The passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 ended a highly controversial struggle and marked an important stage in a gradual revolution in Church and State. Yet the duke of Wellington, whose political standing and skill were largely responsible for its passage, has rarely been given due credit for it. His popular reputation is still that of a wartime genius but a peacetime Blimp. His resistance to parliamentary reform is vividly remembered, but his adoption of Catholic emancipation is lightly passed over in comparison. It is widely believed that he yielded to emancipation only because he was forced to do so by the irresistible demands of O'Connell and the Irish Catholics. More recent accounts have hinted at a different picture, but the old image is far from being completely exorcised. It is the aim of this article to show that, instead of blindly opposing Catholic emancipation until further resistance was both useless and dangerous, Wellington had long regarded the question with an empirical eye and had, in fact, been considering means of passing it years before 1829.

The question in 1898 of the recognition by Cambridge University of St Edmund's House, a Roman Catholic foundation, might initially seem to involve questions irrelevant in the modern university. It can, however, be seen to raise issues concerning modernity, the place of religion in the university and the role of the university itself. This article therefore sets this incident in university history in wider terms and examines the ways in which the recognition of St Edmund's House was a chapter in the history of liberalism, in the history of Roman Catholicism, in the history of education and in the history of secularism.

This paper takes the case study of a well-known but also rather poorly-regarded text, Ratpert of St Gall's Casus Sancti Galli, to examine some of the methodological issues of modern historians reading medieval historians. It is argued that features of Ratpert of St Gall's monastic history which modern readers have found frustrating or even boring were actually the result of the author's specific rhetorical strategies and ideas of history. Ratpert developed an innovative way of writing the history of a Christian community in the mortal world. Unlike other monastic historians who were developing the genre at the time and who followed more hagiographical models, Ratpert chose to put the anonymous, timeless collective of the monks at the centre of his text. His idea of history suggests a lack of effective human agency in the world, in which ups and downs forever follow one another, and contrasts this with the eternity of God.

The role of indulgences in pre-Reformation English religion remains incompletely studied. Centred on material contained in the Lincoln episcopal registers dating from c. 1290 to c. 1340, granting indulgences for prayers for the souls of named people and often specifying their burial locations, this article argues that their place in medieval spirituality and charitable activity has been under- appreciated. Examining the mechanisms and implications of the Lincoln records, it suggests that under-recording of actions considered normal and routine, rather than lack of popularity, lies behind the failure to give indulgences their due place in assessment of English medieval religious life.

In 1894 the prominent English journalist and religious visionary, W. T. Stead, published If Christ came to Chicago!, a work of investigative journalism focusing on the problems of the modern city. The book constituted a manifesto for Stead's notion of the ‘Civic Church’, a religious movement through which he hoped to revive a sense of national religion, and unite churches and philanthropic associations around a shared commitment to follow Christ's example of social service. This article explores the development of Stead's ‘Civic Church’ ideal and his campaign to achieve this in Britain's urban-industrial society between 1886 and 1895.

This article contends that William Whiston (1667–1752) has been misidentified as an Arian for more than three hundred years. Though Whiston was labelled an Arian by his theological opponents, and early in his career naively accepted the Arian label for his own Christological beliefs, he consistently demarcated his own beliefs from those of Arius of Alexandria and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Furthermore, Whiston agreed with the Council of Nicaea's decision to rule Arius’ understanding of the relationship of the Son to the Father out of bounds. Thus, William Whiston should no longer be called an Arian.

In any evaluation of the character and accomplishments of the English Reformation, an essential ingredient must be a sympathetic but, so far as possible, objective assessment of the nature – in all its strengths and weaknesses – of the unreformed Church and religion upon which the Reformation was wrought. Among the multifarious operations of the pre-Reformation Church, perhaps the most central to its fundamental purposes was the conduct by its clergy of the worship of God and the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, as effected on the small scale by the parish clergy and on the grand scale by the priests and clerks of the greater collegiate churches and the religious of the monasteries. As acts of worship, commemoration and intercession, the efficacy of these rituals lay in the simple fact of their enactment by those to whom their conduct was committed, irrespective of the grandeur of the setting or the presence or absence of any congregation or other attendance. Nevertheless, credit both terrestrial and celestial was perceived to redound upon those institutions which endeavoured to clothe their acts of devotion and worship with the finest products that the artisans of the day could create, within the grandest achievements of their contemporary architects. In respect of the conduct of the liturgy, it was, in the event, those institutions which had carried these arts to their highest levels that eventually proved to be the principal casualties of the Reformation process; a period of less than fifteen years (1535–49) sufficed to effect the extinction of all the monastic churches, and of all the collegiate churches except for some thirty which enjoyed cathedral status, academic function or extremely close royal connection.

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.