This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and Northern Rus' as processes separated by established confessional and institutional boundaries. Surviving narrative sources mention a number of clerical peregrinators crossing confessional borders in northern Europe in the post-conversion period, and some contemporaneous baptismal rites from Scandinavia and northern Rus' testify to their ability to influence the basic Christian rituals in both regions. These phenomena suggest that differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were in no way preventing contacts across the early Christian north in the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth century.

The abbey of St Augustine was named for Augustine ‘Apostle of the English’, as was its associated parish church, but was governed from its foundation by canons of the rule of St Augustine of Hippo. The two Augustines in the equation were a source of confusion. A reconstruction of the abbey's lost liturgical calendar suggests that the chapter sought to exploit this uncertainty in the matter of the foundation history of their abbey, with the aim of displacing, in the popular mind, the humble ‘English’ saint of the dedication in favour of the ‘Latin’ founder of the canons' rule.

This paper interprets late medieval religious culture by considering lay expectations of and attitudes towards the clergy. The analysis is prompted by and framed around a convent controversy, which was extensively documented in the course of an ecclesiastical trial. Contemporary ‘convent reform’ is not conceived as an ecclesiastical event, but rather as a symptom of the changing relationship between town and convent. The description of religious provision in the town shows that there was a strong lay demand for the clergy and the rituals performed by them, and that parishioners were ready to invest financially in maintaining local priests, even if it involved considerable additional expenses. The conflict between town and convent can therefore be considered as a result of a liturgical deficit in the spiritual market of the town. The parishioners' behaviour is interpreted as a symptom of the eucharistic and penitential devotional culture of the time, which was regulated in practice by the principle of intercession and the institution of good works. The paper argues that the divergent strands of late medieval religious culture generated a ‘consumption’ of the sacred. The mendicant friars had a special role in the late medieval religious market as they provided opportunities for religious experiences which differed in kind from parish observances.

This article analyses the varying contemporary and later responses to Robert Southey's Life of Wesley (1820). Acclaimed for its literary qualities, its appearance in the shadow of the Evangelical Revival and the growing Methodist movement meant that its biographical perspective was long obscured by the nineteenth-century ‘Wesley legend’. Methodist reviewers such as Henry Moore and Richard Watson, repelled by his critique of ‘enthusiasm’ as well as his claim that Wesley was motivated by power and ‘ambition’, questioned Southey's theological credentials and religious orthodoxy. A more nuanced view of Southey's biography was provided by Anglican commentators such as Reginald Heber and Alexander Knox who, while sympathetic to Wesley and the Evangelical Revival, supported many of Southey's judgements from a High Church Anglican standpoint. This article sets Southey's biography within the context of his own theological and political evolution, exploring the issues of authorial motivation and the longer-term literary and historical impact and legacy of his biography.

This article is a contribution to the recent debate in this Journal between Ralph Brown and Boyd Hilton concerning the nature of British nineteenth-century premillennialism.1 It discusses the premillennialists' view of time and argues that a sense of God's involvement with the historical process led them to affirm temporal development and progress as the media for divine activity. It also discusses their view of the destiny of the earth and shows how premillennialist eschatology was fully materialistic, placing a high view on the body and the physical world. These are important factors in accounting for the premillennialist social vision.