It appeareth (I saye) what an exacte lyfe the trew lyfe of a Christian is: which is a continuall resistance of all sinne, bothe in thought, word and deede, and a performance or exercise of all good woorkes, that possiblie he can deuise to doe.

God requireth at our handes, that we should make his lawes and preceptes our studie and cogitations: that we should think of them continuallie, & meditate vpon them bothe day and night, at home and abrode, early & late, when we go to bedde, and when we rise in the morning: this is his commaudement, & there is no dispensation therin.

GH. Williams and N. F. Cantor have both attempted in recent years to solve the problem of the authorship of the anonymous treatises of MS. C.C.C.415 and E. H. Kantorowicz has mapped out a place for him in the history of the development of political theory. The thirty-four tracts of this manuscript, with their variety of subject matter and lines of approach, including theocratic kingship, Gelasian political theory, neo-Donatism, bitter anti-Gregorianism and a nostalgia for the purity of the primitive church, present a fascinating puzzle in the history of Anglo-Norman Church-State relations. They have been considered by some to represent the earliest sparks of Wycliffism in England, and even to one writer the first indications of the peculiar ethos of the Anglican Communion.

True to its catholicity, the Counter-Reformation was in spirit a universal movement. The new universalism of the post-Tridentine Church produced greater centralisation, enhancing the authority of the papacy, and was reflected in the attempted imposition throughout the Catholic world of institutional uniformity and liturgical, cultic and devotional standardisation. In practice, however, the Counter-Reformation must also be seen as a local phenomenon, not only in the obvious sense that it was within their immediate locality that early modern Catholics were exposed to the new impulses originating at Rome, but also in the sense that such impulses were filtered through a prism of localism. Throughout the Catholic world, individual communities sought to preserve their traditional, home-grown institutions and customs, often by imaginatively adapting the new norms to suit local requirements. The existence of a complex relationship between centre and periphery, resting on a process of often tense negotiation and cultural exchange (since it could be a dynamic and not simply a one-way affair) has provided recent historians of Catholic reform with a fresh conceptual polarity, that of local versus universal, to set alongside the more standard dichotomies of popular and elite, official and unofficial or learned and lay religion.

By the 1230s Latins and Greeks were riot short of issues for debate or polemic, but the topic of purgatory did have a novel feel about it. The doctrine seems to emerge on the common agenda fairly suddenly, finding no place, for example, in the wide-ranging list of 104 points of divergence drawn up by the Byzantine prelate, Constantine Stilbès, in the wake of the cruel sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. The subject did, however, establish itself as a hardy perennial, and it is proposed to trace its main ramifications up to the death of Emperor Michael viii in 1282, and then to concentrate on the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–9). Without a doubt the debates and the constant attempts at reunion were not conducted in isolation from wider cultural, political and military considerations, the kind of considerations that in 1400 would lead the Byzantine emperor to journey as far as England. But here the emphasis will fall on the theological aspects. Moreover, there were also in play forces of inertia, ignorance and mutual incomprehension difficult to assess rationally. The thirteenth-century friar, Humbert of Romans O.P., in discussing what would make for reunion with the Greeks noted how a schism might be continued simply because it had existed for a long time, just like the feud between Guelf and Ghibelline.

Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.

This article employs evidence relating to church seating between 1560 and 1640 in order to argue that English people experienced the interior of their parish church as a setting of profound significance. It seeks to augment the rather secular interpretative framework within which social and economic historians have tended to consider the importance of church seating. Such seating mattered to people not only because of their preoccupation with social precedence during a period of economic strain, but because of its stirring and symbolic location. Church seating also deserves to be interpreted as evidence of popular attachment to the church, rather than almost exclusively as an instrument of social control deployed by parochial leaders. Much of the surviving documentation relates to the misdemeanours of a conspicuous minority, but it is also possible to examine the sources for what they reveal of the arguably more positive attitudes of the ever elusive majority.

Writing in Past and Present in 1964 Henry Pelling commented:

The influence of the churches on the working class in nineteenth century Britain is a subject which has long aroused sporadic interest among political and social historians, but which has apparently lent itself more readily to hasty generalisation than to detailed investigation for its own sake.

In 1813, a century after the death of John Locke, an anonymous pamphleteer in London, writing under the pseudonym of ‘Abraham, saac and Jacob’, complained about the restrictions which were placed on the Jews. In The Lamentations of the Children of Israel representing the Hardships they suffer from the Penal Laws, the author recalled John Locke as a defender of the Jews, and quoted one of the philosopher's favourable comparisons between Jews and Gentiles. The author evidently felt that Locke's advocacy of toleration for dissenters in the second half of the seventeenth century could be applied to the Jews of nineteenth–century England: having argued in defence of non–Anglicans, Locke was believed to have argued for non–Christians too.

This article explores the various factors that both encouraged Irish Presbyterian involvement in mission and shaped how they understood their missionary calling. It contributes to the recent growth of interest in the Protestant missionary movement and takes issue with the predominant interpretation of Irish Presbyterianism offered by David Miller who misunderstands the complex relationship between traditional Presbyterianism, evangelicalism and modernity. After an overview of the main developments between 1790 and 1840, a consideration of the influence of the Reformed theological tradition, eschatology and the growth of evangelicalism is followed by an examination of the Enlightenment, the expansion of the British empire and the Presbyterian sense of patriotic duty. Though various non-religious factors shaped Presbyterian attitudes to mission, it will be argued that their active involvement was a product of sincere religious conviction and an eschatological reading of the signs of the times.

Westminster Abbey has been surprisingly neglected by early modern historians. This article attempts to recreate a full sense of the institution and its character during this period, in order to build it into our picture of the post-Reformation religious landscape. The abbey, it is argued, continued to be an important religious institution, while its high-profile ceremonialism, coupled with strong secular and religious jurisdiction over the surrounding locality, may have served as an inspiration for the emerging Laudian movement. Nevertheless, the abbey and its school were never exclusively proto-Laudian in their religious character.

The great bay of the Sierra Leone estuary is a show-piece of tropical scenic beauty, and the nineteenth-century hymn-writer may well have been alluding to it when he spoke wistfully of the land where ‘every prospect pleases…’ Four centuries before that, the first visitors from Europe compared the wild peaked hills on the south side of the estuary, as they crackled with thunder in the summer storms, to the proud mane of a roaring African lion; and they gave Sierra Leone (originally Serra Lyoa, ‘The Leonine Hills’) its name. On the north side of the estuary, long golden beaches are still today backed only by mop-headed palms and by slow-rising smoke from hut- or bush-fires. The estuary runs from the Atlantic to the east, and its throat closes round a score of islets: seen from the entrance channel, they reminded a seventeenth-century French captain of ‘hay-stacks on a distant field’.

In January 1736 an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title, The Alliance between Church and State, or the Necessity of an Established Religion, and a Test Law demonstrated. Its author was William Warburton, a well-to-do but still comparatively obscure country clergyman. Although this was only his second publication in the field of divinity, he was already revealing the taste for controversy which was to characterise his literary career. The Alliance appeared at the height of the campaign by the Protestant dissenters to repeal the Test Act of 1673, and only weeks before the defeat, on 12 March 1736, of a motion for its repeal in the House of Commons. Clearly intending his work as a contribution to this debate Warburton was concerned less with giving an account of the relationship between Church and State than with providing a coherent and forceful justification both of the establishment of the Church of England and of the defence of that establishment by the Test Act. In the preface he claimed to treat the subject ‘abstractedly’.

There is no end in sight to historical squabbles about the speed, impact and enduring cultural and ecclesiastical legacies of the English Reformation. The past two decades have witnessed a lively and stimulating debate about the reception and entrenchment of Protestant belief and practice in local contexts. Over the same period we have seen a series of heated and animated exchanges about the developments taking place within the early Stuart Church and the role they played in triggering the outbreak of hostilities between Charles I and Parliament in 1642. While the focus of the first controversy has been the relationship between zealous Protestantism and the vast mass of the ordinary people, the second has been conducted almost exclusively at the level of the learned polemical literature of the clerical elite. So far little attempt has been made to bridge and span the gap. This is hardly surprising – sensible scholars think twice before venturing into two historiographical minefields simultaneously. Nevertheless the problem of reconciling these parallel but largely discrete bodies of interpretation and evidence remains, and it is one which historians like myself, whose interests straddle the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century divide and the Catholic–Protestant confessional fence, can no longer afford to sidestep and ignore. This essay represents a set of tentative reflections and speculations on recent research, a cautious exploration of three clusters of inter-related issues and themes.

The letting of pews was virtually a universal practice in the churches of nineteenth-century Britain. Although letting and private ownership of seats were well known before the 1700s and have continued in the present century, the renting of fixed seats for use during divine service reached its height in the Victorian period. Worshippers paid anything from one shilling to thirty shillings or more to reserve a seat for one person for a year. It thus became a considerable expense to accommodate a large family. By its ubiquity it is clear that the practice was accepted by church-goers as a facet of ecclesiastical life and was accepted by church authorities as a necessary feature of congregational management. But the fact that the system was generally introduced and operated at the discretion of individual congregations or their owners and patrons, with little or no interference from denominational authorities, has meant that comparatively meagre attention has been paid to how it worked in practice and to what its effects were on congregational life.

In an important article published in this Journal in 1979, Professor Nicholas Canny attacked the notion that the Protestant Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that the entire question was misformulated, in part because no such decisive event occurred until the nineteenth century. It is the argument of the present article that Professor Canny did not disprove the relevance or usefulness of the question, and that ‘why the Reformation failed in Ireland’ remains a central problem of early modern Irish history.

One of the most important weapons in the armoury of the Church during its struggle with heresy in the later Middle Ages was the militant and outward-looking piety of the lay faithful. There were two main ways in which the Church could employ the religious zeal of the laity in the defence of the faith, especially during the critical battle with catharism in the thirteenth century. One was the issue of crusade indulgences and privileges to all who took up arms in, or otherwise contributed to, the struggle against the heretics and their protectors (in technical terms, their fautors). The crusading army which such a move could create was a powerful and relatively inexpensive instrument, but it had its disadvantages. The crusade against the Albigensians showed that it was very difficult to control in the field, while that against the Hussites demonstrated that its failure had serious effects on the enthusiasm of the faithful. The second way of employing lay piety was the establishment of permanent religious organisations, orders and confraternities, which would be at the service of the papal inquisition against heresy. In contrast to the temporary legal obligation of the crucesignatus, membership of such an organisation expressed a permanent commitment to the defence of the faith, a commitment rewarded only in articulo mortis by the grant of the plenary indulgence. My intention here is to examine some political aspects of both the use of the crusade indulgence, together with its associated privileges, and the functioning of anti-heretical orders and confraternities in Italy, mainly in the thirteenth century. Events in Italy deserve study for two reasons.

Syon Abbey was a royal foundation established by Henry v in 1415. It was situated at Isleworth on the Thames, just across the river from the royal palace of Richmond and the Charterhouse of Sheen, and some three hours rowing time upstream from London Bridge. It was the only Bridgettine foundation in England. It was a double house consisting of sixty nuns and twenty-five men, of whom thirteen were to be priests; the abbess ruled over the whole establishment, but the confessor general, one of the priests, had spiritual jurisdiction. From the time of its foundation until its dissolution in 1539, the prestige of Syon stood high. The nuns included daughters of many well-connected families; many of the monks, like William Bonde and John Fewterer, had previously been fellows of Cambridge colleges or, like Richard Whitford, had served as chaplains to prelates and noblemen. The royal foundation and its wealth, the convenient situation close to a royal palace and within easy reach of London, the social status of the nuns and the intellectual calibre of the priests, and its high standard of religious observance all contributed to the abbey's prestige.

The Protestant portion of the population of the north of Ireland experienced an extraordinary outburst of religious fervour in 1859. This article provides a critical overview of some of the interpretations of the revival offered by scholars and suggests a number of hitherto ignored themes under three headings: causes, controversies and consequences. The first section moves beyond questions of social and economic determinism to outline the sense of expectancy for revival that was created through the Evangelical reform movement amongst Presbyterians in the north of Ireland. The second considers the controversies of the revival, especially the various physical phenomena that accompanied some conversions, and the Evangelical critique of the revival offered by William McIlwaine and Isaac Nelson. The final section shows how the revival consolidated religious identities in Ulster and contributed to obscuring the dominance of conservative Evangelicalism within the Presbyterian Church.