Commencing with the Waldensian movement in the twelfth century and continuing with the Lollard and Hussite movements in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, critical thinkers in the Christian tradition began to stress the basic equality of all believers. The ideology of Protestantism embraced that principle in its doctrine of ‘the priesthood of all believers’, though the interpretation of the doctrine varied considerably. A century and a quarter after the inception of the Protestant Reformation, English writers engaged in a full-fledged debate on the right to preach. Before the debate had concluded, the original, strictly religious question had given rise to issues of much greater import, and in so doing had helped to create the spirit of reform which was the hallmark of Puritan England.

This paper addresses a major historical lacuna by highlighting some of the ways through which women helped to shape Irish responses to the English Reformation in Ireland. It reveals that women were often key to a web of contacts linking English resistance to the Tudors’ reformations to Irish resistance. It affirms that women played a significant role in the Reformation in Tudor Ireland, not least of all in its ultimate failure. Because virtually no Irish women became Protestants in the sixteenth century, though a small number of Irish men was converted, no self-perpetuating indigenous community of Irish Protestants was generated.

Every reader of Abelar's Historia Calamilatum, the ‘story of his misfortunes’, knows how he mocked histnaster, Anselm of Laon. What has not been made clear is that he mocked in a comparable way a master of even greater standing, St Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. The reason why this latter attack has not been emphasised is that it appears in one version only of Abelar's Theologia, and its interpretation as mockery depends on detailed scrutiny. Abelard delighted in jokes, particularly when they were dangerous. ‘He cannot restrain his laughter,’ St Bernard warned, ‘listen to his guffaws.’ Jokes depend so much for their effect upon tone and context that it is difficult for an historian to keep an ear out for them when he only has formal texts as evidence; furthermore, a joke loses its cutting edge once it has been laboriously explained. Nevertheless, Abelar's mockery of St Anselm does have to be explained step by step if it is to be appreciated at all. The circumstances are as follows.

In the early years of the fifth century a significant step in the development of the Roman Church's claim to a universal jurisdiction was taken as it clarified its relationship with the Churches of Eastern Illyricum. Among the letters of Innocent i, bishop of Rome from 402 to 417, there are a half dozen addressed to the churches within that prefecture, politically now in the East but ecclesiastically still looking to Rome. Yet the authority exercised by the Roman bishop was not all-encompassing, being restricted primarily to judicial matters. This article considers Innocent's epistula xviii, written to a group of Macedonian bishops, headed by Rufus, bishop of Thessaloniki, Innocent's vicar, in which Rome acts as a court of appeal in the matter of Bubalius and Taurian. What is fascinating is the role that forgery played in the appeal process. It is argued that the evidence should be considered in its own historical context and not in the light of later ecclesiological understandings.

England's first Tudor monarchs were formally devoted to the cult of St Thomas of Canterbury. In popular memory, however, Thomas was a champion of law and custom, an opponent of untrammelled royal power, and – especially among the clergy – a martyr for ecclesiastical ‘liberties’. This suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was considerably less ‘monarchical’ than is sometimes supposed. In the 1530s Thomas became a powerful symbol of resistance to Henry VIII's royal supremacy. However, the fact that he could be portrayed as a patron of the clergy's sectional interests helps to explain how opposition was weakened and divided.

The importance to scholars of the papal registers and other records in the Vatican Archives as a source for later medieval history scarcely needs to be emphasised. From the thirteenth century onwards, the different series of records proliferated. They begin with registers of outgoing correspondence, known as the Vatican Registers, in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) and financial accounts of the apostolic chamber under Nicholas III (1277–80). For the fourteenth century, there are new series of registers of outgoing letters (the Avignon Registers and the Lateran Registers) and a vast increase in the quantity of surviving records of the apostolic chamber. However, with the increasing abundance of such records, the proportion to have been published diminishes. It is in the fourteenth century that the sheer wealth of the surviving sources (there are, for instance, sixty registers of papal letters from the pontificate of Gregory XI, which lasted seven years and three months) first becomes a serious problem for those pursuing the publication of papal records.

This article explores the use and promotion of contact relics in medieval England. It argues that by the late eleventh and early twelfth century, large English monastic houses were uncomfortable with unauthorised individuals touching high status corporeal relics and so re-introduced and promoted contact relics as alternative objects of veneration. It argues that contact relics were an important aspect of English saints' cults until the Reformation, in a similar manner to Celtic and Brittonic cults.

Twentieth-century scholars believed that Arnobius the Younger was an African monk living in Rome. This is untenable. There is now considerable doubt over the authorship of several works ascribed to him by Germain Morin: the Expositiunculae has been proved to date from the early medieval period, but the author of the anti-predestinarian Commentarii in Psalmos, one ‘Arnobius’, is also responsible for writing the mid fifth-century Praedestinatus, an attack on Augustine's predestinarian theology and its champion, Prosper of Aquitaine. The content of these works and related evidence point to Julian of Eclanum as the true author.

Bede's preoccupations in the later years of his life have recently come under close scrutiny. This article will set out the argument to this point, then explore how the Ecclesiastical history conforms to more general perceptions of Bede's purposes. It will conclude that this work was designed to address just one part of his wider reform agenda, as that pertained to the Northumbrian king of the day, Ceolwulf. To this end, Bede painted a picture of the current situation within the Church which is far more optimistic than that on offer in the Letter to Ecgberht just a few years later. It must be concluded that his specific purposes as regards any particular work, and the audience at which that work was aimed, exercised a considerable influence over his strategy, which varies enormously from one part of his output to another.

The International Congress on World Evangelization held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July 1974 was a seminal event in the history of Evangelicalism. This article considers the significance of the congress as an arena for the emergence of challenges from Latin America and Africa to the social and political conservatism that characterised much of the Evangelical movement in the northern hemisphere. These challenges demanded that Christian mission should be defined as a broader process than evangelism alone, and made their mark on the ‘Lausanne Covenant’, a document adopted by the congress which has had normative status among Evangelicals ever since.

This article explores the political significance of past Christian suffering at the dawn of the Augustan era through an analysis of correspondence containing accounts of hardships endured by conforming clergymen during the English civil wars and Interregnum. The politics of martyrdom to be derived from letters to John Walker was grounded on the correspondents' conviction that their epistles conveyed accounts of sequestered clergymen and their families who had suffered for their profession of Christian truth. The persecutions that loyal clergy had endured during the 1640s and 1650s were signs that the Church by law established, both then and now, was the true English Church. Furthermore, as documentary witnesses to oral testimonies which identified the genuine sufferers for Christian truth within recent memory, the epistles themselves aspired to be martyrological relics.

In Rome the Inquisition was not above that of other places, but applied it self only to that City, as others did in their Cities. The Pope indeed was superintendent and overseer of them all, maintaining nevertheless the agreements, immunities, and lawful Customs of every one, and so it continued until Paul the third, who did institute a Congregation of Cardinals in Rome, giving them the Title of Inquisitors General, who nevertheless do not command the Inquisition of Spain, which by agreement was first instituted: So likewise they ought not to take away the authority of this States Inquisition, also instituted by agreement some hundred years since. Which thing I have considered for to conclude, that it is not reasonable that Inquisition should take that which belongeth unto this.

There were tears of joy and rounds of applause among the prelates who closed the Council of the Church in Trent Cathedral in December 1563. The 226 signatories to the final decrees and the many other attendant theologians and canon lawyers who had served on sub-committees no doubt had mixed emotions at this conclusion: pride in what had been achieved; relief that the bitter arguments which had characterised many of the final sessions were now ended; thankfulness that, with whatever haste, they had finally agreed on a package of legislation for the sick pope to sign, in case his death would mean that the work was lost or had to be redone; hope and expectation – at least among the genuine reformers – that they could now go out into the world knowing what they had to defend against heretics, and that they had rules – whatever the omissions – to guide their reform of the Church and its members. The sick pope recovered; by June 1564 he had ratified the canons and decrees produced by the Council since its opening in December 1545 and ordered their printing and circulation to diocesan bishops for implementation.

Wesleyan Methodists in Victorian Britain are supposed to have been hampered by traditional methods of mission. From the 1850s onwards, however, they launched a strategy of appointing home missionary ministers. Although Wesleyans adopted no new theology, left structures unchanged and still relied on wealthy laymen, they developed fresh work in cities, employed paid lay agents, used women more and recruited children as fundraisers. Organised missions, temperance activity and military chaplaincies bolstered their impact. District Missionaries and Connexional Evangelists were appointed and, in opposition to ritualist clergy, Wesleyans increasingly saw themselves as Nonconformists. They experienced a quiet revolution in home mission.

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the social history of death, there has been little scholarly examination of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on perceptions of and discourses about hell. Scholars who have addressed the issue tend to conclude that Protestant and Catholic hells differed little from each other in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of printed English-language sources, and finds significant disparities on questions such as the location of hell and the nature of hell-fire. It argues that such divergences were polemically driven, but none the less contributed to the so-called ‘decline of hell’.

Certainly since the time of the Emperor Constantine there had been little doubt in the Christian world that Christ was crucified, buried and rose from the dead on the site later occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Eusebius described the discovery of the tomb beneath the site of the Roman temple to Venus and the construction of the church, dedicated in 335. Constantine's church underwent numerous changes and rebuilding, through invasions, occupations, earthquakes and the disastrous fire of 1808, which caused extensive damage. But at no time did anyone seriously dispute the convictions of the competing Christian factions – Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Georgians, Copts and Ethiopians – who had chapels, or at least a recognised foothold, within that sacred precinct. While earlier travel accounts, such as those of Willibald (AD 724) and John Mandeville (1322), had recognised that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was located well within the walls of Jerusalem, it was generally accepted that this was because the city had expanded and surrounded the site, and that new perimeter walls enclosed the place of the crucifixion and the tomb which according to the biblical texts had to lie ‘without’ the city walls.

The Virgin Mary was a powerful and evocative figure around whom the competing religious parties of Victorian Britain arrayed their forces. She was at the forefront of controversy whenever Scottish and English Protestants clashed with Irish Catholics, and whenever evangelicals attempted to purge the Church of England of ritualism. Roman Catholic leaders placed the cult of the Virgin at the centre of their campaign to evangelise Britain after 1840. This article analyses the development of Marian Catholicism in Victorian Britain, and considers Anglo-Catholic and Protestant responses to the growth of the Marian cult.

‘On my side are St. Benedict and the whole of antiquity’, wrote Rancé to Mabillon in February 1693, ‘and what is called study has only been instituted when discipline has been lax’. However one may sympathise with his great adversary, it can hardly be denied that, at least so far as the Cistercian order was concerned, Rancé was historically justified. The transmission of new ideas depended on freedom of movement and this was not compatible with the monastic vow of stability. It was this, rather than any ingrained conservatism, that made the monastic orders so slow to adapt themselves to the new learning of the cathedral schools and the rising universities. The Cistercians in particular were seemingly committed by their founders to being, Like St. Benedict, scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus. It was the vocation of Cîteaux to recall men to the primitive observance of the Rule in which the essential tasks of the monk were liturgical prayer and manual labour. There was to be no school in the cloister. The only instruction provided for in the early consuetudines was training in the chant. The making of books, save by permission of the general chapter, was expressly forbidden.

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.

Richard Baxter could never write for long without inserting some autobiographical reminiscence, some reference to his own experiences. The argument of his most serious works is relieved by such an illustration as ‘When I was young, I was wont to go up the Wrekin-Hill with great pleasure (being near my dwelling) and to look down on the country below me’; or ‘I cannot forget that in my youth…sometimes the morrice-dancers would come into the church in all their linen and scarfs, and antic-dresses, with morrice-bells jingling at their legs’; or ‘the case, as I remember, when I was a boy, our school was in, when we had barred out our master’; or ‘the raining of that grain about ten years ago in England…I tasted it, and kept some of it long, which fell on the leads of the church, and of the minister's house in Bridgnorth’; or ‘I never awaked since I had the use of memory, but I found myself coming out of a dream’. This autobiographic tendency Baxter himself might piously rationalise: ‘All these I mention as obliged to record the Mercies of my great Preserver to his Praise and Glory’; and ‘I find it convenient to remember what is past, and to insert the transcript of my own experiences, that I may fully try whether I have gone rationally and faithfully to work or not’. In fact, however, it is clear that he was fascinated by experience, and its strangeness, for its own sake; by life itself. In this, as in much else, he was a man of his age, which abounds in diaries, memoirs and autobiographies.