St. Oswald's part in the English revival of Benedictine monasticism usually known as the tenth century reformation was the subject of a classical study by the late Dr. Armitage Robinson, whose conclusions have gained very wide acceptance. Dr. Robinson was mainly interested in the part St. Oswald played in the conversion of Worcester cathedral into a fully Benedictine community. He drew a sharp distinction between the conduct of St. Æthelwold at Winchester and that of Oswald at Worcester.Accepting the usual opinion that Æthelwold expelled clerks from Winchester by violence and replaced them with monks, he argued that Oswald on the contrary was a gentle man who preferred to convert the Worcester community to monasticism gradually and made no expulsions. In his argument Dr. Robinson found himself greatly handicapped by the paucity of information in the few narrative sources relevant to the tenth century which were reasonably contemporary. He found himself forced to take into consideration post-Conquest hagiography and to discriminate within the conflicting details of late traditions. In spite of the poor character of the narrative evidence he thought, and he has carried most later scholars with him in this, that he could supply the defects of his narrative sources by what was mainly a statistical study of the witness-lists to the many charters issued in Oswald's name during his pontificate. It is upon his calculations that Dr. Robinson's theory in the end rests. It will be argued in this paper that the late traditions are of little value and that the witnesslists of Oswald's charters do not quite bear the weight Dr. Robinson put upon them. A rather different view of Oswald's pontificate will be suggested and by taking into account some allegedly contemporary evidence which Dr. Robinson, on reasonable grounds, ignored, some wider considerations relating to the establishment of the monks will be offered.

In the Middle Ages it was believed that the souls of those who died in a state of mortal sin were consigned to hell immediately after death, those that were free from sin went straight to heaven, while those guilty of venial sins, the majority, entered purgatory, a state in which sin was cleansed through suffering. Bodily death for most of the faithful was, therefore, seen as initiating a period of transition between life on earth and eternal bliss in heaven. The emphasis on the soul during this period of transition, and the complex variety of prayers for reducing the soul's sufferings in purgatory, have been extensively explored by historians.

The primary account of the martyrdom of Maurice and the Theban legion occurs in a letter addressed by Eucherius, bishop of Lyons c. 434–50, to a fellow bishop, Salvius. This relatively brief document has attracted a degree of scholarly attention out of all proportion to its length, the purpose of which has been to investigate its historical basis. There are those who believe with varying degrees of certainty that there is a historical basis to the story which Eucherius relates, that there did indeed exist a group of Theban soldiers who were executed in the Alps during the early years of the reign of Emperor Herculius Maximianus because they refused, for religious reasons, to obey his commands. However their arguments have left many unconvinced. Denis Van Berchem's thorough examination of the story has raised many doubts about its veracity, and many commentators now incline to believe, with him, that no such martyrs ever existed.

The problem of ascertaining by what means and what authority true teachings may be distinguished from false is fundamental to any ecclesiology, since the ecclesiastical community is based, above all, on commonly accepted doctrine. It is a community whose limits are defined — and the parameters within which it operates set — by the body of teachings which is accepted within it as true. Thus, the fundamental practical question which any ecclesiology must address becomes, in effect, who has authority to determine what is taught and what is not; and the answer reveals the main thrust ofthat ecclesiology. In broad terms, two principal, and often conflicting, emphases may be noted: on the community of Christian pilgrims (whom any structure exists to serve), and on the formal ecclesiastical structure (within which the faithful may find security). Pastorally, these emphases are associated to some degree with two different assumptions: either that the believer gains confidence in the institution because of the truth that is taught in it, or that a teaching will be received with confidence by believers ior he reason that it is taught within the institution. In the second case, the pursuit of truth may be subordinated to the support of the expedient.

Boniface VIII probably spent some half a million gold florins on the acquisition of lands for the Caetani. But of that money not a word is said in the Introitus and Exitus volumes, the main account books of the Apostolic Chamber. Where was it accounted for and from whence did it come? The pope had certain special sources of income which would not ordinarily be reckoned in the main account books, and of these, some could properly be termed his fortune as a private person, while others attached to his office as pope. There was the private fortune which he had before he assumed the tiara. There were the incomes of benefices personally reserved to him, gifts made him by prelates and laymen, legacies, sometimes the goods of deceased prelates, and the so-called ‘private visitations’ and ‘secret services’. Later in the fourteenth century many other sources were tapped for the benefit of a secret fund, and all in all the sums which it disposed of were formidable and sometimes enormous. The ends to which the money was directed were as various as the characters and policies of the pontiffs: it was used for nepotistic ends on a princely scale, as a mere convenient subsidiary to the main financial machine, as a war account, as a means of making enormous loans to lay rulers, or simply as a petty cash account. The earliest records of the secret accounts to survive are from the midfifteenth century, but the large sums involved, and its covert but great importance in papal policy in general make the earlier history of this institution as interesting as it is obscure.

On Passion Sunday in 1417 (28 March) a sermon known by its scriptural theme as ‘Accipiant qui vocati sunt’ was delivered at the general council of the Church then assembled in the south German city of Constance. Three centuries later it was edited by Hermann von der Hardt who characterised ‘Accipiant’ as ‘by far the most severe sermon in which the enormous crimes of prelates – especially love of money, ambition, luxury and ignorance – are revealed with the greatest liberty and are vehemently reproached, so that it is a wonder that the council heard it patiently’. In an earlier publication containing excerpts from this sermon, Hardt had described it in similar terms as being ‘not unlike a burning furnace in terms of its fiery passion and its vehement attack on the vices of the clergy’. More recently Heinrich Finke clearly agreed with these appraisals in describing ‘Accipiant’ as a ‘scharfe Reformpredigt’, for he did not bestow such adjectival emphasis on any other reform sermon listed in his register of the Constance sermons. Paul Arendt, a student of Finke's and the author of the only monograph devoted to the many surviving sermons from Constance, repeatedly commented on the severity of ‘Accipiant’, especially in his long chapter on ‘das Hauptthema unserer Prediger: Behandlung der Frage der kirchlichen Reform’.

Hardt ascribed this sermon to Vitale Valentine OFM, bishop of Toulon. However, as the following analysis will show, it is certain that this ascription was based on conjecture and that another preacher actually delivered the sermon. Hardt's only source for his edition of ‘Accipiant’ was an Erfurt manuscript which is now in the Schlossbibliothek at Pommersfelden. Because this lacks a rubric or colophon identifying the author of the sermon, Hardt's attribution must have been inferred from internal evidence. Thus began the long tradition of Vitale Valentine's authorship of ‘Accipiant’ which has previously been accepted without question by scholars of these conciliar sermons.

The Martyrs' Memorial at Oxford is usually interpreted as an anti-Tractarian statement provoked by the publication of R. H. Froude's notorious Remains. This paper argues, however, that the monument's anti-Catholic nature has been overlooked, largely as a result of interpreting the scheme in the light of subsequent developments. Much of the original polemic surrounding the project was directed exclusively against Roman Catholicism and it won support from a wide theological spectrum within the Church of England. The heated debate over the wording of the inscription is examined, as is the question of whether the memorial should take the form of a Martyrs' Church or a Martyrs' Monument.

In the mid-1940s a Catholic lay organisation, Maria Duce, emerged in Ireland which vigorously promulgated the idiosyncratic writings of Revd Denis Fahey, a Holy Ghost priest. Amongst other activities, Maria Duce campaigned in the late 1940s for an amendment of the Irish constitution of 1937 by which the Roman Catholic Church would be recognised as the ‘one true Church’ rather than the ‘special position’ enshrined in article 44 of the constitution. The origins and development of Maria Duce are charted in some detail and particular attention is paid to Fahey's role in the group. The campaign to amend article 44, which ultimately led to the demise of the organisation in 1954, is examined, as is the lack of widespread support for the activities of Maria Duce in post-war Ireland.

This article argues that as a part of the Tory reaction (1680–5) England's church courts were revived and utilised in the prosecution of religious dissent. The records of the church courts in three deaneries in and around London demonstrate that the numbers of prosecutions in the courts increased significantly in the early 1680s after the defeat of the Exclusion Bill and that the vast majority of these prosecutions were for religious offences. This brief flowering of persecution sought to ‘exclude the excluders’ and to remove political and religious dissidents from positions of secular power and from parish vestries.

Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation.

John of Damascus (c. 655–745) is a striking figure in church history as a defender of icon veneration and as a Church Father who maintained Byzantine Orthodoxy despite living under Muslim rule. His life amongst Muslims and his association with the Umayyad Melkite Christian community, the Christian Church which attempted to maintain an adherence to Byzantine Orthodoxy after the Arab conquest, is often associated with his defence of icons. However, most scholarship claims that his Three treatises on the divine images were written solely against Byzantine iconoclasm. This article provides a close reading of his Treatises focusing on themes which overlap with contemporary Jewish and Muslim debates on figurative images, arguing that John wrote his Treatises in an attempt to create a seminal Melkite theology on icons for both Byzantine and Umayyad Christians faced with iconoclastic arguments from all three Abrahamic faiths.

In the twelfth century the cult of St Agatha of Catania was revived on the island of Sicily. This article explores the development of the cult within the wider process of the re-Christianisation of an island which had, in the previous century, been removed from Muslim control by Norman conquerors. It demonstrates that the revival of St Agatha's cult occurred through its connection to powerful political circles and to a range of emergent communication networks. The increasing renown of this shrine centre contributed to Sicily's integration into the Latin Christian world, and countered suspicious external perceptions of the island.

This article investigates the development of the use of texts and images in commemorating the regicide of Charles I , from private commemoration among Royalists during the Republic, to its official institution after the Restoration. The article will argue that the Office gave official sanction to an image of the virtuous suffering king which had been in existence even before his execution. The Office also presented a particular view of the king's moral character, the causes of the Civil War and the Restoration which was to become the accepted account expounded in commemorative sermons for the next 150 years. Drawing on Old Testament themes, the Office also aimed to point a political moral used by successive governments, namely that attacks on the established order incurred divine punishment.

A distinction is often made between magisterial and radical reformers in the early modern period, Luther and Thomas Müntzer being frequently taken as representatives of two quite different reformations, especially in regard to the understanding of Scripture and of the political realm. It can, however, be argued that the Reformation as a whole was radical, and that it is misleading to characterise one aspect of it as mainstream, another peripheral. The comparison between Müntzer and the Scottish reformer, John Knox, appears to support the contention that the chasm between the two camps is not unbridgeable.