From the fifth through to the eighth century an ecclesiastical official, the apocrisiarius, streamlined the effective governance of both Church and Empire by serving as the pope's permanent representative at the imperial Byzantine court. The letters of a former apocrisiarius, Pope Gregory i, serve as the best sources for uncovering the duties of this office and its benefits to the Church and the Empire. Investigating this office under Gregory emphasises the independent ambassadorial mandate given to these men and highlights the vital role of personal relationships in the conduct of imperial business.

This paper reconsiders the first ‘General Chapter’ of Benedictine abbots (late 1131). To explain the timing and circumstances of this event, previous scholarship mostly referred to the influence of the Cistercians on reformist groups within ‘traditional’ monasticism. A closer look at the primary evidence reveals how the first General Chapter needs to be framed against the activities of overlapping coalitions of ecclesiastical and secular agents pursuing various political, ideological and institutional interests. It also allows the causes of the ensuing dispute with the Cluniacs to be established more securely, and provides new insights into contemporary usages of statutes and the semantics of the word ‘ordo’.

This article dissents from the classic analysis of the ‘commission for ecclesiastical promotions’ (1681–4) offered by Robert Beddard in 1967. Rather than acting as a powerful ‘instrument of tory reaction’, in the hands of a ‘reversionary interest’ of lay and clerical ‘Yorkists’ dedicated to changing the political hue of the upper ranks of the clergy, in reality it functioned as ‘an instrument of personal rule’ for a king who had not surrendered his own interests to those of his heir presumptive. Its political impact is queried with evidence from the start of James's reign that emphasises the immediate sense of crisis felt by many bishops.

This article contends that William Whiston (1667–1752) has been misidentified as an Arian for more than three hundred years. Though Whiston was labelled an Arian by his theological opponents, and early in his career naively accepted the Arian label for his own Christological beliefs, he consistently demarcated his own beliefs from those of Arius of Alexandria and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Furthermore, Whiston agreed with the Council of Nicaea's decision to rule Arius’ understanding of the relationship of the Son to the Father out of bounds. Thus, William Whiston should no longer be called an Arian.

This article examines accounts of continental church life to be found in the travel journals, letters and books of leading High Church Anglicans in the nineteenth century. It argues that these constitute a neglected source of evidence for understanding the interaction between continental church developments and the High Church revival in Anglicanism. It focuses particularly on accounts of travel in Catholic countries, and concludes that there are good reasons for assuming that experience of Catholic worship on the continent influenced High Church attitudes towards liturgical and ritual reform in Anglicanism.

The collapse of the British Student Christian Movement in the long 1960s is conventionally ascribed to its mimicking of student radicalism at a time of increasing secularisation. Yet analysis of the SCM's rhetoric demonstrates that in the early 1960s the movement imagined a religious crisis when student Christianity was still strong. By embracing a theological vision of ‘secularisation’, which demanded the deliberate transposition of Christian eschatologies into secular form, the SCM embarked on an early, original and influential journey into political radicalism. In this way, the SCM made a significant contribution to British student radicalism in the late 1960s.

In writing this review I am in no small danger of running short of superlatives. To put it simply, this is a sublime scholarly achievement. Knowing the intense labour and demanding exactitude of a project like this, I am very impressed. It is difficult to conceive how Chad van Dixhoorn could have done a better job of putting these minutes and papers at the service of the scholarly community. He had help along the way, to be sure, and the skilful guidance of David F. Wright and John Morrill, but one quickly gets the sense that this is the fruit of his singular vision. If we count his years as a Cambridge PhD student, van Dixhoorn has worked full-time on the Westminster Assembly for longer than it existed in the first place. I recall being told that he had calculated (I think with tape measure in hand) that, yes, all the members of the assembly could squeeze into the smallish Jerusalem Chamber in which they met; he had even taken a shrewd guess, based on the voting records, as to which groups of divines sat next to whom, and where. He once had a dream, he tells us, in which one of the Scottish commissioners to the assembly, Samuel Rutherford, offered to help interpret the nearly impenetrable handwriting of the assembly's main scribe, Adoniram Byfield. It is as good an indication as any of the all-consuming nature of van Dixhoorn's task. Perhaps we should add here a note of thanks not just to him (and his assistants) but to his wife and children as well. For this set represents a generous gift to scholars of the seventeenth century and to all those interested in the development of Reformed Protestantism in the English–speaking world and beyond.