Ecclesiastical History Society

50th Summer Conference

The Church on its Past

Christ Church, Oxford, 17-20 August 2011

WEDNESDAY 17 August

1.00 Registration – Porters’ Lodge

2.00 Committee meeting – Dodgson Room

4.30 Round Table: What has Church History ever done for the Church? – Cathedral North Transept

The Rt Revd John Inge, Bishop of Worcester;
Fr Richard Finn OP, Warden of Blackfriars;
Revd Dr David Cornick (Chair, Churches Together in England; URC minister)
This event has been advertised as part of the Christ Church Cathedral series of Summer Lectures and is open to members of the public as well as the EHS conference

6.00 Festive Evensong for the EHS – Cathedral

6.45 Reception – Deanery

7.30 Dinner – Hall

8.30 Plenary 1: Professor Sarah Foot (University of Oxford) – Freind Room

Has Ecclesiastical History Lost the Plot?

THURSDAY 18 August

7.15 Morning Prayer – Cathedral

7.35 Anglican and RC Eucharists – Cathedral

8.00 Breakfast – Hall

9.00 Plenary 2: Professor David Bebbington (University of Stirling) – Freind Room

The Evangelical Discovery of History

10.30 Coffee/Tea – JCR

11-12.30 Communications: Session 1
1.1 Uses of History in the Early Church (chair: Professor Sarah Foot) – Dodgson Room

Dr Tony Rich (Spurgeon’s College, London)

Who do you think you are? The Self-Understanding of Early Monastic Origins

Luke Gardiner (University of Cambridge)

Intimations of a Massacre: Theodosius I, Thessalonica, and Self-Ironization in Socrates Scholasticus's Church History

Simon Ford (University of Oxford)

Writing the History of Heresy: Liberatus of Carthage and the Council of Constantinople II


1.2 The Crusading Movement (panel; chair: Professor Brenda Bolton) - Freind Room

Professor Andrew Jotischky (Lancaster University)

Back to the Future: Carmelites and Crusading 1350-1530

Thomas Smith (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Honorius III and the Crusade: Responsive Papal Government versus the Memory of his Predecessors
Professor Bernard Hamilton (University of Nottingham)

An Anglican view of the Crusades: Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre

1.3 Perceptions of Reform in England (chair: Dr Judith Maltby) – Old Library

Rev Dr Hannah Cleugh

An ‘Anglican’ Future Past? Reformation Re-Imaginings of the English Reformation

Tom Carpenter (University of Oxford)

The Place of Mary Tudor’s Church in ‘Historic Anglicanism’

Professor Tony Claydon (University of Bangor)

Gilbert Burnet: An Ecclesiastical Historian and the Birth of the English Restoration Era

1.4 Dissenting Rediscoveries (chair: Dr Jonathan Arnold) – Lecture Room 1

Professor Andrew Spicer (Oxford Brookes University)

Archbishop Tait, the Huguenots and the French Church of Canterbury

Roger Ottewill (University of Birmingham) and Rosalind Johnson (University of Winchester)

Memorializing 1662: Hampshire Congregationalists and the 250th Anniversary of the Great Ejection

Revd Geoffrey E. H. Roper

Congregationalism’s Renewal through Rediscovery of its Puritan Heritage

1.5 Revisiting Roman Catholic History (chair: Professor Michael Walsh) – Lecture Room 2

Dom Aidan Bellenger

Dom David Knowles and the Downside Historians

Revd Stephen Morgan (University of Oxford)

Cracks in the Edifice: Recent Challenges to the Received History of Vatican II

Dr Patrick Preston (University of Chichester)

‘Namierite’ Exploration of the History of the Council of Trent?

1.0  Lunch – Hall

2.00 Free time in Oxford

4.00 Tea – JCR

4.30 Communications: Session 2

2.1 Assessing Clerical Authority during the Patristic Period (chair: Professor Andrew Louth) – Dodgson Room

James Corke-Webster (University of Manchester)

A Historian of Authority? Eusebius of Caesarea, Literary Characterization and the Construction of Episcopal Authority

Cyril Chilson (University of Oxford)

Between Reason and Treason: Doctrinal Fickleness and Episcopal Leadership in Sozomen’s Historia Ecclesiastica

Christopher Johnson (University of Oxford)

The Disappearance of the Priest from the Historiography of the Anglo-Saxon Church

2.2 Later Medieval Uses of the Past (chair: Professor Bill Sheils) – Lecture Room 1

James H. Jenkins (Cardiff University)

The Cistercian Use of the Past

Dr Alison McHardy (University of Nottingham)

Using the Past to Right Present Wrongs: Some Petitionary Evidence

Rev Dr Jonathan Arnold (University of Oxford)

Polydore Vergil and Ecclesiastical Historiography: De Inventiboribus Rerum IV-VIII

2.3 Recounting the Protestant Past (chair: Professor Tony Claydon) – Old Library

Dr Natalia Nowakowska (University of Oxford)

Martin Luther and the Nationalists: Historians on the Early Reformation in Poland
Richard Foster (University of Oxford)

The Corruption of the Twentieth Article: A Seventeenth-Century Controversy

Dr Patrick Walsh (Trinity College Dublin)

Recording the Past and Inventing the Church: Patrick Adair’s History of the Irish Presbyterian Church Reconsidered

2.4 Historiography and Radical Movements (chair: Dr Sarah Apetrei) – Lecture Room 2

Dr Rosemary Moore (University of Birmingham)

Insider and Outsider History: Theories of Quaker Origins from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Dr Tim Grass (Spurgeon’s College, London)

Narrating the Lord’s Work: The Catholic Apostolic Church and its History

Dr Philip Lockley (University of Oxford)

Histories of Heterodoxy: Shifting Approaches to Prophets, Millenarians and Messiahs in Modern Church History

2.5 Writing the History of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century (panel; chair: Professor David Bebbington) - Freind Room

Dr Mark Smith (University of Oxford)

The Evangelical Quadrilateral: the Bebbington Thesis and its Critics

Dr Andrew Atherstone (University of Oxford)

G. R. Balleine and A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England

Dr Martin Wellings

‘Storr’s Stunt’: V. F. Storr and the Reshaping of Anglican Evangelicalism

6.00 EHS AGM – Freind Room

7.00 Reception sponsored by Oxford University Press – Tom Quad

7.30 Dinner – Hall

8.30 Plenary 3: Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch (University of Oxford) – Freind Room

Changing Perspectives on the Reformation: The Last Half-Century

FRIDAY 19 August


7.15 Morning Prayer – Cathedral

7.35 Anglican and RC Eucharists – Cathedral

8.00 Breakfast – Hall

9.00 Plenary 4: Professor Judith Lieu (University of Cambridge) – Freind Room

What did Women do for the Early Church?

10.30 Coffee/Tea – JCR

11-12.30 Communications: Session 3

3.1 Perceptions of the Medieval English Church (chair: Professor Claire Cross) – Lecture Room 1

Susan Royal (Durham University)

Historian or Prophet?: John Bale’s Perception of the Past

Dr Rosamund Oates (Manchester Metropolitan University)

‘England, the first that embraced the gospel’: Tudor Histories of Christianity

Alec Corio (Open University)

Who was ‘the Literary Chiffonier’? The Controversial Conflict between G. G. Coulton and F. A. Gasquet

3.2 Historiography of the Scottish Reformation (panel; chair: Professor Andrew Spicer) - Freind Room

Dr Jenny Wormald (University of Edinburgh)

Historiography of the Scottish Reformation: The Myth of the Kirk

Stephen Holmes (University of Edinburgh)

Historiography of the Scottish Reformation: The Catholics fight back

Dr John McCallum (University of St Andrews)

Parish, Town and County: The Local Historiography of the Scottish Reformation

3.3 Dissenting Voices in the Long Eighteenth Century (chair: Dr Peter Nockles) – Dodgson Room

Professor Robert G. Ingram (Ohio University)

‘The Character of an exact Historian’: Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England

Chris Wilson (University of Exeter)

The Medieval Church in Early Methodism and Anti-Methodism

Rev Dr David Hart

John Wesley’s Biography and the Shaping of Methodist History

3.4 Perceptions of British Catholicism (chair: Dr Sheridan Gilley) – Old Library

Professor Bill Sheils (University of York)

The Romantics and the Reformation: Southey, Cobbett and Catholic Emancipation in England

Caroline Watkinson (Queen Mary, University of London)

From Terra Incognita to Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns in British Historiography

Bernard Aspinwall (Glasgow University)

Myths for Militancy: Popular Perceptions of Catholicism in Scotland, c.1850 to the 1940s

3.5 Orthodoxy and Historiography (chair: Professor Andrew Jotischky) – Lecture Room 2

Professor Andrew Louth (Durham University)

Constructing the Apostolic Past: The Case of Dionysios the Areopagite

Dr Alexis Torrance (Princeton University)

Repetition versus Creativity? Conflicts in the Interpretation of Tradition in Contemporary Eastern Orthodoxy

Dr Mikko Ketola (University of Helsinki)

Theological Negotiations or Political Abuse of Ecclesiastical Contacts? The Debate on the Finnish-Russian Theological Negotiations during the Cold War

1.00 Lunch – Hall

2-3.30 Communications: Session 4

4.1 Early Medieval Writing on the Past (chair: Professor Robert Swanson) – Dodgson Room

Jessica Lee Ehinger (University of Oxford)

Biblical History and the End of Times: Seventh-Century Christian Accounts of the Rise of Islam

Conor O’Brien (University of Oxford)

Bede on the Jewish Church

Renie Choy (University of Oxford)

The Deposit of Monastic Faith: The Carolingians on the Essence of Monasticism

4.2 Changing Accounts of the Medieval Papacy (chair: Dr Alison McHardy) - Freind Room

Dr Paul Antony Hayward (Lancaster University)

John of Worcester on the Papacy and the History of Christian Worship

Dr John Doran (University of Chester)

Why did Cardinal Boso compose his Papal Biographies?

Rev Dr Charlotte Methuen (Glasgow University)

Using the Past against the Papacy: Luther’s Appeal to Church History in his Early Anti-Papal Writings

4.3 Writing the History of the Irish Churches (chair: Professor William Gibson) – Lecture Room 1

Prof Salvador Ryan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)

‘Holding up a lamp to the sun’: Hiberno-Papal Relations and the Construction of Irish Orthodoxy in John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662)

Dr Liam Chambers (University of Limerick)

Patrick Boyle, the Irish Colleges and the Historiography of Irish Catholicism

Dr Colin Haydon (University of Winchester)

‘[A]lmost the only Histories we can boast’: Protestant Perceptions of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century and their Uses

4.4 New Approaches to Modern Church History (chair: Dr Frances Knight) – Lecture Room 2

Dr Sarah Apetrei (University of Oxford / Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Church History, Emotion and the Study of Spirituality

Daniel Cummins (University of Reading)

The Church and Property: Some Thoughts towards a New Approach to Church and Society, 1730-1800

Mrs Sarah Flew (Open University)

Money Matters: The Neglect of Finance in the Historiography of Modern Religious History

4.5 Aspects of Modern Anglican History (chair: Dr Martin Wellings) – Old Library

Rev Dr Daniel Inman

The Church’s Past in the Modern University: E. B. Pusey, William Bright and the Honour School of Theology at Oxford, 1869-1882

Dr Stuart Mews

‘Kill Germans’, Hysteria and History: What did the Bishop of London really say in 1915 and what was he believed to have said in the 1930s and after?

Professor John Wolffe (Open University)

The Church of England in the Diocese of London: What does History have to offer to the present-day Church?

4.00 Plenary 5: Professor Ken Parker (Saint Louis University) - Freind Room

Re-visioning the Past and Re-sourcing the Future: Aggiornamento, Ressourcement and Historiography in Roman Catholic Scholarship

Summary/Round Table, led by SCH editors

6.00 Evensong – Cathedral

7.00 Drinks – Cathedral Garden

Launch of the History of the EHS (see back cover)

7.30 Conference Dinner – Hall

SATURDAY 20 August

7.15 Morning Prayer – Cathedral

7.35 Anglican and RC Eucharists – Cathedral

8.00 Breakfast – Hall

The Conference ends after breakfast, but an optional excursion to local places of interest to ecclesiastical historians has been arranged. If you are departing by train in the evening, bring your luggage to the coach in the morning; space for storing luggage will also available in Christ Church: ask at the Lodge when you return your keys.

The trip will leave from outside Christ Church on St Aldates as soon after 9.00 am as possible and travel first to Littlemore where (the now Blessed) John Henry Newman lived from September 1841 to February 1846. The next stop will be Mapledurham House, an Elizabethan manor house with strong Roman Catholic connections – the latest priest’s hole was only discovered in 2002. There will be a tour of the house and a brief talk by Mr John Eyston, the current owner, and a descendant of the Blount family which built the house.


A light lunch at the local golf club follows. Choose from: Shepherds’ pie with vegetables; Mediterranean vegetable pasta with salad; or Seafood pasta in a white wine and dill sauce; all come with tea or coffee. After lunch we will travel on to the medieval village of Ewelme where we will be given a tour of the church and shown the almshouses. After Ewelme the final stop will be the very early Baptist chapel at Cote where we will have tea, before returning to Oxford railway station at about 5.30pm.

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