Any period of history which later ages deem to have been significant is apt to gather to itself a mythology. To the medieval Church the first three Christian centuries appeared as a period of continuous slaughter, in which legions of martyrs preferred to perish rather than deny their faith in Christ. With such an assumption it was inevitable that the extinction of paganism during the years which followed the conversion of Constantine should be seen as a pious work undertaken in conformity with God's will – gesta Dei per Christianos – and when Julian the Apostate attempted to turn back the tide, he was duly slain by two warrior saints sent for the purpose from heaven – a legend which had sufficient vitality eventually to find its way into the Ethiopic Miracles of the Virgin Mary, with Julian transformed into a gigantic artisan named Gôlyâd, who threatens to destroy a monastery and is slain by a martyred knight raised by Our Lady to that end. On the pagan side we have the well-known story of how Serena, wife of Stilicho and favourite niece of Theodosius the Great, took a necklace from the image of the Great Mother for her own adornment and mocked and humiliated an aged vestal virgin who denounced her. At a later date, when Alaric the Goth threatened Rome, Serena was suspected of treachery and strangled. To the pagan historian Zosimus her fate was the reward of her impiety, and it seemed fitting that the neck which had usurped the goddess's ornament would at the last be encircled by the executioner's rope. The factual truth of these stories is not, for our purposes, important. What matters is the witness that they provide to the mythological – or, if you prefer it, the theological – interpretations which were early given to the victory of Christianity.

All sources of Cistercian history avow repeatedly that the primary aim of the founders was a stricter adherence to the Rule. Most scholars accept this but disagree considerably over what this implied in practice. Against an older view that the Cistercians were determined to observe the Rule in every detail and to prohibit not only what St Benedict condemned but even what he failed to mention, a number of more recent commentators, including P. Salmon, B. K. Lackner and J. Leclercq, have argued that the ideal was not a complete literalism so much as a complete fidelity to its spirit of renunciation, penitence, prayer and work. L. B. Lekai has taken this argument several steps further to claim that the Cistercian movement had little to do with a return to the Rule for its own sake. It derived rather from a general desire among the more advanced spirits of the eleventh century ‘to create a life of perfect austerity and seclusion from the world’. The founders ‘handled that venerable document of monastic legislation with remarkable liberality. They invoked and applied it when it suited their purpose; they ignored or even contradicted it when it could not be fitted into their concept of monasticism, largely based on the ideals of the eleventh-century reforms’. The increasing emphasis on the Rule, which Lekai does not deny, is to be explained by two secondary objects: to establish the movement on an indisputably legal foundation and to defend the Cistercians against charges of novelty. In fact, so little were the first Cistercians concerned with literal adherence to the Rule that they immediately departed from it in several important respects. Other deviations followed quickly, not as is often alleged because the Cistercians betrayed their ideals almost as soon as they proclaimed them, but because a literal interpretation of St Benedict had never been their intention in the first place.

The conciliar movement is often seen as the major political issue in which the universities of Oxford, Paris and the newer universities became actively embroiled during the fourteenth century and thereafter. It was the last and most ambitious product of the medieval vision of government by consent and representation that had evolved during the fourteenth century, and it marshalled the resources of theorists and practitioners of politics, of arts and theology faculty lecturers, of canon and civil lawyers, of monarchical publicists and papal hierocrats. In general, conciliarism drew upon the university-trained in a manner not previously seen on such a scale. During the Great Schism (1378–1449), the universities assumed exceedingly important roles in the affairs of the universal Church, with the University of Paris playing a dominant part from the start in proposing the via concilii. Pierre d'Ailly was, like Gerson, Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, and like the earlier Marsilius of Padua, a Paris scholar. And it has recently been argued that university support for the Basle conciliar programme was motivated not only by an attachment to the ideal of conciliar government but also by the hope of reforms which would improve the status of university-trained doctors in the Church. While the bulk of controls proposed by the conciliar movement concerned the reduction of papal control, a few aimed more explicitly at promoting the interests of graduates.

In an article published in Past and Present some years ago, Professor Strauss drew attention to an area of activity that early sixteenth-century reformers considered to be of vital importance - evangelical effort amongst the young. The overwhelming impression left by this article and by a subsequent full-scale study of the indoctrination of the young in the German Reformation is that – in Professor Strauss's terms – failure, not success, was the dominant note.

It is more than twenty-one years since Professor John Bossy wrote his stimulating and controversial article on ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’. His article made familiar to a wide range of students the concepts of ‘seigneurial Catholicism’ and ‘survivalism’. It concluded, tendentiously, that ‘the history of Elizabethan Catholicism is a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations’. Professor Bossy subsequently developed his ideas about the new kind of Counter-Reformation Catholicism which was affecting other countries outside England, and then in 1975 he produced a major work on The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. In this he advanced the view that the English Catholic Community really began in the 1570s. What happened between the 1530s and the 1570s was merely ‘the posthumous history, if you will, of “medieval” or “pre-Reformation” Christendom in England’. He agreed that the English Catholic community launched about 1570 had some continuity with the past, but he argued that it was ‘in most respects a new creation’. Before then, there existed a hangover from the past labelled ‘the Old Religion’, but this was ‘less concerned with doctrinal affirmation or dramas of conscience than with a set of ingrained observances which denned and gave meaning to the cycle of the week and the seasons of the year’. This, according to Professor Bossy, had been aptly termed survivalism. He argued that: ‘As a complex of social practices rather than a religion of internal conviction, it offered no barrier to the degree of attendance at the parish church required to preserve the integrity of the household.’

There were tears of joy and rounds of applause among the prelates who closed the Council of the Church in Trent Cathedral in December 1563. The 226 signatories to the final decrees and the many other attendant theologians and canon lawyers who had served on sub-committees no doubt had mixed emotions at this conclusion: pride in what had been achieved; relief that the bitter arguments which had characterised many of the final sessions were now ended; thankfulness that, with whatever haste, they had finally agreed on a package of legislation for the sick pope to sign, in case his death would mean that the work was lost or had to be redone; hope and expectation – at least among the genuine reformers – that they could now go out into the world knowing what they had to defend against heretics, and that they had rules – whatever the omissions – to guide their reform of the Church and its members. The sick pope recovered; by June 1564 he had ratified the canons and decrees produced by the Council since its opening in December 1545 and ordered their printing and circulation to diocesan bishops for implementation.

Church is not the first place we should think of looking for ‘the historian of the Roman Empire’. He is more usually thought of as the opponent of organised Christianity and of the established church whether under Constantine or the Hanoverians. Yet we know that he dutifully sat in the family pew at Buriton, occasionally attended services elsewhere and was indeed something of a connoisseur of sermons. Our aim is to seek him out during times of worship and, by an imaginative interpretation of certain known facts, to enter as far as possible into his mind. Such informed reading between the lines, using the documents which reveal to complement those which leave things unsaid, is hardly going beyond what the historian does when he deduces probable causes or demonstrable effects from a set of well-documented facts.