Embracing the new dimensions of the city: how far was spiritualism tolerated in nineteenth-century Birmingham?

Much like London, Birmingham was known for its rapidly altering social and cultural structure, sparked by the industrial revolution. With this, non-conformity began to flourish in the Midlands, with Birmingham becoming a town where a relatively large number of educated people embraced the new opportunities offered by the city, including religious ones. Between 1800 and…

Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England 1720-1800

Isabel Rivers is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at Queen Mary University of London. Her book Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720-1800 will be published by Oxford University Press in July 2018. Here she describes the questions she set out to answer. When I’m…

Khazaria and Russia in the Notitiae Episcopatuum

Alex Feldman is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies.  This essay is adapted from the presentation he recently gave at the Ecclesiastical History Society Postgraduate Conference at Newman University, Birmingham, on 7 March, 2018 Byzantium (the Christian Roman empire) and Russia are frequently thought…

Why the Church and the Law?

Professor Rosamond McKitterick is President of the Ecclesiastical History Society 2018-19. Here she explains her choice of theme for the annual Summer meeting 2018 and winter, selected papers from which will form the volume Studies in Church History 56.   My first paper at an international conference as a very young graduate student (and consequently…

The Church of England and Education for Surrey Girls, 1870 – 1914.

Catherine Freeman is a part time doctoral student at the University of Greenwich. She is looking at education and employment for girls in Surrey between 1870 and 1914 and the relationships with ideas of respectable femininity across classes. This piece focusses on some of her research into an industrial school for girls, the archives for…

Magdalene Establishments in nineteenth-century Edinburgh

When I mention Magdalene Asylums as my research topic I usually encounter two reactions. It is either a blank expression followed up by the question ‘What are they?’; or a comment on the Irish Magdalene Laundries…

British Sunday Schools in the era of the First World War, 1900 – 1939

– Caitriona McCartney My thesis intends to address importance of British Sunday schools and assess their effectiveness in the era of the First World War. In doing so my research will demonstrate the significance of religious belief and practice in Britain during the early twentieth century. It is difficult in a more secular twenty-first century…

‘The Past is a Foreign Country’: Reflections on Travelling and the Study of History

Andrew J. Pottenger is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester (Nazarene Theological College). He is preparing a thesis on three ‘doctrines of power’ guiding the Roman emperor Constantine’s interactions with various Christian bishops to address the ecclesiastical problems of schism and heresy.

Introducing… Elizabeth Tingle

Elizabeth Tingle is Professor of Early Modern European History at De Montfort University, Leicester, and pleased to be elected to the committee of EHS in the summer of 2017. I work on the Wars of Religion in France and the Catholic/Counter Reformations more broadly but I have a wide interest in the history of the…

Introducing… Geraldine Vaughan

Dr Geraldine Vaughan, University of Rouen Normandy/Institut Universitaire de France As a French academic (with Scoto-Irish origins), my first experience of an EHS conference in July 2017 – which was organised by Professor Stewart J. Brown in Edinburgh – was totally ‘exotic’. I flew to Scotland on the day during which the French priest Father…

Chosen Peoples and the Universal Church in the early Middle Ages

You do not have to delve very far into the historiography of early medieval Christianity to start finding statements that such and such an author thought their people had been selected by God as a new Israel or chosen people.

Witnessing the Medieval English Parish Church

Since taking up a research fellowship at a single-subject institution last year, I’ve perhaps become a little too comfortable in my material-oriented art historical world. The Ecclesiastical History Society’s postgraduate colloquium in March was a welcome opportunity to widen my disciplinary boundaries.