By the 1230s Latins and Greeks were riot short of issues for debate or polemic, but the topic of purgatory did have a novel feel about it. The doctrine seems to emerge on the common agenda fairly suddenly, finding no place, for example, in the wide-ranging list of 104 points of divergence drawn up by the Byzantine prelate, Constantine Stilbès, in the wake of the cruel sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. The subject did, however, establish itself as a hardy perennial, and it is proposed to trace its main ramifications up to the death of Emperor Michael viii in 1282, and then to concentrate on the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–9). Without a doubt the debates and the constant attempts at reunion were not conducted in isolation from wider cultural, political and military considerations, the kind of considerations that in 1400 would lead the Byzantine emperor to journey as far as England. But here the emphasis will fall on the theological aspects. Moreover, there were also in play forces of inertia, ignorance and mutual incomprehension difficult to assess rationally. The thirteenth-century friar, Humbert of Romans O.P., in discussing what would make for reunion with the Greeks noted how a schism might be continued simply because it had existed for a long time, just like the feud between Guelf and Ghibelline.

An increasing number of men wanted, or needed, to transact business at the papal curia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The contemporaneous development of the papal administration – partly responding to and partly encouraging the growth of business – made its transaction a more elaborate affair for those engaged in it. In a sense, the office of proctor came to the rescue of men faced with the greater frequency and complexity of business at the curia.

In 1530 or 1531 Thomas Alwaye, an otherwise obscure evangelical prosecuted by Wolsey and the bishops for buying English new testaments and other prohibited books, petitioned Anne Boleyn for intervention in his affairs in the following extraordinary terms:

When extreme need began to compel me, right honourable lady, to make me friends by whose means I might be released out of my miserable thraldom, I could not find one in all this realm in whom I had any hope or looked for any comfort until your gracious ladyship came unto my remembrance. But anon I remembered how many deeds of pity your goodness had done within these few years, and that without respect of any persons, as well to strangers and aliens as to many of this land, as well to poor as to rich: whereof some looking for no redemption were by your gracious means not only freely delivered out of costly and very long imprisoning, but also by your charity largely rewarded and all thing restored to the uttermost, so that every man may perceive that your gracious and Christian mind is everywhere ready to help, succour and comfort them that be afflicted, troubled and vexed, and that not only in word and tongue, but even after the saying of St John.

‘Popular religion’ has of late been a much-discussed subject among historians of early modern Europe. Most of the best work has been on France, by French and North American scholars, while for Germany the subject is virtually ignored. Oddly enough, serious scholarship on ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ religion began in Germany at the opening of this century, and by the 1920s a major new field of historical enquiry had been established under the banner of religiöse Volkskunde. However, historians left the study of German popular religion to folklorists, a tendency perhaps reinforced by the rather dubious reputation the discipline of Volkskunde acquired under the Nazi regime. Both before and after 1945, folklore scholars have contributed numerous important studies of popular religion in early modern Germany, but historians have been reluctant to follow in their footsteps. Some of this reluctance may be explained by the absence of precise definition as to what is meant by ‘popular religion’. It is often defined through the use of polar opposites, in terms such as ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religion. The former is institutional religion, the latter that which deviates from institutional norms. Another definition invokes an opposition between theory and practice.

Derek Holmes, proposing a fresh investigation of the history of Catholics in nineteenth-century England, largely by reference to a tiny group of national clerical leaders, has justified his approach by arguing that it is impossible to imagine the development of English Catholicism without them. This seems a strange apology with which to introduce the history of so numerous and diverse a community. Is it to be assumed that that same community has little or no life apart, or that it had little significance except as backdrop to the drama of episcopal politics? This objection is particularly apropos of nineteenth-century Catholicism, which came to enjoy an enormous following in circumstances that appear to bear but a marginal relationship to the activity of the elite. In short, there is surely a popular dimension here, independent of figurehead biography, which is possibly best captured in the nineteenth-century legend of English Catholic history.