The English Church in the Middle Ages

Zoom details:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/77944976267?pwd=OTBmQUhZZjB0MHMwQ1Z1Wkc0dGt6Zz09

Meeting ID: 779 4497 6267

Passcode: augustine

Where did the Church of England come from? How did our medieval forebears understand the presence of God and express their piety? What can this all teach us about how we could be now? This short course explores the origins and development of a distinctly English church during the Middle Ages, and considers some of the implications for our modern understanding of theology and what it means to be the Church.

Session 1 (7pm (GMT), 19 January 2022 online/17 January in person)

The World Made Strange

The Middle Ages are at once intimately familiar and inexpressibly odd. This session begins to pull back the curtain on a world made strange, introducing participants to the medieval world and the ways in which our forebears understood and interpreted the presence of God. We will also explore what understanding the medieval experience of faith could mean for us in the present day.

Learning outcomes

Students will be able to answer these questions:

1.     Why study the Church in the Middle Ages?

2.     What relevance does it have for my own faith and for the Church of England today?

3.     What have been some of the historical debates over the legacy of the medieval English church?

4.     Is there such a thing as ‘the medieval worldview’? How and why might we try to understand and empathise with our forebears?

Session 2 (7pm (GMT), 26 January 2022 online/24 January in person)

Origins: Augustine of Canterbury and the Christianisation of England

Christianity came to Britain with the Romans, but it wasn’t until the 6th century that it became widespread. Initially small and dependent on outside missionaries, the Church in England grew into a complex web of monasteries, cathedrals, and churches by the time of the Norman invasion. This session explores the origins and evolution of the Church to 1066.

Learning outcomes

Students will be able to answer these questions:

1.     How did Christianity come to England? How did it spread?

2.     What role did monasteries have in the Christianisation of England?

3.     Who were the most widely venerated English saints from this era?

4.     How was the Church in England organised by the time of the Conquest?

Session 3 (7pm (GMT), 2 February 2022 online/31 January 2022 in person)

Turbulent priests and ‘ecclesia Anglicana’: Church and State in the High Middle Ages

 The winds of reform that shook the Western Church’s structures from Rome to Paris in the 11th and 12th centuries blew fiercely in England, too. Beginning with the first stirrings of the Gregorian reforms, moving through Henry II’s deadly quarrel with Thomas Becket and into the deceptive calm of the 13th and early 14th centuries, this session addresses the long-running conflict between those who would make the king a pope, and those who would make the pope a king.

Learning outcomes

Students will be able to answer these questions:

1.     How did the Gregorian reform movement manifest itself in England?

2.     What did Magna Carta mean when it spoke of ‘ecclesia Anglicana’, and how did the understanding of that term develop after 1215?

3.     What was the response of the English Church to the doctrine of papal supremacy?

4.     What were the statutes of Provisors and Præmunire? How were they used?

Session 4 (7pm (GMT), 16 February 2022 online/15 February 2022 in person)

‘To Caunterbury they wende’: Pilgrimage, civic piety, and the English Mystics 

The medieval English were a pilgrim people. Not only did they travel in their thousands to Canterbury, Walsingham, Ely, and Chichester amongst others, but scores of English people could also be found on the roads to Rome, Compostela, and Jerusalem. Pilgrimages of the mind, made through reading and meditation, were no less common. Yet pilgrimage was only one way of expressing piety: the medieval English religious experience was full of fraternal organisations, civic celebrations, and other communal expressions of faith. This session explores some of them.

Learning outcomes

Students will be able to answer these questions:

1.     Who went on pilgrimage, to where, and why?

2.     What were some of the other main ways – civic and personal – that people expressed their faith?

3.     Who were the English Mystics and what influence did their writings have?

Session 5 (7pm (GMT), 23 February 2022 online/21 February 2022 in person)

Heresy and Conciliarism: Wycliffe, the Lollards, and Arundel’s Constitutions

The late Middle Ages was a time of upheaval throughout Europe. The Hundred Years’ War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Black Death undermined confidence in institutions, including the Church. Reform seemed needed, but opinions diverged sharply on what sort of reform and how radical it was to be. This session discusses the nascent reform movement in England and its ties with other reformation – or were they heretical? – movements across Europe, and the steps Church and State took to help and/or hinder them.

Learning outcomes

Students will be able to answer these questions:

1.     Who were Wycliffe and the Lollards? Did ‘Lollardy’ really exist?

2.     How did the English Church and state respond to the perceived threat of heresy at home and abroad?

3.     What role did England play in Christendom in the late Middle Ages?

Session 6 (7pm (GMT), 9 March 2022 online (NB, the previous Wednesday being Ash Wednesday)/7 March 2022 in person

The Stripping of the Altars? England on the eve of the Reformation

Was the Reformation inevitable? Historical ‘inevitability’ is a thorny subject, and this question – hotly contested for centuries – is almost certainly unanswerable in that form. Nevertheless, this session will look at trends in lay piety and the changing relationship between Church and State between the accession of Edward IV (1461) and the Henrician Proclamation (1538), assessing the evidence that the seeds of wholesale Church reform had been sown long before Henry VIII laid eyes on Anne Boleyn.

Learning outcomes

Students will be able to answer these questions:

1.     How and why did the relationship between Church and Crown change from the accession of Edward IV to the Henrician Proclamation?

2.     How did propagandists use the cult of saints to promote the new Tudor dynasty?

3.     What effect did the widespread adoption of printing have on popular piety in England?

4.     How aware was the average English believer of reforms happening on the Continent? Was support for them widespread?

5.     Why does it matter what we think about the Reformation in England?

Charlotte Gauthier is a doctoral researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores the ecclesiastical, political, and military history of 15th- and 16th-century English crusading.