Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815–84) combined his ecclesiastical duties and liturgical interests with editing the fourteenth-century Middle English Lay folks’ mass book (1879) for the Early English Text Society, with the aim of showing the continuity of the English Church from the medieval period through the Reformation. In the light of modern scholarship, this article recontextualises both medieval text and Simmons's own editorial practice, and shows how Simmons, as a second-generation Tractarian churchman, sought in this text – and others associated with it – evidence for the Church of England's Catholic underpinning in an imagined medieval English Church.

The concile national of 1811 was one of the greatest flashpoints in the struggle that pitted the Napoleonic Empire against the papacy. This episode, which deserves to be situated within more recent historiographical trends, reveals much about the nature of Napoleonic imperialism and the Church's distrust for the power of the state. This article puts forward the view that the failure of the concile national was not strategic but tactical. Several bishops were frustrated with the pope's recalcitrance over episcopal investiture and fearful of schism. But their initial openness to neo-conciliarism turned to hostility when confronted with the state's intolerance.

Historians and anthropologists have increasingly argued that the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity occurred as they wove the new faith into their traditions. Yet this finding risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves understood the history of Christianity in their societies. This article, a case study of the Tiwi of North Australia, is illustrative in that it uses Tiwi oral histories of the ‘conversion’ of a priest in order to invert assumptions about inculturation and conversion. They insist that they did not accommodate the new faith but that the Catholic Church itself converted in embracing them. Their history suggests that conversion can occur as communities change in the act of incorporating new peoples.

Leo x’s brief Cum nuper, which authorised Cardinal Cajetan to put Luther on trial but did not restrict debate between them, was sent not on 11 September 1518, as has been generally believed, but on 2 November. It referred to a lost brief countermanding the order of 23 August for Luther's arrest: this brief instead offered a safe conduct to Rome. However, Luther's abrupt departure from Augsburg prevented this offer from being made. Exsurge Domine (1520), which convicted Luther without trial on inflated charges of heresy, made the false claim that he had rejected an invitation to Rome.

Two roads diverged in Roman Africa. One led to the movement that came to be known as Donatism, and the other to the so-called Catholic party. The controversy emerged soon after the Diocletian persecution, one side selecting Caecilius as the bishop of Carthage, the other eventually selecting Donatus (and therefore dubbed ‘Donatist’). The schism widened when Constantine supported the former and attempted to enforce his party's status. Violence sporadically erupted between these two parties for the next century, around which time Augustine led the charge to bring about unity, ultimately through legal and coercive means. The success of this unification, however, and the ultimate fate of the Donatists is open to debate, along with virtually every other datum from this controversy. The debated nature of the controversy, therefore, needs to be closely examined, for just what paradigm one takes from the outset could make all the difference.

In these four volumes Wolfram Kinzig has put together the largest compilation to date of texts which profess to set out the principal tenets of the Church between the second and the eighth centuries of the Christian era. In dimension it easily surpasses its German precursors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while in content it can aim to be more eclectic than the compendium which Philip Schaff addressed to the clergy and fellow-believers in 1877. Its only rival in the twenty-first century is the joint labour of Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, broader in chronological range but therefore less exhaustive in its representation of this formative epoch. The first volume affords all necessary materials for the telling and untelling of the narrative which customarily ends with the promulgation of an amplified version of the Nicene Creed at Constantinople in 381; the second is an argosy of western specimens, a high proportion being prototypes or variants of the so-called Apostles Creed; the third is a miscellany of both personal and synodical confessions, some conventional, some idiosyncratic, many obscure in provenance and purpose; the contents of the fourth are drawn primarily from the Carolingian era, though the sources consulted in the first half are as various as the Pontifical of Donaueschingen (vol. iv. 99), the Irish Book of Dimma (iv. 119), the Dicta Leonis Episcopi (iv. 158–61) and the Sacramentary of Autun (iv. 283). The result is a monument of erudition, an invaluable resource for all future scholarship, and pleasurable reading for those who have hitherto been unable to approach the texts for want of an English rendering. The following remarks are therefore offered to the editor of these volumes as a stimulus to discussion, not to throw any aspersion on his judgement or on his many-times-proven competence as historian and critic.

The Yale church historian, Sydney Ahlstrom, had just emerged somewhat dazed from the Sixties when he reviewed the religious trajectory of the United States during that decade. He wrote that by 1966 it was clear that ‘the post-war religious revival had completely frittered out, that the nation was moving towards a crise de la conscience of unprecedented depth’. As well as a ‘growing attachment to naturalism and “secularism”’ he mentioned ‘a creeping or galloping awareness of vast contradictions in American life between profession and performance, the ideal and the actual’ and ‘increasing doubt concerning the capacity of present-day ecclesiastical, political, social and educational institutions to rectify these contradictions’. As Ahlstrom made clear in a later essay, he saw the crisis faced both by the Roman Catholic Church and by the ‘mainline’ Protestant Churches as part of a wider loss of ‘confidence or hope’ in American society and a passing away of ‘the certitudes that had always shaped the nation's well-being and sense of destiny’.