On Passion Sunday in 1417 (28 March) a sermon known by its scriptural theme as ‘Accipiant qui vocati sunt’ was delivered at the general council of the Church then assembled in the south German city of Constance. Three centuries later it was edited by Hermann von der Hardt who characterised ‘Accipiant’ as ‘by far the most severe sermon in which the enormous crimes of prelates – especially love of money, ambition, luxury and ignorance – are revealed with the greatest liberty and are vehemently reproached, so that it is a wonder that the council heard it patiently’. In an earlier publication containing excerpts from this sermon, Hardt had described it in similar terms as being ‘not unlike a burning furnace in terms of its fiery passion and its vehement attack on the vices of the clergy’. More recently Heinrich Finke clearly agreed with these appraisals in describing ‘Accipiant’ as a ‘scharfe Reformpredigt’, for he did not bestow such adjectival emphasis on any other reform sermon listed in his register of the Constance sermons. Paul Arendt, a student of Finke's and the author of the only monograph devoted to the many surviving sermons from Constance, repeatedly commented on the severity of ‘Accipiant’, especially in his long chapter on ‘das Hauptthema unserer Prediger: Behandlung der Frage der kirchlichen Reform’.

Hardt ascribed this sermon to Vitale Valentine OFM, bishop of Toulon. However, as the following analysis will show, it is certain that this ascription was based on conjecture and that another preacher actually delivered the sermon. Hardt's only source for his edition of ‘Accipiant’ was an Erfurt manuscript which is now in the Schlossbibliothek at Pommersfelden. Because this lacks a rubric or colophon identifying the author of the sermon, Hardt's attribution must have been inferred from internal evidence. Thus began the long tradition of Vitale Valentine's authorship of ‘Accipiant’ which has previously been accepted without question by scholars of these conciliar sermons.

During the late Tudor and early Stuart age, England's parish ministries were increasingly occupied by energetic Puritan preachers who sought to convert souls and build ‘godly’ communities. Together with ‘godly’ magistrates and lay supporters, these preachers laboured to replace a culture rooted in traditional festivals, ales, dances and games with a culture sustained by frequent sermons, Scripture-reading and a strict observance of the Sabbath. Not everyone, however, heeded the call of the preachers. Many people, in most places probably a significant majority, were unable or unwilling to embrace the Puritan theology of grace and were opposed to Puritans' interference in their lives. Resistance to Puritans surfaced in different forms and degrees, ranging from indifference and passivity to organised demonstrations and protests, to street fighting and violence. Verbal abuse seems to have been common; the preferred term of abuse, ‘Puritan’, remained a potent and wounding accusation in spite of its common currency. From about the 1570s and 80s, when Puritan evangelism emerged as a significant movement in England, to the period of the Civil War, tensions between Puritans and anti-Puritans periodically surfaced in towns and villages across the kingdom, with divisions in communities cutting across class lines.

Recent work on the 1630s has challenged the established view of Archbishop Laud's central role in the formulation and enforcement of ecclesiastical policy. Kevin Sharpe and Julian Davies have proposed that Charles I was the initiator of religious change, with his archbishop often trailing in his wake, and finding ways to qualify, if not subvert, royal directives on preaching, the Sabbath and the altar. Davies has also argued that an ideology of ‘Carolinism’ rather than ‘Laudianism’ shaped and animated key religious reforms, and to enact them Charles increasingly relied on Bishop Matthew Wren, an unyielding enforcer of royal policy and more ‘Laudian’ than Laud himself. This view of Laud of course echoes the archbishop's defence at his trial: that he was merely the king's good servant, executing the royal will, which is enough to make one pause, since Laud's objective there was not historical veracity but to save his neck. But other findings have also diminished Laud's political stature: it appears that Lord Treasurer Weston, not Laud, was the royal nominee for the vacant chancellorship of Oxford in April 1630, though by the time the king's letter reached the university Laud had been elected; later, in 1636, it has been suggested that far from securing the appointment of his protégé Bishop Juxon as the new Lord Treasurer, Laud may have actually been a defeated rival for the post.

The adoption of socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for many an experience akin to religious conversion. Katherine St John Conway's path to enlightenment provides a stark example. While sitting in her fashionable Bristol church ‘praying for a fuller consciousness of the Presence’, she was confronted by a group of workers adopting the socialist tactic of the ‘church parade’, the invasion of churches during Sunday services to highlight labour disputes and the plight of the unemployed:

[I]n they came, lassies out on strike against starvation wages and for the right to combine … there they stood, sister-women, … ill-clad, wet through with the driving rain, hungry … ‘They stand between me and the Christ.’ So the thought smote me; so I see it still … . For the first time in my life I heard and began to understand.