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.

The discovery of a document, until now hidden in an obscure Protestant pamphlet, presented by Charles cardinal de Lorraine (1525–74) to the privy council in August 1562, underpins recent work which shows the cardinal to have been an evangelical Catholic interested in reform and in reconciliation with Lutherans, both before and after the Colloquy of Poissy. This paper argues that Protestants feared Lorraine precisely because his interest in dialogue had the potential to split the reform movement. Publication of his five articles in 1565 was an attempt to embarrass him after Trent and to compromise his political rapprochement with the prince of Condé.

The rural economy of late medieval Italy displays many features and obeys many tendencies common to western Europe at the time. In the age of fully developed communes and nascent despotism it is customary to emphasise that peasant unfreedom and dependent tenure had as good as disappeared, demesne farming and labour services were forgotten, and seigneurial rights diminished or suppressed; where these things have been discovered to persist they are noticed as curious survivals from a different society. Income from land consisted of rents, which on the older estates of church and nobility were commonly fixed rents in money or kind, paid in perpetuity or to an increasing extent for a term of years or at pleasure. New landlords however were displacing the old, men of the urban oligarchies and middle class, who were harsher than their feudal predecessors and pursued an active agriculture by way of grants in mezzadria (sharecropping), protected in their interest by municipal statute. Among ecclesiastical lordships many monasteries succumbed to debt or moral decay, and ecclesiastical property fell victim to a fresh wave of lay encroachment, proceeding from the towns. In Lombardy and the north all classes of society sought their advantage in taking church land at nugatory rents to sublet for high profits or even in time to possess outright. A new cupidity was in the air.

The proliferation of new monastic orders in the twelfth century presented the Church with a dilemma which had previously challenged the theologians of Christendom: the flowering of diversity within the unity of the faith. Just as theologians had had to resolve contradictions among the writings of the Fathers – the primary authorities for the interpretation of the Bible, and hence the elucidation of God's truth as it was perceived – so, in the new climate of monastic revival, ecclesiastical leaders had to come to terms with the existence of a variety of new interpretations of the Rule of St Benedict, and indeed that of St Augustine – the primary guides to the living of a true Christian life.

‘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.

The Act of Six Articles of 1539 affirmed half a dozen key Catholic beliefs and their denial was made punishable by law: a heretic's death was automatically prescribed for repudiation of transubstantiation, and possible death as a felon for those who denied the divine authority of clerical celibacy, vows of chastity, private masses or the practical necessity of auricular confession. The measure was made even more severe as recantation was of no effect where transgression of the first article was concerned. Little wonder its detractors called the act ‘the whip with six strings’, or the ‘bloody statute’. From early on, the passage of the act was often seen in terms of a personal triumph for Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, along with Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, who piloted the measure through parliament. All of the allusions to Gardiner's involvement come from hostile sources, and most of these ascriptions are vague and lacking in circumstantial detail. William Turner, in The rescuyinge of the Romishe fox, referred to the act in a much quoted statement as ‘the six articles, otherwise called Gardiner's gospel’; it remains a moot point whether Winchester's enemy, Turner, was ascribing to Gardiner authorship of the act or merely endorsement of its orthodoxy. An unknown author, whose work is to be found in Narratives of…the Reformation, argued that the act stemmed from the king's anger against reformist bishops who quarrelled over his deployment of monastic wealth, so Henry, ‘being stirred thereunto by Winchester and other old papists in the next parliament, made vj new articles of our faithy.… The most comprehensive and detailed indictment of Winchester's involvement comes in a highly virulent, and extremely effective, piece of propaganda directed against the bishop.

John Foxe's De censura, sive excommunicatione ecclesiastica, rectoque eius usu, published in 1551, was the earliest tract to be written by an English Protestant on the subject of ecclesiastical discipline and, as such, deserves a closer examination than it has received to date. Given that continental Protestants and, later on, Puritan apologists alike accepted as axiomatic that the Reformation could only be established on the twin pillars of pure doctrine and right discipline, the appearance at this time, amid a stream of doctrinal polemic, of a tract on discipline, was significant. It indicated that Protestants had become confident enough, after waging war on the claims of the Church of Rome, to regulate the lives of its members, to assert similar claims in the name of Scripture and reformed ‘true religion’. That this tract should appear in Edward VI's reign, and not earlier, was important in this respect, for the effect of the Henrician Reformation had been to render impossible any suggestion that the Church should or could be autonomous in discipline. The psychological climate - as well as the theoretical framework - of the Supremacy persisted throughout Edward's reign, but the fact that the king was a minor gave Protestants a breathing space in which to approach the problem of trying to bring the Church into line with pure, apostolic models. In terms of quantity of published material, doctrine, rather than discipline, was undoubtedly much the more important of the issues discussed; by dealing with discipline a Protestant writer was grasping the nettle, for the subject raised questions about the relative roles of Church and State in the reformation of society and, ultimately, about the structure of the national Church. Foxe's tract was the first attempt to face the question of discipline; that it was the only one, even in Edward vi's reign, showed what a hold the Supremacy had taken. The aim of this article, therefore, is to bring out the significance of Foxe ‘s tract and to explore some of the tensions in mid-Tudor Protestant thought which it reflects. The first part (by Catharine Davies) aims to set it more precisely in its Edwardian context; the second (by Jane Facey) uses it to illuminate the changed emphasis of Foxe's thought on the relationship of Church and State required by the writing of the Acts and Monuments.

The Capuchin friar, Valerian Magni, was one of the most influential churchmen of the first half of the seventeenth century. A confidant of Pope Urban VIII, an advisor to the emperor Ferdinand II and an intimate of the Polish king Władysław IV, Magni worked tirelessly as a religious mediator for nearly fifty years. This article investigates his ecumenical activity in two major arenas, Bohemia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the Czech kingdom Magni collaborated with young Archbishop Harrach to counter the Jesuits' harsher policies of reCatholicisation while in Poland he endeavoured to reunite both Protestant and Orthodox communities with the Catholic Church.

The victory of Christianity in the last years of Constantine's was graphically described by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Life of Constantine. Clearly in Phoenicia, where he had excellent sources of reign information, the heart had gone out of the old religion. Every class in the community was prepared to accept Christianity and even to deride the deities that once they had held in awe. The victory there and ultimately over nearly the whole empire was so decisive that one is inclined to forget the tremendous struggle for the hearts and allegiances of the provincials that preceded it. Though in retrospect one might agree with von Harnack's view that even without Constantine's conversion Christianity would have triumphed, this was not how it appeared to most contemporaries. Down to the time of his victory over Licinius (September 324), Constantine seems to have aimed only at securing for Christianity the legal equality with the traditional cults, as envisaged by the Edict of Milan. The Council of Nicaea, however, summoned by the emperor in 325, proved to be decisive both for the establishment of orthodoxy and the victory of Christianity itself. Thenceforth, the history of the empire would also be the history of the Church.

This article is a very tentative effort to analyse material on the clandestine marriages of Catholic recusants from the York ecclesiastical archives. We shall endeavour to discover how these marriages were conducted and how the parties were treated by the Anglican ecclesiastical authorities.

The decline of anti-Catholic sentiment in twentieth-century England stood in stark contrast to attitudes in Wales, where a distinct and persistent anti-Catholic polemic was common as recently as the 1960s. While research into British anti-Catholicism has ignored the situation in twentieth-century Wales, many of the reasons suggested for the fervent nineteenth-century English hostility seem not only to explain the absence of Welsh animosity in the same era, but also to illuminate the predicament in Wales a century later. What we have is a striking example of historical synchronicity: two eras where the majority Christian denomination, already facing an internal crisis, reacts to a Church that is seen to threaten its existence and status, as well as the national way of life it upholds.

In general the term ‘Pietist’ signifies a type of dedicated, personal faith in which deep devotion to Christ and strict morality were prominent. Emphasising the emotions, rebirth, a changed life and religious experience, it often generated a sense of separation from the unredeemed world in its adherents, who typically made use of sermon, Scripture, devotional works and small gatherings of the devout to obtain spiritual edification, often also espousing missionary work. For them experience counted for more than knowledge of doctrine, dedication for more than ecclesiastical status and the personal for more than the institutional. The word was first used of the followers of the Lutheran churchman Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), who, as is well known, formed an important reform movement in Germany late in the seventeenth century and whose successors were influential there until well into the next.

Even the darkest accounts of the eighteenth-century Church of England have generally singled out the religious societies of (various sorts as a bright spark in the gathering Latitudinarian gloom. They included: private devotional groups (‘the religious societies’); the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (referred to here as ‘the SRMs’); the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG); and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which also supported charity schools. Taken together, these activities seem to add up to a considerable movement of religious renewal. The devotional religious societies are of particular interest because of their problematical relationship to the origins of the evangelical revival and of Methodism in particular. The present paper is mainly concerned with this question.

In 1966 Keith Thomas wrote an article in the Times Literary Supplement which laid down the axiom, ‘All historical propositions relating to the behaviour of large groups, for example… religious activity, are susceptible of treatment in this [statistical] way, and indeed permit of no other.’ Social historians have increasingly adopted this approach ever since. It has obviously great merits: I am sometimes afraid, indeed, that the principle is in some ways not being carried far enough, and that only the letter, and not the law, is being implemented. For instance, in my own field, individual village studies, often of high quality, are produced. But their authors frequently omit to indicate the nature of the agricultural and marketing region in which their community lies, and therefore fail to establish either its probable social structure or its ‘normality’ or ‘abnormality’ within its area. Quantified studies of great complexity and considerable value are therefore produced; but this value is diminished by the total ignorance of the reader, and sometimes it seems of the author, of the ‘typicality’ of the example.

‘We have been placed in such a position’, wrote Pope Gregory VII at the beginning of his pontificate, ‘that we are compelled willy-nilly to announce truth and justice to all peoples, especially Christians, according to the Word of the Lord, “Cry aloud and do not cease; lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to my people their sins” (Isaiah lviii. I), and elsewhere, “If you do not announce to the evildoer his iniquity, I shall seek his soul at your hand” (Ezekiel iii. 18). Again the prophet says, “Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from blood” (Jeremiah xlviii. 10); that is, the word of preaching from the rebuke of carnal men.’ These prophetic texts recur throughout the Register of Gregory VII, defining that obligation of rebuking evil-doers which the pope considered to be a primary duty of his office. Gregory VII was the most energetic propagandist of his reforming programme for the extirpation of simony and clerical marriage. His letters were intended to provide their recipients with anctoritates demonstrating the righteousness of the Gregorian cause.

The surviving continuous records of the Court of Arches, or, to give it its full modern style, the ‘beloved Court of Canterbury of the Arches’, tell its history only from the Restoration. It had already been respected for centuries as the chief ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury and a large number of suits continued to come before it every year. The judge or Official Principal, commonly known as the Dean of the Arches from his lesser office as judge in the archbishop of Canterbury's peculiar of that name, was a person of considerable influence and importance. The proctors and advocates who conducted the cases were the more successful members of a flourishing profession. In the early eighteenth century, Thomas Oughton, the writer on ecclesiastical law, who was a proctor of the court, spoke of it with awe and veneration. ‘Let us reverently enter on one of the court days into the sanctuary of this august tribunal. … Behold! How solemn, how awakening the aspect of justice! … At first glance who is not penetrated with emotions of affection and veneration!’ But the court was shorn of most of its jurisdiction during the nineteenth century and it was described by Dickens in 1850 with very different feelings. The society of Doctors' Commons, the stronghold of the profession of the ecclesiastical law, was dissolved in accordance with the Court of Probate Act of 1857 and its buildings were pulled down.

The letters of the First Crusade have traditionally been read as authentic and trustworthy eyewitness accounts of the expedition and they contribute greatly to scholarly understanding of the campaign. But new research on them demonstrates that many of the documents are in fact twelfth-century confections produced in the monastic communities of the West as a means of supporting, participating in and engaging with the crusading movement. This article develops new approaches to the letters and new research questions which account for and accept the problematic authenticity of the corpus, pivoting away from traditional methodologies to explore the monastic scribal cultures that produced and consumed First Crusade letters.

I believe that the Henrician Reformation was a thoroughly revolutionary event, or set of events. It was revolutionary in a constitutional sense in declaring Henry head of the nation-church—as also in an ecclesiological one. It was revolutionary, ere long, in a further theological sense and, ere long again, revolutionary in its effect on property ownership and all that that implied. And, on top of this, it was a landmark in political and administrative history.

This article aims to reassess current historical judgements on the Czech Utraquist Church during the second century of its existence, from 1517 to 1621. It seeks to outline the special problems which Bohemian Utraquism faced as a religious via media, partly viewed from the comparative perspective of the kindred phenomenon of the post-Reformation Church of England. After a discussion of the historiographic issues, the focus is on the distinctive development of sixteenth-century Utraquism and its relations to English theology and eastern Orthodoxy. The Church's intermediate position between the Church of Rome and the fully reformed Protestant Churches is then explored more systematically through the writings of the authoritative, but neglected, theologian of sixteenth-century Utraquism, Bohuslav Bílejovský.

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.