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 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.

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’.

This article comprises a close analysis of churchyard extensions, closures and new cemetery provision in the English midland counties of Leicestershire and Rutland. It provides a graphic outline of these changes, and so extends cemetery history to rural as well as urban areas. The main periods of change examined are the 1850s, 1880–1900 and from the 1960s to 2010. Such a chronology, and its detailed processes and problems, has not hitherto been available for any region. This highlights the effects of these changes on senses of ‘community’, and their links to processes of secularisation, church viability and belonging.

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.

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 object of this article is to describe the social and theological setting of primitive Montanism within second-century Asia in order to account for its appearance and its subsequent condemnation. According to an anonymous source employed by Eusebius the prophecy appeared in the middle of the second century under the leadership of a recent convert called Montanus, and the faithful of Asia gathered and condemned the movement at its outset. Clearly this is a propagandist account but we may accept its broad outlines none the less, in that there was a prophetic movement in which Montanus was a prime mover, and which failed to receive acceptance in the wider Asian Church.

It should be made clear that this article restricts itself to the earliest period of the prophecy and therefore to primary sources which are directly germane to that period. These sources are both preserved by Eusebius, and consist of an unnamed writer known as the anonymous, and an otherwise unknown Apollonius. A further possibly ancient source is employed by Epiphanius, but we shall observe below that its understanding of prophecy is hardly consistent with a second-century Asian origin, whereas both the anonymous and Apollonius reveal their Asian provenance in their extant writings. Although there is a degree of bias in the presentation of the charges, we should none the less accept that there is a factual basis behind the assertions of the opponents, and that their opposition was motivated by a genuine belief that the prophecy did not conform with the tradition and the succession of the Church.

The Spanish Church of the Golden Age has been much discussed but little studied. Certainly, its professional structure and internal administration are much less well understood than those of secular government. This paper seeks to correct some of the imbalance by applying to the 540 members of the Castilian episcopacy who served under Habsburg leadership the prosopographical techniques which in recent years have advanced our understanding of the State. But before doing so it might be useful to describe the structure of the episcopacy and the principles and procedures which governed appointments to it.

On 24 December 1144 'Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured the Christian city of Edessa. This was the most serious setback suffered by the Frankish settlers in the Levant since their arrival in the region at the end of the eleventh century. In reaction the rulers of Antioch and Jerusalem dispatched envoys to the west appealing for help. The initial efforts of Pope Eugenius in and King Louis VII of France met with little response, but at Easter 1146, at Vézelay, Bernard of Clairvaux led a renewed call to save the Holy Land and the Second Crusade began to gather momentum. As the crusade developed, its aims grew beyond an expedition to the Latin East and it evolved into a wider movement of Christian expansion encom-passing further campaigns against the pagan Wends in the Baltic and the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. One particular group of men participated in two elements of the crusade; namely, the northern Europeans who sailed via the Iberian peninsula to the Holy Land. In thecourse of this journey they achieved the major success of the Second Crusade when they captured the city of Lisbon in October 1147. This article will consider how this aspect of the expedition fitted into the conception of the crusade as a whole and will try to establish when Lisbon became the principal target for the crusaders. St Bernard's preaching tour of the Low Countries emerges as an important, yet hitherto neglected, event.

This paper examines the relationship between an English factor, John Harrison, and a Moroccan Sufi rebel, Abu Maḥilli, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Although the two men never met, the revolt that Abu Maḥilli led against the Sa'dian rulers promoted mahdist/messianic goals which intersected with the commercial and eschatological strategies that Harrison was pursuing in Morocco.

The Vestiarian Controversy of 1564–6, during which Archbishop Matthew Parker pressed for full conformity to the provisions of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, is generally taken to mark a watershed in the fortunes of the English Protestant tradition. This study seeks to show that the realities of Elizabethan churchmanship in the 1560s and 1570s were rather more complex. By reference to the career of Thomas Cole, former ‘freewiller’ and returned Marian exile, who was appointed archdeacon of Essex by Edmund Grindal and was Parker's own commissary in Essex and Suffolk as dean of Bocking, it hopes to demonstrate that Parker's efforts at a national campaign for uniformity were inevitably doomed to failure because of pressures both political and jurisdictional. Cole and his allies did not consider the battle lost in 1566; it was the Presbyterian campaign of the 1570s and 1580s, which Parker's efforts helped to provoke, that marked the real turning point in the government's relations with senior churchmen who wished to see the Elizabethan Settlement advanced by means of further parliamentary legislation.

Historians and anthropologists have increasingly argued that the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity occurred as they wove the new faith into their traditions. Yet this finding risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves understood the history of Christianity in their societies. This article, a case study of the Tiwi of North Australia, is illustrative in that it uses Tiwi oral histories of the ‘conversion’ of a priest in order to invert assumptions about inculturation and conversion. They insist that they did not accommodate the new faith but that the Catholic Church itself converted in embracing them. Their history suggests that conversion can occur as communities change in the act of incorporating new peoples.

The emotive associations of the epithet Tridentine reveal confusion over the Council of Trent, which has continued from the seventeenth century to the present day. The complaints of Sarpi, the attacks of Leibnitz, the apologia of Bossuet, the abuse of Protestants, and the recriminations of modern Catholics all reveal different views of the Council's nature, its intentions and its achievements. Implicit in all views, however, is the concept of a Council which had lasting effects.

It is well known that following the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 English Catholic and Protestant polemicists turned to the Church Fathers, and particularly to St Augustine, for source material with which to bolster their doctrinal arguments. Augustine's works were, of course, the basis for so many Reformation controversies, yet the theological disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were entirely different from those of the Early Church. Further development and refinement of doctrine had created a wide gulf between the two periods. Early modern polemic was therefore relying on patristic sources which at times were patently inappropriate. It might therefore be thought that there would be little to be gained from an examination of its use of the Fathers, particularly as there was no reason for bitterly opposed polemicists to take a restrained, objective, or even particularly discerning approach to the patristic sources in order to refute the ‘errors’ of the other side. Historians of the English Reformation have indeed shown little interest in the seventeenth century's preoccupation with St Augustine, the most widely cited of the patristic writers. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that in this period ‘the true meaning of St Augustine was the object of as much unprofitable speculation as has ever been expended on the equally inscrutable mind of God’. Those historians who have dealt briefly with polemical technique in this period have suggested that seventeenth-century uses of patristic texts were likely to be primitive. J. C. H. Aveling argued that both Catholic and Protestant writers were afflicted by the same weaknesses: their understanding of source texts was undermined by a ‘cult of great erudition’ which was essentially shallow.

The reign of Theodosius II, from 408 to 450, coincided with a crucial era in early Christianity. The doctrinal aspects of this era have been exhaustively studied. The following pages have been written in the hope of further clarifying this period by a review of the policies of Theodosius II in relation to real or imagined deviations from Christian orthodoxy.

The second English delegation to the Council of Basel arrived there in August 1434 and remained until the summer of the following year. Its members, unlike their predecessors in the delegation of 1433, took the oath of incorporation and the brief period of their attendance was virtually the extent of England's official participation in the council. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the episode of the second delegation of which no comprehensive account has appeared since Dr. August Zellfelder published his study of England and the council in 1913.

The tortuous history of apocalyptic speculation took a new turn in the late eighteenth century, and one of its proponents was the ebullient bishop of Rochester, Samuel Horsley. The new and alarming ideas emanating from abstruse considerations of the Book of Daniel, of Revelation and the eighteenth chapter of Isaiah were puzzled over in a series of reviews in the Gentleman's Magazine, one of which was a review of the letter from an anonymous ‘Country Clergyman’ to the bishop. It was clearly the opinion of the ‘Country Clergyman’ that Horsley's views were novel.

The history of the Parish Mission in England begins with a petition addressed to pope Gregory XVI by Monsignor Wiseman at the end of January 1840.

In this document, Mgr. Wiseman expressed his belief that the situation in England gave well-founded hopes for the rapid propagation of the Roman Catholic faith, so long as favourable circumstances were seconded by energetic measures. He said that his own journeys throughout England, the opinion of the Vicars Apostolic, of the clergy and of the people, had confirmed him in his conviction that an Institute of missionary priests would be most efficacious, even necessary, if this rapid growth of Catholicism was to become a reality.

‘Almost everything in him has its roots in Augustine and yet almost nothing is genuinely Augustinian.’ The words are those of Reinhold Seeberg and the subject of the appraisal Gregory the Great (540–90). It is an observation that has a particular validity when applied to Gregory's adaptation of Augustine's material in his doctrine of Purgatory, which is the subject of this article. In his thought about life after death, Gregory adopted Augustine's theological framework at almost every point. Dogmatic questions such as: ‘At or after death, do the redeemed people of God, other than martyrs, need purification to make them fit for the love and presence of their holy Creator and Judge?’; ‘Does prayer for the dead relate to this growth?’; or ‘Is the life-to-come static?’; and ‘How should St Paul's more obscure statements in his First Letter to the Corinthians concerning salvation “yet so as by fire” be interpreted?’ were questions that Augustine had himself inherited and explored with diligence and real coherence. In large measure, Gregory was content to adopt Augustine's solutions. But in matters of detail Gregory departed from his great forebear, and then, significantly, it was to ‘firm-up’ some of Augustine's more cautious pronouncements particularly about the possibility of purgative suffering in the afterlife. In the celebrated phrase of B. J. Kidd, Gregory ‘erected speculation into a certainty’.

This article marks the completion of an online database catalogue of the records of taxation of the medieval and early modern clergy of England and Wales in the ‘E 179’ clerical series at The National Archives. It has two parts: an overview of the history of clerical taxation based upon the database's register of tax grants and an analytical guide to the contents of the series, with references to all key documents. The intention is to stimulate research in this important area of study by providing a blueprint for the future exploitation of this rich seam of neglected records.