The Society of Free Catholics was founded in 1914 by a small group of Unitarian ministers, who, inspired by Richard Baxter, James Martineau, F. D. Maurice and the Catholic Modernists, sought to combine historic Catholic sacramental and devotional practice with theological freedom, and to unite all Christians in a Free Christian Church. The members included Anglicans, Nonconformists and a few Roman Catholics. The two main leaders of the society were J. M. Lloyd Thomas of the old Meeting, Birmingham, and W. E. Orchard of the King's Weigh House, London. Their chief legacy was a series of prayer books for public worship.

Most Scots have heard of the National Covenant subscribed in Edinburgh around the end of February 1638. Few, by contrast, know anything about the five acts or articles (requiring the observation of holy days, episcopal confirmation of the laity, kneeling in the act of receiving the eucharist, and permitting the celebration of both communion and baptism in private) passed by a general assembly of the Church at Perth twenty years earlier. Yet those who took time to read the Covenant through would find that its signatories were, among other things, renewing a fifty-year-old pledge to resist all ‘vain allegories, ritis, signes, and traditions brought in the Kirk, without or againis the Word of God and doctrine of this trew reformed Kirk’, and were agreeing more immediately to refrain from the ‘practice of all novations, already introduced in the matters of the worship of God’ until they could be ‘tryed & allowed in free assemblies, and in Parliaments’. Those who examined the aftermath of the Covenant would also learn that it was one of the first acts of the general assembly convened at Glasgow later in 1638 to abjure the Perth Articles. If the National Covenant remains a crucial component of Scottish national consciousness, few Scots, for all the talk of Laud's Liturgy and Jennie Geddes, have much awareness of the debate about church ceremonies that helped to form the context in which the Covenant was produced.

This article examines a previously unnoticed link between the Puritan John Burgess and the Calvinist conformist George Hakewill. In 1604 Burgess preached a court sermon so outspoken and critical of James i's religious policy that he was imprisoned. Nearly twenty years later, however, Hakewill chose to incorporate extended passages from Burgess's sermon into the series of sermons, King David's vow (1621), preached to Prince Charles's household. This article considers why Burgess's sermon became so resonant for Hakewill in the early 1620s and also demonstrates how Hakewill deliberately sought to moderate Burgess's strident polemic. In so doing the article provides important new evidence for the politically attuned sermon culture at Prince Charles's court in the early 1620s and also suggests how, as the parameters for clerical conformity shifted in the latter years of James's reign, Calvinist conformists found a new appeal in the works of moderate Puritans.

Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9 owes its fame to the fact that it has traditionally been associated with the first appearance in Anglican theology of the jure divino theory of episcopacy. So far as I have been able to discover, this tradition appears to derive its origin from the account of the Sermon given by John Strype in the eighteenth century, although the germ of the idea is considerably older, since it can be traced back to the attacks made at the time by Bancroft's puritan opponents, most notably Sir Francis Knollys, who accused him, along with archbishop Whitgift and others, of seeking to undermine the Royal Supremacy by preaching that bishops owed their ‘superiority’ over the lower clergy to God rather than to the queen. Until the eighteenth century, however, this interpretation of Bancroft's teaching is only to be found in puritan writers. Seventeenth-century Anglican church historians in general do not appear to have attached any doctrinal significance to the Sermon. Peter Heylyn, for example, in his Aërius Redivivus (1670) refers to it as ‘a most excellent and judicious Sermon’ and proceeds to give a lengthy summary of its contents without at any point suggesting that Bancroft was putting forward a novel theory of episcopacy, while Thomas Fuller makes no reference to it at all either in his Church History of Britain (1655) or in his account of Bancroft in The Worthies of England (1662). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sermon enjoyed a modest vogue among the Non-Jurors, who admired it for its vigorous defence of the Church of England against the attacks of the puritans; but neither Henry Gandy, who reprinted it at the instigation of Dr. George Hickes in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1709), nor Jeremy Collier, who discussed it at considerable length in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1709-14), drew any explicit connexion between the Sermon and the emergence of the jure divino theory of episcopacy.

There is a large and complex literature regarding the part played by working-class Nonconformity in the industrial revolution and the emergence of the English labour movement. For all its nuances, this writing can be separated into two main strands. The first, broadly Marxist, perspective sees working-class Nonconformity primarily as a form of capitalist control, inculcating bourgeois norms of hard work, thrift, respectability and political moderation into the working class. However, even labour historians who subscribe to this view cannot help but be struck by the ubiquitous accounts of lay preachers at the forefront of Victorian labour movement campaigns, especially in the coalfields. Thus, the second view stresses the part played by working-class Nonconformists in leading their class towards political and industrial emancipation. To a considerable extent, the stance taken, particularly on Methodism, depends on whether writers draw their evidence from national, usually middle-class, denominational hierarchies, or from local accounts of working-class religiosity.

Liturgy, it has often been said, implies doctrine. Nowhere is this more patently clear than in the rubric before the second Exhortation ‘in case he [the Minister] shall see the people negligent to come to the Holy Communion’ in the Prayer Book of 1662. In view of the fact that ‘An Order for Holy Communion’ contained in the Report of the Liturgical Commission, April 1966, has departed from the valuable precedent of 1662, it may not be without contemporary value that we enquire into the origin, purpose and structure of this second Exhortation.

Andrew Holes, a canon lawyer working in the papal court, was one of the few foreigners really admired by Vespasiano da Bisticci. Roberto Weiss directed attention to him, but in 1944 Josephine Bennett for the first time thoroughly discussed his career, trying also to discover the titles of some of the books he bought in Florence. These were said by Vespasiano to be so numerous that he had to have them specially shipped home. In 1944 only about three were discoverable. Nor, of course, during the war was Bennett able to examine the sermon (known only in a Vienna manuscript) that Holes delivered at the English Hospice probably on Tuesday 7 July, 1433 for the Feast of the Translation of Thomas Becket, which would have been one way to investigate his attitudes. Weiss had examined the sermon and Bennett knew of it from him. However, to someone such as Weiss, primarily interested in the Renaissance viewed narrowly as the revival of the pagan classics, there was nothing in it of importance.

Much attention has been paid to the role and functions of the mendicant orders in their urban environment. Among the topics discussed have been the friars' importance for urban development, their coexistence with other religious institutions, their economic practices and their relations with the secular authorities. As far as their spiritual and social significance is concerned their spectacular success and rapid development in the thirteenth century are generally accepted. There were some setbacks, particularly in towns where the Dominicans or Franciscans became involved in the suppression of heresy, but these had little impact on the rapid expansion of the orders. Members from all social groups, academics as well as aristocrats, merchants and artisans as well as the poor, felt the attraction of their sermons and way of life, some to such an extent that they decided to join one of the orders. But while the attraction of the mendicant ideal in the decades following the friars' arrival is undisputed, the problem of their importance for the religious life of the late medieval urban population is far more difficult to discuss. While there are assertions that the friars remained particularly popular, the orders' decline and their need of reform were already obvious in the fourteenth century and the various efforts to bring about a reinvigoration confirm this impression. In the fifteenth century famous mendicant preachers from Vincent Ferrer and Bernardino of Siena to Girolamo Savonarola attracted large crowds in many parts of Europe, but was this indicative of the population's general attitude towards the orders? Were the mendicants still perceived by the people as responding to their spiritual needs? How did the public react to signs of decadence, to disputes among the brothers? A general answer to such questions needs to be based on a large number of local studies and this is still a task for the future.

It is well known that, during the nineteenth century in England, there was widespread criticism of the traditional professions. Their members, it was alleged, formed an excessively privileged group owing their position more to patronage than to personal merit or competence. It is equally well known that patronage was believed to be particularly rampant in the nineteenth-century Church of England. (The novels of Trollope have ensured this.) It has been suggested, all the same, that of all institutions providing professional services to the nineteenth-century public, the Church of England escaped the reforming spirit of the age most completely. I hope in the course of my argument here to illustrate that this was not so and to show that problems which beset other professional men during the century affected the clergy of the Church of England also. I hope to demonstrate that doubts about the appropriateness of patronage as a device for recruiting and promoting parish clergy were, at times, widespread among the clergy themselves, among practising members of the Church of England and among the general public. Indeed, it becomes clear that, at certain crises, Church patronage (and especially patronage in the hands of private individuals) was subject to vigorous attack. It also becomes clear that, by the end of the century, the experiences and arguments of the preceding years were having their effect—that shifts in attitudes towards patronage were taking place and being translated into practice either directly by legislation or more subtly by social convention.

The history of Anglican temperance movements before the First World War reveals working-class influences on English vicarages (not yet recognised by historians) and a corresponding influence of the lower clergy on the Anglican establishment. A study of Anglican initiatives against drink may help provide missing links between the Biblethumping evangelicalism of wine-drinking William Wilberforce's time and the social gospel era of his grandsons, the clerical teetotallers, Basil and Ernest. After 1855, a significant minority of Anglican clergymen, obsessed with the estrangement of the lower orders from organised religion, accepted teetotalism, often at the urging of labourers. In so doing, they reversed somewhat the proposition enshrined in the evangelical tradition that true moral reform depended on the leadership of the privileged classes and the compliance of their social inferiors. Working-class teetotallers continued to exercise influence in parochial temperance organisations; more ambitiously, low-placed teetotal clergymen attempted, through the Church's teetotal society, to convert the highest Anglican dignitaries to total abstinence.

Dr. Philip McNair of Cambridge has written the definitive account of Pietro Martire Vermigli in Italy. After fleeing from Lucca (1542), Vermigli began his exile at Strasburg (1542–7), continued on to Oxford (1547–56) and ended a brilliant theological career at Zürich (1556–62). This scholar who so deeply impressed John Calvin merits serious attention. Recent articles point to Vermigli's influence on the Book of Common Prayer. It is time to add a preliminary study of his biblical exegesis to the scant secondary literature on Vermigli's theology. Here lies the fascination Vermigli held for both Calvin and Cranmer.

This article identifies as the work of Richard Baxter a set of ecclesiastical directions and reading recommendations contained in fos 180–208 of St John's College, Cambridge, MS K.38, once tentatively ascribed to Thomas Barlow, but demonstrably a close analogue of British Library, MS Harleian 6009, which is a copy of a lost Baxter original. Internal evidence of MS K.38 and comparison with MS 6009 and Baxter's Christian directory imply both an earlier date and a wider circulation of Baxter's archetype than hitherto suspected, suggesting a new direction of inquiry into Baxter's scholarly and ecclesiastical associations.

Histories of the modern missionary movement frequently assert that converts were more successful missionaries than Europeans yet details of their work remain sparse. This article examines influential factors in the spread of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa in two ways. It explores the complex and variable processes through life sketches of the African missionaries, Bernard Mizeki, Leonard Kamungu and Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked with the Anglican mission agencies SPG, UMCA and CMS, respectively. It identifies common elements for further scrutiny including the role of travel, translation and communication, and the development of continental centres of Christianity and the trajectories between them and local hubs of mission activity. The transnational turn of contemporary history is employed and critiqued to scrutinise the relations between the local and global in order to comprehend the appeal of Christianity in the colonial era.

This article presents the case of a Victorian schoolteacher who claimed mystical experiences, including ecstasy, the stigmata and mystical espousals. Rather than attempt retrospectively either to prove or disprove these claims, the author seeks to discover where contemporaries drew the line between the natural and supernatural. Reactions shown to the schoolteacher in the 1870s and 1880s by priests, teachers, religious and doctors suggest that clear-cut oppositions between the rationalist and credulous were uncharacteristic of the time. The more common position was to find both atheism and internally consistent Christian theology inadequate and to prefer an idiosyncratic blend of the two.

Richard Burgess, in his Studies in Eusebian and post-Eusebian chronology, argues convincingly for the existence of a hitherto unknown Antiochene continuation of Eusebius' Chronicle. While Burgess does much to advance understanding of fourth-century historiography, his conclusion that this effort derives from a pro-Nicene author is less convincing than his other arguments. Internal evidence in the fragments themselves, and circumstances surrounding the life of the fourth-century bishop Eusebius of Emesa, point to that prelate as the likely author of the source identified by Burgess.

‘The Church History of Joseph Milner is one of those books which may perish with some revolution of the moral and religious character of the English race, but hardly otherwise.’ Sir James Stephen's prophecy reads alarmingly to-day when the book has vanished even from the dustiest and highest shelf of the rectory library. But it was of Milner's History that Cowper also wrote enthusiastically ‘the facts are incontestible, the grand observations upon them are all irrefragible, and the style, in my judgment, incomparably better than that of Robertson or Gibbon’. Translated into German, Swedish and Spanish, relayed to Grundtwigian pietist circles through the histories of Rasmus Sørensen, Milner was read as far north as Greenland and as far east as the Volga. His book was instrumental in converting half a dozen Members of Parliament. It was long considered—as Milner intended it to be—as the replacement of Mosheim's famous History, and as such it was prescribed reading in the educated Evangelical home and beyond. In 1847 Julius Hare regarded it as still ‘the main, if not the sole, source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history’. Ironically, it was from Milner's soundly Evangelical pages that young Newman got his first love of the Fathers. The History of the Church of Christ must thus be reckoned as a book of first importance in the religious history of early nineteenth-century England. Yet, save for a few pages in Abbey and Overton (still the most reliable survey of Evangelicalism, after eighty years) Milner's book is now unknown.

Among the evangelical leaders who flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century, surprisingly little has been written about J. C. Miller, who attained in Birmingham the same degree of importance as McNeile in Liverpool and Stowell in Manchester. He never became a bishop or a dean, no one wrote an official biography of him, and except for an article in the Dictionary of National Biography information about him is not readily available.

Little attention seems to have been given by Zwingli's biographers to the Reformer's pastoral activities between the end of the Marburg Conference (October 1529) and his own death two years later. This may be because the critical edition of his writings in the Corpus Reformatorum, started in 1905, has not yet covered the two final years. Koehler long ago stressed the preponderance of political interests in Zwingli's thought and activities during these twenty-eight months between the two Kappel wars—‘die dämonische Macht der Politik’ as he called it—and the recent work of Hauswirth, Fabian and Haas has followed this clue effectively.