Did the twelfth century discover the individual? For a number of years now medievalists have claimed that it did. Indeed, over the past fifty years, in what Wallace Ferguson calls ‘the revolt of the medievalists’, scholars have claimed for the twelfth century many of the characteristics once given to the fifteenth century by Michelet and Burckhardt. As a result, standard textbook accounts now attribute to the twelfth century some or all of the following: ‘humanism’, both in the narrow sense of study of the Latin literary classics and in the broader sense of an emphasis on human dignity, virtue and efficacy; ‘renaissance’, both in the sense of revival of forms and ideas from the past (classical and patristic) and in the sense of consciousness of rebirth, and historical perspective; ‘the discovery of nature and man’, both in the sense of an emphasis on the cosmos and human nature as entities with laws governing their behaviour and in the sense of a new interest in the particular, seen especially in the ‘naturalism’ of the visual arts around the year 1200. In the past fifteen years, however, claims for the twelfth century have increasingly been claims for the discovery of ‘the individual’, who crops up–with his attendant characteristic ‘individuality’—in many recent titles. In the area of political theory, Walter Ullmann has seen the individual emerging in the shift from subject to citizen. Peter Dronke, Robert Hanning and other literary critics have argued for the emergence of the individual both as author and as hero of twelfth-century poetry and romance. And, in the area of religious thought, R. W. Southern, Colin Morris and John Benton have called to our attention a new concern with self-discovery and psychological self-examination, an increased sensitivity to the boundary between self and other and an optimism about the capacity of the individual for achievement.

We have learnt long since that the pioneers of humanism in early Renaissance Italy are not to be regarded as atheists, pagans, or even non-conformists. Some might be cynical about the institutional and political Church with which as Italians, and not infrequently as ecclesiastical employees, they were all too familiar, but they were not looking to disturb the Church in its role as one of the pillars of established society. If as intellectuals they were critical of the language and philosophical apparatus in which the Church had elaborated its doctrines, this did not usually imply scepticism of the revealed truths that were presumed to be enshrined in dogma or rejection of the rituals and practices of the Church, whatever dangers to the faith conservatives might claim to see in their classical enthusiasm. Among these familiar and respected practices, to the early humanists as to their contemporaries, was the veneration of the saints. Old saints were venerated and new saints made in fifteenth-century Italy as elsewhere, and occasionally they furnished subjects to a man classifiable by his education and professional expertise as a humanist.

‘As one that honoureth and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart’, wrote Archbishop Hutton to Cecil from Bishop-thorpe in December 1604, ‘I wish less wasting of the Trasure of the Realm, and more Moderation in the lawful exercise of Hunting; both that poor Men's Corn may be less spoiled, and other his Majesty's subjects more spared.’ At the time James I was again in the field, as he had been for much of 1604, complementing his natural propensity for settling the principles of a policy and leaving its working out to his ministers with an addiction to strenuous exercise for his health's sake. He had already allowed delay among his more reluctant bishops in carrying through the series of concessions granted to the puritan clergy at the Hampton Court conference; and as the expiry of the period of grace before the full enforcement of the new canons drew nearer, he made it clear that he did not expect to be troubled with whatever detailed problems might arise. They were his bishops’ responsibility. In Bancroft he seemed to have found the primate he need to succeed Whitgift. Not only would Bancroft enhance the prospects of stability within the state by bringing a sense of discipline and order to the Church, but he had the energy and determination to take charge of ecclesiastical administration for months at a time. For these reasons above all the Calvinist James had overcome his reservations about Bancroft's views on iure divino episcopacy. As the guiding hand in convocation behind the revised and more fully explained canons, Bancroft was undoubtedly best fitted, by experience as well as temperament, to take charge of the efforts to enforce them. By the time he died late in 1610, after a hard struggle to ‘reconstruct’ the English Church, only a minority of its dioceses had not lost clergy through deprivation from their livings, mostly for inconformity and most of them in the southern province; countless others had been suspended. So closely has Bancroft been associated with the efforts to obtain obedience to the new canons, especially to the articles in canon 36 referring to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty Nine Articles, that debate about his impact on the Church, both in the parliamentary skirmishing at the time and among commentators since, has commonly used as a measure the number of clergy he is supposed to have dispossessed, whether the 300 his puritan critics claimed, the 60 or so he himself once asserted and which R. G. Usher subsequently endorsed, or the 80 to 90 finally established by S. B. Babbage. The case for or against him has always tended to be built on numbers rather than on any assessment of the degree of responsibility he had for what happened. James, although clearly not open to direct attack in parliament, has in any case seemed a peripheral figure, expressing anger and alarm when signs of opposition to conformity came his way, but in no sense providing continuous direction of his bishops’ efforts. Before he departed once more for the countryside in mid-November, he had settled with Bancroft the manner in which the new canons were to be introduced, quietly permitting additional time beyond the deadline at the end of November for all but the most notoriously inconformable clergy in the hope of edging the rest fairly quickly towards full conformity and, where appropriate, subscription to the new terms ‘willingly and ex animo’.

At about noon on Thursday, 2 March 1905, Charles Gore knocked on the south-west door of St Philip's Birmingham, and, having been admitted, proceeded to be enthroned as the first Anglican bishop of Birmingham. A commemorative booklet described those ceremonies minutely, but only briefly alluded to the prolonged agitation for the creation of the diocese. Apart from passing references and a perceptive analysis, in an earlier pamphlet, of the reasons for the initial failure of the scheme, no substantial secondary literature on the subject exists.

Beyond a doubt, the newspaper La Croix and its publisher, the Maison de la Bonne Presse, have played a central role in French Catholic journalism for over thirty years. Indeed, it was the leading Catholic press voice of the Third Republic from the Dreyfus Affair to the fall of France. No newspaper of Catholic inspiration could seriously contest its circulation dominance, with the possible exception of the Breton Christian Democratic L'Ouest-Eclair. However, the impact of this latter daily was limited to western France, and by the time it outdistanced La Croix's circulation, it had largely abandoned its Catholic or Christian character. La Croix, on the other hand, was known and read throughout France and remained forthrightly Catholic throughout the life of the Third Republic. Its editorial policy was openly papal, and it sought consciously to be the organ of the French Catholic masses.