Origen and Austine might be thought to represent opposite extremes in Pauline exegesis. In working out his characteristic understanding of Pauline theology Augustine developed emphases which were different from those of Origen. In his early works of Pauline exegesis of 394–6 a central point for Augustine is the relationship between works of the law and grace. Origen’s Commentary on Romans develops many Pauline themes, but he takes a more historical approach than Augustine, and a prominent emphasis for him is the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the divine dispensation. Augustine is an independent thinker, who digests his reading and does not plagiarise. It is not always easy to identify his use of earlier writers. The example to be discussed in the following paper is of particular interest, since it gives us the opportunity of seeing Augustine’s reaction to Origen on the central point of justification by faith at a period just before the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy.

‘One is always aware of Bede's Church as an institution of men and women, meetings and buildings, and especially as a bishops' Church.’ With this comment, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill directed attention to a fundamental aspect of Bede's world which requires further examination. From early childhood until his death, Bede was and remained a monk. He had entered the monasterium of Wearmouth and Jarrow at the age of seven and was to remain in it all his life. Although he was ordained to the priesthood by John of Beverley he never advanced to episcopal office. Despite the fact that he was nurtured in a world of reflective scholarship at Wearmouth and Jarrow it is now less common for historians to view Bede as ‘a lonely intellectual locked in an elite minority community’ and a scholar who lived out his life away from the events of the outside world. He perceived that world and the clergy who occupied it, however, through monastic eyes. Since Bede is, and indeed should be, seen as a representative and guardian of a monastic culture heavily influenced by Benedictine spirituality his views concerning the episcopate have not been analysed to the same extent as his views concerning monasticism. This is somewhat surprising since Bede himself perceived a clear link between the episcopal and monastic lives and was deeply concerned with the early Anglo-Saxon Church as an episcopally governed institution. The purpose of this article is to examine Bede's exploration of the manner in which individual bishops came personally to define their prestige, power and authority. This involves an investigation of their continued attachment to ascetic traditions once they had been elevated to the episcopate and an examination of the models applying ascetic sanctity to an episcopal context which Bede inherited from his predecessors in the late antique and early Christian world.

The First Crusade was such an important event with such amazing consequences that it is hardly surprising that an enormous amount of ink has been spent on discovering the reasons why enthusiasm for it was so widespread. Much effort has been spent on examining factors which preconditioned the men of the eleventh century to welcome Urban's appeal in 1095–6. Broadly speaking it has been supposed that the wars against Islam in Spain accustomed men to the notion of Holy War, while the growing authority of the Church in the age of reform predisposed them to obey their spiritual directors – early evidence of this was the Peace and Truce of God first proclaimed by the bishops and clergy of France. Papal initiative in supporting the reconquest of Islamic Sicily and ‘corrupt’ England, and the influence of papal ideas about the militia Christi refined and developed by Anselm of Lucca reinforced the point. The Church threw its authority behind pilgrimage, the great manifestation of the popular piety of the age which was intimately allied to devotion to relics of saints and the cult of their sacred places. The most sacred of all places, and therefore the greatest of pilgrimages, was that to Jerusalem. It was the spiritual reward for this journey to Jerusalem which Urban 11 offered for those going on the expedition of 1095. These factors have always been the substance of discussion and were systematically analysed by Erdmann in a book which remains the basis of scholarly discussion to this day.

Nothing is as problematic in contemporary work on the early Christian Church as Orthodoxy. P. Henry's 1980 conference paper ‘Why is contemporary scholarship so enamoured of ancient heretics?’ outlined the situation, saying, ‘we have moved from historical criticism through historical even-handedness to historical advocacy. The historian is not content to assure the heretics a fair hearing; the historian has become an advocate in their cause. We have done an about-face from Tertullian's De praescriptione haereticorum to De praescriptione patrum’. From ‘ruling-out-of-court of the heretics’ to, in Henry's phrase, ‘ruling-out-of-court of the Fathers’.

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.

There is an element of drama in Anselm's description of the Synod of Reims in 1049 as the assembled bishops are asked to swear before the relics of St Remi that they had not achieved their positions in the Church through simony. The tension mounts as the archbishop of Reims excuses himself from the oath and asks for a private audience with the pope. Of the twenty bishops present, four confessed involvement with simony. One bishop, Hugh of Langres, accused of a long list of crimes in addition, fled the scene rather than submit to Leo IX's justice. However, of all the bishops implicated in the crime of simony, only one was deposed outright: Budic of Nantes, as the narrator of the acts of the synod tersely states:

Finally, the bishop of Nantes came and confessed that his father was the bishop of his civitas and during his life he had received the gift of the episcopate and when he died he took his place for a payment of money. Because of this, by the judgement of the synod, he was deprived of his episcopal ministry. His pastoral staff and ring having been taken away, the office of priest alone was given to him through the intervention of the bishops.

The evidence left by the medieval church courts has proved to be a rich source for the study of both the social and legal aspects of marriage. This has been particularly true for the records of matrimonial litigation generated by the English courts as well as those from the continent and, to a lesser extent, Ireland. Much of this interest has focused on the instance business of the courts, corresponding roughly to modern-day civil litigation. In the context of the English courts, this usually involved an attempt to establish the existence of a valid marriage. Less attention has been paid to the ex officio actions brought by courts against errant individuals. Interest has also tended to concentrate on the actual act of marriage itself and the degree to which this matched the Church's ideal system of how marriages should be formed. Questions concerning courtship and the alternatives to marriage have only begun to be addressed.

Simon Langham, archbishop of Canterbury and former abbot of Westminster, was made cardinal priest of St Sixtus by Urban v on 22 September 1368. Resigning Canterbury, he joined the pope in Italy, formally entering on his duties at Montefiascone on 24 May 1369. He returned with the pope to Avignon in late 1370. In early 1371 he was employed by Pope Gregory XI as a legate in France, England and the Low Countries but by April 1373 was rejoining the curia. After that he lived continuously in Avignon until his death on 22 July 1376, though little is known about his activities. At the curia like all cardinals he maintained a household. The aim of this study is to discuss who were its members, to consider their recruitment and careers and to ask a few questions about Langham's patronage.

As Elizabeth's reign neared its end, the futility of Puritan efforts to restructure the Church of England finally became apparent. By the early 1590s, with a strong conservative shift in the ecclesiastical leadership, the death of powerful patrons and friends at court, and the decisive defeat of the Presbyterian movement, the effect upon Puritan fortunes was devastating. What conservative churchmen did not suspect, however, was that even as they savoured victory, a creative rechannelling of the quest for further reformation was underway. In some quarters, frustration over the failure to gain power had led in different directions, to more radical moves like separatism or the Martin Marprelate project; but non-separating Puritans, few of whom had tied their fortunes to dogmatic Presbyterianism or were prepared to abandon the national Church, improvised a quieter response. If the Church was unreformable, they would reach the citizenry at personal and local levels with a ‘more spiritual and interior religion’. Thus the paradox that ‘the miscarriage of the further reformation coincided with the birth of the great age of Puritan religious experience’: coincided, that is, with the rise of a new, introspective, pietist phase of Puritan initiative.

‘Revisionist’ historians, led by David Loades, have begun to reexamine various aspects of the reign of Mary Tudor and thus to challenge traditional interpretations. Anyone considering the religious history of that period eventually encounters Cardinal Reginald Pole's refusal to accept into England some members of the newly founded Society of Jesus. Concurrent with the reappraisal of Mary's reign, a similar re-examination has dominated early Jesuit historiography. This work, which has generally passed unnoticed by Tudor historians, highlights the encouragement and support that the Society received from reformers, spirituali such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini and Cardinal Giovanni Morone and, equally important, the attacks that both suffered from their common critics, for example from Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul iv), and Melchor Cano. One of that circle was Cardinal Reginald Pole. As research elucidates the relationship between that group and the Jesuits, it adds a new dimension to the old question: why did Pole resist Jesuit involvement in the restoration of English Catholicism? It is the purpose of this article to bring the two fields together and so first to demonstrate how developments in Jesuit historiography challenge established views and, second, to propose a more plausible interpretation.

One of the most problematic tasks which the historian must address is the assessment of people's opinions and the motives for their actions. There is violent disagreement about the opinions of individuals for whom there exist extensive archives of correspondence, whose ideas are recorded in numerous printed works and whose political associations and circles of friends help to disclose their views. How much more difficult then to assess the motives of a man for whom such sources are very slight, whose ideas are set out in the shortest of polemical tracts, and whose opinions, when assembled, seem to represent a mass of contradictions? Such a man was Benjamin Carier whose change of religious opinions and notorious conversion to Rome are the subject of this article. He was a chaplain to James i but his beliefs were not fully attuned to those of the Jacobean clerical establishment and he decided towards the end of his life to embrace Roman Catholicism. He was apparently just a minor churchman whose early promise was never fulfilled and who changed horses out of pique at his enemies' dominance in the Church of England. His conversion in 1613 caused a brief stir but in less than a year he was dead. His influence in the established Church is uncertain; his real doctrinal beliefs appear to be lost or polemicised beyond the point where they can be used to analyse his transfer of religious allegiance.

Much attention has been paid to the role and functions of the mendicant orders in their urban environment. Among the topics discussed have been the friars' importance for urban development, their coexistence with other religious institutions, their economic practices and their relations with the secular authorities. As far as their spiritual and social significance is concerned their spectacular success and rapid development in the thirteenth century are generally accepted. There were some setbacks, particularly in towns where the Dominicans or Franciscans became involved in the suppression of heresy, but these had little impact on the rapid expansion of the orders. Members from all social groups, academics as well as aristocrats, merchants and artisans as well as the poor, felt the attraction of their sermons and way of life, some to such an extent that they decided to join one of the orders. But while the attraction of the mendicant ideal in the decades following the friars' arrival is undisputed, the problem of their importance for the religious life of the late medieval urban population is far more difficult to discuss. While there are assertions that the friars remained particularly popular, the orders' decline and their need of reform were already obvious in the fourteenth century and the various efforts to bring about a reinvigoration confirm this impression. In the fifteenth century famous mendicant preachers from Vincent Ferrer and Bernardino of Siena to Girolamo Savonarola attracted large crowds in many parts of Europe, but was this indicative of the population's general attitude towards the orders? Were the mendicants still perceived by the people as responding to their spiritual needs? How did the public react to signs of decadence, to disputes among the brothers? A general answer to such questions needs to be based on a large number of local studies and this is still a task for the future.

Studies of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in Britain have almost exclusively focused on the Church of England. The impact of the Catholic revival within Scotland has been accorded little attention. This neglect partly reflects the small size of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Yet the subject deserves fuller consideration precisely because the minority Scottish Episcopal Church was, by the nineteenth century, more uniformly High Church in its theology and outlook than the Church of England, a fact which predisposed it to be peculiarly receptive to Tractarianism, which in turn exacerbated its relations with the dominant Presbyterian Kirk. The few serious studies of the question, however, have been coloured by an uncritical assumption that the movement's impact on the Episcopal Church was altogether positive and benign. The differences between the Tractarians and nonjuring episcopalians of the north have been overlooked or understated. While according due weight to the affinities and continuities between the two traditions, this article will question the standard Anglo-Catholic historiography and reveal the tensions within the Episcopal Church sharpened by the often negative influence of the Catholic revival when transported north of the border.

St Radegund, a sixth-century royal ascetic who relinquished her position as the wife of a Frankish king and established a convent in Poitiers, is today a rather obscure French local saint. Yet in the nineteenth century, as a result of the tireless promotion of her cult by Édouard Pie, bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880, St Radegund was widely invoked in France as ‘la sainte reine de la France’ and ‘la mère de la patrie’. Her wonder-working tomb, a popular devotional site in the Middle Ages, offered cures and Pie saw to it that the pilgrim trains to Lourdes made an obligatory prayer-stop at Poitiers. This article analyses devotion to St Radegund during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and explores some of the religious and political connotations of the cult of this royal saint. The development of the cult is particularly significant for it allows us to see, reflected on the local level, something of the larger struggle for national self-definition that was taking place in nineteenth-century French society as royalists contended with Bonapartists and republicans, clericals waged war against secularists and the ultramontanes sought to rouse their fellow countrymen in support of Pius IX.

True to its catholicity, the Counter-Reformation was in spirit a universal movement. The new universalism of the post-Tridentine Church produced greater centralisation, enhancing the authority of the papacy, and was reflected in the attempted imposition throughout the Catholic world of institutional uniformity and liturgical, cultic and devotional standardisation. In practice, however, the Counter-Reformation must also be seen as a local phenomenon, not only in the obvious sense that it was within their immediate locality that early modern Catholics were exposed to the new impulses originating at Rome, but also in the sense that such impulses were filtered through a prism of localism. Throughout the Catholic world, individual communities sought to preserve their traditional, home-grown institutions and customs, often by imaginatively adapting the new norms to suit local requirements. The existence of a complex relationship between centre and periphery, resting on a process of often tense negotiation and cultural exchange (since it could be a dynamic and not simply a one-way affair) has provided recent historians of Catholic reform with a fresh conceptual polarity, that of local versus universal, to set alongside the more standard dichotomies of popular and elite, official and unofficial or learned and lay religion.

The two hundred or so evangelical clergymen who seceded from the Church of England into Protestant Dissent during the first half of the nineteenth century often paid a considerable price for their action. By crossing the subtle social boundary between Anglican priesthood and Nonconformist ministry they forfeited status and often, no doubt, income. A number vanished into comparative obscurity as pastors of small chapels, whether as ministers of a major denomination, Strict and Particular Baptists, Christian Brethren, or preachers in some unlabelled and impoverished chapel. If not so severely penalised for their secession as many of their colleagues who went to Rome, particularly those with wives for whom entry into the Roman priesthood was closed, they usually came off the worse in temporal terms for following the dictates of conscience. This, no doubt, they fully anticipated. What was not anticipated, however, was the imposition of a legal penalty for their act of secession. Though Anglican secessions to Rome or Dissent were not infrequent, their legality was apparently seldom if ever questioned. Liberal Churchmen like Theophilus Lindsey, who had abandoned the establishment for Unitarianism during the eighteenth century, had set up their chapels with impunity. In 1831 the evangelical William Tiptaft received a threat from Thomas Burgess, the bishop of Salisbury, upon seceding from the parish of Sutton Courtney, Berkshire, but nothing came of it. Those who left the via media for Rome were assumed to be acting within the framework of the law when they took up a new ministry as priests of another apostolic confession.

This winning and much-quoted declamation, made in Oxford in 1908 by G. H. Frodsham, the Anglican bishop of North Queens-land, enshrines the aura of romance which has ever since surrounded the Australian bush brotherhoods. The attraction of this form of community life, especially to younger English clergy, lay in its spirit of adventure and in the once magnetic appeal to empire loyalty: duty and sacrifice, for a limited term, in a not too foreign land.

An exchange took place at the end of the nineteenth century between William Rainey Harper and Dwight L. Moody that makes little sense to those who study American intellectual life at the end of the twentieth. What is remarkable about this incident is not that Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, a new institution dedicated to promoting science, advanced research and graduate education, invited Moody, the leading revivalist of the Gilded Age, to speak at one of America's most promising new universities. To be sure, our understanding of the educational reforms associated with the founding of research universities rarely encompasses the transatlantic revivals of Moody and his song leader, Ira Sankey. And Harper's invitation to Moody could reasonably be compared to the contemporary practice of conferring honorary degrees on civic leaders and celebrities not known for their interest in higher education but whose reputation could well benefit the degree-granting institution. What is exceptional in this exchange is Harper's assessment of the similarities between his university and Moody's revivals. While Harper acknowledged the use of different means, he thought his and Moody's aims were the same. ‘I do not understand’, Harper wrote, ‘that you, as a matter of fact, represent any other position than that which is actually maintained here at the University. The differences between us are merely differences of detail.’

There is a large and complex literature regarding the part played by working-class Nonconformity in the industrial revolution and the emergence of the English labour movement. For all its nuances, this writing can be separated into two main strands. The first, broadly Marxist, perspective sees working-class Nonconformity primarily as a form of capitalist control, inculcating bourgeois norms of hard work, thrift, respectability and political moderation into the working class. However, even labour historians who subscribe to this view cannot help but be struck by the ubiquitous accounts of lay preachers at the forefront of Victorian labour movement campaigns, especially in the coalfields. Thus, the second view stresses the part played by working-class Nonconformists in leading their class towards political and industrial emancipation. To a considerable extent, the stance taken, particularly on Methodism, depends on whether writers draw their evidence from national, usually middle-class, denominational hierarchies, or from local accounts of working-class religiosity.

Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.