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.

It is perhaps the most fitting comment on a Christian scholar to note that, whereas his work has been of importance to the Church down the years, the details of his life have passed into obscurity. This remark is particularly appropriate in looking at the figure of Zacharius Ursinus, the main author of the Heidelberg Catechism and one of the founding fathers of the German reformed tradition. Most previous analysis has been focused on his growing sympathy with the teaching of Calvin in the period prior to his open adoption of the reformed cause following the death of Melanchthon. The effort to explain the background to the break-up of the Philippist party in the 1560s has yet deflected attention from a proper consideration of Ursinus' own views. Even the most recent account by Derk Visser, where some new insights have been provided on the basis of the published correspondence, is mostly concerned with this problem of his early development. Yet any serious attempt to place his writing in its historical context must concentrate on the situation in Heidelberg, which was the setting for the bulk of his work both as a reformer and pedagogue. In seeking to fill this gap, it is the purpose of the present paper to rediscover something of the man's character and the nature of his religious conviction, rather than to take up the now established debate about the relation of his theology to that of the other leading reformers. Such a study should furnish a useful basis for a more balanced assessment of his own contribution to the broader history of the Church.

The reaction of the Orthodox Church to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) arguably set a pattern that would persist until the end of Byzantium. While members of the hierarchy were mostly opposed to accepting invitations to attend the council, the Emperor Theodore i Laskaris saw it as an opportunity to open up a dialogue with the papacy in the hope of deriving some political advantage. This episode reveals that negotiations over the Union of Churches divided Byzantine society in a way that had not happened before 1204.

This essay examines the political and religious impetus behind Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis's recognition of Anglican orders in 1922. The furore surrounding recognition, the events that led up to it and the fall-out that followed shed light on the many difficulties faced by religious leaders in the post-war Orthodox world, difficulties that led to fierce jockeying among Orthodox clerics as they tried to establish themselves in relation to their coreligionists and to the larger Christian world. The controversy also offers insight into the problems inherent when a ‘comprehensive’ Church such as the Church of England enters into discussions with a more uniformly dogmatic confession such as Orthodoxy.

During a period of almost forty years, major Protestant denominations in Canada consolidated their scattered and individual Chinese mission activities into centralised institutions. However, the missions did not gain significant success in the mission field. Church leaders and missionaries often attributed this to a chronic lack of financial and human resources. But the real reason was the anti-Chinese sentiment that always cast a shadow over the missions. The rise of nationalism in the Chinese community at the turn of the twentieth century also had a negative effect on the mission.

This paper is focused on Elizabeth's Reformation in the Irish Pale around Dublin, the key religious battleground in Tudor Ireland. It highlights the strength of opposition to Elizabeth's religious settlement from the start of her reign. It shows in stark terms that Ireland experienced a Reformation virtually without reformers, and suggests that that was a major reason for its failure. The contrasting experiences of England and the Pale suggest, in turn, that revisionist historians have underestimated the progress of Protestantism in England before Elizabeth's reign.

Few biblical episodes have generated more theological interpretation across the centuries than that of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he appears fearfully to resist the divine will in the moments before the passion sequence is initiated. Scholars of the early modern period, however, have tended not to notice how central the scene became in the wake of Protestant and Catholic reformation developments, renewed calls for spiritual self-examination and the resurgent phenomenon of martyrdom. This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that, in the case of England, Jesus in Gethsemane not only held acute resonances across different confessions, but resulted in interpretations that perpetuated a new kind of subjectivity, and one that influenced modernity and its notions of the divided self in a state of faith and doubt.

Alexander Crummell's application to enter the General Theological Seminary in 1839 was problematic for the Episcopal Church. Admitting the African American abolitionist would have exacerbated divisions over slavery within a denomination still recovering from the American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. The Church's increasing financial dependence on its upper-class members was a further complication. In Northern states the social elite supported anti-abolitionist violence, whilst in the South support for the Church came predominantly from slaveholders, who opposed any form of abolitionism. In order to safeguard the Episcopal Church's future, the denomination had to reject Crummell's application.

Highlighting some of the tensions within Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania after the Council of Trent, this article offers a corrective to the traditional Jesuit-centred paradigm of Catholic renewal. While long held to be central to the successes of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits were opposed by large sections of the Catholic nobility, a paradox that has never been adequately explained. By exploring the conflicts between the Jesuits and the more established Dominican order, the phenomenon of Catholic anticlericalism can be understood as part of a wider dissonance in Catholic culture, and integral to the accommodation of noble and Catholic culture after Trent.

The Welsh religious revival of 1904–5 was a remarkable event which has evoked a number of contradictory responses. These were in some ways fuelled by the content of a folk memory which often appears to be divorced from the events of the revival itself. As a result, ambiguity has surrounded the revival and particularly the contribution of Evan Roberts, probably its most interesting and colourful leader. This article explores some aspects of that folk memory and seeks to ‘demythologise’ them by drawing on accounts of the revival meetings published by those who were involved at the time.

Parish priests in late eighteenth-century Malta often grumbled about their poverty, but their excuses were generally self-serving and related to the financial demands of their bishop; like incumbents in mainland Europe, they were not in a bad financial situation. Their relative affluence was a result of revenues such as tithes, mass legacies and surplice fees. In small communities this income may have been tiny, but parish priests were not entirely dependent on parochial revenues, since they were generally drawn from middle-rank families and might possess personal wealth in addition.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, most European nations experienced a period of state-sponsored anti-Catholic legislation that has come to be known by the German term Kulturkampf. The question that this article seeks to address is whether or not the United Kingdom, and specifically Ireland, can be said to have experienced such a phenomenon. By examining the case of Robert O'Keeffe, a Roman Catholic parish priest who sued the cardinal archbishop of Dublin in the civil courts, it is possible to determine both whether Britain experienced a Kulturkampf, and to offer some suggestions as to why the United Kingdom appears to have been different in this regard from its European neighbours.

This paper examines Joseph Edkins's failed attempt to correct the theology of Hong Xiuquan during his trip to Nanjing in March and April 1861. Through his debates with individual rebels and his written exchange with Hong, Edkins learned that the Taipings were unwilling to accept ‘orthodox’ teachings and scriptural interpretations that conflicted with their established belief system. Challenging exclusionary and pathologising discourses, the paper shows that Hong's response to Edkins's efforts was rooted not in his ‘irrational’ modes of thinking, but in his desire to preserve both his revelation-based worldview and the personal authority that it legitimised.

The ‘Gregorian Reform’ or ‘Gregorian Revolution’ is a model of top–down ecclesiastical change that assumes that local bishops suddenly became, to some extent, agents of Rome. One striking illustration of this is the portrayal of the ‘new Gregorian bishop’, based largely on Berardus of Marsica (d. 1130), presented by Pierre Toubert in his classic Structures du Latium médiéval (1973), and now reprised by Jacques Dalarun (2003). This article, employing an unedited collection of miracles, re-examines Toubert's treatment of Berardus and reveals a reforming saint who belongs less to Rome and more to his idiosyncratic cathedral of Santa Sabina.

There are a number of excellent studies on the Protestant Churches in the Third Reich, but none contains a thorough treatment of the smaller Free Churches. Ernst Christian Helmreich included a short chapter on these in his 1979 work on The German Churches under Hitler: background, struggle and epilogue. The recent publication of a work by Andrea Strübind on the German Baptist Churches, Die unfreie Freikirche: der Bund der Baptistengemeinden im Dritten Reich (1995), and by Herbert Strahm on the Episcopal Methodist Church, Die Bischöfliche Methodistenkirche im Dritten Reich (1989), should encourage research on a topic that has been badly neglected in the past.

This article seeks to shed light on the relationship of German evangelicalism as embodied in the Free Churches to the mainline provincial churches as well as to the regime of National Socialism. It will show that evangelicals were actually far less united than is generally perceived to be the case.

In 1846 a new, greatly expanded, edition of Sir Henry Spelman's History and fate of Sacrilege (1643, published in 1698) appeared, edited anonymously by ‘two priests of the Church of England’. These priests were John Mason Neale and his friend and apparent assistant Joesph Haskoll. The monograph-length introductory essay and other editorial contributions show, as well as vast learning, an aspect of Neale's multi-faceted achievement hitherto unnoticed, that of a stringent critic of great families and other lay people who possessed former church property (Spelman's definition of ‘Sacrilege’) and, more widely, of political and economic conditions in mid nineteenth-century England.

The latest monograph on the religious settlement of the Restoration calls attention to the untrustworthiness of Clarendon's account of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 while adopting the customary view, based on Clarendon's Life, that the Lord Chancellor ‘took a leading part in the Parliamentary attack upon the Indulgence’ in February 1663. With only one known exception, historians have relied heavily, and in most cases completely, on either Clarendon or T. H. Lister in ascribing to Clarendon a rôle of complete opposition to the Declaration of Indulgence of 1662 and the motives behind it, and the single exception, W. D. Christie, made only cautious references to some inaccuracies in the Life. Writers have erred in adopting Clarendon's narration of the Declaration and its background, and consequently have misinterpreted his basic policy and his interpretation of the English constitution. Careful study of new material and a re-examination of Clarendon's Life reveal that Clarendon consistently supported comprehension and toleration and that he was not responsible for the failure of the Declaration of Indulgence. It is even possible that the section of the Life so frequently cited in connexion with the Declaration does not even apply to that subject.

Before the early nineteenth century pew-renting was comparatively rare in Anglican churches, and where it existed the practice was generally administered as a less serious means of fund-raising. But just before 1800 or so, methods of administering the letting of sittings became more businesslike and impersonal. The frequency of pew-renting grew exponentially with the advent of the Church Building Acts beginning in 1818, but the profits realised were usually less than is assumed. The often offensive and sometimes dishonest administration of pew-rent schemes, when later combined with waning churchgoing and a consequent surfeit of rentable sittings, marked the system's decline.

This paper argues that the earliest church at Beodericisworth, the later Bury St Edmunds, was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Probably in the reign of Athelstan, the (supposed) body of St Edmund, king and martyr, was translated into this church. The cult of St Edmund burgeoned and before the end of the eleventh century St Edmund's shrine had become one of England's foremost pilgrim centres and attracted the wealth which helped pay for the great Romanesque church built to house it. Nevertheless, a wide variety of sources, both written and visual, demonstrate that the cult of St Mary retained much vitality, becoming the pre-eminent secondary cult in Bury St Edmunds, one especially fostered by Abbot Anselm (1121–48). Finally, similar examples are cited of other churches where dedications to saints like St Mary, who enjoyed widespread veneration, were replaced by those of saints of more local fame but whose (supposed) bodies those churches possessed.