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.

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.

Père Lecler, in his survey of Toleration and the Reformation, concluded that ‘among all the countries that were divided by the Reformation … England comes last so far as tolerance is concerned. Even the simple freedom of conscience which was gradually extended to the whole of Europe, was constantly threatened in England by police inquiries’. With the exception of Spain, Italy and possibly Scotland, the English government was more successful and persistent in its attempts to enforce unity of religion than its counterparts. The explanations of this fact are probably largely political: in most European countries, the willingness to listen to tolerationist arguments was in proportion to the practical difficulty of suppressing dissenters. As Professor Owen Chadwick said, ‘Catholic France accepted the Edict of Nantes in 1598 … not because Catholic France affirmed toleration to be merely right, but because without the Edict France must be destroyed’. The victory of toleration was normally a victory of expediency over principle. Featly, for example, says that ‘toleration of different religions falleth in some respects, within the compass of the mysteries of State, which cannot be determined in the Schools, but are fittest to be debated at the Council table’.

Anglican exegesis in the later seventeenth century of Revelation's prophecies demonstrates that apocalyptic ideas continued to hold currency in England after the mid-century period with which they are most often associated, promoting the very civil and ecclesiastical authorities they had previously been used to oppose. Present in the writings of prominent Restoration scholars and churchmen like Henry More, Gryffith Williams and Gilbert Burnet, as well as lesser-known authors, Anglican apocalyptic interpretation dispels the traditionally-held opinion that such convictions lost their power and validity with the decline of radical fortunes, and confirms that apocalyptic thought was not simply a language of disaffection on the political and religious margins of society.

In the middle of the fourteenth century the Castilian Church was suffering severe strains. Falling rents exacerbated by plague were affecting many monasteries and making it difficult for them to maintain discipline. At the same time the nature of the regime of Pedro 1 drove a distinguished group of secular clergy into exile in France and Italy. An alternative reaction lay in seeking the eremitical life, and this was to lead to the remarkable phenomenon of the Jeronimite Order. The cause of ecclesiastical reform was to be sustained by both exiles and hermits.

In 1544, one Francesco Colonna, making his testament in Venice, wrote: ‘I recommend to Almighty God my being and my soul, and when it is his pleasure to remove me from this life, I am content; knowing that in this life I can do no good thing, but rather that I shall always offend his majesty. If I have ever said a word or performed a deed that was pleasing to him, I know that I have always been impelled and moved by the Holy Spirit, when I have had any good thought, desire or wish, I have always recognised it to be from him and through his grace alone and whenever I have willed to conduct myself by my blind judgment, presumptive wisdom and diabolical spirit, I have always done the contrary and offended his divine majesty. I leave all, therefore, to God, the Supreme Father … and should he wish to take away all that he has given me, there would remain my sins alone, for these sins are mine and all other things are his; if I go with these sins before God, I am damned, if I wish to make satisfaction, I cannot. Indeed there is no saint who can take my sins for his and satisfy and placate the wrath of God, nor is there anyone who can do so save Jesus Christ. To him, therefore, I leave all my wretched thoughts, desires and acts and all my sins, past, present and future. I make a bundle of them and give them to Jesus Christ my Lord, with the certain faith and constant hope that he will, out of sublime charity, accept them for his.’

At the time when encyclopaedic works on the military orders began to be produced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was widely held that the military order was an institution which had existed for most of the Christian era. Many of the orders catalogued in these volumes were reported to have been founded well before the period of the crusades, although there were often conflicting opinions about the precise antiquity of a particular foundation. Various dates were, for example, given for the establishment of the military order which the knights of the Holy Sepulchre were thought to constitute: although some held that it had been founded shortly after the first crusade, its creation was attributed by others to St James the Less in the first century A.D., while its origins were also placed in the time of Constantine and in that of Charlemagne. The foundation of the order of Santiago, which in fact occurred in 1170, was often traced back to the ninth century; yet while some linked it with the supposed discovery of the body of St James during the reign of Alfonso 11, others associated it with the legendary victory of Clavijo, which was placed in the time of Ramiro i. The accumulation of myth and tradition recorded in these encyclopaedias has exercised a prolonged influence on historians of the military orders: disproof has not always been sufficient to silence a persistent tradition. It is, nevertheless, clear that the Christian military order, in the sense of an institution whose members combined a military with a religious way of life, in fact originated during the earlier part of the twelfth century in the Holy Land.

The first century of the Catholic Church in Korea was characterised by recurrent and often severe persecutions. Consequently a cult of martyrs developed from early in the Church's history. Wider Catholic concepts relating to martyrdom and spirituality, in particular belief in a corrupting world and the significance of martyrdom in offering a means of release, set individuals on the path of martyrdom. They were then informed and encouraged by the development of the cult itself, and the solidarity and support of the Christian community. However, Korean Christians also carried with them Confucian and Buddhist concepts concerning the nature of virtue, asceticism, world-renunciation and self-sacrifice, and they subscribed to a set of social values which saw kinship ties and posthumous reputation as paramount. In the area of martyrdom these indigenous concepts and values complemented and reinforced those derived from Catholicism.

Uncertainty regarding the circumstances in which devotion to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was established is almost as old as the devotion itself. The earliest surviving version of the legend, which recounts the adventures of the celebrated statue from the time of Gregory the Great to its discovery in the Montes de Toledo by the pastor Gil Cordero - an account dating from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century - places its reappearance in the reign of the son of Fernando iii of Castile, ‘su fijo Don Alfonso el qual gano las Algesiras e murio sobre Gibraltar’, thus conflating Alfonso x, Fernando iii's son, who died in 1284, with Alfonso x's great-grandson Alfonso xi (1312–50). Attempts to unscramble or to disguise this confusion have a long history too, the earliest being that of the corrector of Ms AHN 48B, who expunged words and phrases and supplied marginal additions to bridge the gap between the reigns of the two Alfonsos.

Gerald of Wales is primarily responsible for the generally accepted view of Henry II as a founder of monasteries. In his De Principis Instructione Liber he gives an account of the penance imposed on the king at Avranches in 1172 for his part in Becket's murder, and its commutation. Gerald reveals that instead of leading a Crusade to the Holy Land in person, and, we learn from other sources, maintaining two hundred knights there for a year at his own expense, Henry delayed for three years. He thus eventually gained from the pope a commutation to encompass the founding of three monasteries. These were, says Gerald, Waltham, where a group of holy secular canons were replaced with canons regular, Amesbury, where he violenter intrusit nuns from Fontevrault, and the third was probably Witham where a group of patient and holy men humbly bore hardship and the lack of a roof over their heads. ‘Sed quid attinet humana versutia contra divina consilia?’ asks Gerald. In a long passage he elaborates his theme that the Almighty will not be deceived by such a shamming, paltry, effort.

This article examines responses to the spread of Lutheranism and related heresies in England during the final years of the ascendancy of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. It demonstrates that the preferred method for dealing with scholars and others toying with the New Learning was to attempt to convince them of the error of their ways rather than to punish them. The small number of Lutheran heresy trials in the 1520s is shown to be evidence not of a ‘soft’ approach to the growing problem of Lutheran infiltration, but of a successful policy of humanist reform.

Current evaluation of the Church of England under the first four Georges follows in the main the assessment made by Norman Sykes in his monumental Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1934. According to that view the Church, which was lastingly cleared of the universal slackness previously imputed to it, exhibited a pervasive Latitudinarianism sympathetically portrayed by Sykes as ‘practical Christianity’, an emphasis on cdnduct and good works to the neglect of ‘organised churchmanship’ and the ‘mystical element’ in religion. R. W. Greaves detected similar features in the concept of ‘moderation’: suspicion of popery and friendship towards dissenters, a cult of plainness in theological explanation and a very general contempt of whatever was medieval. Historians have been willing to acknowledge as exceptions to this ‘mild’ quality of Anglican churchmanship the early Methodists and ‘small Evangelical and High Church minorities’, but only the two former have been taken seriously. Piety of a more traditional kind - rubrical, sacramental, Catholic - has been identified, only to be discounted. The Establishment has been seen in the light of the judgement recently summarised by Dr Anthony Russell: ‘Certainly the temper of the eighteenth century which favoured reason above all else, and was deeply suspicious of mysticism and the emotions, was against any form of sacramentalism.’

In the newly independent Irish Free State, a triumphalist Catholicism was embodied visually in mass-produced imagery and revivalist architecture. The Academy of Christian Art was set up in 1929 to regenerate Catholic art and architecture, but it failed to address the challenge of Modernism. A debate between eclectic and modern form was most acute in architecture, where the Hiberno-Romanesque and the neo-Classical were favoured by lay and cleric alike. Stained glass was the one form where Modernism was influential. The culmination of populist Catholicism and its visual representation was the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 with its temporary public altars and massive spectacle: a manifestation of Irish national identity.

The triumphal return of Charles II on 29 May 1660 was the prelude to a determination of the restored monarchy's structure rather than its aftermath. The many and vexed problems attendant upon Charles's reinstatement were still to be resolved, for the Declaration of Breda had wisely been confined to generalities. A parliament would be necessary to settle the terms of an indemnity, the ownership of the confiscated lands, the future of the army, and the character of the national Church.

Historians of the eighteenth century have written of William Whiston, if at all, with an ill-concealed smile. ‘The engaging Whiston’, that ‘most amiable of heretics’, is duly noted in every account of the development of Arianism in England, but his lunatic vagaries are kept well to the fore. Yet Whiston has some claims to serious historical attention. His heresies were considered dangerous enough to provoke the champions of both high and low-church to counter attack, and to unite the warring factions in the turbulent Convocation of 1710/11 in a concerted attempt to silence ‘this corrupter of our common Christianity’, this ‘fallen star of our church’. To Whiston, rather than to Samuel Clarke, belongs the dubious credit of having revived the Arian heresy in England, and although Clarke's less flamboyant teaching was ultimately more influential, Whiston, in converting the dissenters Joseph Hallett and James Peirce to Arian views, was indirectly responsible for the conflagration at Salter's Hall in 1719, and the spread of Unitarianism in English dissent. The story of the discovery of ‘Primitive Christianity’ and the prolonged persecution which Whiston's attempts to propagate his new gospel provoked is not widiout elements of farce, but there is a serious side to the episode. The abortive attempt to cite Whiston before the ‘court of Convocation’ in 1711, and his subsequent prosecution in the Court of Delegates, were seen by churchmen as yet another demonstration of the impotence of the Church of England in the face of her enemies, and by latitudinarians and unbelievers as a dangerous attempt on the liberties of protestant Englishmen. Like the Sacheverell trial, to which it forms a pendant, the Whiston affair was, while it lasted, a cause célèbre, and casts further light on the eighteenth-century debate on the place and function of the Church in Society.

Photius (patriarch of Constantinople 858–67, 877–86) was born c. 813. His father Sergius, a wealthy official, was exiled along with Photius for opposing Iconoclasm, evidently in 833. During this exile, which lasted until 842, Photius read voraciously. Later, probably in 845, he catalogued his reading in his Bibliotheca. Yet Photius composed neither the Bibliotheca nor his other pre-858 work as formal scholarly literature, for which the contemporary audience was exiguous. Indeed he found no satisfactory use for his talents as the leading scholar of his time until he was rewarded for his learning with the patriarchate.

The Christian ministry of bishops, priests and deacons is essentially an urban one. It developed in the two generations after the fall of Jerusalem when the Church, though practically destroyed in Palestine, emerged as a religious and cultural force among the synagogues of the Dispersion. These were predominantly urban communities, and their organisation had developed accordingly. Except, however, for the final phase in Jerusalem, Jesus's message had been directed almost exclusively to the inhabitants of rural Palestine. The Greek cities he had passed by: he had preached in the territory of Caesarea Philippi, but not in Caesarea itself (cf. Mk. viii. 27) and the illustrations for his parables were drawn from the daily life of the Palestinian countryside. In this paper I propose to trace briefly how this message ultimately penetrated the countryside of the Graeco-Roman world and beyond, and to suggest how its inhabitants, finding the plain words of Jesus's teaching more intelligible than the philosophic commentaries of the urban Christians, may have played their part in shaping the development of thought and doctrine in the early Church.

In explaining the failure of Mary Tudor's plans for Catholic revival during her reign, it is customary to dwell on her manifold errors of judgment. No one can deny her ardent desire to restore the love for Rome among her subjects—she declared that her people's souls meant more to her than ten kingdoms; but she is remembered for burning heretics and thus providing English Protestantism with much-needed martyrs and respectability, rather than for inspiring Counter-Reformation zeal. The most obvious reason for this failure was Mary's early death, which left her little time for long-term policies; but in addition emphasis must be placed on her misunderstanding of her subjects' prejudices and confusion after the schism. She disgusted the strong Henrician national feeling by marrying a foreigner and delighting openly in her Spanish blood; she showed no sympathy for the financial worries of influential subjects who had obtained monastic property and had no wish to surrender it; she instigated a persecution which aroused distaste even in minds accustomed to sixteenth century suffering and punishment; and she embarked on an unpopular war and lost Calais disastrously. Moreover, she reposed greatest trust in Reginald Pole, the papal legate, another leader who failed to comprehend the bitterness of English xenophobia and the strength of anticlericalism and heresy. Pole assumed that anti-Roman sentiments were the shortlived results of schismatic sin and would fade with the orderly restoration of Roman rule; and so he did not even begin to build a militant organisation which could have tried to resist Elizabethan Protestantism. It is an impressive catalogue of mistakes.

As Cornelius Mayer wrote recently, the massive output of literature on Augustine (c. 50,000 extant titles) cannot hide the fact that ‘much scholarly work remains to be done on the enormous variety and scope of Augustine's influence’. One area of which this is particularly true is Augustine's impact on Byzantine theology.

While Augustine's own use of Greek patristic literature and contacts with the Greek patristic world have been investigated for some time and in some detail, his influence on Greek authors – especially during the later Byzantine era – has been sadly neglected. However, recent research on such authors as Maximos Planudes (c. 1255–1305), Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and Prochoros Kydones (c. 1333–c. 1370) has done something to remedy that situation. This paper seeks to present a summary of that development and provide a context for further study.

During the last hundred years our knowledge of the educational institutions of medieval England has steadily increased, both of schools and universities. We know a good deal about what they taught, how they were organised and where they were sited. The next stage is to identify their relationship with the society which they existed to serve. Whom did they train, to what standards and for what ends? These questions pose problems. They cannot be answered from the constitutional and curricular records which tell us about the structure of educational institutions. Instead, they require a knowledge of the people—the pupils and scholars—who went to the medieval schools and universities. We need to recover their names, to compile their biographies and thereby to establish their origins, careers and attainments. If this can be done on a large enough scale, the impact of education on society will become clearer. In the case of the universities, the materials for this task are available and well known. Thanks to the late Dr A. B. Emden, most of the surviving names of the alumni of Oxford and Cambridge have been collected and published, together with a great many biographical records about them. For the schools, on the other hand, where most boys had their literary education if they had one at all, such data are not available. Except for Winchester and Eton, we do not possess lists of the pupils of schools until the middle of the sixteenth century, and there is no way to remedy the deficiency.