At the end of the eighth century Alcuin of York adapted an Augustinian catechetical programme for missionary use among the Avars of central Europe. This article explores how and why Alcuin went about adapting Augustine's plan, focusing on the place of his effort in the early medieval tradition. Special emphasis is placed on the idea of ‘innovative deference’ whereby Alcuin distinguished his work from that of his predecessors while consciously preserving a Christian tradition. The article also considers the importance of adaptation to the Carolingian world, including the influence of Alcuin's programme upon other Carolingian thinkers.

Although scholars have come increasingly to recognise the considerable influence of early modern Catholic writers upon the historiography of the English Reformation, a crucial aspect of this influence has received scant attention: the impact of Catholic polemical writings upon perceptions of the Reformation. This article will examine a particularly striking and important example of the effects of Catholic polemic, the attacks on the calendar of martyrs included in editions of John Foxe's Acts and monuments. It will describe how these attacks merged with traditions of anti-Puritanism to create a stereotype of the Marian martyrs as being poor, from the lowest social classes, uneducated and disrespectful of authority to the point of rebellion. These attacks also laid the foundation for the myth, still prevalent today, that many of the Marian martyrs were guilty of Trinitarian or sacramentarian heresies which would have led to their condemnation as heretics even under a Protestant regime.

This article explores an important but hitherto neglected factor that helps to account for the early divergence between Richard Baxter (1615–91) and John Owen (1616–83). Theological differences alone cannot account for that divergence, since in the early 1640s Baxter and Owen would have agreed on the issues that later separated them. Their starkly contrasting experiences of the First Civil War helped to set them apart. For Baxter, personally caught up in the upheaval, the war was a disaster that corrupted the Gospel. For Owen, untouched by the fighting, the war was a blessing from God that liberated the Gospel from Arminian captivity. All this helps to illuminate some of the ways in which the civil wars continued to shape religious developments and divisions long after the battles had ceased.

This article examines, through the work and attitudes of its first four governors, the relations between Church and State in the last Australia colony to be established. It covers the period from the foundation of the colony in 1829 to the arrival of the first resident bishop of Perth in 1857. It challenges the prevailing historiography of a colonial administration wedded to Anglican privilege, and discusses the persistence of an erastian mind-set among the colonial governors in the 1840s despite the advent of a new paradigm of autonomous imperial engagement by the Church of England.

This article examines the involvement of the prominent New Testament scholar, B. H. Streeter (1874–1937), in the Oxford Group, the movement founded by the American religious leader Frank Buchman. Streeter's mind was shaped by a liberal and modernist Anglicanism, while Buchman's ideas originated in a more Evangelical milieu; however, a common desire to do something about the international crisis of the 1930s brought them together. Streeter committed himself to Buchman's work in July 1934. In the next three years, influenced by Group teachings on the guidance of God, he concluded that his previous religious outlook had been too humanistic, and his faith became more experiential