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.

Alfred's royal anointing by Leo IV has long been one of the puzzles of Alfredian scholarship. Despite the ingenuity of the greatest Anglo-Saxon specialists, no really satisfactory explanation has yet been given of the strange story retailed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 853, and repeated in Latin translation by Asser in his Vita Alfredi. Such near-contemporary evidence demands careful attention, especially since it has important implications for the authorship of the Chronicle itself.

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.

The internal politics of the Counter-Reformation varied in accordance with the individual circumstances of each European country. Nevertheless, many of the problems raised were common to all. The reception of the Tridentine decrees, the clash of regular and secular clergy, the pressure of local, ecclesiastical, and secular interests, the influence of the Spanish monarchy, and the part played by changing conditions in the structure of the Curia itself, especially the foundation of the Congregation of Propaganda in 1622—these affected societies as disparate as the Holy Roman Empire and Ireland. Against this background, Irish ecclesiastical history is of more than parochial or diocesan interest, and its disputes during the early seventeenth century throw light, by analogy, upon wider European developments. Indeed, so far as the British Isles are concerned, the Counter-Reformation was mainly an ‘Irish question’, much as Catholic Emancipation was to be later, although it was to throw up no figures of the same calibre as Campion or Parsons.

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.

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 lavish patronage bestowed on Westminster Abbey by Edward the Confessor, and later by Henry III, ensured its status as the church which pre-eminently enjoyed royal favour and was designated by each as his mausoleum. During the intervening reigns the prestige of the abbey was less assured. The present paper seeks to examine the extent to which the genuine charters issued from, or for, Westminster between 1066 and 1216 testify to any special relationship with the monarchy.

During the late 1480s there began a revival of the Lollard heresy that had been driven underground early in the century by the repressive measures of Henry IV and his successor. Had such measures been taken with the same vigour at this time, it would no doubt have been driven underground once more; but in their absence it began to flourish, and by the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century it had become a serious menace. The Convocation of 1511 was convened to discuss the suppression of heresy, for ‘In this tyme also we perceue contradiction of the lay people … We are also nowe a dayes reued of heretykes, men mad with marueylous folysshnes’. The archbishop of Canterbury gave the example to the rest by initiating an extensive persecution in his own diocese of Canterbury. The bishop of London, Fitzjames, had already begun to move against the heretics in his jurisdiction in 1510, and completed his first major persecution by burning two of them in 1511. At the same time bishop Smith of Lincoln was busy examining heretics in Buckinghamshire.

Historians in recent years have shown considerable interest in the alienation from conventional church-going revealed by the Religious Census of 1851, as well as in the efforts of the churches to reach the masses in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to special means of evangelism before 1850, the impression perhaps being given that despite awareness of the problem of the unchurched, the response to this was narrow and conventional—a matter simply of increasing and rationalising the traditional provision of churches, clergy and parish organisation or their Dissenting equivalents. It is true that Sunday Schools have been noted as devices for capturing and controlling the young; but little attention has been paid to what was probably the most characteristic device during the second quarter of the century for extending religious influences to adults outside the Church— the domestic visitation society. The purpose of the present paper is to attempt a limited inquiry into the circumstances in which these societies began; the different models they followed; and the purposes they pursued.

Hatred of popery was hardly a puritan monopoly in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century England. The conviction that the pope was Antichrist was something of a commonplace amongst Protestant Englishmen. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the terms in which the identification was established and asserted. The supposed link between such concerns and a ‘millenarian’ radicalism has quite rightly been challenged, most notably by Dr Bauckham. It remains true, of course, that sensitivity towards the extent and nature of the popish threat was a hallmark of puritanism. The consequences of this, however, were ambiguous. The conviction of the reality and pervasiveness of the popish threat undoubtedly prompted much of the puritan critique of the established Church. Certainly, the rhetoric of Antichrist played a crucial role in puritan denunciations of the corruptions of the English Church. But such denunciations drew much of their polemical force from the fact that the premise on which they were based – the antichristian nature of popery – was generally accepted by English Protestants. For the whole strength of the puritans’ case rested on their ability to present their position as but the logical extension to the area of church polity and ceremony of positions readily accepted in the realm of doctrine. Even the most committed Presbyterians accepted that the doctrine of the established Church was unequivocally Protestant. For the immediate polemical purposes of Presbyterians this provided a powerful argument for a parallel and equally thorough reformation of church polity and discipline. Taking a longer perspective and in the face of the threat from Rome, such considerations served to underline the ties of common interest and identity that bound puritans to the national Church.

‘The right way, yea, and the only way, to understand the scripture unto salvation’, declared William Tyndale, is to seek in it, ‘chiefly J L and above all, the covenants made between God and us.’ For the Henrician heresiarch, the key to the reforming of England was the bible in translation, and the key to the bible was the idea of covenant. By the power of that idea he proposed to free England from the clutch of Rome: covenant would unlock scripture, cleanse it of popish corruptions and fit it to its work of reformation. Thus instructed, his countrymen would build their faith not on Roman sand but ‘on the rock of God's word, according to his covenants …’ Tyndale was not the first theologian to discover covenant in scripture, but he infused die concept with unprecedented energy: it became his cardinal principle of exegesis and the ruling element in his project of religious revolution.

The sermon which John Fisher preached at the month's mind of Lady Margaret Beaufort, on 29 July 1509, compared her with Martha, traditionally the woman of action and counterpart of Mary, the woman of contemplation. The virtues he stressed, in addition to nobility of character and lineage, were those of good order: the disciplining of Lady Margaret's body and manner of life through prayer and abstinence, her hospitality and charitable dealings with her neigh-bours. The bishop saw discipline also as the mark of her household: statutes for its government were read four times a year, her servants well cared for, her almsfolk regularly supported. Whenever factions arose among her servants she applied herself with great skill to keeping the peace and finding a solution to controversy. Fisher's account has recently been compared by Retha Warnicke with other memories of her household recorded by Henry Parker, Lord Morley. The same elements are found in both descriptions, but Morley complements Fisher's portrait of charity and able household management with a spectacle of splendid conviviality worthy of the great ladies of the past, Queen Elfleda and Matilda, wife of Henry 1. Morley's memories of the household he entered in the early 1490s are not all contemporary with Fisher's who did not become Lady Margaret's confessor until 1498 or later, and the bishop allocates more of her day to religious observance. But whether her piety grew more exacting and intense in her last decade, or was simply more closely observed by her confessor, she remained until her death the centre of a network of patronage and influence in which she took an active part. Her household was a society with many facets, defined not merely by the austere and charitable practices of its head, but by her importance as a tenant-in-chief of the Crown and mother of the king. It was the combination of all these elements that placed her so high in contemporary estimation. This article explores the life of her household not only as the home of works of charity and a pattern of worship whose special feature was devotion to the Name of Jesus, but also as a centre of justice and regional influence and as a source of support for the activities of the Crown.

David Hume's attacks on religion posed particular problems of method and approach for those who undertook to reply to them. This article is concerned with the responses of two main groups from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth: a number of Anglicans and Episcopalians, and a smaller group of rational Dissenters. The responses of some of these are well known, but those of others have not hitherto been investigated. The essay charts a definite shift from wit and ridicule to reasoned and mannerly response as the appropriate way to deal with infidelity. Most respondents assumed that Hume could be adequately refuted by rehearsing old arguments; however, a small but significant number maintained that his infidelity was of positive value for the future of Christianity.

The godly magistrate was an essential figure in the progress of the Protestant Reformation throughout Europe, and Scotland with its very powerful nobility was no exception. Prophetic preachers, discontented lairds, cosmopolitan merchants, and English troops all contributed to Protestant success in 1560, but there can be little doubt that it was the Lords of the Congregation themselves, the nobility, who made the Reformation happen. Furthermore, only by harnessing lordship to Protestantism could John Knox and his colleagues ensure that the fortuitous circumstances which provided the protesters with their opportunity in 1560– the fusing of patriotic and religious ideals – could be built on to ensure the future of a reformed kirk. The godly magistrate provided that combination of theological truth and practical reality which could translate the ideas of the new Church's clerical leaders into practice, particularly in the context of a hostile Crown.

Joan Bocher, or Joan of Kent as she came to be called, is well known as the victim of the Edwardine Protestants in 1550. She was burnt for her Anabaptist view of the Incarnation: that Christ did not take flesh of the Virgin. Her Lollard and sacramentarian background is less well known. The purpose of this study is to draw attention to that background and to its significance. The story of Joan of Kent reveals that Tudor Lollardy, far from being an abortive movement, was a highly influential, eclectic and evolutionary branch of reform in England.

Any period of history which later ages deem to have been significant is apt to gather to itself a mythology. To the medieval Church the first three Christian centuries appeared as a period of continuous slaughter, in which legions of martyrs preferred to perish rather than deny their faith in Christ. With such an assumption it was inevitable that the extinction of paganism during the years which followed the conversion of Constantine should be seen as a pious work undertaken in conformity with God's will – gesta Dei per Christianos – and when Julian the Apostate attempted to turn back the tide, he was duly slain by two warrior saints sent for the purpose from heaven – a legend which had sufficient vitality eventually to find its way into the Ethiopic Miracles of the Virgin Mary, with Julian transformed into a gigantic artisan named Gôlyâd, who threatens to destroy a monastery and is slain by a martyred knight raised by Our Lady to that end. On the pagan side we have the well-known story of how Serena, wife of Stilicho and favourite niece of Theodosius the Great, took a necklace from the image of the Great Mother for her own adornment and mocked and humiliated an aged vestal virgin who denounced her. At a later date, when Alaric the Goth threatened Rome, Serena was suspected of treachery and strangled. To the pagan historian Zosimus her fate was the reward of her impiety, and it seemed fitting that the neck which had usurped the goddess's ornament would at the last be encircled by the executioner's rope. The factual truth of these stories is not, for our purposes, important. What matters is the witness that they provide to the mythological – or, if you prefer it, the theological – interpretations which were early given to the victory of Christianity.

It has been assumed by historians that the High and Low Church parties in the early eighteenth-century Church of England were exclusive and homogenous groups. However the life and career of Bishop William Talbot, as with a number of other clergy, raises questions about these assumptions. Though Talbot was ostensibly a Latitudinarian Whig, he embraced some clear High Church principles, including those on the Trinity and on the sacerdotal nature of the priesthood. Talbot also repeatedly opposed the idea of a split between High and Low Churchmen, which had its origin in political abuse rather than theological principle. This study of Talbot's thought suggests that churchmen were able to embrace both High and Low Church principles and thus demands a reconceptualisation of the presumption of exclusivity in the two parties. Historians therefore need to revise their views of the Church parties of the early eighteenth century and to recognise that they existed as overlapping and complementary tendencies around Anglican core values rather than as exclusive and opposing bi-polar structures.

This article examines the triple biography of Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Becket and Thomas More, published by Thomas Stapleton in 1588 and generally regarded as a work of pious hagiography. By focusing on the circumstances in which the book was written and published, the article demonstrates its polemical significance at a time of rapid political change in Catholic/Protestant relations in both England and Europe. Conceived as a Catholic alternative to the history of the Christian past produced by Foxe, Stapleton's book also addressed contested issues within Catholicism: how to deal with the Elizabethan regime, and the status to be accorded to recent martyrs. In answering these questions, Stapleton's views reflect the complexity of Catholic thought at this time, and its fluidity in response to the shifting political circumstances of the late 1580s.

The absence of any adequate modern biography of Mabillon has long left a deplorable gap in the history of French scholarship. Almost immediately after his death his intimate disciple, Dom Thierry Ruinart, wrote a short life which must always remain essential for any estimate of its subject's character, and a more formal notice found its place in Dom Tassin's history of the Maurists. After that, no work of any originality or insight appeared until 1879, when a well-documented study of Mabillon's early life and some of his work was published in a most inaccessible fashion by H. Jadart, who continued his patient investigations for another thirty years. Then, in 1888, Emmanuel de Broglie produced his classical picture of the society of St. Germain-des-Prés and the journeys of Mabillon which, though a work of genuine scholarship and high literary charm, was extremely selective and made no attempt to cover the whole of Mabillon's life and work. De Broglie's volumes, however, soon followed by a similar work on Montfaucon, by their very excellence deterred would-be biographers until in the early years of the present century Dom P. Denis began to make preparatory soundings among the mass of Maurist documents with a view to writing a formal history, which must have contained a long account of Mabillon. His labours issued in a number of valuable articles in the Revue Mabillon, but he died with his main task unaccomplished. Meanwhile Dom Henri Leclercq contributed to the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie an article, as long as a short book, on Mabillon, as well as numerous other articles on topics connected with his works, but it was not generally known that during the last years of his life, in what time that indefatigable worker could steal from compiling single-handed the last volumes of his great Dictionnaire, he had written what was at least the first draft of a full-scale biography. He succeeded, as is well known, in finishing his encyclopedia a few months before his death, and he also despatched the manuscript on Mabillon to his Paris publisher, but, for an unexplained reason, publication was long delayed and it was only a year ago that the second volume appeared. It is nowhere stated what editorial changes have been made, though it is implied that there has been some abbreviation.