Innocent III regularised ecclesiastical usage of several penalties which punished the innocent along with the guilty, notably the interdict. His actions need to be understood in their intellectual as well as political context. It has long been thought that Peter the Chanter taught the future pope when he studied theology at Paris. This article presents evidence of the Chanter's radical influence on Innocent's attitude to collective guilt and punishment and compares their views with canonistic doctrine.

This article explores the printed and oral communications through which the sixteenth-century holy woman Elizabeth Barton publicised her political prophecies against the Henrician Reformation. Authorship of the primary printed account of Barton's early career has been misattributed, leading scholars to underestimate the number of accounts of Barton's miracles which circulated in her lifetime. This observation leads to an analysis of the media apparatus used by Barton and her adherents, which was an expansion into the political realm of the textual and oral networks through which saints' lives and miracles were publicised in late medieval England.

This paper highlights striking commonalities between the pre-Reformation Church in England and that in the Pale around Dublin, and argues that the eventual failure of the Tudor reformations in the Pale was not inevitable. It shows that while the Henrician Reformation encountered very considerable opposition at first, the Pale's secular and ecclesiastical elites subsequently endorsed a moderated religious settlement wherein papal authority was abrogated. They acquiesced in the first Book of Common Prayer. However, the crown's deputies were loth to enforce religious change and Protestantism won very few adherents as late as 1553.

Calvin Colton (1789–1857) was an important publicist for both evangelical revivalism and the Whig party in antebellum America. Contrary to the standard historical interpretations, however, Colton did not move smoothly from the one to the other but took up political advocacy only after denouncing Yankee revivalism and its attendant social advocacy as threats to Church and State alike. At the same time his turn to episcopacy went together with a pronounced anglophobia. An analysis of Colton's rhetoric and career path reveals a consistent pattern beneath his unexpected changes and some under-explored dimensions of American religion before the Civil War.

As in every other branch of learning, the study of the early history of Christianity has undergone massive changes during the last century. This has been due not only to the vast accumulation of knowledge through new discoveries, but to new approaches to the subject, together with the rise of archaeology as a principal factor in providing fresh information. The study of the early Church has as a result moved steadily from dogma to history, from attempts to interpret divine revelation through the development of doctrinal orthodoxy down the ages, to research into the historical development of an earthly institution of great complexity and of great significance in the history of mankind over the past two thousand years.