The reform of the Northumbrian Church constitutes a predominant theme in much that Bede wrote in his later years. Recent analyses of his later biblical commentaries have confirmed this, although a tendency remains to treat his historiographic masterpiece, theEcclesiastical history of the English people, completed in c. 731, as only aloofly reformist in outlook. This article contests such a view through an analysis of the narrative and characters of book iv, which when scrutinised can be seen to amplify some of the key reform-oriented issues voiced in Bede's last and most openly reformist work, theLetter to Egbert.

The article offers an analysis of the public debate on priestly marriage, conducted in the last decades of the eleventh century. This was the first debate on the subject in six hundred years, erupting in the context of the reform movement. Although the theme of priestly marriage was mentioned in the Carolingian period as well as in the tenth and first half of the eleventh century, it was the anonymous defence of clerical marriage, the Epistola de continentia clericorum, that gave rise to a wide-ranging public debate. The article examines this debate in terms of the argumentative approaches used by the participants, the aim being to emphasise an important undercurrent in the understanding of priestly marriage contrary to the official – or Gratian – view on the issue.

This article explores the ministry of service and love of neighbour exercised by Katharina Schutz Zell, wife of the Strasbourg Reformer Matthias Zell, focusing on Schutz Zell's theological justification for her ministry and her attempts to help those around her to understand their suffering in terms of the Gospel. Following Luther, Schutz Zell saw love of neighbour as an important means of spreading the Gospel, and thus as private activity, but as public ministry. Her work exemplifies, and may have served as a model for, the role of (female) deacon as defined by the Reformed tradition.

Richard Greenham has traditionally been depicted as a ‘comfortable’ or ‘affectionate’ divine, and in recent years it has even been suggested that he was not predestinarian in his theology at all. This article seeks to show that not only was he indeed predestinarian in his theology of salvation, but that the concept of an all-powerful, all-determining deity was central to his pastoral method. Greenham is used as an example in demonstrating that English Calvinism could be pastorally adaptive and successful, not by softening its core ideas, but by strongly emphasising man's inability to earn his own salvation and God's power over both heaven and hell.

John Henry Newman made two formative trips to Rome, the first as an Anglican priest in the early spring of 1833 when he spent five weeks in the Eternal City accompanied by his friend and colleague Hurrell Froude. The second trip was made shortly after he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1846. On both these journeys, Newman visited the Roman catacombs, which were certainly part of the standard tour of the day but which had become in the nineteenth century sites that were enveloped in considerable ecclesiastical and theological polemical debate. Looking at Newman's reactions to these sites, at these two very important junctures of his life and career, gives a very provocative and enlightening glimpse into the inner workings of his mind and heart. On a different but equally interesting historical plane, such an investigative lens highlights the significant number of people who were part of Newman's life during this period and who were devotionally drawn to these primitive burial sites.