Marginalia in medieval theological manuscripts are rarely worth investigating further but Merton College, Oxford MS. L. i. 14 (Coxe 132), ‘Peter of Poitiers on the Sentences’ followed by Simon of Tournai's Summa in sacram paginam has several most important drafts of letters. The manuscript which was written early in the thirteenth century has at fos. 109r, 110r and 113r in a cursive hand of the second half of the second quarter of the thirteenth century entries almost certainly made by William of Thetford, an early prior of the Oxford house of the Friars Preachers.

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.

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.

It is probably no one's fault that general histories of the Church in the nineteenth century are so misleading about bishop Colenso. Unless one gets down to the primary source material, which is almost all in South Africa, there is no way of escaping from the distortions of controversy. Almost all the books about Colenso are unreliable. His own biography was written by an ardent admirer who hoped to succeed him as bishop of Natal. The lives of his principal opponents, Robert Gray and James Green, are just as unsatisfactory. Gray's life was written by his son. Green's was written by Dr. Wirgman, a frank and open controversialist. Histories of the Province of South Africa are either missionary propaganda, or else become so immersed in the constitutional and legal issues connected with Colenso, that the character of the man himself is lost. In consequence, the bishop of Natal appears in history as a kind of religious schizophrenic—on the one hand a great missionary who loved the Zulu people with an infinite tenderness and, on the other, a wilful and spiteful heretic for whom no action was too base and mean. Or, worse still, he is represented as a brilliant but misunderstood fore-runner of modern biblical scholars who was also by accident a South African missionary.

It was long a commonplace of Reformation history that John Bale, the Catholic friar turned Protestant firebrand, was during his time at Cambridge University a member of Jesus College. This received wisdom was enshrined in the pages of such standard reference works as Cooper and Venn, and was regularly repeated, where appropriate, in histories of the university and of the English Reformation. This was not questioned until J. Crompton observed over thirty years ago that there was no foundation for this tradition. Crompton's lead was followed some years later by L. P. Fairfield, who reiterated in his study of Bale that there was ‘no evidence whatever that Bale ever became a member of Jesus College’. However, despite these categorical conclusions, the editor of Bale's surviving plays, Peter Happé, now the leading authority on Bale's life and works, has recently maintained that after all he ‘probably entered Jesus College’. In making this claim, Happé argues partly from a passage in Bale's own writings relating to his connection with two early Fellows of Jesus College, Geoffrey Downes and Thomas Cranmer, and partly from a later tradition of Bale's membership attested in a seventeenth-century manuscript history of the college. A close analysis of the evidence, however, corroborates the contention of Crompton and Fairfield, and indicates that the later tradition arose from a misinterpretation by the Stuart antiquary Thomas Fuller of Bale's own recollections.

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.

During the period of Laudian supremacy in the 1630's many of the bishops pursued a rigorous policy of enforcing the Book of Common Prayer ‘w[i]thout addition, alteration or diminution’. They found that ‘the Divine Service in ye forenoones is neither performed w[i]th that solemnity of time, manner, and ord[e]r, w[hi]ch of right it ought, nor frequented and attended by those that belong to the severall parishes’. Bishop Wren of Norwich, who was, perhaps, Laud's most forthright supporter deliberately went to stay in Ipswich, the main Puritan centre in his diocese, and in June 1636 celebrated divine service in full ‘which had never been there observed before’. Wren, in common with other Laudian bishops, maintained that the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer required him to decide the precise form which services should take in the diocese, because it stated that ‘for the resolution of all doubts, concerning the manner how to understand, do, and execute, the things contained in this Book; the parties…shall always resort to the bishop of the diocese, who by his discretion shall take order for the quieting and appeasing of the same’. Archbishop Laud expressed himself well satisfied with Wren's work in this matter, and told Charles I in his annual report to the king at the end of 1637 that ‘divine service…is diligently frequented; and that beyond what could suddenly be hoped for in such a diocese, and in the midst of the humourousness of this age’. Charles I told Wren ‘not to desist from enforcing all canonical observance’ in the diocese.

The statutes of the Gilbertine order, established by Gilbert of Sempringham in the second half of the twelfth century, underwent modification during the following century as a consequence of two legatine visitations, in 1238 and 1267. This paper examines these new regulations in the context of growing episcopal concern for the internal discipline of nunneries and considers the possible inter-relationships between the ‘self-regulating’ and internally-disciplined Gilbertine order and the synodal legislation of reforming bishops and their episcopal visitation of non-Gilbertine nunneries, particularly in Yorkshire. It suggests that the visitation by Ottobuono Fieschi of the Gilbertines in 1267 and his legatine council of London in 1268 informed the outcomes of both, leading to a convergence of Gilbertine legislation with the wider legislation that applied to all nunneries.

The 1640 General Assembly of the Kirk, dominated by Covenanters, was keen to discover something amiss in the doctrine of the Episcopalian John Forbes of Corse. Ultimately they were forced to admit his orthodoxy, even while deposing him for his refusal to subscribe the National Covenant. Modern scholars have succeeded where Forbes's contemporary antagonists failed, representing Forbes as the champion of a party that was, to one degree or another, out of step with the Calvinist orthodoxy of the day. This article examines Forbes's theology at points where his disagreement with contemporary reformed thought has been claimed, and draws implications from its findings for our knowledge and understanding of seventeenth-century Scottish theology more broadly.