Gottschalk is a surprisingly unfamiliar figure in this country. Since Archbishop Ussher produced the first modern study of him in 1631, very little has been written about him in English-speaking countries, whereas in France and Germany he has been the subject of innumerable articles and many books. There has been renewed interest in Gottschalk since Dom Morin stumbled on some long-lost works by him in the Bongars library in Bern in 1931. For English readers it may be well to begin with a brief account of the facts.

For the great majority of English men and women in the Reformation the principal indication of individual religious beliefs is the initial clause in their testaments, bequeathing their souls to God. Cast in the form of a personal bequest and frequently composed on the testator's deathbed, the religious statement appears to provide a revealing personal comment upon the individual's beliefs, unlike seemingly more public acts or protestations of faith. Unfortunately for the historian interested in tracing the presence of early Protestantism, Calvinism or religious conservatism within individuals or communities, will-making by the early modern era had become a cultural ritual. With a strong potential for ritualised statements, the pitfalls in using these preambles in isolation as indications of faith are generally well known. It is the intention of this paper to outline evidence for considering testamentary declarations as formulae, in indeterminate relationship with the specific religious convictions of the testators.

One of the most striking features of the first decades of open Jewish resettlement in England is the speed with which Jews managed to integrate themselves into so many different spheres of English life. From the first appointment of a Jew as a broker on the Exchange in 1657 to the first Jewish knighthood in 1700, the story is one of a dramatic rise in the acquisition of rights, privileges and special consideration. So, too, had Jews long been a part of English intellectual and academic life, but before Cromwell's tacit permission of Jewish residence in 1656 only Jewish converts to Christianity dared to make their appearance at English universities. This pattern was broken with the Abendana brothers, Jacob (d. 1685) and Isaac (d. 1699), Hebrew scholars and bibliophiles who came to London from Holland after the Restoration. Jacob Abendana, in the last four years of his life, was rabbi of the Sephardic community in London; Isaac, from at least 1663, taught Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge. Both men were very much in demand by English scholars, who turned to them to solve Hebraic problems of various kinds and to procure Hebrew books for themselves and for university libraries. Both brothers worked on the first translations of the Mishnah into European languages and thus helped make available to Christian scholars this central core of the Talmud, the Jewish ‘oral’ law. Finally, it was Isaac Abendana who invented the Oxford diary and thereby made a permanent mark on the social habits of the university in which he laboured.

The Austrian Protestants of the eighteenth century are not without their memorials; the noble series of Jahrbücher produced by the Society for the History of Austrian Protestantism and the bicentennial celebrations of Joseph II's Toleration Patent in 1981 have seen to that. But whereas the Hungarian Protestants are perceived as central to the history of their kingdom, the great Protestant emigration from Salzburg in 1731–2 receives a mention in general histories produced outside England, the Moravian propaganda machine has ensured that the religious fate of Bohemia and Moravia figures in the general myth of Protestant revival, and even the development of Silesian Protestantism has attracted new attention, the Austrian Protestants seem never to be centre stage, though their irritating presence in the wings is admitted to goad the Habsburgs in their search for new methods of government.

Apostolic delegate in Turkey and Greece and archbishop of Messambria from January 1935 to December 1944, Angelo Roncalli was confronted from 1939 to 1944 with extraordinary situations of human suffering. His response to some of the challenges has received little attention. Yet both public and private archives contain materials sufficient to throw considerable light on Roncalli's activities during those years.