Although Constantine was interested in the Council from a political point of view, and although he evidently got what he wanted from it, he did not simply walk away from Nicaea with the creed and consider the matter at an end. His letters written after the Council are important evidence for his attitude during it.

Any modern study of St Patrick must recognise the essential truth in Binchy's observation that while ‘ we certainly know a great deal about St Patrick the man and the servant of God… of the life and labours of Patrick, apart from a few data furnished almost by accident in the Confessio and Epistola, we know virtually nothing’.1 It might, however, be more positively phrased to the effect that while we do not know many facts about Patrick's life, we know a great deal about how he saw his life.

It is no secret that the great orthodox ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and fifth centuries were purveyors of the new Christian imperial ideology. They as much as any group of writers laid the foundations of Byzantinism, by demonstrating from the course of events how it paid for emperors to be pious according to the prescriptions of the Catholic tradition, or how much better it was for the security, prosperity and destiny of the Roman Empire when the state and the (true) Church were consonant and false religion abandoned. So successful was the campaign in which they were engaged that by the sixth century, even though virtually all the Western provinces had fallen into barbarian hands, a clash between Church and State had become unthinkable, and no other ‘single hope for the permanency of the Empire’ had become possible but ‘the favour of God Himself, as Justinian, the energetic champion of reunification, proclaimed to all his successors.1 Such sentiments were in large measure the results of the works of those who had created attractive historical images of good Christian rulers.2 It was above all Eusebius Pamphilus, Tyrannius Rufinus, Socrates ‘Scholasticus’, Salmaninius Sozomen, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Gelasius of Cyzicus who bequeathed to future generations an unblemished, idealised picture of Pax Constantiniana, a paradigm also reinforced by other Christian historians such as Lactantius and Athanasius.3 It was Rufinus who set the

Of the literary bequest from the Middle Ages, homilies provide one of the more useful tools in helping us to understand the medieval mind, at least from the perspective of the Church. Homilies provide us with insight on a number of levels, extending well beyond the personal viewpoint of those who wrote and preached them. They also clearly reflect the values, aspirations, and concerns of an era. Homilies are particularly valuable, especially if one has them in large numbers, because they are generally addressed to people of both genders, of all ages, and from every stratum of society. This is especially true of the large corpus of homilies attributed to Bishop Caesarius of Arles who directed his attention to both laity and clergy of all ranks with the aim of encouraging reading in order to promote literacy and divine wisdom. The Caesarian homiliary that survives from the early Middle Ages, is an enviable collection of documents.: one need only consider the scarcity of this type of source for contemporary Visigothic Spain. Homilies did exist in that period in Spain, but the ravages of time and man have caused so much to disappear.

The consistory court of the bishops of Ely by the fourteenth century regularly held its sessions in Cambridge, the largest and most prosperous city of the diocese. Ely itself was small, little more than a hamlet, and physically isolated. Recurrent flooding in the fens often cut off the roads leading into the Isle of Ely, and even at the best of times Ely tended to be rather out of the way. Although Cambridge was flat and lowlying, it rose just far enough above the level of the fenlands to be secure from all but the worst flooding, while the River Cam gave the city ready access to the commercial networks of eastern and southern England.

The library of John Blacman represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of devotional and mystical writings known to have been owned by any individual in late medieval England. On that ground alone it would merit attention. Buthis library repays study for other reasons. Firstly it is possible to place it within a detailed context. We know a considerable amount about Blacman himself and this knowledge of the man is paralleled by our knowledge of his books. Our perception of the private libraries of late medieval England is normally based on bald lists of books, occasionally supplemented by a handful of surviving manuscripts. These lists are usually derived from wills, which can all too frequently be shown to be seriously defective as a complete record of the libraries concerned. And, in particular, such lists can give only a static and skeletal picture of the relationship between the books and their owners. However, in the case of Blacman's library, while our major source is indeed a list of his books, it is a list which is exceptionally revealing. To some extent this is because part of the list is more informative than usual in providing the complete contents, insteadof a single portmanteau title, for about a third of the books. Hence we can reconstruct the precise nature of a number of the composite volumes in the library. More important is the fact that we have, properly speaking, not This article began life, in very different form, as a paper given to the Exeter Conference on ‘The medieval mystical tradition in England’. I am much indebted to the kindness and forbearance of the editor of the conference proceedings, Miss Marion Glasscoe.

Count Gerald of Aurillac (855–909) might seem rather out of place in a gallery of medieval saints: an aristocratic warrior, a great lord, Gerald seemed very much a man of this world rather than a saint in ascetic withdrawal from it. This was also the initial opinion of his biographer, who is, as far as this article is concerned, effectively his maker since we shall be dealing only with the ‘textual’ Gerald and not the historical one. This biographer, no less a figure than Abbot Odo of Cluny (879–942), began his Vita of Gerald (c. 930) by saying that many people doubted that Gerald was a saint. The opening words of Odo's Praefatio are quite explicit and perhaps rather surprising: ‘many people tend to doubt whether what is said about the blessed Gerald is true. And quite a lot of these people say that these stories are not only not true but fantastic.’ Originally Odo himself had not been too certain of Gerald's saintliness, though by the time he came to write the Vita he was convinced enough.2 The problem lay in convincing others.

The Virgin Mary was a powerful and evocative figure around whom the competing religious parties of Victorian Britain arrayed their forces. She was at the forefront of controversy whenever Scottish and English Protestants clashed with Irish Catholics, and whenever evangelicals attempted to purge the Church of England of ritualism. Roman Catholic leaders placed the cult of the Virgin at the centre of their campaign to evangelise Britain after 1840. This article analyses the development of Marian Catholicism in Victorian Britain, and considers Anglo-Catholic and Protestant responses to the growth of the Marian cult.

Among the Puritan ‘martyrs’ celebrated by Samuel Clarke and Daniel Neal, few have been more frequently mentioned and less carefully considered than Richard Sibbes (1577–1635). Sibbes, primarily remembered as Preacher of Gray's Inn and author of The Bruised Reede, has been presented as one of a number of early Stuart preachers who neither approved nor practised bending the knee in communion, nor wearing the surplice, nor signing the cross in baptism, and yet who somehow remained within the Established Church. He was, it is reported, constantly troubled by Laud. Doubly deprived, censured and silenced, Sibbes became a model for his numerous disciples – among them Thomas Goodwin, John Davenport, John Cotton – who would later find their way into dissent. It is supposed that only the power of his lawyer-friends and noble patrons allowed him to retain his ministry at Gray's Inn for almost two decades. After his death, his writings became almost entirely the possession of Nonconformists and Sibbes came to be read through separatist spectacles. And yet, although remembered as espousing a robustly reformed theology, his moderation was particularly admired by those who followed him. Sibbes seemed to stand above the tumult of the times, ‘to preserve the vitals and essentials of religion, that the souls of his hearers, being captivated with the inward beauty and glory of Christ, and being led into an experimental knowledge of heavenly truths, theirspirits might not evaporate and discharge themselves in endless, gainless, soul-unedifying, and conscience-perplexing questions’.

This paper argues that Puritanism and gender interacted in dialectic fashion in seventeenth-century England and changed one another significantly as a result of that interaction.1 Such Puritan strategies as reliance on the experience of the individual, extensive use of literacy, and infusion of spiritual issues into all activities deeply affected women's spirituality and their conventional roles in the community. At the same time, changes in the traditional practices of gender altered the Puritan experience. Gender gave new reality to the Puritan emphasis on spiritual egalitarianism, the Puritan practice of godly communion and counsel, and the development of lay–clerical relationships. From the interaction between Puritanism and gender, new forms of reciprocity and alternative sources of authority emerged among the godly.

Repeatedly in the course of the later Middle Ages latent resentment against the clergy, its privileges and behaviour exploded in outbursts of hatred and violence in the German cities. Late medieval Magdeburg saw some of the ugliest manifestations of this kind. In 1325 its citizens murdered their archbishop. In 1402 they surged looting and burning through the ecclesiastical quarter of the city, threatening violence to the clergy. Magdeburg was no isolated case. The bishop, chapter and clergy of Worms informed the council of Frankfurt in the Spring of 1386 how the citizens of Worms had beaten and thrown in prison priests and prelates, set fire to chapels, monasteries and churches and stolen religious items of great value. During the heyday of the Leagues of the Rhenish and Swabian Cities in the 1380s the laity in Basle, Cologne, Worms, Speyer and Mainz, no longer fearing the clergy's powerful friends, vented their pent-up hatreds. As the clerical author of the Chronicon Moguntinum explained they took revenge on the clergy ‘and thus they persecuted them more than the Jews, not caring for the princes of the land, but following their own volitions’. Time and again tempers flared and ecclesiastical property was burned, ecclesiastics were beaten or faced with a choice between self-imposed exile and abridgement of their privileges.

The subject of this article claims attention for two special reasons. Firstly, and without any doubt, Grabe was one of the greatest atristic scholars of his age and lent lustre to the scholarly tradition at Oxford where his later years were spent. Secondly, his phenomenal patristic scholarship was inspired by a religious motive, which derived from his attachment to Lutheran Syncretism, a movement begun by the Helmstedt theologian Georg Calixtus (1586-1656). The problem of Grabe's neglect by historians is compounded by the confusion created by a contemporary account of the vital episode which brought him from Germany to Oxford and from Lutheranism to the Church of England. This article will therefore, draw together the scattered information which exists on Grabe's career and thereby remedy the neglect of historians, and dispel some of the confusion surrounding him.

In the early eighteenth century, the legacy of conflict among English Protestants found an outlet in the controversy over ‘occasional conformity’. During the years 1702–4, Tory backbenchers in the House of Commons introduced a series of bills designed to strengthen the Corporation and Test Acts (1661, 1673), which had required all officials of local government and holders of Crown appointments to adhere to the established Church of England. Since the passage of these legal tests, Protestant Nonconformists seeking office had circumvented their intent by taking communion in an Anglican parish as seldom as once a year, while attending meetings of their fellow dissenters for worship. So long as they procured a certificate of conformity from the minister, they were eligible for government positions, and dissenters had gained control of several parliamentary boroughs.

The creation in North America of the first overseas diocese of the Church of England was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and unlikely of the changes in British colonial policy which resulted from the American Revolution. Before the war, the Anglican campaign for the appointment of colonial bishops had been a major reason for the colonial fear of British tyranny; many Americans, particularly Nonconformists, vigorously protested against a scheme which they saw as a bid to recreate a Laudian ecclesiastical tyranny. But the post-war colonial policy envisaged the colonial bishop as a focus of political stability and loyalty. The new prestige and political responsibility accorded by the government to the Church was equally remarkable in view of the government's Erastian suppression of Convocation since 1715 and its politic responsiveness to Dissenting sensibilities. Despite occasional outbreaks of clerical frustration at the Church's inability to act independently, the Church of England had been unable to escape this political domination. This paper will attempt to explain why, given the government's prior hostility to the design, ministries in the 1780s should have decided to extend the church hierarchy to the colonies.

Neither charity nor charity sermons were new to the eighteenth century. Giving to the needy was a long–established feature of Christianity. In his ‘Rule and Exercise of Holy Living’ (1650), an extreme expression of such Christianity, Jeremy Taylor urged good Christians to ‘Give, looking for nothing again, that is, without consideration of future advantages: give to children, to old men, to the unthankful, and the dying, and to those you shall never see again; for else your Alms or courtesie is not charity, but traffick and merchandise.’ By the eighteenth century the City of London already had a tradition of sponsored annual sermons, called ‘spital’ sermons, for its own hospitals, i.e. St Thomas's, Barts, Bethlem, etc. However, as associated charities, charities conceived by, supported and directed by contributors, grew increasingly numerous in the course of that century, charity sermons also increased in number and importance. Associated or joint–stock voluntary charity welcomed its need for ongoing financial support; this, its supporters claimed, would ensure efficiency and accountability. The problem with such support, however, was not only that the charity needed to attract, and continue to attract, large numbers of donors, but also that it needed to convince those donors to repeat their contributions annually. The charity sermon became a central instrument in this process. Thus, usually on the anniversary of the establishment of the charity, the society would invite a prominent or popular clergyman to address present and potential donors, and a collection would be taken afterwards. After one such sermon on 9 July 1762, the governing committee of the Asylum for Orphaned Girls congratulated itself, well pleased with a collection of over £226 ‘and many new subscribers added’.1

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’.

The tortuous history of apocalyptic speculation took a new turn in the late eighteenth century, and one of its proponents was the ebullient bishop of Rochester, Samuel Horsley. The new and alarming ideas emanating from abstruse considerations of the Book of Daniel, of Revelation and the eighteenth chapter of Isaiah were puzzled over in a series of reviews in the Gentleman's Magazine, one of which was a review of the letter from an anonymous ‘Country Clergyman’ to the bishop. It was clearly the opinion of the ‘Country Clergyman’ that Horsley's views were novel.

Victorian Methodism was a religion of experience. More specifically, it was a religion of conversion experience. A personal, attested, conversion experience, undergone in a chapel, a mission hall or even the home, was an essential prerequisite of becoming a Methodist. Subsequently relived and dissected in a class meeting, it was a vital part of living as a Methodist. Finally, recounted and honoured in circuit obituaries and station records, it was posthumous testimony of the grace and fellowship accorded to an individual who had been a Methodist. For all that, it was a curiously unsystematised aspect of nineteenth-century Methodism. Contemporary doctrine, custom and practice taught that conversion experience was something which could, at least in theory, happen to anyone, at any time, in any place. It did not discriminate between social classes, between the sexes, even between the mature and the juvenile. Moreover it required, at least in principle, no act