The study of church history, in a degree perhaps unparalleled among the various branches of historical study, combines both the analysis of flux and change and also the continuities and constants that somehow remain through the vicissitudes and disasters of human history. Without needing to have any prefabricated pattern imposed upon it, in Marxist or other style, church history discloses startling continuities, so that to talk about Constantine or Origen or Augustine is somehow not to indulge in antiquarianism but to be talking about issues which (despite vast changes in the intellectual framework within which the debate proceeds) remain alive for the living community of the church now. The sweat drips from our brows as we make die effort to preserve impartiality and detachment. My subject is Constantine’s conversion and the shift that this brought to the intellectual and religious history of Europe. If we put the story back into its historical context and try to look at it with the eyes of a contemporary, the shift may not seem exactly the kind of shift that at first the modern historian thinks he sees.

The Vita Herluini, composed by Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster, has long been recognised as the most important source for the foundation and early history of one of the greatest of the Norman religious houses. It formed the basis of Porée’s account several years before it was first edited in its entirety by Armitage Robinson. The significance of the text is more than local or hagiographical, for it covers a crucial period in Norman ecclesiastical development. When Herluin first determined to adopt the monastic habit, the reconstruction of religious life in the duchy was far from complete. When Gilbert wrote the Vita, some time after the elevation of Anselm to the see of Canterbury, Norman prelates, many of them sons of Bec, were urgently engaged in the reformation of the church in William the Conqueror’s new kingdom. Gilbert Crispin’s interpretation of the religious vocation was very different from that of the founder. He wrote as a man experienced in ecclesiastical government and as a theologian of moderate distinction; he had grown to maturity in the cloister and had experienced no crisis of conversion. His outlook was certainly coloured by his own experience and preoccupations. The Vita is the interpretation by a man raised in a flourishing and learned community of the motivation of an uneducated knight who had experienced spiritual rebirth in a world where religious values were far less certain. The form and emphases of the Life are perhaps worth some consideration.

Guibert of Nogent gives a number of examples of a change for the better (bonae mutationis exempla) in the lives of his contemporaries. He evidently considered conversion to be a subject of strong topical appeal to his readers, as well as a matter of importance in itself, and he gives as many examples as he can. He has a double sense of the word conversio in mind. He often refers to the decision to enter a monastery which was the common meaning of the term in his day, but he also understands by it something closer to the larger sense of‘conversion’. Evrard of Breteuil, he says, turned from his pride to examine the wretched state of his soul, and began to look about him for a way of life in which he might live more worthily. He followed the example of Theobald of Champagne, who came to dislike the profession of arms: inter ipsa rudimenta militiae arma despiciens, and made himself self-supporting as a charcoal-burner. One Simon, count of Valois, ‘enriched the religious life of our day by the outstanding example of an unexpected conversion’: mirabili nostri temporis religionem inopinae mutationis claritate ditavit. Such a conversion was often—as Guibert relates it—sudden and irreversible in the change of direction it brought about. For St Bruno, his conversionis initia was something to which he, and others, could later look back with certainty as the moment when he began to live a different kind of life.

In 1854 the Congregation of Rites suppressed the feast and cult of the ‘blessed’ Pons de Léras. At its suppression the cult of ‘Saint’ Pons had been formally part of the liturgy of the diocese of Lodève for a little over a century: there are no records of any earlier popular devotions. The inclusion of Pons in the liturgy of the diocese was the work of Mgr Jean-Georges de Souillac (1732–50), the penultimate pre-revolutionary bishop of Lodève, and the composition of a liturgical office for the feast of the blessed Pons de Léras (18 September) was the work of Souillac’s successor Mgr Jean-Félix-Henri de Fumel (1750–90). It is difficult to see a pre-eminent piety at work in this distinguished patronage. Even the most assiduous of recent local historians of the Lodèvois, who makes it plain that he would be glad to see the cult re-instated, is quite clear that the eighteenth-century proclamation of the ‘blessed’ Pons was une affaire d’État et non pas d’Église, owing nothing to papal approval, which was never sought, and confined solely to Lodève.

Catharism in the affected regions of Languedoc, especially the eastern Toulousain, Carcassès, part of the Albigeois, where the problem of heresy first reached crisis point for twelfth-century churchmen, affected all classes. This is admitted by Marxist as well as non-Marxist historians. A working hypothesis has been put foward by Griffe to explain why the heresy, which affected a whole series of localities in the twelfth century, built up support more strongly in these areas of Languedoc than anywhere else. Usurpation of tithes, he suggests, predisposed an impoverished rural nobility to support cathar preachers who confirmed them in their hostility to the church by suggesting religious reasons why they should not give up the detained tithes. Disputed allegiances, conflicts and war costs weakened the position of the lords who might otherwise have supported persecution at the early and vulnerable stage of the heresy’s development. So preachers were free to gain converts.

This sentiment might well have been voiced by any abbot contemplating the ambivalent relationship between his house and its patrons. They expected material, as well as spiritual returns on their investment, and these might well conflict with the best interests of the monastery. Ambivalence, though, was equally reflected in the attitude of religious houses towards their benefactors, as this brief survey of baronial patronage in England, between the late eleventh and the mid thirteenth centuries, indicates.

No real doubt seems to have been held by baronial patrons that benefactions were necessary to their wellbeing in the afterlife, but they were largely guided by the maxim that ‘it is the thought which counts’, judging from the limited extent of their grants, whether on their own behalf or for the souls of deceased kinsfolk. Could things have been otherwise? They were imbued from infancy with the concept that the integrity of the fief must prevail over all other considerations. Inevitably such conditioning was reflected in their response towards things spiritual as well as towards temporal claims on their loyalties.

Hanc autem donationem feci eis pro salute memorati domini mei illustris Regis Henrici et pro salute anime mee et Berthe uxoris mee, et omnium antecessorum et successorum nostrorum. Thus briefly Rannulf de Glanville explains his foundation of Leiston abbey, and we have no reason to doubt his word. This motive is completely conventional and occurs in virtually every contemporary monastic foundation charter, which underlines its validity rather than detracting from it. Perhaps there is no need to look further; but Glanville’s is not the only voice to be heard on the foundation of Leiston abbey, and the founder does not answer all the questions we should like to ask. Did he perhaps have other motives? How did he go about choosing a religious order? To these questions we have to find our own answers. We can arrange facts in a suggestive series, and then ascribe more or less simple intentions which explain them. The shortcomings of such a method are obvious, though the results can be plausible and are often the only ones available. The unreliability of the answer is our penance for the temerity of the question.

The motives of individuals are necessarily conditioned by the expectations of society. Some walks of life are recognised as demanding a high degree of self-sacrifice and noble motivation, as being (in modern terms) vocations. Others are careers worthy of esteem, and yet others are condemned, so that it is supposed that no ethically minded person would engage in them. As the social structure changes there is an adaptation in the pattern of esteem, and an interesting example of this process is provided by the new thinking about knighthood which emerged in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. So much has been written about chivalry that a broad review of the subject is out of the question in this paper, but it may be of interest to re-examine it in the light of this theme. An appropriate starting-point is provided by a passage from the history of the first crusade written about 1110 by Guibert of Nogent:

It is written in the Koran:
Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the
army of the Elephant?
Did he not cause their strategem to miscarry?

Historically the Elephant was the Christian king of Ethiopia who attacked Mecca in 570, but some twelfth-century Moslems considered that this sura was a prophetic reference to Reynald of Châtillon, who was singled out as the chief enemy of Islam.

Hubert de Burgh was the most powerful man in England during the minority of Henry III, the real ruler of England for most of the decade of the 1220s. In his climb to power, in his exercise of it, and perhaps most of all, in his sudden disgrace and persecution, his biography is dramatic and compelling. One of the factors in his rise and fall was the religious motivation for his acts, a factor which is all too often neglected in modern biography and history. No one doubts that Hubert de Burgh was a Christian, though his lord, king John, flirted with disbelief; but no one has really considered what effects Hubert’s Christianity may have had upon his actions. Nor how strong it was by comparison with other motivations.

On 1 March 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain. Ten years later the Moorish inhabitants of Castile were offered the alternative of conversion or emigration. The fate of the Moors in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon was deferred until the reign of the emperor Charles V. But though he kept the inquisition out of Aragon for forty years, he did not succeed in reconciling his Morisco subjects with their Christian brothers. Philip II failed much more notably. For his policy stimulated the great Morisco revolt of 1568–70. Thereafter they were scattered round the kingdom in a forced diaspora. In 1582 their expulsion was proposed in the council of state. Finally in 1609–10 the government of Philip III, chastened by the twelve years truce in the Netherlands, set about the expulsion of all the three hundred thousand or so Moriscos who remained.

The 1260 movement was the first widespread outbreak of popular fervour in medieval Italy to make flagellation the centre of its devotion. Together with subsequent movements it provided a general impetus to lay religious life by leading to the foundation of a large number of confraternities all over the country. In this paper I intend to describe this phenomenon and in this way examine the motivation, collective and individual, which led people to participate. I shall then outline briefly the devotional practices of flagellant companies and show how they came to institutionalise the spirit of this popular fervour.

After the undoubted achievements of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth is usually considered a period of spiritual recession for the major institutions of the western church. The regular orders, on the whole, suffered along with the rest, and apparently none more so than the family of Saint Francis. Like its fellows, it experienced the general decay of discipline known as conventualism. In part, however, this was but the symptom of a more fundamental malaise, a diffuse but widespread disenchantment with the ideal which, in the previous century, the order had made peculiarly and gloriously its own, that of absolute evangelical poverty; and this in turn, it goes without saying, followed from the catastrophic double conflict on poverty which filled the first quarter of the fourteenth century: the ‘practical’ conflict over observance between the spirituals and community, which led many spirituals into heresy and revolt against the church; and the ‘theoretical’ conflict which embroiled pope John XXII with all shades of opinion in the order, and came likewise to a heretical and schismatic end. No wonder, then, if the fourteenth century seems, for the Franciscans, an epoch peculiarly bleak.

Motives are the inner springs of action, the invisible causes which are apprehended only in their visible effects. The latter, when collected and classified as numerical data, are known as statistics, through which at least one aspect of the former can be explored and analysed. Thus, while we cannot ask them to reveal such fundamental questions as to what moved men to enter or leave the monastic life, we can legitimately seek an answer in quantitative terms to what is preliminary and, as such, vital to our understanding of the problem of religious motivation: what do statistics disclose with regard to the force of religious motivation and to its rise and decline among the black monks in England in the two centuries between the first catastrophic onslaught of the Black Death and the dissolution (AD 1350–1540)? This question encompasses a vast field and, for the purposes of this present study, our attention must be limited to the three cathedral priories of Ely, Norwich and Worcester.

The problem of the date and significance of Luther’s so-called ‘tower-experience’ (Turmerlebnis)—the moment of illumination at which he came to his new understanding of Romans 1:17—is one of the longstanding cruces of modern Luther-scholarship. Since the problem was first raised in its modern form by German scholars at the beginning of the present century probably no aspect of Luther’s biography has attracted so much attention or has been the subject of so much controversy: and even to-day, although the nature of the debate has changed considerably in recent years as new arguments and new solutions have been put forward, it still remains one of the central issues in all discussions of Luther’s early intellectual development, not only because it presents the irresistible fascination of an unresolved conundrum but also because in traditional historiography it has always been closely identified with the complex question of when and how Luther arrived at his reformation theology.

It is well known that the church of England, in the time of Charles I, showed a special interest in the eastern church. Archbishop Laud patronised Greek and oriental scholarship. As its chancellor, he enriched Oxford University with Greek and oriental manuscripts and made plans to print them. He projected a Greek press at Oxford and achieved one in London. He obliged the king’s printers to print three Greek texts. He also provided the learned press at Oxford with Arabic type. He then sent qualified scholars to the Ottoman empire in search of more manuscripts. Meanwhile he endowed the study of the Hebrew and Arabic tongues.

On 6 December 1616, Marco Antonio De Dominis, the Roman catholic archbishop of Spalato, on the Dalmatian coast, arrived in England. According to Arthur Wilson, he was ‘old and corpulent, unfit for Travel, being almost at his journies end by Nature’, yet he soon began to speak out vigorously against the faith and practices of Rome. Finding himself warmly welcomed by the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, he accepted several appointments in the church of England—including those of dean of Windsor and master of the Savoy—and became a prominent anti-Roman controversialist. Then, after five and a half years in England, De Dominis, like a wandering star in the Ptolemaic system, ‘went Retrograde, placing himself again in the Roman Calendar.’ What moved De Dominis to undertake so arduous a physical and spiritual journey as that which led him to England, and why, having found an honoured place among ideological allies, did he leave it to go to the very citadel of the ecclesiastical power he had attacked?