Simon Sudbury is one of the more obscure archbishops of Canterbury.He should be better known, if only because he was archbishop during a particularly confused but important period of English history—the period of Edward III's dotage and Richard II's minority. Anything which casts a little light upon the politics and personalities of that period should be welcome to historians.

The absence of any adequate modern biography of Mabillon has long left a deplorable gap in the history of French scholarship. Almost immediately after his death his intimate disciple, Dom Thierry Ruinart, wrote a short life which must always remain essential for any estimate of its subject's character, and a more formal notice found its place in Dom Tassin's history of the Maurists. After that, no work of any originality or insight appeared until 1879, when a well-documented study of Mabillon's early life and some of his work was published in a most inaccessible fashion by H. Jadart, who continued his patient investigations for another thirty years. Then, in 1888, Emmanuel de Broglie produced his classical picture of the society of St. Germain-des-Prés and the journeys of Mabillon which, though a work of genuine scholarship and high literary charm, was extremely selective and made no attempt to cover the whole of Mabillon's life and work. De Broglie's volumes, however, soon followed by a similar work on Montfaucon, by their very excellence deterred would-be biographers until in the early years of the present century Dom P. Denis began to make preparatory soundings among the mass of Maurist documents with a view to writing a formal history, which must have contained a long account of Mabillon. His labours issued in a number of valuable articles in the Revue Mabillon, but he died with his main task unaccomplished. Meanwhile Dom Henri Leclercq contributed to the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie an article, as long as a short book, on Mabillon, as well as numerous other articles on topics connected with his works, but it was not generally known that during the last years of his life, in what time that indefatigable worker could steal from compiling single-handed the last volumes of his great Dictionnaire, he had written what was at least the first draft of a full-scale biography. He succeeded, as is well known, in finishing his encyclopedia a few months before his death, and he also despatched the manuscript on Mabillon to his Paris publisher, but, for an unexplained reason, publication was long delayed and it was only a year ago that the second volume appeared. It is nowhere stated what editorial changes have been made, though it is implied that there has been some abbreviation.

‘The Church History of Joseph Milner is one of those books which may perish with some revolution of the moral and religious character of the English race, but hardly otherwise.’ Sir James Stephen's prophecy reads alarmingly to-day when the book has vanished even from the dustiest and highest shelf of the rectory library. But it was of Milner's History that Cowper also wrote enthusiastically ‘the facts are incontestible, the grand observations upon them are all irrefragible, and the style, in my judgment, incomparably better than that of Robertson or Gibbon’. Translated into German, Swedish and Spanish, relayed to Grundtwigian pietist circles through the histories of Rasmus Sørensen, Milner was read as far north as Greenland and as far east as the Volga. His book was instrumental in converting half a dozen Members of Parliament. It was long considered—as Milner intended it to be—as the replacement of Mosheim's famous History, and as such it was prescribed reading in the educated Evangelical home and beyond. In 1847 Julius Hare regarded it as still ‘the main, if not the sole, source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history’. Ironically, it was from Milner's soundly Evangelical pages that young Newman got his first love of the Fathers. The History of the Church of Christ must thus be reckoned as a book of first importance in the religious history of early nineteenth-century England. Yet, save for a few pages in Abbey and Overton (still the most reliable survey of Evangelicalism, after eighty years) Milner's book is now unknown.

For well over a hundred years, the convocation of Canterbury presented one of those curiosities which give England so much of her charm. It was summoned to transact business, and, as soon as it met, it was prorogued before it could transact any business at all, apart from the pure formality of agreeing to an address to the sovereign. It remained prorogued until the sovereign dissolved parliament. This state of affairs originated in 1717, when an immediate prorogation precluded the lower house of convocation from censuring the latitudinarian sermons of Hoadly.

This bibliography is part of the preparation of an edition of Eriugena's Periphyseon (De diuisione naturae) for the series, Scriptores latini Hiberniae, published by the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. It supplements the shorter one contained in J. F. Kenney's Sources for the Early History of Ireland, i: Ecclesiastical (New York 1929), and, except in the lists of MSS., does not repeat what is contained there. The letter K against a MS. indicates that it is mentioned by Kenney. Dom Maïeul Cappuyns's study, published in 1933, would have afforded a broader and sounder foundation to build upon, but its bibliographical material, though ample, is not systematically arranged. Kenney supplies the form, Cappuyns the greater part of the matter, the rest of which derives from researches carried out since he wrote.