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.

There are four major interpretative themes in historical writing about nineteenth century English politics whose exposition has customarily involved a bald allusion to Gladstone's abolition of compulsory church rates in 1868. In reality the facts do not justify any of these familiar uses. What follows is intended not only to demonstrate that this is so by briefly describing ‘how it really happened’, but also to consider how it has come about that this legislation has been so often pressed into service in inappropriate contexts ever since it was passed, and to speculate a little upon this as part of the general problem of the delays and paradoxes in the development of historical writing on nineteenth-century England.

‘About that time [1567–8] there were many congregations of the Anabaptists in London, who called themselves Puritans or Unspotted Lambs of the Lord. They kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’.

This paper is an attempt to develop the clue handed down to us by John Stow to the location of an early—if not the earliest—thoroughgoing nonconformist congregation within the Elizabethan Church. Considering the length of time it has been in print, it is a clue strangely neglected by historians both of nonconformity and of London during this period.

The Appendices to the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, published in the great reforming era of the eighteen-thirties, provide rich fields for the exploration of fossil-hunters. There, enrolled and briefly described, are the Church courts of the country. Their practice had, by that time, shrunk considerably; but few, or none, of the old courts had disappeared entirely.

‘Out with history,’ Kierkegaard wrote in an 1848 journal entry, ‘in with the situation of contemporaneity’, he continued. ‘This is the criterion: as I judge anything contemporaneously, so am I judged. All this chatter afterwards is an illusion.’ In this entry, as in many others, Kierkegaard put forward his own concept of ‘contemporaneity’, while simultaneously levelling criticism both at the historicist impulse in nineteenth-century philosophy and theology and his contemporaries in Copenhagen. In numerous other entries he condemns his intellectual colleagues for envying his genius, failing to respect his worth and for subjecting him to endless abuse.

The French Church on the eve of the Reformation presents a varied and complex spectacle. Since the end of the Hundred Years War the number of clergy had grown significantly, much of the material damage caused by the war had been made good, and an army of administrators had placed the Church on what seemed to be a healthy financial base. In the diocese of Rouen under Guillaume d'Estouteville (1453–83) the archbishop's annual revenues rose from about 4,000 to about 10,000 livres; the Church was served by an excellent administration; and an abundance of priests ensured that there were few or no empty benefices. Yet neither a more numerous clergy nor sound finances could guarantee a religious revival or an active faith. The Church's aim never went beyond an attempt to turn the clock back, and it did not adapt to the expanding economy of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Ecclesiastical institutions failed to invest in anything other than land and, to a lesser extent, urban property, and too much capital was immobilised in land and ‘treasure’, while the expanding commercial sectors of the upper-Norman economy went ignored. Similarly, corruption, abuses and apathy existed alongside the first glimmerings of new attitudes, and without a lead from the top the forces of regeneration would be blocked by traditional attitudes and styles of administration, and the combined effects of the rise of Protestantism and the raging inflation of the sixteenth century could be temporarily disastrous.

As a historian and man of learning, William of Malmesbury has over the last century drawn the most diverse reactions from those scholars whose work has brought them into contact with him. On the one hand, praise has been lavished on his wide reading, critical acumen and historical judgement; on the odier, his credulity, carelessness, wilful mishandling of evidence and meandering irrelevance have been stigmatised. One group of scholars sees him as head and shoulders above, and in advance of his time, a ‘modern’ writer; others see him as the creature of his epoch and immediate environment in a pejorative sense. Yet it would surely be true to say that no-one since or apart from William Stubbs has attained such a command of William's output as to be in a position to make an overall assessment of it. Even Stubbs did not claim to be attempting this and, in any case, he was unacquainted with several of William's works, and misattributed others.

Within the league table of thirteenth-century English bishops, Master Alexander ‘de Stavensby’ has generally been considered no more than a second division player. The standard biographies do their best to credit him with a network of associations that includes such luminaries as St Dominic and Stephen Langton, but the evidence is uncertain, or at least has never been probed sufficiently deeply to achieve certainty. Master Alexander remains a shadowy figure; a scholar of strange dreams and visions; a rootless cosmopolitan whose family and even whose birthplace remain unknown. Yet it is possible to trace his earlier career with greater precision. His origins and his close association with Stephen Langton and the early friars can be traced more exactly, and once established they help to illuminate his achievements as bishop.

One of the most interesting of the various groups of Orthodox Christians that constituted the Rum Milleti within the Ottoman Empire were the Karamanli Christians of Asia Minor. These Karamanli Christians, or Karamanlides, were a substantial body of Christians Orthodox in religion but Turkish in speech. During the Ottoman period they were largely concentrated in the interior of Asia Minor, although they were also to be found in the Crimea and on the shores of the Sea of Azov. The question of their origin is a matter of controversy and is likely to remain so. Greek scholars incline to the view that the Karamanlides were of Greek descent and adopted Turkish as their vernacular, either by force or as a result of their isolation from the Greek speaking Orthodox Christians of the coastal regions. Turkish scholars regard them as the descendants of Turks who had migrated to Byzantine territories before the conquest or had served as mercenaries in the Byzantine armies and who had adopted the religion but not the language of their new rulers.

The search for royal councillors was one of the major difficulties which Henry V had to face once he had achieved the conquest of Normandy. Many local royal officials, having taken the oath of loyalty to the king, were confirmed in their posts; others were brought over from England—a system which proved satisfactory at first. But the finding of personnel for the higher offices presented Henry with a serious problem. Since he was unwilling to trust the native French at so early a stage he could, and did, begin by seeking the counsel of his fellow-countrymen. But this method could not continue indefinitely, since it did not correspond with the intentions lying behind the conquest, planned to be lasting and permanent. However, the alliance with Charles VI, cemented in 1420 by the Treaty of Troyes, meant that the English could now call upon a number of Frenchmen, many of Burgundian origin or sympathy, to serve in the royal council. It was soon realised, too, that the university of Paris was an admirable seed-ground for future royal councillors, especially lawyers, of whom there was need. By the end of Henry V's reign, a number of these graduates were already employed by the English: under the regency of the duke of Bedford they soon achieved a numerical superiority in the royal council in France. From now on, the English dominions were to be ruled by men of these two groups.

The first Bible to be printed in England was produced in 1535 by the royal printer, and with Henry VIII's initial support. It has attracted little scholarly attention. This first extensive examination traces its creation and early reception as witness to the uncertain course of the English Reformation. Its origins reveal a dependency on continental models, which were then modified to create a book carefully placed between conservatism and reform. Priests, scholars, children and crooks left their marks on the Bible, and advanced digital technology exposes unique evidence for the merging of Latin and English in late Henrician liturgy.

The bishops of Liège became concerned with Christianisation throughout the whole diocese in the Carolingian period. This study examines the concrete measures that they took. The field chosen is the Ardennes region in the south of the diocese, where they reorganised the abbey of St-Hubert as a religious centre. The bishops reformed the community and offered it economic support. They also encouraged the cult of St Hubert and introduced the new custom of annual processions. This approach throws light on the pastoral situation in a way that their episcopal capitularies cannot.

John Foxe and the English Reformation. Edited by David Loades. Pp. xii+340 incl. 54 figs. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997

This volume, a collection of papers presented at a colloquium held in Cambridge in 1995 on John Foxe and his seminal work, the Acts and monuments (popularly known as Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’), has the chief virtue of any good collection of conference papers: it presents a range of diverse topics approached from a variety of disciplines and methodologies by a number of respected scholars. This volume also succeeds in avoiding one of the paramount shortcomings of such collections, a lack of focus and common themes. In fact, Loades's book is so tightly focused that its title is slightly misleading inasmuch as the articles in it tend to ignore Foxe's life and career (indeed several of the contributors write about periods, decades or even centuries after Foxe's death), while only one article in it discusses any of the other works, apart from his martyrology, that Foxe wrote. Instead the contributions to this collection largely address three topics: the composition or manufacture of the Acts and monuments, the influence of continental writers and craftsmen on the book and, finally, its influence on Foxe's contemporaries or on subsequent generations. As such this is the most important book on the Acts and monuments, that most important of books, since William Haller's influential study was published over three decades ago.

Lord Acton believed that there was a dichotomy in English history between the life expressed in the Church and the principle of nationality. It is evident from a study of the writings of John Wyclif (c. 1320–84) that at least one medieval English theologian asserted that a principle of English nationality was fused into the life of the English Church. Regardless of how the next fifty years of scholarship may judge the connexion in medieval Christianity between national traditions and the universal Church, the English aspect of it is important at present. Wyclif provided the original impetus to the Lollard movement. Increasing scholarly attention has been given to Lollardy and its possible influence on the English Reformation. It now seems important to survey systematically the texts of Wyclif's treatises themselves for what light they may shed on the relationship between ecclesiastical and temporal history in the English tradition.

This article assesses how Lutheran and other Reformation doctrines spread and were countered in the Portuguese seaborne empire. Portugal's inquisitorial and episcopal repression of ‘Lutherans’ was extended to Brazil and Asia, where it was supported by the Society of Jesus. The Portuguese empire's transcontinental connections favoured the emergence of interconnected histories, facilitating the circulation of books, engravings and beliefs and thus provided non-Portuguese people with links to the reformed world that spread amongst and disturbed the Portuguese living in India and Portuguese America. By opening up routes the Portuguese, paradoxically, functioned as vectors for other ways of interpreting Christianity.