Notice is hereby given, that if any man be mindful to enlist in his Majesty's service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White, Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieut.-General of his Majesty's forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both which are now in danger, let him repair to the drum-head at the Cross, where each man shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and all other proper encouragements.

This notice, which was published at the height of the agitation which beset the forest of Pendle in the summer of 1748, conjures images beloved of the Methodist hagiographer. Assuming quasi-military titles, squire and parson rally a drink-sodden mob to do battle against the preachers of the Gospel, and all in the name of religion and commerce. Historians, however, are required to take a more dispassionate view of the motives and actions of those who, through violence or polemic, attempted to arrest the growth of the Evangelical Revival, a movement which was to prove one of the most influential religious and cultural movements in the history of the British Isles. John Walsh's pioneering essay on ‘Methodism and the mob’ was one of the first serious attempts to treat anti-Methodist agitation sympathetically, and to place it in the much broader context of the norms of popular protest in the eighteenth century. However, detailed academic studies of anti-Methodist protests remain scarce, and the strong correlation between these and other examples of popular hostility towards other deviant religious groups, such as Catholics, Nonconformists and Jews, remains understated.

The survival in published form of a range of sermons commemorating the execution of Charles I provides an opportunity to examine the character and limits of political debate within the Church of Ireland. After 1688 the task of condemning the regicide of 1649 without seeming to question the legitimacy of the Revolution presented serious difficulties. In the longer term the anniversary ceased to be contentious, as defenders of the Hanoverian establishment appropriated much of the traditional Anglican rhetoric of obedience to lawful authority. That appropriation provides the context for a significant 30 January sermon by Jonathan Swift.

The collapse of the British Student Christian Movement in the long 1960s is conventionally ascribed to its mimicking of student radicalism at a time of increasing secularisation. Yet analysis of the SCM's rhetoric demonstrates that in the early 1960s the movement imagined a religious crisis when student Christianity was still strong. By embracing a theological vision of ‘secularisation’, which demanded the deliberate transposition of Christian eschatologies into secular form, the SCM embarked on an early, original and influential journey into political radicalism. In this way, the SCM made a significant contribution to British student radicalism in the late 1960s.

‘Between Creator and creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity between them cannot be seen’. With these words the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 concluded its condemnation of the doctrine of the Trinity held by Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202). The council based its assessment on Joachim's use of biblical texts as analogies for divine unity. For Joachim had, in the opinion of those who judged him, reduced the irreducible gap between God and His creatures by making God like His creatures. He had allegedly emphasised the principle of similarity at the expense of that of dissimilarity. The result was the dilution of the type of unity appropriate to the Trinity from a unity of essence to a mere unity of collection, no more binding than the spiritual unity among the faithful as expounded in many passages in the Bible, most importantly in John xvii. 22: ‘And the glory which thou has given me, I have given to them: that they may be one, as we also are one.’

This article is based on the sermons of the moderate Puritan minister Richard Culverwell, preached in his parish of St Margaret Moses, London, from the mid-1620s to the early 1630s, and recorded in detail by one of his leading parishioners, the fishmonger John Harper. It uses this material to discuss the reception of demanding Calvinist divinity, and to contribute to scholarly debates on the nature and impact of the Laudian regime in London. Although Culverwell continued to preach a Calvinist message, his sermons show a process of adaptation to changing times, and reveal the constraints and tensions that he was facing.

On 25 May 1085 Pope Gregory VII died in exile. The ninth centenary of the death of this great pope – ‘the greatest who has ever sat in St. Peter's chair’ Erich Caspar called him in 1924 – provides an obvious pretext for a bibliographical essay. What makes such. an essay a necessary exercise rather than a mere commemorative gesture is the fact that there is not available at present in any language a full-scale biography of Hildebrand–Gregory which reflects the current state of research. There is no doubt that Gregorian studies are flourishing: the colloquium in Salerno in May 1985 will offer an impressive account of research in progress. Over 200 books and articles on different aspects of the life and thought of Hildebrand-Gregory, written in the second half of this century, are listed below. Perhaps it is this sheer wealth of material and opinion which has disheartened potential biographers. The following survey concentrates on Gregorian literature since 1947, the year in which the Salesian and Scriptor of the Vatican Library, Father Giovanni Battista Borino (1881–1966) founded in Rome the journal Studi Gregoriani, which has certainly fulfilled its founder's purpose of stimulating research into the history of the papal reform movement.

Hobbes's eschatology in Leviathan is one of the most striking aspects of this classic work and has received considerable scholarly attention. Nevertheless, its scriptural interpretation has rarely been examined. This article closely analyses Hobbes's scriptural case for two aspects of eschatology: the doctrine of mortalism and the terrestrial kingdom of God. It shows that, to a large extent, Hobbes's biblical exegesis for these two eschatological issues was preceded by that of his contemporaries, including Richard Overton and John Archer. It is likely, in particular, that the scriptural interpretation for Hobbes's mortalism was directly indebted to Overton's Mans mortalitie.

Although much has been written about Hooker's thought in recent years, particularly since the preparation of the Folger edition of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, surprisingly little has appeared on the relationship between Hooker's ideas and those of contemporary defenders of the Elizabethan establishment. Hooker's Laws was a controversial work, and we can expect to learn much about its meaning by comparing it with the works of his fellow controversialists. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the insight that can be gained from a comparison of his thought with that of his contemporaries, by examining one major problem in its exegesis – that is, his attitude to the role of bishops in the government of the Church.

This article examines, through the work and attitudes of its first four governors, the relations between Church and State in the last Australia colony to be established. It covers the period from the foundation of the colony in 1829 to the arrival of the first resident bishop of Perth in 1857. It challenges the prevailing historiography of a colonial administration wedded to Anglican privilege, and discusses the persistence of an erastian mind-set among the colonial governors in the 1840s despite the advent of a new paradigm of autonomous imperial engagement by the Church of England.

Scholars generally associate the Order of Apostles, founded around 1260 by Gerardo Segarelli in Parma, Italy, with medieval heresies. This article analyses the leading source for the first three decades of the Apostles, the chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene de Adam of Parma, and casts Segarelli and the Apostle friars instead as thirteenth-century mendicants who rivalled the Franciscans in the Emilia, the Romagna and the March of Ancona. Salimbene's depiction of Gerardo Segarelli focuses on the chronicler's desire to recreate his rival as an inversion of Francis of Assisi and Franciscan ideals. Gerardo Segarelli emerges in the account as an anti-Francis. Yet only after 1274, when the Second Council of Lyons ordered a general suppression of all religious movements founded after Fourth Lateran in 1215, did the situation change slowly for Segarelli's followers as opponents began to question their obedience to papal authority. Gerardo Segarelli and the Apostle friars ultimately faced condemnation as heretics, but not before the 1290s. Salimbene's chronicle, written in the 1280s, should not be taken as a source for a ‘Segarellian heresy’ launched by a ‘heresiarch’ in the Joachite year 1260, but as a source for mendicant rivalry in the thirteenth century that was deeply passionate in its rhetoric and invective.

Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815–84) combined his ecclesiastical duties and liturgical interests with editing the fourteenth-century Middle English Lay folks’ mass book (1879) for the Early English Text Society, with the aim of showing the continuity of the English Church from the medieval period through the Reformation. In the light of modern scholarship, this article recontextualises both medieval text and Simmons's own editorial practice, and shows how Simmons, as a second-generation Tractarian churchman, sought in this text – and others associated with it – evidence for the Church of England's Catholic underpinning in an imagined medieval English Church.

This paper adopts an exegetical approach to Bede's narrative of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria in the Historia ecclesiastica ii. 9–14. HE ii. 12–13, which is loosely based on passages in the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great, diverge significantly from the latter in order to explore biblical parallels. Bede's description of Coifi's ride to the pagan shrine at Goodmanham in order to throw a lance into it is an inversion of the account of the piercing of Christ's side in John xix.34: just as water flowed from Christ's side so the piercing of the shrine led to the baptism of the Northumbrians.

This article re-examines a controversial group in English religious history: the millenarian followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott. The identities of many of Southcott's supporters have remained unclear, despite notable academic attention. Their relative social dislocation is most disputed; greater consensus characterises debates over women's attraction to Southcottianism. This article uses a recently-opened archive of Southcottian material, and reinterprets previously-known sources, to revise all existing pictures of who Southcottians were. Southcottian occupations in industrial regions indicate a similar social makeup to contemporary Methodism; Southcottianism had no distinct appeal to women. New evidence of the personal experiences of Southcottians further suggests that they may be best understood as a branch of the ‘heart religion’ of the period, one taking a distinctive view of the ways and means of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

In a general history of modern England A. J. P. Taylor stated that by the 1920s England ‘had ceased to be, in any real sense, a Christian nation’. He was no doubt referring to declining membership and attendance figures in most Protestant Churches (not the Roman Catholic Church), and may have been implying that there had been substantial abandonment of traditional belief. In regard to traditional morality, based on Christian precepts, he found greater laxity but no very noticeable decline; and this conclusion seems to be generally supported by Church experience in trying to uphold established morality in the inter-war years. Church assembly records and church newspapers show constant concern with familiar moral enemies such as drunkenness and gambling, and possible new dangers in the shape of films, broadcasting and information about birth control. Gambling was increasing because of the popularity of football pools and greyhound racing, but drunkenness appeared less common than before 1914, and the cinema was reasonably harmless (a Cinema Christian Council and other bodies striving to keep it so), as also was television when its broadcasts began in 1936. None the less, the general decline in church attendance was an indication of an increasingly secularised society in which the Churches, taken as a whole, had diminishing influence, and arguably this had a weakening effect on traditional morality.

Perhaps because the classification of religious behaviour in the Middle Ages has not received much attention, there seems to be no scholarly consensus concerning the number or nature of its genres. This means that at present we tend to have either inadequately differentiated, broad categories of medieval religious acts, or somewhat incoherent lists of highly specific religious practices. That a good number of these religious forms pre-existed and continued long after the Christian Middle Ages is not in doubt; nor is the fact that such religious behaviours are not necessarily confined to the Christian tradition. The present discussion, however, will focus exclusively upon the Latin Christian tradition, c. 1000–c. 1500.

Surveying the expressive modes of medieval religion presents less difficulty than grouping such behaviours within larger intelligible categories. Current scholarly literature makes it clear that certain varieties of medieval religious practice are almost universally acknowledged: veneration of the saints; attendance at sermons; private prayer; participation in public, collective liturgies (for example, processions on diverse occasions); acting under the influence of prophecy; setting off on pilgrimage, whether penitential or devotional; taking the Cross; performing formal or informal acts of devotion or piety (‘devotion’ is one aspect of the medieval religious life urgently in need of sharp definition); and attempting, often through ascetic exercises, to experience God (mysticism). By no means is this an exhaustive list. The titular subject of this essay, as the reader will have noticed, does not appear in it.

The importance of canon law collections to Anglo-Saxon legal culture has long been thought negligible, especially in comparison to the considerable importance of an alternative genre of canonical literature known as the penitential handbook. Over the past several decades, however, evidence for the use and circulation of continental canon law collections in pre-Conquest England has been mounting, to the extent that it could challenge traditional notions about the dominance of penitential law in the early English Church. This study presents new evidence for the reception in Anglo-Saxon England of a major continental collection known as the Collectio vetus Gallica.

We state as a fact, which we have received, on what we deem undoubted authority, that the Puseyite party have bought up the BRITISH CRITIC, which publication accordingly will from henceforth be dedicated to the promulgation of their principles: The Record, 1 Jan. 1838

This article focuses on the Tractarian takeover and subsequent control of the British Critic, a politically and theologically conservative quarterly periodical, between 1838 and 1843. In doing so it claims several justifications. Firstly, and primarily, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Critic within first-generation Tractarianism and therefore to rehabilitate an extensive periodical journalism as a vital yet neglected source for historians of the movement. Though various Tractarians such as Richard Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey had all written for the British Magazine and William Sewell regularly for the Quarterly Review in the early 1830s, it was the Critic which came to serve as the principal medium for the movement's commentary. Historians' neglect of this commentary, it is suggested, has had important consequences in terms of our understanding of Tractarianism, for it has served to marginalise certain aspects of the movement's early thought – in particular the social criticism which was a consistent feature of the Critic's pages.

The Calvinistic Confession of Faith written by the patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Loukaris, is considered to be the most important product and at the same time the manifesto of the attempted union of the Protestant and Orthodox Churches. Presenting evidence which has been neglected in previous research, this article aims to revise this communis opinio by demonstrating that the book that was actually meant to become the theological foundation for the envisaged union was in fact the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio, a bilingual (Latin and Greek) publication (1623, 1627, 1648) containing the Βelgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and several canons of the Synod of Dordrecht.

A major manuscript discovery of hitherto unknown letters of Augustine of Hippo is a scholarly event whose importance can hardly be exaggerated. It is as though one of the lost books of Livy had suddenly turned up in palimpsest among medieval manuscripts in a cathedral library. For a discovery in similar circumstances, one has to go back to December 1904 when the learned Rev. Dr Karapet Ter-Merkettshian found an Armenian manuscript of Irenaeus' Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching in the library of the church of the Blessed Virgin at Eriwan in Armenia.

In seventeenth-century France, secular law favoured parents’ authority in children's choices of marriage, religion or the clerical state, despite Catholic theology and canon law favouring individual freedom. Negotiating this tension led many clerical writers – in advice on choosing a state of life found in devotional treatises, sermons and catechisms – to reconcile parental involvement with vocational liberty. Believing that the right choice of a state was virtually necessary for salvation, they urged parents and children to cooperate in discerning and accepting God's call. Amid conflicts with French law and culture, pastoral persuasion helped to forge an enduringly influential strain in modern Catholicism.