Ecclesiastical History Society

1

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY SOCIETY

Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held at 6pm, in the Prestonfield Room, Pollock Halls, University of Edinburgh, on 27 July 2016

Approximately 61 members of the Society were present.

1. Apologies

Apologies were received from Frances Andrews, Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, Janice Holmes, Susan Royal, Salvador Ryan, Chris Wilson and John Wolffe.

2.Minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes were approved and signed by the President.

3.Matters arising from the minutes

None.

4. President’s business

(a)The President led a minute’s silence in honour of members of the Society of whose deaths we had been informed since the last AGM: Professor Christopher Brooke (President 1968-9), Revd Sydney Clayton, Mr John Etherton, Mr David J. Hall, Dr Elaine Kaye, Professor Auke J. Jelsma, Professor David Loades (President 1992-3), Mr Marcel Travers-Smith, Dr Jenny Wormald, Revd Canon Dr Timothy Yates.

(b)He complimented his predecessor, Simon Ditchfield, on a highly successful year, which included hosting the EHS at York; the inception of a new format for the Winter Meeting, with communications as well as plenary speakers; another successful Postgraduate Colloquium, at Magdalene College, Cambridge; the growth of the Society’s online and social media presence; and the digitization of the SCH archive as part of the transfer to CUP.

(c)Ten of the most eminent scholars in religious history internationally have agreed to become Fellows. Their replies showed the esteem in which the Society is held.

(d)The President also congratulated our postgraduate bursary holders, a record number for recent years: Luke Bancroft, Michele Baiteri, Alistair Beecher, Andrew Carter, Nicholas Dixon, Robert Evans, Nicholas Garnier, Mariam Kartashyan, Jevgenijs Lutjko, Ryan Mallon, Fraser McNair, Philippa Mesiano, David Mark Rathel and Stephen Tong

(e)He also announced that the Michael Kennedy Prize has been awarded to Miriam Adan Jones for ‘Vernacular baptism and the church of the English’, delivered at the Winter Meeting in January.

(f)Looking ahead, Rosamond McKitterick has agreed to be our president in 2018-19, but before thenMorwenna Ludlow’s presidency from 2017-18 will focus on ‘Churches and Education’. She was invited to introduce this.

5. Election of officers

(a)Having been re-elected in 2013, Simon Jennings agreed to stand again as Treasurer and was re-elected until 2019. Proposed by Charlotte Methuen, seconded by David Hart. Accepted nem. con.

(b)The meeting elected Morwenna Ludlow as Vice President for 2016–17.

Proposed by Andrew Spicer, seconded by Jacqueline Rose. Accepted nem. con.

(c)The President thanked those who are completing their terms as Ordinary Committee Members: Salvador Ryan and Chris Wilson. In their place, Chris Langley and Thomas Hunt were nominated and, in the absence of other nominees, elected without ballot for 2016-19.

(d)The President outlined the Committee’s aims in seeking to expand the now diminished list of EHS Fellows. Ten distinguished names were put forward for the meeting’s approval: Clyde Binfield, Peter Brown, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natalie Zemon Davies, David Hempton, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Isabel Rivers, André Vauchez, Rowan Williams and Frances Young. These were elected en bloc, proposed by David Bebbington, seconded by Morwenna Ludlow and accepted nem. con.

6.Treasurer’s report and approval of the accounts

(a)Simon Jennings apologized for the non-arrival of the accounts in hard copy, and projected them instead for the meeting’s approval. He reported that the Society’s funds have increased by around £500; that our investments have lost some value; that our main expenditure (As ever) is publishing – but that in future CUP will deal internally with this; that the conferences broke even after bursaries and speakers’ expenses are taken into account.

(b)In short, EHS finances are stable. The Committee would like to make some inroads into our reserves in the coming years, in bursaries and other measures to support scholarship in our field.

(c)Approval of the accounts was proposed by Jay Brown and seconded by Anne Brook, being accepted nem. con.

(d)Our independent financial examiner, Glynn Goodwin of Benten and Co., was re-elected, proposed by Robert Swanson and seconded by Simon Ditchfield.

(e)At this point the two resolutions amending the Constitution were passed. They were proposed by Simon Jennings and seconded by Gareth Atkins.

(f)The President thanked Simon and his team for their excellent work.

7.Secretary’s report

The Secretary spoke briefly about the activities of the EHS, present and future.

(a)The Society should be pleased with its growing online and social-media presence, while recognizing that this is still a work in progress.

(b)The Winter Meeting will be held in Cambridge in January 2017, returning to London the following year.

(c)He welcomed thoughts and ideas as to how the EHS can continue to improve and to reach wider audiences. While we should be pleased with what we do well, it is important to be alive to new opportunities.

(d)The President thanked Gareth for his work on behalf of the Society.

8.Conference Secretary’s report

a)Michael Walsh remarked with satisfaction upon the attendance at this year’s Conference (c. 128 registered) and its international composition. There is also a large representation from Scotland: predictably!

b)He expressed his gratitude to Jay Brown and to New College’s Cheyne Fund, which has been used to defray costs, which have been considerable. This year’s meeting costs over £30,000, which includes some £6,000 for postgraduate discounts and bursaries.

c)The Summer Conference for 2017 is to be held at Exeter from 18-20 July.

d)The President thanked Michael warmly for the work he has done for the Society over many years, as he now hands over to David Hart.

9. Editors’ report

(a)On behalf of the editorial team, Charlotte Methuen announced that the entirety of SCH is now digitized.Subscribing members should have had an e-mail granting them access.

(b)Since the end of December there have been over 20,000 hits on CUP’s SCH page. Introductions and tables of contents should eventually be free to all visitors. In due course we will receive royalties from downloads.

(c)There have been few problems with SCH 52, the first volume in our current arrangement with CUP.

(d)Charlotte encouraged members to approach institutional libraries regarding subscribing with CUP directly. Such subscriptions can be made on a stand alone basis or packaged along with other journals to which they already subscribe.

(e)All of our back stock is now transferred from Boydells. Volumes since 2007 are held by CUP and by us. American stock has been sold to Scholars’ Bookshelf.

(f)The President expressed the Society’s thanks to the editorial team for their ongoing hard work.

10. International relations report

(a)Simon Ditchfield noted that recent events have made the need for maintaining our international links all the more important.

(b)He thanked Robert Swanson, Hugh McLeod and others for their work with CIHEC on behalf of the EHS.

(c)He reported that the Committee is seeking a representative to serve for a limited period, of perhaps three years, in a similar capacity.

(d) He also underlined the importance of cultivating other international connections: seeking to sponsor panels at other conferences, and participating in the proposed European Academy of Religion, which he will attend in the first instance.

11.AOB

Amanda Haste made an announcement on behalf of independent scholars. As President of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars, she hopes to bring together like-minded members of the EHS to forge links that will benefit such scholars, beginning by updating the website.

Committee for 2016–17

PresidentStewart J. Brown

Vice-PresidentMorwenna Ludlow

Past PresidentSimon Ditchfield

Honorary SecretaryGareth Atkins

Honorary TreasurerSimon Jennings

EditorsCharlotte Methuen, Andrew Spicer

Conference SecretaryDavid Hart

Other members2014–17Janice Holmes, Jacqueline Rose

2015-18Susan Royal, Cordelia Warr

2016-19Thomas Hunt, Chris Langley

APPENDIX I: Constitutional Amendments

(i)RESOLUTION: that Clause 7 of the Constitution of the Society be amended as follows:

1) In sub-clause d) to delete the words "and Editors" and to insert the conjunctive "and" between "Conference Secretary" and "membership Secretary", deleting the comma between them accordingly.

2) To insert a new sub-clause after sub-clause d) to read: "The Editors shall be appointed for a five year term of office, renewable for one further term of five years." His sub-clause shall take effect in relation to the Editors in office at the time of the Meeting at which this Resolution is approved as if they were being elected for the first time at this Meeting

3) To designate the sub-clause inserted by virtue of 2) above as sub-clause 7e) and to re-designate the following sub-clauses accordingly.

(ii)RESOLUTION: that the office of Membership Secretary should be placed in abeyance and the functions thereof be performed by the Secretary and Treasurer until such time as the Members resolve to appoint a person to that office.

APPENDIX II: New Fellows

1. Peter Brown is probably the most eminent living scholar of Christian Antiquity. Born in Ireland in 1935, he has since the 1960s produced a stream of seminal books and articles, including a celebrated biography of Augustine (1967), an influential revisionist survey, The World of Late Antiquity (1971), and a number of works on holy men, the sacred, religious authority and how these shaped and were shaped by the society of their day. He was made FBA in his 36th year and after a fellowship at All Souls, became Professor successively at Royal Holloway, Berkeley and Princeton, where he is now Rollins Professor of History Emeritus. He has won numerous prizes, including this year the Dan David Prize for interdisciplinary research; he has honorary doctorates from some twenty institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, KCL, Trinity Dublin, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and Pisa; he has delivered numerous prestigious named lectures and lecture series; and he is connected with or has been honoured by learned societies across Europe. His work is credited both with bringing coherence to the study of Late Antiquity as a field, and has done much to pioneer the use of sociological and anthropological methods as tools for historical analysis. Most importantly for this society, he has demonstrated the centrality of religion to processes of social and cultural change, an endeavour in which he continues to be engaged.

2. Professor Isabel Rivers is an intellectual historian of the long eighteenth century (1660-1830), with particular interests in the history of religion and the history of the book. Her numerous publications deal with the history of Dissenting, Methodist and Evangelical literary culture, and authors ranging from Bunyan to Hume, through Doddridge, Law, Whitefield, and John Wesley. She co-founded the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies with David Wykes when she joined QMUL in September 2004. Previously she had worked at Oxford, Leicester, Cambridge, and UEA. She is the leader of the Dissenting Academies Project set up in 2006 in order to provide a comprehensive history of the Protestant dissenting academies (1660-1860). The project has partly been funded by several major grants, especially from the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC Religion and Society Programme. It combines an archive-based approach with an innovative use of digital resources, has already published two fully searchable databases online, and a multi-authored volume to be published by CUP is in preparation. She joined the EHS in 2006.

3. Caroline Walker Bynum (see has been one of the towering figures among American historians of the past decades. Born in 1941, her distinguished academic career progressed from a first post at Harvard to culminate in appointment in 2003 as Professor of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton – one of the pinnacles (if not indeed the pinnacle) of academic posts among American medievalists. (She has been emerita since 2011.) Her work has received extensive formal recognition with presidencies of major American learned societies, a string of honorary degrees, and formal state honours. Most of her work falls under the EHS umbrella, although more in the sphere of history of mentalities than of institutions, and considerably stretching the boundaries in work notably on ‘the body’ and ‘materiality’. Initially noted as a feminist historian, she has produced a succession of seminal works which underpin many recent developments in the broader social and cultural formulation of the history of Christianity. Working across disciplinary and other boundaries (especially with the increasing integration of art-historical approaches into her investigations), she remains an active scholar who, despite being ‘retired’ clearly has no intention to ‘retire’.

4. Frances Young (see retired from the University of Birmingham in 2005, having been an academic within the Department of Theology since 1971, being promoted to the Edward Cadbury Chair in 1986. As well as her academic work as a theologian, she is an effective Methodist Minister. She was appointed FBA in 2004, and holds an OBE for services to Theology. Much of the historical element in her academic work (including a main paper delivered to an EHS conference and published in SCH) focuses on the early Church and its doctrinal development, but as a theologian she seeks to give the ideas and thinking of that period a contemporary resonance. Her c.v. records a stint as editor of Studia Patristica; she has a strong personal interest in the L'Arche communities. She has remained an active scholar since ‘retirement’; her most recent book is a reworking of her Bampton lectures, delivered in Oxford in 2011: God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (CUP, 2013).

5. Since 1 January 2013 Rowan Williams he has been Master of Magdalene College Cambridge. He studied for his doctorate at Christ Church and Wadham College Oxford, working on the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky. His career began as a lecturer at Mirfield (1975-1977). He returned to Cambridge as Tutor and Director of Studies at Westcott House. After ordination in Ely Cathedral, and serving as Honorary Assistant Priest at St George's Chesterton, he was appointed to a University lectureship in Divinity. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow and Dean of Clare College. During his time at Clare he was arrested and fined for singing psalms as part of the CND protest at Lakenheath air-base. Then, still only 36, it was back to Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity for six years, before becoming Bishop of Monmouth, and, from 2000, Archbishop of Wales. He was awarded the Oxford higher degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1989, and an honorary DCL degree in 2005; Cambridge followed in 2006 with an honorary DD. He holds honorary doctorates from considerably more than a dozen other universities, from St Andrews to Durham to K U Leuven, Toronto to Bonn. In 1990 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. As well as a church historian and a theologian, Dr Williams is a noted poet and translator of poetry, and, apart from Welsh, speaks or reads nine other languages. Of particular relevance to the society, he has published books on Dostoevsky, Arius, Teresa of Avila, and Sergii Bulgakov.

A few of his publications (from Wikipedia):

• Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (2008)

•Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (2007)

•Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (2005)

•Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (2003)

•Faith and Experience in Early Monasticism (2002)

•The Poems of Rowan Williams (2002)

•Arius: Heresy and Tradition (2nd edn, 2001)

•On Christian Theology (2000)

•Teresa of Avila (1991)

•Christianity and the Ideal of Detachment (1989)

•Faith in the University (1989)

Frances Andrews

6. Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History for two decades.He has written extensively on Tudor England; his biography Thomas Cranmer: a Life (Yale UP, 1996) won the Whitbread Biography, Duff Cooper and James Tait Black Prizes. More recent publications from Penguin/Allen Lane have included Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (appearing in the USA as The Reformation: a History), and A History of Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years (in the USA, Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years), which won the 2010 Cundill Prize; his latest book is Silence: a Christian History. He is working on a biography of Thomas Cromwell.Professor MacCulloch was the presenter on BBC4 and BBC2 of "A History of Christianity - the first 3,000 years", which won the Radio Times Listeners' Award in 2010, "How God made the English" (BBC2, 2012) and "Henry VIII's fixer: the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell"(BBC2, 2013); his BBC2 series Sex and the West was aired in spring 2015.

He received a knighthood in January 2012 for services to scholarship.

7. André Vauchez is a French medievalist specialising in the history of Christian spirituality. He studied at the École normale supérieure and the École française de Rome. His thesis, defended in 1978, was published in English as Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages in 1987 and has become a standard and deeply influential reference work as have many of his other publications. Vauchez served as the director of medieval studies at the École française de Rome (1972–1979), Director of studies at the French CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), and Professor of medieval history at the University of Rouen (1980–1982) and at the University of Paris X Nanterre (1983–1995). He was awarded the Balzan Prize for Medieval History in 2013 (see

His books include, as author:

• La spiritualité du Moyen Âge occidental VIIIe–XIIIe (1975)
• La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge, 1198-1431 (1981), translated into English and Italian

• Les laïcs au Moyen Âge (1987)
• Saints, prophètes et visionnaires : le pouvoir du surnaturel au Moyen Âge (1999)

• François d'Assise (2009), awarded the Prix Chateaubriand 2010; translated into English, 2012.

As editor

• Histoire du christianisme, vols IV, V & VI (1990-1993)
• Dictionnaire encyclopédique du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (1997-1998)
• Christianisme: dictionnaire des temps, des lieux et des figures (2010)

• Rome au Moyen Âge (2010)

8. Professor Clyde Binfield has made a distinctive contribution to the field of church history, in his work on late-modern Nonconformity, combining interest in its architecture and its personalities and uncovering some of the relationship webs connecting its leaders, but always setting these in the context of a broader presentation of what was going on in that part of the religious world – socially and culturally as well as theologically and ‘politically’. Aside from this, he has also been a longstanding contributor to EHS conferences, probably doing more than he realizes to shape their erudite and friendly ethos. Better tribute has been paid by Reg Ward in his essay ‘Professor Clyde Binfield: A Critical Appreciation’, in Bebbington and Larsen’s festschrift, Modern Christianity and Cultural Aspirations (2003).