Starting with the fact that John of Antioch and Nestorius were friends, this article asks whether they were also theological allies, as is commonly assumed. Based on an examination of a letter written by John to Nestorius in November of ad 430, as well as other pertinent letters and documents, the author concludes that the two were not on the same side theologically, but that John was unaware of how fundamentally they disagreed. The relationship between John and Nestorius is then used to help interpret the proceedings at Ephesus in ad 431, the action of John and of Cyril of Alexandria in the Reunion of 433 and the Christological controversy as a whole.

The ‘Gregorian Reform’ or ‘Gregorian Revolution’ is a model of top–down ecclesiastical change that assumes that local bishops suddenly became, to some extent, agents of Rome. One striking illustration of this is the portrayal of the ‘new Gregorian bishop’, based largely on Berardus of Marsica (d. 1130), presented by Pierre Toubert in his classic Structures du Latium médiéval (1973), and now reprised by Jacques Dalarun (2003). This article, employing an unedited collection of miracles, re-examines Toubert's treatment of Berardus and reveals a reforming saint who belongs less to Rome and more to his idiosyncratic cathedral of Santa Sabina.

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution.

Herbert Thorndike's Of the covenant of grace (1659) was the largest and last substantial word on its subject from a priest of the seventeenth-century English Church. Recasting elements of practical divinity that are commonly associated with evangelical Puritanism, attacking the error of absolute and immediate predestination by decree and shifting stress from baptism to regeneration, Thorndike defended God's honour and majesty by affirming human freedom of choice in the ordo salutis and the moral life. His argument centred in a programme of reciprocal ‘helps’ that unites Arminian synergism with the early modern scholastic concept of scientia media, God's ‘middle knowledge’.

This article considers how the roots of modern vegetarianism, one of the fastest growing cultural trends in the UK and USA since the 1960s, can be found in Protestant sectarianism. Christian vegetarianism is shown to have developed in three main periods: the first during the first half of the nineteenth century and culminating in 1847 with the founding of the Vegetarian Society; the second starting in the 1890s; and the third in the 1960s. The article demonstrates that the main themes to be found in the arguments for Christian vegetarianism are humanitarianism, purity and reincarnation. It examines why these movements experienced only limited success in preaching a Christian vegetarian message and considers whether this work continues today in the work of groups of vegetarian Christians within the mainstream Churches.

On 4 May 1897 more than a hundred Parisians – mostly women of high society – perished in the Charity Bazaar fire. The records of this terrible accident reveal much about the charitable practices of the nobility in France of the Third Republic. This article explores the place of religion in upper-class charity within the context of republican anticlericalism. It focuses especially on issues of inter-faith collaboration and the role of aristocratic women in supporting the work of the Catholic Church.