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.

During the war, many learned books published on the continent missed notice in England, among them one which advanced the study of the Responsiones supposedly sent by pope Gregory I in answer to the queries of St. Augustine: Responsiones included by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica (i. xxvii). This unnoticed book, entitled Die Quellen zur Angelsachsenmission Gregors des Grossen: eine historiographische Studie, by Suso Brechter, Münster, 1941 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des altem Mönchtums und des Benediktinerordens, Heft 22), was not reviewed in the English Historical Review nor (so far as the present writers know) in other periodicals. There is no copy of it in the British Museum nor the Cambridge University Library, and, though the Bodleian has a copy, it was, up till August 1956, uncut.

In the period of time between the Islamic conquest and the coming of the crusaders to Palestine in 1099, Christian pilgrims from East and West continued to visit the Holy Land, and particularly Jerusalem, by the licence of the Islamic government. Among the western visitors during this period at least half a dozen of them published accounts of their journeys. However, these accounts tell one virtually nothing about the life of the local Church, beyond the occasional list of shrines, churches, monasteries and the number of personnel assigned to them. As one modern scholar has remarked, ‘In the Patriarchate of Jerusalem the indigenous element is always half-hidden behind the crowds of pilgrims of every nationality…In the Holy City the resident aliens often outnumbered the Christian natives of Jerusalem, but in Palestine taken as a whole, the Syrians must always have been a majority.’

The study of local history can contribute much to the understanding of religious changes in the nineteenth century, for, as Professor Asa Briggs has shown, each provincial city of Victorian England had its own distinguishing class structure and manner of life. Nonconformity was strong in Birmingham and Sheffield, towns of the steel and iron industry which was largely in the hands of small masters; Manchester with its cotton mills, its large proletariat and Irish immigrants, its wealthy employers and cosmopolitan merchants, was a very different society, marked not only by a dominant Dissent but also by a strong Roman Catholicism. Although Liverpool resembled Manchester in its wide class differences and its large number of Irish poor, it was a commercial rather than an industrial city. Moreover, unlike Manchester, it was an ancient incorporated borough and the activity of the town council in building churches in the eighteenth century during a period of great population growth (from about 10,000 in 1700 to 77,000 in 1801) appears to have been one factor in stemming the tide of Dissent, which was noticeably weaker in Liverpool than in the other three cities referred to above. In the nineteenth century the main religious issue at Liverpool was not Dissent versus the Establishment, but conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Chartism, so powerful in other cities, appears to have taken second place to the sectarian conflict at Liverpool.

The Emperor Julian the Apostate (361–3) tried to reverse the policy of his kinsman Constantine the Great by restoring the pagan cults which he had subverted. One of his measures was to appoint chief priests for each province. Towards the end of his brief reign Julian wrote to Arsacius, the high priest of the province of Galatia. The emperor said he was pleased to see the worship of the gods so magnificently revived, but yet more could be done. Arsacius was invited to consider and attempt to imitate the practices which had made Christianity so successful, in particular Christian hospitality towards strangers, reverence for the dead and the pretended piety of Christian lives. Pagans too should practise works of charity. Provision should be made for the poor and hostels furnished in every city, so as to form a chain of confessional caravanserais.

Gottschalk is a surprisingly unfamiliar figure in this country. Since Archbishop Ussher produced the first modern study of him in 1631, very little has been written about him in English-speaking countries, whereas in France and Germany he has been the subject of innumerable articles and many books. There has been renewed interest in Gottschalk since Dom Morin stumbled on some long-lost works by him in the Bongars library in Bern in 1931. For English readers it may be well to begin with a brief account of the facts.

Recent work on the 1630s has challenged the established view of Archbishop Laud's central role in the formulation and enforcement of ecclesiastical policy. Kevin Sharpe and Julian Davies have proposed that Charles I was the initiator of religious change, with his archbishop often trailing in his wake, and finding ways to qualify, if not subvert, royal directives on preaching, the Sabbath and the altar. Davies has also argued that an ideology of ‘Carolinism’ rather than ‘Laudianism’ shaped and animated key religious reforms, and to enact them Charles increasingly relied on Bishop Matthew Wren, an unyielding enforcer of royal policy and more ‘Laudian’ than Laud himself. This view of Laud of course echoes the archbishop's defence at his trial: that he was merely the king's good servant, executing the royal will, which is enough to make one pause, since Laud's objective there was not historical veracity but to save his neck. But other findings have also diminished Laud's political stature: it appears that Lord Treasurer Weston, not Laud, was the royal nominee for the vacant chancellorship of Oxford in April 1630, though by the time the king's letter reached the university Laud had been elected; later, in 1636, it has been suggested that far from securing the appointment of his protégé Bishop Juxon as the new Lord Treasurer, Laud may have actually been a defeated rival for the post.

Arguments as to why St Louis diverted his 1270 crusade to Tunis from Jerusalem have been raging ever since the expedition returned to France. Although historians have recently agreed that the diversion was the decision of Louis himself, this consensus has not led to exploration of his reasons for crusading to a north African port city. This essay argues that the diversion to Tunis is best understood in terms of Louis's ideas about conversion in general and his policy towards the Jews of his land in particular. The close parallels between Louis's Jewish policy and the Tunisian strategy suggest that these conversion policies led Louis to Tunis.

Thomas White alias Blacklo, an English Catholic priest, natural philosopher and theologian, was the leader of a small group of Catholics, known as ‘Blackloists’, who in the 1640s and 1650s wrote in support of Oliver Cromwell. This article seeks to explain the ecclesiological, theological and political arguments put forward by White and his followers in order to justify their approach to the Independents and later to the Lord Protector. After putting into context and interpreting some of the issues elaborated in White's circle, the reaction of the Holy See to Thomas White and to his political and theological positions is examined. While contemporary historiography seems to agree that the majority of English Catholics were on the king's side during the civil war, the evidence that emerges from White's case shows that the Roman hierarchy was of a different opinion.

When Immanuel Bourne published his larger catechism in 1646, he prefaced it with an unusually full account of the history of catechising. He was not the first author of the period to trace the practice back to the examples of religious instruction in both Old and New Testaments, or to cite the works of Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen as proof of the existence of religious education in the early Church. Nor was he alone in praising the efforts of those continental reformers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who thought they had revived the characteristic form of instruction of the early Church after centuries of neglect, though it may be added that Bourne's list of contemporary European catechists was longer and more cosmopolitan than others'.

Tyranny is a recurrent preoccupation in the life and thought of Thomas More. It is among the first of the subjects which he takes for his own in his earliest examination of Greek prose. It is the theme of a significant number of his Latin poems. It provides the matter of his Richard III and the anti-matter of Utopia: it is among the evils which his imaginary commonwealth is designed to annihilate. ‘He always’, wrote Erasmus, ‘had a special loathing of tyranny.’

During the later Middle Ages the ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally abandoned ritual humiliation in the market place as an integral part of penance imposed by sentence in its courts, although intermittently this punishment continued into the early sixteenth century. In the early decades of the ecclesia anglicana of Elizabeth, however, several jurisdictions reintroduced shaming in the market place as a consistent part of a disciplinary regime. Although constituting no more than an episode, as public penance had again declined by the 1580s, the reintroduction of penance in the public forum reveals much about the character of the Anglican Church in the first decades after the settlement of 1558, but also reflects back on the pre-Reformation Church.

Josephine Butler waged an unremitting campaign against the ‘state regulation of prostitution’, both in Britain and on the continent, from 1869 until her death. She was a convinced feminist, appalled by the double standard inherent in state regulation, and also, as this article demonstrates, a devout Anglican Evangelical whose spiritual experiences inspired her work. She argued for the right of ‘inspired’ Christian women to preach and teach and developed a radical feminist theology, claming that Christ had treated women as of equal importance to men and had ‘liberated’ them. Her belief in her individual mission enabled her to assume the leadership of a notoriously contentious and emotionally draining campaign.

The conference between James i, some of the bishops and representatives of the puritans at Hampton Court palace in January 1604 was one of the most significant events in the political and religious history of England. But at the present time its significance is not clearly understood. The king's puritan policy did not begin or end there, but even in 1604 the conference was understood as a chance for the puritans to gain a measure of toleration or to begin a further reformation of the Church of England. As things turned out neither was the case. The classic accounts of Gardiner and Usher assumed that the conference was a failure for the puritan cause, but in 1961 Mark Curtis, in a widely accepted article, claimed that the king was more sympathetic to the puritans than Gardiner and Usher had allowed. Professor Curtis analysed the creation of the proclamation of October 1603 which announced the conference and claimed that its genesis showed a measure of serious criticism of the Established Church which has never been acknowledged by historians. He pointed out the episcopal bias of the official account of the conference, William Barlow's The Summe and Substance of the Conference… at Hampton Court, and noted the importance of what he felt was a neglected source, an ‘Anonymous Account’, which he believed showed marked differences between the king and the bishops, and emphasised the common ground between the king and the puritans. By considering the decisions made at the conference - whether they were put into effect or not - Professor Curtis was convinced that the conference itself was a puritan success in which the king made important concessions to them.

On 27 November 395, shortly after the remains of Theodosius had been interred beside the tombs of Constantine and his successors in Constantinople, the eastern praetorian prefect Fl. Rufinus was murdered by troops outside the capital. Zosimus' narrative of the incident, deriving from Eunapius, adds that Rufinus' widow and daughter escaped with a safe conduct to sail to Jerusalem, ‘which had once been the dwelling of the Jews, but from the reign of Constantine had been embellished with buildings by the Christians’. As the only glimpse of the fourth-century development of Jerusalem from outside the Christian tradition, Zosimus' passing remark is not without interest – even if no more than a casual and seemingly unpartisan aside. We cannot unfortunately make comparisons with what, if anything, Eunapius' contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus had said on the subject in his lost narrative of Constantine; but to judge from the Constantinian back-references in the surviving books it is unlikely to have been sympathetic – certainly no more so than his lukewarm endorsement of Julian's later attempt at restoring the Jewish Temple to Jerusalem, which Ammianus attributed merely to a desire ‘to perpetuate the memory of his reign with great public works’.

An eminent reformation historian of the present day has complained that histories of the Tudor period have concentrated on ‘too few and too untypical figures’. The observation is most apposite with regard to the opening phases of the English reformation. Reformation figures of more ordinary metal have been neglected as a result of a preoccupation with the few whose lives, and deaths also in some cases, were more spectacular. Furthermore, and for the same reason, even those who were not consigned to oblivion have been frequently misrepresented. To some extent the subject of this study, George Browne, claims the attention of the modern research worker on both counts.

One of the most problematic tasks which the historian must address is the assessment of people's opinions and the motives for their actions. There is violent disagreement about the opinions of individuals for whom there exist extensive archives of correspondence, whose ideas are recorded in numerous printed works and whose political associations and circles of friends help to disclose their views. How much more difficult then to assess the motives of a man for whom such sources are very slight, whose ideas are set out in the shortest of polemical tracts, and whose opinions, when assembled, seem to represent a mass of contradictions? Such a man was Benjamin Carier whose change of religious opinions and notorious conversion to Rome are the subject of this article. He was a chaplain to James i but his beliefs were not fully attuned to those of the Jacobean clerical establishment and he decided towards the end of his life to embrace Roman Catholicism. He was apparently just a minor churchman whose early promise was never fulfilled and who changed horses out of pique at his enemies' dominance in the Church of England. His conversion in 1613 caused a brief stir but in less than a year he was dead. His influence in the established Church is uncertain; his real doctrinal beliefs appear to be lost or polemicised beyond the point where they can be used to analyse his transfer of religious allegiance.

Early in 1652 the leading Independent divine John Owen, with a group of other ministers, published a plan for the reform of the Church entitled The Humble Proposals. The scheme aroused antagonism and opposition. The existence of petitions against it, one of them published by Roger Williams under the title The Fourth Paper (1652), was noted by David Masson in his Life of Milton. The protest was more intense, and went on longer, than Masson suggests. Petitions were soon followed by a number of tracts, some of them anonymous, others raising the issues in an introductory epistle or an appendix to material with a wider reference. Taken together, they clearly indicate a well-organised campaign behind the scenes.