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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The momentous paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person provides us with the context for gaining a firm grasp of Luther's own redefinition of the range and role of philosophy. By no means the life-long combatant, distorter or victim of scholasticism as later scholarship often claims, Luther at once unfolded and redirected a tradition that stretched back through St Bonaventura to St Francis of Assisi, a tradition that rejected the Thomistic ‘Unmoved Mover’ and envisaged a covenantal ‘God who acts’. For Luther, the ‘God who acts’ became the ‘God who acts in Christ’, who is unpredictable and foils any systematic search, who contrary to ‘reason’ carries the cross from Christmas to Easter.

This article rejects the approach that treats the Gunpowder Plot as a discrete historical episode. The plot is better understood when examined in parallel with the period after November 1605; the surprising leniency shown by the Jacobean government towards English Catholics destroys the motives upon which conspiracy theories are based. This article demonstrates that Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, supported King James's toleration since both wished to preserve domestic stability and peace with Spain. The assassination of King Henri IV of France in 1610 did more to jeopardise toleration than did the Gunpowder Plot, despite the latter's profound impact on the English popular consciousness.

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 importance of Augustine Baker in the history of English devotional literature has long been recognised, but there has always been a major handicap to any proper understanding of him—the fact that most of his works have not been published, except in a onevolume digest, entitled Sancta Sophia, which one of his disciples, Serenus Cressy, produced in 1657. Thus Baker has recently been the subject of a full-scale monograph, which, though otherwise scholarly and accurate enough, suffers from the fact that the author has not consulted the Baker MSS., and has, therefore, together with almost every other expert in this field of study, begun and ended his work without knowing whether Cressy's digest truly reproduces his master's voice. What follows is an attempt to answer this hitherto unanswered question by reconstructing the circumstances of the book's publication and by comparing it with some of the MSS. But first, some definitions.

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.