‘Almost Every Miracle is Open to Carping’: Doubts,Relics, Reliquaries and Images of Saints in the Long 12th Century

Many of the great surviving monuments from the middle ages, the cathedrals, churches and objects made for them or for private devotion, testify to the importance of Christian faith in medieval culture. Devotion to the saints was a facet of that belief, vividly recorded in the surviving relics, reliquaries and images of saints as well as in hagiographic literature. Yet medieval sources also contain references to doubts about the nature and power of saints and their relics. The overcoming of doubt or incredulity was a widely used trope in hagiography. However, if we take medieval doubts seriously, they should prompt us to consider whether the images and objects created to celebrate particular saints might sometimes have been designed to bolster dubious claims or help to authenticate disputed material within a rich discourse about both individual saints and relics and about the nature of holy bodies more generally.     

“The Holy Rollers Are Invading Our Territory”: Southern Baptist Missionaries and the Early Years of Pentecostalism in Brazil

Beginning with the often overlooked fact that the establishment of one of the largest Pentecostal churches in the world, Brazil's Assembléia de Deus (Assembly of God), was not the result of missionary activity by the U.S.‐based Assemblies of God, this paper makes creative use of Southern Baptist missionary sources to examine the first twenty‐five years of Pentecostalism in Brazil. Considering not only what the first Pentecostal missionaries did but also what they did not do, it suggests the following reasons for the extraordinary growth of the emergent movement: early Pentecostals had neither the funds nor the theological need to focus on education; their personal class affiliations did not incline them to privilege efforts to evangelise the upper classes; there was no strong female Pentecostal missionary presence; and the Pentecostals were able to “poach” from the Baptists' “flock.” The paper concludes that greater attention needs to be paid to the specific historical circumstances of Pentecostal growth in Brazil, especially during the decade of the 1930s.     

Visual Reflections on History and Kingship in the Medieval English Great Church

The images of royalty set up on the western face of the choir-screen or pulpitum of medieval English great churches formed an enduring iconographic tradition which was found across England and was apparently without continental parallel. Discussing in detail the remains of the choir-screen at Salisbury cathedral and the records of the screen at Durham cathedral, this article suggests their potential antecedents in 12th-century representations of lineage. It then explores their probable meanings and functions for contemporary audiences, with reference to liturgy, history and clerical identity.     

CONTEXTUALISING THE LARNAX: TRADITION, INNOVATION AND REGIONALISM IN COFFIN USE ON LATE MINOAN II–IIIB CRETE

Summary. This paper analyses coffin use in the tombs of Late Bronze Age Crete in terms of both mortuary traditions on the island and regional variations in cultural practices. It argues that the revival of coffin use in the Final and Post-palatial periods (in ceramic terms, Late Minoan II–IIIB) constituted a recourse to an earlier burial custom within negotiations of rapidly changing mortuary practices across the island. However, this ‘re-invention’ involved significant modifications to the form and significance of the coffin. The paper then explores spatial variations in choices of coffin types, as one potential window onto the issue of intra-island regionalism in social and cultural practices.