Amidst the theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the ritual kiss often played an important role in trying to distinguish orthodox from heretical Christians. For early Christian leaders such as Rufinus, Jerome, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola, the kiss became a means to malign an opponent while simultaneously reinforcing one's own claims to theological legitimacy. The kiss's connection to a wide range of symbolic systems made it a particularly versatile tool for early Christian polemics.

Focusing on the rural zones of Palestine and exploiting extensive archaeological research permits a re-examination of the traditional view that much of Palestine had been Christianised by the late fourth century. This article suggests that the process of adopting Christianity in the countryside was far more gradual than previously believed. While the map of holy sites in Palestine had largely taken shape by the end of the fourth century, the conversion of the population only achieved real momentum during the fifth and sixth centuries. Research on the community churches of Palestine, in particular on their location in the villages, reveals that Christian penetration into the countryside stemmed from internal social developments and was not institutional in inspiration.

The bishops of Liège became concerned with Christianisation throughout the whole diocese in the Carolingian period. This study examines the concrete measures that they took. The field chosen is the Ardennes region in the south of the diocese, where they reorganised the abbey of St-Hubert as a religious centre. The bishops reformed the community and offered it economic support. They also encouraged the cult of St Hubert and introduced the new custom of annual processions. This approach throws light on the pastoral situation in a way that their episcopal capitularies cannot.

Appreciations are less painful to write than obituaries, yet in the case of a departing co-Editor, there is still a funereal note to strike. Martin has given nearly twelve years of devoted service to the Journal, and the entreaties of all around him in the Journal office were not sufficient emotional blackmail to extend this period. I could not have wished for a better, more meticulous, more reliably supportive or more entertaining colleague in the last seven years. As I was entering courtship with the Journal and judging whether this might become a promising union, Martin's excellent post-prandial armagnac was a strong indication that we could do business together, and so it has proved.

This article examines responses to the spread of Lutheranism and related heresies in England during the final years of the ascendancy of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. It demonstrates that the preferred method for dealing with scholars and others toying with the New Learning was to attempt to convince them of the error of their ways rather than to punish them. The small number of Lutheran heresy trials in the 1520s is shown to be evidence not of a ‘soft’ approach to the growing problem of Lutheran infiltration, but of a successful policy of humanist reform.

The two bishops of Worcester between 1218 and 1266, William of Blois and Walter de Cantilupe, were in many ways very similar. Both were dedicated reformers, who made use of the cathedral chapter's churches for their own households for example. Yet their relationships with the monastic chapter of Worcester were very different. William's episcopate was marked by acrimony and dispute, Walter's by harmony and assent. The reasons for these differences are complex but include the personalities and backgrounds of the bishops, the chapter's growing awareness of the limitations of monastic chapters for bishops' patronage and political changes within England.

The momentous paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person provides us with the context for gaining a firm grasp of Luther's own redefinition of the range and role of philosophy. By no means the life-long combatant, distorter or victim of scholasticism as later scholarship often claims, Luther at once unfolded and redirected a tradition that stretched back through St Bonaventura to St Francis of Assisi, a tradition that rejected the Thomistic ‘Unmoved Mover’ and envisaged a covenantal ‘God who acts’. For Luther, the ‘God who acts’ became the ‘God who acts in Christ’, who is unpredictable and foils any systematic search, who contrary to ‘reason’ carries the cross from Christmas to Easter.

The rite of confession is generally recognised by scholars to have been an essential feature of medieval Christianity. However, there is no scholarly consensus regarding the frequency or character of confession by lay people before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Since it is important to understand the background to these matters, this study examines confession both as it was supposed to be practised and as it was reported in practice among soldiers in western Europe prior to 1215. By focusing on the fighting men of Western Europe, a particular but not insignificant segment of lay society, this knotty problem is addressed from a new angle.

The experience of Jean-Pierre Camus, a reforming bishop in seventeenth-century France, highlights the problematic ambivalences present within French Catholic reform after the Council of Trent: the persistent tensions between bishops, the papacy and lower clergy over the most effective means of achieving renewal and the most appropriate forms of ecclesiastical government, as well as the growing emphasis upon episcopal perfection within an episcopate that was, paradoxically, closely linked to politics and secular society. His publications on episcopacy provide an insight into the motivations and beliefs of a prominent episcopal reformer and into the ecclesiastical culture of seventeenth-century France. This article seeks to demonstrate that Camus' episcopal ideal was a coherent adaptation of traditional and contemporary views produced in response to post-Trent circumstances and that the bishop's published views had a significant impact upon his fellow prelates and their relationship with the papacy.

William Robertson, Scottish historian, Presbyterian minister and leader of the Moderate church party, has been credited with a position regarding episcopacy that differed markedly from the sectarian suspicion shown by earlier Scottish Presbyterians. This article examines Robertson's attitude to episcopacy in the light of an early episode in his career, when he apparently had a chance to enter the Church of England (which offered greater rewards in terms of money and status than the Scottish Kirk), but did not take the opportunity. This examination, taking into account the views of episcopacy and the Church of England expressed in Robertson's histories and elsewhere, suggests that his personal position was in fact closer to the traditional hostility of older Scottish Presbyterianism than to the tolerant and even Latitudinarian views normally associated with the Enlightenment.

Studies of sixteenth-century Calvinist churches lay great emphasis upon the importance and coherence of discipline and congregational organisation. They do less justice to the wide variety of practice that existed between and even within the new national Churches. This was true even of France, the first Reformed Church to be organised on a national level according to Calvinist precepts, and the one most clearly controlled by Geneva. Despite the influence of Geneva, exercised remotely by Calvin and more immediately by his lieutenants within France, French congregations cultivated a wide range of organisational practices on critical issues, stubbornly maintaining a number of practices of which the Genevan leadership definitely disapproved.

During the later Middle Ages the ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally abandoned ritual humiliation in the market place as an integral part of penance imposed by sentence in its courts, although intermittently this punishment continued into the early sixteenth century. In the early decades of the ecclesia anglicana of Elizabeth, however, several jurisdictions reintroduced shaming in the market place as a consistent part of a disciplinary regime. Although constituting no more than an episode, as public penance had again declined by the 1580s, the reintroduction of penance in the public forum reveals much about the character of the Anglican Church in the first decades after the settlement of 1558, but also reflects back on the pre-Reformation Church.

The Martyrs' Memorial at Oxford is usually interpreted as an anti-Tractarian statement provoked by the publication of R. H. Froude's notorious Remains. This paper argues, however, that the monument's anti-Catholic nature has been overlooked, largely as a result of interpreting the scheme in the light of subsequent developments. Much of the original polemic surrounding the project was directed exclusively against Roman Catholicism and it won support from a wide theological spectrum within the Church of England. The heated debate over the wording of the inscription is examined, as is the question of whether the memorial should take the form of a Martyrs' Church or a Martyrs' Monument.

During a period of almost forty years, major Protestant denominations in Canada consolidated their scattered and individual Chinese mission activities into centralised institutions. However, the missions did not gain significant success in the mission field. Church leaders and missionaries often attributed this to a chronic lack of financial and human resources. But the real reason was the anti-Chinese sentiment that always cast a shadow over the missions. The rise of nationalism in the Chinese community at the turn of the twentieth century also had a negative effect on the mission.

The Charity Organisation Society is conventionally assumed to have emerged as a natural response to chronic problems of urban poverty relief which, by 1869, had become acute. While accepting that such an approach identifies a necessary dimension of explanation, the argument presented here contends that no sufficient explanation of the emergence of the COS can be given without taking into account the ecclesiastical dimension of events, in particular, the key role played by Whig Broad Churchmen determined to ‘hold the line’ against ideals of religious voluntarism in the aftermath of the shock of Gladstone's 1868 disestablishment of the Church of Ireland.

The discovery of a document, until now hidden in an obscure Protestant pamphlet, presented by Charles cardinal de Lorraine (1525–74) to the privy council in August 1562, underpins recent work which shows the cardinal to have been an evangelical Catholic interested in reform and in reconciliation with Lutherans, both before and after the Colloquy of Poissy. This paper argues that Protestants feared Lorraine precisely because his interest in dialogue had the potential to split the reform movement. Publication of his five articles in 1565 was an attempt to embarrass him after Trent and to compromise his political rapprochement with the prince of Condé.

The survival in published form of a range of sermons commemorating the execution of Charles I provides an opportunity to examine the character and limits of political debate within the Church of Ireland. After 1688 the task of condemning the regicide of 1649 without seeming to question the legitimacy of the Revolution presented serious difficulties. In the longer term the anniversary ceased to be contentious, as defenders of the Hanoverian establishment appropriated much of the traditional Anglican rhetoric of obedience to lawful authority. That appropriation provides the context for a significant 30 January sermon by Jonathan Swift.

Cardinal Manning's Catholic University project was a spectacular failure. Financial mismanagement by Thomas John Capel, the Rector, as well as gossip surrounding his personal life, undermined confidence in him and the college. The Jesuits opposed the scheme as it rivalled their own plans. Despite a Vatican ban, the Jesuits, some influential converts, old Catholic families and sympathetic bishops continued to press for Catholic higher education at Oxford, for social reasons and because they preferred the classical education to Manning's scientific syllabus. The project revealed the tensions and divisions caused by Manning's vision of future Catholic engagement in late Victorian society.

The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) was founded in 1877 and split from the wider body, the Student Christian Movement, in 1910. Although CICCU's prospects were bleak, it survived the interwar period and in the late 1930s began to grow. After 1945 CICCU developed into a highly effective force within Cambridge University. It sustained its membership in the 1960s, when many other student Christian groups were in decline. CICCU's growth was the product of a matrix of factors, including attachment to evangelical doctrine and adaptation to cultural change. Its survival and growth has significantly influenced Christianity in Britain and beyond.

The history of English Catholic theology between the break with Rome and the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I remains relatively little-known, despite (or perhaps because of) the publication of two recent American studies by P. S. O'Grady and E. A. Macek respectively: Henry VIII and the conforming Catholics, Collegeville, Minn. 1990, and The loyal opposition: Tudor traditionalist polemics, New York 1996. The appearance of a work which proposes to undertake a fresh survey of the whole period must therefore be welcomed.