On 10 October 1216, eight days before his death, King John sent instructions to Walter de Lacy, sheriff of Hereford, by letters patent:

Know that for the sake of God we have conceded to Margaret de Lacy three carucates of land to be assarted and cultivated in our forest of Aconbury, to build there a certain religious house for the souls of William de Braose her father, Matilda her mother and William her brother. And we instruct you to assign those three carucates of land in the aforesaid forest to the same Margaret.

For the historian of King John, this concession indicates that the king was at last prepared to restore to his favour the Braoses and the Lacys, Welsh Marcher lords and barons of Ireland, who had spectacularly fallen from favour in 1208. Yet for the historian of the military orders and of monastic orders in general, it marks the beginning of a relationship between a patron and a religious house which gives a valuable insight into how that relationship could go badly wrong.

In this article I shall republish a small corpus of epitaphs from the Roman imperial household, with apparently Christian features. These texts have not previously been published together. The dating of these inscriptions will be discussed, and inferences about the Christian community in the imperial service during the Severan period will be drawn from the points of comparison which can be made between the texts.

It has long been known from literary sources that there were Christians in the emperors' service in these years. For the generation after Justin Martyr's death, Christian literature provides three references to Christianity in the familia Caesaris. Hippolytus says that Callistus, later to be bishop of Rome, was the slave of Carpophorus, a Christian ‘of the emperor's household’ during the reign of Commodus (180–92). Irenaeus, writing in that reign, refers in the course of a theological argument to ‘those in the royal palace who are believers’, without giving any hint about the number of Christians involved. Then in the 190s Tertullian's Apologeticum lists the palace along with other commanding heights of Roman life in which, he asserts, Christians have established a presence. By this time it was evidently well-known in Christian circles, including in the provinces, that there were Christians in the familia Caesaris: of these three authors, only Hippolytus was based in Rome where the imperial household was centred.

Pilgrimage is universally recognised by historians as a principal feature of medieval popular religion, if by ‘popular’ we mean something in which the ordinary laity fully participated. While we can be confident of the fact of this participation, accurate measures of its scale are less easy to come by, while putting names to the thousands of humble participants is less easy still. Narrative sources, such as chronicles and hagiographies, tend to describe the pilgrimages of the great and good (and also of the not so good), and even when, especially in and after the fourteenth century, pilgrims themselves begin to leave accounts of their journeys for their own satisfaction, or for the edification and information of others, they can be seen, almost by definition, as standing somewhat apart from the nameless masses because they are either literate themselves, or addressing a literate pilgrimage ‘public’.

The task of putting not merely names, but faces, to ‘ordinary’ pilgrims is not quite hopeless, however, although the materials which make it possible vary in their availability and abundance at different times and places. Use has been made of monastic cartularies to trace at least fragments of the biographies and family histories of members of the knightly classes whose participation in pilgrimage, it has been argued, helped to foster the crusading movement. A little later, the records of English royal government reveal the names of numerous pilgrims who sought royal licence and safe-conduct for their travels, registered the appointment of attorneys for the duration of their absence, or, as witnesses at inquisitions post mortem, remembered births and deaths by the year in which they themselves, or kin or friends, went to the Holy Land, to Canterbury, Compostela or elsewhere. Some at least of these names are those of men (and women) who occur elsewhere in surviving records and about whose lives and connections it is therefore possible to know at least a little. From all over Christendom, too, there are wills, made by intending pilgrims as a necessary part of their preparations.

The object of this article is to describe the social and theological setting of primitive Montanism within second-century Asia in order to account for its appearance and its subsequent condemnation. According to an anonymous source employed by Eusebius the prophecy appeared in the middle of the second century under the leadership of a recent convert called Montanus, and the faithful of Asia gathered and condemned the movement at its outset. Clearly this is a propagandist account but we may accept its broad outlines none the less, in that there was a prophetic movement in which Montanus was a prime mover, and which failed to receive acceptance in the wider Asian Church.

It should be made clear that this article restricts itself to the earliest period of the prophecy and therefore to primary sources which are directly germane to that period. These sources are both preserved by Eusebius, and consist of an unnamed writer known as the anonymous, and an otherwise unknown Apollonius. A further possibly ancient source is employed by Epiphanius, but we shall observe below that its understanding of prophecy is hardly consistent with a second-century Asian origin, whereas both the anonymous and Apollonius reveal their Asian provenance in their extant writings. Although there is a degree of bias in the presentation of the charges, we should none the less accept that there is a factual basis behind the assertions of the opponents, and that their opposition was motivated by a genuine belief that the prophecy did not conform with the tradition and the succession of the Church.

St Simon Stock is an elusive thirteenth-century Carmelite saint of whom it may be said that very little is known but about whom much has been written. The details of his life and even the fact of his existence have aroused considerable controversy over the centuries. In part the lack of firm information could be attributed to the fact that, until recently, the early history of the Carmelites, or Whitefriars, was little known and clouded by legendary claims about the order being founded on Mount Carmel by the prophet Elijah. In addition, church historians have tended to focus on the larger and better documented Franciscan and Dominican orders. The Carmelites, although numerically fewer, were nevertheless a significant presence in medieval England comprising at their peak some thirty-nine communities and a total approaching 1,000 friars. Fortunately, in the past few years, the quantity of published research on Carmelite history has increased significantly.

According to the Byzantine scholar Andronicus Callistus, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks on 29 May 1453 was a cataclysm of such magnitude that it was mourned not only by the Greeks, but by people of every nation. This may sound like the type of rhetorical flourish with which Byzantine authors were fond of adorning their works, yet recent scholarship has tended, if anything, to corroborate Callistus' assertion. Over the past few years, historians of the crusades have been largely successful in showing that the fifteenth century, far from witnessing the decline of the crusading ideal, was a period when it remained as potent as ever, even in a country as far removed from the main theatres of action as England. Consequently, the fall of such an important Christian city was greeted with shock and anger throughout western Europe, and for the rest of the century the burning question for crusading strategists was how the disaster could be reversed.

It is of course true that no large-scale expedition was ever launched against the Turks after 1453, the efforts of successive popes ultimately failing to organise a united Christian response. Yet this does not detract from the overwhelming evidence that all sections of western society took the threat posed to Christendom very seriously, and continued to believe that to take up arms against the infidel was one of the highest acts of piety.

In the two centuries before 1410 it was the custom for the king of Aragon to open a session of the cortes with a speech. These speeches were not merely simple statements of the reasons why the cortes had been summoned but were elaborately staged and ornately constructed orations, very often written in the style of sermons. Affairs of state were portrayed in terms of Christian morality with the aid of exempla drawn from the Old Testament and from other religious works, emphasising, above all, the king's God-given authority. Exempla were also derived from written royal histories of the Crown of Aragon, transmitted orally by the king to his people and used to create a feeling of national pride and unity between the king and his subjects. I propose to examine the use of these royal sermons in the Crown of Aragon first by discussing whether it is indeed right to call these politically motivated speeches sermons at all; second, by putting the Crown of Aragon into context by examining the evidence for royal preaching throughout Europe; third, by considering the evidence for a long-standing tradition of preaching by members of the royal house of Aragon; and finally, in order to illustrate in more detail the nature and content of royal Aragonese sermons, by providing a detailed analysis of the speeches by King Pedro iv ‘the Ceremonious’ to the Cortes of Tarragona (Catalonia) of 1370 and to the Cortes of Monzón (Aragon) of 1383, full texts of which were recorded in the official proceedings.

Early in March 1554 the three English reformers and later Oxford martyrs, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the former bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, and the bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, were transported to the supposedly safe location of Oxford to expedite their trials. Their stay in Oxford, however, turned out to be a long one, lasting until their execution by burning outside the Northgate there: Latimer and Ridley on 16 October 1555; Cranmer on 21 March 1556. During the time they spent in Oxford – between nineteen and twenty-four months – they were usually confined apart from one another, in a number of locations, by the municipal officials responsible to the crown for their safekeeping: the mayor and the two bailiffs of Oxford. Cranmer, the most important and politically the most sensitive of the prisoners, appears to have spent most of his long confinement in the Bocardo, the local prison over the town's Northgate next to St Michael's church. Latimer and Ridley, on the other hand, spent considerable time privately boarded in the houses of, respectively, the bailiffs and the mayor, and Ridley, in particular, seems to have been able to maintain regular written and personal contact with their supporters and sympathisers. Their confinement must have put the three reformers, all of them Cambridge graduates, into a variety of contacts with local residents, but records for only two of those relationships have survived, and from diametrically opposite sources.

Religious politics in Scotland during the middle decades of the seventeenth century have always attracted much historical attention. The conflict of the Covenant, the tensions of the Cromwellian occupation and the troubled Restoration period have understandably drawn scholars like moths to the flame. Many heroes have been discovered, ranging from Alexander Shields at one extreme to Archbishop James Sharp at the other, some of them with an apparent significance, intellectual or political, far beyond the supposedly purblind world of Restoration Scotland. But no contemporary has emerged more enhanced in the eyes of subsequent scholarship, nor more frustrated in his own time, than Robert Leighton – ‘the outstanding bishop of the period’ – bishop of Dunblane from 1661 to 1672 and for two more years the most reluctant archbishop of Glasgow ever to wear the mitre. A number of historians have trawled the evidence of a career which oscillated between failed attempts at accommodation between Episcopalians and Presbyterians and periods of disappointed withdrawal. His moderation and humanity, chief among the qualities noted by intimates such as Gilbert Burnet and opponents including Robert Wodrow, have inevitably loomed largest in most subsequent assessments of his actions. A few later scholars, particularly those strongly sympathetic to the Covenanters, have taken the opposite tack, regarding Leighton's excessive posthumous reputation as sufficient excuse for sometimes perverse contradiction. And yet the evidence offered by the celebrated library founded by the bishop in Dunblane has never been properly weighed. How far do the volumes accumulated during his lifetime and bequeathed to the Bibliotheca Leightoniana cast light upon its founder's philosophical interests? And do they help explain those peculiar responses, a remarkable commitment to both public reconciliation and private retirement, with which Leighton approached Scotland's troubled religious situation? These are the intertwined questions with which this essay is concerned.

‘places consecrated to God [should] be venerated by all, and by no means profaned or in any way violated by a jarring or unsuitable activity, whether in working, jesting or playing …; [there should be] no laughter, shouting, immoderate mirth, indecent and indiscreet dances, indecent mockeries and harmful plays proper to the market-place or the stage’: letter of Bishop Edmund Lacy of Exeter, 1451

Old churchyards enshrine vast amounts of personal and social history, although most of it, sadly, is not recoverable. Furthermore, they often display a romantic and touching beauty. When exploring villages and towns in all parts of Britain, many of us have been moved by the sight of a raised platform of hummocky turf surrounding an ancient Christian church, walled and gated, crossed by narrow paths, shaded by mature trees, dotted with leaning headstones and lichened table-tombs, perhaps with the weathered stump of a medieval preaching cross. Above all we are impressed by the thought that most of the local population, over many centuries, lies here, ‘each in his narrow cell for ever laid’. For example, a rural churchyard of half an acre at Widford in Hertfordshire is estimated to hold more than 5,000 burials, laid to rest over a period of at least 900 years. Such places have witnessed many solemn rituals: consecration by a bishop, occasional claims of sanctuary, sad clusters of mourners around open graves, the commemorative prayers and bell-ringing of All Saints' and All Souls' days, parochial processions on Palm Sunday or Corpus Christi, and at all periods the lonely vigils of the bereaved. Repeatedly opened and re-filled by generations of gravediggers, churchyards are potent reminders of human mortality which the living have mostly treated with respect, deep reflection and some superstition.

Early in 1629 one Peter Shaw, an obscure London preacher, appeared before the Court of High Commission. While the records of the court for the relevant period have been lost, it seems clear from a later case that Shaw was both convicted and suspended. For, speaking in 1631, during proceedings against the antinomian, Samuel Pretty, Laud claimed that he

spake the less in this cause (as he intimated) because there had been so much said against these same and the like tenets in the causes of one [Robert] Townes and one Mr Shaw, which Mr Shaw, though the said bishop of London hath in public declared he should never have to do by his consent in this diocese, yet no place, said the bishop, will serve him but he must needs have admittance in London and he came to me for admittance, which I purpose, never, God willing, to grant.

During the period immediately prior to Shaw's prosecution the authorities had launched an investigation into his activities and opinions, one that involved over two dozen witnesses whose testimony appears to have been condensed into a single dossier, which survives in the state papers for March 1628/9. The three documents contained in that dossier – a set of court articles, notes from two of Shaw's sermons and a letter allegedly written by one of his supporters – are reproduced below.

Jean Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian religion, wrote that ‘there is a twofold government of man; one aspect is spiritual…the second is political…. There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority’. He emphasised this further by stating that ‘we must keep in mind that distinction which we previously laid down so that we do not (as commonly happens) unwisely mingle these two, which have a completely different nature’. The idea of the separation of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions was, of course, no post-Reformation innovation but had been a theme over centuries of conflict between popes and secular princes throughout Europe. With the fragmentation of western Christendom in the sixteenth century, the issue came to prominence within individual states, not least Scotland. As early as 1559, during the civil war which led to the Reformation, a letter to the regent, Mary of Guise, from ‘the professouris of Christis ewangell’ mentioned two ‘kingdomes’. It asserted that there was ‘ane kingdome temporall’ and ‘Christis kingdome’, the Kirk, and that the former ought to be ruled by ‘mortell men’ and the latter by Christ alone. The regent was described as ‘ane servand and na quein havand na preheminence nor authoritie above the kyrk’.

In December 1845 Bishop Michael Russell of Glasgow and Galloway wrote to a keen young Episcopalian layman, Alexander James Donald D'Orsey, a teacher at the High School in Glasgow, suggesting ordination. Conscious of the growing numbers of immigrant Episcopalians in the western suburbs of Glasgow, the bishop's intention was to stimulate a new congregation for ‘the wants of the poorer class there’. Evidently D'Orsey was already known to the bishop for he mentions him as pleading ‘with your usual eloquence’ the cause of the Episcopalian Church Society, which would raise part of the £80 stipend. Russell envisaged that D'Orsey would work in this new congregation for a year or two until something more worthy of the young man's talents came up. D'Orsey wrote stating that the proposal was attractive, not least because it was a congregation which would primarily be comprised of the ‘humbler classes’. He would continue in his present work and undertake the congregational duties part-time. His present income made it preferable to refuse the stipend, suggesting that it should go to augment the livings of poorer clergy. As a new priest D'Orsey went on to create the congregation that eventually became St John's, Anderston, and to become embroiled with Russell's successor, Bishop Walter Trower, over ritualism in the parish. The deposit of D'Orsey's correspondence with these two bishops in the National Library of Scotland provides the opportunity for a localised insight into the emergence of Episcopalian ministry to the poor in nineteenth-century Scotland's most industrialised city, and to the connection of such ministry with ritualism.

We state as a fact, which we have received, on what we deem undoubted authority, that the Puseyite party have bought up the BRITISH CRITIC, which publication accordingly will from henceforth be dedicated to the promulgation of their principles: The Record, 1 Jan. 1838

This article focuses on the Tractarian takeover and subsequent control of the British Critic, a politically and theologically conservative quarterly periodical, between 1838 and 1843. In doing so it claims several justifications. Firstly, and primarily, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Critic within first-generation Tractarianism and therefore to rehabilitate an extensive periodical journalism as a vital yet neglected source for historians of the movement. Though various Tractarians such as Richard Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey had all written for the British Magazine and William Sewell regularly for the Quarterly Review in the early 1830s, it was the Critic which came to serve as the principal medium for the movement's commentary. Historians' neglect of this commentary, it is suggested, has had important consequences in terms of our understanding of Tractarianism, for it has served to marginalise certain aspects of the movement's early thought – in particular the social criticism which was a consistent feature of the Critic's pages.

Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous, woman of her age. For much of the 1870s and 1880s she promoted the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She became a vice- president of the National Secular Society, the members of which thought almost as highly of her as they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president. In 1889, however, she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became president of the Theosophical Society, the members of which again revered her almost as much as they did its prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from the materialist atheism of the secularists to the New Age thought of the theosophists. All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable to recover any coherence in her activities within the secularist, Fabian and theosophical movements. Indeed, they have spoken of her many lives, as though she wandered aimlessly, if enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no guiding theme whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life, they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she did, but rather to her hidden needs, such as to follow a dominant man or to exercise her powers. They turn to her emotional make-up to explain her final flight from reason, and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope to represent Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with her secularism, Fabianism and theosophy, was very much of her time, for whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped by a religious movement to make Britain a truly Christian nation and a political movement to make Britain a democratic nation, the later part of her reign took its shape from the need to find both a faith capable of surviving the rationalist onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended franchise had failed to solve.

In 1564 Artus de Cossé-Brissac, bishop of Coutances in Normandy, was a member of a French diplomatic mission to Queen Elizabeth. He took the opportunity to assert a claim to exercise episcopal jurisdiction in the Channel Islands. The claim was less preposterous than it might appear, since Coutances's jurisdiction in the islands had been acknowledged throughout Henry viii's reign, and again in that of Mary. Queen and Privy Council took the 1564 claim seriously enough to demand a response from the islanders. After a good deal of prevarication on their part, the crown eventually ruled against the bishop's claim, on the grounds, as argued by the islanders, that they were subject to the bishop of Winchester. In the event, Winchester was not to enjoy its newly rediscovered rights for long. The islands were already in the process of establishing their own churches, using French Calvinist forms of worship and a fully synodical system of church government. From 1576 the islanders governed themselves without reference to episcopal authority, which was not to be re-established, in Jersey, until the reign of James i, and in Guernsey that of Charles ii. When challenged the islanders defended their position by claiming that they were indeed part of the diocese of Coutances, and that they were following the best practice of the reformed churches in that diocese.

This story is well established in outline, largely through the labours of island historians, but above all through the work of two impressive nineteenth-century French historians. A. J. Eagleston made accessible a good deal of this work, including his own researches, but unfortunately his book had to be posthumously published and is therefore rather piecemeal. D. M. Ogier has now published a valuable study of the Reformation in Guernsey. It traces the internal history in depth, stressing the conservatism of the bulk of the population and skilfully elucidating the crucial question of ecclesiastical property, before going on to its main concern, the impact of the Presbyterian discipline on island society. Although Ogier acknowledges the significance of relations between the English crown and various French parties in explaining events, he does little to elucidate these interactions; nor does he display much interest in the personalities involved in his story. This article will attempt to explain both the reluctance of successive English governments to challenge the rights of the bishop of Coutances, and the apparent inability of the Elizabethan government to prevent French Protestant refugees moulding the island churches in their own image. It will also look at some of the leading figures involved, most notably one John Aster, dean of Guernsey, a prime mover in the events of the 1560s, whose career in military administration before his ordination at the age of fifty has not been noticed; and more generally it will emphasise the link between militant Protestantism and the worlds of diplomacy and espionage.

The role of Protestantism in the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) has been strongly disputed since the ‘turn’ and reunification of 1989/90. Many of the disagreements derive from different interpretations of the relationship between State, Church and Society in the GDR. This paper first describes the state institutions which formulated and executed church policies for the Communist Party of the GDR (the SED), and then surveys relations between Church and State, offering an explanation for actions and motivations on both sides. The thesis advanced is that the decisive phase of the transformation of a ‘bourgeois’ Church into a ‘Church within socialism’ took place between 1958 and 1978, and that the preceding and subsequent periods merely had the character of ‘past history’ and ‘epilogue’.

A variety of institutions influenced Church–State policies in the GDR. First, at government level, there was until 1957 a department for ecclesiastical affairs controlled by the deputy prime minister ; after that date, there was an official secretary for church affairs, answerable to the chairman of the government (Ministerrat). At party level in the SED, there was a working group for church affairs which was part of the secretariat of the SED's central committee, answerable to the first secretary or the secretary-general of the central committee. The central committee office included a member with specific responsibility for church affairs, generally the second in line after the party chairman. In the Ministry for State Security (MfS), those involved were the head of the so-called ‘main department for social superstructure’, together with a representative of the minister or the minister himself, and the heads of administration in individual ‘Lands’ or districts.

Alien priories, the small dependencies of foreign religious houses established in the years following the Norman Conquest, were partly thank-offerings for military success and partly civilising centres and reminders of home for England's new rulers. Their foundation in the newly-conquered lands mirrored the success of the Anglo-Normans in colonising the British Isles, since later examples were planted in southern Scotland and in Ireland too. In England their establishment dated from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries. They passed out of existence over a time-scale which was almost as long, for from the late thirteenth century, during periods of Anglo-French war, they were under attack from the crown as alleged nests of spies and as exporters of wealth to the enemy. The consequent seizure of these small houses by the crown and their vigorous exploitation by the exchequer reduced monastic life in all these houses and extinguished it in many, so that the mother houses found it advantageous to sell smaller properties while some of the larger priories were prompted to seek denization. Such solutions are evident from the last two decades of the fourteenth century. Apparent landmarks in this process of disintegration and change prove, upon close inspection, to be illusory; neither the ‘expulsion’ of 1378 nor the Act of Dissolution of 1414 were such decisive moments in the history of these houses as was once thought. Instead, we may suggest, each of these small houses must be examined separately, for the later history of each was distinctive. The religious life was entirely extinguished in some, which had become merely manors, by the later fourteenth century. Courtiers under Edward III and Richard II acquired a number which they used for the endowment of new religious houses; the Carthusian order was an especial beneficiary. Henry V endowed his new foundation of Sheen with alien priories, while some others were used to augment the endowments of existing monasteries and even hospitals. Pontefract (Yorkshire), thanks to the good offices of John of Gaunt, became denizen in 1393.

Every ecclesiastical historian knows, or, dare I say, should know, Lucien Febvre's incisive and polemical article, ‘Une question mal posée’, first published in 1929, in which, beginning with a critique of recent work on the origins of the Reformation, the author ended by calling ecclesiastical history into question. The aim of this article is to place this famous article in context by examining Febvre's main contributions to the history of the Church, or as he preferred to say, the history of religion. Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) was a prolific writer and, although he has not been studied as intensively as his junior colleagues Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, his scholarly work has often been discussed. A bibliography published in 1990 listed 2,143 items either by or about Febvre which had been published up to that time. Since the history of religion was one of Febvre's main interests, it follows that this article will have to be rigorously selective, discussing his major contributions to the field together with a few studies of his achievement.

In order to give some sense of his intellectual development, Febvre's books and articles on religious history will be discussed in chronological order of publication, before any attempt at an assessment of his reception, cool or warm, or the significance of his work. These books and articles appeared in three clusters, published in 1901–11, 1925–30, and 1941–9 respectively.

Spain in the sixteenth century was not exempt from the movements of reform sweeping over Europe. Its enthusiastic but short-lived reception of Erasmian humanism in the 1520s is well-documented. So is its even more enthusiastic suppression of native ‘Lutheran’ conventicles in the 1550s and the extinction of hope for a Protestant Church in the kingdom of the Spanish Habsburgs. These events have relegated Hispanic Protestantism to little more than a footnote in most histories.

The story, though, is not limited to the Iberian peninsula. A dedicated cadre of Spaniards did battle in the realm of ideas from places of exile in Naples, France, England, Geneva and Germany. In so doing, they contributed significantly to a core literature of evangelical humanism in Spanish. This corpus consists, in part, of translations of Reformers' works, such as Melanchthon's Antithesis and Luther's treatise on Christian liberty, by Francisco de Enzinas (1540); Calvin's catechism, by Juan Pérez (Geneva 1556); and Calvin's Institutes, by Cipriano de Valera (London 1597). Translations of classics also figure prominently in the work of Francisco de Enzinas, for example Plutarch's Lives and the Decades of Livy.