There are several reasons why the study of the works of Sidonius Apollinaris should be of particular interest to ecclesiastical historians. He represents in a peculiar way the end of the old régime, under which Christianity had taken root and had begun to spread, and the beginning of the new period which we call the Middle Ages. He was a devoted admirer of the Roman imperial system, a devotee of the Muses of Roman poetry and prose, but also, in the second part of his life, a bishop of the Christian Church. He was born about 430, when the emperor Valentinian III, who could be reasonably represented as the scion of a legitimate dynasty, was apparently in secure possession of the imperial throne. He died about 480, bishop of a see in a barbarian kingdom, a few years after the last Roman puppet-emperor had been dethroned. He has left us not only poems and panegyrics but also letters dealing, among other things, with the day-to-day problems of his see. His contribution to our knowledge of the Gallic Church of the mid-fifth-century—a dark period by any standard of measurement—must be of great value, and perhaps a fresh survey of certain aspects of it may not be unfruitful.

In order to understand the crusading movement it has always been necessary to define what was understood by the ‘crusade’ as a religious exercise within the Christian tradition. This attempt to identify the ‘crusade idea’ goes back to the earliest commentators on the First Crusade, but has gained increasing vitality during the last thirty years. It is not a matter of weighing the relative importance of, on the one hand, the religious and, on the other, the secular or political motives, but of describing the content of the nova religio as such. In this sense Erdmann, who first set up the subject as capable of disciplined study, traced the antecedents in socio-religious forms of behaviour without which the Kreuzzugsidee could not have been conceived, regarding it as in its essentials formulated at the launching of the First Crusade, with Jerusalem as only a minor and ancillary target. Alphandéry, to single out another notable contributor to this type of study, diagnosed the dramatic emergence of a distinctive idée de croisade during the very course of the First Crusade, concentrated on the deliverance of the Holy Places, a unique experience never to be wholly repeated. Another notion of the ‘crusade’ was developed by Rousset—an institution de salut with its characteristic ideology, entertained generally during the first half of the twelfth century.5 There are studies also of the ideas associated with crusading in the crusade appeals, preaching, justification and criticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the forms of procedure, and in Latin and vernacular poetry.

One of the features in common in sixteenth-century episcopal visitations in England, whether Catholic or Reformed, is enquiry after usurers. Bonner's Articles for London in 1554 may be compared in this respect with Grindal's Injunctions for York 17 years later: ‘…Whether in the City of London or diocese of the same name there be any person that is a notorious and common usurer, which lendeth his money for unlawful and excessive gain and lucre, contrary to the manifest words of scripture, to the evil example of other Christian people, to the danger of his own soul, and to the utter undoing and hindrance of many, especially if poor and young beginners, borrowing for their necessity?’ ‘…the churchwardens and sworn men of every parish shall half yearly from time to time present unto the Ordinary the names of all such persons of their parish…as be usurers, that is to say, all those who lend money, corn, ware, or other thing, and receive gain thereof over and above that which they lend’.

If it is true that the built-in principle of radical self-criticism is one of the marks of the Reformation tradition, contemporary students of Reformation thought have a valid claim upon their place in its authentic succession. Though more slowly and with occasional relapses into an earlier stance of confessional apologetics, this applies increasingly also to studies dealing with the relation of the theology of Luther and Calvin.

In the numerous studies of the life of Cardinal Newman, there has frequently been too much attention paid to his own personal development while the circle in which he moved has been ignored. This is particularly true of some of his early associations at Oxford.