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.

This article examines the canonisation process of Clare of Assisi and seeks to contextualise it within the currents of early Franciscan history. It refutes recent scholarship on Clare that has focused upon her place in the history of medieval women and draws on Italian scholarship to argue for a more nuanced reading of the texts surrounding Clare that takes into account the deep-set divisions between the papacy and the friars about the role of women in the Franciscan order and compares the post-mortem treatment of Clare to that of Francis.

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.

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.

This article seeks to uncover the origins of the ‘Ranters’ by examining Abiezer Coppe's early life and social network. It suggests that Coppe's background, experiences and milieu – particularly his Baptist phase and the associations he made during this period – are crucial to appreciate the genesis of the ‘Ranters’. As such it should be regarded as a further contribution towards the growing consensus that the origins of ‘radicalism’ in the English Revolution are to be located in the religion of the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestants lower down the social scale.

This study focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century images, commissioned by the Ordo Eremitarum Sancti Augustini, of Augustine in rapture at the Trinity, revealing a wounded heart. This imagery begins an iconographical trend within the order that portrays Augustine as the Doctor of Love and departs from the image initiated by Possidius of Augustine as the rational thinker and bishop. A comparison with contemporaneous images of Francis receiving the stigmata reveals a new understanding of the relationship of the body to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century mendicant piety, and the importance of the iconisation of the body in the Hermits' understanding of Augustine.

In two texts written between 1185 and 1205, Gervase of Canterbury proposed a vision of the role of the Benedictine community of Christ Church in relation to the archbishop, their nominal abbot. In the Tractatus de combustione and the Actus pontificum, Gervase repeatedly presented the monks as the guardians of the archbishops' relics and memory. This in turn allowed him to establish close links between the prelates and a precise locus, the cathedral, in an attempt to reassert the traditional role of Christ Church as the archiepiscopal church at a time when this role was under threat.

From the early Reformation the Scottish Kirk had seen national public fasting as an essential exercise in furthering the spiritual, political and material well-being of the nation. For that reason fasts were held frequently, particularly at times of national crisis in Church and State. In 1706, with parliament about to deliberate on a treaty for an incorporating union with England, a national fast seemed an obvious step. The refusal of the Court party to grant a civil sanction to a fast therefore placed the issue to the forefront of national debate, providing the opposition with a major opportunity to disrupt the progress of the treaty.

Using the records of heresy trials as well as the vernacular texts composed by English dissenters during the period 1381–1521, this article chronicles the development of Wycliffite and Lollard views about sexuality and lay and clerical marriage. John Wyclif's Latin writings reveal that he both professed caution about clerical marriage and articulated a culturally traditional theology of sexuality. Whereas his hesitation at the prospect of a married clergy gave way to enthusiasm among later dissenters, his ideas about lay sexuality resonated with dissenting and mainstream writers alike. The evidence calls further into doubt the view that Lollardy was an innovative movement with respect to issues of gender and sexuality.

What was the source of authority in the Church in Tudor England? This article traces the use of an ancient symbol of the power of metropolitan archbishops, the woollen pallium, between 1533 and 1603. The later Henrician Church saw this garment as a sign of royal supremacy. Under Mary, however, Archbishop Pole made extravagant claims which led the Elizabethan Church to reject earlier Tudor notions of this symbol. Set against the backdrop of the source of episcopal jurisdiction, this article traces the use of the pallium in England in a Church moving from Roman obedience to a Protestant settlement.

The central Middle Ages in western Europe witnessed both a significant growth in the cult of the Virgin Mary and the rise of the dualist heretical movements known as the Cathars. Whilst the Cathars' dualism meant they denied any role for the Virgin Mary in the incarnation, nevertheless they often assigned her an important place in their beliefs. This article explores the considerable affinities which existed between contemporary orthodox doctrines and heretical teachings on Mary and, through a case study of the Disputatio inter catholicum et paterinum hereticum, examines the close relationship between anti-Cathar polemic, orthodox biblical exegesis and heretical belief.

This paper revisits the question of the influence of Jewish biblical exegesis on Christian scholars in twelfth-century France, by focusing in particular on Abelard's response to a question of Heloise in her Problemata about questions raised by 1 Samuel ii.35–6 (=1 Regum ii.35–6) concerning ‘the faithful priest’ prophesied as Eli's successor, the meaning of ‘will walk before my anointed’ and the nature of the offering his household should make. Abelard's discussion of the views of an unnamed Jewish scholar illustrates a consistent movement evident in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries for certain Christian exegetes to approach Jewish scholars to resolve problems posed by the text of the Old Testament. While the passage in 1 Samuel was traditionally interpreted in a Christocentric fashion, Heloise implicitly supports a more historical reading of the text in the question she puts to Abelard. The Jewish scholar's interpretation reported by Abelard is very close to that of Rashi's twelfth-century disciples.

This study sets the history of a friendship in the context of religious reform in Italy in the 1530s. Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton were friends at the University of Padua but gradually became foes. In 1536 Morison returned to England to become Cromwell's propagandist and later Throckmorton began his dramatic career as Pole's agent. In Italy, however, both these young humanists had links with a group of reformers later called ‘spirituali’. Morison met them through contacts with Edmund Harvel and Bishop Cosimo Gheri. The discovery of Throckmorton's inventory shows that he owned books associated with Italian reform, including banned publications containing writings of the Northern Reformers. The rift between them was caused by political reformation in England, not religion in Italy.

The Presbyterian Review (1831–48) was one of the most important sources for Evangelical thought within the Church of Scotland before the Disruption of 1843, and for Free Church opinion after the schism. However, its views concerning slavery have yet to be subjected to critical evaluation by historians. Initially, it reflected the radicalism of the Evangelical leader, Andrew Thomson, especially in its demand for the immediate, uncompensated abolition of West Indian slavery. It also used slavery as part of its polemics against High Church Anglicans and Tractarians over the legacy of William Wilberforce and in its disputes with the Scottish Voluntaries. Subsequently, during the ‘Send back the money’ controversy, its position moved closer to the moderation of Thomas Chalmers.

This essay focuses upon particular elements of testimonies within the East African Revival in late colonial Uganda, giving analytical priority to the voice-hearing experiences of converts that often precipitated their conversion. While conversion within this movement aligns broadly with recent interest in discontinuity in Christian conversion, this essay highlights the roles of non-Christian spirits in fomenting radical religious change, including conversion to the East African Revival movement. It argues that the very experiences which occasioned these revivalists’ radical breaks with their past ways of life also established metaphysical continuity with them.

Although the union between the Latin and Greek Churches was one of Pope Innocent III's career-long ambitions, the limited provisions made by the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council regarding the eastern Churches have led most historians to assume that by the end of his pontificate this matter had been relegated to one of secondary importance and was treated only as an afterthought during the council. By collecting and re-examining the surviving sources, this article shows that considerable time and energy was in fact spent during the council in regulating the affairs of the Churches of former Byzantine lands. The ensuing decisions and legislation formed the basis of the organisation of the Church in much of the Greco-Latin East for at least another three centuries.

While a number of historians have focused attention on the development of Protestant missionary thought and activity in India during the nineteenth century, comparatively little is known about the social background, education and motives of the missionary candidates eventually selected for service in that part of ‘the mission field’. Who were these men and why did they go? What pressures and motives lay behind the continued expansion of missionary activity in India during this period?

Richard Baxter (1615–91) was possessed of that all-embracing curiosity, indefatigable energy and tenacious idealism which, as Reformation and Renaissance passed into the sober Augustan certainties of the Enlightenment, became ever rarer among Englishmen. His many-sidedness is reflected in the very different kinds of interest his career attracts. The ecclesiastical historian meets in Baxter both puritanism's most committed apologist and its most idiosyncratic representative, a man who, involved in every doctrinal controversy and every negotiation or conference convened to discuss a national church settlement, was to have a lasting influence on English Dissent. His participation in these debates is, however, more than a chapter in the history of later puritanism: it contributed to the development of seventeenth-century rationalism and liberalism and shows suggestive affinities with the thought of the Cambridge Platonists. There is, furthermore, contemporary relevance in Baxter's conception of ‘mere Christianity’: ‘the first exponent of Ecumenism in England’, he promoted ecclesiastical reconciliation, both practically, in the Worcestershire Association, and theologically, in the attempt of such treatises as Richard Baxter's Catholick Theologie (1675) to harmonise Calvinism and Arminianism.

In the current standard text-book of English Church Law appear the following statements about the origin of Convocation: ‘The Convocation, in its origin, was for the purpose of taxation and no other; it was altogether unlike the Convocation of the foreign synods, which were composed solely of the bishops, collected to declare what was the doctrine, or what should be the discipline, of the Church. It is easy, however, to conceive how the clergy, when once convoked, gradually assumed the same power as existed in those foreign synods to which their Convocation might appear to bear some analogy.’ In examining this quotation we must consider, (a) the composition of the foreign synods; (b) their relation if any to the English Convocation; (c) the taxing functions of both bodies.

The Reform Bill of 1867 inaugurated a new era in the political history of Great Britain. By enlarging the electorate and increasing the possibilities for party organisation this Act brought to a close that period of the mid-nineteenth century when parties were in a state of flux. This was manifested in Parliament by a growing disparity between the popularly elected House of Commons and the hereditary based House of Lords. In 1868 and 1869 these bodies converged in a constitutional struggle over the disestablishment of the Irish Church. By toppling Disraeli from the premiership and acquiring a clear mandate from the electorate for a change in the status of the Irish Church Gladstone was able to make an irrefutable case for disestablishment. When Gladstone placed his bill before Parliament opposition developed in the first instance, as expected, from churchmen and Tories in the House of Lords who feared that the passage of disestablishment would admit a host of further changes in the constitution. Through the efforts of archbishop Tait, however, and other moderates the upper house wisely passed the principle of the bill. But opposition to the measure was based not so much on upholding the principle of establishment in Ireland, which was indefensible, but on a disagreement with the substance, or the details by which the Irish Church was to be disendowed. During the committee stage the House of Lords precipitated a crisis by so amending the bill as to maintain the financial security of the Irish Church. For the purpose of reaching a compromise on the disendowment clauses of the bill a conference of party leaders was summoned. To this end the mediation efforts of the queen were directed. But any settlement of the crisis depended in the final analysis on the extent of Conservative opposition and the ease with which party divisions could be bridged.