The Middle Ages remained serenely unaware that a dark problem might attach itself some day to the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. They knew their Gregory, studied his Moralia and other scriptural commentaries with uplifted hearts, read his Dialogues with equal veneration and devotion and never perceived even the glimmer of a contradiction between the two categories of works. Then came the Reformation with its stress on Scripture and its dislike of the ‘superstitious Romanist piety’ fostered by works like the Dialogues. A problem thus arose for the Reformers. They had little love for the papacy but retained a veneration for the Church Fathers, among whom they counted Gregory the Great, that great interpreter of Scripture, who had been instrumental in bringing Christianity to England. Was it possible to retain Gregory but divest him of an embarrassing work? It is important to note that the first attempts to deny Gregory's authorship of the Dialogues are rooted in the polemics of the Reformation period.

The disagreement between Thomas More and William Tyndale has often been deplored. It has been felt that the controversy failed to bring out the best in More as a writer – that he became bitter, bullying and, worst of all, tedious. Alistair Fox, in his recent book on More, while rightly assigning an important place to the controversial works, writes of them, on the whole, with distaste, finding ‘a pattern of progressive deterioration; dialogue gives way to debellation, self-control yields to loss of proportion and perspective, candour is replaced by dishonesty, and charity is displaced by violence’. More's latest biographer, Richard Marius, finds ‘ferocity and deadly dullness’ in More's polemic, ‘monumental self-righteousness and viciousness’ in Tyndale's. Other modern readers have agreed; C. S. Lewis, in particular, pointed to the tragic irony of such a lengthy quarrel between two men who shared many intellectual assumptions and were to have strangely similar fates. It is true that the opponents have much in common, true also that the scolding of scholars is no longer regarded as first-class intellectual entertainment. And the reader, while admitting the importance of the long-distance debate in the Renaissance as a means of clarifying and disseminating ideas, misses, in More's writings against Tyndale, the pleasing courtesy of his Letter to Martin Dorp in defence of Erasmus and, more acutely perhaps, the ability to compress and control his subject which gives his earlier polemical letters their attractive blend of lightness and earnestness.

The material presented below grew out of a study of episcopal administration in the diocese of Barcelona in the mid-fourteenth century. Among the bishops' registers which were analysed for the study, three proved especially important: two from the communia, or general, series, Notule communium 15 and 16 (NC 15 and NC 16); and one from the collations series, Registrum collationum 9 (CO 9), covering the years 1345–51. The registers record both a period – 1345–8 – of presumably normal diocesan administration, and the plague period – the so-called Black Death struck Barcelona in spring 1348. The communia and collations series were selected both because they provided information about general diocesan administration and because the two series were conflated beginning with NC 15 in 1348, and remained separate until 1361.

In recent years the doctrine of providence has attracted increasing attention from secular historians. They have come to realise that it cannot be regarded as the exclusive domain of their religious colleagues, nor as an intellectual oddity, picturesque but irrelevant to serious analysis of political movements and choices. In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas showed the pervasiveness of the belief in providence in early modern England and its function as explanation, consolation and reassurance in a world often unpredictable, inexplicable and unjust. Other historians have shown its place in the rise of Puritan activism. Most recently, Blair Worden has elucidated the doctrine and has powerfully demonstrated its importance as an engine of political action in the ‘politics of Cromwellian England’ as well as its part in crucial decisions in the career of Cromwell himself.

To the mixed relief and regret of the scholarly community, Lutherjahr 1983 is fading into the distance but the tide of writings stimulated by the quincentenary shows little sign of abating. Some of the works here reviewed fall into the category of ‘late pickings’ from the 1983 harvest, including three collections of essays which originated at scholarly conferences or colloquia held specifically to mark the quincentenary.