The Counter-Reformation initiated a long period of growth in the numbers of the secular and religious clergy of Catholic Europe. Mario Rosa has observed that in Italy the clerical population reached its peak in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu described the peninsula as a ‘monk's paradise’, and that it declined thereafter as reformist governments attempted to curb the religious orders and restrict new ordinations to the priesthood. According to Rosa, in the early eighteenth century the Italian Church had a ‘plethora’ of poorly trained priests who lived on the meagre sums provided by their patrimony and sought to improve their lot by obtaining benefices and endowments. In spite of the efforts of the hierarchy to improve clerical education, Rosa continues, Italian seminaries lacked adequate resources to train the great numbers of clerics.Rosa's observations about the expanding ecclesiastical population before the mid-eighteenth century are borne out by statistical evidence to be found in the archive of the northern diocese of Novara, where numbers of secular or diocesan priests tripled between the early seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the composition of the Novarese priests and to test the applicability of Rosa's observations about the economic status and education of the Italian clergy to the diocese of Novara.

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, issued by the leaders of the German Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) churches in October 1945, was a unique document in the recent history of the Christian Churches. This public acknowledgement of responsibility and guilt for their inadequate response to the criminal actions of the nation's political leaders was, and remains, unprecedented. The solemn proclamation included the by-now well-known sentences:

With great pain do we say: through us endless sufferings have been brought to many peoples and nations. What we have often borne witness to before our congregations, we now declare in the name of the whole church. We have for many years struggled in the name of Jesus Christ against the spirit which found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of tyranny, but we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously and for not loving more ardently.

The century from the calling of the Council of Trent to the conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle stands out as one of the most creative in the pastoral history of Christian Europe. The great number of new apostolic orders, the devotional flowering in France which tamed and domesticated the mysticism of Spain for everyman, the renovation of the parish and the priestly life aspired to by Carlo Borromeo, Pierre Berulle and Vincent de Paul are all aspects of a transformation which is the spiritual face of the baroque. The practice of confession stands somewhere near the centre of this transformation. From an annual social rite concerned essentially with the restoration of peace and the guaranteeing of restitution, it became a monthly or even weekly private rite of reconciliation of the penitent with God. It became, too, the focus for the direction of souls which was now seen, supremely in the work of Francis de Sales, as a central part of the work of the priest. The Salesian tradition was to dominate the flood of devotional manuals published in every European language in the seventeenth century, and in it the practice of confession was developed beyond the juridical and canonical framework of Trent, and turned into a subtle and highly personal instrument of spiritual direction.

The identification of a tract without title-page or caption title in the Library of the Society of Friends in London, together with the location in the Library of the Baptist College, Bristol, of another tract of which no copy was known to exist, makes it possible for the first time to summarise fully the beginnings of the Baptist Western Association. The Association's activity, apart from days spent in waiting upon God in fasting and prayer, was twofold: the resolution of queries submitted by the churches represented; and the issuing of circular letters of exhortation to the churches. Circular letters issued from nine of the Association's first ten meetings are printed in the first of the tracts mentioned, queries submitted and resolved at nine of the meetings in the second. From other sources we know that in 1655 the Association ordained as its superintendent Thomas Collier, the editor of both tracts; and that in 1656 it issued a Confession of the Faith. An assembly of ‘messengers’ or representatives of churches in the South-Western counties of England, meeting normally once in the spring and once in the autumn, the Western Association was a pioneer among those regional associations of churches which have ‘always been a feature of Baptist life’. Correct information concerning its meetings and leaders, and the churches represented, is thus desirable. The fifty-seven queries, moreover, with the answers they received, throw light upon issues then the concern of many beyond Baptist circles.

These well-known words of Frederick Engels date from 18441 and did not go unsupported by contemporary opinion in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In Sheffield, for example, it was generally thought in 1843 triat not one family of artisans in twenty attended church or chapel, while Horace Mann, the author of the report on the religious census of 1851, reached the melancholy conclusion that ‘the masses of our working population…are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations’. In 1860 Lord Shaftesbury remarked that not 2 per cent of the working men in London attended church, while a modern authority, Dr K. S. Inglis, has declared that even in northern and midland towns, where social relationships were more harmonious and the range of worshippers far wider than in East London, the majority did not attend worship; popular abstinence from worship (to use his term) had become an inherited custom.

The article offers an analysis of the public debate on priestly marriage, conducted in the last decades of the eleventh century. This was the first debate on the subject in six hundred years, erupting in the context of the reform movement. Although the theme of priestly marriage was mentioned in the Carolingian period as well as in the tenth and first half of the eleventh century, it was the anonymous defence of clerical marriage, the Epistola de continentia clericorum, that gave rise to a wide-ranging public debate. The article examines this debate in terms of the argumentative approaches used by the participants, the aim being to emphasise an important undercurrent in the understanding of priestly marriage contrary to the official – or Gratian – view on the issue.

Of the literary bequest from the Middle Ages, homilies provide one of the more useful tools in helping us to understand the medieval mind, at least from the perspective of the Church. Homilies provide us with insight on a number of levels, extending well beyond the personal viewpoint of those who wrote and preached them. They also clearly reflect the values, aspirations, and concerns of an era. Homilies are particularly valuable, especially if one has them in large numbers, because they are generally addressed to people of both genders, of all ages, and from every stratum of society. This is especially true of the large corpus of homilies attributed to Bishop Caesarius of Arles who directed his attention to both laity and clergy of all ranks with the aim of encouraging reading in order to promote literacy and divine wisdom. The Caesarian homiliary that survives from the early Middle Ages, is an enviable collection of documents.: one need only consider the scarcity of this type of source for contemporary Visigothic Spain. Homilies did exist in that period in Spain, but the ravages of time and man have caused so much to disappear.

The subject of this article claims attention for two special reasons. Firstly, and without any doubt, Grabe was one of the greatest atristic scholars of his age and lent lustre to the scholarly tradition at Oxford where his later years were spent. Secondly, his phenomenal patristic scholarship was inspired by a religious motive, which derived from his attachment to Lutheran Syncretism, a movement begun by the Helmstedt theologian Georg Calixtus (1586-1656). The problem of Grabe's neglect by historians is compounded by the confusion created by a contemporary account of the vital episode which brought him from Germany to Oxford and from Lutheranism to the Church of England. This article will therefore, draw together the scattered information which exists on Grabe's career and thereby remedy the neglect of historians, and dispel some of the confusion surrounding him.

In October 1826, an impassioned letter appeared in The Times, written by an outraged correspondent whose house had been entered unceremoniously by two offensive females who demanded first a donation towards the construction of a missionary training college and then a justification of his refusal to subscribe. He fulminated against the triumphalism of voluntary religious societies: ‘It seems “to grow by what it feeds on”’ The first half of the nineteenth century in Britain was certainly an age of ‘evangelical aggression’, and probably the modern missionary movement was making an impression on British society far deeper than it made on such countries as India and Africa, to which missionaries were sent. Missionary enthusiasm appears to have increased lay giving for home missions as well as foreign missions; it probably stimulated interest in home missions and increased the number of candidates for the ministry; it almost certainly provided a fillip to theological education; it reinforced the already existing tendency to express piety in activity rather than quiescence; it helped to bury fatalistic and deterministic theological systems; it appears to have appealed, like the later temperance movement, to all classes of society; and (perhaps related to the last claim) it declared war on denominational bigotry.

Was non-residence in benefices necessarily an abuse? It was an old problem, usually linked with pluralities, and even if the Councils of Constance and Basel had done nothing about it, non-residence had been denounced by Gerson, by Panormitanus and by Denys the Carthusian; it remained a live issue in the later fifteenth century. An interesting discussion of the subject emerges from the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83) with his father and brother, successive rulers of Mantua. It raises points of wider importance than the particular matters at stake and throws some light upon relations between the Italian powers and the papacy over Church appointments; in Italy there was no Pragmatic Sanction, and appointments would often depend upon official request and more or less informal ways and means of accommodation with the Roman court. It is, however, not only about appointment to, and absenteeism from, major benefices, but also minor ones. In the absence of any general treatment in depth of the subject, these documents contribute some specific and important evidence about practical problems and attitudes in Italian ecclesiastical life. Resentment in the small Lombard principality of Mantua towards non-resident ‘foreigners’ and papal reservations, professions of concern about pastoral standards and the social standing of the local clergy are among other themes which emerge; not least remarkable is that the cardinal's viewpoint as revealed in the correspondence was sometimes distinctly different from that of the lay rulers, in spite of his being their close relative and top-level agent in the papal court.

Edward Gee, rector at Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, from 1643 until 1660, was born in 1612 or 1613, at Banbury (Oxon.). During the years following the reorganisation of the Church in Lancashire along Presbyterian lines in 1646, he achieved recognition as a leading member of the clergy in that county. In 1650 he was said to possess the parsonage-house and glebe at Eccleston, with tithes and a water cornmill. Although he had agreed with the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, he opposed the more revolutionary changes carried out in 1648 and 1649, years in which the House of Commons was purged by the army, king Charles I executed, and the monarchy and the House of Lords abolished. The decision of the new republican Commonwealth regime to exact a promise of allegiance, known as the Engagement (first, in 1649 from a number of important Englishmen, and then in 1650 from all adult males in England) provoked a major pamphlet debate. This Engagement Controversy was the occasion of a lengdiy and detailed exchange of opinions and interpretations concerning the whole problem of how the subject should in conscience behave with respect to a drastic change of government, or, as many would have it, a usurpation of civil authority.

It has been argued that the handbooks of penance known as the ‘Frankish’ penitentials, though ‘an important and necessary stage in the development of medieval church and society’, were an ‘ephemeral and ultimately despised intrusion’ into the Frankish Church of the eighth and ninth centuries. The importation of these books by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries and the adverse reaction of the Frankish bishops to the Irish system of private penance which they introduced is a story too well known to require rehearsal here; after spreading rapidly in the eighth century the penitentials were challenged and condemned by several synods in the century which followed. This reaction had important consequences for the penitentials, to be sure, but to my knowledge it has not previously been asserted that the Frankish penitentials were merely transitional or that their impact on the Frankish Church was either peripheral or minimal. On the contrary, Fournier, Watkins and McNeill and Gamer, among others, believe the Carolin-gian era to have been heavily influenced by these texts and, in turn, to have been decisive in their development.

Ernulf, bishop of Rochester, died aged eighty-four, on 15 March 1124. In the course of his life, he studied under Lanfranc and was a close friend of Anselm at Bec. One-time prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, his advice was apparently sought by the king; he became a much respected abbot of Peterborough; and, as bishop, he instigated the important collection of secular and ecclesiastical law, the Textus Roffensis. Of his own writing, only three letters survive: one to Anselm, pleading with him to return from exile; one to the monk Lambert of St-Bertin, answering four questions on the eucharist and a fifth concerning a passage from the prophet Joel; and the third to Walkelin of Winchester, dealing with the case of canon law which the two men had previously discussed. It is this last letter, appearing in the manuscripts with the title De incestis coniugiis, which makes of Ernulf something more than a shadow among the Anglo-Norman theologians and men of letters who came to England in the aftermath of conquest. It is in this letter-treatise that Ernulf emerges as an accomplished lawyer and juridical thinker, whose approach has departed radically from that of Lanfranc, his former teacher, and is closely comparable to the principles for legal judgement set down by Ivo of Chartres in the preface to his Decretum and Panormia. Ernulf's use of such methods, grounded in, and made possible by, the new systematic collections of canon law, helps to confirm what has already begun to be evident, that this systematic, deliberately and self-consciously rational, jurisprudence finds its way into England well before the dissemination of Gratian's Decretum in the mid-twelfth century.

One of the features in common in sixteenth-century episcopal visitations in England, whether Catholic or Reformed, is enquiry after usurers. Bonner's Articles for London in 1554 may be compared in this respect with Grindal's Injunctions for York 17 years later: ‘…Whether in the City of London or diocese of the same name there be any person that is a notorious and common usurer, which lendeth his money for unlawful and excessive gain and lucre, contrary to the manifest words of scripture, to the evil example of other Christian people, to the danger of his own soul, and to the utter undoing and hindrance of many, especially if poor and young beginners, borrowing for their necessity?’ ‘…the churchwardens and sworn men of every parish shall half yearly from time to time present unto the Ordinary the names of all such persons of their parish…as be usurers, that is to say, all those who lend money, corn, ware, or other thing, and receive gain thereof over and above that which they lend’.

When Richard Baxter arrived in the camp of the victorious New Model Army shortly after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, he was greatly distressed by the religious and political heterodoxies that found expression through the ‘few proud, self-conceited, hotheaded Sectaries’ who had become Cromwell's ‘Favourites’. He observed that these men held ‘vehement Disputes’ in behalf of ‘Liberty of Conscience’, the doctrine that the civil magistrate should have nothing to do with matters of religion. Furthermore, he noticed that they also talked of ‘State Democracy’ and ‘Church Democracy’ as well as ‘about Free-grace and Free-will, and all the Points of Antinomianism and Arminianism’. In other words, in Baxter's mind those men who were attacking the orthodox Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and election were the very same men who were demanding additional political liberties. A single test case may be framed of the compatibility and nurturing effect (each upon the other) of these two tendencies by an examination of the writings of the New Model Army chaplain, John Saltmarsh.

The Rev. H. D. Leeves, recently appointed as the British and Foreign Bible Society's first full time agent in the Levant, arrived in Constantinople in January 1821. Before this time the Society's interests in Turkey had been promoted at different times by the Rev. Robert Pinkerton; the Rev. Henry Lindsay, Chaplain to the Embassy in Constantinople; and the Rev. James Connor, an agent of the Church Missionary Society. Within a short time of his arrival Leeves was reporting to the Committee in London on the position with regard to the Society's proposed edition of the New Testament in Karamanlidika, that is, in Turkish printed with Greek characters. In a letter of 8 February 1821 he reported that ‘the transcription of the Turkish Testament, in Greek characters, has advanced very little. This is upon the whole fortunate, and I think it will be best to suspend it entirely until the corrected edition is ready. The Secretary to the Patriarch (i.e., Alexander Petropolis), who has undertaken this work, has so little time to spare, that I believe it will be necessary to look out for another person to perform it, when the amended copy is ready to be put into his hands’.

The county of Chester between 1750 and 1850 affords an interesting field of study into the impact on religion of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent great, mainly urban, population growth. In the east where the Cheshire plain swells to low foothills, which in turn give way to the gaunt moorlands and windswept heights of the Pennines, in the early stages of the Revolution factory villages were established in places where streams provided water power; in the lower part of the curious salient of the county which sunders Lancashire from Derbyshire by thrusting up to Holme Moss, cotton mills, print works, and collieries sprang up as the basis of a fairly dense population in what had hitherto been a district of small importance. By 1800 Stockport with its power spinning and hand weaving of cotton, its bleaching, printing, and hatting industries, had surpassed the ancient city of Chester in population. Ten miles to the south lay Macclesfield in which the older manufacture of silk buttons had been largely eclipsed by silk throwing and weaving. In a maturer phase of the Revolution, from about 1820, for the first time the western part of the county became involved. The expanding population of Liverpool crossed the Mersey in the recently introduced steam ferries to occupy the opposite shore at Birkenhead. Until that time the Wirral peninsular (of which Birkenhead is a part) had remained remote and undeveloped and notably conservative in religion. In 1850 the rest of the county, interspersed with quiet country towns such as Northwich, Knutsford and Congleton, was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Thus, Cheshire affords within itself a contrasting variety of rural life and of earlier and later industrialism.

It is well known that the crusades were represented as wars sanctioned by God, who helped the crusaders. At the same time, according to crusade propaganda, the liberation of the Holy Land was most probably not the only purpose of the crusades. Some sources allow us to affirm that the papacy and preachers had the idea that God would allow the crusaders to settle in Outremer only when they would merit it by the absence of sin. Furthermore, in the second half of the twelfth and, to a greater extent, in the thirteenth century, there was a spread of the idea that God could destroy the Saracens on his own, but was testing his faithful. In fact, all these ideas together suggested that, according to the propaganda, the liberation of the Holy Land was not considered to be God's only goal, for he also wished to bring to this land faithful people without sin who would settle there, elected by God.