From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, many archbishops in the western Church turned to the papacy to obtain confirmation of supra-metropolitan prerogatives in harmony with the hierarchical principles of the Gregorian Reform. The study of the proofs produced by these primates makes it possible to identify distinct, contrasting encounters between local ecclesiastical structures and the False Decretals, a canonical collection (c. 836–8/c. 847–52) which was widely disseminated in the central Middle Ages. This process reveals the opposition between two types of territorial primacies, based, on the one hand, on kingdoms searching for unity or, on the other, on the civil provinces of the late Roman Empire.

Recently it has been suggested that fundamental disagreements over the theology of grace had little impact upon parish life in early Stuart England. However, by considering the local circumstances and wider national repercussions of an open debate over predestination in the 1630s between two Norwich lecturers, William Bridge and John Chappell, this article will argue the contrary. It will show that the public nature of the clash between Bridge and Chappell, examined by the church courts, ensured that predestination became a politically divisive issue within Norwich's parishes on the eve of the English Civil War.

Although the first Quakers aligned history with superfluous tradition, detrimental to true appreciation of the inward voice of God, by the early eighteenth century they had produced their first histories as a defence against Anglican allegations of continued disorder and enthusiasm. At the same time, pressure to publish the collected works of James Nayler, a convicted blasphemer, proved particularly contentious. Leo Damrosch has sought to understand what Nayler thought he was doing in the 1650s; this study considers what motivated later Quakers to censor his works and accounts of his life, and demonstrates how English Friends in particular sought to revise the popular image of Quakerism by rewriting history.

In 1855 the sisters of St André in Tournai (Belgium) openly revolted against their bishop by sending a delegation to the pope. It was the high point of a conflict that had been simmering since 1850, and would continue to reverberate until 1886. This case study illustrates the religious, social and gender fault-lines opened by modernity between authoritarian bishops and a new generation of self-conscious religious women active in society. The field of tension provided Vatican diplomacy with the opportunity for an unprecedented affirmation of its mediating role. The affair of St André was one of the first occasions on which the Curia was directly confronted with ultramontane feminism, and it neatly defines the margins within which the Holy See was hammering out a matrix for the Romanisation and ‘standardisation’ of religious women. At the price of ‘following the beaten track’ to Rome, the second sex could sufficiently escape the grip of the first estate to operate a silent revolution in education, charity and devotion during the nineteenth century.

The trial of Penguin Books for publishing an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's lover is a symbolic episode in histories of 1960s Britain, used to illustrate changes in social attitudes. However, historians have not appreciated the impact of the trial on Anglican attitudes towards contemporary society. Using correspondence in the papers of the Mirfield father and literary critic Martin Jarrett-Kerr, this article reveals the tensions within a loose coalition of Anglican radicals just as their views began to receive attention in the media. Jarrett-Kerr and fellow liberal Anglo-Catholics found themselves in an uneasy alliance with Liberal Anglicans, whose views were conflated with those of the radicals.