John Doran’s sudden and premature death on 31 October 2012 tragically deprived his wife Aleta and their three young daughters of a devoted husband and father. At this moment, too, the Ecclesiastical History Society also lost a part of its future, for John was one of its most loyal and talented younger members, a medievalist whose appointment as one of the two editors of Studies in Church History had been confirmed just three months earlier.

The household was an ideological battleground in antiquity. To ‘turn a man against his father’ was to challenge deeply held convictions about how society should be constituted. For a free man to raise children in his own image was understood – by Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike – as a right and even a duty. The household was the acknowledged nerve centre for the processes of social control and social reproduction.

Manuscript D.V.3 in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin is a fat, late eighth-century volume of martyr narratives. Produced at Soissons, probably in the nunnery of Notre-Dame, it may be no coincidence that eighteen of its forty texts concern female martyrs. A further four address familial groups in which wives or mothers play prominent roles. The earliest Latin version of the passion of St Adrian (BHL 3744) is among them: one of many late, ‘novel-esque’ accounts of martyrdom, it is constructed out of clichéd formulae and predictable tropes for post-persecution audiences, like others of its genre. Lacking any historical verisimilitude about the age of persecutions, the passion of Adrian is characteristic of this group of hagiographies in offering valuable insights into domestic Christianity in the age in which it was composed: it brings into sharp focus links between women and material Christianity within the late antique household, the theme this essay pursues into the Carolingian period.

Theodred, bishop of London, who also held episcopal authority in Suffolk and Norfolk, drew up a statement in the 940s of how he intended to leave his property after his death. Despite his German name, he was probably a native of Suffolk, for he bequeathed a number of Suffolk lands to close relatives living in the region. His most generous bequests were to his cathedral church of St Paul in London, but he made a substantial grant of four estates in Suffolk to the church of St Edmund. Theodred’s will provides one of the earliest datable references to the existence of a religious household charged with maintaining the cult of St Edmund. King of the East Angles, Edmund had died in 869, having been defeated in battle by a Danish army which went on to conquer his kingdom. Later generations remembered him as a martyr, although contemporary sources said little about the circumstances of his death. A community of St Edmund was well established at Bury by the middle years of the tenth century, inspiring not only the generosity of the local bishop, but also his confidence in the efficacy of the congregation’s prayers. Theodred bequeathed land to the church of St Edmund as the property of God’s community there, for the good of his own soul. Exactly when a religious congregation first assembled to preserve the memory of the martyred king, and when it erected a wooden church to house his shrine remains, however, debatable.

Arriving at the Lateran on 8 January 1198, officials conducted Innocent III (born Lotari dei Conti di Segni) ceremonially to his apartments within the palace, there to rest, pray and dine.’ Foremost amongst his concerns was the household, last reformed by Gregory I (590–604). Whilst Innocent clearly adopted Gregory as his model, both for the shaping of his personal life as pope and for his understanding of the papal office, the young pope’s efforts to make his household as exemplary as that of his great predecessor have not received the attention they undoubtedly deserve. Gregory’s finest Life, composed c.875 by John, a Roman deacon, uses material from the early vitae, thus avoiding the ‘scrappy and grudging’ biography of the Liber pontificalis. Instead, John draws extensively on Gregory’s letters and the crumbling but then still extant papyrus volumes of the Registrum to demonstrate how this pope transformed his household into monastery, hospice and refuge. Three centuries later, the author of the Gesta Innocentii or Deeds of Innocent III could do no better than to adapt portions of John’s Life to highlight reforms not evidenced since the sixth century Like Gregory, Innocent wished to restore the ideas of the apostolic age to the Church. And where better to begin the spiritual renewal than within a reformed household? His inaugural sermon as pope on St Matthew’s faithful and wise servant accords perfectly with John the Deacon’s view of Gregory as paterfamilias Domini, head of the Lord’s household. Innocent, therefore, regarded the household not only as a metaphor for the congregation of the faithful but also, like Gregory before him, as a model to be used by missionaries to plant and nurture the faith throughout Christendom. Whilst the ongoing conversion of Livonia would provide Innocent with a rare opportunity to inculcate the Christian household within a pagan society, in the Patrimony of St Peter he diverged from Gregory’s path by purposeful itineration with his familia, thus initiating a public role for the household.

The College of Cardinals constituted the innermost circle of the medieval papal household – arguably one of the most important households in Christendom – whose influence was sought by envoys pursuing diplomatic affairs and petitioners looking to secure grace and justice. The relationships between the pope and the cardinals of his household, and of the household with those outside the papal curia, were integral to the operation of papal government. The college consulted with the pope on matters of politics and everyday church administration, and its specific roles included the election of new popes, the concession of privileges, auditing legal cases heard at the papal curia, deployment of its members as legates a latere, and the administration of important curial departments. Although the pope could not dismiss existing cardinals, it was the personal prerogative of the reigning pope to select clergy for appointment to this elite household, although his decisions seem to have been subject to ratification by the existing members of the college, whose exact level of involvement in appointments remains unclear.

When the Cathar Church was first established in southern France in the twelfth century it was generally tolerated by the secular authorities. At that time its hierarchy recognized only one type of Cathar household, which consisted of single-sex communities of initiated members known as ‘the perfect’. After the introduction of the Papal Inquisition in Languedoc in 1233, the Cathar Church was systematically persecuted and one consequence of this was that its leaders’ conception of what constituted a Cathar household became diversified. The traditional households of the perfect retained their central place in Cathar life, but the hierarchy also recognized a new type of Cathar household. This consisted of families of committed believers and their dependants, whose work was seen to be vital to the survival of their Church. This essay examines how this change in attitude came about and what its practical consequences were for Catharism.

The Hebrew chronicle written by Solomon b. Samson recounts the mass conversion of the Jews of Regensburg in 1096.’ The Jews were herded and forced into the local river where a ‘sign was made over the water, the sign of a cross’ and thus they were baptized, all together in the same river. The local German rivers play another role in the accounts of the turbulent events of the Crusade persecutions. They were also the place where Jews evaded conversion, drowning themselves in water, rather than being baptized by what the chronicles’ authors call the ‘stinking waters’ of Christianity. Reading these Hebrew chronicles, one is immediately struck by the tremendous revulsion expressed toward the waters of baptism. Indeed, in his analysis of the symbolic significance of the baptismal waters for medieval Jews, Ivan Marcus has suggested that baptism by force in the local rivers was so traumatic that they instituted a ritual response during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One component of the medieval Jewish child initiation ceremony to Torah study was performed on the banks of the river, expressing Jewish aversion to baptism (see Fig. i).

The household has been a compelling metaphor for the Christian Church since biblical times. In his epistle to the Ephesians (3: 15), St Paul wrote of ‘the whole family’ of Christ’s followers ‘in heaven and earth’; in Galatians 6: 10, he equated the congregation of the elect with ‘the household of faith’. But these were merely variations on a more ancient theme. In the Old Testament too the language of kinship is deployed to describe the community of God’s chosen people, the Jews, while the idea of the family as the basic building block of human society and the state has its roots in the fourth century BCE, in Aristotle’s celebrated treatise on Politics. The interrelated tropes of the household as a microcosm and nursery of the Church and commonwealth continued to be invoked throughout the medieval period and they proliferated in the wake of the religious upheavals inaugurated by the Reformation. Expressions of these commonplaces abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. A long succession of Protestant ministers compared families with ‘seed-plots’ and ‘seminaries’ in which the tender plants of godly religion and good citizenship were nurtured, and with ‘[bee]hives, out of which swarm the materials for greater assemblies’.

In 1530 Richard Whitford published A Werke for Housholders, for ‘them that have gydyng and governaunce of any company for an order to be kepte bothe in them selfe | and in them that they have in rule and charge’. The work swiftly went through at least seven editions in as many years; Tudor householders clearly found something of value in its advice. Its author was many things: a Bridgettine monk, a humanist, a prolific author of works in the vernacular, and a survivor who went on writing and publishing even after the dissolution of his monastery. He died in 1543. His books provide some important insights into vernacular humanism and late medieval monasticism, and the often unappreciated relationship between the two, which was demonstrated by his reflections on household piety. This essay argues that Whitford’s Werke for Housholders was rooted in his monastic experience, closely linked to Syon’s pastoral role, and that ideas about the early modern ‘godly household’ should perhaps be adjusted in the light of this connection.

Late medieval monastic households shared many features in common with the large secular households of the gentry and aristocracy Indeed, the language used in describing monastic households had always echoed that of the extended secular family with ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ living together under the authority of a superior representing Christ but exercising control of the religious community as a ‘father’ or ‘mother’ figure. While the common life of the monastery was very different in many of its details to the lifestyle of a lay family, monastic legislators used the family relationship to describe the modus operandi of the monastic community St Augustine enjoined his monks to ‘obey your superior as you would a father’, and reminded an errant community of nuns that their superior had been ‘the mother not of your body but of your mind’. St Benedict wrote as ‘a father who loves you’, reminding his followers that God is ‘a loving father’ and urging them to show each other ‘the pure love of brothers’ while accepting the abbot as both the ‘father of the household’ and a ‘spiritual father’ who would provide for all their worldly and spiritual needs. David Rnowles therefore considered the medieval monastic conventus to be a ‘family’ in which a ‘simple family life’ was led by monks under the care of an ever-present superior who acted as a loving paterfamilias in governing the monastery; the monastery was ‘the home of a spiritual family whose life and work begin and end in the family circle’.

That the ecclesia in antiquity met in private homes was well known to first- and second-generation English reformers who sought to reshape the late medieval established Church. In the wake of Catholic accusations of novelty – and thus illegitimacy – evangelicals developed a history of their movement that stretched back through the generations to the early Church itself, and none more successfully than John Foxe (d. 1587), author of Acts and Monuments and England’s major martyrologist. A crucial link in this historical chain would prove to be the Lollards, medieval English heretics whose ‘privy assemblies’ saw the reading of vernacular Scripture and its exposition, recitation of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and even hints of liturgical activity, all in the private space of the home.

The Decalogue was central to religious education in Reformation England, but this had not always been the case. The early Christian communities sought to distance themselves from the Ten Commandments and what they saw as the legalism of the Jewish faith, while the Middle Ages saw the ascendency of a parallel moral tradition: that of the seven deadly sins. Although the Decalogue never disappeared entirely from Christian life, by the fourteenth century, the parson from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could remark of the Commandments that ‘so heigh a doctrine I lete to divines’. The eventual triumph of the Decalogue over the sins during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was enormously significant, for the Ten Commandments not only taught religious doctrine; they also conditioned personal and communal devotions and moral and ethical behavioural norms. To an unparalleled extent, the Ten Commandments engendered a sense not only of the individual’s bond with God but also of the social and familial bonds they shared with mother and father, brother and sister, master and servant, and the broader community of neighbours wherein they dwelt. This essay will argue that one unintended consequence of the increasing prominence of the Decalogue in the households of sixteenth-century England was that it not only reinforced traditional understandings of household authority: it also modified them significantly. Understandings of gender relations in early modern England have been framed in a number of different ways over the past forty years: in terms of the essential stability of the household, the tightening of patriarchal control, and even in terms of crisis. But what these approaches fail to recognize is that, while the Decalogue undoubtedly reinforced parental (and particularly patriarchal) authority, it did so by stressing in equal measure the responsibility that was also inherent in authority, and the duties of care owed by superiors to inferiors. In both senses of the word, the commandments came to constitute a new, universal ‘moral system of the west’, given authority by Scripture and ubiquity through catechesis. An important aspect of this system was a much more nuanced understanding of patriarchal responsibility than has often hitherto been recognized.

What did it mean to live with the Bible in post-Reformation England? The increased availability from 1560 of printed vernacular Bibles to own and keep in the home marked a profound change in where and how people experienced Scripture. Most authors have concentrated on the impact of this cultural shift on the textual practices of household religion, especially Bible reading or study in the context of daily prayers and associated instruction. More recent research has examined interactions with the Bible as object, especially the common practice of annotating specific passages, recording information or otherwise marking the pages. A turn in humanities disciplines over the past decade towards visual and material culture has emphasized the connotative role of Bibles as signifiers, with important studies of their display function within female piety, as part of the conventional vocabulary of provincial portraits or as staged properties in Renaissance drama. Yet despite these contributions there is still an overwhelming focus in the existing literature on the use of religious books in relation to the textual and oral practices of domestic devotion - on readers and reading practices – and a good deal of generalization about the locations for such practices, derived from a particular conceptual model of the country house with clearly defined internal arrangements and designated room functions.

On the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross, 3 May 1606, Henry Garnet was hung, drawn and quartered in St Paul’s churchyard, London. In his last dying speech Garnet adapted the liturgy from the office hours of the day and he proclaimed in Latin: ‘We adore thee, O Christ and we Bless thee, because by thy Cross, thou hast redeemed the world. This sign shall appear in heaven, when the Lord shall come to judgment’. Finally, beseeching God to let him always remember the cross, he crossed his arms upon his chest and was turned off the scaffold.