On Monday 23 May 550 a directive was issued by the Emperor Justinian to John, metropolitan bishop of Anazarbus in Cilicia Secunda. Another directive, cast in corresponding terms, was sent to Cosmas, bishop of Mopsuestia (the present day Misis, seventeen miles east of Adana in southern Turkey) in the same province. ‘We indicate to your holiness”, he writes to John, ‘that you are to convene all the most-religious bishops of your synod; you are to repair to the town of Mopsuestia and make a detailed examination, with the senior men (whether clerics or laity), there established, foregathering, and learn from them whether they know the date when Theodore's name was removed from the diptychs.” If the senior persons in question do not know the answer, the fact is to be expressly recorded and the diptychs themselves are to be duly checked. Into the events leading up to this directive I will not now enter. It must suffice to recall that the setting was the so-called Three Chapters Controversy: what to do about Nestorius' precursors Theodore and Diodore, about Theodoret's writings against Cyril of Alexandria's twelve Anathematisms and the Letter of Ibas to Maris. On these matters the Council of Chalcedon had been indecisive. A hundred years after that council, it looked to many people, the emperor included, as if a few modest addenda to the council's decisions, amounting, perhaps, to nothing more than explications of its mind on Nestorius and his school, would put an end to the painful disunity of eastern Christendom.

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.

Deceit is normally held in low esteem; pointing as it does to an evil disposition; there are, nonetheless, countless instances when it has reaped obvious benefits and deflected all manner of harm and ill report and mortal perils. For our conversation is not always with friends in this earthly life: Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto 4, i

A common response to the enforcement of religious conformity in the sixteenth century was deceit, either by silence or dissimulation. Contemporaries called people who chose this evasion Nicodemites, after Nicodemus who came to Christ by night. The propaganda campaign conducted against them by anti-Nicodemites stressed the necessity of individual witness, supported by scriptural references. Virtually all the major reformers made their contribution – Calvin, Viret, Bullinger – even Bucer after an earlier more easy-going phase. Prominent among the lesser lights were Italian exiles who had personal experience of Nicodemite dilemmas after conformity began to be enforced in Italy in the early 1540s. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Francesco Negri and Caelio Secondo Curione all wrote on the subject, but Pier Paolo Vergerio, who left his Italian bishopric for exile in 1549, was by far the most outspoken and prolific.

The Viking invasions of the ninth and early tenth centuries were referred to in a large number of contemporary Frankish texts, including not only annals and chronicles, but also saints’ lives, miracle texts, capitularies, royal and private charters, letters, sermons, biblical commentaries, hymns, poems and prayers. The great majority of these texts were written by clerics, either religious or secular, and as a result the raids are frequently described in religious terms and set within a religious framework. For example, the Vikings are often denoted as ‘pagani’ and the Franks as’ christiani’; towns are burned ‘divino iuditio’ and battles won ‘adiuvante Domino’,1 and the invasions are represented as a punishment for the Franks’ sins in fulfilment of biblical prophecy.

The present interest in Puritanism has brought forth a large number of remarkable works dealing with the history of Puritanism as well as with puritan thought. Naturally enough, puritan covenant theology has also come in for treatment in many recent studies. However, English and American scholars have as a rule failed to contribute a satisfactory discussion of the idea of the covenant in puritan theologians. One principal reason for this failure is to be found in the fact that many of these scholars are primarily interested in sociology and less in theology. Another reason stems from the tendency to isolate the Puritans in England and New England from their English background as well as from their Continental forerunners and contemporaries. Interpretations which thus tend to neglect both theology and history necessarily lead to grave misunderstandings in the presentation of puritan covenant theology. The wellknown work of Perry Miller is typical in many respects. Miller presents his interpretation of the covenant in book IV under the general heading: Sociology! Although he seems to be aware of the existence of earlier covenant theology he tends to regard William Perkins as the inventor of the puritan concept of the covenant. In Miller's understanding covenant theology means essentially the puritan theologians' counter-action to tendencies within their own camp, viz., Arminianism and Antinomianism. This might be true for the period about 1650, but only then. Finally Miller regards covenant theology as implying a departure from essential Calvinism. This is also true to a certain extent but calls for a much more careful analysis than Miller's.

The role of the Church of England in the permissive reforms of the 1960s has been neglected. This article examines the Church's part in the campaign for the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council played a key role in setting up the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, and in later campaigns culminating in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. In advocating the separation of crime and sin, senior Anglicans were promoting the secularisation of the criminal law, but many church members opposed this reorientation of Church and State. The importance of the Church of England in homosexual law reform suggests that existing narratives of secularisation and the permissive society need to be revised.

Count Gerald of Aurillac (855–909) might seem rather out of place in a gallery of medieval saints: an aristocratic warrior, a great lord, Gerald seemed very much a man of this world rather than a saint in ascetic withdrawal from it. This was also the initial opinion of his biographer, who is, as far as this article is concerned, effectively his maker since we shall be dealing only with the ‘textual’ Gerald and not the historical one. This biographer, no less a figure than Abbot Odo of Cluny (879–942), began his Vita of Gerald (c. 930) by saying that many people doubted that Gerald was a saint. The opening words of Odo's Praefatio are quite explicit and perhaps rather surprising: ‘many people tend to doubt whether what is said about the blessed Gerald is true. And quite a lot of these people say that these stories are not only not true but fantastic.’ Originally Odo himself had not been too certain of Gerald's saintliness, though by the time he came to write the Vita he was convinced enough.2 The problem lay in convincing others.

In 1851 an official census of religious worship was held in Great Britain for the first and last time. Alongside the ordinary decennial census, parliament sought information about attendance at public worship on a given Sunday, about the number of sittings available in churches and chapels, and about certain other matters. Because the result could be interpreted as showing that half the nation were Nonconformists, parliamentary defenders of the Establishment resisted any proposal to repeat a census of this sort. Every ten years from 1860 to 1910, they recommended instead a census of religious profession, by which the Church of England would certainly appear to be comparatively stronger. On these occasions nonconformist members of parliament invariably said that they would have a census of attendance or none at all. Consequently, since 1851 no official information about the religious preferences of the population has ever been collected. Its very uniqueness is one reason for coaxing out of the 1851 census of religious worship all the evidence it can yield. It is a richer quarry than its comparative neglect by social and ecclesiastical historians might suggest. The purpose of this article is to discuss how reliable it is as a source and what it reveals about religious practice in large English towns.

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the so-called renaissance in Morean studies in recent years has been to provide the historiography with a new focus, namely the phase of More's career that begins in the aftermath of Utopia (1516) and concludes with his imprisonment in 1534. Hitherto, interest in that period was confined largely to the domestic scene celebrated in Holbein's famous portrait and drawings, the household at Chelsea as a centre of humanist culture, Christian piety and cosy family virtue. Yet this was the period of More's public career in which he served as a councillor to Henry vm and in a number of major administrative posts before his elevation to succeed Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529. It was also the period in which he assumed a leading role in the campaign against the Reformation in England, partly as a prosecutor of heresy on behalf of the Crown, but more spectacularly as a polemicist, specifically commissioned by the Church to defend orthodox doctrine against the challenge of the reformers – a task on which he expended some million words in the period between his tract against Luther in 1523 and the changed circumstances which induced a more devotional literary mode in the much acclaimed Tower Works.

With particular attention paid to the experience of the Marian exiles, this paper analyses the sixteenth-century Protestant debate about the rectitude of flight from persecution. It suggests that, although this debate must be located in a centuries-old Christian discussion about flight, contemporary understandings of the nature of God's will and providence were equally important. The paper contends that the Marian exiles largely succeeded in justifying their flight to their brethren, and that this success had a significant impact on the subsequent historical accounts of the period.

Under the heading ‘transubstantiation’ in the Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church, one finds that the word was in widespread use in the later part of the 12th cent., and at the Lateran Council of 1215 belief in Transubstantiation was defined as de fide; but the elaboration of the doctrine was not achieved till after the acceptance of the Aristotelian metaphysics later in the 13th cent., when it found classic formulation in the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas.

The conciliar movement is often seen as the major political issue in which the universities of Oxford, Paris and the newer universities became actively embroiled during the fourteenth century and thereafter. It was the last and most ambitious product of the medieval vision of government by consent and representation that had evolved during the fourteenth century, and it marshalled the resources of theorists and practitioners of politics, of arts and theology faculty lecturers, of canon and civil lawyers, of monarchical publicists and papal hierocrats. In general, conciliarism drew upon the university-trained in a manner not previously seen on such a scale. During the Great Schism (1378–1449), the universities assumed exceedingly important roles in the affairs of the universal Church, with the University of Paris playing a dominant part from the start in proposing the via concilii. Pierre d'Ailly was, like Gerson, Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, and like the earlier Marsilius of Padua, a Paris scholar. And it has recently been argued that university support for the Basle conciliar programme was motivated not only by an attachment to the ideal of conciliar government but also by the hope of reforms which would improve the status of university-trained doctors in the Church. While the bulk of controls proposed by the conciliar movement concerned the reduction of papal control, a few aimed more explicitly at promoting the interests of graduates.

According to a beloved and now generally disbelieved story, the Cross upon which Jesus suffered was discovered some three hundred years after the event by the saintly Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, Rome's first Christian emperor. For centuries, this story enjoyed the greatest vogue, blossoming into a full-blown Legend of the Cross which traced its genealogy all the way back to the Garden of Eden. With the waning of the Middle Ages, however, came new criteria for evidence, and with them a scholarly predisposition to dismiss the discovery, as well as the legend, as pure bunkum. Put together all the pieces of the True Cross, it became common to say, and one could float a fine freighter.

The theological reticence of the Moderates in the eighteenth-century Scottish Kirk sits oddly with their contribution to other spheres of literature, notably historical writing. A faultline runs through the historiography of Moderatism, dividing those historians who believe the Moderates remained committed Calvinists from those who endorse the view of contemporary critics within the Kirk that the Moderates favoured Arminianism, or worse. An appreciation of the Moderate preference for history over theology may go some way towards resolving this conundrum. Moderate accounts of religious history ran in parallel with the historical sociology of stadial progress which emerged in the Scottish Enlightenment. Moderate historians recognised that human interpretation of the divine also followed a developmental pattern. Thus, although the Moderates continued to uphold subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, their writings indicate that an historical sensitivity to theological change replaced what they perceived to be an inevitably time-bound commitment to dogma.

The vital contribution of women to the early development of English dissent, especially during the era of the Civil War and Interregnum, has received considerable scholarly attention since the appearance of Keith Thomas's seminal study in 1958. However, the focus of interest has chiefly been on the roles played by individual women as preachers or church founders, and no concerted attempt has yet been made to replicate analyses of New England Puritanism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which have highlighted the disproportionate numbers of women in church membership. There has been a similar lack of effort to document the effects of gender in determining English religious practice in the period after 1700, despite the beginnings of academic preoccupation with women's experience of Christianity in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and despite an abundance of evidence from sociologists and statisticians since the Second World War about women's greater performance on most indicators of religious belief and behaviour. This brief article therefore hopes to break new ground in assembling evidence about the strength of female support for Protestant Nonconformity in England from 1650 to the present day, using three distinct assessment criteria: membership, attendance, and profession.

The distinction between a Puritan ‘plain’ and a Laudian ‘metaphysical’ preaching style rests on secular rhetorical theories of persuasion that are relatively unimportant to early Stuart homiletics but are central to later Latitudinarian polemics on preaching. Instead, the ‘English Reformed’ theory and method of sermon composition rests on the didactic function of preaching and the need for the Holy Spirit and hearers to co-operate with the preacher. Although Andrewes and some avant-garde conformists questioned this theory, they developed no alternative method of composition. Arguments made in the 1650s for direct inspiration by the Spirit contributed to the decline of both theory and method.

During the Great War, leaders in the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland – the established Church of Scotland and the United Free Church – struggled to provide moral and spiritual leadership to the Scottish people. As National Churches which together claimed the adherence of the large majority of the Scottish people, the two Churches were seen as responsible for interpreting the meaning of the war and defining war aims, as well as for offering consolation to the suffering and the bereaved. At the beginning of the war, leaders of the two Churches had been confident of their ability to fulfil these national responsibilities. Both Churches had experienced a flowering of theological and intellectual creativity during the forty years before the war, and their colleges and theologians had exercised profound influence on the Reformed tradition throughout the world. Both had been active in the ‘social gospel’ movement, with their leaders advancing bold criticisms of the social order. The two Churches, moreover, had been moving toward ecclesiastical union when the war began, a union which their leaders hoped would restore the spiritual and moral authority of the Church in a covenanted nation.

There are two anonymous treatises concerning the General Council that are left to us from the reign of Henry VIII: the one is Hatfield MS. No. 46, which has never been put into print, the other is A Treatise concernynge generall councilles, the Byshoppes of Rome and the Clergy, published by Berthelet in 1538, which was a development of Hatfield MS. No. 47. Though their existence has been known for some time, they have failed to receive the attention they deserve; the first treatise has been summarised by historians of the English Reformation, the second hardly ever mentioned, although its MS. draft was cursorily used by F. van le Baumer. Neither treatise has, thus, ever been studied in its entirety. The purpose of this paper is to give a fuller account of what these treatises are, to elucidate the circumstance of their composition, and to place them in the context of the general history of contemporary Tudor literature on the General Council.

In 1530 or 1531 Thomas Alwaye, an otherwise obscure evangelical prosecuted by Wolsey and the bishops for buying English new testaments and other prohibited books, petitioned Anne Boleyn for intervention in his affairs in the following extraordinary terms:

When extreme need began to compel me, right honourable lady, to make me friends by whose means I might be released out of my miserable thraldom, I could not find one in all this realm in whom I had any hope or looked for any comfort until your gracious ladyship came unto my remembrance. But anon I remembered how many deeds of pity your goodness had done within these few years, and that without respect of any persons, as well to strangers and aliens as to many of this land, as well to poor as to rich: whereof some looking for no redemption were by your gracious means not only freely delivered out of costly and very long imprisoning, but also by your charity largely rewarded and all thing restored to the uttermost, so that every man may perceive that your gracious and Christian mind is everywhere ready to help, succour and comfort them that be afflicted, troubled and vexed, and that not only in word and tongue, but even after the saying of St John.

While it is incontrovertible that the Catholic faith exercised a profound influence on the lives of the common people of fifteenth-century England, it is equally apparent that many aspects of contemporary belief and practice will never be wholly clear. This is not simply for want of evidence but more the result of the limitations of the sources. It may, for instance, be assumed that contemporaries' religious priorities would be illuminated by close examination of their wills since these documents almost invariably deal with pious provisions intended to benefit testators' souls. But tolerably represented by surviving wills as the wealthy and town-dwelling classes of late medieval England are, analysis of these documents is treacherous. Just as the scribes who registered them certainly standardised the presentation of different testators' wishes, so probate procedures militated against even faintly unorthodox expression. Moreover, the proportion of a testator's movable or immovable estate represented in any given will is impossible to gauge, as a result of which no measure may be taken of any testator's devotion by comparison of his religious bequests with those made for other purposes. It must also be remembered that wills reveal nothing of the pious provision that testators undoubtedly made during their lifetimes for their own benefit. Neither do they convey any impression of what family or friends may have agreed to discharge for the benefit of a testator's soul. Late medieval wills are undeniably disappointing and frequently misleading.