Ecclesiastical History Society
(Registered Charity No. 1053883)
Summer Conference, 23-26 July 2008
Baile na Corribe, Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh, Éire / Corrib Village, National
University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
‘God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World’
The forty-seventh summer meeting of the Society
(Speakers at the plenary sessions are sponsored by NUI Galway’s Millennium Fund)
Wednesday, 23 July
13.00
Arrivals and registration
14.00
Committee Meeting
16.00
Tea
16.30
Professor Robert Swanson will induct Dr Bill Sheils (University of York) as President
The Presidential Address:
Nature and Modernity: J. C. Atkinson and Rural Ministry in England, 1850-1900
18.00
Wine reception
18.30
Dinner
20.00
Communications by Members: Session 1
1.1 Late Medieval Magic and Nature
Chair: Professor Robert Swanson
Dr Catherine Rider (University of Exeter)
Reading the Natural World: Omens and the Church in Late Medieval England
Suzy Knight (Queen Mary College, University of London)
The Rose of Jericho as Renaissance Birthing Aid: Devotion, Popular Belief and
Sympathetic Magic Combined
1.2 The Reformation and Nature
Chair: Professor Tony Claydon
Professor Alexandra Walsham (University of Exeter)
Footprints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain
Jonathan Willis (University of Warwick)
Nature, Music, and the Reformation in England
Professor Andrew Spicer (Oxford Brookes University)
Church-Building and the Natural World
1.3 The Church in the New World
Chair: Dr Mark Smith
Dr Robert Withycombe (Charles Sturt University)
The Natural World as God’s Challenge’
Mrs Susan Withycombe (Charles Sturt University)
Ninian, Christopher and John the Baptist: Building Churches in Australia’s Bush
Capital
Thursday, 24 July
08.00
Breakfast
09.00
Professor Sarah Foot (University of Oxford)
Plenty, Portents and Plague: Ecclesiastical Readings of the Natural World in Early
Medieval Europe
10.30
Coffee
11.00
Dr Simon Ditchfield (University of York)
Conversion and the Natural World: the Jesuits in the Americas
12.30
Lunch
14.00
Communications by Members: Session 2
2.1 The Early Medieval Church and Creation
Chair: Professor Sarah Foot
Dr Stanley P. Rosenberg (Centre for Scholarship & Christianity in Oxford and
Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford)
Preparing for the Saeculum: The Desacralization and Legitimization of Nature in
Augustine’s De genesi ad litteram
Dr Clare Stancliffe (University of Durham)
The Relationship between Creator and Creation: The Early Irish Perspective
Tamsin Rowe (University of Exeter)
Liturgy and Nature in England in the Central Middle Ages
2.2 Early Modern Religion and Natural Disasters
Chair: Professor Alexandra Walsham
Dr Elaine Fulton (University of Birmingham)
The Hand of God? Responses to Natural Disaster in Early Modern Europe
Dr Alasdair Raffe (University of Durham)
Nature’s Scourges: the Natural World
Thanksgivings, 1543-1866
and
Special
Prayers,
Fasts
and
Dr Peter Forsaith (Oxford Brookes University)
A Dreadful Phenomenon at the Birches
2.3 Modernism and Faith
Chair: Professor David Bebbington
Michael Gladwin (University of Cambridge)
Australian Anglican Clergymen, Religion and Science, 1800-1850’
Professor Clyde Binfield (University of Sheffield)
A Natural Sense of Place: What Gaudi and Le Corbusier had in common
Professor Michael Bentley (University of St Andrews)
Methodism, Science and the Natural World: Some Tensions in the Thought of
Herbert Butterfield
15.30
Tea
16.00
Communications by Members: Session 3
3.1 God's Bounty in the Medieval World
Chair: Brenda Bolton
Dr Conor Kostick (Trinity College, Dublin)
God’s Bounty: Providing for Crusaders 1096-1148
Professor Robert Swanson (University of Birmingham)
Pay back time? Tithes and Tithing in Late Medieval England
3.2 Early Modern Society and the Sea
Chair: Dr Stella Fletcher
Sarah Parsons (University of Exeter)
The 'Wonders in the Deep' and the 'Mighty Tempest of the Sea': Nature, Providence
and English Seafarers’ Piety, c. 1580-1640
Dr Elizabeth Tingle (University of Plymouth)
The Sea and Souls: Maritime Votive Practices in Counter-Reformation Brittany
1500-1750
3.3 Early Modern Science and Religion
Chair: Dr Jeremy Gregory
Dr Robert Ingram (Ohio University)
The Eighteenth-Century Boyle Lectures: Nature and Apologetic in the Georgian
Church of England
Dr Bill Jacob
Eighteenth-Century Clergy and the Natural World
Dr Keith Francis (Baylor University)
Samuel Wilberforce, Charles Darwin and the Natural World: An Anglican
Conversation
17.15
Break
17.30
Annual General Meeting
18.30
Barbeque Dinner
20.00
Dr Paul White (Editor, Darwin Correspondence, Cambridge)
Darwin's Churches
Friday, 25 July
08.00
Breakfast
09.00
Professor Chris Clark (University of Connecticut)
Christian Utopias in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America
10.30
Coffee
11.00
Communications by Members: Session 4
4.1 Nature as a Source for Religious Teaching
Chair: Dr Peter Clarke
Professor Karla Pollmann (University of St Andrews)
No Rose without Thorns? Augustine, Natural Phenomena, and the Fall
Olga Gusakova (Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences)
A Saint and the Natural World: A Model of Obedience in Anglo-Saxon Hagiography
Dr Tadhg O hAnnrachain (University College, Dublin)
The Miraculous Mathematics of the World: Proving the Existence of God in Cardinal
Péter Pázmány's Kalauz (1637)
4.2 Love of Nature in the Central Middle Ages
Chair: Dr Barbara Bombi
Dr Dominic Aidan Bellenger (Downside Abbey, Bath)
Paradise Enclosed: The Carthusian Garden
Gesine Oppitz-Trotman (University of East Anglia)
Birds, Beasts and Becket: Falconry and Hawking in the Life and Miracles of St
Thomas
Brenda Bolton (University of London)
Subiaco – Innocent III’s Version of Elijah’s Cave
4.3 Nature and Spirituality in the Modern World
Chair: Dr Bill Shiels
Rev Dr Andrew Atherstone (Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford)
The Alpine Analogies of Frances Ridley Havergal
Dr Mark Smith (University of Oxford)
The Mountain and the Flower: The Power and Potential of Nature in the World of
Victorian Evangelicalism
Rev Dr Derek Murray
A Mild Form of Vegetarianism
12.30
Excursion (with packed lunch): The Burren, Dysertodea High Cross and Corcomroe
Abbey (returning about 18.30).
18.45
Round Table
20.00
Conference Dinner
Saturday, 26 July
08.00
Breakfast
08.30
Departures or excursion: Clontuskert Abbey, Clonmacnoise and Clonfert Cathedral
18.00
Return to Galway