Nicephorus Gregoras was a fourteenth-century man of letters living in Constantinople who wrote a history of his own times. This work is an example of the traditional school of Byzantine historial writing in that it consists of an introductory summary of earlier history and a much fuller account of events contemporary with the author. But it departs from tradition in that it deals as much, or more, with ecclesiastical as with civil affairs. Gregoras was deeply implicated in the hesychast controversy, which began simply as a dispute among monks, but developed into a crisis of state, and his concern with it, in his life as well as his history, serves to illustrate its scope and importance. He was aware that his history lacked balance and needed some excuse. But the literary deficiencies of the work may be offset by its value as historical evidence. Since it was the hesychast doctrine, opposed by Gregoras, which became officially accepted, it is interesting to read the account of a defeated partisan. One must not, however, expect dispassionate reporting from Gregoras, although his account has sometimes been taken as such by western theologians.

An analysis of the works of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) on natural philosophy, this article aims to show the affinities between the content and form of his philosophy of nature and some main features of medieval, scholastic and Renaissance thought: theology as the ‘queen of sciences’ (‘regina scientiarum’), science as ‘handmaiden to theology’ (‘philosophia ancilla theologiae’), the emblematic or typological understanding of world phenomena, and belief in the ‘great chain of being’ (‘scala naturae’). It argues that Edwards's works are inseparable from the school of ‘physico-theology’, the English followers of which set out to prove the being and attributes of God by the order and harmony of nature, and through their worship of the God of nature to show ‘the wisdom of God in creation’ in face of the threats which new modes of scientific thought and reasoning were posing to traditional Christian thought and belief in the early modern period.

In reviewing the historiography of the Catholic reform in seventeenthcentury France, one cannot but be struck by the scant attention devoted to the old monastic orders. At a superficial level, this may well be because there are few genuine successes to record or because the numerous failures of attempted reforms make up a particularly depressing and unedifying tale. It is obvious that the more recently founded congregations, both male and female, proved to be more sensitive to the needs of the age and better equipped to deal with them; it was they who succeeded in attracting most of the religious elite who sought entry into the religious life out of a sense of vocation. The rapid growth of the Jesuits, Capucins, Oratorians, Lazarists and Eduists among the male societies, and of the Ursulines, Carmelites and Visitandines among the female are proof enough of that. But this of itself does not demonstrate that the older, monastic orders were not suited to the spiritual or pastoral needs of the age. Indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that, if reformed, they could act as centres for religious revival and attract outstanding individuals. The earliest stirrings of the Catholic reform in the 1590s and 1600s were closely connected to houses of old orders like the Benedictines and the Carmelites; many of the forty new religious houses founded in Paris between 1600 and 1640 belonged to the old orders. As for the inability of the old orders to attract recruits of a high quality, one need but point to the Maurists, Port Royal and the Cistercian strict observance.

This essay, which stems from a broader project on religion in the nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, seeks to recreate the experiences of the thousands of Protestants who struggled tenaciously to retain or hide their faith in colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico before the declaration of religious tolerance in 1869 and before the establishment of the region's first Protestant churches, the Anglican congregation of Ponce, organised in 1869, the Episcopal mission of Havana, started in 1871, and the Anglican congregation of Vieques, an island located eight miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, founded in 1880.

The aim of this learned and enterprising book is to elucidate the structure and intention of Clement's Stromateis by comparing it with pagan texts from the first and second centuries of our era which belong, as we might now say, to the same genre. This term, which is chaperoned by quotation marks on p. 15, has proved itself heuristically indispensable, but has no closer equivalent in ancient Greek than genos, which is as likely to denote the style or metre of a work as its place in a critical taxonomy. Strict conventions governed versification and the composition of speeches for given occasions, but it is we who have all but invented the epyllion and coined our own names for the novel, the autobiography and the didactic poem. While Heath proposes on p. 138 to render Stromateis as ‘layout’, ‘miscellany’ is the term that is now most commonly applied to this and other ancient texts whose amorphous character seems to resist taxonomy. As Heath observes, however (p. 24), there are all too many specimens of Greek and Latin writing which are in some sense miscellaneous: she might have quoted the thesis of her namesake, Malcolm Heath, that abrupt transitions, divagations and surprises were not aberrations from the classical norm, but calculated devices to heighten the pleasure or whet the interest of the reader, both in poetry and in prose. The culture of ubiquitous imitation was also a culture of unceasing improvisation, and both practices are amply illustrated in Heath's comparison of the Stromateis with four books from the second century to which it bears an obvious resemblance: the Natural history of Pliny the Elder, the Convivial questions of Plutarch, the Attic nights of Aulus Gellius and the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus.

Most of Archbishop Williams's manuscript remains were destroyed in a fire in 1695. However, the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, contains a volume of manuscript sermons and sermon notes that have not been significantly studied. On closer examination, the sermons can all be dated to the 1640s, and several were delivered on significant occasions. They show that Williams was a far more committed preacher than has generally been acknowledged, and demonstrate his explicit and consistent adherence to Reformed theology. They therefore help in explaining his close links with godly communities and so his significance during the Long Parliament.

Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.

In the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (590–604), the devil is sometimes given direct speech in which he is shown protesting his innocence. The devil in these stories is frequently interpreted as comical, trivial and somewhat underwhelming. However, when re-read through the lens of Gregory's exegesis of Genesis iii, and his ideas regarding the devil, sin and language, what emerges is that it is the devil's verbal skill and appearance of harmlessness that make him dangerous. This failure to see the devil's words as a deceptive recapitulation of Genesis iii cannot be separated from the Dialogues’ complex historiography.

The experience of Jean-Pierre Camus, a reforming bishop in seventeenth-century France, highlights the problematic ambivalences present within French Catholic reform after the Council of Trent: the persistent tensions between bishops, the papacy and lower clergy over the most effective means of achieving renewal and the most appropriate forms of ecclesiastical government, as well as the growing emphasis upon episcopal perfection within an episcopate that was, paradoxically, closely linked to politics and secular society. His publications on episcopacy provide an insight into the motivations and beliefs of a prominent episcopal reformer and into the ecclesiastical culture of seventeenth-century France. This article seeks to demonstrate that Camus' episcopal ideal was a coherent adaptation of traditional and contemporary views produced in response to post-Trent circumstances and that the bishop's published views had a significant impact upon his fellow prelates and their relationship with the papacy.

In 1859, following the evangelical revival in Ulster, a Female Mission was founded in Belfast as an evangelistic agency and philanthropic enterprise. It was one of many voluntary societies. Upper-class evangelical women employed the services of lower-class women of similar religious energy to work among the poor of the city. This article explores the surviving documentation of the mission to assess its work, and, more important, to ascertain if involvement in this limited public sphere was a catalyst in the broader liberation of evangelical women. The issues go beyond the relationship of inner faith and public expression in popular religion to the notion that evangelicalism, as a heightened form of Christian belief and action, was a trajectory as well as a boundary in nineteenth-century society.

Robert Barnes is a name well known to historians of the English Reformation. He receives brief mention in most historical surveys, being variously discussed as Coverdale's prior, Luther's friend, Cromwell's protégé, or Henry VIII's martyr. Among scholars whose interests lie primarily with the theology of the Reformation, Barnes has at times received further, more focused attention, his written works being examined in some detail and he himself being painted as a rare English Lutheran. Those interested in the politics of the Henrician Reformation have also found reason to assign Barnes a place of some importance, giving particular attention to his later role as royal ambassador to the princes and theologians of the German Protestant League of Schmalkalden. In contrast to these portraits of Barnes as a theologian and diplomat, and in spite of the fact that Barnes regularly mounted the pulpit while in England, there has been no comparable emphasis on Robert Barnes the preacher. The reason for this lacuna is quite simply that, despite the amount of contemporary commentary on his preaching, none of Barnes's actual sermons has been preserved. This is a fact all the more lamentable since, as those friends and foes who did comment upon his preaching make clear, he was known by contemporaries to be an extraordinarily zealous and effective preacher.

Alien priories, the small dependencies of foreign religious houses established in the years following the Norman Conquest, were partly thank-offerings for military success and partly civilising centres and reminders of home for England's new rulers. Their foundation in the newly-conquered lands mirrored the success of the Anglo-Normans in colonising the British Isles, since later examples were planted in southern Scotland and in Ireland too. In England their establishment dated from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries. They passed out of existence over a time-scale which was almost as long, for from the late thirteenth century, during periods of Anglo-French war, they were under attack from the crown as alleged nests of spies and as exporters of wealth to the enemy. The consequent seizure of these small houses by the crown and their vigorous exploitation by the exchequer reduced monastic life in all these houses and extinguished it in many, so that the mother houses found it advantageous to sell smaller properties while some of the larger priories were prompted to seek denization. Such solutions are evident from the last two decades of the fourteenth century. Apparent landmarks in this process of disintegration and change prove, upon close inspection, to be illusory; neither the ‘expulsion’ of 1378 nor the Act of Dissolution of 1414 were such decisive moments in the history of these houses as was once thought. Instead, we may suggest, each of these small houses must be examined separately, for the later history of each was distinctive. The religious life was entirely extinguished in some, which had become merely manors, by the later fourteenth century. Courtiers under Edward III and Richard II acquired a number which they used for the endowment of new religious houses; the Carthusian order was an especial beneficiary. Henry V endowed his new foundation of Sheen with alien priories, while some others were used to augment the endowments of existing monasteries and even hospitals. Pontefract (Yorkshire), thanks to the good offices of John of Gaunt, became denizen in 1393.

Since the end of the nineteenth century scholars have been divided on the identity of Hilary of Poitiers's opponents in his Commentarium in Matthaeum. As he wrote the treatise in the early 350s, it is assumed that his opponents, if real and not contrived, must be ‘Arian’. What has not been sufficiently considered is whether Hilary may be addressing other fourth-century theological positions. In this article it will be argued that two key passages from the commentary, generally used to indicate an awareness of ‘Arian’ ideas, actually suggest an engagement with the theological views commonly associated with Photinus of Sirmium.

During the first half of the fourteenth century titles granted by English religious houses replaced patrimonial titles and titles granted by laymen and women as the predominant titles for unbeneficed secular clergy in most dioceses. This probably reflects the greater security an undying corporation provided for the ordaining bishop; but none of the various kinds of title as described in episcopal registers can necessarily be taken at face value and in practice ordinands were not expected to depend on the grantors of their titles for their future careers or for long-term financial support.

John Wesley required detailed records to be compiled of Methodist society members. One extant list is that of the Keighley circuit for 1763–5. This article, breaking new ground in Wesley studies, argues that symbols in this and other catalogues recorded members’ spiritual condition. These symbols are used to analyse recruitment, losses and spiritual change on a quarterly basis. They reveal that although recruitment in the circuit was high during a revival at the start of a new preaching regime, it fell quickly, many members departed and there was little overall improvement in spiritual condition. Recruitment and changes were not uniform across the circuit, pointing to local rather than regional or national influences.