David Hume's attacks on religion posed particular problems of method and approach for those who undertook to reply to them. This article is concerned with the responses of two main groups from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth: a number of Anglicans and Episcopalians, and a smaller group of rational Dissenters. The responses of some of these are well known, but those of others have not hitherto been investigated. The essay charts a definite shift from wit and ridicule to reasoned and mannerly response as the appropriate way to deal with infidelity. Most respondents assumed that Hume could be adequately refuted by rehearsing old arguments; however, a small but significant number maintained that his infidelity was of positive value for the future of Christianity.

The issue in the series of crises leading to the suppression of the Jesuit order in France in 1764 was the absolute obedience owed under the Jesuit Institute by every French Jesuit to the superior general of the Society of Jesus resident in Rome. On the eve of the suppression, the French law courts and the Crown reasoned that Jesuit subjects of the king of France ought not to owe such obedience to a foreign superior living on foreign soil. In the eyes of the secular authorities, the French Jesuits' connection with their superior general constituted a threat to the security of the French state. Initially, most French Jesuit leaders accepted this point of view and tried to come to an accommodation with the state which would have loosened their ties to the general.

Modern scholarship on John Knox has tended to ignore his development of the covenant concept and his place in the covenant tradition. This is especially surprising because of the significance of the covenant idea for seventeenth-century Scottish history. The covenant, moreover, became a basic theme of English and American Puritan thought in the century following Knox's death. During the early years of the formulation of the covenant concept in English Puritanism, Knox was a revered figure. Following his various preaching activities in Edwardian England and his association with English exiles on the Continent during Mary's reign, he continued to maintain his interest in and contact with English Protestants, even while playing a major role in the establishment of the Reformed faith in Scotland. In 1568–9, for example, he was called upon to give advice respecting the question of separation from the Church of England. It is, thus, quite possible that his views on the covenant influenced English Puritan thought, as well as the thought of the Scottish Protestants. A study of Knox's views on the covenant is also important because of the place of the covenant in the development of his position on the legitimacy of active rebellion against tyrannical, idolatrous sovereigns. Finally, an examination of Knox's covenant thought is significant because it reveals that he was not as dependent on John Calvin as has been commonly supposed.

In his greatest piece of political philosophy, the Leviathan of 1651, Thomas Hobbes dedicated the astonishing mass of eighteen voluminous chapters solely to the discussion of religious matters. Although his earlier political treatises, The elements of law of 1640 and the De cive of 1642, discussed theological doctrines at some length, they never accorded so great a role to questions of religion and theology as did Leviathan. The two books of Leviathan in which Hobbes promulgated his theological doctrines are almost exactly equal in length to books I and II, and one of the chapters in book III (‘Of power ecclesiasticall’) is in some ways the longest chapter in the work. The kind of contentious eschatological doctrines which Hobbes had been careful to leave unchallenged in his early works, namely the question whether the soul had an independent existence after the death of the body, figured particularly high in Leviathan. Why was it that Hobbes's interest in theology increased so sharply between 1642 and 1651, and what was the particular point of the theology of Leviathan?

Derek Holmes, proposing a fresh investigation of the history of Catholics in nineteenth-century England, largely by reference to a tiny group of national clerical leaders, has justified his approach by arguing that it is impossible to imagine the development of English Catholicism without them. This seems a strange apology with which to introduce the history of so numerous and diverse a community. Is it to be assumed that that same community has little or no life apart, or that it had little significance except as backdrop to the drama of episcopal politics? This objection is particularly apropos of nineteenth-century Catholicism, which came to enjoy an enormous following in circumstances that appear to bear but a marginal relationship to the activity of the elite. In short, there is surely a popular dimension here, independent of figurehead biography, which is possibly best captured in the nineteenth-century legend of English Catholic history.

On 18 May 1843, the Established Church of Scotland was broken up by the Disruption, as most of the Evangelical party walked out of the annual meeting of the General Assembly. They left in protest over lay patronage in appointments to church livings and what they perceived as the State's refusal to recognise the Church's spiritual independence. In all over a third of the ministers and perhaps half the lay membership left the establishment. On the day of the Disruption, the prominent Edinburgh Dissenting minister, Dr John Brown of the United Secession Church, Broughton Place, felt called to play a part in the event. Early that afternoon, his biographer related, he was in a peculiarly solemn mood and ‘could not resist the impulse’ to enter the still empty Tanfield Hall where the outgoing ministers were to gather. He took a seat on the platform and waited. In time, the procession of outgoing ministers and elders arrived followed by the immense crowd. As they streamed into the hall, Brown stepped forward to greet them. He was, however, immediately enveloped in the crowd and his gesture passed unnoticed. It was a telling moment. During the past decade, Brown had been one of the most stern and unbending of the Scottish Voluntaries, those who believed that church membership must be entirely voluntary and who opposed in principle the connection of Church and State. A leading campaigner for the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland, Brown had refused to pay the Edinburgh church rate, or Annuity Tax, in highly publicised case of civil disobedience.

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.

The publication of Christopher Hill's Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings was an exciting event for students of mid-seventeenth-century England. It provides a readily available edition of Winstanley's most important writings. To these Hill offers a compelling introduction which has much to stimulate and interest, but in his interpretation of Winstanley there are also invitations to misunderstanding. Ultimately, Hill's interest in Winstanley arises from his perception of the seventeenth-century writer as ‘modern’ and, if another recent article is any guide, this continues to be the common factor for studies of Winstanley. It is the purpose of this article to argue that this ‘modern’ view of Winstanley misconstrues his intellectual sources and historical significance by minimising the part theology played in his theories of social and moral change. The result of such a view is to misrepresent Winstanley's meaning, and his relationship to his contemporary world.

This article explores interactions between Baptist lay theologians and ordained clergy during the first English civil war. Despite their marginalised position outside the national Church, Baptists employed a variety of innovative techniques to coerce ordained ministers into debates which the latter would have preferred to avoid. Though Baptists during the period did not achieve intellectual parity with the members of the Westminster Assembly and others whom they sought to influence, their efforts contributed to an ongoing transition within the early modern English Atlantic whereby religious culture was made more participatory and theological authority democratised.

It has been assumed by historians that the High and Low Church parties in the early eighteenth-century Church of England were exclusive and homogenous groups. However the life and career of Bishop William Talbot, as with a number of other clergy, raises questions about these assumptions. Though Talbot was ostensibly a Latitudinarian Whig, he embraced some clear High Church principles, including those on the Trinity and on the sacerdotal nature of the priesthood. Talbot also repeatedly opposed the idea of a split between High and Low Churchmen, which had its origin in political abuse rather than theological principle. This study of Talbot's thought suggests that churchmen were able to embrace both High and Low Church principles and thus demands a reconceptualisation of the presumption of exclusivity in the two parties. Historians therefore need to revise their views of the Church parties of the early eighteenth century and to recognise that they existed as overlapping and complementary tendencies around Anglican core values rather than as exclusive and opposing bi-polar structures.

It is well known that the role of public opinion in England before and during the Crimean War was almost uniquely important. It is probably equally well known that in the middle of the nineteenth century church-going and clerical prestige both reached a remarkably high level, except among the working classes. There is, thus, a strong prima facie case for supposing that the churches played a significant part in forming opinion at this critical time, offering as they did to their members interpretations of public events in accordance with their own theological outlook. Certainly such interpretations were far more in demand during the Crimean War than during the wars of either the eighteenth or the twentieth century. It is a striking fact that this was the last English war to be begun with the proclamation of a General Fast, and probably the only modern war in which military disasters prompted another General Fast. The clergy's public was remarkably large and remarkably attentive. The circulation of the religious weekly press almost approached that of the serious secular weeklies (the Athenaeum apart), while the long life of the Penny Pulpit, made up exclusively of the recent sermons of the most popular preachers of the day, reveals a substantial sermon-buying public well below the social levels which the familiar bound volumes of a single preacher's sermons suggest.

The early years of the twentieth century prior to the outbreak of World War I have been described as a period in which the Liberal Party was in a state of decline. One significant aspect of this decline was the deterioration of what in the late nineteenth century has been labelled as political nonconformity. Gladstone's statement that Nonconformists supplied the backbone of British Liberalism perhaps best symbolises the political significance of this group for the vitality of the Liberal Party.

It is not at first sight easy to explain the ever-growing appeal which Cluny had during the tenth and eleventh centuries for clergy and still more for laymen, particularly in Burgundy, France, Christian Spain and North Italy. The basis of Cluniac life was the choir service of the monks and the silence and ordered round of the cloister. By and large the Cluniacs did not seek to work outside the cloister or to become involved in wider pastoral care. They were, indeed, concerned for the Church and for the world at large, but with a view to winning individuals to share spiritually and to support materially the other-worldly ends of the monastic order. Yet, especially under abbots Odilo and Hugh, there was a rapid rise in the number of houses subject to Cluny or otherwise influenced by it; a Cluniac house formed part of the neighbourhood of a large part of the people who lived to the south and west of Lorraine. Cluny itself was well situated to attract travellers, and its dependencies were especially important on the pilgrimage routes. Together with the increasing number of Cluniac houses the long series of charters which record its endowment with monasteries, churches, lands and other wealth testify to its impact upon Church and Society in western Europe.

Although scholars have come increasingly to recognise the considerable influence of early modern Catholic writers upon the historiography of the English Reformation, a crucial aspect of this influence has received scant attention: the impact of Catholic polemical writings upon perceptions of the Reformation. This article will examine a particularly striking and important example of the effects of Catholic polemic, the attacks on the calendar of martyrs included in editions of John Foxe's Acts and monuments. It will describe how these attacks merged with traditions of anti-Puritanism to create a stereotype of the Marian martyrs as being poor, from the lowest social classes, uneducated and disrespectful of authority to the point of rebellion. These attacks also laid the foundation for the myth, still prevalent today, that many of the Marian martyrs were guilty of Trinitarian or sacramentarian heresies which would have led to their condemnation as heretics even under a Protestant regime.

The immediate purpose of this article is narrative, in particular its aim is to draw attention to two little-known incidents in the early life of William of Corbeil, archbishop of Canterbury (1123–36) and to a rearrangement of the chronology of the Canterbury-York dispute in the 1120s, and, in general, to tell part of the story of that dispute again. The story is worth telling because it is colourful and dramatic and crowded with incident, because it is almost all that we know of a remote and thinly-documented period of English Church history, and because it marks an entirely new interest in English affairs on the part of the popes, who took part in the dispute with an energy and effect unparallelled since the seventh century. Despite (or perhaps because of) the excellence of the sources—Eadmer, monk of Canterbury, and Hugh, precentor of York—the story has only once been told at all fully for its most important period, that from 14 August 1114 to 9 December 1128—by Mr. Nicholl, in his recently published ‘Life’ of Thurstan, archbishop of York (1114–40). Naturally, he concentrated on Thurstan, the greater man of the two, the man with the better case, the victor in the dispute, of whom much more is known. This article is intended to give a brief synopsis of the early life of the loser, to tell of his early introduction to the dispute and his eventual part in it.

The Protestant divine John Dury has long been identified as holding millenarian beliefs. However a closer reading of his apocalyptic commentaries and a more clearly defined use of terms reveals that Dury's apocalyptic beliefs are more complex than previously recognised. This article offers a detailed analysis of his preface to the European millenarian tract Clavis apocalyptica to demonstrate that apocalyptic and millenarian belief in the seventeenth century is in need of a careful reassessment.

Religious politics in Scotland during the middle decades of the seventeenth century have always attracted much historical attention. The conflict of the Covenant, the tensions of the Cromwellian occupation and the troubled Restoration period have understandably drawn scholars like moths to the flame. Many heroes have been discovered, ranging from Alexander Shields at one extreme to Archbishop James Sharp at the other, some of them with an apparent significance, intellectual or political, far beyond the supposedly purblind world of Restoration Scotland. But no contemporary has emerged more enhanced in the eyes of subsequent scholarship, nor more frustrated in his own time, than Robert Leighton – ‘the outstanding bishop of the period’ – bishop of Dunblane from 1661 to 1672 and for two more years the most reluctant archbishop of Glasgow ever to wear the mitre. A number of historians have trawled the evidence of a career which oscillated between failed attempts at accommodation between Episcopalians and Presbyterians and periods of disappointed withdrawal. His moderation and humanity, chief among the qualities noted by intimates such as Gilbert Burnet and opponents including Robert Wodrow, have inevitably loomed largest in most subsequent assessments of his actions. A few later scholars, particularly those strongly sympathetic to the Covenanters, have taken the opposite tack, regarding Leighton's excessive posthumous reputation as sufficient excuse for sometimes perverse contradiction. And yet the evidence offered by the celebrated library founded by the bishop in Dunblane has never been properly weighed. How far do the volumes accumulated during his lifetime and bequeathed to the Bibliotheca Leightoniana cast light upon its founder's philosophical interests? And do they help explain those peculiar responses, a remarkable commitment to both public reconciliation and private retirement, with which Leighton approached Scotland's troubled religious situation? These are the intertwined questions with which this essay is concerned.

The great expansion in monasticism in Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a commonplace of medieval history, as is the marked diminution in monastic grants after c. 1200. Far more attention, however, has been paid to the religious houses than to their founders, and it is only by looking at a baronial family over a long period that one can discern the fashions which undoubtedly existed in monastic benefaction and the changes in attitude of successive generations. The Clare family were both long-lasting and prolific, and, because of the numerous changes in the landed position of various members of the family, it is possible to see how closely in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the acquisition of new territories and the endowment of monasteries went together. Moreover, we are able to trace the changing preferences for different monastic orders and, to some extent, the reasons for this, and, in addition, to see this in the context not only of Normandy and England, but of Wales and Ireland as well. Whereas in the eleventh and early twelfth century, the Clares' gifts passed to Benedictine houses, many of them Norman or with Norman connections, they became more interested later in the new orders of the Augustinian canons and Cistercians which were spreading rapidly over Europe. At the same time they made grants to the military orders of the Hospitallers and Templars which, by giving knights the opportunity to combine fighting with a monastic life, fused two ideals of the twelfth-century world. In contrast to the variety and amount of these monastic benefactions, the Clares were content in the thirteenth century to make only the occasional grant, but they were insistent on maintaining their rights of patronage. In addition, their interest turned to the new orders of friars. There is, however, no indication here of continuous family interest from one generation to the next as would have been the case in the early twelfth century.

‘places consecrated to God [should] be venerated by all, and by no means profaned or in any way violated by a jarring or unsuitable activity, whether in working, jesting or playing …; [there should be] no laughter, shouting, immoderate mirth, indecent and indiscreet dances, indecent mockeries and harmful plays proper to the market-place or the stage’: letter of Bishop Edmund Lacy of Exeter, 1451

Old churchyards enshrine vast amounts of personal and social history, although most of it, sadly, is not recoverable. Furthermore, they often display a romantic and touching beauty. When exploring villages and towns in all parts of Britain, many of us have been moved by the sight of a raised platform of hummocky turf surrounding an ancient Christian church, walled and gated, crossed by narrow paths, shaded by mature trees, dotted with leaning headstones and lichened table-tombs, perhaps with the weathered stump of a medieval preaching cross. Above all we are impressed by the thought that most of the local population, over many centuries, lies here, ‘each in his narrow cell for ever laid’. For example, a rural churchyard of half an acre at Widford in Hertfordshire is estimated to hold more than 5,000 burials, laid to rest over a period of at least 900 years. Such places have witnessed many solemn rituals: consecration by a bishop, occasional claims of sanctuary, sad clusters of mourners around open graves, the commemorative prayers and bell-ringing of All Saints' and All Souls' days, parochial processions on Palm Sunday or Corpus Christi, and at all periods the lonely vigils of the bereaved. Repeatedly opened and re-filled by generations of gravediggers, churchyards are potent reminders of human mortality which the living have mostly treated with respect, deep reflection and some superstition.

Not much is known about Robert Holland, the only Renaissance demonologist to venture into print in the Welsh language. He was born in 1557 at Conway, the third son of a gentleman, and went eventually to Cambridge and into the Church of England. He took his B.A. at Magdalene in 1577–8, was ordained at Ely two years later and spent the 1580s preaching and schoolmastering in East Anglia. In 1591 he became rector of a crown living at Prendergast, near Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, and he was subsequently presented to Walwyn's Castle and Robeston West in the same county. As a result of the patronage of John Philipps of Picton, he was also incumbent of the Carmarthenshire parish of Llanddowror from at least 1594 until 1608. He is presumed to have died before the end of James I's reign, probably in 1622.