Global Visions and Patriotic Sentiments: The Rise and Fall of Ecumenical Reputations, 1890–1922

Two names stand out in the wealth of young talent which forged the networks which came together in what has come to be called the ecumenical movement, John R. Mott (1865–1955) and his contemporary Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931). For his fellow American Robert Schneider, Mott was ‘undoubtedly the most famous Protestant ecumenist of the early twentieth century’. To his fellow Swede Bengt Sundkler, Söderblom provided the spark of innovation in 1919–20 which was ‘the beginnings in embryo of what later became the ecumenical movement in its modern form’. The purpose of this paper is to consider their contributions in the period from 1890 to 1922, and the overlap and divergences of their roles in the movements contributing to ecumenical thinking and action. Amongst those disparate though sometimes overlapping strands were the concerns of foreign missions, students and peace. A subsidiary theme is that of mischief-making, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes by design of the press.

Medieval Saints’ Cults as International Networks: The Example of the Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria

Veneration of the saints was an important element of medieval piety and was pervasive throughout all levels of medieval society. In the early centuries of Christianity there was no formal process for declaring someone a saint and many cults were purely local affairs. However there were a number of saints who enjoyed an international cult. These were often major figures from the early days of Christianity, such as the apostles, the most famous perhaps being Peter, whose cult was centred in Rome at the heart of the western Christian establishment. For those cults that developed an international dimension, it is possible to view the transmission of the cult as creating a network or networks of individuals linked by their devotion to that particular saint. At one level this concept of a network is more metaphorical than actual. Individuals, unknown to each other, could share a common veneration for a particular saint. They were linked by their shared knowledge of the saint’s story, which provoked a common reverence. Indeed the actual transmission of the saint’s story can be considered to create a network of sorts as it passes from person to person, either by word of mouth or through the movement of written texts. A network of this sort can be considered to span both time and space.

Scottish Catholic Correspondence Networks in Eighteenth-Century Europe

This is a ‘work-in-progress’ essay. I am making an inventory of eighteenth-century Scottish Catholic correspondence with ARCANE, a database management system which, once the letters are processed, will enable me to give a material representation of this correspondence and of the networks, both human and epistolary, which it reveals. My hypothesis is that links of all kinds – the correspondence itself to start with – enabled the Scottish Catholic community to weather the penal laws in the eighteenth century. What the mission needed most was money and priests; both came from outside Scotland, which is why I have decided to deal with the continental network first.

St Sabas and the Palestinian Monastic Network under Crusader Rule

The monastery founded in the fifth century by St Sabas, in the Kidron Valley a few kilometres south-east of Bethlehem, has been described as ‘the crucible of Byzantine Orthodoxy’. The original cave cell occupied by Sabas himself grew into a monastic community of the laura type, in which monks lived during the week in individual cells practising private prayer and craft work, but met for communal liturgy on Saturdays, Sundays and feast days. The laura, which differed from the coenobium in the greater emphasis placed on individual meditation, prayer and work, was the most distinctive contribution of the Palestinian tradition to early Christian monasticism. The first laura had been founded in the Judean desert in the fourth century by Chariton, and cenobitic monasteries had been in existence in Palestine both in the desert and on the coastal strip since the same period. Nevertheless, partly as a result of an extensive network of contacts with other foundations, both laurae and cenobitic monasteries, partly through Sabas s own fame as an ascetic, and partly through a burgeoning reputation for theological orthodoxy, St Sabas became the representative institution of Palestinian monasticism in the period between the fifth century and the Persian invasion of 614. The monastery’s capacity to withstand the Persian and Arab invasions of the seventh century, and to adapt to the cultural changes brought by Arabicization, ensured not only its survival but also its continued importance as a disseminator of monastic practice throughout the early Middle Ages. In 1099, when the first crusaders conquered the Holy Land, it was almost the sole survivor of the ‘golden age’ of Palestinian desert monasticism of the early Byzantine period. The monastery continued to prosper under crusader rule. It was an important landowner and its abbot was in the twelfth century a confrater of the Knights Hospitaller. Moreover, it is clear both from varied genres of external documentary sources – for example, pilgrimage accounts and hagiographies – and from the surviving manuscripts produced in the monastery between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, that the monastery’s spiritual life also flourished in this period. The role of St Sabas and Palestinian monasticism within the broader scope of Byzantine monastic reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries suggests that the continuing function of the monastery at the centre of a wider network of practices and ideals across the Orthodox world engendered a revival of early monastic practices in a period more often associated with decline and the struggle to preserve the integrity of monastic life.

A Glocal Knitwork: Sewing Circles in the Church of Sweden as a Global Women’s Network

The Swedish branch of the missionary movement and sewing circles in the Church of Sweden are two sides of the same coin. They started at about the same time, in the 1830s and in the 1840s, and they depended on, and still depend on, each other. Over the years, thousands of Church of Sweden sewing circles have had foreign mission as their purpose. The sewing circles’ money raising and knowledge were and are of great significance for Swedish foreign mission.

Networks of Ideas, Networks of Men: Clerical Reform, Parisian Theologians and the Movement to Reform Prostitutes in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century France

In the first decades of the twelfth century, a wandering preacher was reported to have ‘advised’ the young men of Le Mans to marry the prostitutes of the town in order to save these ‘unchaste women’ (feminae quae minus caste vixeruni) from their lives of sin: ‘On his advice many of the young men married the unchaste women for whom he bought clothes to the value of four solidi, just enough to cover their nakedness.’ At the end of the same century, something very similar occurred in Paris, where another preacher was praised for encouraging the scholars and burghers either to marry prostitutes or to donate towards their dowry fund: Almost all the public prostitutes, no matter where the athlete of Christ went, abandoned their brothels and flocked to him. He himself led most of these women to marriage.Others, however, who were unable to remain chaste on account of fear of weakness, he gave a not insubstantial sum of money as dowries and reformed them with legal marriage. To this goal the Parisian students collected two hundred and fifty silver pounds and the burghers over a thousand.

The Nordic Network Shows its Weakness as the Cold War sets in: The Visit of the Rev. A. Cotter to the Nordic Lutheran Churches of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, 1946

The Second World War afforded a major test of the strength of international ecclesial networks in war-ridden Europe. Most of the existing links between hostile countries and their churches were cut during the war and had to be rebuilt after the hostilities had ceased. Among the most complicated tasks was the re-establishing of relations with the German churches, whose position was further complicated with the onset of the Cold War. This essay discusses the British attempt to re-establish official relations between the German and Nordic Lutheran churches in 1946.

Religious Networks in Action: The European Expansion of the Cult of St Thomas of Canterbury

‘Wonder not at our coming here, for unto you, Englishmen, God gave such a wondrous martyr, that he filleth nearly all the world with miracles.’ This admiring assertion, attributed to an archbishop and primate from the Nigros Monies – possibly Stephen, archbishop of Tarsus, which lies at the foot of. the Taurus Mountains in Armenia – provides a good introduction to the theme of this book, for it links Iceland, Canterbury and the eastern Mediterranean in a remarkable manner. The quotation comes from a lost life of St Thomas written in Latin by Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide in Oxford, who died in 1174; but it is known only from its transmission through one of the longest texts in Old Norse, the Thomas Saga Erkibyskups, compiled in Iceland through the thirteenth century from English Latin sources. This Anglo-Icelandic example, however, is only one part of an extraordinary phenomenon which saw the cult of the ‘wondrous martyr’ established, and not only at the official level, across the whole of the West, from Norway to Sicily and from Portugal to Poland, before the end of the twelfth century. The English martyr was probably depicted among the array of saints on the West front of Trondheim cathedral; his mosaic image stands next to that of St Silvester in the apse behind the high altar in Monreale; the headquarters of the Portuguese Templars at Tomar had a chapel with a reliquary containing fragments of his brains and blood; and French monks from Morimond brought the cult to Sulejów in the diocese of Gneisno in 1177.