It is widely accepted that the separation of property between abbot and monks in the great English Benedictine abbeys may largely be blamed upon William Rufus. The hypothesis is a coherent one. Rufus asserted, ‘brutally and unjustly’, a claim to hold and enjoy the revenues of abbeys of royal patronage when the abbot died. A firm separation of property, with the development of the obedientiary system as its counterpart, has been seen as arising and hardening in response to the pressures of royal custody in vacancies. Separation, it is said, came about ‘on a grand scale’ in the reign of Henry i immediately following the spoliation of vacant abbeys by his brother, until by the mid-twelfth century the system of separated portions was ‘firmly and completely established in all the great houses’. When the properties were divided the abbot would support himself and his household of knights, officials and servants from his portion and those properties alone would fall under the control of royal officers during a vacancy.

In 1620, twenty-two years after his death, Thomas Stapleton received the tribute hoped for, I suppose, by many, if not all professors. Four of his friends collected together his works and published them. His Opera Omnia fill four folio volumes: translation, controversy, the fruit of his years of lecturing worked over and set out in lengthy, ordered dissertations, history, biography, moral instruction, panegyric, speeches made on academic occasions, commentaries on the Sunday, feast-day and Lenten gospels. The whole was prefaced by a life of the author written in Latin verse by Henry Holland. The best preserved and best cared-for copy is to be found in Lambeth Palace library.

Uber dem Berg gibst auch Leute. This ultramontane remark made in 1742 by Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, professor of theology and chancellor of Tübingen University between 1720 and 1756, was intended to shake students out of their cosy, provincial and exclusive Lutheran theology. It was time, so Pfaff argued, they opened windows, put aside their arrogant hair-splitting about correct Lutheran doctrine, and looked at the wider Protestant world beyond Württemberg. Knowledge of the sources of the Christian Church, and of the customs and legal shape of Protestantism in Germany as it had developed since the Reformation, provided the only sure defence of the Protestant Church in an age when autocratic behaviour was fashionable with princes, and the temporal authority of Popes Clement xi and Clement XII was still an inescapable fact.

In the medieval schools the Bible and the Fathers of the Church together constituted the fundamental argument in theological speculation. They were the two auctoritates, though different in order and degree, upon which the whole structure of the Sacra Doctrina was built. ‘The foundation stones of the edifice, of which the masters in theology are the architects’, as bishop Grosseteste in a famous letter addressed to the regent-masters in theology at Oxford put it, ‘are the books of the Old and the New Testaments’. The authoritative interpreters of Holy Writ are the Fathers of the Church. It was, therefore, imperative that the Masters in Sacra Pagina should be familiar with both the biblical and patristic teaching. That they were deeply versed in Holy Scripture cannot be doubted. Their writings bear witness to their thorough knowledge of the Sacred Books. The Bible was the text-book of the faculty of theology, the beginning and the end of the whole theological course. And since it was their main duty to expound the Scriptures, the masters in Divinity were rightly styled Magistri in Sacra Pagina, or in Sacra Scriptura.

As the starting-point of this paper I take the question, When did the Church come into existence? It is a question to which a great variety of answers is given; but they can be classified in two groups according to whether they put the birth of the Church before or after the death of Christ. These two groups again correspond roughly with two ways of thinking about the Church. We may think of it primarily as an organization with a function to perform; and in that case we shall think—as I do—of its coming into being at the moment that Jesus called his first disciple. Or we may think of it as a body of people who possess a certain status before God—forgiven sinners, redeemed persons or the like—and in that case we shall tend to think of its coming into being as a sequel to the completed redemptive work of Christ on the Cross.

The Austrian Protestants of the eighteenth century are not without their memorials; the noble series of Jahrbücher produced by the Society for the History of Austrian Protestantism and the bicentennial celebrations of Joseph II's Toleration Patent in 1981 have seen to that. But whereas the Hungarian Protestants are perceived as central to the history of their kingdom, the great Protestant emigration from Salzburg in 1731–2 receives a mention in general histories produced outside England, the Moravian propaganda machine has ensured that the religious fate of Bohemia and Moravia figures in the general myth of Protestant revival, and even the development of Silesian Protestantism has attracted new attention, the Austrian Protestants seem never to be centre stage, though their irritating presence in the wings is admitted to goad the Habsburgs in their search for new methods of government.

The article explores the theories of Roland of Cremona op (†1259), the first Dominican master of theology in Paris and a practising physician, regarding demonic influence on body and soul. Roland uses contemporary neurological theories of voluntary motion and cognition to explain how precisely demons might move the bodily members of possessed subjects, induce seductive images and implant scientific knowledge. The complex interaction of fields of knowledge demonstrated in his unique theories sheds light on the intellectual climate of the early thirteenth century in general, and of the early Parisian Dominican school in particular.

During the early modern age the appointment of Maltese bishops involved conflicts in the management of ecclesiastical patronage, jurisdictional issues and international diplomacy. The procedure for appointment, established by Charles v in 1530 when he granted Malta to the Order of St John, was the result of a compromise: safeguarding rights of royal patronage without undermining the independence of an international military order. It is important, however, to underline the reforming activity conducted by bishops appointed in such political ways, especially through the application of some institutions provided by the Council of Trent, such as diocesan synods.

On Whit Sunday 1569, after evening service, William and Geoffrey Soden went to see their vicar. They expected a difficult encounter, and took along three of their neighbours of Swalcliffe near Banbury for moral support. The Sodens had been wrangling between themselves and with their mother, and there was also some dispute with the vicar, Richard Crowley. William now told the vicar that they wished to receive communion next day, and asked ‘to know if he would admit them thereunto’. Crowley replied ‘I will not’, and said it was ‘because they came not penitently’. He explained in court later that ‘the said William and Geoffrey Soden did not come to this respondent Anno 1569 penitently or in brotherly reconciliation, but obstinately, with vehement words, as is known to the whole company then present’. Crowley had shown the Sodens the Book of Common Prayer, ‘and exhorted them in the presence of those men according to the rule of the said Book, but the said William and Geoffrey Soden regarded it not but continued still in their obstinacies’. There was more: the vicar declared ‘I have to examine you on your belief, the articles of your faith and the Ten Commandments, and do not know how you could answer.’ The brothers were furious: ‘Yea, Master Vicar, that ye go about to shame us before the whole people’, declared Geoffrey, and they stomped off ‘uncharitably and obstinately, with great threatening words’.

The Swalcliffe rows simmered on.

If St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, was a fairly typical London parish in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its archive is unusually good. A reasonable number of its parishioners have surviving wills, which is true for the City's parishes generally; but St Andrew Hubbard is extraordinary in preserving churchwardens' accounts in a virtually unbroken run from c. 1450. It thus proves possible to gain a more than usually clear impression of parishioners' beliefs and conduct both for the period preceding the Reformation and then during subsequent upheavals. Scrutiny of testamentary practice either side of c. 1540 indicates a profound and rapid shift in the way in which individuals conceived of and exploited their parish. While, by comparison, churchwardens' accounts suggest institutional continuities, analysis of two mid sixteenth-century initiatives to keep property which had been devised to the parish sheds further welcome light on the reflexes that a community developed to safeguard its interests in this critical period.

When it first appeared in Germany, Gottfried Arnold's History of heretics (1699) was a publishing sensation, immediately causing a stir due to its radical reinterpretation of the Christian past. Numerous scholars wrote against it, but the most determined was the Orthodox Lutheran Ernst Salomon Cyprian, who considered the central thesis of the work – that the history of the Christian Church was a history of decline – a deliberate attack on the principles of Lutheran belief. In Cyprian's view, Arnold's reading of the past was shaped by a cast of personal faith which not only rewrote the Protestant narrative of Christian history, but threatened the very fabric of Lutheran belief.

In 1660 the Quaker movement was confronted with a new political situation. In response, the leadership constructed a centralised system of bureaucracy designed to maintain solidarity in the face of persecution. Not all Friends, however, reacted positively to the changes, especially the new arrangements for women's meetings and the conduct of weddings. By the 1670s the movement was split by the Wilkinson–Story controversy, an internal dispute reflected in Quaker meetings throughout the country. This article examines the friction between Friends in Hertford and the claims made by some members of the meeting that George Fox was stifling individual spiritual freedom, the touchstone of Quaker doctrine.

I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557–1567). Edizione critica, I: Il processo sotto Paolo IV e Pio IV (1557–1561); II: Il processo sotto Pio V (1566–1567), I: Guigno 1566–ottobre 1566; II: Novembre 1566–gennaio 1567; III: Gennaio 1567–agosto 1567. Edited by Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto. (Collectanea Archivi Vaticani, 43.). Pp. cxix+577; Pp. clxxix+370; 371–956; 957–1453. Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998, 2000. 88 85042 30 9; 88 85042 34 1

The correspondence of Reginald Pole, II: A calendar, 1547–1554. A power in Rome. By Thomas F. Mayer. (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Pp. xvi+410. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. £50. 0 7546 0327 X

The judicial investigation of Pietro Carnesecchi by the Roman inquisition in the years 1546–67 constitutes a major chapter in the history of the Italian peninsula and of the Church of Rome. Thanks to the indefatigable energy of Dario Marcatto, the publication of the documents from the archives of the Roman inquisition now places all the available sources at the disposal of the scholarly world. Massimo Firpo's critical introductions to these two volumes builds securely on his previously published essays, which included an account of Carnesecchi based on the edition of 1870. What he now writes confirms and extends his earlier findings.

This article explores medieval and Renaissance evidence for the origins and meaning of the imperial regalia privileges exercised by the Greek archbishops of Cyprus, said to have been granted by the Emperor Zeno (c. 425–91), along with autocephaly, upon the discovery of the relics of the Apostle Barnabas. Though claimed to have existed ab antiquo, these imperial privileges in fact have their origin in the late sixteenth century and bear the characteristics of western Latin ecclesial and political thought. With the Donation of Constantine as their prototype, they bolster the case made to the Italians and the French for saving Christian Cyprus from the Turks.