Current historical opinion inclines to the view that the reign of Charles i was a time of increased stringency for the English Catholic community. There may have been a relaxation for upper-class Catholics with court connexions, but there was also a great increase in the number of those sequestered for recusancy and a higher level of recusancy fining. Dr K. J. Lindley suggests that this policy of increased severity in fining may even have been an important factor in inclining the recusant population towards neutrality during the English Civil War. The significance of financial persecution is seen in a rather different light in analyses of the Interregnum, however. Here, despite the fact that pecuniary mulcts were higher than they had ever been before or were to be again, the treatment of Catholics has been portrayed as a continuous movement towards greater toleration only brought to an end with the fall of the Protectorate.

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.

During the final months of the First World War, the General Assemblies of the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland - the established Church of Scotland and the voluntary United Free Church - committed themselves to work for the thorough re- construction of Scottish society. Church leaders promised to work for a new Christian commonwealth, ending the social divisions and class hatred that had plagued pre-war Scottish industrial society. Bound together through the shared sacrifice of the war, the Scottish people would be brought back to the social teachings of Christianity and strive together to realise the Kingdom of God. The Churches would end their deference to the laws of nineteenth-century political economy, with their emphasis on individualism, self-interest and competition, and embrace new impera- tives of collective responsibility and co-operation. Along with the healing of social divisions, church leaders also pledged to end the ecclesiastical divisions in Scottish Presbyterianism. The final months of the war brought a revival of the pre-war movement to unite the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church into a single National Church, and Scottish ecclesiastical leaders held forth to a weary nation the vision of a united National Church leading a covenanted Christian commonwealth in pursuit of social justice and harmony.

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.

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.

It is notable that, in contrast to Ireland, there was no religious question in the decennial censuses of Great Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Parliament debated and determined the contents of the enumeration and the inclusion of religion was keenly disputed until 1914. The debates raised issues of religious liberty, church establishment and practical applicability. However, census-taking required broad public cooperation and the possibility of widespread opposition to the question led to its repeated exclusion. Only in the twenty-first century was the religious question reconsidered and included, as a result of changes in British society.

This article deals with the practice and theory of penances imposed on heretics by inquisitors in southern France before 1250. At first inquisitors offered a simple choice between penance as proof of conversion or death by burning. Lay resistance forced a subtler approach whereby penitents were removed from the local community in order to be gradually reintegrated into the wider Catholic one. The construction of prisons and the imposition of crosses helped turn inquisitors into an institution. From being a means to the destruction of organised heresy, they became a permanent police force of doctrinal orthodoxy.

This article explores the political theology of Athanasius' ‘Life of Antony’. It argues that the work is profoundly concerned with the relationship between the Church and the empire, which it treats as a component of the relationship between the Church and the fallen world order. Athanasius explores this issue through Antony, striving to live as a citizen of heaven within the fallen world. Athanasius sees allegiance to earthly authority as problematising allegiance to the heavenly kingdom, which is bound up with a concern for the Christian's identity: the Christian must understand himself and the world in relation to the kingdom of heaven, rather than the earthly kingdom.

The episcopate of Cuthbert as bishop of Lindisfarne was a product of a time of great change in the Northumbrian Church in the late seventh century. Bede's Ecclesiastical history and Stephen's Life of Wilfrid make it clear that the expulsion of Wilfrid, bishop of York and sole bishop of the Northumbrians, in 678 (HE v. 19; VW 24) opened up the Northumbrian diocese to large-scale ecclesiastical reorganisation. Wilfrid's vast see was divided and new bishops appointed. In 664, as a young man, Wilfrid had played a significant part at the Council of Whitby in bringing about the expulsion of Colmán, Aidán's successor as bishop of Lindisfarne, the termination of the Columban mission and the replacement of the see of Lindisfarne by that of York; but the bishops who replaced Wilfrid were prepared to deal sensitively with the legacy of Aidán's mission in a post-Council of Whitby era. Bosa, trained at Whitby under Abbess Hild who had been instructed in the religious life by Aidán, became bishop of Deira at York; Eata, abbot of Lindisfarne, one of Aidán's Northumbrian disciples and formerly abbot of the monastery of Melrose which had been founded in the time of the Columban mission, became bishop of Bernicia with his episcopal seat variously at Hexham and Lindisfarne; and Eadhæsd, a former companion of Aidán's disciple Chad (HE iii. 28), was made bishop of Lindsey (HE iv. 12). When Lindsey was lost to the Mercians in 679 Eadhæd was made bishop of the short-lived see of Ripon [HE iv. 12), and in 681 Trumwine, whose antecedents are unknown but who later retired to Whitby, became bishop of Abercorn on the Forth [HE iv. 12, 26).

The general opinion of historians has been that the East India Company was opposed to the presence of Christian missionaries in India. It is generally held also that when the Charter Act of 813 left the Company with no option but to admit them, its governments in India maintained a fairly consistent posture of religious neutrality. These notions have recently been reinforced by Penelope Carson. But thisignores the Company's policies towards Roman Catholic missionaries. In the eighteenth century the Company welcomed Roman Catholic missionaries. It was at the nvitation of the Bombay government that Italian Carmelite missionaries settled there in 1718. It was at the invitation of the authorities of Fort St George that a French Capuchin mission was established in Madras in 1742. When the Company came into Kerala towards the end of the eighteenth century an Italian Carmelite mission was already established there, with a bishop and two priests. The mission was soon receiving material support from the Company.

The orthodoxy which dismissed the pre-Reformation parish as the point where the many failings of the Church met to blight ordinary lives has exercised a tenacious grip on the historical imagination. Current opinion, on the other hand, perceives the parish as deserving of inquiry, not least because of a dawning realisation that it was a point where managerial expertise and a noteworthy buoyancy of spirit intersected. Ostentatious programmes of church rebuilding and embellishment testify both to competence and to a vitality bordering on exuberance in many parish communities. If more difficult to appraise, the liturgical life of many parishes seems to have flourished and was enhanced by the steady accumulation of vessels, vestments, lights, embroidered cloths and painted images. Many wealthier parishes also supported numerous auxiliary clergy and a sophisticated musical repertory and performance. But building and liturgical elaboration were not products merely of whim. In addition to an obligation to support the incumbent by regular payment of tithe, responsibility for maintaining church fabric and the wherewithal for worship within the church had been assigned to the parish community by canon law in the thirteenth century. Many parishes conspicuously exceeded their brief. In matters of securing revenues it seem at the very least safe to assume widespred competence. Historians, however, have by and large failed to respond to the laity's achievement and that in spite of abundant surviving documentation. Investigation of the financial regime of the late medieval parish is long overdue. If it has received any attention at all, parish finance has been charaterised in very general terms of corporate levy and ad hoc donation.

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.

Two generations of lawyers and historians of the early Church have worked over the scanty evidence bearing on the legal and political relations between the first Christian communities and the Roman Empire. It is not the intention of the present writer to add to the enormous volume of work on the subject. The results of their battles have been ably summarised by A. N. Sherwin-White, and with his conclusions the legal problem may be allowed to rest until new evidence is forthcoming. The object of this paper is to look at the question from another point of view, and to ask who were the sufferers, and in particular, who were martyred in the period before the first general persecution under Decius. Were Polycarp, Justin, Blandina and the rest chance victims of private denunciation and the fury of the mob, or did they represent a tradition of belief in which martyrdom became the climax of earthly life? And what of those who obeyed the precept to flee during persecution? Was their action due to cowardice, or was it the belief that martyrdom was not the will of God? Can we see in the controversy over martyrdom which engaged so much of Tertullian's energies, one more phase in the strife between the orthodox and gnostic concepts of Christianity, on the outcome of which so much in the future of the Church depended? What, in fact, was the relationship between the Gnostics and the Roman authorities?

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.

In his biography of Archbishop William Courtenay published in 1966, Joseph Dahmus wrote that ‘until documented evidence to the contrary is provided, one may assume that the connection between Wycliffitism at Oxford and Lollardy was hardly more than accidental. Although the work of Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks has since shown that the link was anything but accidental, Dahmus’ scepticism is I am grateful to the participants in the three seminars at which this paper was read for their comments, and especially to Dr J. R. L. Highfield and Dr Paul Brand, both of whom offered helpful suggestions for its improvement. All remaining errors are my own. I thank also the Warden and fellows of Merton College, for allowing me access to their splendid archive, and Mr John Burgass, former assistant librarian, his successor Mrs Fiona Wilkes, Dr S. J. Gunn, and Dr Sarah Bendall for their assistance.

The numerous surviving formulary volumes compiled by ecclesiastical administrators and lawyers in pre-Reformation England are valuable but neglected adjuncts to the period's surviving church court records. Using material in a fifteenth-century volume originally compiled by a lawyer of the courts at York, this article demonstrates the utility of such volumes to supplement and complement the surviving court books and papers. In particular it draws attention to two cases taken to the Council of Constance. These add to evidence of England's acceptance of that assembly's jurisdictional claims, and illustrate England's integration into the court structures of the broader Catholic Church.

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.

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.