In March, 1570, there was an unusual  spectacle in the mighty Church of S Peter at Ripon (one of great S Wilfrid's great foundations). The sight to be seen was of a once-senior priest of that Church in church on a Sunday morning, wearing a white sheet. This fate was known as Doing Penance; it was a humiliation commonly reserved for adulterers and fornicators.Blackburn had been found ..read more

Many people will know that Oxford has three terms (Michaelmas; Hilary; Trinity); each of them contains eight weeks of "Full Term", in which undergraduates are expected to be resident. Each week is a Sunday-Saturday week, and is known as First week ... etc.. Increasingly, Colleges expect undergraduates to come back before First Week so as to get geared up and write Collection Papers to prove that ..read more

The author of the medieval English religious play the Resurrexio Domini sometimes gives the impression of introducing Kisses as amatter of course. The play is written in Middle Cornish; naturally, the rubrics or stage directions are in Latin.So, when the Lord visits His Mother after He has risen, Maria amplexatur eum et osculatur. After He has reassured her, Osculantur et separant. During the ..read more

It's many decades since I visited the Episcopalian Church of Old S Paul's in Edinburgh ... but my recollection is of learning that, before its Victorian rebuild, it was so constructed that the Priest and each worshipping family had a separate and independant room to occupy. The door was kept open so that they could hear ... This was presumably so that, in some sort of way, they would be legally ..read more

 Yeah ... Tunisia ... I'm not making this up ...English Catholics regarded 'Mary Queen of Scots' as their lawful Queen; at least plausibly so, since she was at the head of the female line of the House of Tudor. They naturally wondered who in Europe was fittest to be her King Consort. Often they thought of Don John of Austria. They made clear to the King of Spain at the end of 1573 that, if ..read more

We Englishmen ... I won't presume to speak for the Scots ... are extremely (nowadays everybody says incredibly) insular. This fault was encouraged during my own childhood by talk of a Second Elizabethan Age ... the phantom-heroics of the Age of Elizabeth Tudor were still, in their fictionalised forms, alive and well. It had been a time when Englishmen went to sea and robbed Spanish galleons ..read more

 What to do about a Queen Regnant who lacks a husband?I am writing, of course about, a woman who in her own right holds the rights to the Crown of (let us say)  England. I am not writing about all those women who, simply by marrying or being married to a male who happened to be a lawful Sovereign, acquired what is is essentially a courtesy title of "Queen". Such women are commonly ..read more

 During the long resistance of the English people to the imposition by Tudor despots of schism and heresy, a dispossessed monk wrote a hymn of which I offer you the first two stanzas. I won't take my quotation any further, because ... well, I'll be honest with you ... he does rather go on about the dissolution of the monastic houses!"Christ crucified!/ For thy wounds wide,/ Us commons guide ..read more

In 1605, what is arguably Caravaggio's finest picture appeared upn the scene in S Augustine's Church in Rome. It was a painting of the Mother of God with her Divine Child. Two pilgrims are approaching them, on their knees, and neither is very smartly dressed. The man has piedi fangosi, dirty feet; the woman is wearing a cuffia sdrucita e sudicia, a torn and dirty headdress. I do not know what ..read more

By the time of the Seicento, many people throughout Europe, but not least in Rome, were impressed to see before their own very eyes, gleamingly white statues from antiquity; and great profit was made by those enterprising individuals who dug them up, restored broken arms and noses, and sold them on to their fellow-countrymen or to visitors from the North who were performing the Grand Tour. You ..read more