episcopate which are, I believe, of some relevance to the theme of this conference.

Until the pioneer work of Dr G. R. Owst in the 1920s and 1930s English sermon literature was a neglected field. Even today Owst’s two general studies remain largely isolated monuments, the starting-point of those who would pursue the sermon, but not, perhaps, so influential in related fields as their intrinsic worth and astonishing thoroughness would appear to merit.

As Owst pointed out, James Gairdner’s four-volume work on Lollardy failed to take account both of unpublished material in episcopal registers and of an extensive sermon literature in manuscript. It was by means of the sermon that Owst himself was able to recreate much of the social background of fourteenth and fifteenth-century England. A prominent element in that background was Lollardy.

Spirituality is a catholic word, beginning to dissolve into ecumenese, but it is much better than ‘piety’ with its nineteenth-century overtones, or the rather better eighteenth-century phrase ‘inward religion’. And it suggests, as I should wish to do, some of the continuities between medieval and protestant religion.

The fifteenth century is still for historians a very misty valley, but we are coming to see some things more clearly, and one thing is that late medieval thought and devotion is not to be written off or talked down as preparing for the Reformation because it was in fact religion run to seed, and in the field of devotion characterised by a morbid and individualistic pietism. Preaching, for example, was of growing importance. We have not yet the full story of the number of preacherships founded in German towns in the fifteenth century and their significance. We know that this was accompanied by a stress on the importance of hearing the Word, almost to the point of disparaging the sacrament of the altar, and not only Wessel Gansfort but Gabriel Biel can be quoted at this point. Again, the lay study of a vernacular Bible ante-dates the reformers. Much as John Bunyan echoed the older English of the puritan Geneva Bible, so that astonishing market-gardener among the prophets, Clement Ziegler of Strasbourg, is steeped in the pre-Reformation Bible which appeared in 1466.

One of the most significant aspects of the religious literature written in England in the critical half-century before the Long Parliament was the considerable contribution made by lay writers. Whatever belief one chooses, Anglicanism, Puritanism, mysticism, skepticism, rationalism, deism, a lay representative can be found who espoused it. Whatever type of writing one selects, devotional books, spiritual biographies, polemics, ecclesiastical histories, legal studies, a search of the Short Title Catalogue would readily bring to light a layman who produced such works. From the pietist John Norden to the firebrand William Prynne, to the contemplative moderate Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, the age abounds with a rich variety of lay religious opinion.

In English history the seventeenth-century upheavals were of great importance in leading to parliamentary government, religious toleration and autonomous science. In both popular belief and scholarly teaching the Puritans have been given much credit for these developments. However, the process was much more tentative and complex than has often been supposed. For example, Milton is remembered as a prophet of popular liberty but his experience in the practical affairs of government drove him to aim at government by a virtuous aristocracy which was most likely to arise from among those who had property and the consequent time to spare for political activity. The recent awakening of interest in the more extreme sectarian and revolutionary movements on the Continent and in England has brought into sharper focus the relative conservatism of many of the Puritans and has given the English Civil War and its aftermath the appearance of a rift within the landowning and propertied classes. Science owed much to the current questioning of tradition and of authority but it also owed not a little to the diligence of several royalist clergy and laity who in their years of unemployment during the interregnum devoted themselves to scientific observations and experiments; the genius of Sir Christopher Wren was maturing during these years. Families and individuals were often torn by conflicts of loyalties. There was the loyalty to the possibility of a better and more balanced society free from ecclesiastical impositions and from the exercise of power without responsibility; there was also the loyalty to the existing structure of society which, for all its faults, was a fence protecting the country from mob rule and communal chaos. Many changed from side to side in the years before, during and after the Civil War and they did so not simply out of a prudential desire to be on the winning side but because they were apprehensive of the revolutionary trends in the movement in which they had got involved.

Although most historians of the English Civil War pay lip service to Puritanism as one of its main ingredients, as a matter of fact, the analysis of religious conviction is rarely undertaken except, perhaps, in regard to the ministers. How deeply Puritanism impinged on the laity is either ignored or treated in an imprecise fashion or explained as rationalisation of deeper economic or social concerns. The Whig historians, who coined the phrase ‘Puritan Revolution’, really see Puritanism playing a general political role, leading to toleration, with the advanced exponents of liberty, like Cromwell, or as causing the opposition to clerical episcopal tyranny in the case of people like Prynne. Even so careful an historian as W. A. Shaw fails completely to understand Pym’s use of biblical imagery and, I think, basically underplays the religiosity of the Parliament men.

Recent seventeenth-century historians have stressed the opportunities the disruption caused by the Civil War gave to women to assert a new role for themselves, first in religion, then in society in general. There is much truth in this thesis: especially among the more extreme sects like the Ranters, and, later, the Quakers, women did publicly teach and evangelise, activities hitherto exclusively reserved for men. Yet this emphasis upon radical women sectaries can be misleading since it tends to obscure the importance of more sober protestant matrons. For them the Civil War did not mark a new period of spiritual awakening or intellectual enlightenment: rather it brought to fruition a tradition of independent action by laywomen which can be traced back at least to the days of the Henrician Reformation.