The Evangelical awakening which took place in the province of Ulster during 1859 was one of the most important events in the religious history of the north of Ireland. Although it has received virtually uncritical acceptance by modern Evangelicals in Northern Ireland, few are aware that there was a significant minority of Evangelicals who dissented from offering the movement their wholehearted support. This article examines why one of nineteenth-century Belfast's most controversial Anglican clerics, the Revd William McIlwaine, was very critical of the movement. Not all critics were outright opponents of the revival, however. McIlwaine was one of the revival's moderate critics, who believed that it was partially good. Nevertheless, the awakening's physical manifestations and its impact on theology and church order deeply disturbed him. The article also explains why 1859 was a turning point in McIlwaine's ecclesiastical career, which saw him move from Evangelicalism to a moderate High Church position.

This article explores the reception of the European Protestant Reformation in the British Atlantic using the early Bermudan Church as a case study. It offers an alternative model for Puritan colonisation which was driven by a reformed vision for godly globalisation and evangelisation rather than flight from persecution in England. By shedding light on ecclesiastical ties between the reformed Churches on the continent and the British Atlantic, it extends the ideological foundations for the establishment of British America beyond the theories of empire and economic opportunism usually addressed by historians.

St Simon Stock is an elusive thirteenth-century Carmelite saint of whom it may be said that very little is known but about whom much has been written. The details of his life and even the fact of his existence have aroused considerable controversy over the centuries. In part the lack of firm information could be attributed to the fact that, until recently, the early history of the Carmelites, or Whitefriars, was little known and clouded by legendary claims about the order being founded on Mount Carmel by the prophet Elijah. In addition, church historians have tended to focus on the larger and better documented Franciscan and Dominican orders. The Carmelites, although numerically fewer, were nevertheless a significant presence in medieval England comprising at their peak some thirty-nine communities and a total approaching 1,000 friars. Fortunately, in the past few years, the quantity of published research on Carmelite history has increased significantly.

Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII, was a man both personally extraordinary and yet representative of his age. He abandoned the normal cursus honorum of the legal profession to enter the king's service more suddenly than any of his contemporaries; yet he was one of many common lawyers newly influential in the king's councils of the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. He was probably the only layman in Henry's inner circle to have studied at a university; yet within fifty years of his death most English statesmen of the first rank would have done so. In pursuing the king's interests, Dudley generated sufficient animosity to make himself one of the two scapegoats for Henry's policies tried and executed in 1509–10; yet it was more his manner, his efficiency and his political isolation than any difference of intent that distinguished him from Henry's other ministers. In pursuing his own interests he built a large landed estate faster than any of his colleagues, but their aims and eventual achievements were not so different from his. The one respect in which Dudley was unique was that he had leisure, while under arrest in the Tower of London, to commit to paper his thoughts on English government and society. The resulting treatise, The tree of commonwealth, enables us to juxtapose his stated ideals with his actions as a royal minister and as an influential layman. Thereby we may hope to shed new light on the relations between Church, State and lay elites on the eve of the English Reformation.

Although Constantine was interested in the Council from a political point of view, and although he evidently got what he wanted from it, he did not simply walk away from Nicaea with the creed and consider the matter at an end. His letters written after the Council are important evidence for his attitude during it.

When students of early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical history come to compile a religious ‘map’ of England, their attention will be drawn to a matter commented upon often enough by contemporaries, but almost entirely neglected now—the catastrophic decline in the influence of the Church in much of the countryside. The greatest triumphs of Nonconformity were won in the rural areas of Wales, and by the time of the religious census in 1851 English Dissenters had established a long lead over the Church in the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, were ahead in Huntingdonshire, and were within striking distance of drawing level in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk. In the southern and south-eastern counties the Church preserved its formal ascendancy, but often attracted a smaller proportion of the people to its services on census Sunday than in counties which were overrun by Dissent. The real tragedy for the Church in this period, it may be argued, was not that industrialisation concentrated people where her. endowments, manpower and accommodation were thinly spread, but that things went so badly where her resources were concentrated. It is the object of this paper to draw attention to this major question of ecclesiastical history and geography, and to suggest that part of the answer to it lies in the tithe question.

At the end of the fourth century a theory is found in the works of several writers to the effect that the episcopate and the presbyterate are essentially one order, differentiated only by the presiding function of the bishop and the reservation to him of the right of ordination. In the East this view is expressed in the homilies of St. John Chrysostom on I Timothy where he says:

‘Discoursing of bishops, and having described their character, and the qualities which they ought to possess, and having passed over the order of presbyters, he proceeds to that of deacons. The reason of this omission was, that between presbyters and bishops there was no great difference. Both had undertaken the office of teachers and presidents in the Church, and what he has said concerning bishops is applicable to presbyters. For they are only superior in having the power of ordination, and seem to have no other advantage over presbyters.’

Paul Tagaris was a Byzantine Greek, born perhaps in the 1320s. Only in quite recent years has his name been unearthed from the documents in which it had for long been lurking unobserved. Fr. R.-J. Loenertz, O.P., and Fr. Joseph Gill, S.J., have both, though independently, assembled most of the evidence for his remarkable career. This article can add only a few details to that evidence. But it has been thought worth-while to present the whole story as a connected narrative worthy of the attention of ecclesiastical historians.

This winning and much-quoted declamation, made in Oxford in 1908 by G. H. Frodsham, the Anglican bishop of North Queens-land, enshrines the aura of romance which has ever since surrounded the Australian bush brotherhoods. The attraction of this form of community life, especially to younger English clergy, lay in its spirit of adventure and in the once magnetic appeal to empire loyalty: duty and sacrifice, for a limited term, in a not too foreign land.

Orthodox criticism of Bishop Reynold Pecok began ten years before he recanted and resigned in 1457–8. It came from a group of consciously orthodox theologians whose views were outraged by Pecok's teaching in sermon, disputation and writings. Long before his trial and recantation, Pecok had offended two important movements: a pastoral movement, deeply committed to preaching, which he outraged by belittling the importance of preaching; and a patristic movement which had grown up in the universities from the 1420s and whose members were now undertaking pastoral work. Pecok's gradually revealed hostility to the Fathers was particularly offensive to his younger opponents. If differences in age thus gave rise to differences of emphasis among Pecok's opponents, so too did differences of academic background. Nevertheless, as learned, consciously orthodox theologians with pastoral interests, they shared a common theological culture. The changes in emphasis found their expression in the course of controversy.

The Restoration was a victory for the governing classes, a victory for social stability and discipline. Dissent, the gentry argued, led to republicanism and social disintegration: Anglicanism and the monarchy meant order. Yet despite the ease with which Charles it returned in 1660 and the relative lack of bloodshed which accompanied his restoration, it was by no means certain that the settlement would be anything more than transitory. God, in his infinite and impenetrable

Bernd Moeller concludes in his often-quoted study of late medieval German piety that ‘one could dare to call the late fifteenth century in Germany one of the most churchly-minded and devout periods of the Middle Ages’. In his review of Moeller's work, W. D.J. Cargill Thompson points out that the ‘profound conservatism’ of this religiosity, which included devotion to the mass, veneration of saints and their relics, and the reading of vast amounts of religious literature, poses a problem for our understanding of the causes of the Reformation. How does one reconcile this traditional churchliness with the ‘remarkable suddenness’ of its collapse after 1520? One would have expected greater resistance to Lutheran ideas than actually occurred.

The year 1688 was for England a religious as well as a political turning-point, and nowhere more so than among the English Roman Catholics. The post-Revolution Church was maintained and led by the same clergy who had flourished under James 11, but in very different circumstances. The hectic triumphalism of the years before 1688 gave way to a period of slow, cautious, and self-consciously a-political consolidation. The change can be seen in the careers of two men, Bonaventure Giffard and John Gother. Giffard had been provocatively consecrated bishop of Madura in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall in 1688. In the same year he had gone to Oxford, to preside over twelve catholic dons at Magdalen College, intruded in the place of the evicted protestant Fellows. There he had confirmed and sung the mass, while protestant undergraduates stormed and howled outside the chapel windows. The Revolution brought a fourteen-month prison sentence in Newgate, from which he emerged, a chastened man, to oversee the formation and consolidation of congregations and clergy funds and organisations in the Midland District and, after 1702, to take charge of the London District with its mission to the London poor and unchurched.

As Sir Thomas More reflected upon the religious atmosphere during the first months of 1528, he could not conceal his dismay that the situation was steadily deteriorating. Indeed, he thought the popular orthodoxy so weak that any ‘senseless clown’ could gain wide support for an attack on the Church. Within the year, Simon Fish's Supplication of the Beggars had made More a prophet, forcing the busy new chancellor of England to reply to Fish with The Supplycacyon of soulys. Historians have hesitated to label Fish senseless or a clown, for the tremendous impact of his short tract upon Henry vm and the English Reformation is generally recognised. While it is manifest that the Supplication was a rabble-rousing piece of anti-clericalism, perhaps another measure should be taken of Fish before closing off the subject of his significance from discussion. Specifically, if evidence should place Fish and his writings within that group identified with William Tyndale, more credence would be lent to chancellor More's repeated assertions that a number of ‘evangelicall brethren’ existed to propagate Tyndale's beliefs.

Writing to Wolsey from Bergen op Zoom in 1527 the English ambassador described the Low Countries as being in grave peril from heresy, ‘for yf ther be tre men that speckes, the tweyn keppis Lutter ys openyon’: it was a pardonable exaggeration. Of Luther's immediate popularity in the Netherlands there can be no doubt. In taverns, private houses and on barges the religious issues of the day were hotly debated; from pulpits the new doctrines were championed or denounced, and in public places posters appeared pillorying the mendicants. The succession of placards forbidding the reading, sale or printing of Luther's writings and the increasingly severe penalties prescribed for attendance at conventicles, for harbouring apostate religious and, above all, for spreading heretical notions tell the same tale. Already by 1525 Luther had become a household name in the Netherlands and a new synonym for heretics ‘Luytrianen’ had entered common speech, displacing the older ‘Valdoysen ende Wijclevisten’.

No one doubts that the treatise on repentance published in 1648 as the sixth book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is by Hooker, but there has been considerable doubt that 1648 (as I shall call it) belongs in the Laws. Keble pronounced it ‘an entire deviation from its subject’, which should have been the Disciplinarian proposal that the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction be exercised by congregational lay-elders, while W. Speed Hill concludes his recent detailed discussion of the problems surrounding the posthumous three last books of Hooker's great work by calling on those who would include 1648 in the Laws to argue their case for its inclusion ‘in the face of a substantial body of evidence, internal and external, to the contrary’. The present note is a response on the ‘internal’ side to Professor Hill's call for argument.

During the past forty years, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England has received a great deal of attention from intellectual, social and Church historians. Because of the nature of the general interpretation traditionally followed, most scholars have found it fruitful to concentrate their research upon particular groups or individuals and to fit the ensuing studies into either a rather narrow stream labelled ‘Anglican’ or a very broad one named ‘Puritan’. While the number of biographies of English bishops and analyses of ‘Anglican’ divines has increased at a more than respectable rate recently, studies of English ‘Puritans’ and their brethren in New England have grown to almost unmanageable proportions. With all of these riches at hand, however, no recent historian has published an overall synthetic history of the Church of England under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts to match that completed by W. H. Frere more than two-thirds of a century ago. Indeed, a good deal of controversy still ranges over the boundaries and validity of such terms as ‘Anglican’ and—especially— ‘Puritan’. Plunging into that dispute, this paper will examine the nature and historiographical origins of these categories, redefine them so that they better apply to the evidence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and spell out some of the social and political implications that spring from this modified point of view. While the argument presented here, no doubt, will neither please nor satisfy all historians working in the field, one hopes that it will provide some with a glimpse at the outlines of a new synthesis.

Christian ethics is not a matter of fixed and unchangeable laws. If we are to study its history we must follow a story of development and trace the evidence of an evolution. This is not something that should shock us as though its development were something that puts in question its changeless value. On the contrary, its value is confirmed by its evolution, because Christian ethics is essentially dynamic. From this intrinsic dynamism we are constantly pushed forward. As Christians we live under one commandment, the commandment of love given by Jesus himself which is the centre of the dynamism. If Christian ethics becomes static, it contradicts its very nature. Far from being a tradition that is to be upheld from age to age, Christian ethics is the means of criticising the traditions of every age and a means of searching lines of development for the future.

Historians accept that the personality of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, was of central importance in determining the nature and objectives of his regime from 1547 to 1549. Unfortunately, they disagree about many aspects of that elusive character; it is therefore important to eradicate misapprehensions about Somerset's views from historical discussion. Vain, insensitive and lacking judgement in personal and political relationships, he yet retains the reputation of a politician concerned for the commonweal, whether from the motives of political calculation suggested by Michael Bush or the influence of Christian humanism detected by Brendan Bradshaw. Charlatan or Christian, the reputation of ‘the good duke’ shows astonishing resilience despite the quantities of cold water poured upon it by Sir Geoffrey Elton. To complicate matters, a misleading interpretation of Somerset's views on higher education, a central concern of the ‘commonwealth’ programme, appears to have become the accepted orthodoxy, making it even more difficult to discover Somerset's true character. This paper examines the origins, development and significance of that error and traces it to its source in a preoccupation typical of Tudor Protestantism.

On 20 November 1210, before a large crowd of spectators which had flocked to the market-place of Les Champeaux outside the Saint-Honoré Gate in Paris, the heretical Amalricians were burnt at the stake. Fire that day consumed ten men, of whom nine were certainly laicised priests, deacons and sub-deacons. Six days earlier, at the nearby church of St Honorius, they had been stripped of their clerical status and handed over for execution to the royal officials of the rex chrislianissimus, Philip Augustus. Indeed, from the time some three months beforehand that Master Ralph of Namur, discoverer of their existence and pseudo-convert to their beliefs, was instructed by his clerical superiors to infiltrate the sect – an act of ecclesiastical espionage which eventually delivered the Amalricians to the flames – a highly placed royal counsellor, the Hospitaller Brother Guerin, had been consulted immediately. For this was a matter of urgency, and not just to the Church.