In the century following the death of St Francis, the Franciscan order underwent enormously rapid changes. As Franciscans became university masters, inquisitors, royal councillors and bishops, some confronted dilemmas in reconciling their religious vows with the duties of their offices. Yet whereas some friar-bishops and archbishops might have shied away from involving themselves in their churches' finances, Eudes Rigaud, the first Franciscan archbishop of Rouen, made significant investments in landed property, seigneurial rights and rents on behalf of his archdiocese. The Franciscan archbishop's commitment to ecclesiastical reform, evident in his meticulous visitations of his clergy as recorded in his episcopal register, is also visible in his efforts to augment his archdiocese's temporalities.

The seventeenth-century Spanish Church stood out among other Catholic countries of western Europe on account of the high percentage of members of the religious orders – especially Dominicans – recruited as bishops. While their authority as preachers and theologians, schooled in the post-Tridentine tradition, made them eminently suitable candidates for office, they had none of the secular experience normally required of an episcopate that worked in close alliance with the state. The political and fiscal pressures placed on this alliance under Philip IV prompted an unprecedented crisis of recruitment to the Spanish church hierarchy, of which the religious orders became the direct beneficiaries.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, most European nations experienced a period of state-sponsored anti-Catholic legislation that has come to be known by the German term Kulturkampf. The question that this article seeks to address is whether or not the United Kingdom, and specifically Ireland, can be said to have experienced such a phenomenon. By examining the case of Robert O'Keeffe, a Roman Catholic parish priest who sued the cardinal archbishop of Dublin in the civil courts, it is possible to determine both whether Britain experienced a Kulturkampf, and to offer some suggestions as to why the United Kingdom appears to have been different in this regard from its European neighbours.

This article uses the parish ministry of John R. W. Stott as a case study of the resilience of evangelical churches in England in the postwar period. It situates Stott's experience at All Souls in the context of the debates over the reasons for the resilience of conservative Protestantism in the western world, and argues that closer attention to particular historical facts is necessary in order to understand this phenomenon properly. The article suggests that in England in the 1960s secularisation theory became a part of the story it was trying to tell, as it generated anxiety among Christian leaders, like Stott, who were committed to reversing the decline in church attendance in England.

The growth in the study of church history in China is one outcome of Deng Xiaoping's policy of ‘reform and opening’, as well as a result of increasing exchanges of scholars and ideas between China and the west during recent years. Since the 1980s Chinese scholars have to a great degree abandoned the Marxist interpretative framework, and gradually developed their own interpretations and methodologies for the study of church history. In consequence, academic studies in the 1990s displayed a fair, honest and objective character which marked the process of maturation in the development of church history as a discipline. In this process Professor Yu Ke played an important role, of inheriting the past and ushering in the future as the real founder of the discipline in China.

I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557–1567). Edizione critica, I: Il processo sotto Paolo IV e Pio IV (1557–1561); II: Il processo sotto Pio V (1566–1567), I: Guigno 1566–ottobre 1566; II: Novembre 1566–gennaio 1567; III: Gennaio 1567–agosto 1567. Edited by Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto. (Collectanea Archivi Vaticani, 43.). Pp. cxix+577; Pp. clxxix+370; 371–956; 957–1453. Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998, 2000. 88 85042 30 9; 88 85042 34 1

The correspondence of Reginald Pole, II: A calendar, 1547–1554. A power in Rome. By Thomas F. Mayer. (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Pp. xvi+410. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. £50. 0 7546 0327 X

The judicial investigation of Pietro Carnesecchi by the Roman inquisition in the years 1546–67 constitutes a major chapter in the history of the Italian peninsula and of the Church of Rome. Thanks to the indefatigable energy of Dario Marcatto, the publication of the documents from the archives of the Roman inquisition now places all the available sources at the disposal of the scholarly world. Massimo Firpo's critical introductions to these two volumes builds securely on his previously published essays, which included an account of Carnesecchi based on the edition of 1870. What he now writes confirms and extends his earlier findings.