Though the political ideas of JohnPonet, Edwardian bishop and Marian exile, continue to attract interest, the facts of Ponet's life and, especially, of his activities during his years of exile have excited no high degree of scholarly attention since the works of Christina Garrett and Winthrop S. Hudson. Yet one piece of evidence, unknown to both Garrett and Hudson, exists that tells us a few important things about his attitude toward and, particularly, his involvement in, the propaganda and polemical activities of Protestant exiles under Mary. The evidence in question is a letter from Ponet in Strasbourg to John Bale ‘at Frankfurt’; and since this document has appeared to date only in excerpts, it will be well to begin by offering a complete transcription of it.

William Robertson, Scottish historian, Presbyterian minister and leader of the Moderate church party, has been credited with a position regarding episcopacy that differed markedly from the sectarian suspicion shown by earlier Scottish Presbyterians. This article examines Robertson's attitude to episcopacy in the light of an early episode in his career, when he apparently had a chance to enter the Church of England (which offered greater rewards in terms of money and status than the Scottish Kirk), but did not take the opportunity. This examination, taking into account the views of episcopacy and the Church of England expressed in Robertson's histories and elsewhere, suggests that his personal position was in fact closer to the traditional hostility of older Scottish Presbyterianism than to the tolerant and even Latitudinarian views normally associated with the Enlightenment.

One of the most important contributions of the Council of Trent (1545–63) to the Catholic or Counter-Reformation was its decree calling for the establishment of diocesan seminaries for the education of the secular clergy. To date, however, the role played by seminaries in the training of parish priests has not been the subject of detailed research. Most Italian diocesan histories, concerned more with the lives and decrees of reforming bishops than with the development of parish life, do not go beyond the institutional aspects of the problem, noting when seminaries were founded and what financial difficulties they faced. Little has been done to investigate the academic content of seminary training and the quality of seminary graduates. Among the few valuable points of reference are a study of clerical education at Rome by G. Pelliccia and brief comments on the seminary curriculum of Bologna by Paolo Prodi. While they have found that seminarians of both cities received practical instruction in the exercise of the cure of souls, they have not uncovered sources pertaining to the books used at seminaries or possessed by parish priests.

Ordination registers have been unduly neglected by historians, and the bibliography ofworks dealing with them is scant. Nevertheless, they are our most valuable source for documenting the recruitment of clergy, both secular and regular, while they also provide indirect evidence for demographic, religious and educational trends. The data assembled in the graphs and tables below, extracted from the archiepiscopal archives of York, detail the total surviving ordination records from England's largest diocese during the period from just before the first outbreak of bubonic plague to the beginning of the Reformation.

Scholarly life in eleventh-century Italy comes to the notice of English historians chiefly in connexion with Lanfranc of Pavia, who (in a striking phrase of Dom David Knowles) ‘sought a career and found a vocation north of the Alps’, and with Anselm of Aosta, who succeeded him as prior of Bee and as archbishop of Canterbury. About their early education we know but little. However, the pattern of their lives—an education in north Italy, then travel to distant lands, and the eventual discovery there of an employment or vocation which would scarcely have been possible at home—was not untypical. I shall seek to describe the kind of north-Italian scholarly circles in which Lanfranc, in particular, grew up, with a view to illustrating how scholars were educated, their later careers, and their place in the history of medieval learning, culture and society. Thus we may hope to learn something about the Italian background of the two great Norman archbishops of Canterbury and, more generally, about the ecclesiastical life of north Italy which the Gregorian Reform would soon in such large measure sweep away.

The earliest extant Canterbury register is an artifact of the scribes and notaries, clerici and magistri working within the household of Archbishop John Pecham (1279-92). Of the numerous members of Pecham's familia, John of Bologna, trained in the Italian notarial arts and the cursus, was of great influence in this regard. He accompanied the new scholar-archbishop who left Rome in June 1279 to take up the most important and exacting ecclesiastical office in England. After Pecham's day, as C. R. Cheney has amply demonstrated, the use of notaries public in English episcopal chanceries was commonplace: the example of the archbishop's employment of notaries, no doubt encouraged and guided by John of Bologna, must be seen as a prime cause of this. Appropriately, John's Summa Notarie, a manual for fledgling notaries in England — ‘where they are unacquainted with the notarial art’ — was dedicated to Pecham. The conceptualisation, composition and even custody of Pecham's register must be seen within this framework. The subsequent rationalisation and retention of Canterbury records of all kinds including registers, though not exclusively attributable to John of Bologna and Pecham's notaries, was probably strongly influenced by them. For this reason, all that can be learned about Pecham's register and record-keeping among his staff is of significance — certainly to historians of what Robert Brentano has called ‘the written Church’.

William the Conqueror attempted to create one unified centralised kingdom in the British Isles on a scale which had never been realised before. The king employed both his military power and his influence on the Church to achieve this ambitious end. William had a congenial archbishop of Canterbury at his side who, in turn, attempted to raise his metropolitan see to the position of the spiritual capital of the whole island. Yet what looked like success during Lanfranc's lifetime began to crumble already under Anselm; the third post-conquest archbishop of Canterbury, Ralph d'Escures (1114–22), had to witness the collapse of Lanfranc's system. The idea of Canterbury's primacy was still alive, but it clashed more and more with actual events.

Tatian, the second century Christian apologist, is something of an enigma to students of early Christian history and doctrine. How far was he influenced by his teacher Justin Martyr? What caused him to become an extreme exponent of the encratite heresy? Did his heretical views only develop after Justin's death, and were these the cause of his leaving Rome? or were these views only a development of tendencies which existed from the beginning? The answers which we give to these questions will largely depend on the view we take of, and the date we assign to, the one apologetic work of his which is extant—his Oration to the Greeks, a violent polemic against Graeco-Roman culture in the course of which Tatian reveals, in somewhat cryptic manner, his own theological views and gives a brief account of his own spiritual pilgrimage.

At Rouen on a certain day, the people who had undertaken to go on that expedition [that is, the First Crusade] under the badge of the cross began to complain to one another, ‘After traversing great distances, we desire to attack the enemies of God in the East, although the Jews, of all races the worst foes of God, are before our eyes. That's doing our work backward.’ Saying this and seizing their weapons, they herded the Jews into a certain place of worship, rounding them up by either force or guile, and without distinction of sex or age put them to the sword. Those who accepted Christianity, however, escaped the impending slaughter.

The apparitor, usually known by his popular name, the summoner, is a minor character in ecclesiastical administration. Most of what we know about summoners has come from literature, notably from Chaucer's scathing portrait in The Canterbury Tales where the summoner is not given any of the saving graces allowed to other scoundrel-pilgrims. Chaucer's summoner, although an officer of the church courts of moral correction, practised bribery and extortion, and in his illicit sex life ‘was as hot…and lecherous as a sparrow’ his lechery was written on his scabby, syphilitic face. It is not my purpose here to dispel literary illusion, but rather to take a hard look at the world of actual summoners – those with names and careers – in pre-Reformation London. I will then single out one summoner, Charles Joseph, and examine his role in that early sixteenth-century cause célèbre: the affair of Richard Hunne. Joseph, after all, confessed to the murder of Hunne in 1514 and even implicated the vicar-general of London in the crime. With new evidence about summoners, I hope to offer a plausible solution to this baffling case.

Among those who came into collision with the authorities during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII was Robert Wisdom. Although one of the lesser figures among the English reformers, he was not without importance. In 1552 he was suggested by Cranmer as a person suitable and willing to fill die then vacant archiepiscopal see of Armagh, but eventually he was passed over. At the time of the Marian reaction he sought refuge on the Continent, and on his return was made archdeacon of Ely, in the enjoyment of which dignity he died nine years later, in 1568.

Amidst the theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the ritual kiss often played an important role in trying to distinguish orthodox from heretical Christians. For early Christian leaders such as Rufinus, Jerome, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola, the kiss became a means to malign an opponent while simultaneously reinforcing one's own claims to theological legitimacy. The kiss's connection to a wide range of symbolic systems made it a particularly versatile tool for early Christian polemics.

‘Who won the Becket controversy?’ is not an unusual kind of question to appear in examination papers. The general idea of the answer has been, and still is in many quarters, to assign Thomas Becket to that large elysium for historical figures who by their death have won the victory for which they struggled in life. Those scholars, however, who have studied closely how some of the issues raised in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) worked themselves out in practice after Becket's martyrdom, have show that things were not so simple. In the day-to-day relations of the secular and ecclesiastical courts a spirit of compromise and co-operation is constantly evident, and the developing complexity of legal problems and procedures favoured now one jurisdiction, now the other. In the relations of the English Church and the papacy ‘ecclesia Anglicana libera sit’ might sound very well as a battle-cry, but the English Church was far from agreed about how much it wanted to be free from the king in order to obey the pope. There were men in the decades after 1170 who would even have considered ‘compromise’ the wrong word to use about the situation. Gerald of Wales tells us that as Richard of Ilchester, bishop of Winchester, sat talking one day, he declared that the pusillanimity of the martyr's successor, Richard of Dover, had lost for the Church every point for which Becket had fought. This is an unlikely story for various reasons, but Gerald's anecdotal style often serves to reflect the thoughts of some of his contemporaries.

George Amiroutzes, commonly called the Philosopher for his wide learning, was a native of Trebizond. In 1437 he accompanied John VIII Palaeologus, emperor of Constantinople, to Italy to the Council of Ferrara-Florence as one of the three erudite laymen (the others were George Scholarius and George Gemistus ‘Pletho’) that the emperor took with him to advise him on the difficult theological questions there to be discussed. As the events unfolded division arose in the ranks of the Greeks. First, in Ferrara, there was the question as to what should be the subject of the opening discussion—the addition of the Filioque to the Creed, or the doctrine of the Filioque. Bessarion, metropolitan of Nicaea (later cardinal) and Scholarius (later the patriarch Gennadius) wanted to start with the latter as the more fundamental; Mark Eugenicus, metropolitan of Ephesus, and Gemistus preferred the former and their opinion prevailed. Amiroutzes agreed with Bessarion and Scholarius. In Florence, where the subject of debate was the doctrine of the Filioque, the rift between the two parties was more serious. It was a rift mainly between the leaders, for the majority of the Greek bishops, of a lower intellectual standard, was content to follow. For union the protagonists were Bessarion, Isidore, metropolitan of Kiev and of all Russia, Gregory, the imperial confessor, and Dorotheus, metropolitan of Mitylene. Against union, Mark of Ephesus stood almost alone but indomitable. George Amiroutzes was a staunch supporter of the unionists, who in several of the private conferences of the Greeks bitterly attacked Eugenicus and who gave a written vote in decisive and clear terms in favour of the orthodoxy of the Latin doctrine on the Procession of the Holy Spirit. The decree of union of the Latin and the Greek Churches was promulgated in solemn session on 6 July 1439. It bears the signatures of the emperor, of all the Greek prelates but two (Eugenicus and Isaias of Stauropolis), of five deacons of the Great Church and of several monks. The three ‘philosophers’ did not sign because they were laymen. As is well known, after their return to Constantinople most of the Greek prelates, under the influence of Mark Eugenicus and of popular sentiment, repented of their adherence.

It may confidently be surmised that at all times in history many men and women have sighed for the abatement of systematic and organised violence between or within tribes, empires and states, particularly when personal involvement has seemed likely. Such sentiments must have been common in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even though the combatants in war were relatively few; famine and pestilence, the indirect consequences of conflict, were severe enough to guarantee that. It has been estimated that in the seventeenth century, there were only seven years in which wars were not being fought somewhere in Europe. Calculations for the eighteenth century could be expected to yield similar results. Yet it was only towards the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (known to contemporary Englishmen as the Great War) that determined action was taken to establish organised movements for peace. The result was the establishment in 1815 and 1816 of two peace societies in the United States, and of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace (commonly described as the Peace Society) in Great Britain. These remained virtually alone until other bodies were formed in Britain and on the Continent in the period after 1867. These in turn contributed to the movements which led to inter-governmental conferences for peace and disarmament in the first decade of the twentieth century and to the formation of the League of Nations after the First World War.

Over the past forty years historians have demonstrated continued interest in tracing the development of radical early modern English apocalypticism. The Tudor and Stuart eschatological scene, however, encompassed more than just millenarian activism. This article emphasises the pastoral ends to which Revelation was used by a group of late sixteenth-century writers as they sought to make it accessible to the ‘common sort’ of Christian. Viewing interest in the Last Days through this pastoral lens highlights both the tense complexities present in the Elizabethan Church and the usefulness of eschatological themes in studying ordinary and normative aspects of religious experience.

The work of the English Deist Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Marcion in his time, received much negative criticism in England and abroad, especially in Germany. His views aroused comments in books, dissertations and journals. Only in the first half of the twentieth century was he to be praised by theologians such as Adolf von Harnack and Emanuel Hirsch, who likewise disparaged the Old Testament.

This article contributes to the debates about nineteenth- and twentieth-century working-class religiosity and about the nature, timing and extent of secularisation. After defining ‘popular religion’ and identifying its key components in the context of the Black Country from 1914 to 1965, its decline during the last thirty years of the period is analysed, using extensive oral evidence, in terms of four principal factors: the effects of war; an increasing emphasis on the private nuclear family and changing attitudes to children; the disappearance of older working-class neighbourhoods and communities; and greater prosperity and the availability of secular leisure facilities.

The Norman Church has sometimes been depicted as welcoming the Capetian conquest of Normandy in 1204. Its relations with the last Angevin dukes of Normandy, Richard the Lionheart and King John, certainly showed signs of serious tension, especially the election dispute at Sées (1201–3), but there is also ample evidence of continuing co-operation between the dukes and the Norman Church. Prior to 1204, moreover, Philip Augustus of France had done very little to win over the Norman Church. It is demonstrated here that he was far less generous to the religious houses of south-east Normandy, which he had annexed in 1200, than has hitherto been believed. Most of the alms recorded in fiscal accounts for the Évrecin testify to the patronage of the local aristocracy, not the kings of England and France.