The two works of Rodulfus Glaber, the Histories and the Life of St William, have always been held to be of special importance because of the supposed Cluniac origins of this writer. Glaber is commonly referred to as a Cluniac monk, as can be seen from the title of an important modern series of articles about him, while Delaruelle's famous essay about Cluny and Holy War leans heavily upon his ‘Cluniac connections’. The lack of literary sources about the history of Cluny in the reign of Odilo accounts in part for the extensive use of his Histories by the numerous corps of historians of Cluny. By contrast the Life has been somewhat neglected, and indeed the literature on St William of Dijon in English is very limited. It is important, therefore, to discover in what sense, if any, Glaber can be called a Cluniac.

‘C'est à vous, Madame, à qui je parle.’ So wrote the distinguished church statesman and reforming bishop of the Meaux diocese to Marguerite d'Angoulême, duchess of Alençon (later queen of Navarre), powerful sister of the Renaissance monarch François I, on 22 December 1521. The personal and emphatic form of address employed here by Guillaume Briçonnet arose from his concern that Marguerite should grasp firmly a neglected aspect of Christian doctrine: the role of the Spirit in the life of each believer as well as within the Ecclesia. By grace, came the episcopal injunction, Marguerite must recognise ‘le vray feu qui s'est logé, long temps a [i.e. il y a longtemps déja] dans vostre cceur’;and by this same grace French Christendom must acknowledge its state of desolation. An analysis of the 1521–4 exchange of letters between the duchess of Alençon and the bishop of Meaux reveals both the extent of Briçonnet's distress at what he saw as basic weaknesses in the French Church and his spiritual counsel aimed at rectifying a situation he held to be desperate.

The bishops of the medieval English Church were among the greatest landowners in the kingdom. The list of their estates in the Valor ecclesiasticus of 1535 eloquently testifies to their extensive holdings. But concentration on temporalities as the source of episcopal wealth ignores the extent to which the Church's own jurisdictional and administrative structure provided a means for generating wealth. This income, which the Church itself provided for bishops as a part of their office, distinct from the revenues generated by land-holding and other resources ancillary to their ecclesiastical functions, deserves more attention than it has so far received. The neglect of income from spiritualities is partly explicable by the nature of the sources, which are usually very incomplete and, in most cases, limited in chronological coverage. Nevertheless, usable evidence does survive from many dioceses, which eventually may be brought together to produce a worthwhile general statement.

In the 1740s, despite personal and doctrinal disagreements, the leaders of the Revival were still at one. Between old Dissent and new Methodism suspicions were not absent but were absorbed in a common enterprise. Wales had not yet gone its separate path. The Wesleys, Whitefield, Doddridge and Howel Harris (1714–72), whom some of his countrymen consider the greatest Welshman of his age, were all actively in touch. One form of co-operation was in visits to Lady Huntingdon at her home in Chelsea. Here Whitefield, Doddridge and Harris took turns in preaching before a circle of the countess'ss noble friends. These they hoped to win for the Revival. They also hoped to gain a wider religious, and even political, influence for themselves.

A well-to-do prebendary of the eighteenth century might spend a part of his time in his cathedral close, a part in his other benefices, a part in some favourite country home, a part in London seeking favour in the court which could lead to a bishopric. He might even, like Dr Vesey Stanhope in Barchester Towers, spend years abroad, never doing a day's duty in Barchester Close – ‘and yet there was no reason against his doing duty except a want of inclination on his own part’. Dr Stanhope was doubtless intended to represent standards of the eighteenth century surviving into the nineteenth; and there is no doubt that non-residence was widespread, pluralism common in the eighteenth century. It has often and reasonably been said that these were no novelty: their roots go back to the refoundation of secular cathedrals after the Norman Conquest; non-residence and pluralism rose and fell in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rose again to remarkable heights in the fifteenth; Thomas Wolsey set a standard of pluralism no later prelate could scale, yet the reformers – for all their squeamish phrases – made little permanent impression on these practices, which survived into the age of Trollope. But it is exceedingly difficult to find any precise evidence as to how the pluralists of any age filled their time. The interest of Thomas Gooch (1675–1754) nes precisely in this: until he became bishop of Norwich he was a canon of Chichester and of Canterbury, whose cathedral records throw some light on his residence, and Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his periods of residence are exactly known. These three offices divided his attention. It is true that he was also archdeacon of Essex, and held other preferment besides, but such evidence as we have suggests that this involved him in only occasional duties: we have found evidence of six occasions when he held archdeacon's visitations in person.

As the quincentenary of Miintzer's birth looms ominously in 1989, the manufactories of research are already working overtime. After the spate of publications on the Peasants' War in 1975 a lull in production set in, with the market subsequently depressed by severe competition from the Luther anniversary in 1983. Now the Müntzer industry has once again picked up, but the models coming off the production line bear little resemblance to the crude and garish stereotypes of yesteryear. At last a saner image of Müntzer is being shaped by means of the tools of sounder source editions, greater theological insight and a firmer chronology of life and work. In this enterprise scholars from the English-speaking world, to whom Müntzer has often seemed an incomprehensible figure on the margins of the Reformation, are taking full and vigorous part. Their contribution is assessed at the conclusion of this review, which concentrates perforce on the most significant German publications of the last two decades.