Holland is an increasingly prominent public intellectual and popular historian. The (perhaps unexpected) rise to superstardom of his podcast, The Rest Is History, with political historian Dominic Sandbrook, has now garnered him an American fanbase, and the two are about to embark on a second visit to the United States. For the uninitiated, The Rest is History has been going since 2020, following what has become my personal favorite formula for podcasts: two affable and well-informed hosts, with ever-deepening layers of banter and in-jokes. What began as one-off, entertaining explorations of isolated incidents (Tutankhamen! Cromwell!) or thematic joyrides through the centuries (Top Ten Eunuchs! Top Ten Mistresses!) has evolved, with its fans’ devoted enthusiasm, into something more subtle and unexpected: multilayered, well-researched, nuanced explorations of complex events, presented in a conversational narrative (see, for example, their more recent series on the rise of Hitler, the sinking of the Titanic, the battle of Little Big Horn, and the beginning of World War One). Whether Sandbrook and Holland think of themselves this way or not, they are both very good teachers and storytellers, with a pedagogical style that is perhaps out of fashion in the academy today but which, in my experience, is the only way that ever actually works.

It is perhaps impossible for Holland to be a credible public intellectual in a country as secular as the United Kingdom without being a professed agnostic, and yet he has always been more sympathetic than most academics to the social and moral legacy of Christianity. For years he has been quite happy to debate with humanists, arguing that the moral basis for this or that position owes its existence to the fundamentally Christian moral bedrock of Western society — the legacy of a still present if increasingly forgotten Christendom, like the ghost of an older cathedral surviving as the crypt of the present building.

This position has become somewhat more complex in recent months by Holland’s recent encounter with cancer. In his telling, his diagnosis resulted in one desperate “foxhole” plea to the Virgin in the church of St. Bartholomew the Great in London. The medieval church of St. Bart’s housed, in the 18th century, a printing press and was, in the words of its current rector, the only place known to be visited by both the Blessed Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin. Holland, to his bemused surprise, seems now to be in remission, although he maintains that if he was healed, God and Our Lady must have a sense of humor. We may be fairly confident on this point at least, regardless of his health status.

Be that as it may, Pax is dedicated, generously, to Holland’s physician, and the book, if anything, is Holland’s imaginative effort to get “outside” Christendom, and thereby, perhaps, to have a standpoint from which to appreciate its real legacy. The book begins in the last years of Nero’s reign and extends to the death of the emperor Hadrian in 138, one of the so-called “Five Good Emperors.” In other words, it takes us to the opening shot of Gladiator: Rome at its greatest territorial extent, its boundaries now fixed by imperial fiat, its peace the boast of its rulers. As epigraph Holland quotes the famous laconic verdict of Tacitus, ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant (“The Romans created a desert and called it peace”). And indeed, the book is an ironic exploration, not of the stability of the Roman peace, but of exactly how fragile and febrile the political situation remained in these decades.

The first half of Pax, the strongest part of the book, is a truly gripping narrative of Nero’s ever more ambitious efforts to part company with the “reality-based community,” the tumultuous events in the “year of the four emperors,” and the iron-fisted rise of Vespasian and the Flavian dynasty, culminating in the wholesale slaughter of the Roman city of Cremona and, more famously, in the savage destruction of Jerusalem in 70. The catastrophe of Pompeii and Herculaneum is followed by the death of Vespasian’s son Titus, and the succession of his younger brother, the obsessive, effective, but paranoid Domitian. Domitian’s assassination in 96 paved the way to a slightly jittery imperial procession of Galba, Trajan, and Hadrian, by coup.

Throughout, Holland notes the myriad ways Romanitas, or the idea of being Roman, constantly evolved. Geographically, the empire’s frontiers expanded and contracted with imperial conquests in Britain and Scotland and, briefly under Trajan, of Ctesiphon and Iraq. The militarizing and militarized office of emperor in this period would end, not only in marginalizing the civilian Senate from any real political power, but in making it necessary for the emperor to be a solder in command of legionary loyalties and politics, while the legions themselves relied on auxiliary units of non-Roman but Romanized peoples from the frontier zones. Vespasian’s political rise hinged on the cooperation of the (Judaean) prefect of Egypt, Alexander, and his control of its grain supply, as well as the Syrian political operator Mucianus, while his son Titus kept Yosef ben Mattityahu, or Josephus, lived in a villa as a sort of Flavian Virgil while he wrote The Judaean War.

That Vespasian’s seizure of power had come at the cost of razing a historic Italian city, Cremona, was camouflaged in the grand style by the staging of an imperial triumph over the capture of Jerusalem, which had actually been Roman for years and which in booty did little to justify the pageantry. In the ensuing years, Holland chronicles not only the destruction, but the rhetorical and political othering and “outsidering,” of the Judaeans, a group who had hitherto worked with both Greek and Roman rulers but, when handled with increasing political tactlessness, rose up in the Bar Kochba revolt during Hadrian’s reign. Holland declines to call them “Jews” as yet; likewise, “Christians” appear, in my edition, for the first time on page 352 of 360, and Holland quietly omits any mention of them, for example, in connection with Nero. This is a deliberate choice on Holland’s part: an argument that Jewish and Christian identities both were created by these events rather than acted as the sole cause of them, and both Jews and Christians were defining themselves in relation to the amorphous, shape-shifting colossus of Roman imperial power.

Like marble busts carved and recut again, the emperors crafted their political identities in imitation of and in opposition to one another: Galba aiming for a bygone republican severity, Otto role-playing Nero, Vespasian channeling Augustus amid the rubble of Nero’s Golden House, Trajan posing as the anti-Domitian even as he furthered his legacy, Hadrian reenacting Augustus again. Grandiose behavior and sexual proclivities of all kinds had a political as well as a psycho-sexual role to play in this hall of mirrors, which, often as not, tended to overwhelm the emperors.

What Holland describes in Pax is the political world before Christianity, not so much the world of Christ as the world of Paul and the gospel-writers engaging with the wider Mediterranean. The effect is to remind the reader that the Apocalypse, for example, is not a futuristic sci-fi dystopia but a meditation on the immediate political context. If that is strange to us, Holland argues, then the Roman Empire was, indeed, an irreducibly strange place to anyone looking at it from the present vantage point of Christendom. But whatever your political sympathies, it seems likely that most of us will be fated to hear, and perhaps to give, sermons on the relationship between church and empire in the next four months. Almost certainly, the language will be heated and highly colored, polarized and polarizing, and most, if I know my church, will advocate for a vision in which there can and should be no common ground between Rome and Jerusalem, church and empire. Inevitably, Constantine will come up as A Bad Thing.

In his efforts to describe the Roman world on its own terms, I believe that Holland’s Pax can potentially help us to nuance this debate somewhat: to understand not only the reasons for the ferocity of Christian polemic directed against Roman society by Paul and the gospel writers, but also to appreciate the sheer extent of the transformation of that society by Christians in compromised positions of power over the centuries, in ways which we all, Christian or no, continue to inherit today.

“And John 1 doesn’t have an article, even though Greek could easily give you one. ‘In beginning was the Word ….’” I have been talking with the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Abts Wright, who, after a teaching career at Sewanee spanning over 30 years, will be stepping down from full-time faculty responsibilities at the School of Theology. Dr. Wright will continue to teach students in Hebrew, part time, partly to safeguard the language offering at the college, partly because it is her passion.

The daughter of a Methodist minister, Becky Wright was ordained deacon in 1974 in Baltimore, and ordained priest in the Washington National Cathedral, since, she says, the Methodist conference was too large to fit anywhere else. It was a fitting beginning to a vocation that has always existed squarely in the middle ground between teaching and ordained ministry, and indeed, between the Methodist and Episcopal churches.  But she has more than a streak of the Methodist independence of mind and conscience. “I was thrown out of my parish, my father was thrown out of the conference, and my brother was thrown out of the denomination, so I’m the slacker in the family.”

Becky Wright has always followed her own path in vocation, not least because there does not seem to have been an already existing path for her follow. Self-taught in Greek and Hebrew, and already a priest with five years of parish experience when she applied to graduate school, no one was more surprised than she when she was accepted into Yale Graduate School, where she was the only woman graduate student in her department at the time. Already fiercely committed to the work of parish and community, she seems to have had little desire ever to be a pure academic, and indeed, was often infuriated by the dismissal of her ministry and of parish experience broadly speaking. “What can you do [that’s] real?” she was once asked by a very eminent biblical scholar. She may have forgiven him, but the question still clearly makes her angry, even now.

As Becky Wright steps away from full-time teaching in the School of Theology, Sewanee is faced with the task of finding her successor. In the last several months, I have been particularly struck by the — I am told, near-insurmountable—difficulty of finding ordained academics within the Episcopal Church who specialize in the Hebrew Old Testament and who might be willing to teach in a residential seminary. Most of our faculty in Episcopal seminaries who teach the Old Testament are, like Becky Wright, not Episcopalian — and thank God for them! But setting seminaries aside for a moment, it seems a curious problem for our denomination to have, indicative of deeper structural concerns and preoccupations within the church. It remains the case that, lectionary or no lectionary, clergy still find preaching on the Old Testament to be a difficult task, and one to be avoided if possible. The psalter, the ancestral bedrock of both monastic and lay devotion and the foundation of the daily office, seems likewise unloved in most congregations. The critical distance necessary to appreciate on their own terms, and open for the church’s learning, texts that clergy may find difficult to apply to current events takes experience and practice, the vague ideal of prophetic preaching notwithstanding. And yet, our denomination claims to appreciate biblical scholarship, and a more complex attitude to Scripture than a simple fundamentalism: so why the difficulty? Is it that the Old Testament continues to be just disturbing enough, just spiky enough, just difficult enough, just angry and aggrieved and indignant enough, that on some unconscious level we don’t want to hear it? Is the Old Testament just too un-genteel?

In an era of both rising anti-semitism and anti-Judaism, as well as uncritical and apocalyptic interpretations of the war in Israel and Gaza, the Episcopal Church cannot afford to not educate its clergy in this area. More than a simplistic position piece on current events, Episcopal clergy’s education in biblical studies should be founded on the conviction of the richness and complexity of the Hebrew Scriptures we have received, however rarely we may preach on them. If we really believed the former, perhaps the latter might change.

Supersessionism, argues Wright, is not a viable intellectual position for a Christian today. More than anything else, Hebrew, she finds, helps. Teaching Hebrew, for her, has always remained a tool to open Scripture to people in the church in a deeper way. Biblical languages may seem an “academic” luxury to some, but Wright is insistent on its necessity as an integral part of seminary formation, not least amid the present tragedies in Israel and Gaza, which are very close to her heart. She will continue teaching to ensure that no seminary student will go without the opportunity of learning Hebrew. For my part, as more dioceses turn to online programs of formation, I am concerned about whether biblical languages, and Hebrew in particular, will be consistently offered to clergy within the Episcopal Church. Duolingo notwithstanding, foreign languages remain extremely difficult for faculty to teach and for students to learn effectively and sustainably through an online platform beyond the level of asking where the train station is — “dead” languages with different alphabets, exponentially more so. When asked what we lose by only reading Scripture in translation, Wright doesn’t hesitate a moment. “You lose Jesus’ Bible. You lose ‘the God of our fathers.’” Does this not seem like a casualty we ought to be concerned about?

“The problem is, translations are all on the flat,” Wright continues. The compressed nature of Hebrew allows for complex wordplay and multiple registers of meaning conveyed simultaneously in the original text, all of which is lost to the reader when a translator, however sensitive, chooses one primary meaning in English. “For example, Hebrew verbs in the seventh stem simultaneously indicate reciprocity, iteration, or ironic ‘feigning.’ When Elijah taunts the prophets of Baal [1 Kings 18:27], he’s using a verb in the seventh stem that means all of these things.” The prophetic books in particular often use pun-like juxtapositions of ideas that sound similar in Hebrew, almost a kind of sight-rhyme, all of which vanishes in English. “In the end, we have a very domesticated sense of what a prophet is supposed to be like.”

If there is a running thread throughout my conversation with Becky Wright, it is this: Hebrew Scriptures understood only in translation are, if not one-dimensional, then at least flattened versions of the original texts. As with the lectionary’s pruning of the Psalter, this flattening nearly always exists to domesticate, to soften raw emotional impact and shrink the emotional register, and to simplify and make monochromatic the compressed and explosive beauty of the Hebrew. The verbal play, which seems inherent to so much of the prophetic literature in particular, recedes; we have only diatribes, dimly understood. Wright points me to passages in Job in which Job’s complaint is taken up by God, then taken up by Job quoting God quoting Job, which reminds me of nothing so much as jazz improvisation, or two dueling rappers. What would it do to our inherited fears of an angry “Old Testament God” to recapture God’s intimate, conversational, messy entanglement with human suffering, the lament and the honest indignation so present in Hebrew Scripture? Surely it couldn’t hurt.

Archbishop Cranmer hid his wife abroad while he watched Queen Anne and his friend Thomas Cromwell go to the block, one after the other. In the latter years of his reign, the increasingly ailing and unstable Henry seemed to turn against the very reforms he had begun, going so far as to reinstate Catholic transubstantiation as the official theological position on the Eucharist. Henry’s near-totalitarian political tactics demanded total obedience even to his arbitrary and alarming changes of mind, but they did not conceal the truth that, for many years at least, the Act of Supremacy did not immediately (or ever) create something like an Anglican identity, except by destabilizing the former religious landscape so entirely that something new would have to grow in its place.

This something new, as the recent and wonderful book by Lucy Moffat Kaufman argues, was the “people’s Reformation” undertaken in and by Elizabethan parishes in the second half of the 16th century. This ground-up reconstruction was paradoxically made possible, not least, by the fragile and sometimes autocratic stability imposed by Elizabeth over the course of her long reign, which benefitted even her many detractors and settled gorges after the violence experienced in the successive reigns of evangelical Edward and Catholic Mary. Before the Elizabethan Settlement, some of the individual components of what would become Anglican identity certainly existed and would be repurposed by the queen and her archbishops: Cranmer’s two Books of Common Prayer, Tyndale’s vernacular Bible and its royal variations, Coverdale’s psalter, the Ten, the Six, and the Forty-Two Articles. The sheer extent of scorched earth between 1534 and 1558, when Elizabeth came to the throne, suggested any of these might still become anathema at any time. Nevertheless, they had survived the wreckage, and so had Elizabeth.

That this was the case can, and should, be attributed to the short life of an extraordinary and still under-appreciated woman in our church’s history: Henry’s last wife, Catherine Parr, who, we recall, “survived.” Beyond the rhyme, we do not usually recall what surviving meant, or why it was important, or what Catherine did with her life before, during, or after Henry, and certainly not why it might be important to our church. As the musical Six pungently puts it, “In history I’m fixed as one of Six, and without him [Henry] I disappear.” But in considering the conundrum of Anglican identity, I believe we can set Catherine, as much as poor Anne Boleyn, as a necessary and constructive foil to Henry’s destructive presence. In what follows I am indebted to the biographies, short and long, of Susan James, the editorial work of Janel Mueller, who collected all of Catherine’s writings into one volume, and the spirit of Martin Simpson’s “A Ballad for Katherine of Aragon”; all mistakes are mine.

Throughout her 36 years of life, Catherine Parr constantly built connections and “affinity”: married four times — the only husband of her choice arguably her most disastrous step — the women of the court were for her a much more reliable network. Her extraordinary mother, Maud Parr, was lady in waiting to Catherine of Aragon and named her daughter for the queen. Maud’s husband died when Catherine was 5, and the widow took upon herself estate management, as well as all of her children’s schooling, which she modeled on the famously erudite household of Thomas More.

Maud died in 1531. Having endured ill treatment from her first husband’s family, Catherine was widowed two years later, after only four years of marriage; her second, much older husband, John Neville, Baron Latimer, had two young children from a former marriage and estates in Yorkshire. When the Catholic uprising, the Pilgrimage of Grace, erupted in 1536 in response to Henry’s change of religion, Latimer and Catherine were initially courted by the rebels. With steady leadership, the Pilgrimage could have been the downfall of Henry VIII, but in the event, Catherine bore the brunt of some of its most chaotic moments, held captive with her husband’s children by the rebels hoping to force Latimer’s hand in their favor. When royal vengeance came to Yorkshire it would be crushing, and Catherine left for the South, thoroughly disgusted, we may assume, by the Catholic North.

When Latimer died in 1543, Catherine would have been only 31. She found her way into Mary Tudor’s household, just as her mother had been lady in waiting to Catherine. An intense flirtation at court with the thoroughly roguish Thomas Seymour followed — and a connection to his sister, the young Lady Jane Grey. Catherine might have married Seymour had the king not suddenly interposed himself into her life. She may have tried to deflect his courtship with Bible verses, some of which survive, and which proved an unsuccessful tactic. They were married by the end of the year. By this stage, Henry was so decrepit that, if the marriage was consummated, Catherine certainly never became pregnant by him.

She was the most “common” of all of Henry’s wives, neither the scion of a prominent family nor conventionally trained for her position. As well as her mother’s education, however, which included a command of four languages, and an intense evangelical faith, Catherine did, in addition, know something about being a stepmother. Under her aegis, not only Mary but also Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, was brought back into the royal household, and Catherine made arrangements for the young Prince Edward’s tutors, something which would have a huge effect not only on Edward VI but also on the formation and education of Elizabeth. It seems likely that, in her new role, Catherine looked to model herself on the evangelical Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister to Henri I of France and mother to the future King Henri IV. Marguerite of Navarre was likewise formidably educated, publishing some of the first printed books to be written by a woman in French, including The Mirror of a Sinful Soul, the first book a young Princess Elizabeth would translate for her stepmother.

In these years, Catherine Parr would serve as royal regent for her husband, an unprecedented sign of favor, and she would begin a striking publishing campaign. She seems to have participated in and advanced the Tudors’ favorite form of PR: portrait painting, not least of (all) the royal children. In 1545, with Cranmer she published The King’s Primer, which bound together Cranmer’s Great Litany with her translation of Bishop Fisher’s psalter; it was, in short, a proto-BCP. She commissioned vernacular paraphrases of a New Testament translation by Erasmus, of which, Susan James argues, she may well have been responsible for both Matthew and Acts. But her Prayers or Meditations would be Queen Catherine’s most popular work, bridging the divide between the world of late medieval devotional literature and the new evangelical sensibility for translation work. A blend of Thomas à Kempis with her original prayers, the Prayers emphasized personal relationship with God and helped to restore some degree of religious credibility to Henry’s household. Two years later, Catherine’s Lamentation of a Sinner likewise combines the familiar patterns of medieval devotional texts with a new evangelical intensity.

No good deed goes unpunished, and Catherine’s ever-more radical influence brought inevitable backlash: in this case, by the Catholic chancellor Stephen Gardiner. Hoping to prove the queen a dangerous Lutheran, Gardiner ordered the torture and eventual burning of the evangelical preacher Anne Askew, hoping to find personal connections to the queen. Quickly purging her library, Catherine took to her bed in surely genuine terror, pleading with Henry that, if she had read too much, it was only to amuse him and so that she might better learn from his superior wisdom. It was, thankfully, exactly the right thing to say, and Catherine escaped what Mueller calls her “Tudor near-death experience.” When Henry died in 1547, Catherine overstepped the formal period of mourning to finally marry her old lover, Thomas Seymour. Bearing her first child, a daughter, in four marriages at the then-geriatric age of 36, Catherine died of puerperal fever, Jane Grey the chief mourner at her grave.

Most portraits of Catherine Parr, it must be said, do not necessarily do justice to the liveliness and single-minded intensity of her mind and her spirit. Her reign as queen itself brief, and to say she “survived” is perhaps a tragic technicality. Invoking both her mother’s independent outlook and that of Queen Marguerite, Catherine Parr transmitted to both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor some semblance of family life, and to Elizabeth, at least, the bare bones of the education that would form one of the queen’s chief pleasures later in life. I imagine Catherine in Elizabeth’s mind: a vivid, learned, talkative redhead, so much like herself, someone who showed that it was possible to reign, alone, as queen, however briefly the chance was given her. After Mary’s death, no one particularly thought Elizabeth would return to the Catholic faith: her mother’s evangelical convictions, and her much deeper relationship with Catherine, ensured it. At least one of Catherine’s prayers has survived into today’s text of the Book of Common Prayer, and she was arguably even more important in suggesting, before Cranmer could do so, the kind of religion the English people could respond to: the language of the psalter, personal devotional prayers, the authenticity of conversion. In five brief years, she established a model her daughter-in-law would practice for 45 years, a relative commoner paving the way for “a people’s reformation.”

Revelations
By Mary Sharratt
Mariner Books, 320 pages, $16.99

Not so very long ago, you couldn’t get scholars, or novelists for that matter, to touch the late Middle Ages. In the language of Barbara Tuchman’s ubiquitous 1978 monograph on the 14th century, the Middle Ages were “calamitous”: plague-ridden, depressing, religious, the end of an era. Why go there when the glowing scientific advances of the Renaissance beckon from just around the corner?

To be sure, the religious and political landscape of late medieval Europe had more than its fair share of darkness, but it was also a time of immense structural changes that underlay the religious and political transformations of the 16th century. Urbanization in London and East Anglia intimately connected England with the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy; war forged dynastic connections between England and France, Spain and Portugal, and even with Czech Bohemia.

A courtier like Chaucer, as Marion Turner’s new biography attests, really got around, as did many of the pilgrims he wrote about, such as his indomitable Wife of Bath, who traveled as far as Jerusalem. This era also witnessed a concomitant explosion of writing in the vernacular — in middle English, in middle Dutch, in various German dialects, in French — by ordinary people. The vast majority of this is religious and devotional in character, but incorporates along the way a wealth of detail, much of it previously inaccessible to historians, about the nature and rhythms of ordinary life. For the novelist, the lilt of middle English is just different enough to our ears to be exotic, just similar enough emotionally to land.

The late Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, beginning with Wolf Hall in 2009, arguably reignited our interest in historical fiction as a genre; not least, the blockbuster success of Hamnet, by veteran novelist Maggie O’Farrell, ensures more books in the genre will find a market, perhaps, than in times past. On the heels of a pandemic during which comparisons with the Black Death were ubiquitous, and in the midst of the climate crisis, we are perhaps more in a mood to identify with the anxieties of the late medieval world than ever before. The vivid, slightly shambolic nature of late medieval religion likewise offers an appealing, inclusive alternative to our grimly polarized society. In particular, pilgrimage in all its forms retains its seemingly universal appeal for the spiritual but not religious, as well as offering to the novelist bountiful opportunities for sly social observation.

Matthew Kneale’s Pilgrims goes full, broad Chaucer, following a ragtag group who have, for various and not entirely religious motivations, found themselves on pilgrimage to Rome. Each chapter is written from a different character’s point of view, from the beggar boy haunted by visions of his cat in purgatory all the way up the social scale to the formidable young noblewoman who has sued her way to financial independence via several terrible lovers but cannot manage to get a divorce from her first husband.

Significantly, however, the prologue begins the story with the violent backlash against the Jews that accompanied Simon de Montfort’s rebellion against King Edward in the 1260s, described in terms of claustrophobic intimacy. Insider or outsider, in this story you cannot escape your neighbors. While it is publicized as a comic novel, I found Pilgrims more poignant than funny, very definitely a story in which we are all in the same boat together.

Though it is almost a century too soon, one of Kneale’s characters, Matilda Froome, bears a marked resemblance to perhaps the best known of all late medieval pilgrims, the Norwich housewife, Margery Kempe. Point for point, Kneale includes all the potent components of Margery’s life, recounted in what is sometimes called the first autobiography in English, the medieval equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses: brewing, repeated childbirth, visions and conversion, constant weeping, pilgrimage to Rome (alienating all her fellow pilgrims along the way), probable mental illness, and her quirk of referring to herself as “your creature.”

In Revelations, Mary Sharratt makes a much more serious and comprehensive effort to fill out the details of Margery’s remarkable life. From the beginning, Sharratt draws out one of the most familiar encounters in all late medieval English literature: the moment, in The Book of Margery Kempe, in which Margery pays a call on the anchorite Julian of Norwich, the author of Revelations of Divine Love.

As a student of mine once remarked, if their writing styles are anything to go by, the meeting must have resembled a terrier trying to play with a Great Dane; for better or worse, Margery never had a scrap of Dame Julian’s poise. In Sharratt’s interpretation, however, Margery’s life, following that encounter, represents a kind of special embassy, even ordination “consecrated by Julian, secretly carrying her book out into the great world.”

For Kneale’s pilgrims, the pilgrimage is the excuse for life to happen along the way; Sharratt is much more interested in the particular religious moment in which Margery found herself — specifically, in the drama between Margery’s efforts to preach and proclaim her visions and her complicated relationship with religious authority. Sharratt invents, dramatically but not improbably, Margery’s arrest and trial at York Minster for Lollard heresy.

The followers of John Wycliffe, colloquially “Lollards,” are often referred to as pre- or proto-reformers by later historians. They represent, however, many of the most broadly shared concerns of devout medieval laypeople, including their critique of the clergy, that Jan Hus and Martin Luther would later refashion in new forms.

Sharratt’s instinct is to connect Margery, not only to the Lollards but also to the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and to the beguines, devout laywomen from the Low Countries. In Sharratt’s hands, Margery becomes the emissary and apostle of these groups, while, unlike Kneale, she downplays the absurd, tragicomic aspects of The Book of Margery Kempe. Both novels demonstrate, however, the ebullient life to be encountered in the worlds of the late Middle Ages.

I appreciated Kirk Smith’s recent piece, published on this blog, on his tenure as the interim dean of CDSP and the several directions in which he senses that seminary education is heading. Alongside my fellow medievalist, I agree entirely that to be engaged in the formation of seminarians is an incredible privilege, an opportunity to see the future of the church taking shape before your eyes. I echo his cri de cœur for bishops and the wider church to be engaged with, and to invest in, this future, to work and to hope for the next generation even while — in fact, because — we live amid radical environmental and social change. Seminaries are not an optional extra, nor a luxury we can no longer afford. If the future of the Episcopal Church includes more laypeople, as Bishop Smith argues, so be it — as a layperson myself I can only applaud — but that will require strategic planning and investment in lay education, which seminaries are actually best placed to provide.

In particular, I would like to respond to and somewhat nuance Bishop Smith’s call for the church to embrace online education. I have been engaged in online teaching in a variety of forms since I entered graduate school 20 years ago; throughout my nine years teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary, I taught both online courses and in-person courses with online components. And like virtually all faculty and clergy I know, my teaching and service moved online during the COVID pandemic, while we had to make do as best we could. I have continued to teach students online in classes beyond the Episcopal Church, precisely because I have been curious about the experience and how to improve online pedagogy in my particular subject area. I am very aware that this does not make me an expert in online education and technology. The following, however, are some observations I offer regarding the nature of the online formation of seminarians for the Episcopal Church, including some warnings and cautionary tales.

In one fell swoop, online seminary promises to eliminate many of the challenges faced by residential seminary education: the necessity of asking seminarians (and faculty and staff) to move with their families, the expense of maintaining residential institutions with nationally recognized accreditation, and on a more general level, the promise of more “practical” and “applied” learning. But online education is not the same thing as formation, a distinction that Bishop Smith explicitly notes, when he describes the hollowing out of a solid grounding in the core disciplines of seminary education at the expense of tangential, of-the-moment electives.

It is very easy and natural for online education in particular to become piecemeal, and very difficult to make all the different bits join up in a disciplinarily cohesive whole — particularly when faculty with different disciplinary and academic backgrounds are living in different states and have little personal contact with one another beyond the odd Zoom meeting (and most Zoom meetings are very odd). In sacrificing residential seminary formation for the sake of cost-effective “education,” the Episcopal Church, always a regional and diverse body, risks losing one of its most effective organs for creating and maintaining its identity as a denomination.

Simultaneously one of the most beautiful and most difficult things about seminary education, from a faculty perspective, is that it is almost never what any of us actually got our Ph.D. in: as faculty, we come to seminary with a highly specialized training that, as teachers and colleagues, we have to broaden, adjust, and adapt to the needs of our students and the wider church, alongside our fellow faculty. After many years of the intensive, narrowing drive to specialize, we have to open ourselves out again. Seminary education is inevitably integrative as a result, interdisciplinary in nature, involving the whole person of both faculty and students. In that sense it is a healthy model of education in ways that, I would argue, conventional academia is not. It is also an extremely difficult thing to achieve, for that exact same reason, and requires both faculty and students to be all in to reap its deepest and greatest benefits.

My hunch is that online seminary will be very efficient at offering individual courses or seminars on isolated topics, such as courses on reading spreadsheets, filing taxes, or the basics of church administration that Bishop Smith suggests that clergy need. I am less confident that online seminary will be able to offer, for example, a sustained and cohesive understanding of the New Testament from an Episcopal perspective. I am even less confident that students will develop theologically formed and informed habits of pastoral ministry.

And that begins, or should begin, at the beginning, in the introductory, basic, core period, exactly the moment when an in-person experience is most valuable and necessary. I am hesitant about online education’s capacity to form from scratch effective and lasting habits of worship and prayer, in either churches or seminaries. Introductory should mean in-person, wherever possible.

In the classroom and out of it, students inevitably learn from one another as well as from faculty — one of the reasons that most residential seminaries rely on cohort learning. Seminarians come from a bewildering variety of backgrounds — one of the reasons I most enjoy teaching them. With one another, they learn, not least, that the Episcopal Church is diverse and complicated and contains multitudes of different experiences different than the one they know or take for granted: “This is not how we do it at my home parish!” is a common refrain. Particularly when our seminarians are increasingly not themselves cradle Episcopalians, how will they learn about the broader church they are joining — never mind how their church relates to the broader ecology of the Anglican Communion — except through one another and listening to one another’s stories? For us within the church truly to honor and promote the kind of diversity we say we honor, that has to be reflected in the learning experiences of the seminarian.

Not long ago and still in the shadow of COVID, I wrote a piece concerned about the fate of what I called “the church social”; I was, and remain, worried that we as a society are forgetting how to be with one another on a very basic level. Quite rightly, Bishop Smith points to the problem of the newly ordained dropping out of ministry, perhaps because, as he argues, not enough care was taken in choosing ordinands in the first place.

To some extent, I think there will always be those who find ministry harder than seminary; I do not always think my most academically gifted students will make the best seasoned all-round priests. However, I would frame the problem in slightly different terms than Bishop Smith does: I would argue that church is, and always was, inescapably social. Extravert or introvert, to be a priest is to enter a highly social vocation, requiring developed interpersonal and communication skills and real emotional resilience. This won’t come simply through CPE, however rigorously reformed. To believe that is to outsource what should be the major goal of seminary: forming priests. This is why I defend the social nature of residential seminary as a necessary precursor to future ministry.

Residential seminary at its best offers both necessary challenge and support, neither of which can exist in the same way in an online experience, even at its best. Seminaries can be stressful and challenging communities in which to live, but a seminarian who is a good citizen of a residential seminary community and who participates regularly in a field education placement site by and large has had a taste, if only a taste, of what it means to be in a visible position of authority and responsibility in a parish church.

For many of our younger seminarians in particular, the persona they must necessarily create to do effective ministry grows and develops as they watch their mentors and one another do the job, grounded in the core disciplines of their shared academic formation. The parish priests I know who have worked in the parish for 30 years and more — often without recognition, promotion, or honor from the wider church — have survived and continued to do ministry by being connected people, and in part, by building networks and relationships with fellow clergy.

In a world desperate for meaningful connection and community, these are the people who can model, and form in turn, the Christ-centered communities in which we find our God-given end. How can we expect them, the ministers of the gospel, to do that if we don’t allow them the experience and the formation in the first place?