This article offers, for the first time in English, a reconstruction of the career of Theodore of Heraclea, a leading figure in the Eusebian alliance from the early 330s until the mid-350s. It also provides an overview of Theodore's literary remains and suggests that the anti-Marcellan tone of his surviving fragments is in keeping with the other documents that emanated from the Eusebian alliance during this period, especially those from the Council of Serdica (343) and the Council of Sirmium (351). Finally, it is suggested that the diversity of ways in which Theodore was received by later patristic authors illustrates that the polarising categories of ‘Arian’ and ‘Nicene’ are insufficiently nuanced to describe Theodore's actual theological concerns.

In the early years of the fifth century a significant step in the development of the Roman Church's claim to a universal jurisdiction was taken as it clarified its relationship with the Churches of Eastern Illyricum. Among the letters of Innocent i, bishop of Rome from 402 to 417, there are a half dozen addressed to the churches within that prefecture, politically now in the East but ecclesiastically still looking to Rome. Yet the authority exercised by the Roman bishop was not all-encompassing, being restricted primarily to judicial matters. This article considers Innocent's epistula xviii, written to a group of Macedonian bishops, headed by Rufus, bishop of Thessaloniki, Innocent's vicar, in which Rome acts as a court of appeal in the matter of Bubalius and Taurian. What is fascinating is the role that forgery played in the appeal process. It is argued that the evidence should be considered in its own historical context and not in the light of later ecclesiological understandings.

This article explores the early medieval transformation of a pagan Roman monument, Hadrian's tomb, into a Christian fortress consecrated to St Michael. Ado of Vienne's claim that Boniface IV (608–15) dedicated an elevated chapel to the archangel atop the ‘moles Hadriani’ is challenged and reexamined. The many similarities between Michael's shrine on Monte Gargano and this Roman chapel instead indicate that the angelic devotion spread from Gargano to Rome, sometime in the early eighth century, and that the Lombards were the likely transmitters.

The ‘Dialogue on the life of John Chrysostom’, published by Palladius of Helenopolis c. 408–9, is a key source for the history of the Church at the beginning of the fifth century. This paper argues that the history of the Johannite schism provides the background against which to understand the scope and nature of this work. It questions the received chronology of Palladius’ later life and shows that he is not so much a hard-core supporter of John who refused all contact with the official Church, as someone who could envisage the followers of John accepting an offer of amnesty in 408/409 and reintegrating into the Church. The dialogue is a strategic work that accepts that after the death of John (407) the Johannites can only bank on the support of Rome to improve their situation. As a consequence its trustworthiness cannot be accepted at face value.

The importance of canon law collections to Anglo-Saxon legal culture has long been thought negligible, especially in comparison to the considerable importance of an alternative genre of canonical literature known as the penitential handbook. Over the past several decades, however, evidence for the use and circulation of continental canon law collections in pre-Conquest England has been mounting, to the extent that it could challenge traditional notions about the dominance of penitential law in the early English Church. This study presents new evidence for the reception in Anglo-Saxon England of a major continental collection known as the Collectio vetus Gallica.

An important way in which the late medieval papacy exercised its authority over the English Church was by granting dispensations, special graces that allowed exceptions to canon law in certain instances, notably permitting marriages between close kin. In 1533 the Dispensations Act forbade Henry VIII's subjects to petition the papacy for favours. But dispensations did not disappear after the break with Rome. The archbishop of Canterbury's Faculty Office continued to issue almost all those previously available from Rome. This article explores the transition to this new office, noting how Cardinal Wolsey's legatine activity in the 1520s prepared the way.

Bede's preoccupations in the later years of his life have recently come under close scrutiny. This article will set out the argument to this point, then explore how the Ecclesiastical history conforms to more general perceptions of Bede's purposes. It will conclude that this work was designed to address just one part of his wider reform agenda, as that pertained to the Northumbrian king of the day, Ceolwulf. To this end, Bede painted a picture of the current situation within the Church which is far more optimistic than that on offer in the Letter to Ecgberht just a few years later. It must be concluded that his specific purposes as regards any particular work, and the audience at which that work was aimed, exercised a considerable influence over his strategy, which varies enormously from one part of his output to another.

This article discusses one specific way in which Protestant communion was, and still is, celebrated: the ‘Wandelabendmahl’, or ‘walking communion’, in which communicants receive bread and wine at the two sides of the altar, walking around it in between. After a general discussion of the ‘Wandelabendmahl’ in Lutheranism, the article examines how this rite was and is reflected in material culture, especially in today's northern Germany and southern Denmark. The rite was physically enshrined in church buildings by special furnishings at and around the altar. This study argues for a more holistic approach to sources: the inclusion of material culture in the study of religious practices allows for consideration and analysis of the experience of parishioners on a day-to-day basis. It is argued that it was by such means – visible, tangible, and to be experienced by each individual parishioner – that complex theological concepts were made accessible to congregations.

This article consists of a detailed study of a series of extraordinary diplomas issued by King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ during the 990s. These diplomas restore lands and rights to churches which had earlier been despoiled by the king and his advisors and their wording indicates that they were intended as a conscious gesture of penitence. As such, the documents were of central political importance and it is argued that they can be fruitfully mined for evidence of Æthelred's own thoughts and feelings in these years; these diplomas might well be considered to preserve Æthelred's own ‘voice’.

There has long been speculation about Anna of Denmark's faith. How and when the consort of King James VI and I came first to use the Catholic liturgy and then to convert from Lutheranism is explained here in detail. Powerful women within the queen's household were crucial to this change of faith, which gave hope to Catholics that Anna might convert her children and persuade the king to be more tolerant towards them in his multiple kingdoms. Even though these hopes were unrealised, the possibility is explored that she sought to found a monastery in France. That she had remained Catholic during such a turbulent era in British religious history is remarkable.

When Roman Catholics and Puritans declined to swear the ex officio oath, they cited not only legal but also religious arguments. They appealed to their consciences and noted that Scripture disallowed the taking of the Lord's name in vain and the swearing of oaths against truth, justice or judgement. They then argued that the ex officio oath violated these biblical standards. Such arguments were powerful because they rested on the same theory of oath-taking that buttressed the Elizabethan regime's own use of oaths. The Elizabethan authorities could question the application of this theory, but they could not challenge the theory itself, for to do so would risk undermining the very mechanism that they used to enforce the Elizabethan settlement: oaths.

This article re-examines a controversial group in English religious history: the millenarian followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott. The identities of many of Southcott's supporters have remained unclear, despite notable academic attention. Their relative social dislocation is most disputed; greater consensus characterises debates over women's attraction to Southcottianism. This article uses a recently-opened archive of Southcottian material, and reinterprets previously-known sources, to revise all existing pictures of who Southcottians were. Southcottian occupations in industrial regions indicate a similar social makeup to contemporary Methodism; Southcottianism had no distinct appeal to women. New evidence of the personal experiences of Southcottians further suggests that they may be best understood as a branch of the ‘heart religion’ of the period, one taking a distinctive view of the ways and means of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

The intention of this article is to examine the principal features of John Stratford's Winchester episcopal register (Hampshire Record Office, 21M65/A1/5), recently edited for the Surrey Record Society, and hence to consider Stratford's reputation as a diocesan bishop insofar as this is determinable. Frequent absences on royal business, often abroad, are meticulously recorded, necessitating competent ‘central administration’ and a well-qualified and trusted familia. Both of these are in evidence. The impression given is of an efficiently run diocese with a surprising amount of pastoral work, particularly ordinations and visitation of monasteries, being performed by the bishop in person.

The nineteenth century witnessed a transition from the ancien régime to the ‘age of mobilisation’, says Charles Taylor, from an organically and hierarchically connected society to a fragmented society based on mass participation, charismatic leaders and organisational tactics. Amid this upheaval the Netherlands Reformed Church faced an unprecedented crisis as it lost its taken-for-granted social status. This essay examines the new legitimation that Abraham Kuyper offered the Church through his Free Church theology, and how various other aspects of his theology, including his baptismal and public theology, developed in conjunction with his ecclesiology. Kuyper's ecclesiology thus offers a case study of problems that ecclesiology in general faced due to the social and cultural shifts of the nineteenth century.

Scholarly accounts of John Cotton's pre-migration divinity focus upon its legalism. Cotton's Old-World voice speaks with the law-mindedness of the ‘precisianist’ and the ‘experimental predestinarian’. Cotton, moreover, is said to have made a ‘radical change’ when, in Massachusetts, he renounced the law's ‘power’. Legalist therein becomes solifidian. Such a view fails to account for the very particular nature of Cotton's Old-World evocations of the moral law. Cotton was a diffident legalist in old Boston. A flirtation with the covenant of works momentarily roused the power of the moral law, but this was atypical of Cotton's English divinity. It was in Massachusetts that Cotton made bold pastoral use of the law's power. And, with this, he coupled a theological revision that cut through the roots of Old-World piety: placing unusual stress on the passivity of faith, he rejected the ‘evidentiary’ value of the Puritan holy walk.

The conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653 created almost as many problems as it solved for the English government of the country. Not least of these was how, if at all, the majority Catholic population was to be won over to Protestantism. This article reassesses Cromwellian religious policy towards the Catholic laity and traces its evolution up to the end of the decade, taking account also of Catholic responses to official measures. It argues that the supposed leniency of government policy has been overstated and that Catholics who refused to conform to Protestantism in fact risked heavy penalties.