‘One is always aware of Bede's Church as an institution of men and women, meetings and buildings, and especially as a bishops' Church.’ With this comment, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill directed attention to a fundamental aspect of Bede's world which requires further examination. From early childhood until his death, Bede was and remained a monk. He had entered the monasterium of Wearmouth and Jarrow at the age of seven and was to remain in it all his life. Although he was ordained to the priesthood by John of Beverley he never advanced to episcopal office. Despite the fact that he was nurtured in a world of reflective scholarship at Wearmouth and Jarrow it is now less common for historians to view Bede as ‘a lonely intellectual locked in an elite minority community’ and a scholar who lived out his life away from the events of the outside world. He perceived that world and the clergy who occupied it, however, through monastic eyes. Since Bede is, and indeed should be, seen as a representative and guardian of a monastic culture heavily influenced by Benedictine spirituality his views concerning the episcopate have not been analysed to the same extent as his views concerning monasticism. This is somewhat surprising since Bede himself perceived a clear link between the episcopal and monastic lives and was deeply concerned with the early Anglo-Saxon Church as an episcopally governed institution. The purpose of this article is to examine Bede's exploration of the manner in which individual bishops came personally to define their prestige, power and authority. This involves an investigation of their continued attachment to ascetic traditions once they had been elevated to the episcopate and an examination of the models applying ascetic sanctity to an episcopal context which Bede inherited from his predecessors in the late antique and early Christian world.

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.

As Elizabeth's reign neared its end, the futility of Puritan efforts to restructure the Church of England finally became apparent. By the early 1590s, with a strong conservative shift in the ecclesiastical leadership, the death of powerful patrons and friends at court, and the decisive defeat of the Presbyterian movement, the effect upon Puritan fortunes was devastating. What conservative churchmen did not suspect, however, was that even as they savoured victory, a creative rechannelling of the quest for further reformation was underway. In some quarters, frustration over the failure to gain power had led in different directions, to more radical moves like separatism or the Martin Marprelate project; but non-separating Puritans, few of whom had tied their fortunes to dogmatic Presbyterianism or were prepared to abandon the national Church, improvised a quieter response. If the Church was unreformable, they would reach the citizenry at personal and local levels with a ‘more spiritual and interior religion’. Thus the paradox that ‘the miscarriage of the further reformation coincided with the birth of the great age of Puritan religious experience’: coincided, that is, with the rise of a new, introspective, pietist phase of Puritan initiative.

Studies of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in Britain have almost exclusively focused on the Church of England. The impact of the Catholic revival within Scotland has been accorded little attention. This neglect partly reflects the small size of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Yet the subject deserves fuller consideration precisely because the minority Scottish Episcopal Church was, by the nineteenth century, more uniformly High Church in its theology and outlook than the Church of England, a fact which predisposed it to be peculiarly receptive to Tractarianism, which in turn exacerbated its relations with the dominant Presbyterian Kirk. The few serious studies of the question, however, have been coloured by an uncritical assumption that the movement's impact on the Episcopal Church was altogether positive and benign. The differences between the Tractarians and nonjuring episcopalians of the north have been overlooked or understated. While according due weight to the affinities and continuities between the two traditions, this article will question the standard Anglo-Catholic historiography and reveal the tensions within the Episcopal Church sharpened by the often negative influence of the Catholic revival when transported north of the border.

An exchange took place at the end of the nineteenth century between William Rainey Harper and Dwight L. Moody that makes little sense to those who study American intellectual life at the end of the twentieth. What is remarkable about this incident is not that Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, a new institution dedicated to promoting science, advanced research and graduate education, invited Moody, the leading revivalist of the Gilded Age, to speak at one of America's most promising new universities. To be sure, our understanding of the educational reforms associated with the founding of research universities rarely encompasses the transatlantic revivals of Moody and his song leader, Ira Sankey. And Harper's invitation to Moody could reasonably be compared to the contemporary practice of conferring honorary degrees on civic leaders and celebrities not known for their interest in higher education but whose reputation could well benefit the degree-granting institution. What is exceptional in this exchange is Harper's assessment of the similarities between his university and Moody's revivals. While Harper acknowledged the use of different means, he thought his and Moody's aims were the same. ‘I do not understand’, Harper wrote, ‘that you, as a matter of fact, represent any other position than that which is actually maintained here at the University. The differences between us are merely differences of detail.’