Starting with the fact that John of Antioch and Nestorius were friends, this article asks whether they were also theological allies, as is commonly assumed. Based on an examination of a letter written by John to Nestorius in November of ad 430, as well as other pertinent letters and documents, the author concludes that the two were not on the same side theologically, but that John was unaware of how fundamentally they disagreed. The relationship between John and Nestorius is then used to help interpret the proceedings at Ephesus in ad 431, the action of John and of Cyril of Alexandria in the Reunion of 433 and the Christological controversy as a whole.

Since the end of the nineteenth century scholars have been divided on the identity of Hilary of Poitiers's opponents in his Commentarium in Matthaeum. As he wrote the treatise in the early 350s, it is assumed that his opponents, if real and not contrived, must be ‘Arian’. What has not been sufficiently considered is whether Hilary may be addressing other fourth-century theological positions. In this article it will be argued that two key passages from the commentary, generally used to indicate an awareness of ‘Arian’ ideas, actually suggest an engagement with the theological views commonly associated with Photinus of Sirmium.

This article examines Sulpicius Severus' use of the image of St Jerome in his Dialogi, a work intended to defend Sulpicius' earlier Vita Martini, as well as to censure the low standards of the Gallic clergy and ascetics. Sulpicius, by misrepresenting the contents of Jerome's epistle xxii, was able to offer an indirect critique of his compatriots. Moreover he played to a secondary pro-Rufinian audience by reworking Rufinus' arguments and casting them in Jerome's face. These included such sore points as the reception of Jerome's epistle xxii, his volte-face on the question of Origen and his excommunication by John of Jerusalem. This use of figured speech adds another dimension to this text, one which suggests that Sulpicius was not as friendly towards Jerome as has previously been thought.

The Tomus ad Antiochenos is still thought to represent Athanasius at the summit of his career, generously trying to make peace between two groups of Catholics in Antioch. However, in the light of the resurrected Epistula catholica of the Synod at Alexandria in 362, another interpretation is more likely – namely, that the Tomus is another piece of ecclesiastical politics of the sort attacked by Edward Schwartz a century ago. This interpretation suits the end of Athanasius’ career much better than the older view.

Tremellius' 1569 edition of the Syriac New Testament was a quite distinctive product of Heidelberg oriental scholarship, very different from other sixteenth-century editions produced by Catholic scholars. Tremellius produced his edition by first reconstructing an historical grammar of Aramaic and then, in the light of this, vocalising the text of Vat. sir. 16 which he took to be more ancient than that of Widmanstetter's editio princeps. Thus in this way he sought to construct the earliest recoverable linguistic and textual form of the Peshitta. The anonymous Specularius dialogus of 1581 is here used for the first time to corroborate this assessment of Tremellius' achievement and to cast light on the confessional polemics his edition provoked.

This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul's Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with an historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledon's celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past.

Arguments as to why St Louis diverted his 1270 crusade to Tunis from Jerusalem have been raging ever since the expedition returned to France. Although historians have recently agreed that the diversion was the decision of Louis himself, this consensus has not led to exploration of his reasons for crusading to a north African port city. This essay argues that the diversion to Tunis is best understood in terms of Louis's ideas about conversion in general and his policy towards the Jews of his land in particular. The close parallels between Louis's Jewish policy and the Tunisian strategy suggest that these conversion policies led Louis to Tunis.

The ‘Gregorian Reform’ or ‘Gregorian Revolution’ is a model of top–down ecclesiastical change that assumes that local bishops suddenly became, to some extent, agents of Rome. One striking illustration of this is the portrayal of the ‘new Gregorian bishop’, based largely on Berardus of Marsica (d. 1130), presented by Pierre Toubert in his classic Structures du Latium médiéval (1973), and now reprised by Jacques Dalarun (2003). This article, employing an unedited collection of miracles, re-examines Toubert's treatment of Berardus and reveals a reforming saint who belongs less to Rome and more to his idiosyncratic cathedral of Santa Sabina.

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution.

This article explores aspects of the life and works of the religious exile John Ernest Grabe, who fled Lutheran Prussia to settle in England in 1697. Welcomed in Oxford, he established a network of contacts in the academic and publishing worlds that enabled him to pursue an ambitious programme of religious scholarship. His Spicilegium patrum and edition of the Septuagint established his reputation as a patristic and biblical scholar of international standing. A passionate believer in regaining and retaining the purity of the primitive Church, he willingly defended Anglican orthodoxy against the controversial Arian scholar William Whiston.

It has been assumed by historians that the High and Low Church parties in the early eighteenth-century Church of England were exclusive and homogenous groups. However the life and career of Bishop William Talbot, as with a number of other clergy, raises questions about these assumptions. Though Talbot was ostensibly a Latitudinarian Whig, he embraced some clear High Church principles, including those on the Trinity and on the sacerdotal nature of the priesthood. Talbot also repeatedly opposed the idea of a split between High and Low Churchmen, which had its origin in political abuse rather than theological principle. This study of Talbot's thought suggests that churchmen were able to embrace both High and Low Church principles and thus demands a reconceptualisation of the presumption of exclusivity in the two parties. Historians therefore need to revise their views of the Church parties of the early eighteenth century and to recognise that they existed as overlapping and complementary tendencies around Anglican core values rather than as exclusive and opposing bi-polar structures.

Thomas White alias Blacklo, an English Catholic priest, natural philosopher and theologian, was the leader of a small group of Catholics, known as ‘Blackloists’, who in the 1640s and 1650s wrote in support of Oliver Cromwell. This article seeks to explain the ecclesiological, theological and political arguments put forward by White and his followers in order to justify their approach to the Independents and later to the Lord Protector. After putting into context and interpreting some of the issues elaborated in White's circle, the reaction of the Holy See to Thomas White and to his political and theological positions is examined. While contemporary historiography seems to agree that the majority of English Catholics were on the king's side during the civil war, the evidence that emerges from White's case shows that the Roman hierarchy was of a different opinion.

Herbert Thorndike's Of the covenant of grace (1659) was the largest and last substantial word on its subject from a priest of the seventeenth-century English Church. Recasting elements of practical divinity that are commonly associated with evangelical Puritanism, attacking the error of absolute and immediate predestination by decree and shifting stress from baptism to regeneration, Thorndike defended God's honour and majesty by affirming human freedom of choice in the ordo salutis and the moral life. His argument centred in a programme of reciprocal ‘helps’ that unites Arminian synergism with the early modern scholastic concept of scientia media, God's ‘middle knowledge’.

This paper traces the history of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, one of the most successful of the eccentric and idiosyncratic private ecumenical initiatives of the mid-nineteenth century. The principal motivation behind the venture was a Romantic medievalism inspired by the lay Roman Catholic Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle and the Anglican ritualist priest, Frederick George Lee. While initially attracting widespread support, the leaders failed to recognise the power of vested interests in both Churches. After a vigorous denunciation by Henry Manning, the hopes of reunion proved to be little more than a dream.

The Society of Free Catholics was founded in 1914 by a small group of Unitarian ministers, who, inspired by Richard Baxter, James Martineau, F. D. Maurice and the Catholic Modernists, sought to combine historic Catholic sacramental and devotional practice with theological freedom, and to unite all Christians in a Free Christian Church. The members included Anglicans, Nonconformists and a few Roman Catholics. The two main leaders of the society were J. M. Lloyd Thomas of the old Meeting, Birmingham, and W. E. Orchard of the King's Weigh House, London. Their chief legacy was a series of prayer books for public worship.

This article considers the radical contribution of Edward Irving to mid-Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism, in an analysis of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical theology and spirituality, political and social thought and missionary activity. While historians of doctrine have acknowledged the influence of aspects of Irving's thought upon liberal Anglicans like F. D. Maurice, they have paid scant attention to Irving's influence upon the theology of Evangelical churchmen. Irving's legacy was, in fact, an important and positive force for theological change. This article also challenges the conventional historical view that Evangelical churchmen produced only negative polemical works in response to the innovatory approaches of Oxford Movement and ‘Broad Church’ theologians. It considers, in particular, the work of the leading Anglican Evangelical theologian Thomas Rawson Birks, which was shaped by the legacy of Irving and has many significant parallels with that of Maurice.

This article considers how the roots of modern vegetarianism, one of the fastest growing cultural trends in the UK and USA since the 1960s, can be found in Protestant sectarianism. Christian vegetarianism is shown to have developed in three main periods: the first during the first half of the nineteenth century and culminating in 1847 with the founding of the Vegetarian Society; the second starting in the 1890s; and the third in the 1960s. The article demonstrates that the main themes to be found in the arguments for Christian vegetarianism are humanitarianism, purity and reincarnation. It examines why these movements experienced only limited success in preaching a Christian vegetarian message and considers whether this work continues today in the work of groups of vegetarian Christians within the mainstream Churches.

The ancient library of the canons of St Peter at the Vatican contained two copies of the Panormia, an immensely successful canon law collection attributed to Ivo of Chartres.1 Neither was part of the legacy of Cardinal Giordano Orsini (d. 1438), and they may well have been at St Peter's since the later twelfth century when they were written. In spite of the many losses the library suffered, both survive, as MS G 19 and MS G 19bis.2

The friendship of Thomas Cranmer with the Polish humanist and diplomat Bishop Johannes Dantiscus is one of the most interesting among Cranmer's European-wide circle of acquaintance. Although it was extremely episodic and petered out in religious disagreement, it was a vivid and early illustration of the international cast of mind of this central figure of the English Reformation. So one of the archival discoveries which pleased me most in writing my biography of Thomas Cranmer was a pair of letters from Cranmer to Johannes Dantiscus. I learned of these letters through the generosity of Dr Stephen Ryle, who sent me an unsolicited letter about them while I was actually reading the proofs of my book, and supplied me with photocopies of the originals in the Czartoryski Library in Kraków, preserved amid other fragments of the Polish royal archives. As I hastened to read these, in a frighteningly brief window of opportunity before my proofs had to be completed, I found a beguilingly and startlingly novel addition to Cranmer's career, which necessitated last-minute alterations to my text. The letters were dateable to early summer 1527. The first letter was written from Bilbao on the Basque coast, while the writer was waiting for a ship to England, and passed on greetings to Dantiscus from a number of mutual acquaintances in diplomatic circles at the emperor's court in Spain.

One of the weaknesses of post-colonial theory has been a tendency to view colonialism in unitary and essentialist terms. This weakness is particularly evident in post-colonialism's treatment of missionary endeavour. This is the result of insufficient engagements with missionary texts. This article engages with one of the most remarkable missionary texts. Dan Crawford's Thinking black reveals an openness to Africa far in advance of prevailing ideas. While this enlightened attitude had its roots partially in the author's character, it was also an expression of the primitivism typical of the Brethren movement. We may therefore see Crawford as a paradigm of Brethren missions.