Since they got a toe-hold in universities, the achievement of women in the field of medieval history has been high. Some female historiography may have been justly criticised for a certain breathlessness of style, a narrowness of concern, a subjectivity, even romanticism, of approach: faults produced, no doubt by the pressures of most women’s early socialisation. But the work of Rosalind Hill has shown an exemplary freedom from the faults and contributed substantially to the achievement. The combination of good sense and judgement with breadth of vision might perhaps have been expected from that rare person (of either sex) who can combine scholarly excellence with prowess in mountaineering. And so, despite its title, the paper that follows, in which I deal with the careers of two very active and intelligent women who commanded both the respect and the affection of many contemporaries (however unfairly posterity has treated them) will not, I hope, be thought a wholly inapt tribute.

Bishop Gardiner, whom the polemical John Bale had described as ‘the great Caiaphas of Winchester’, sharply drew the attention of the lord protector, Seymour, to ‘two seditious books’ not long after the death of Henry VIII in 1547, showing his anxiety to oppose the advance of protestantism which he saw as leading to civil as well as religious rebellion; both books were by Bale, at this time in exile abroad.

With supreme self-confidence the St Andrews kirk-session declared on 31 May 1564:

In 1165 the deanery of Salisbury was the object of royal jobbery. A long dispute followed in which John tried to mediate by means of several letters. In one of them he wrote: ‘If my advice is asked… I reply that in all cases of stubborn doubt one should act as follows: First let us enquire and follow the prescriptions of Divine Law on the matter; if this gives no certain solution, one should go back to the canons and (then) to the examples of the saints; if nothing certain is to be found there, one should finally investigate the mind and counsel of men wise in the fear of the Lord …’. In this enumeration of means to enlighten problems of practical life, the exempla sanctorum are placed along with the authorities of the Bible and of Canon Law, although ranking lower than these precepts. They complement the abstract rules by concrete comparison, like legal precedents they were meant to explain special cases or fill gaps in the law.

The storm centre of John Wyclif’s quarrel with the Church was his doctrine of the Eucharist. The critic of clerical dominion over secular things and of the authority of the pope had passed through ecclesiastical censure almost unscathed; but the proponent of a revisionist theology of the eucharistic sacrament would at once lose the countenance of academic colleagues and public opinion alike, and would suffer the consequences. The crisis of Wyclif’s career came with striking rapidity after he broadcast, in his Confessio or public statement in the Oxford schools on 10 May 1381, his opinion that the presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist was figurative, ‘sacramental’, or in some sense, to anyone not acquainted with the terms of his own mental world, less than real.

RECENT historians have drawn attention to the influence of women in later lollardy, and it may also be that in parts of England as soon as lollardy moved out from the university some women immediately adopted its tenets, their involvement being largely hidden by the inadequacies of the contemporary sources. The attractions of lollardy for lay people in general and women in particular are not hard to understand. After a millennium during which a priestly caste had more and more been distancing itself from the laity certain discontented lay people, excluded from the mysteries of the church and especially from direct access to the scriptures, could scarcely have failed to respond to novel doctrines which stated that a lay man predestined to life stood equal in the eyes of God to any priest. These revolutionary ideas first propagated by Wyclif continued to be disseminated by some heretical clergy throughout the fifteenth century. One such priest, John Whitehorne, parson of the parish of Coombe Bisset in Wiltshire, in 1499 confessed to having taught, in addition to much else, that ‘when Christ should ascend into heaven, he left his power with his apostles and from them the same power remaineth with every good true Christian man and woman living virtuously, as the apostles did, so that priests and bishops have no more authority than another layman that followeth the teaching and good conversation of the apostles’.

When the court chaplain Wipo produced his Gesta Chuonradi in 1046 as an instruction in kingship for the young Henry III, he prefaced it with an indictment of contemporary writers’ laziness in failing to chronicle the deeds of their great men, although convenient models had been provided by pagan authors and Old Testament historians. The latter, in describing David’s single combats, Solomon’s counsel, Gideon’s magnanimity, and the battles of the Maccabees, had created a remarkable series of biographies illustrative of the different ways in which a man could serve the common weal. Their achievement deserved imitation. The main drift of Wipo’s argument is unfortunately too broad a theme for discussion here. What concerns us is simply that for him the Maccabees were the archetypes of heroic warriors, and that he expected his audience to be as familiar with their exploits as he was himself.

If you want to be a philosopher-shut up! Otherwise everyone will know that you are talking nonsense’. In the eleventh passus of Piers Plowman Imagination tells Will (the Dreamer) that he has been deserted by the learning of the clerks and bereft of the reason of his own mind because he could not stop himself from interfering and, puffed up with pride and presumption, had acted in matters where it was not appropriate for him to be the judge. ‘Philosophus esses si tacuisses’, as both the Bible and Boethius teach us: you might be a philosopher if only you could hold your tongue. Adam had had all Paradise to enjoy so long as he kept quiet. But when he ‘mamelede about mete’, when he began to talk nonsense, babbling about forbidden fruit when he should have kept mum—when he forgot that he was a man and began to pry into the mind and wisdom of God himself, to meddle with divine things-he was turned out of the garden. It is a passage which might have been taken straight from John of Salisbury, and indeed John was not a prophet without honour in the England of the fourteenth century. In many ways it is the theme tune of the Metalogicon and the Policraticus; and an ability to keep quiet was an understandably valuable attribute for a political agent of archbishop Theobald to possess as much as anybody else caught up in the ecclesiastical politics of the 1150s. But John of Salisbury would have us believe that the virtues of silence and non-interference had been one of the main lessons that he had learnt in the Parisian schools, which were cursed with the plague of words, and where he had been subjected to the relentless outpourings of those who talked too much and thereby created nonsensical things in profusion.

The important part played by women in the history of the crusader states has been obscured by their exclusion from the battle-field. Since scarcely a year passed in the Frankish east which was free from some major military campaign it is natural that the interest of historians should have centred on the men responsible for the defence of the kingdom. Yet in any society at war considerable power has to be delegated to women while their menfolk are on active service, and the crusader states were no exception to this general rule. Moreover, because the survival rate among girl-children born to Frankish settlers was higher than that among boys, women often provided continuity to the society of Outremer, by inheriting their fathers’ fiefs and transmitting them to husbands many of whom came from the west.

Few contemporaries and fewer historians have seen fit to praise the diplomacy of James I, least of all in its religious aspects. Oldenbarnevelt found it impossible to follow James’s apparent tergiversation on the Dutch religious issue between 1613 and 1618, while historians have tended to look no further than a purely theological interest to explain James’s intervention. This paper does not set out to ‘rehabilitate’ James, but it does attempt to show that his actions were more coherent and had a more respectable political motive, than was hitherto believed.

Lothario dei Conti di Segni became pope as Innocent III in 1198, at the age of thirty-seven, and for the eighteen years of his pontificate he had two chief preoccupations: to regain the Holy Land for the Church and to restore the true Faith in Europe. It is with the latter that I am concerned here, and with just one moment in his endeavour to counter the heretical tendencies and movements which had been threatening the stability of the Church for a century or more by 1198. This is the problem of vernacular versions of the Scriptures, a problem which arose, seemingly for the first time ever at this level, at the very beginning of Innocent’s pontificate. It is a well-known if not celebrated moment, and has had a place in every modern discussion of the question of vernacular versions of the Bible in the Middle Ages, since the days when S. Berger first gave it prominence in his La Bible française au moyen âge (Paris, 1884).

The early Cistercians were remarkable for their hostility to the feminine sex. ‘No religious body’ wrote Southern, was ‘more thoroughly masculine in its temper and discipline than the Cistercians, none that shunned female contact with greater determination or that raised more formidable barriers against the intrusion of women.’ The whole tenor of several of the early Cistercian statutes was that women were to be avoided at all costs. One decree enjoined the monks to sing like men and not imitate the high-pitched tinkling of women. Apart from these disparaging references to the female sex in general, an early statute explicitly stated that no Cistercian abbot or monk should bless a nun. In the thirteenth century this was interpreted as applying to the solemn consecration of nuns—a task which pertained to the bishop. It is stated that abbots did have the power to bless nuns at the end of their novitiate. But this later interpretation may well reflect later subtleties. It seems probable that the decree was originally intended to stop the Cistercians concerning themselves with nuns. The view that it was originally a straight-forward prohibition is strengthened by the fact that the same early decree went on to forbid the baptizing of infants. This decree, therefore, is crucial to any analysis of the position of nuns within the Cistercian order in the twelfth century. Dating it is difficult.

For the thirteenth-century Guglielmites women were the only hope for the salvation of mankind. These idealists believed that contemporary human failings could be remedied and that all were soon to be saved through the intervention of a female. Yearning for such immanent change, the Guglielmites quickly moved from enthusiasm to heresy. If the false Christians, jews, saracens, and, in fact, all diose outside Christianity were still not transformed by grace, according to these zealots, it was the fault of the present form of the ecclesia which must therefore be altered to fulfill their utopian expectations.

In this year (975) Edgar, king of the English, reached the end of earthly joys, chose for him the other light, beautiful and happy and left this wretched and fleeting life’ (ASC MS A). Edgar died in his thirty-second year. He had ruled the whole of England for sixteen years, since the age of sixteen, and the northern parts of it at least since the age of fourteen. He left three known surviving children, each by a different mother. Eadgyth, his daughter, was abbess of the nunnery at Wilton, appropriately enough since she was the daughter of the nun Wulfthryth. He left two sons. The eldest Edward the martyr was the son of his first marriage to a lady named Aethelflaed. Edward’s mother was dead or otherwise disposed of by 975. She had disappeared early in the reign, before Edgar took as his wife and queen the lady Aelfthryth in 964. Aelfthryth was the mother of two sons: Edmund, who pre-deceased his father in 972, and Aethelred, better known to history as Aethelred Unraed. The reputation which has attached to the mild Aethelred would hardly apply to his mother, who involved herself with great purpose in the advancement of her two sons. Aethelred was at most nine years old in 975, making all possible allowance for the speedy consummation of his mother’s marriage and the birth of his elder brother. We do not know the age of Edward, but he is called a ‘child ungrown’ in MS C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which should make him no more than twelve, the age of social maturity in tenth century England. These two children, or more accurately their supporters, immediately flung themselves into a battle for the throne.

Apocalyptic ideas lay at the very heart of British Protestant thought throughout the early modern period. They were held by thinkers from all sections of the theological spectrum within Britain, and formed part of the mainstream of the different reformed traditions found within the Tudor state and the kingdom of Scotland. Most British Protestants viewed their daily lives and the world in which they lived through the lens of apocalyptic thought. Its key themes helped create the new Protestant consciousness which emerged in the early modern period throughout the whole of the English-speaking world.

In the preface to the third edition of The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages Beryl Smalley pointed out the dilemma posed by the apparently simple solution contained in the mature teaching of Thomas Aquinas, whereby the literal sense of biblical interpretation was all that the sacred writer intended. Her question as to what should be included under ‘all’ preoccupied many medieval students of Scripture.

In 655 king Oswy of Northumbria defeated and killed Penda of Mercia near the river Winwaed. The odds were heavily against Oswy. He faced Mercian forces some three times larger than his own, his nephew Ethelwald had defected and his son Egfrid was currently held hostage by queen Cynewise of Mercia. So depressed had Oswy’s power become in the years leading up to 655 that he had even tried, unsuccessfully, to buy off Penda and although the favourable outcome at the Winwaed may have been assisted by the river’s bursting its banks, Bede, recording the victory, was inclined to regard the unexpected success as heaven-sent request for fulfilment of a vow Oswy had made, in sheer desperation, to dedicate his daughter to God and to holy virginity if he were victorious. Thus, on a wet November day, the future of the infant Elfled was sealed. Barely a year old, she was consigned to the cloister at Hartlepool, where her aunt Hild presided, and shortly transferred to Hild’s new foundation at Whitby where she grew up in the monastery which was to become preeminent in the north of England under the rule of its remarkable foundress. The outlook for the tiny princess was not one of solitary gloom.

One of the traditional puzzles in Calvin studies has been Calvin’s proposed and supposedly French edition of the sermons of the Greek Church Father, John Chrysostom. The date, circumstances, and precise scope of this project have always been uncertain, chiefly because the only evidence for the plan is a substantial fragment of a prefatory introduction in Calvin’s own hand. As yet, no mention of or allusion to it has been found in any other contemporary source. The fact that all we have is a preface, or the first draft of one, suggests that the scheme was abortive. At any rate, no such work was published by Calvin, though that does not prove that he never actually got round to translating the Homilies. It is just as conceivable that no publisher would take it on. But it is likely that the combination of Calvin’s other extensive literary commitments and the heavy demands and vexations of what was a pioneering local and cosmopolitan ministry simply hindered him from realizing his intention.

Although the story of the nun of Watton by Aelred of Rievaulx was published by Twysden in the seventeenth century and reprinted by Migne, it has never been studied in detail for the light it throws on religious life and attitudes in the twelfth century and on the history of the order founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham. This neglect has been the result less of ignorance than of the nature of episode, which was described as ‘disgraceful and fanatical’ by Dixon, ‘distressing’ by Eckenstein and by Graham, ‘painful’ by Powicke, ‘strange’ by Knowles, ‘of almost casual brutality’ by Nicholl, and as ‘curious’ and ‘unsavoury’ by Aelred Squire.