In the thirteenth century Dominican theologians studying and teaching at the University of Paris began to debate how Christ experienced physical pain during his crucifixion. Drawing upon patristic arguments these considerations culminated in the conclusions of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas that Christ's physical pain was the most severe that had ever been experienced in the history of humanity. The reasons for Dominican concern to emphasise the unique severity of Christ's pain are complex and not always complimentary. The debate can be understood as part of the high medieval revival of interest in humanity and human achievement, but it can also be read as a challenge to Cathar beliefs and as a form of resistance to increasingly popular modes of affective piety.

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.

It is more than twenty-one years since Professor John Bossy wrote his stimulating and controversial article on ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’. His article made familiar to a wide range of students the concepts of ‘seigneurial Catholicism’ and ‘survivalism’. It concluded, tendentiously, that ‘the history of Elizabethan Catholicism is a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations’. Professor Bossy subsequently developed his ideas about the new kind of Counter-Reformation Catholicism which was affecting other countries outside England, and then in 1975 he produced a major work on The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. In this he advanced the view that the English Catholic Community really began in the 1570s. What happened between the 1530s and the 1570s was merely ‘the posthumous history, if you will, of “medieval” or “pre-Reformation” Christendom in England’. He agreed that the English Catholic community launched about 1570 had some continuity with the past, but he argued that it was ‘in most respects a new creation’. Before then, there existed a hangover from the past labelled ‘the Old Religion’, but this was ‘less concerned with doctrinal affirmation or dramas of conscience than with a set of ingrained observances which denned and gave meaning to the cycle of the week and the seasons of the year’. This, according to Professor Bossy, had been aptly termed survivalism. He argued that: ‘As a complex of social practices rather than a religion of internal conviction, it offered no barrier to the degree of attendance at the parish church required to preserve the integrity of the household.’

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.

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.

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.

The Church of post-Conquest England experienced a number of ecclesiastical and administrative changes brought on, in part, by the Normans’ implementation of Gregorian reform. Despite the growing fervour for non-lay intervention in ecclesiastical matters, many of the Norman innovations actually increased the king’s involvement with the Church. For example, a new practice emerged whereby the king appropriated a church's revenues upon the death of its abbot or bishop. Before this time, vacant houses were apparently cared for by their priors or other ecclesiastics and the king played little or no role in their administration. William the Conqueror altered forever this custom when he took direct control of vacant churches and placed their administration, although generally not their revenue, in the hands of royal officials.

Scholars continue to argue about whether Ignatius' epistles give evidence of one or two groups of opponents. It is the claim of this article that Ignatius confronted a single group. We will best understand the characteristics and heritage of its members first by taking care not to overemphasise the systematic character of their thinking about Jesus, and second by setting their Christology within the context of Jewish speculation about divine mediator figures and the varieties of ‘Christian’ beliefs about Jesus. The article also compares Ignatius' positions with characteristics of Jewish Christianity and suggests that the intensity of his polemic may owe more to what he shared with this group than to the differences between them. The article concludes with some observations about the difficulties inherent in the term ‘Jewish Christianity’.

The 1661 Savoy Conference has generally been seen as a failure for which Richard Baxter is principally to blame. While it is true that he must share in the responsibility, it should be shared more widely. This article argues that the failure at the Savoy was the end result of tactical errors made a year earlier by the wider Presbyterian leadership who then left Baxter to shoulder the blame alone; and that the restored bishops never had any intention of offering any meaningful concessions at the Savoy.

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 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 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 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.

‘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’.

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.

In St Mary's Church, Barbados, there is a monument to a curate who died in 1851, and ‘whose labours as a clergyman of the Church of England for fifty years were distinguished by talent, energy & faithfulness. His efforts were unceasing to make known the truths of the Gospel to all classes in this island. At an early period in his ministry he led the way in rescuing the then slave population from spiritual bondage and darkness. In this work of Christian love he was ever resolute, singlemin-ded, Sc uncompromising’. Mr Harte's claim to our interest is further increased when we learn that he was once prosecuted by the vestry of his parish for, among other things, teaching slaves ‘doctrines of equality inconsistent with their obedience to their masters’ and for comparing the white inhabitants of his parish to those of Sodom and Gomorrah, somewhat to the advantage of the latter.

The return to office of Peel and the Conservatives in 1841 was reassuring to the Church. On the whole, Melbourne had been less objectionable than the bishops had expected. But the Whigs had by no means lived down the suspicion with which Churchmen naturally regarded a party so strongly supported by Dissenters; and, although there were men unfriendly to the bishops in the Tory ranks, Peel was a far more skilful disciplinarian than Melbourne, if only because he took more pains.

Late at night on 18 May 1688 the bishops, granted an audience by James II, handed him their petition. ‘When he looked upon it he said he knew whose handwriting it was, as well he might, for it was the Archbishop's.’ It certainly was the archbishop's hand, but it was not wholly his work, nor that of the other six bishops who had signed it with him and who now presented it to their king. How this document came into being is the subject of this paper.

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.

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.