Why did Christianity decline relatively to Islam in wide areas of the Mediterranean world during the European Middle Ages? The problem has deserved more attention than it has received from historians, for the pattern is not a consistent one and the decline where it took place, cannot be explained on the grounds of Moslem military superiority alone. The first generation of Moslem conquerors that so decisively defeated the Byzantine armies were plunderers who sought booty and revenge for past wrongs suffered at the hands of the Byzantine authorities or simply from the agricultural and urban populations of the east Roman frontier provinces. Confronted with undreamed of success, they had little idea of establishing either civil government or settling in the areas they had conquered. They had little desire also to convert their new Christian subjects, for that would diminish the flow of tribute exacted in exchange for protection. Yet as time went on, Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean showed none of the survival and recuperative power that characterised the Orthodox Church in the Balkans during the five centuries of Ottoman occupation from 1390–1912. Of the areas overrun by successive Moslem invaders down to 1400 only Spain, Sicily and Crete re-emerged as Christian territories.

Despite the superabundance of material available for the historical preliminaries and the progress of the Council of Ferrara-Florence, there is a source which to all intents and purposes has been neglected and has, therefore, remained outside the purview of the historiography concerning this critical Council. In more than one respect this source sheds significant light on the attitudes, mechanics and state of mind of at least some Greek sections and their aspirations in the matter of the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. The source is not an official document but, as we shall presently see, a memorandum or, to use Foreign Office jargon, a minute by a highly placed official who was not either in his private or public capacity in any way involved in the matter reported. The memorandum demands attention on several counts. It records an unexpected approach on the part of some Greeks to the duke of Milan shortly before Eugenius IV decided to transfer the Council from Ferrara to Florence. The record reveals, like a flashlight, how much diplomatic activity was going on in the corridors of power, in the couloirs, in the backrooms safely removed from the gaze of the public, of the annalists, official shorthand writers, and the forerunners of the modern journalists and of the media, that is to say, the diarists, eavesdroppers and reporters appointed by the various European courts at the seat of the Council. This memorandum or minute is the only source that informs posterity of an abortive, but nonetheless very symptomatic approach intended to settle the question of the union by radical means. Above all, the memorandum faithfully reflects the age-old Byzantine ideology which reached back into the somewhat hazy ancient Roman period and which had matured over more than a millennium that manifestly linked Nea Roma with Roman antiquity. The core and tenor of this approach associates historical continuity with historical Roman law, a combination that had served as the very ingredient, nay, as the anima that gave birth to, and shaped the future of, the Church in Byzantine realms.

In a particularly active, if sadly undocumented, period in the history of the English Church, Alexander, third bishop of Lincoln (1123–1148), stands out as a prelate of unusual energy and achievement. Beyond his intermittent involvement in national affairs, he was responsible in the twenty-five years of his episcopate for the establishment of at least nine prebends in the Lincoln chapter; the acquisition of substantial assets for his see—including the right of market and fair in two towns; the setting up of an additional and final, archdeaconry; extensive structural and decorative innovations at his cathedral; the founding of at least one leper hospital; the erection of two, and very probably three, castles; and the establishment of four religious houses. The last of the activities in this impressive curriculum, the founding of the Cistercian houses of Thame and Louth, the Arrouaisian house of Dorchester and the Gilbertine house of Haverholm, all in the brief period 1139–41, represents an achievement approached at that time only by the three foundations of bishop Warelwast of Exeter (1107–37) at Plympton, Launceston and Bodmin. If, moreover, Alexander was not the formal founder of the Gilbertine house of Sempringham some years earlier, it is at least clear that he played a decisive role there, as, indeed, there is good reason for supposing that he made a more positive and critical contribution to the early development of this, the only indigenous English monastic order, than has previously been allowed.

Cassian was not a systematic writer; or, perhaps to be more just, he was not afraid to allow his ideas to develop, and even change. He suffers, therefore, more than some at the hands of historians of spirituality. It is temptingly easy to present him as the instigator of a twotier system: of an asceticism that distinguished contemplation from the ‘practical’ eradication of vice, or the régime of the hermit from that of the coenobite; and that distinguished them as activities of greater and lesser merit, raising the contemplation of the hermit above the more preoccupied discipline of community life. Those who think of Cassian in these terms have also to face the fact that most western ascetics, in the centuries that followed, came together in groups to conquer sin; and yet they thought Cassian (as did Benedict) in some sense their master. Indeed, there are signs that Cassian himself witnessed the growing popularity of the coenobitic life. Given this apparent contrast, therefore, between his supposed interpretation of the spiritual life and the relentless development of communal asceticism, many feel impelled to regard him as a remote perfectionist, or at best—where signs of resignation to community life appear—as a weary and reluctant realist.

According to the Rule of St. Benedict the powers of an abbot, who stands in the place of Christ, are virtually absolute. It is true that the Rule has general injunctions for an abbot's good behaviour. He must always be mindful of the words of the apostle, ‘ye have received the spirit of the adoption of children, in which we cry Abba, Father’. He should study to be loved not feared, and the Rule states that he ‘should not harass the flock committed to him, nor exercise his power in an arbitrary, unjust way, but should always remember that for all his decisions and acts he must render account to God’. Nevertheless, there are no sanctions to enforce this code of conduct. In the abbot's hands lies the ultimate control of the administration. The Rule specifies that the abbot is to appoint the prior, and that the cellarer is bound by his commands.

Despite royal favour the promotion of leading king's clerks to the episcopal bench in fourteenth-century England was not always easily accomplished. The difficulties which Edward in encountered when trying to secure the see of Winchester for William of Wickham are well known. Several years earlier John Buckingham, Wickham's predecessor as keeper of the privy seal, had also met with opposition which threatened to bar his path to a bishopric, despite the fact that his early ecclesiastical career had given no cause for papal offence.

The emotive associations of the epithet Tridentine reveal confusion over the Council of Trent, which has continued from the seventeenth century to the present day. The complaints of Sarpi, the attacks of Leibnitz, the apologia of Bossuet, the abuse of Protestants, and the recriminations of modern Catholics all reveal different views of the Council's nature, its intentions and its achievements. Implicit in all views, however, is the concept of a Council which had lasting effects.

Of the many testimonials to the importance of the role assumed by the European universities in the political and ecclesiastical machinations which accompanied attempts to find a solution to the problems created by the elections of the rival popes Urban VI and Clement VII in 1378, there is none more striking than the tract written by Boniface Ferrer (brother of the saint) in 1411, after the Council of Pisa in 1409 had declared both the then rivals deposed, and had replaced them by Alexander v. This tract, intended as a defence of the Avignonese claimant, Benedict XIII is an extremely bitter attack on the academics of the day, both individually and generally. Several of them are singled out for criticism, especially those who had taken a major part in producing the conciliarist viewpoint. Thus, Simon de Cramaud, patriarch of Alexandria and acting president of the Council of Pisa for most of its sessions, is twice called an heresiarch. Many of the other major thinkers of the day have their integrity attacked, notably Pierre d'Ailly, bishop of Cambrai, and Baldus de Ubaldis, one of the major lawyers of the period.

Writing to Wolsey from Bergen op Zoom in 1527 the English ambassador described the Low Countries as being in grave peril from heresy, ‘for yf ther be tre men that speckes, the tweyn keppis Lutter ys openyon’: it was a pardonable exaggeration. Of Luther's immediate popularity in the Netherlands there can be no doubt. In taverns, private houses and on barges the religious issues of the day were hotly debated; from pulpits the new doctrines were championed or denounced, and in public places posters appeared pillorying the mendicants. The succession of placards forbidding the reading, sale or printing of Luther's writings and the increasingly severe penalties prescribed for attendance at conventicles, for harbouring apostate religious and, above all, for spreading heretical notions tell the same tale. Already by 1525 Luther had become a household name in the Netherlands and a new synonym for heretics ‘Luytrianen’ had entered common speech, displacing the older ‘Valdoysen ende Wijclevisten’.

The importance of the influence of returned Marian exiles on the origins of Elizabethan Puritanism has been widely recognised. The majority of the exiles, even those who had been ‘Coxians’ in the Frankfort disputes, were men who from the outset regarded the Elizabethan Settlement as a compromise, a mere step on the road to full reformation. Both in Parliament and in the Lower House of Convocation in 1563 small but determined and vociferous groups of exiles pressed for and carried others with them in support of radical reforming measures. The vestiarian controversy marked a turning-point, for it threw up the problems of priorities and obedience to the magistrate in a peculiarly stark form. In the need to resolve these problems many of the exiles found themselves committed, with greater or less reluctance, to an ‘establishment’ position and parted company with the younger radicals who became the leaders of Presbyterian Puritanism in the 1570s. But it was nevertheless from the exiles that the Puritans had first learned to treat the English Church as only imperfectly reformed and the work of rooting out popery as a work which had scarcely begun.

The calibre of the early Elizabethan clergy left much to be desired and much criticism was levelled by contemporaries and near contemporaries at the bishops for their failure to check the flow of insufficient ministers into benefices. While historians have acknowledged the existence of legal obstacles in the way of a firm episcopal policy in this regard, and have come gradually to realise some of the profound implications of the patronage system, no one has charted in detail the law of patronage which so hampered hierarchical attempts to raise the standard of the parochial clergy.

In July 1824 two new bishoprics were organised in the West Indies, the bishopric of Jamaica including Honduras and the bishopric of Barbados and the Leeward and Windward islands, to promote the activity of the Anglican Church among the slave population. A series of resolutions passed in the House of Commons in May 1823 committed the government to reforms intended to prepare the slaves for eventual freedom, and primary importance was given to their need for religious instruction. Knowledge of Christianity was regarded as an ‘indispensable necessity to…the foundation of every beneficial change in their character and future condition’. Most of the reform programme, which included the abolition of flogging for women, the admission of slave evidence in court and the improvement of manumission facilities, involved revision of existing slave codes and implementation, therefore, depended, outside the crown colonies, on the cooperation of the island assemblies. The imperial government, however, was free to promote religious instruction and chose to appoint the bishops. Under their supervision the Anglican Church in the West Indies was to become a missionary force. As the Secretary of State explained to the governor of Jamaica, ‘his Majesty's Government have been anxious to prove the deep interest which they feel in the encouragement of the religious and moral instruction of the Negroes, by at once taking upon themselves the whole charge of placing the Clergy of the West Indies under Episcopal control’. Funds were voted to pay the bishop of Jamaica £5,600 p.a. and salaries were also provided for six auxiliary curates and an archdeacon to help to supervise the clergy.

Little attention seems to have been given by Zwingli's biographers to the Reformer's pastoral activities between the end of the Marburg Conference (October 1529) and his own death two years later. This may be because the critical edition of his writings in the Corpus Reformatorum, started in 1905, has not yet covered the two final years. Koehler long ago stressed the preponderance of political interests in Zwingli's thought and activities during these twenty-eight months between the two Kappel wars—‘die dämonische Macht der Politik’ as he called it—and the recent work of Hauswirth, Fabian and Haas has followed this clue effectively.

As an episode in the history of Puritan ideas on liberty of conscience, the importance of the Whitehall Debates has long been acknowledged. Their publication at the end of the last century by Sir Charles Firth, who discovered them among the Clarke MSS., and their republication in the 1930s by A. S. P. Woodhouse, who made extensive additions to the original text, are evidence of their high regard. As Professor Woodhouse saw them, the Debates dealt with one of ‘the most significant issues of Puritan political thought:…the question of religious liberty’. Other historians have attributed even greater value to the Debates, acclaiming them as a major contribution to Puritan thought on this subject. W. K. Jordan, in his monumental study of religious toleration in England, hailed them as ‘momentous’; and, more recently, Christopher Hill has coupled them with the debates concerning James Nayler as ‘the two great set debates on religious toleration’ which survive from the revolutionary period. In view of this long-standing recognition, it is paradoxical that there exists no coherent and comprehensive discussion of the Debates: or rather, of the debate on 14 December 1648, this being the only day for which a detailed account survives. Although the arguments of various speakers have been summarised, no attempt has been made to offer an interpretation of the debate as a whole, on the grounds of the ‘confused and fragmentary’ state of the records.

The Reform Bill of 1867 inaugurated a new era in the political history of Great Britain. By enlarging the electorate and increasing the possibilities for party organisation this Act brought to a close that period of the mid-nineteenth century when parties were in a state of flux. This was manifested in Parliament by a growing disparity between the popularly elected House of Commons and the hereditary based House of Lords. In 1868 and 1869 these bodies converged in a constitutional struggle over the disestablishment of the Irish Church. By toppling Disraeli from the premiership and acquiring a clear mandate from the electorate for a change in the status of the Irish Church Gladstone was able to make an irrefutable case for disestablishment. When Gladstone placed his bill before Parliament opposition developed in the first instance, as expected, from churchmen and Tories in the House of Lords who feared that the passage of disestablishment would admit a host of further changes in the constitution. Through the efforts of archbishop Tait, however, and other moderates the upper house wisely passed the principle of the bill. But opposition to the measure was based not so much on upholding the principle of establishment in Ireland, which was indefensible, but on a disagreement with the substance, or the details by which the Irish Church was to be disendowed. During the committee stage the House of Lords precipitated a crisis by so amending the bill as to maintain the financial security of the Irish Church. For the purpose of reaching a compromise on the disendowment clauses of the bill a conference of party leaders was summoned. To this end the mediation efforts of the queen were directed. But any settlement of the crisis depended in the final analysis on the extent of Conservative opposition and the ease with which party divisions could be bridged.

‘It is now disputed at every table’, declared Whitgift in 1574, ‘whether the magistrate be of necessity bound to the judicials of Moses’. Edwin Sandys told Bullinger of Zürich in the previous year that it was being maintained, to the great trouble of the Church, that ‘The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them’. Though often neglected by historians as an important factor in the Reformation, the question of the validity of the Old Testament judicial (as opposed to moral or ceremonial) law frequently arises in the writings of the Reformers, and their various answers made no slight impact on the course of events. It bears directly on Henry VIII's divorce and the bigamy of Philip of Hesse; the treatment of heresy and the possibility of toleration; the persecution of witches; usury and iconoclasm; Sabbatarianism and the rise of the ‘puritan’ view of the Bible as a book of precedents, and the corresponding shift to legalism in Protestant theology. The question is also of fundamental relevance to the thought of the Reformers on natural law, the godly prince and magistrate, and the so-called ‘third use of the law’. This article is an attempt to survey, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the various interpretations of the Mosaic penal and civil laws, with particular reference to the development of legalistic tendencies after Luther.

The importance of Augustine Baker in the history of English devotional literature has long been recognised, but there has always been a major handicap to any proper understanding of him—the fact that most of his works have not been published, except in a onevolume digest, entitled Sancta Sophia, which one of his disciples, Serenus Cressy, produced in 1657. Thus Baker has recently been the subject of a full-scale monograph, which, though otherwise scholarly and accurate enough, suffers from the fact that the author has not consulted the Baker MSS., and has, therefore, together with almost every other expert in this field of study, begun and ended his work without knowing whether Cressy's digest truly reproduces his master's voice. What follows is an attempt to answer this hitherto unanswered question by reconstructing the circumstances of the book's publication and by comparing it with some of the MSS. But first, some definitions.