The Vita of Christina of Markyate has been celebrated as ‘perhaps the twelfth century's most effective and revealing personal history of a woman’. Indeed, the Vita's account of Christina's early career is vivid and remarkably detailed: one can read at length of Christina's saintly childhood, her efforts to escape an unwanted marriage, her ascetic hardships living with the hermit Roger and her intimate spiritual friendship with Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans. But while we know a great deal about Christina's early career, more than for almost any other contemporary woman, we know almost nothing about her later life. Her Vita is incomplete, its text known only from a single fire-damaged fourteenth-century manuscript, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E i. Christina's Vita is the very last item in the Tiberius manuscript. On the final folio, as Christina is reproving Geoffrey for incorrect behaviour, the text breaks off at the bottom line in the middle of a word: ‘que minus recte videbatur gerere sapienter increpando, sa…’. As the last datable reference in the Vita is to 1139, and Abbot Geoffrey died in 1146, the existing text of the Vita appears to cover events no later than the early 1140s.

On Passion Sunday in 1417 (28 March) a sermon known by its scriptural theme as ‘Accipiant qui vocati sunt’ was delivered at the general council of the Church then assembled in the south German city of Constance. Three centuries later it was edited by Hermann von der Hardt who characterised ‘Accipiant’ as ‘by far the most severe sermon in which the enormous crimes of prelates – especially love of money, ambition, luxury and ignorance – are revealed with the greatest liberty and are vehemently reproached, so that it is a wonder that the council heard it patiently’. In an earlier publication containing excerpts from this sermon, Hardt had described it in similar terms as being ‘not unlike a burning furnace in terms of its fiery passion and its vehement attack on the vices of the clergy’. More recently Heinrich Finke clearly agreed with these appraisals in describing ‘Accipiant’ as a ‘scharfe Reformpredigt’, for he did not bestow such adjectival emphasis on any other reform sermon listed in his register of the Constance sermons. Paul Arendt, a student of Finke's and the author of the only monograph devoted to the many surviving sermons from Constance, repeatedly commented on the severity of ‘Accipiant’, especially in his long chapter on ‘das Hauptthema unserer Prediger: Behandlung der Frage der kirchlichen Reform’.

Hardt ascribed this sermon to Vitale Valentine OFM, bishop of Toulon. However, as the following analysis will show, it is certain that this ascription was based on conjecture and that another preacher actually delivered the sermon. Hardt's only source for his edition of ‘Accipiant’ was an Erfurt manuscript which is now in the Schlossbibliothek at Pommersfelden. Because this lacks a rubric or colophon identifying the author of the sermon, Hardt's attribution must have been inferred from internal evidence. Thus began the long tradition of Vitale Valentine's authorship of ‘Accipiant’ which has previously been accepted without question by scholars of these conciliar sermons.

Perhaps because the classification of religious behaviour in the Middle Ages has not received much attention, there seems to be no scholarly consensus concerning the number or nature of its genres. This means that at present we tend to have either inadequately differentiated, broad categories of medieval religious acts, or somewhat incoherent lists of highly specific religious practices. That a good number of these religious forms pre-existed and continued long after the Christian Middle Ages is not in doubt; nor is the fact that such religious behaviours are not necessarily confined to the Christian tradition. The present discussion, however, will focus exclusively upon the Latin Christian tradition, c. 1000–c. 1500.

Surveying the expressive modes of medieval religion presents less difficulty than grouping such behaviours within larger intelligible categories. Current scholarly literature makes it clear that certain varieties of medieval religious practice are almost universally acknowledged: veneration of the saints; attendance at sermons; private prayer; participation in public, collective liturgies (for example, processions on diverse occasions); acting under the influence of prophecy; setting off on pilgrimage, whether penitential or devotional; taking the Cross; performing formal or informal acts of devotion or piety (‘devotion’ is one aspect of the medieval religious life urgently in need of sharp definition); and attempting, often through ascetic exercises, to experience God (mysticism). By no means is this an exhaustive list. The titular subject of this essay, as the reader will have noticed, does not appear in it.

The arrival of St Augustine in England from Rome in 597 was an event of profound significance, for it marked the beginnings of relations between Rome and Canterbury. To later generations this came to mean relations between the papacy in its universal role, hence the throne of St Peter, and the metropolitical see of Canterbury and the cathedral priory of Christ Church, for the chair of St Augustine was the seat of both a metropolitan and an abbot. The archiepiscopal see and the cathedral priory were inextricably bound in a unique way.

Relations with Rome had always been particularly close, both between the archbishops and the pope and between the convent and the pope. The cathedral church of Canterbury was dedicated to the Saviour (Christ Church) as was the papal cathedral of the Lateran. Gregory had sent the pallium to Augustine in sign of his metropolitan rank. There had been correspondence with Rome from the first. In Eadmer's account of the old Anglo-Saxon church, it was built in the Roman fashion, as Bede testifies, imitating the church of the blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, in which the most sacred relics in the whole world are venerated. Even more precisely, the confessio of St Peter was copied at Canterbury. As Eadmer says, ‘From the choir of the singers one went up to the two altars (of Christ and of St Wilfrid) by some steps, since there was a crypt underneath, what the Romans call a confessio, built like the confessio of St Peter.’ (Eadmer had both visited Rome in 1099 and witnessed the fire that destroyed the old cathedral some thirty years before in 1067.) And there, in the confessio, Eadmer goes on to say, Alfege had put the head of St Swithun and there were many other relics. The confessio in St Peter's had been constructed by Pope Gregory the Great and contained the body of the prince of the Apostles and it was in a niche here that the pallia were put before the ceremony of the vesting, close to the body of St Peter. There may be, too, another influence from Rome and old St Peter's on the cathedral at Canterbury. The spiral columns in St Anselm's crypt at Canterbury, which survived the later fire of 1174, and are still standing, were possibly modelled on those that supported St Peter's shrine. These twisted columns were believed to have been brought to Rome from the Temple of Solomon. At the end of the sixth century, possibly due to Gregory the Great, they were arranged to form an iconostasis-like screen before the apostle's shrine. Pope Gregory III in the eighth century had added an outer screen of six similar columns, the present of the Byzantine Exarch, of which five still survive. They are practically the only relics of the old basilica to have been preserved in the new Renaissance St Peter's.

Scholars have tended to ignore Elizabeth's letters as a potential source for evidence of her religious beliefs, and have turned elsewhere to find a ‘window into her soul’. A few fixed on her personal Book of devotions as the most valuable route into her inner life, since it was generally assumed that she had composed the prayers within it herself. From this kind of evidence, the queen emerged as a deeply pious princess, far different from the politique figure who dominated the writings of A. J. Pollard, J. E. Neale and J. B. Black. J. P. Hodges, for example, thought these private prayers revealed both ‘a spiritual perception’ and ‘a deep personal faith which has every token of sincerity’, while William P. Haugaard, likewise, detected a ‘spiritual depth and unity to her character’. As the prayers also manifested a belief in solifidianism, Haugaard identified Elizabeth's piety as unmistakably Protestant, a view which Christopher Haigh endorsed. More recently, however, Patrick Collinson has questioned the historical value of the Book of devotions. He first speculated that the prayers within it might well have been written for Elizabeth by others, and in a clever piece of deconstruction, went on to suggest that, in any event, the book itself (together with one or two other small devotional books) was probably a fashion accessory rather than an object encouraging personal piety. To find clues to her religion, Collinson preferred to rely on the queen's actions and private behaviour. There he saw so many illustrations of religious conservatism, including her dislike of married clergy, hostility to the destruction of crosses and church monuments, her use of Catholic oaths and her ‘unusually negative prejudice against the preaching ministry’ that he dismissed the queen as ‘an odd sort of Protestant’, arguing that her conservative policies probably reflected her religious preferences rather than simply political expediency. Collinson has not been alone in playing down Elizabeth's Protestantism, although only a small minority of historians today describe the queen as a Henrician Catholic, who would have been content in 1558 ‘to return to the Church of her father’.

During the late Tudor and early Stuart age, England's parish ministries were increasingly occupied by energetic Puritan preachers who sought to convert souls and build ‘godly’ communities. Together with ‘godly’ magistrates and lay supporters, these preachers laboured to replace a culture rooted in traditional festivals, ales, dances and games with a culture sustained by frequent sermons, Scripture-reading and a strict observance of the Sabbath. Not everyone, however, heeded the call of the preachers. Many people, in most places probably a significant majority, were unable or unwilling to embrace the Puritan theology of grace and were opposed to Puritans' interference in their lives. Resistance to Puritans surfaced in different forms and degrees, ranging from indifference and passivity to organised demonstrations and protests, to street fighting and violence. Verbal abuse seems to have been common; the preferred term of abuse, ‘Puritan’, remained a potent and wounding accusation in spite of its common currency. From about the 1570s and 80s, when Puritan evangelism emerged as a significant movement in England, to the period of the Civil War, tensions between Puritans and anti-Puritans periodically surfaced in towns and villages across the kingdom, with divisions in communities cutting across class lines.

As Cornelius Mayer wrote recently, the massive output of literature on Augustine (c. 50,000 extant titles) cannot hide the fact that ‘much scholarly work remains to be done on the enormous variety and scope of Augustine's influence’. One area of which this is particularly true is Augustine's impact on Byzantine theology.

While Augustine's own use of Greek patristic literature and contacts with the Greek patristic world have been investigated for some time and in some detail, his influence on Greek authors – especially during the later Byzantine era – has been sadly neglected. However, recent research on such authors as Maximos Planudes (c. 1255–1305), Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and Prochoros Kydones (c. 1333–c. 1370) has done something to remedy that situation. This paper seeks to present a summary of that development and provide a context for further study.

The importance to scholars of the papal registers and other records in the Vatican Archives as a source for later medieval history scarcely needs to be emphasised. From the thirteenth century onwards, the different series of records proliferated. They begin with registers of outgoing correspondence, known as the Vatican Registers, in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) and financial accounts of the apostolic chamber under Nicholas III (1277–80). For the fourteenth century, there are new series of registers of outgoing letters (the Avignon Registers and the Lateran Registers) and a vast increase in the quantity of surviving records of the apostolic chamber. However, with the increasing abundance of such records, the proportion to have been published diminishes. It is in the fourteenth century that the sheer wealth of the surviving sources (there are, for instance, sixty registers of papal letters from the pontificate of Gregory XI, which lasted seven years and three months) first becomes a serious problem for those pursuing the publication of papal records.

Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII, was a man both personally extraordinary and yet representative of his age. He abandoned the normal cursus honorum of the legal profession to enter the king's service more suddenly than any of his contemporaries; yet he was one of many common lawyers newly influential in the king's councils of the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. He was probably the only layman in Henry's inner circle to have studied at a university; yet within fifty years of his death most English statesmen of the first rank would have done so. In pursuing the king's interests, Dudley generated sufficient animosity to make himself one of the two scapegoats for Henry's policies tried and executed in 1509–10; yet it was more his manner, his efficiency and his political isolation than any difference of intent that distinguished him from Henry's other ministers. In pursuing his own interests he built a large landed estate faster than any of his colleagues, but their aims and eventual achievements were not so different from his. The one respect in which Dudley was unique was that he had leisure, while under arrest in the Tower of London, to commit to paper his thoughts on English government and society. The resulting treatise, The tree of commonwealth, enables us to juxtapose his stated ideals with his actions as a royal minister and as an influential layman. Thereby we may hope to shed new light on the relations between Church, State and lay elites on the eve of the English Reformation.

Deceit is normally held in low esteem; pointing as it does to an evil disposition; there are, nonetheless, countless instances when it has reaped obvious benefits and deflected all manner of harm and ill report and mortal perils. For our conversation is not always with friends in this earthly life: Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto 4, i

A common response to the enforcement of religious conformity in the sixteenth century was deceit, either by silence or dissimulation. Contemporaries called people who chose this evasion Nicodemites, after Nicodemus who came to Christ by night. The propaganda campaign conducted against them by anti-Nicodemites stressed the necessity of individual witness, supported by scriptural references. Virtually all the major reformers made their contribution – Calvin, Viret, Bullinger – even Bucer after an earlier more easy-going phase. Prominent among the lesser lights were Italian exiles who had personal experience of Nicodemite dilemmas after conformity began to be enforced in Italy in the early 1540s. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Francesco Negri and Caelio Secondo Curione all wrote on the subject, but Pier Paolo Vergerio, who left his Italian bishopric for exile in 1549, was by far the most outspoken and prolific.

On Whit Sunday 1569, after evening service, William and Geoffrey Soden went to see their vicar. They expected a difficult encounter, and took along three of their neighbours of Swalcliffe near Banbury for moral support. The Sodens had been wrangling between themselves and with their mother, and there was also some dispute with the vicar, Richard Crowley. William now told the vicar that they wished to receive communion next day, and asked ‘to know if he would admit them thereunto’. Crowley replied ‘I will not’, and said it was ‘because they came not penitently’. He explained in court later that ‘the said William and Geoffrey Soden did not come to this respondent Anno 1569 penitently or in brotherly reconciliation, but obstinately, with vehement words, as is known to the whole company then present’. Crowley had shown the Sodens the Book of Common Prayer, ‘and exhorted them in the presence of those men according to the rule of the said Book, but the said William and Geoffrey Soden regarded it not but continued still in their obstinacies’. There was more: the vicar declared ‘I have to examine you on your belief, the articles of your faith and the Ten Commandments, and do not know how you could answer.’ The brothers were furious: ‘Yea, Master Vicar, that ye go about to shame us before the whole people’, declared Geoffrey, and they stomped off ‘uncharitably and obstinately, with great threatening words’.

The Swalcliffe rows simmered on.

Recent work on the 1630s has challenged the established view of Archbishop Laud's central role in the formulation and enforcement of ecclesiastical policy. Kevin Sharpe and Julian Davies have proposed that Charles I was the initiator of religious change, with his archbishop often trailing in his wake, and finding ways to qualify, if not subvert, royal directives on preaching, the Sabbath and the altar. Davies has also argued that an ideology of ‘Carolinism’ rather than ‘Laudianism’ shaped and animated key religious reforms, and to enact them Charles increasingly relied on Bishop Matthew Wren, an unyielding enforcer of royal policy and more ‘Laudian’ than Laud himself. This view of Laud of course echoes the archbishop's defence at his trial: that he was merely the king's good servant, executing the royal will, which is enough to make one pause, since Laud's objective there was not historical veracity but to save his neck. But other findings have also diminished Laud's political stature: it appears that Lord Treasurer Weston, not Laud, was the royal nominee for the vacant chancellorship of Oxford in April 1630, though by the time the king's letter reached the university Laud had been elected; later, in 1636, it has been suggested that far from securing the appointment of his protégé Bishop Juxon as the new Lord Treasurer, Laud may have actually been a defeated rival for the post.

The adoption of socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for many an experience akin to religious conversion. Katherine St John Conway's path to enlightenment provides a stark example. While sitting in her fashionable Bristol church ‘praying for a fuller consciousness of the Presence’, she was confronted by a group of workers adopting the socialist tactic of the ‘church parade’, the invasion of churches during Sunday services to highlight labour disputes and the plight of the unemployed:

[I]n they came, lassies out on strike against starvation wages and for the right to combine … there they stood, sister-women, … ill-clad, wet through with the driving rain, hungry … ‘They stand between me and the Christ.’ So the thought smote me; so I see it still … . For the first time in my life I heard and began to understand.

In his greatest piece of political philosophy, the Leviathan of 1651, Thomas Hobbes dedicated the astonishing mass of eighteen voluminous chapters solely to the discussion of religious matters. Although his earlier political treatises, The elements of law of 1640 and the De cive of 1642, discussed theological doctrines at some length, they never accorded so great a role to questions of religion and theology as did Leviathan. The two books of Leviathan in which Hobbes promulgated his theological doctrines are almost exactly equal in length to books I and II, and one of the chapters in book III (‘Of power ecclesiasticall’) is in some ways the longest chapter in the work. The kind of contentious eschatological doctrines which Hobbes had been careful to leave unchallenged in his early works, namely the question whether the soul had an independent existence after the death of the body, figured particularly high in Leviathan. Why was it that Hobbes's interest in theology increased so sharply between 1642 and 1651, and what was the particular point of the theology of Leviathan?

Inscribed on the wall of the expiatory Basilica of Sacré Coeur, at Montmartre, the 1873 ‘national vow’ of France interprets the nation's recent misfortunes as divine chastisement of an errant and irreligious people. Since it was Napoleon III's withdrawal of French troops from Rome that had made it possible for the Italian forces to capture the papal city in September 1870, the ‘national vow’ reflects a strong sense of French responsibility for the pope's loss of his temporal power. The Catholic Right interpreted France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and her subsequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine, as God's punishment on ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ for her desertion of the Vicar of Christ, and the ‘national vow’ pledged prayer for the Roman pontiff's deliverance from his enemies. This study analyses the devotion of French Catholics to ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’ during the Third Republic through an exploration of some of the religious and political meanings of pilgrimage to visit ‘Peter in chains’. It also charts the process by which promotion in the Catholic press, rapid train transportation and cheaper package fares opened an era of mass pilgrimage to Rome and paved the way for a new popular papal style.

The Blagdon controversy is the name given to the dispute between Hannah More, the conduct-book writer and prominent Evangelical, and Thomas Bere, the curate of Blagdon, a village in the Mendip hills in Somerset, where she had set up a Sunday school in 1795. It began quietly as a purely local affair in 1799, blazed into national notoriety in 1801, and petered out in the summer of 1802. It was the most problematic episode in More's career, seriously jeopardising her reputation as a loyalist. According to M. G. Jones, her most substantial biographer, the controversy centred on two issues: ‘ whether the lower orders should be educated, and if so, by whom?’, and ‘Was Miss More a Methodist? Were her schools Methodist schools? Had she established them with or without the consent of the clergy in whose parishes the schools were set up?’ To Ford K. Brown the controversy ‘was at first simply a dispute between a country parson and Mrs Hannah More over the alleged “Methodism” of the teacher of one of her schools”. However, ‘taken up by the London journals, it roused national interest when the Orthodox party saw it correctly as a symbol of Evangelical aggression’. Brown's analysis is part of his controversial thesis in which the Evangelicals are portrayed as an almost Leninist vanguard movement, intent on a fundamental revolution in Church and Nation. More recently, however, attention has focused on the gender issues behind the controversy. Viewed from this perspective, More has been seen as the embodiment of a revisionist female ideology, replacing the accommodating female ideal with an activist model: hence the virulent chauvinism of her opponents' attacks. Though the gender aspect of the controversy will be briefly mentioned, and its importance acknowledged, this article focuses on the theological and ecclesiological factors which, with the partial exception of Brown's tendentious account, have been neglected in previous studies. These are the light thrown on the inadequacies of diocesan structures; the particular problems of the Mendip parishes; the issues dividing Evangelicals and High Churchmen; the tensions between the Church and Methodism; the rival, but overlapping, agendas of Evangelical Sunday school pioneers and itinerant Methodist preachers; and ultra-loyalist fears of a cultural attack waged by William Wilberforce and his associates, interpreted as a front for ‘Jacobinism’. Three questions are posed about the controversy, all of which centre around Evangelical–High Church relationships. What aspects of More's work in the Mendips particularly disturbed some High Churchmen? Why, given these facts, did other High Church clergy rally to her defence? Why did her opponents retreat in the spring and early summer of 1802?

This essay, which stems from a broader project on religion in the nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, seeks to recreate the experiences of the thousands of Protestants who struggled tenaciously to retain or hide their faith in colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico before the declaration of religious tolerance in 1869 and before the establishment of the region's first Protestant churches, the Anglican congregation of Ponce, organised in 1869, the Episcopal mission of Havana, started in 1871, and the Anglican congregation of Vieques, an island located eight miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, founded in 1880.

The Catholic Church in Korea dates its foundation from 1784 when Yi Sŭng-hun returned from Beijing where he had been baptised by a member of the resident Catholic mission. He had sought out the Catholic priests at the instigation of Yi Pyok who, in the winter of 1777, had been a member of a meeting of young, reform-minded Shirhak (‘New Learning’) scholars. This meeting had been called to examine scientific, mathematical and religious treatises written by the Jesuits in China. On his return, Yi Sung-hun brought with him books and religious articles which he shared with Yi Pyok, and together they began to evangelise among their friends and neighbours. It was not very long, however, before their activities began to meet with opposition from other Confucian scholars and to arouse the suspicions of the authorities. In 1785 Yi Pyok and other Christians were arrested at a meeting in the house of Kim Pom-u, a member of the chungin class of technical specialists. Those present were given a lecture on proper Confucian conduct and released, apart from Kim Pom-u who was severely beaten and sent into exile where he died from his injuries. Worse was to follow in 1791 with the execution of Yun Chi-ch'ung and his cousin, Kwon Sang-yon, for their refusal to perform the chesa ancestral rites for Yun's dead mother. Nevertheless the Church continued to grow during the 1790s, and its members pressed the bishop of Beijing to send a resident priest. This was achieved in 1795 when a Chinese priest, Fr Chou Wên-mu, arrived in Seoul. Under his ministry, and with the assistance of members of the laity, the Church grew from around 4,000 believers to nearly 10,000 at the outbreak of the Shinyu persecution in 1801. This persecution cost the lives of Fr Chou and at least 300 of the laity, but the Church survived.

Nationaler Protestantismus und Ökumenische Bewegung. Kirchliches Handeln im Kalten Krieg (1945–1990). By Gerhard Besier, Armin Boyens and Gerhard Lindemann (postscript by Horst-Klaus Hofmann). (Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungen, 3.) Pp. vi+1074. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999. DM 86. 3 428 10032 8; 1438 2326

This is indeed a formidable offering – three and a half books by three and a half authors, all for the price of one and a half – and it must be admitted to those whose stamina or German quail at the prospect that some of the viewpoints and a little of the material by two and a half of the contributors has been made available in English in Gerhard Besier (ed.), The Churches, southern Africa and the political context (London 1999) at £9.99. The soft option is, however, no substitute for the real thing, which, like that other blockbuster, the late Eberhard Bethge's Bonhoeffer, is a contribution both to scholarship and to a struggle inside the German Churches. This, readers in the Anglo-Saxon world need to assess as best they can. It is not often that attempts are made by both the World Council of Churches and their principal paymasters in the German Churches to stop the publication of a work of scholarship, to be foiled (in best nineteenth-century style) by the liberalism of the German Ministry of the Interior; but that has happened here. And the rest of the world has the more reason to be grateful to the ministry for the authors have exploited the archives of the Stasi and the KGB, access to the latter of which has now been closed under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, which appears to have more to hide than anyone.

The link between all this and Besier's inquiries in America is provided by the sad fate of the Protestant Churches of the Ost-Block during the Cold War.