According to the Rule of St. Benedict the powers of an abbot, who stands in the place of Christ, are virtually absolute. It is true that the Rule has general injunctions for an abbot's good behaviour. He must always be mindful of the words of the apostle, ‘ye have received the spirit of the adoption of children, in which we cry Abba, Father’. He should study to be loved not feared, and the Rule states that he ‘should not harass the flock committed to him, nor exercise his power in an arbitrary, unjust way, but should always remember that for all his decisions and acts he must render account to God’. Nevertheless, there are no sanctions to enforce this code of conduct. In the abbot's hands lies the ultimate control of the administration. The Rule specifies that the abbot is to appoint the prior, and that the cellarer is bound by his commands.

It is surprising to find that Friends were included within the terms of the Toleration Act. The political situation they faced in 1689 was distinctly unpromising. They not only continued to experience the hostility and prejudice that they had suffered since their earliest days, but they were seriously compromised by the close identification of William Penn with the discredited Catholic policies of James II. An examination of the debates in parliament on the Toleration Bill reveals that Friends were by no means certain of being included in the act. Yet their acceptance of the terms they were offered is also surprising in view of their objection to any compromise with the state over matters of religious conscience, an objection which led to their refusal to seek licences under Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. Moreover, a number of recent studies have identified the continued insistence of many provincial Friends, particularly in the rigorous heartland of Quakerism in the north–west, upon the strict maintenance of their testimonies, and indeed a redefining of those testimonies partly in response to the growing compromises with the state made by the Quaker leadership.

It has long been a favourite theme of ecclesiastical historians, particularly in Germany, that the separation of cathedral chapter from episcopal estates was an important step in the development of ecclesiastical administration, not least because it assisted cathedral chapters to become independent and powerful electoral colleges. It was shown by Gerhard Kallen in the 1920s and, more recently and in greater detail, by Rudolf Schieffer, how this separation of estates, which took a long time to be effected, began with grants made to the cathedral ‘for the use of the brothers’ or with grants for more specific purposes, usually of a liturgical nature. This paper looks at a closely related issue, the splitting up of the estates held by the chapter. This division was to some extent inherent from early on, because of the conditions attached to certain benefactions, but it increased throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The way the chapter's revenues were organised had important consequences for the cohesion of the chapter as a community and also for the way in which clerical preferment operated. This can be very clearly demonstrated by a comparative study of the ways in which German and English cathedrals managed their property in the twelfth century. Since the differences between the German and the English systems are so striking the two will be considered in turn, and a comparison will also be made of the control which German and English clerks had over their personal property, which deserves attention not least because the dividing line between personal and chapter property was sometimes a fine one.

Religious revivals in early industrial England have received considerable attention from historians concerned with explaining their appearance in relation to social, economic, and political trends. R. B. Walker, for example, in a general assessment of the impact of external forces on Wesleyan Methodist growth after 1830, argued that political tension in the years 1832 to 1834 may have contributed to religious revival, and that the outbreak of cholera in 1832 certainly increased religious excitement. Chartism, on the other hand, probably competed with the chapels and made revival less likely, while general economic trends of boom and depression had no apparently conclusive impact. Some historians have noted these connections between religious revivals and secular stimuli and have gone on to ask what functions revivals might serve for those participating in them. Eric Hobsbawm in 1957 suggested that, in the half-century after 1790, intense political and religious excitement often coincided and that at such times ‘preachers, prophets, and sectarians might issue what the labourers would regard as calls to action rather than to resignation’. E. P. Thompson, by contrast, forwarded an ‘oscillation’ theory by which it was conceivable that religious revivalism reflected ‘the chiliasm of despair’ amongst working people and occurred ‘just at the point where “political” or temporal aspirations met with defeat’. More recently, Hobsbawm appeared to concur with this theory when he interpreted the revivalism which superseded Swing riots in several parts of the country in 1830 as ‘an escape from, rather than a mobilisation for social agitation’.

The momentous paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person provides us with the context for gaining a firm grasp of Luther's own redefinition of the range and role of philosophy. By no means the life-long combatant, distorter or victim of scholasticism as later scholarship often claims, Luther at once unfolded and redirected a tradition that stretched back through St Bonaventura to St Francis of Assisi, a tradition that rejected the Thomistic ‘Unmoved Mover’ and envisaged a covenantal ‘God who acts’. For Luther, the ‘God who acts’ became the ‘God who acts in Christ’, who is unpredictable and foils any systematic search, who contrary to ‘reason’ carries the cross from Christmas to Easter.

The present-day parishioner, constantly urged to take a more positive role in the life of the local church community, might be surprised to reflect that this onus of responsibility is a comparatively recent development, and that throughout most of the Middle Ages, on the rare occasions when parishioners as such were mentioned at all in the ecclesiastical records, it was virtually in the capacity of property, and often troublesome property at that.

This article examines the development of English Methodism during the formative period between 1738 and 1741, focusing upon the experiences of women, who made up the majority of Methodists both at this time and through much of the movement's history. In particular, the role that women and questions of gender played in the conflict between the Wesley brothers and the Moravian leadership in London is considered. Using accounts written by the male leaders of both groups and the women who supported them, it is argued that women's choices determined the outcome of this early battle, shaping the nascent movement in crucial ways.

This paper analyses the reactions of the Holy See and Italian Catholic public opinion towards two events which can be considered as turning points in the history of British Palestine: the disturbances of August 1929 and the presentation of the Peel Plan in the summer of 1937. Through this analysis, based on a wide range of sources, it shows how the Vatican attitude towards the Palestinian question changed during the interwar period. At the same time it aims to ascertain whether or not the Holy See and the Catholic hierarchy in Palestine were in accord with the Italian government's Near East initiatives.

John Wyclif (d. 1384), Thomas Netter (d. 1430) and Jean Gerson (d. 1429) had a good deal in common. They were all theologians, and thus ‘masters of the sacred page’ by trade. They all recognised the absolute authority of Scripture in matters of the Catholic faith over and against any pretensions of canon law. What separated them, therefore, was not the recognition of authority as such, but rather the correct application of that authority. Wyclif exercised his rights as a university master to dissent from ecclesiastical determinations that ran contrary to the truth as revealed in Scripture. Netter and Gerson set out to curb this sort of magisterial excess which they believed would inevitably lead to the destruction of all proper norms of authority within the Church. Rather than being a simple tale of heresy and orthodoxy, therefore, this late medieval conflict turned on the question of professional expertise, rights and responsibilities.

This article examines the neglected role of religious ideas and vocabulary in expressions of English national sentiment in the fourteenth century, particularly in official rhetoric. Many official uses of religious language followed well-established literary conventions. However, documents requesting nationwide prayers during national crises suggest that the government encouraged the concept of a special relationship between God and England, modelled on Old Testament Israel, well before the Protestant Reformation. National misfortunes were explained as divine punishment for national sins, with England presented as a collective moral community. Parallels with Israel were then drawn out more explicitly in public preaching, bringing this interplay between religion and politics to a wider audience.

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.

The Presbyterian congregation which used to meet in Tothill Street, Westminster, during the later Stuart period is now chiefly remembered for its succession of distinguished pastors. There were three of them, each a figure of importance in the dissenting community of London: first Thomas Cawton, a Bartholomean, under whose direction the congregation was formed and held together in the precarious years following the enactment of religious Uniformity; then Vincent Alsop, an accomplished controversialist who took issue with the doctors of the Church of England, and who, for a quarter of a century, faithfully tended his flock in good times and bad; finally there was Dr. Edmund Calamy, the learned historian of Caroline nonconformity, one of a new generation of Presbyterian divines, during whose early ministry the meeting removed from Tothill Street to other and more spacious premises in the nearby Princes Street. Our present purpose is to take a closer look at one of these ministers, the middle one—Vincent Alsop, ‘a man of great worth and piety’, who superintended his Westminster congregation from 1677 to 1703, the year of his death. His ministry, as we shall show, was to make an important contribution to the emancipation of Old Dissent, especially in the 1680s.

On 22 April 1646 the House of Commons formally questioned the jure divino claims put forward by the ministers in the Westminster Assembly. Ostensibly this action represents the climax to one of the most puzzling developments in the Civil War: the triumphant assertion of Erastianism by men who had acquiesced in the passing of theocratic measures in the early part of the Civil War. W. A. Shaw's reading of the situation typifies the general attitude of historians of the period: the resolution of the problem by denying that it is one. His main thesis is that English Puritanism in the period 1641–6 was never really divorced from its historic Erastian associations.

Time supposedly heals all wounds, but the religious strife between Puritans and Anglicans in the seventeenth century had left a bitter legacy in the minds of the New England Congregationalist ministers. Even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 had in time brought the principle of religious toleration for the protestant sects in the mother country, the animosities of the Stuart regime still evoked suspicion and distrust in the minds of those in New England whose ancestors had left England to found their Zion in the wilderness. But many years had passed since the days of archbishop William Laud, the Clarendon code and the policy of conformity. Although Anglicanism was dominant in England, by the middle of the eighteenth century it was tempered by the principle of toleration for dissenting protestants. But in New England those professing the Anglican faith were a minority among the Congregationalist offspring of the founding puritan fathers. Even in those provinces to the south where it represented the majority of the colonists the Anglican Church suffered from one great defect. There were no resident bishops in America; consequently, those colonists who wished to be ordained as ministers must make the long, expensive, and often hazardous journey to England. Few could undertake such a trip so that most of the Anglican clergy in the colonies came from the mother country.

After Elizabeth's accession the Church in England was in a confused condition. The queen envisaged a politique settlement which, although protestant, was not reformed, thereby enabling her to avoid both international conflict and open internal rebellion. This meant that the established Church must not follow too closely the radical changes in ceremony, doctrine and administration associated with the continental Reformed Churches. However, Elizabeth was compelled to recruit the necessary new bishops and chief ecclesiastical officers from amongst the returned exiles and other convinced Protestants.

Coronations, grand royal entrances and the ceremonies of royal burials were public manifestations of the ‘sacra maiestas regia’. The Polish ceremonies had close parallels in other European monarchies, and also their own special features. The rites formed a symbolic drama with social and political overtones; they were needed to preserve order in the human community. Recent studies in this region have brought interesting results, especially when seen in a long perspective of time and with due contemplation of the mentality and attitudes behind the outward show.

When the first clerical marriage took place in defiance of church law, the Reformation embarked on a course which involved far more than mere tinkering with the moral regulation of the priesthood. Clerical marriage necessitated a reconsideration of one of the oldest Christian conundrums, the relationship between the holy and the body. Now that a life of celibacy was no longer mandatory for the clergy, and sexual abstinence was no longer considered to be the estate most pleasing to God, reformers had to build a new accommodation between sexuality and the sacred. Sexual renunciation and holiness, once indivisible, had been riven apart.

While much has been written about the London Missionary Society and its very impressive record in the foreign mission held, comparatively little recognition has been given to the Society's early and equally important contribution to church union. This is not surprising. The London Missionary Society has historically been associated with the Congregational Church and until recently was called the Congregational Council for World Missions. Its founding fathers and early patrons, not to mention its missionaries, were mostly Independents although other sympathetic evangelicals—mostly Calvinistic Methodists and English and Scottish Presbyterians—were also involved in its formation. In the view of most historians, the significance of the London Missionary Society lay principally in its impact on heathen popujations in far away lands, only minimally in its impact on those who united to direct its affairs in England. In short, it has often been assumed that, like the Baptist and Wesleyan missions that preceded it, the London Missionary Society was designed to serve a limited denominational or theological constituency and that its evolution into a branch of the Congregational Church was almost inevitable from the beginning.

‘There were about ten million Catholics in the British dominions, and, properly considered, Queen Victoria was one of die great Catholic powers of Europe. She reigned over more Cadiolics man some Catholic Sovereigns’. This was the claim of an Irish member of parliament in advocating equality of Catholic education with Protestant at the great meeting held by Cardinal Cullen in the Marlborough Street ‘Cathedral’ in Dublin in January 1872. The meeting was intended to demonstrate the unanimity of laity and clergy in the demand for denominationalism in the National Schools system and the rejection of mixed schools. On the same day the opposition to Cullen's policy was expressed by die Radical John Roebuck in an address given in Sheffield, in the course of which he argued that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 had merely been a dissembling attempt by the Liberals to dupe Dissenters and Radicals and bind diem to Mr Gladstone. It had not brought religious peace to Ireland. ‘Were not the whole body of the Cadiolics, headed by Cardinal Cullen, still determined upon attaining their old end, which was supremacy of the Cadiolic Church in Ireland?’ At the Dublin gathering Cullen quoted J. S. Mill on die danger of a state monopoly in education and roundly condemned the government's policy of mixed education as a scheme which die Protestant Archbishop Whately had admitted was the only way of weaning the Irish from the abuses of popery. The organ of Irish nationalist opinion, The Freeman's Journal, rallied support by denouncing Lord Hartington for resisting the logic of die argument that Irish education of Cadiolic children should be handed over to ‘the priests and people of Ireland’: English Protestants were insincere in favouring a denominational system for Scotland while treating Catholic education for the Irish as subversive of civil and religious liberty.

‘Revisionist’ historians, led by David Loades, have begun to reexamine various aspects of the reign of Mary Tudor and thus to challenge traditional interpretations. Anyone considering the religious history of that period eventually encounters Cardinal Reginald Pole's refusal to accept into England some members of the newly founded Society of Jesus. Concurrent with the reappraisal of Mary's reign, a similar re-examination has dominated early Jesuit historiography. This work, which has generally passed unnoticed by Tudor historians, highlights the encouragement and support that the Society received from reformers, spirituali such as Cardinal Gasparo Contarini and Cardinal Giovanni Morone and, equally important, the attacks that both suffered from their common critics, for example from Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul iv), and Melchor Cano. One of that circle was Cardinal Reginald Pole. As research elucidates the relationship between that group and the Jesuits, it adds a new dimension to the old question: why did Pole resist Jesuit involvement in the restoration of English Catholicism? It is the purpose of this article to bring the two fields together and so first to demonstrate how developments in Jesuit historiography challenge established views and, second, to propose a more plausible interpretation.