A major manuscript discovery of hitherto unknown letters of Augustine of Hippo is a scholarly event whose importance can hardly be exaggerated. It is as though one of the lost books of Livy had suddenly turned up in palimpsest among medieval manuscripts in a cathedral library. For a discovery in similar circumstances, one has to go back to December 1904 when the learned Rev. Dr Karapet Ter-Merkettshian found an Armenian manuscript of Irenaeus' Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching in the library of the church of the Blessed Virgin at Eriwan in Armenia.

Was there a second session of the Council of Nicaea? To that question – first posed and affirmatively answered by Otto Seeck – there have been numerous responses, mostly in the form of bald assertions of one kind or another. Occasionally there have been lengthier discussions of the matter, but with no emerging consensus, and it is still the case that opposite views continue to surface in discussions of the aftermath of the first ecumenical council. Furthermore, among the statements accepting or rejecting the fact of a second session, it is regularly unclear whether the problem at issue is that of a reassembly at Nicaea of all the bishops who had gathered there in 325, a reassembly of these same bishops at some other unspecified place, or a reunion somewhere of only some of those who had participated at the major gathering.

Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh (c. 1300–60), is a well-known but ill-defined figure in the history of fourteenth-century thought. Two aspects of his writings have chiefly attracted the attention of modern scholars: his theory of dominium and grace, and his polemics against the mendicant orders. In the former role, he is considered the source of one of the major doctrines of Wyclif; in the latter, a continuator of the polemic of William of Saint-Amour, and a source of the anti-mendicant sentiment prevalent in English literature in the age of Chaucer.

Discussion of the errors combatted by Ignatius of Antioch of centred on the question of whether they were one or two in number. While some scholars have discovered opposition to a single, composite Judaeo-Christian-Docetic error, others have argued that Ignatius opposed two groups, viz. Docetists and Judaisers. Here I intend to discuss a third error which appears to be connected with the continuing tension, observable in other writings of the time, between the priestly and prophetic ministries.

‘We have been placed in such a position’, wrote Pope Gregory VII at the beginning of his pontificate, ‘that we are compelled willy-nilly to announce truth and justice to all peoples, especially Christians, according to the Word of the Lord, “Cry aloud and do not cease; lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to my people their sins” (Isaiah lviii. I), and elsewhere, “If you do not announce to the evildoer his iniquity, I shall seek his soul at your hand” (Ezekiel iii. 18). Again the prophet says, “Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from blood” (Jeremiah xlviii. 10); that is, the word of preaching from the rebuke of carnal men.’ These prophetic texts recur throughout the Register of Gregory VII, defining that obligation of rebuking evil-doers which the pope considered to be a primary duty of his office. Gregory VII was the most energetic propagandist of his reforming programme for the extirpation of simony and clerical marriage. His letters were intended to provide their recipients with anctoritates demonstrating the righteousness of the Gregorian cause.

In the middle of the fourteenth century the Castilian Church was suffering severe strains. Falling rents exacerbated by plague were affecting many monasteries and making it difficult for them to maintain discipline. At the same time the nature of the regime of Pedro 1 drove a distinguished group of secular clergy into exile in France and Italy. An alternative reaction lay in seeking the eremitical life, and this was to lead to the remarkable phenomenon of the Jeronimite Order. The cause of ecclesiastical reform was to be sustained by both exiles and hermits.

Ordination registers have been unduly neglected by historians, and the bibliography ofworks dealing with them is scant. Nevertheless, they are our most valuable source for documenting the recruitment of clergy, both secular and regular, while they also provide indirect evidence for demographic, religious and educational trends. The data assembled in the graphs and tables below, extracted from the archiepiscopal archives of York, detail the total surviving ordination records from England's largest diocese during the period from just before the first outbreak of bubonic plague to the beginning of the Reformation.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the local history of the English Reformation — that long, slow process of religious change which in many parts of the country did not really begin until after Elizabeth's accession and was still not complete at her death. The process was slow because of the paucity of parish clergy able and willing to preach the Word, catechise the young, upbraid the ungodly and so plant Protestantism firmly in the land. It took a long time to raise the intellectual and moral standards of the Church's personnel – to carry out a thorough ‘reformation of the ministry’.

Bernd Moeller concludes in his often-quoted study of late medieval German piety that ‘one could dare to call the late fifteenth century in Germany one of the most churchly-minded and devout periods of the Middle Ages’. In his review of Moeller's work, W. D.J. Cargill Thompson points out that the ‘profound conservatism’ of this religiosity, which included devotion to the mass, veneration of saints and their relics, and the reading of vast amounts of religious literature, poses a problem for our understanding of the causes of the Reformation. How does one reconcile this traditional churchliness with the ‘remarkable suddenness’ of its collapse after 1520? One would have expected greater resistance to Lutheran ideas than actually occurred.

Tudor governments were characterised by their concern that Tudor power and policies should be advertised in pomp and pageantry and in the printed and spoken word. A great deal of work has been done by modern historians on this subject. One of the most exhaustively researched aspects of Elizabeth's reign has been the pomp and pageantry surrounding the queen herself; the products of the Elizabethan printing presses and pulpits have also been dealt with, although not as systematically. There has been little attempt to follow up Conyers Read's introductory article on William Cecil as one of the government members responsible for propaganda. The present study proposes to consider from this perspective the career ofan eminent Elizabethan ecclesiastic and statesman, Elizabeth's first archbishop of Canterbury.

The five days of municipal insurrection in Toulouse from 13 to 17 May 1562 were critical ones for the city's Protestants. The Huguenots attempted to seize control of the city in a coup which failed on a grand scale. Two hundred Protestants may have died in the street fighting alone; over two hundred were executed after the rising had been suppressed and at least as many again were hanged in effigy. In all, over a thousand suspects were investigated by the authorities, determined to ensure that the city would remain safe from Protestant contagion in the future.

As the fieriest champion of the Radical Reformation Thomas Müntzer remains an enigma. A spate of recent works has greatly increased our knowledge of the development of his theology and of his contribution to the Peasants' War in central Germany, but they have failed to resolve the precise relationship between his theological convictions and his involvement in social revolution. A profusion of Marxist writings, above all from East Germany, has stressed the objective function of his religious radicalism in promoting and legitimating mass rebellion in Saxony and Thuringia at the expense of its subjective intention, whilst the bulk of Western scholarship, in particular Walter Elliger's massive though scarcely definitive biography, has emphasised the primacy of his theological vision, to which social and political concerns were at best subordinate or tangential.

The century from the calling of the Council of Trent to the conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle stands out as one of the most creative in the pastoral history of Christian Europe. The great number of new apostolic orders, the devotional flowering in France which tamed and domesticated the mysticism of Spain for everyman, the renovation of the parish and the priestly life aspired to by Carlo Borromeo, Pierre Berulle and Vincent de Paul are all aspects of a transformation which is the spiritual face of the baroque. The practice of confession stands somewhere near the centre of this transformation. From an annual social rite concerned essentially with the restoration of peace and the guaranteeing of restitution, it became a monthly or even weekly private rite of reconciliation of the penitent with God. It became, too, the focus for the direction of souls which was now seen, supremely in the work of Francis de Sales, as a central part of the work of the priest. The Salesian tradition was to dominate the flood of devotional manuals published in every European language in the seventeenth century, and in it the practice of confession was developed beyond the juridical and canonical framework of Trent, and turned into a subtle and highly personal instrument of spiritual direction.

The Restoration was a victory for the governing classes, a victory for social stability and discipline. Dissent, the gentry argued, led to republicanism and social disintegration: Anglicanism and the monarchy meant order. Yet despite the ease with which Charles it returned in 1660 and the relative lack of bloodshed which accompanied his restoration, it was by no means certain that the settlement would be anything more than transitory. God, in his infinite and impenetrable

Laudian divines cried up the king's prerogative. But they also affirmed that episcopacy was by divine, not human right. Was jure divino episcopacy, which many clerics asserted in the decades after Bancroft's famous sermon of 1589, in fact incompatible with the traditional English theory of the Royal Supremacy? Catholics and extreme puritans answered this question in the affirmative, and many recent commentators have accepted their judgement. The purpose of the present study is to question this interpretation, and to suggest that the first two Stuarts endorsed the theory of jure divino episcopacy not because they were misled by the rhetoric of such men as Bancroft, Barlow and Laud, but because they correctly perceived that these divines were vigorous supporters of the king's Supremacy in ecclesiasticals.

The Established Church in the eighteenth century, although not monolithic in its structure, had evolved a delicate counterpoise in its attitude to the fraught question of the relationship between Church and State. The Church was the protector of public religion and morality and as such was protected by the State with a test law and endowment. William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, was the chief theoretician of the idea of a mutually satisfactory alliance of ‘the two swords’. The ecclesiastical policy of Georgian England, however, owed less to ideology than to the natural development of the English Church after the break with Rome and under the influence of emerging nationalism. The French Church had developed along similar lines to the English – without losing its Roman connections – and there has been a tendency to blur the distinctions between ‘Anglican’ and ‘Gallican’.

These well-known words of Frederick Engels date from 18441 and did not go unsupported by contemporary opinion in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In Sheffield, for example, it was generally thought in 1843 triat not one family of artisans in twenty attended church or chapel, while Horace Mann, the author of the report on the religious census of 1851, reached the melancholy conclusion that ‘the masses of our working population…are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations’. In 1860 Lord Shaftesbury remarked that not 2 per cent of the working men in London attended church, while a modern authority, Dr K. S. Inglis, has declared that even in northern and midland towns, where social relationships were more harmonious and the range of worshippers far wider than in East London, the majority did not attend worship; popular abstinence from worship (to use his term) had become an inherited custom.

In 1852 a Roman Catholic procession at Stockport, held in spite of the warning given by a recent royal proclamation, had caused widespread rioting, physical damage and the loss of a life. This was at the height of popular reaction to the main wave of Irish Catholic immigration and in the aftermath of popular Protestant upheaval over the restoration of a Catholic hierarchy. Other anti-Irish riots had subsequently occurred in industrial towns, for example at Liverpool frequently and at Tredegar, Monmouthshire, in 1882. Despite this, it may seem somewhat surprising that a serious crisis over a Catholic procession should have occurred as late as 1908. But the procession was intended to be a notable and explicit vindication of Roman Catholic sacramental beliefs, and there was a considerable and active residue of anti-Catholic feeling in Edwardian England.

It has been maintained by E. R. Norman that:

…the social attitudes of the Church have derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture, and not, as Christians themselves always seem to assume, from theological learning. The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost exactly to the values of their class and generation. Thus theological scholarship justified the structural social obligations of the eighteenth century world; thus it provided a Christian basis for Political Economy… [my italics]

When the Westminster Assembly convened in 1643, English puritans were confident that their effort to reform the government and liturgy of the Church of England would at last be completed. Their expectations were not fulfilled. In the early sessions of the Assembly the ‘dissenting brethren’, a group of clerical Independents led by Thomas Goodwin, opposed the establishment of a national Church on a Presbyterian model. The Independents claimed to be as orthodox as the other members of the Assembly in matters of doctrine, but they could find in scripture no ground for synods exercising the authority of excommunication. So deep was the dissension they created that, in spite of all Presbyterian attempts at reconciliation, spiritual harmony was not restored to the puritan crusade.