Cyprian's baptism is usually placed in 245–6, two to four years before he became bishop. The early treatise Ad Donatum is thus taken as a witness to the neophyte's spiritual ‘transition’. This article challenges this common biographical narrative. A date just before Cyprian's ordination in 248/9 fits the evidence better than 246. As comparison with Ad Quirinum suggests, the winsome portrait of Cyprian the true convert that Ad Donatum paints might have done more than exhort neophytes to zealous spirituality: it may also have been meant to silence the presbyters whom Pontius’ Vita and Cyprian himself portray as critics of his ordination.

This article examines the ceremonial reception of papal legates in the early Middle Ages. It offers a precise, distinctive and normative portrait of their ritualised practice well before the existence of written canonical rules and procedures. The customs, principles, gestures and symbols conditioning legatine activities in this historical era became necessary pre-conditions to political communication, interaction and exchange. Their expression and representation, it is argued, help to explain the manifestation of Roman authority in distant Christian provinces, its varied meaning to contemporaries and the formative rules of political governance and diplomacy.

The reaction of the Orthodox Church to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) arguably set a pattern that would persist until the end of Byzantium. While members of the hierarchy were mostly opposed to accepting invitations to attend the council, the Emperor Theodore i Laskaris saw it as an opportunity to open up a dialogue with the papacy in the hope of deriving some political advantage. This episode reveals that negotiations over the Union of Churches divided Byzantine society in a way that had not happened before 1204.

Viewed with hindsight, the link between Jansenism and Gallican resistance to papal pronouncements can seem inevitable. Before 1653, however, Rome's reluctance to commit itself unambiguously to condemning Jansen's ideas of grace made the idea of gaining papal support conceivable to some of his supporters. This article examines one hitherto ignored moment: the panegyric delivered in Rome by Charles Hersent, whose career in controversy combined ultramontane views with Jansenist theology. The episode reveals the broader volatility of these years, often missing from accounts that present the condemnation of Jansenism as inevitable, and the fact that Jansenism was not yet fused with Gallicanism.

Wesleyan Methodists in Victorian Britain are supposed to have been hampered by traditional methods of mission. From the 1850s onwards, however, they launched a strategy of appointing home missionary ministers. Although Wesleyans adopted no new theology, left structures unchanged and still relied on wealthy laymen, they developed fresh work in cities, employed paid lay agents, used women more and recruited children as fundraisers. Organised missions, temperance activity and military chaplaincies bolstered their impact. District Missionaries and Connexional Evangelists were appointed and, in opposition to ritualist clergy, Wesleyans increasingly saw themselves as Nonconformists. They experienced a quiet revolution in home mission.

Historians and anthropologists have increasingly argued that the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity occurred as they wove the new faith into their traditions. Yet this finding risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves understood the history of Christianity in their societies. This article, a case study of the Tiwi of North Australia, is illustrative in that it uses Tiwi oral histories of the ‘conversion’ of a priest in order to invert assumptions about inculturation and conversion. They insist that they did not accommodate the new faith but that the Catholic Church itself converted in embracing them. Their history suggests that conversion can occur as communities change in the act of incorporating new peoples.

In these four volumes Wolfram Kinzig has put together the largest compilation to date of texts which profess to set out the principal tenets of the Church between the second and the eighth centuries of the Christian era. In dimension it easily surpasses its German precursors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while in content it can aim to be more eclectic than the compendium which Philip Schaff addressed to the clergy and fellow-believers in 1877. Its only rival in the twenty-first century is the joint labour of Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, broader in chronological range but therefore less exhaustive in its representation of this formative epoch. The first volume affords all necessary materials for the telling and untelling of the narrative which customarily ends with the promulgation of an amplified version of the Nicene Creed at Constantinople in 381; the second is an argosy of western specimens, a high proportion being prototypes or variants of the so-called Apostles Creed; the third is a miscellany of both personal and synodical confessions, some conventional, some idiosyncratic, many obscure in provenance and purpose; the contents of the fourth are drawn primarily from the Carolingian era, though the sources consulted in the first half are as various as the Pontifical of Donaueschingen (vol. iv. 99), the Irish Book of Dimma (iv. 119), the Dicta Leonis Episcopi (iv. 158–61) and the Sacramentary of Autun (iv. 283). The result is a monument of erudition, an invaluable resource for all future scholarship, and pleasurable reading for those who have hitherto been unable to approach the texts for want of an English rendering. The following remarks are therefore offered to the editor of these volumes as a stimulus to discussion, not to throw any aspersion on his judgement or on his many-times-proven competence as historian and critic.