This paper investigates the origins of Anglican Anglo-Catholic missions, through the missionary theology and practice of the founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Richard Benson, and an exploration of its initial missionary endeavours: the Twelve-Day Mission to London in 1869, and two missions in India from 1874. The Indian missions comprised an institutional mission at Bombay and Pune, and a unique ascetic enculturated mission at Indore by Fr Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill ssje. It is argued that Benson was a major figure in the inauguration of Anglo-Catholic missions; that his ritualist moderation was instrumental in the initial public success of Anglo-Catholic domestic mission; and that in overseas missions he had a clear theological preference for disconnecting evangelism from Europeanising. Benson's approach, more radical than was normal in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a consequence of envisaging mission's being undertaken by a religious order, an entirely new phenomenon for Anglican missions.

Of all European states in the nineteenth century, Spain was among the slowest to respond to the great changes, social, political and economic, which were transforming Western civilisation. The Spaniard's reluctance to adopt the innovations of his neighbours, or to abandon the habits and outlook of a past age were a frequent source of friction between Spain and other nations; so much so that Lord Clarendon, whilst British foreign secretary, once likened Spain to a North African state with which Britain could have little in common on account of her failure to do ‘any of the many things which bind nations together’. Among the most persistent causes of dissension of this nature was the Spanish reluctance to tolerate the free practice of the protestant faith, and it is the object of this article to trace the gradual establishment of freedom of worship in Spain, and to estimate the respective contributions of the Spaniards themselves and of foreign pressure.

This paper presents a probable identification of not one but two portrait miniatures of Gregory Cromwell, only son of England's only vice-gerent in spirituals, by Hans Holbein the Younger. The historical evidence has hitherto remained unconnected because of misunderstandings about Gregory's age, which are clarified here, and also thanks to the unexpected modern locations of the two relevant miniatures.

The early modern Japanese Church developed syncretistic practices in which Roman Catholicism came to function similarly to Buddhism and Shintō. This study examines the development of such practices, with particular focus on penitential rituals. It argues that certain of these rites were produced in the very early years of the mission through extensive discussions between European priests and Japanese Christians. They were compromises that were both hard-fought and intentional.

According to several distinguished historians Katherine of Aragon could have averted the Henrician reformation by accepting Cardinal Campeggio's suggestion that she take vows of religion and enter a nunnery, thus facilitating her husband's remarriage. Here it is argued that, even if Katherine had agreed, the fulfilment of such a project would pose serious problems. Once he recognised the enormity of what the legate intended, Henry rapidly lost interest: his craving for an undisputed succession could hardly have been satisfied by adding a second potentially contentious papal bull to that which had allowed his first marriage.

In December 1845 Bishop Michael Russell of Glasgow and Galloway wrote to a keen young Episcopalian layman, Alexander James Donald D'Orsey, a teacher at the High School in Glasgow, suggesting ordination. Conscious of the growing numbers of immigrant Episcopalians in the western suburbs of Glasgow, the bishop's intention was to stimulate a new congregation for ‘the wants of the poorer class there’. Evidently D'Orsey was already known to the bishop for he mentions him as pleading ‘with your usual eloquence’ the cause of the Episcopalian Church Society, which would raise part of the £80 stipend. Russell envisaged that D'Orsey would work in this new congregation for a year or two until something more worthy of the young man's talents came up. D'Orsey wrote stating that the proposal was attractive, not least because it was a congregation which would primarily be comprised of the ‘humbler classes’. He would continue in his present work and undertake the congregational duties part-time. His present income made it preferable to refuse the stipend, suggesting that it should go to augment the livings of poorer clergy. As a new priest D'Orsey went on to create the congregation that eventually became St John's, Anderston, and to become embroiled with Russell's successor, Bishop Walter Trower, over ritualism in the parish. The deposit of D'Orsey's correspondence with these two bishops in the National Library of Scotland provides the opportunity for a localised insight into the emergence of Episcopalian ministry to the poor in nineteenth-century Scotland's most industrialised city, and to the connection of such ministry with ritualism.

Following the vote in favour of birth control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Church of England became the first major Christian denomination explicitly to condone the use of birth control. This paper argues that the bishop of Winchester, Theodore Woods, was the previously unheralded principal actor responsible for reversing the position of the Church. Woods was convinced that the Church needed to ‘modernise’ its position in order to secure a receptive audience for its higher-ordered teachings on marriage, sex and especially procreation. In turn, he hoped to bring about an increased birthrate amongst the eugenically ‘desirable’ English middle and upper classes.

The nineteenth century witnessed a transition from the ancien régime to the ‘age of mobilisation’, says Charles Taylor, from an organically and hierarchically connected society to a fragmented society based on mass participation, charismatic leaders and organisational tactics. Amid this upheaval the Netherlands Reformed Church faced an unprecedented crisis as it lost its taken-for-granted social status. This essay examines the new legitimation that Abraham Kuyper offered the Church through his Free Church theology, and how various other aspects of his theology, including his baptismal and public theology, developed in conjunction with his ecclesiology. Kuyper's ecclesiology thus offers a case study of problems that ecclesiology in general faced due to the social and cultural shifts of the nineteenth century.

The 1559 Book of Common Prayer printed by Richard Grafton has been dismissed by bibliographers, who have suggested that Grafton printed it as ‘agent for Jugge and Cawood’ (the Queen’s Printers) and ‘improperly put his name in the imprint’. Relying on evidence from a 1559 Grafton prayer book in the collection of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which contains the signatures of members of Elizabeth i’s Privy Council that can be dated prior to the opening of Elizabeth’s Reformation Parliament, this article argues not only that Grafton’s Book of Common Prayer was legitimate (indeed ‘authorised’), but also that it may have been printed in a limited edition, perhaps to be circulated in association with the Bill for Uniformity.

This article discusses one specific way in which Protestant communion was, and still is, celebrated: the ‘Wandelabendmahl’, or ‘walking communion’, in which communicants receive bread and wine at the two sides of the altar, walking around it in between. After a general discussion of the ‘Wandelabendmahl’ in Lutheranism, the article examines how this rite was and is reflected in material culture, especially in today's northern Germany and southern Denmark. The rite was physically enshrined in church buildings by special furnishings at and around the altar. This study argues for a more holistic approach to sources: the inclusion of material culture in the study of religious practices allows for consideration and analysis of the experience of parishioners on a day-to-day basis. It is argued that it was by such means – visible, tangible, and to be experienced by each individual parishioner – that complex theological concepts were made accessible to congregations.

Female religious, especially holders of benefices, made significant contributions to aristocratic family strategy and fortune in early modern France. This study of members of the wider Montmorency family in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries demonstrates the financial and political benefits derived from female benefice holding. Abbey stewards and surintendants of aristocratic households collaborated in the administration of religious revenues. Montmorency control of Sainte Trinité, the Abbaye aux Dames, Caen, for over a century was associated with attempts to assert political influence in Normandy. Conflict ostensibly over religious reform could have a political dimension. Yet reform could be pursued vigorously by those originally cloistered for mercenary or political reasons.

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

The abbey of St Augustine was named for Augustine ‘Apostle of the English’, as was its associated parish church, but was governed from its foundation by canons of the rule of St Augustine of Hippo. The two Augustines in the equation were a source of confusion. A reconstruction of the abbey's lost liturgical calendar suggests that the chapter sought to exploit this uncertainty in the matter of the foundation history of their abbey, with the aim of displacing, in the popular mind, the humble ‘English’ saint of the dedication in favour of the ‘Latin’ founder of the canons' rule.

To Englishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few institutions inspired such horrified fascination as the Bedlam hospital, the principal London mad-house. Yet Bedlam, or to give it its proper title, the hospital of St Mary of New Bethlehem, had been in existence for several centuries before its principal charge became the care, or perhaps more correctly the confinement, of the insane. The origins of Bedlam lie in the 1240s, in the reign of King Henry III. To date, the circumstances which gave rise to the hospital's foundation have failed to attract the understanding and attention which they deserve. Bedlam's founders would no doubt have been surprised to learn of the subsequent fate of their institution, intended in origin not as a mad-house but as a link between England and the Holy Land, part of a wider movement in which the cathedral church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and its bishops sought land, alms and hospitality in western Europe. The purpose of this present essay is to investigate the links between England and the church of Bethlehem which gave rise to the foundation of Bedlam. In the process, it is hoped that new light will be shed upon English attitudes to the crusades, upon the reorganisation of the finances and administration of the bishops of Bethlehem exiled from the Holy Land after 1187, and in particular upon the career of one bishop, Goffredo de Prefetti. It was Goffredo who was to be personally responsible for the introduction of the Bethlehemites to England, and so it is with his career that we should commence.

On 10 October 1216, eight days before his death, King John sent instructions to Walter de Lacy, sheriff of Hereford, by letters patent:

Know that for the sake of God we have conceded to Margaret de Lacy three carucates of land to be assarted and cultivated in our forest of Aconbury, to build there a certain religious house for the souls of William de Braose her father, Matilda her mother and William her brother. And we instruct you to assign those three carucates of land in the aforesaid forest to the same Margaret.

For the historian of King John, this concession indicates that the king was at last prepared to restore to his favour the Braoses and the Lacys, Welsh Marcher lords and barons of Ireland, who had spectacularly fallen from favour in 1208. Yet for the historian of the military orders and of monastic orders in general, it marks the beginning of a relationship between a patron and a religious house which gives a valuable insight into how that relationship could go badly wrong.