The tracts which John Knox wrote in 1558 are regarded as the core of his political writings and the key to his entire political thought.1 The most famous - and infamous - of his works, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, was published in the spring and was followed in July by The Letter to the Regent [Augmente], The Appellation and The Letter to the Commonalty of Scotland These tracts have suffered from two serious misconceptions. The first is the natural tendency to link all the 1558 material together and in particular to treat the First Blast and the July tracts .as a unified whole. This has distorted the meaning of all the pamphlets and led to vain efforts to mould them into a composite unit which can then be labelled ‘Knox's political thought’. In fact, it is extremely important to separate them and to make a sharp distinction between their intended audiences and purposes. Crucially, the First Blast was written primarily for an English audience and the July tracts intended for a Scottish one.

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.

This article discusses the origins of ‘misión integral’ or integral mission, a term coined by the Ecuadorian theologian C. René Padilla (b. 1932). As the first critical study of Padilla, it argues that the origins of ‘misión integral’ are to be found within a cluster of political and social forces that were reshaping post-war Latin America: rural-urban migration, the resulting complications of urbanisation and the rapid expansion of the universities, where Marxist ideas of revolutionary change were of growing appeal to students. This article relies on interviews with many of the leading personalities involved, together with personal papers, archival research and Latin American census data.

In an article published in Past and Present some years ago, Professor Strauss drew attention to an area of activity that early sixteenth-century reformers considered to be of vital importance - evangelical effort amongst the young. The overwhelming impression left by this article and by a subsequent full-scale study of the indoctrination of the young in the German Reformation is that – in Professor Strauss's terms – failure, not success, was the dominant note.

One of the most striking features of the first decades of open Jewish resettlement in England is the speed with which Jews managed to integrate themselves into so many different spheres of English life. From the first appointment of a Jew as a broker on the Exchange in 1657 to the first Jewish knighthood in 1700, the story is one of a dramatic rise in the acquisition of rights, privileges and special consideration. So, too, had Jews long been a part of English intellectual and academic life, but before Cromwell's tacit permission of Jewish residence in 1656 only Jewish converts to Christianity dared to make their appearance at English universities. This pattern was broken with the Abendana brothers, Jacob (d. 1685) and Isaac (d. 1699), Hebrew scholars and bibliophiles who came to London from Holland after the Restoration. Jacob Abendana, in the last four years of his life, was rabbi of the Sephardic community in London; Isaac, from at least 1663, taught Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge. Both men were very much in demand by English scholars, who turned to them to solve Hebraic problems of various kinds and to procure Hebrew books for themselves and for university libraries. Both brothers worked on the first translations of the Mishnah into European languages and thus helped make available to Christian scholars this central core of the Talmud, the Jewish ‘oral’ law. Finally, it was Isaac Abendana who invented the Oxford diary and thereby made a permanent mark on the social habits of the university in which he laboured.

Some years ago Professor Powicke wrote of the possibility that a study of the surviving records of the medieval church courts would ‘reveal unexpected possibilities of insight into the daily lives of men and women in a pre-Reformation diocese as subjects of an active jurisdiction, parallel to that of the common law. That this jurisdiction existed we already knew, but the prospect of seeing it at work is exciting’. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the exploration of the working of the church courts would throw light on the whole relationship between Church and People in medieval, and indeed post-medieval, England. Unfortunately, the records, although quite voluminous, have survived only in a haphazard and intermittent way, and it is, as yet, impossible to form any general conclusions about the subject as a whole. In the hope of contributing to this process, I propose to examine the working of the consistory court in the diocese of Lincoln, one of the largest and most populous dioceses in pre-Reformation England.

In the course of the 1690s and into the early eighteenth century a number of English divines and laymen became embroiled in a pamphlet war on the doctrine of the Trinity. It was a wide-ranging debate and its participants included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Socinians, deists and Arians. Until recently, however, this controversy had received scant attention from historians. It is only within the last few years that an interest in the trinitarian controversy has emerged: a number of works have appeared on the more notable of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century anti-trinitarian thinkers, and J. C. D. Clark has pointed out the political implications of anti-trinitarian views. There is, nevertheless, one aspect of the trinitarian controversy which has remained relatively untouched, and that is the debate on the Trinity which raged within the Established Church.

Early in 1629 one Peter Shaw, an obscure London preacher, appeared before the Court of High Commission. While the records of the court for the relevant period have been lost, it seems clear from a later case that Shaw was both convicted and suspended. For, speaking in 1631, during proceedings against the antinomian, Samuel Pretty, Laud claimed that he

spake the less in this cause (as he intimated) because there had been so much said against these same and the like tenets in the causes of one [Robert] Townes and one Mr Shaw, which Mr Shaw, though the said bishop of London hath in public declared he should never have to do by his consent in this diocese, yet no place, said the bishop, will serve him but he must needs have admittance in London and he came to me for admittance, which I purpose, never, God willing, to grant.

During the period immediately prior to Shaw's prosecution the authorities had launched an investigation into his activities and opinions, one that involved over two dozen witnesses whose testimony appears to have been condensed into a single dossier, which survives in the state papers for March 1628/9. The three documents contained in that dossier – a set of court articles, notes from two of Shaw's sermons and a letter allegedly written by one of his supporters – are reproduced below.

This article discusses the propagation of the devotion of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary in the Low Countries around 1500. The central argument is that the secular goal of the promoters of the devotion was to create a large spiritual and emotional community in support of the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty and its ideology of peace and territorial unity. To this end a whole array of old and new media was exploited. The article analyses the dynamics of this devotional communication and gives special attention to the role of miracles, vernacular theatre and the printing press.

Tobias Crisp presented a sophisticated, if highly tendentious, critique of the Puritan way to salvation. Having taken the view that the Puritan ordo salutis required of its practitioners a works-based devotion that sprang from a principal commitment to ‘law’ rather than ‘grace’, Crisp attacked both the theological and pastoral shortcomings of Puritanism. He then proceeded to develop a counter-theology of his own that promised a pastoral direction very different from that presided over by Puritan divines. This article addresses these dimensions of Crisp's discourse, and also assesses the self-defence mounted by Puritan respondents to Crisp.

William Perkins, usually described as an Elizabethan Puritan, was significant in ways that are only beginning to be recognised by historians. His writings, published in numerous editions in England and on the continent and translated into Latin and half a dozen vernacular languages, made him the most prominent English theologian of his day. This article contends that his career was devoted not to bringing about changes in the Established Church but to making that Church's teachings better known and appreciated. Perkins should be seen as a leading apologist for the Elizabethan Church of England.

The Brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford, an anonymous tract commonly ascribed to William Whittingham, dean of Durham, and printed in Heidelberg in 1574 and 1575, enjoys a unique reputation among the polemical writings of the Elizabethan puritans for its well-documented if partisan account of the controversies of the Marian exiles in their German and Swiss congregations. The importance of the Brieff discours as a source for the history of the Exile has hitherto tended to divert attention from the circumstances of its origin in the Elizabethan puritan controversy. This note is intended to introduce new evidence on the activities of a group of puritan propagandists responsible for organising the publication of this and other tracts in the early years of the Elizabethan Presbyterian Movement; to call in question the traditional attribution of the Brieff discours to Whittingham; and to suggest that the author may have been a relatively obscure exile, Thomas Wood.

Was Cuthbert Tunstal a ‘trimmer’—that is, one primarily concerned with his own advantage—rather than a partisan in the religious revolution initiated by Henry VIII? We might have expected the latter contingency after reading the glowing tribute paid to him by Sir Thomas More: ‘… the incomparable Cuthbert Tunstal, who, to everyone's satisfaction, has recently been appointed Master of the Rolls. I will not try to praise him, not simply because the world would discount such praise from a close friend, but because his fine qualities and learning defy description. His fame is so widespread, that praising him would be, as they say, like lighting up the sun with a candle’. Yet the historiographical neglect of Tunstal seems to indicate that historians have preferred the pejorative judgement of Foxe, who says that he ‘dissembled’ in taking the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII. All the conservative bishops who took the oath ‘turned cat-in-the-pan’ in Mary's reign, but when they took it in 1535 they were, according to Foxe, ‘right Lutherans’. He, unquestionably, thought Tunstal was a ‘trimmer’.

The 1859 revival has been granted a special place in Ulster's religious history. It is most often portrayed as a spontaneous and dramatic outpouring of the Holy Spirit, leading to the conversion of many thousands of men and women, and resulting in the moral and social reformation of a formerly sinful society. While this popular image requires a degree of modification in the interests of historical accuracy, the importance of the movement itself is not questioned. As Peter Gibbon ha pointed out, ‘the Ulster religious revival of 1859 involved larger numbers of people in sustained common activity than any movement in rura Ulster between 1798 and 1913’. Its value to the historian lies in its revelation of the attitudes of Ulster society — both religiouss and secular — to the popular, evangelical style of Protestantism which had been making steady progress in Ireland from the late eighteenth century. The dramatic visible and well-publicised nature of religious activity in 1859 serves to highlight the more controversial aspects of that faith, and indicates the degree of adjustment made by churchmen and laity to a movement wich largely ignored conventional ecclesiastical and social boundanes. It is the purpose of this paper to assess the impact of the events of 1859 on Ulster society and to consider its significance in the light of modern sociological approaches to the study of revivalism.

At the time when encyclopaedic works on the military orders began to be produced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was widely held that the military order was an institution which had existed for most of the Christian era. Many of the orders catalogued in these volumes were reported to have been founded well before the period of the crusades, although there were often conflicting opinions about the precise antiquity of a particular foundation. Various dates were, for example, given for the establishment of the military order which the knights of the Holy Sepulchre were thought to constitute: although some held that it had been founded shortly after the first crusade, its creation was attributed by others to St James the Less in the first century A.D., while its origins were also placed in the time of Constantine and in that of Charlemagne. The foundation of the order of Santiago, which in fact occurred in 1170, was often traced back to the ninth century; yet while some linked it with the supposed discovery of the body of St James during the reign of Alfonso 11, others associated it with the legendary victory of Clavijo, which was placed in the time of Ramiro i. The accumulation of myth and tradition recorded in these encyclopaedias has exercised a prolonged influence on historians of the military orders: disproof has not always been sufficient to silence a persistent tradition. It is, nevertheless, clear that the Christian military order, in the sense of an institution whose members combined a military with a religious way of life, in fact originated during the earlier part of the twelfth century in the Holy Land.

The rigorous enforcement of religious discipline was a hallmark of Calvinist Churches in Reformation-era Europe. Wherever Calvinism took hold, ministers and elders went to extraordinary lengths to inculcate a Reformed morality among the members of local congregations. Since Calvinists identified the eucharistic community as the pure assembly of saints, it was necessary for Reformed consistories to defend the sanctity of the Lord's Table from all human corruption.

It is notoriously difficult for biographers of late-medieval people to recapture the personalities of their subjects, and consequently motives often have to be deduced from actions. This fundamental difficulty prompted the great Professor Jacob Burckhardt to date the emergence of the individual from the Renaissance and to assert that, rulers apart, there were few developed personalities in the Middle Ages. Medieval people saw their world through a sort of ‘religious mist’, perceiving things distorted rather than as they really were. In spite of some recent support, Burckhardt's theory is not really tenable, but historians still find the prevalent religious aura difficult to penetrate. We may know the official doctrine and moral teaching of the Church, but we cannot safely assume that they were understood by the laity, when both contemporary sermons and literature proclaim the contrary. Even were the Church's teaching understood, historians would still not know in what ways and to what extent religion influenced other fields of individual activity – economic, social or political. Burckhardt's problem remains of more than purely religious importance.

Recent interest in the position of women in the early Church has stimulated new investigations of texts and documents which consider or define the roles of women. A number of surveys have appeared which consider a spectrum of early sources, and most of these refer to the rules laid down for widows and deaconesses in the Didascalia apostolorum. A simple reading of the Didascalia interprets it as a description of contemporary church practice which reveals a Church that allowed women a certain amount of involvement in restricted spheres: widows are to pray for the Church and deaconesses to assist at the baptism of women and to visit Christian women in their homes. Since the Didascalia does not empower women it is generally regarded with a certain amount of suspicion by those postulating a more positive role for women in early Christianity. However, a closer examination suggests that such a reading is not the whole story. Rather than having a purely descriptive function, it is more likely that the Didascalia represents an attempt to change the structure of ministry in the Churches in Syria, opposing some practices and supporting others. This article will argue that the internal evidence of the Didascalia reveals it to be an attempt to impose an episcopal structure on the Church and to restrict the activity and authority of women. Seen against a background of other sources this suggests that there were groups of Christians in second- and third-century Syria and Asia Minor which recognised women's authority, and that the Didascalia was written partly in opposition to such groups.

Between 1 June and 1 August 1508, the newly refounded tribunal, known to history as the Spanish Inquisition, was subjected tojudicial investigation by a ‘General Congregation’ at Burgos, in Old Castile. The process resulted from the activities of Diego Rodriguez Lucero. As inquisitor of Córdoba, he was accused of making false charges of ‘judaising’ against conversos, or converts from Judaism and/or their descendants, and ‘Old Christians’ alike. During the Congregation's examination of his work, many of the tensions and difficulties which had arisen in Spanish society as a result of the Inquisition's work were exposed. To date, the only detailed consideration in English of Lucero's rise and fall - published in 1897-has been that of the great liberal Protestant historian of the Inquisition, H. C. Lea. As ever, his work was solidly based on the best early printed sources, but also on documents from the Castilian national archives at Simancas and the cathedral archives in Cordoba itself, as well as other places. In recent years, however, many more documents have come to light, which make possible a more profound and thorough investigation of the Lucero affair. Progress towards increased knowledge has not, however, been uninterrupted. Many of the manuscript sources in the Cordoba Cathedral archives to which Lea refers are no longer traceable, having, in some cases, been torn from their bindings; others have simply vanished. Such, it appears, is the degree of passion which the name of Lucero still inspires.