Compared with other apologetical works from the early Christian period, the Consultationes zacchaei et Apollonii are surprisingly little discussed. One reason for this is that a lack of scholarly consensus regarding both the author and the period when the text was written has clearly limited its usefulness as a source for historians and theologians. But there is a second problem too: the Consultationes appear to belong to a number of different genres. The work, in different parts, has aspects of a standard apologetic treatise, in which the basic doctrines of Christianity are explained to a sympathetic pagan; of a sometimes rather specialised exposition of systematic theology, which is especially concerned with the relationship between the persons of the Trinity; of a rather mean-spirited attack on various kind of Christian enemies, from pagans to heretics to Jews; of an ascetic, or perhaps even monastic, tractate, which seeks toexplain certain Christian practices.

Within the league table of thirteenth-century English bishops, Master Alexander ‘de Stavensby’ has generally been considered no more than a second division player. The standard biographies do their best to credit him with a network of associations that includes such luminaries as St Dominic and Stephen Langton, but the evidence is uncertain, or at least has never been probed sufficiently deeply to achieve certainty. Master Alexander remains a shadowy figure; a scholar of strange dreams and visions; a rootless cosmopolitan whose family and even whose birthplace remain unknown. Yet it is possible to trace his earlier career with greater precision. His origins and his close association with Stephen Langton and the early friars can be traced more exactly, and once established they help to illuminate his achievements as bishop.

This article aims to reassess current historical judgements on the Czech Utraquist Church during the second century of its existence, from 1517 to 1621. It seeks to outline the special problems which Bohemian Utraquism faced as a religious via media, partly viewed from the comparative perspective of the kindred phenomenon of the post-Reformation Church of England. After a discussion of the historiographic issues, the focus is on the distinctive development of sixteenth-century Utraquism and its relations to English theology and eastern Orthodoxy. The Church's intermediate position between the Church of Rome and the fully reformed Protestant Churches is then explored more systematically through the writings of the authoritative, but neglected, theologian of sixteenth-century Utraquism, Bohuslav Bílejovský.

Few conflicts in imperial Germany were more important than the Kulturkampf, a major dispute between the Catholic Church and the Prussian State and a notorious example of the destructive character of Bismarckian politics. The Kulturkampf began in 1871, gathered in intensity and bitterness until 1878, and then continued with slowly diminishing severity down to 1887. Despite all its drama (the attempted assassination of governmental officials, the arrest and trial of prominent churchmen, even riots and mass demonstrations) and its undeniable political importance, the Kulturkampf remains among the neglected problems of nineteenth-century German history. For the most part what has been written is so contradictory and prejudiced that even now – more than one hundred years later – the issues remain controversial and, in many respects, obscure.

Recent research has rendered untenable the glib characterisation of the Henrician Reformation as ‘Catholicism without the Pope’, but the essential nature of the motives and achievements of Henry vra and his ministers in the 1530s and 1540s remains a controversial issue. To J. K. McConica, the polity created in the 1530s was an ‘Erasmian’ one, with the views of the great humanist on such matters as vernacular Scripture, superstitious pilgrimage and religious instruction providing a consensual nexus to bind together all but the most extreme shades of religious opinion. More recently, Glyn Redworth has similarly argued that the Henrician Reform was from the first ‘an intellectually coherent and satisfying movement’, and that it had positive and distinctive religious aspirations, seeking to use the techniques of ‘Protestant’ evangelism to transmit a purged but none the less essentially Catholic doctrine. G. W. Bernard has, by contrast, characterised the direction of religious policy after the break with Rome as ‘deliberately ambiguous’, and sees Henry as a ruler who held together an unwieldy coalition of interests by employing the rhetoric of continental Protestantism while inhibiting the implementation of any fundamental change.