Parish Projects
(A) Based at My-Parish
English and Welsh Churchwardens’ Accounts (Valerie Hitchman, Kent)
We are creating a searchable resource listing all surviving churchwardens’ accounts from the earliest known sets (c.1300) to c.1850.
Sacrament Books of St Catherine, Bethlehem (Felicita Tramontana, Warwick)
Database of seventeenth-century baptism, marriage and burial entries at St Catherine, Bethlehem, a sacrament centre of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, compiled in the course of MIGMED, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship project at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (2016-18)
Tower Ball Deposits in the German Lands (Beat Kümin, Warwick History)
This Gerda Henkel Foundation funded research project examines the Germanic custom of depositing writings & objects into spheres located on top of prominent buildings. (2023-24).
Warwickshire Parish Accounts (Dugdale Society, Heritage & Culture Warwickshire, My-Parish)
Transcriptions and editorial project, involving volunteers, aiming to make the county's earliest surviving accounts by churchwardens, constables, highway surveyors and overseers of the poor more accessible to the public (2020-).
(B) Other Projects (from 2003-)
Please note that many of the following initiatives are 'historic', i.e. completed or no longer actively pursued
Warwick Projects
Catholic Warwick: A History of the Parish of St Mary Immaculate (Ruth Barbour; parish website info / book now available from Archdiocese of Birmingham)
Communal Culture – Communal Power: Parishes in the Holy Roman Empire c. 1500-1800, incl. the village republic of Gersau (Beat Kümin)
The Conscience of the Community’: The Character and Development of Clerical Complaint in Early Modern England(Juliet Ingram)
The Progress of the Reformation in Cheshire to the Death of Bishop William Downham (1577) (Pat Cox)
The Spatial Reordering of the English Parish Church in the 1630s (James Brown)
The War of Two Cultures- the campaign for ‘godly reformation’ in the 1650s (Bernard Capp)
Invisible Saints: A community-driven, web-based project to locate, digitally record and document the medieval devotional wood sculpture of the British Isles, which survives, largely unrecognised, in situ, in institutional and private collections and circulating within the works of art market. (Don White)
Projects in the British Isles
Art and Architecture in the Later Medieval English and Scottish Parish (Julian Luxford, St Andrews)
!!NEW!! Berkswell Hall (Brenda Murray, Berkswell)
Careers of the Chantry Clergy of the Midlands pre- and post-Dissolution (Sylvia Gill, University of Birmingham)
Chichester Centre for Ecclesiastical Studies: Parish-related projects (Andrew Foster, University of Chichester)
Economy and Society in Rural Russia: the Serf Estate of Voshchazhnikovo 1750-1860 (Tracy Dennison, University of Cambridge)
Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition (Sheilagh Ogilvie, University of Cambridge)
Liturgy and Musicians in the English Parish Church 1450-1575 (Roger Bowers, University of Cambridge)
Lyddington History Project (Rosemary Canadine, Lyddington/Rutland) NEW: award of major Heritage Lottery Fund grant (press release May 2011)
Making the Church Holy: The Fabric of the Sacraments 800-1800 (Andrew Spicer, Oxford Brookes) [project webpage]
Map of Early Modern London: Parish entries (Christopher Highley, Ohio State University)
Medieval Churches of Northamptonshire: The Evolution of Religious Space 800-1550 (Paul Barnwell, English Heritage) [see also the "imaginary reconstruction" of a service in Blisworth parish church below]
Music and Confession in Heidelberg, 1556–1618 (Matthew Laube, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Music at the College of St Mary, Warwick, in the Late Middle Ages (Alexandra Buckle, Worcester College, Oxford)
Parish Church Building and the English Economy c. 1180-1536 (Gabriel Byng, Clare College, Cambridge)
Priests, Parish Devotions and the Dead in France c.1450-c.1720 (Elizabeth Tingle, University College, Northampton)
Southwell and Nottingham Church History Project (Rev. Keith Turner, Chair of the Project Management Team, which includes John Beckett and Christopher Brooke, University of Nottingham; project manager and main contact: Janice Avery)
Times of Trouble and Deliverance: Worship in the Kirk of Scotland, 1646-1658 (Chris R. Langley, Aberdeen University)
Vestry and Select Vestry: Assets, Liabilities or Irrelevances in the Development of Chorley 1780-1830? (John Edward Harrison, University of Central Lancashire)
Victoria History of Cornwall(Nicholas Orme, University of Exeter)
Projects in other parts of Europe
Church and community history in the duchy of Schleswig 1550-1850 (Karsten Merrald Sørensen, Aarhus/Denmark and Flensburg/Germany)
The church in the middle. An inquiry into the urban parish and parish church in the Southern Low Countries (ca. 1450-1700). Case study: Saint-James parish in Ghent (Michal Bauwens, Ghent/Belgium)
Le culte de Saint-Job à Wezemaal aux XVe et XVIe si è cles (Bart Minnen, Wezemaal, Belgium)
Ecclesiastical Spaces in Urban and Rural Communities of Hildesheim, 1550-1750 (Renate Dürr, Frankfurt, Germany)
Kirchenreform in Mittel- und Osteuropa um die Wende des 14./15. Jhs. [Church Reform in Central and Eastern Europe around 1400] (Leszek Zygner (Polnische Historische Mission, Göttingen)
Parish Life and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Malta (Frans Ciappara, Malta)
Parishes in the State of the Teutonic Order in Prussia 1243-1525 (Andrzej Radzimiński, Nikolaus Copernicus University, Toruń/Poland)
Das politische Lied der Reformationszeit (1517-1555): Ein Beitrag zur Kommunikationsgeschichte des Politischen im 16.Jahrhundert [Political Songs in the Age of the Reformation: A Contribution to the History of Political Communication in the 16thC] (Stephanie Moisi, Graz/Austria)
Profan und heilig: Kirchhöfe als Orte und Räume symbolischer Kommunikation in der ländlichen Gesellschaft Westfalens[Profane and sacred: Churchyards als Sites and Spaces of Symbolic Communication in Westphalian rural society] (Werner Freitag, Münster, Germany)
The Fifteenth-Century Register of Obits of the Parish of St Paul at Villeneuve, Vaud: A Critical Edition (Arthur Bissegger, Lausanne, Switzerland)
The Late Medieval Parishes of Gettorf and Husum (Ronny Andersen, University of Southern Denmark)
The Reformation’s first 100 years on Bornholm, Gotland and Saaremaa (until 1645) (Jürgen Beyer, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Visitation Records and Early Modern German Parishes (Peter Thaddäus Lang, Stadtarchiv Albstadt, Germany)
Projects in North America
From Community Conflict to Collective Memory: Lived Religion and the Late Medieval Parish Church, c. 1350-1539 (Kristi Woodward Bain, Northwestern University)
‘Religious Space and the Construction of Identity in Early Modern England (Susan Guinn-Chipman, University of Colorado, Boulder)
‘The Good Women of the Parish’: Visibility and Participation in Late Medieval English Parishes (Katherine French, SUNY-New Paltz)
The Politics of Reading in the English Parish 1536-1642 (John Craig, Simon Fraser University, Canada)