By far the greatest proportion of the time and energy that is expended on the study of church history is devoted to the areas where the Church has, for practical purposes, died out, or where it is demonstrably declining. The history of that more considerable part of the Christian world which is still expanding, is the preserve of a tiny minority of specialists.

The East India Company's accession to political and administrative responsibility in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was greatly complicated by the simultaneous development of the evangelical movement in England with its missionary agents overseas. India was one of the first areas of British expansion to feel the pressure of evangelical influence upon the conduct of its government. South Africa was to take its turn soon afterwards, and in both cases the younger Charles Grant played an important part, through his tenure of the offices of President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary.

In July 1824 two new bishoprics were organised in the West Indies, the bishopric of Jamaica including Honduras and the bishopric of Barbados and the Leeward and Windward islands, to promote the activity of the Anglican Church among the slave population. A series of resolutions passed in the House of Commons in May 1823 committed the government to reforms intended to prepare the slaves for eventual freedom, and primary importance was given to their need for religious instruction. Knowledge of Christianity was regarded as an ‘indispensable necessity to…the foundation of every beneficial change in their character and future condition’. Most of the reform programme, which included the abolition of flogging for women, the admission of slave evidence in court and the improvement of manumission facilities, involved revision of existing slave codes and implementation, therefore, depended, outside the crown colonies, on the cooperation of the island assemblies. The imperial government, however, was free to promote religious instruction and chose to appoint the bishops. Under their supervision the Anglican Church in the West Indies was to become a missionary force. As the Secretary of State explained to the governor of Jamaica, ‘his Majesty's Government have been anxious to prove the deep interest which they feel in the encouragement of the religious and moral instruction of the Negroes, by at once taking upon themselves the whole charge of placing the Clergy of the West Indies under Episcopal control’. Funds were voted to pay the bishop of Jamaica £5,600 p.a. and salaries were also provided for six auxiliary curates and an archdeacon to help to supervise the clergy.

In a very real sense the case of Richard Hunne is far from over. Ever since Hunne was found dead in his cell on the morning of Monday 4 Decembern 1514 – hanging from a staple by his own girdle – the issue of why he died and who was responsible has been the object of furious controversy among polemicists and historians alike. Many explanations have been put forward – some convincing, others merely ingenious – and all, in one sense or another, plausible. An equally interesting facet is the controversy that surrounds the account of the case. It is to this often neglected aspect of the affair – in particular in relation to The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe – that this paper is principally directed. ‘The Story of Richard Hun’ ofers the student of Foxe remarkable scope for exploration. Here we see Foxe not only as archivist – but for his zeal various documents, such as the transcripts of Hunne's interrogation and trial for heresy, would almost certainly not have survived – but also as a commentator in his own right. Over a third of the martyrologist's account – an unprecedented amount incidentally, in Foxe's treatment of the Henrician period – was devoted to developing his own line of thought while, at the same time, he attempted to work out for himself and his reader the peculiar inconsistencies that governed the course of Hunne's life and death. The question then arises, how reliable is Foxe on Richard Hunne. Did he faithfully report the facts of the case or are there signs that he might have been biased? Clearly the first consideration when answering this question must be to ascertain the exact circumstances of Hunne's interrogation and trial and the events leading up to his death: what happened to Richard Hunne in the Lollard's Tower and why?

The year 1808 does not feature with any greater prominence in the history of Catholic relief legislation than it does generally in Irish history. It was an uneventful year for Anglo-Irish relations, and for the Irish Catholic community in particular it was – on the surface at least – a period of embarrassment, division and failure. The veto controversy, which dominated Catholic politics in 1808, was productive of mutual misunderstanding and was to cast a shadow over the later proceedings of Catholic interest groups. But the significance of the dispute, hidden even to the protagonists, lay in the very breadth and depth of the misunderstanding. With the veto controversy began the gradual loss of confidence in the traditional champions of Catholic relief, the equally gradual transfer of the initiative to new champions and, all unseen, the first faint crack in the union of Britain and Ireland. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the causes and course of an incident which was fraught with such long-term serious consequences.

The public controversy over ritualism in the Church of England reached its peak in the 1870s, with the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act and the attempts, eventually abandoned through use of the episcopal veto, to prosecute ritualist clergy for the use of technically illegal ceremonial ornaments or vestments. One other related subject that caused a similar degree of controversy at the time, though it has been less well remembered since, was the emphasis within ritualist circles on auricular or sacramental confession. The subject of auricular confession, made privately to a priest, was one of the most explosive religious issues, both morally and theologically, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From 1378 to 1418, the Roman Church was faced with a situation hitherto unprecedented. For the first time in its history, it experienced a schism for which its constitution, as accepted in 1378, could provide no solution: there were two popes, both of whom could claim to have been legally elected. The dissident cardinals who rebelled against Urban vi in July 1378, only three months after they had elected him pope, discovered some legal (although admittedly rather spurious) grounds for denouncing the election and declaring the papacy vacant; a step followed in September by the election of the cardinal Robert of Geneva as rival pope, taking the name of Clement VII.

There are several reasons why the study of the works of Sidonius Apollinaris should be of particular interest to ecclesiastical historians. He represents in a peculiar way the end of the old régime, under which Christianity had taken root and had begun to spread, and the beginning of the new period which we call the Middle Ages. He was a devoted admirer of the Roman imperial system, a devotee of the Muses of Roman poetry and prose, but also, in the second part of his life, a bishop of the Christian Church. He was born about 430, when the emperor Valentinian III, who could be reasonably represented as the scion of a legitimate dynasty, was apparently in secure possession of the imperial throne. He died about 480, bishop of a see in a barbarian kingdom, a few years after the last Roman puppet-emperor had been dethroned. He has left us not only poems and panegyrics but also letters dealing, among other things, with the day-to-day problems of his see. His contribution to our knowledge of the Gallic Church of the mid-fifth-century—a dark period by any standard of measurement—must be of great value, and perhaps a fresh survey of certain aspects of it may not be unfruitful.

That the priests of the Anglo-Saxon royal household functioned as a primitive chancery is a popular and reasonable hypothesis, corroborated both by contemporary continental practice and by the overlap between chancery and chapel evident from the twelfth century to the fourteenth. Evidence for an Anglo-Saxon chancellorship as such, however, remains frustratingly elusive. This paper argues for the existence of a special tier of priests entrusted with the king's reliquary and archive. It examines their role in the royal household, resolving conflicts in the evidence, to argue that the later office of chancellor evolved from their office.

The essay argues that a text first printed in English in 1651 must date from about 1610, and that it preserves a first-hand account of previously unsuspected theological discussions, arranged by Archbishop Whitgift in late 1595, that eventuated in the Lambeth Articles. The doctrinal positions advanced in these discussions – and in the several written responses to the Articles that Whitgift also solicited – clarify the archbishop's handling of this early predestinarian controversy but also complicate in fundamental ways the received picture of the late Elizabethan doctrinal landscape.

In autumn 1944, the British Ministry of Information sent one of its officials, the Revd Herbert M. Waddams, to Sweden and Finland. His task was to collect information about opinions in church circles in both countries and to try to persuade them to a more favourable attitude towards the Allies, especially the Soviet Union. Sweden had remained neutral throughout the war and Finland had just made peace with the Allies. Waddams's memoranda on the trip reveal how the assessment of the international situation by a representative of a British government ministry differed from that of churchmen in Sweden and Finland.

The Isle of Man was a distinct diocese before it became a possession of the English crown in 1399. In the following centuries it retained not only a national legislature, the Tynwald, but the lord bishop of Sodor and Man. Ecclesiastical officers were to be found in Tynwald as early as 1614, and throughout the nineteenth century it included the lord bishop, the vicars-general and the archdeacon of the diocese. During the twentieth century the number of ecclesiastical officers in the legislature dwindled, until today only the lord bishop survives, and his position remains controversial.

Describing the general condition of the Latin Church in Outremer in the 1220s, Jacques de Vitry enumerated, as examples of those who had chosen the religious life, the hermits of Mt Carmel:

Others, following the example and imitation of the holy solitary Elijah the Prophet, live on Mt Carmel, especially on the part which overlooks the city of Porphyria, which today is called Cayphas [Haifa], near the spring which is called the spring of Elijah, and not far from the monastery of the Blessed Virgin Margaret. They lead a solitary life in small cells as in a hive; like the bees of the Lord they gather the honey of spiritual sweetness.

Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532), cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church during the High Renaissance, was not merely a scholar influenced by the humanism and renewed Platonism of his day but a phil-Hellene according to various associations of Hellenism ranging from literary to political, ancient to modern. He embraced Hellenism in its many senses despite his belonging to the generation born after the fall of Constantinople. This is significant, for although Giles's interest in ancient Greek language and letters is generally acknowledged, insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to Giles's inclusive interest in Byzantine Hellenism and Orthodox Christian doctrine.

This article discusses Martin Luther's appropriation of the tradition of bridal-mysticism, and contrasts it with that of Bernard of Clairvaux. According to Bernard, through the power of divine grace, the human person and God both come to find each other objects of mutual desire. By contrast, Luther, in Freedom of a Christian (1520), uses the bridal motif to describe the divine-human relationship as one of promise and trust. In this, the Reformer both appropriates and significantly reinterprets the bridal-mystical motif in accordance with the claims of his newly-minted Reformation theology of justification through faith.

The article presents and discusses the text of a little-known pallium grant of Pope Nicholas II for Archbishop Ealdred of York. Through comparison with other contemporaneous products of the papal chancery and the contents of other sources narrating the events reported in Nicholas's text, the study concludes that the papal privilege is substantially authentic. An edition, superseding a previous, late nineteenth-century one, which was based on just one of the two York manuscripts that preserve the papal privilege, is provided in the Appendix, together with a modern English translation.

Repeatedly in the course of the later Middle Ages latent resentment against the clergy, its privileges and behaviour exploded in outbursts of hatred and violence in the German cities. Late medieval Magdeburg saw some of the ugliest manifestations of this kind. In 1325 its citizens murdered their archbishop. In 1402 they surged looting and burning through the ecclesiastical quarter of the city, threatening violence to the clergy. Magdeburg was no isolated case. The bishop, chapter and clergy of Worms informed the council of Frankfurt in the Spring of 1386 how the citizens of Worms had beaten and thrown in prison priests and prelates, set fire to chapels, monasteries and churches and stolen religious items of great value. During the heyday of the Leagues of the Rhenish and Swabian Cities in the 1380s the laity in Basle, Cologne, Worms, Speyer and Mainz, no longer fearing the clergy's powerful friends, vented their pent-up hatreds. As the clerical author of the Chronicon Moguntinum explained they took revenge on the clergy ‘and thus they persecuted them more than the Jews, not caring for the princes of the land, but following their own volitions’. Time and again tempers flared and ecclesiastical property was burned, ecclesiastics were beaten or faced with a choice between self-imposed exile and abridgement of their privileges.