Recent interest in the position of women in the early Church has stimulated new investigations of texts and documents which consider or define the roles of women. A number of surveys have appeared which consider a spectrum of early sources, and most of these refer to the rules laid down for widows and deaconesses in the Didascalia apostolorum. A simple reading of the Didascalia interprets it as a description of contemporary church practice which reveals a Church that allowed women a certain amount of involvement in restricted spheres: widows are to pray for the Church and deaconesses to assist at the baptism of women and to visit Christian women in their homes. Since the Didascalia does not empower women it is generally regarded with a certain amount of suspicion by those postulating a more positive role for women in early Christianity. However, a closer examination suggests that such a reading is not the whole story. Rather than having a purely descriptive function, it is more likely that the Didascalia represents an attempt to change the structure of ministry in the Churches in Syria, opposing some practices and supporting others. This article will argue that the internal evidence of the Didascalia reveals it to be an attempt to impose an episcopal structure on the Church and to restrict the activity and authority of women. Seen against a background of other sources this suggests that there were groups of Christians in second- and third-century Syria and Asia Minor which recognised women's authority, and that the Didascalia was written partly in opposition to such groups.

Describing the general condition of the Latin Church in Outremer in the 1220s, Jacques de Vitry enumerated, as examples of those who had chosen the religious life, the hermits of Mt Carmel:

Others, following the example and imitation of the holy solitary Elijah the Prophet, live on Mt Carmel, especially on the part which overlooks the city of Porphyria, which today is called Cayphas [Haifa], near the spring which is called the spring of Elijah, and not far from the monastery of the Blessed Virgin Margaret. They lead a solitary life in small cells as in a hive; like the bees of the Lord they gather the honey of spiritual sweetness.

In the Middle Ages it was believed that the souls of those who died in a state of mortal sin were consigned to hell immediately after death, those that were free from sin went straight to heaven, while those guilty of venial sins, the majority, entered purgatory, a state in which sin was cleansed through suffering. Bodily death for most of the faithful was, therefore, seen as initiating a period of transition between life on earth and eternal bliss in heaven. The emphasis on the soul during this period of transition, and the complex variety of prayers for reducing the soul's sufferings in purgatory, have been extensively explored by historians.

Most Scots have heard of the National Covenant subscribed in Edinburgh around the end of February 1638. Few, by contrast, know anything about the five acts or articles (requiring the observation of holy days, episcopal confirmation of the laity, kneeling in the act of receiving the eucharist, and permitting the celebration of both communion and baptism in private) passed by a general assembly of the Church at Perth twenty years earlier. Yet those who took time to read the Covenant through would find that its signatories were, among other things, renewing a fifty-year-old pledge to resist all ‘vain allegories, ritis, signes, and traditions brought in the Kirk, without or againis the Word of God and doctrine of this trew reformed Kirk’, and were agreeing more immediately to refrain from the ‘practice of all novations, already introduced in the matters of the worship of God’ until they could be ‘tryed & allowed in free assemblies, and in Parliaments’. Those who examined the aftermath of the Covenant would also learn that it was one of the first acts of the general assembly convened at Glasgow later in 1638 to abjure the Perth Articles. If the National Covenant remains a crucial component of Scottish national consciousness, few Scots, for all the talk of Laud's Liturgy and Jennie Geddes, have much awareness of the debate about church ceremonies that helped to form the context in which the Covenant was produced.

Certainly since the time of the Emperor Constantine there had been little doubt in the Christian world that Christ was crucified, buried and rose from the dead on the site later occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Eusebius described the discovery of the tomb beneath the site of the Roman temple to Venus and the construction of the church, dedicated in 335. Constantine's church underwent numerous changes and rebuilding, through invasions, occupations, earthquakes and the disastrous fire of 1808, which caused extensive damage. But at no time did anyone seriously dispute the convictions of the competing Christian factions – Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Georgians, Copts and Ethiopians – who had chapels, or at least a recognised foothold, within that sacred precinct. While earlier travel accounts, such as those of Willibald (AD 724) and John Mandeville (1322), had recognised that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was located well within the walls of Jerusalem, it was generally accepted that this was because the city had expanded and surrounded the site, and that new perimeter walls enclosed the place of the crucifixion and the tomb which according to the biblical texts had to lie ‘without’ the city walls.