Reformation in the Far North: Cumbria and the Church, 1500–1571

Abstract

In the early industrial period, financial and professional services were mainly accommodated within residential premises. Centrally located houses became increasingly given over to office use. Eventually, converted parlours and bedrooms proved inadequate and enterprises started to commission specially designed premises: the era of purpose-built offices eventually arrived, brought about by a combination of growing commercial wealth, institutional reform, residential suburbanisation and acceptance of new fashions in the use of architecture. This study of the emergence of the office district of Leeds illustrates the transformation of urban space in the early industrial era. New light is cast on the relationship between the growth of office uses and the process of suburbanisation, and there is a detailed analysis and mapping of the transformation of particular streets and of the role played by individual professions. The paper covers the era up to 1861 when the purpose-built office era can be said to have become established in Leeds.     

Pope Clement V and the crusades of 1309–10

There were three crusading expeditions in 1309– 1310: against the Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean, the Moors in Granada, and the Venetian soldiers occupying the papal city of Ferrara. The campaigns illustrate the continuing vitality of the crusading movement despite the setbacks of the previous decades; but they also reveal the consequences of extending the crusade to various ‘fronts’, both outside and within the frontiers of Christendom. For Clement V's original intention of concentrating the crusading energy of the West on his project for a Hospitaller passagium particulare was frustrated first by insistent Aragonese and Castilian demands for crusade privileges and taxes for the Granada campaign, and later by the draining-off of papal funds to the Ferrara war. It was the crusade against Venice which proved most successful, and the lesson was clear to the papal court: in a period of soaring military costs and growing suspicion about the real motives of crusading kings and princes, the papacy could best promote the cause of Christ by concentrating on the ‘home front’, the policy pursued by Clement's successor, John XXII.     

War and the emergence of the English parliament, 1297–1360

Although the opening of the Hundred Years' War led the kings of France and England to make similar demands upon their subjects, the effect on the monarchy and on the Estates was markedly different in the two countries. In England taxation gave parliament a central role in the medieval polity while in France it strengthened first local autonomy and then absolute monarchy. Because parliament had an inescapable obligation to grant taxation for common defence, the Commons sought to limit this to periods of open war, and to criticise and control the handling and expenditure of the tax. The character of taxation, as levied by common assent and for the common profit, likewise permitted resistance to the extension of prerogative rights and the assertion of parliament's right to grant the tax on wool. In these matters the Commons were forced into a defensive dialogue with the Crown over their obligations which educated them in political argument and the techniques of parliamentary opposition. The power to levy taxation on grounds of ‘necessity of state’ strengthened both monarchies; but in England this was subject to the assent and authority of parliament which thereby emerged as a political institution concerned with the common needs of the realm.     

Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Orientalism and the English Universities, 1800–50

Challenging the fundamental assumption of Edward Said that orientalism was a product of the secular Enlightenment, this article explores the state of oriental learning at England's most prestigious sites of intellectual and discursive production in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the definitively Christian approach to empire propounded by the leading university orientalists of the period, the essay excavates an important era of orientalism overlooked by modern scholarship. From the most senior positions in the universities there spread a distinctly anti-secular and ‘providentialist’ reading of empire. Unlike the secular orientalism of the eighteenth and later nineteenth century, this new ‘evangelical orientalism’ formed the major institutionalised means of understanding Britain's Asian empire during the decades in which it was chiefly acquired. In place of the collusion of extractive imperialism and secular knowledge forms delineated by Edward Said, the article therefore outlines a relationship between orientalism and empire that was more fraught and contested.     

Excavations in the Church of St Augustine's Abbey,Canterbury 1955–58

THE EXCAVATION of Anglo-Saxon structures below the W. end of the 11th to 12th-century nave of the church of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, occupied three seasons between and 1957. Further, small-scale, excavation took place subsequently on the site of the pre-Conquest church of Sts Peter and Paul to test particular points. The need for the excavations in 1955 arose unexpectedly out of routine consolidation of the upstanding remains (which are in the care of what is now the Department of the Environment), when there were discovered by chance the voussoirs of an arch a few inches below ground level in the ill-defined mass of masonry at the extreme SW. corner of the Norman church.     

Reactions of the Governments of Nigeria and Biafra to the Role of the Catholic Church in the Nigeria–Biafra War

Abstract

The high incidence of conflict in the world today, and the overwhelming influence of religion on man and his society, have resulted in an increasing engagement of religion in conflict management. However, in spite of its high profile in managing conflict, religion can sometimes form a barrier to conflict resolution. The Nigeria–Biafra war was one of those wars in which religion, as an instrument of conflict management, played a double-edged sword. This paper examines the reaction of the parties to this conflict to the role of the Catholic Church in managing the conflict.

The involvement of the Catholic Church in the Nigeria–Biafra war has ever remained one of the highly controversial themes of this war. While the role played by the church appeared to be a welcome development on the part of the Biafran Government, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria (FMG) was against the church and its activities, particularly its relief programme in Biafra during the war. From the available evidence, the church’s relief services, just like those of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were carried out on both sides of the war. The difference was on the level of dependence on it, as well as the degree of its exploitation by the two parties. In addition to its high dependence on the Caritas airlift, the Biafran Government, in its war of propaganda hinged on religion, was out to exploit every available opportunity provided by the church’s relief programme in Biafra. It therefore made its overtures of ‘friendship’ to the church in Biafra and beyond as it assumed the status of a ‘maligned child’ of the mother church. To the FMG that was out to crush a rebellion, such manipulation of religion, using the platform of the church’s programme of relief in Biafra was more than a frustration of its war effort. Its anger was thus directed against the church both locally and internationally such that the latter, among other things, could achieve little or nothing in terms of conflict resolution, although the relief programme of the church in general saved the Biafran population from a war in which starvation was obviously an instrument.