WRITER & HISTORIAN
If you stand outside the former Augustinian priory of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London before evensong, twice a month, you can hear the sound of late medieval London. It is the only active church in the country to have a ring of five bells cast before the Reformation – in this... Continue Reading →
We don’t know his real name. In ancient inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but because Hebrew used a script which elided vowel sounds we don’t know how his earliest followers might have said it. He has come to be known as Yahweh, but Yaho, Yahu or Yah are also possibilities. Perhaps... Continue Reading →
The northern diaspora we call the age of the Vikings is testament to the mobility of early medieval Europe. So too is the fact that the most contemporary account we have of the viking raid on Lindisfarne of 8 June 793 comes from the court of Charlemagne in faraway Aachen. Alcuin, a Northumbrian monk and... Continue Reading →
Constantine the Great might have authorised Christianity across the Roman Empire with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, but it was the emperor Theodosius I, half a century later, who put the brute force of the imperial state behind the faith. Policy had vacillated through the 4th century. The emperor Julian (361-363) had been... Continue Reading →
The spire of the church of St Lambert in Münster has three unusual adornments: cages. They were first hung on 22 January 1536 to hold the mutilated bodies of Jan Bockelson, Bernard Krechting and Bernhard Knipperdolling, surviving leaders of the Anabaptist sect which had controlled the city for sixteen months. Anabaptism had emerged in the... Continue Reading →
"Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," TS Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets, the fruit of his own long struggle with spiritual torment. Eliot ultimately found solace in the late-medieval Christian mysticism of Julian of Norwich, but his point still stands: what reality is and how we learn to bear it has been... Continue Reading →
Five of the first six archbishops of Canterbury to be consecrated were not native to this country. None came from as far afield as the seventh: Theodore, born in 602, was a Greek-speaking monk from Tarsus – the modern Turkish city of Gözlü Kule – in what was then a Byzantine province. Educated in Antioch... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 