As a historian and man of learning, William of Malmesbury has over the last century drawn the most diverse reactions from those scholars whose work has brought them into contact with him. On the one hand, praise has been lavished on his wide reading, critical acumen and historical judgement; on the odier, his credulity, carelessness, wilful mishandling of evidence and meandering irrelevance have been stigmatised. One group of scholars sees him as head and shoulders above, and in advance of his time, a ‘modern’ writer; others see him as the creature of his epoch and immediate environment in a pejorative sense. Yet it would surely be true to say that no-one since or apart from William Stubbs has attained such a command of William's output as to be in a position to make an overall assessment of it. Even Stubbs did not claim to be attempting this and, in any case, he was unacquainted with several of William's works, and misattributed others.

Venetian religious literature of the Renaissance period presents an amorphous picture to the historian; there were few recurrent preoccupations among Venetian religious writers and they used a wide variety of theological styles. The topic of the officium episcopi, the bishop's duties and rule of life, did however recur with some frequency. There was, indeed, a considerable volume of literature on this subject in Catholic Europe as a whole between the Conciliar era and the post-Tridentine period. The best known, almost the only widely known Italian example of the genre is the work of a Venetian: the De officio episcopi of Gasparo Contarini. Other Venetian writings on this theme have been barely studied, however, although in some cases they are subtler and more redolent of spirituality, if less explicit, than Contarini's work. It may well be that Venetians, over a period of a century and a half, made a particularly important contribution to the genre and since the Venetian patriciate produced a large number of bishops (the major bishoprics of the Venetian Terraferma were normally held by Venetian nobles) this would not be altogether surprising. It should be said, however, that even in this genre of religious literature it is difficult to point to a specifically Venetian tradition or to any particular continuity of themes; to take the case of Gasparo Contarini, a search for the Venetian antecedents of his ideas yields rather sparse fruits.

Sixteenth-century reformers, led by Martin Luther, justified their resistance to the Roman Church on the basis of Scripture literally understood. Were they influenced by the foremost medieval authority on the literal meaning of Scripture, Nicholas of Lyra? At one time, it seemed obvious that the answer was, ‘yes’. According to a couplet famous in the sixteenth century: Si Lyra non lyrasset, totus mundus delirasset, Lutherus non saltasset.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.