The Council of Nicaea was a landmark event, yet uncertainty surrounds almost every aspect of the council and its proceedings. No Acts survive, the signatory lists are incomplete, and the organization of the council’s meetings and the identities and motivations of those who participated remain controversial. Rather than propose another hypothetical reconstruction, the aim of this chapter is to reconsider the different interpretations made possible by our limited evidence and the particular questions that have divided scholarly opinion. Who attended the council? Who took the leading roles in the council’s deliberations? And who proposed and supported the crucial decisions, such as the inclusion of the contested term homoousios into the Nicene Creed? Not only are such questions essential to understanding the council and its legacy, but our search for answers offers the opportunity to look beyond the emperor Constantine and the most famous episcopal protagonists, and consider the significance of Nicaea for some of the less prominent figures who contributed to the drama. While their voices are difficult to hear, these more humble individuals had their own parts to play and shared the contemporary awe at a spectacle that symbolized the changing status of Christianity within the fourth-century Roman empire.

The original Goths were a Germanic people who played a crucial role in the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of medieval Europe. In 410, a Gothic army led by Alaric sacked the imperial city of Rome, and at the end of the fifth century kingdoms ruled by Visigoths and Ostrogoths dominated much of the post-Roman West. The last Gothic kingdom disappeared more than a thousand years ago, when Visigothic Spain fell to the Muslim Arabs in 711, yet the Gothic legacy endured. The Renaissance depiction of the Goths as destructive barbarians was balanced by the Reformation’s respect for Gothic vigour and freedom, which gathered momentum in Germany and England and inspired the cultural revival from which the modern Gothic emerged. This chapter provides an introduction to the Goths of history, from their legendary origins to the downfall of Visigothic Spain, for only against that historical background, it claims, can we understand the attraction of the Gothic from the seventeenth century to the present day.

‘Few councils have been so rooted in tradition as the Council of Chalcedon.’ The words are those of Aloys Grillmeier, from the conclusion of the first volume of his monumental work Christ in Christian Tradition, and they are words with which the bishops who gathered at Chalcedon in 451 would have wholeheartedly agreed. Yet what do we mean by ‘Christian tradition’? How did that tradition develop over time? Who had the authority to determine what would come to be regarded as traditional? All of our contemporary sources for the great controversies that divided the Christian Church in the fourth and fifth centuries appeal to the authority of the one true and unchanging Christian tradition. Yet at the heart of those controversies lies a debate over the very nature and interpretation of Christian tradition itself. In this short paper I wish to explore the place of the Council of Chalcedon in that debate and the evidence of the Acts of Chalcedon that have now become so much more accessible through the superb new translation and commentary that Richard Price and Michael Gaddis have brought before us.

In its broadest sense Christian tradition embraces everything handed down by the Church from the time of the apostles onwards, including doctrinal teachings, ethics, customs and liturgical practices. More narrowly, tradition represents the expression of the faith of the Church, preserving the Christian message revealed by Christ for later generations.