Ernulf, bishop of Rochester, died aged eighty-four, on 15 March 1124. In the course of his life, he studied under Lanfranc and was a close friend of Anselm at Bec. One-time prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, his advice was apparently sought by the king; he became a much respected abbot of Peterborough; and, as bishop, he instigated the important collection of secular and ecclesiastical law, the Textus Roffensis. Of his own writing, only three letters survive: one to Anselm, pleading with him to return from exile; one to the monk Lambert of St-Bertin, answering four questions on the eucharist and a fifth concerning a passage from the prophet Joel; and the third to Walkelin of Winchester, dealing with the case of canon law which the two men had previously discussed. It is this last letter, appearing in the manuscripts with the title De incestis coniugiis, which makes of Ernulf something more than a shadow among the Anglo-Norman theologians and men of letters who came to England in the aftermath of conquest. It is in this letter-treatise that Ernulf emerges as an accomplished lawyer and juridical thinker, whose approach has departed radically from that of Lanfranc, his former teacher, and is closely comparable to the principles for legal judgement set down by Ivo of Chartres in the preface to his Decretum and Panormia. Ernulf's use of such methods, grounded in, and made possible by, the new systematic collections of canon law, helps to confirm what has already begun to be evident, that this systematic, deliberately and self-consciously rational, jurisprudence finds its way into England well before the dissemination of Gratian's Decretum in the mid-twelfth century.

Dispute about the authenticity of the Dialogues attributed to St Gregory the Great is not new. As long ago as 1551, when the New Learning had given birth to the critical study of texts, the Protestant humanist scholar Huldreich Coccius first challenged the traditional ascription of that work to Gregory, on the grounds that it differed from all the other works of the great pope and doctor, ‘in character, style of expression, seriousness and purpose’. There followed more than two centuries of controversy on this subject, coloured by confessional antagonism, with strong opinions expressed on both sides. The Benedictine scholars, Van Haeften, Mabillon, Ceillier and others, were particularly affronted by the challenge to the patristic authority of the Dialogues, which seemed also to be a challenge to their monastic loyalties. All that is known of the person and life of St Benedict, patriarch of Western monasticism, comes from the vivid biography presented in that book, and the book is generally acknowledged to have been a principal factor in the triumph of the Regula Benedicti as the general rule of monastic observance in medieval Europe.

Those writing at the time, and subsequent historians, have tended to exaggerate the importance of the tenth-century monastic revival and of the reform movement which followed the Norman Conquest. During each period contemporary writers glorified the achievements of the reformation, of which they themselves were products, and belittled or even denigrated the religious life of the preceding era. This was partly because the hallmark of both reformations was the strict enforcement of the Rule of Benedict; the ideal of strict Benedictinism appealed to those writing during the reformations, since they themselves were strict Benedictines, and it has appealed to some historians in our own day. One result has been a tendency to emphasise the influence of continental models so much that it overshadows the importance of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. David Knowles makes continental influence on the tenth-century revival the theme of chapter 1 of his The Monastic Order in England.

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.

On 20 November 1210, before a large crowd of spectators which had flocked to the market-place of Les Champeaux outside the Saint-Honoré Gate in Paris, the heretical Amalricians were burnt at the stake. Fire that day consumed ten men, of whom nine were certainly laicised priests, deacons and sub-deacons. Six days earlier, at the nearby church of St Honorius, they had been stripped of their clerical status and handed over for execution to the royal officials of the rex chrislianissimus, Philip Augustus. Indeed, from the time some three months beforehand that Master Ralph of Namur, discoverer of their existence and pseudo-convert to their beliefs, was instructed by his clerical superiors to infiltrate the sect – an act of ecclesiastical espionage which eventually delivered the Amalricians to the flames – a highly placed royal counsellor, the Hospitaller Brother Guerin, had been consulted immediately. For this was a matter of urgency, and not just to the Church.

For the great majority of English men and women in the Reformation the principal indication of individual religious beliefs is the initial clause in their testaments, bequeathing their souls to God. Cast in the form of a personal bequest and frequently composed on the testator's deathbed, the religious statement appears to provide a revealing personal comment upon the individual's beliefs, unlike seemingly more public acts or protestations of faith. Unfortunately for the historian interested in tracing the presence of early Protestantism, Calvinism or religious conservatism within individuals or communities, will-making by the early modern era had become a cultural ritual. With a strong potential for ritualised statements, the pitfalls in using these preambles in isolation as indications of faith are generally well known. It is the intention of this paper to outline evidence for considering testamentary declarations as formulae, in indeterminate relationship with the specific religious convictions of the testators.

The immediate responsibility for the spiritual well-being of the parish in the early sixteenth century lay with the priest who had the living. Patrons of church livings were able, however, to influence parochial care by extending their patronage to priests who would be certain to maintain their cures satisfactorily. While the patron had no legal obligation to ensure the proper execution of parochial duties by his appointee, a certain degree of responsibility would be expected of men like Sir Thomas More, who allied themselves with the defence of the clerical estate while denouncing the personal or professional shortcomings of many of its members.

As many had done long before, John Henry Newman, in his sermon of 1842 on ‘The Christian Church an imperial power’, drew his model of the corporate life of the Church from the state: ‘We know what is meant by a kingdom. It means a body politic, bound together by common law, ruled by one head, holding intercourse part with part, acting together’. This description, little changed, could have applied as well to the university community of Newman's Oxford, and it is not implausible that an experience of fellowship there, strained and divided as it sometimes was, could have provided an unconscious model for his understanding of the ecclesial community. Even if it did not become explicit in Newman's thought, the analogy of head and members was present to the thinking of university men at Paris with regard to their own corporate life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly when relations were strained and division of the body threatened. Whatever the origins of conciliarist theory, then, in the reflections of canonists and theologians, there was an experience of ecclesial community in the corporate life of medieval Paris that could have given living content to speculation about the Church in the most influential intellectual centre of Christendom. The shaping of that experience deserves some attention as a matrix for conciliarist thought.

Historians accept that the personality of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, was of central importance in determining the nature and objectives of his regime from 1547 to 1549. Unfortunately, they disagree about many aspects of that elusive character; it is therefore important to eradicate misapprehensions about Somerset's views from historical discussion. Vain, insensitive and lacking judgement in personal and political relationships, he yet retains the reputation of a politician concerned for the commonweal, whether from the motives of political calculation suggested by Michael Bush or the influence of Christian humanism detected by Brendan Bradshaw. Charlatan or Christian, the reputation of ‘the good duke’ shows astonishing resilience despite the quantities of cold water poured upon it by Sir Geoffrey Elton. To complicate matters, a misleading interpretation of Somerset's views on higher education, a central concern of the ‘commonwealth’ programme, appears to have become the accepted orthodoxy, making it even more difficult to discover Somerset's true character. This paper examines the origins, development and significance of that error and traces it to its source in a preoccupation typical of Tudor Protestantism.

One night in the early 1520s, probably in the first half of 1522, the church of St Mary's, Rickmansworth, was badly damaged by arson. Iconoclasts deliberately set fire to all the images, to the reserved sacrament on the high altar, to the ornaments and jewels in the vestry, and to the rood and organs in the rood loft. The incendiaries made sure of their blaze by wrapping tow around the rood and pushing tow and banner staves through the bars of the chancel to act as fire-lighters. Their conflagration was also assisted by the large amount (280 pounds) of candle wax in the rood loft. At the same time, the offenders broke open the font and scattered the holy water. As a result of these actions, the chancel and vestry of the church were either severely damaged or destroyed.

One of the most striking features of the first decades of open Jewish resettlement in England is the speed with which Jews managed to integrate themselves into so many different spheres of English life. From the first appointment of a Jew as a broker on the Exchange in 1657 to the first Jewish knighthood in 1700, the story is one of a dramatic rise in the acquisition of rights, privileges and special consideration. So, too, had Jews long been a part of English intellectual and academic life, but before Cromwell's tacit permission of Jewish residence in 1656 only Jewish converts to Christianity dared to make their appearance at English universities. This pattern was broken with the Abendana brothers, Jacob (d. 1685) and Isaac (d. 1699), Hebrew scholars and bibliophiles who came to London from Holland after the Restoration. Jacob Abendana, in the last four years of his life, was rabbi of the Sephardic community in London; Isaac, from at least 1663, taught Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge. Both men were very much in demand by English scholars, who turned to them to solve Hebraic problems of various kinds and to procure Hebrew books for themselves and for university libraries. Both brothers worked on the first translations of the Mishnah into European languages and thus helped make available to Christian scholars this central core of the Talmud, the Jewish ‘oral’ law. Finally, it was Isaac Abendana who invented the Oxford diary and thereby made a permanent mark on the social habits of the university in which he laboured.

On 8 December 1527 two scholars, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur, carried penitential faggots at St Paul's Cross as a token of abjuration of heresy. With this act both men formally cleansed their souls and brought about their reconciliation with the Church. Far from being the end of a story, however, this ceremony proved to be the beginning of a controversy which has survived until the present day. For Thomas Bilney subsequently renounced his abjuration and became a significant figure in the early Reformation in England, eventually dying at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1531. And yet, despite the importance attributed to him as a reformer, Bilney is now, as he was then, an ambiguous figure whose relationship with the Catholic Church and precise beliefs have never been conclusively determined. Many writers have claimed Bilney as a champion of their particular causes or have sought to identify his place in the wider movements of the Reformation. For the Protestant John Foxe he was a martyr, albeit a flawed one, for the reformed faith, who refused to the last to be intimidated into a second abjuration. For Sir Thomas More, in somewhat mischievous mood, he was a Catholic saint brought to realise the error of his ways at the stake and reconciled to the Church with almost his last breath.

The Counter-Reformation initiated a long period of growth in the numbers of the secular and religious clergy of Catholic Europe. Mario Rosa has observed that in Italy the clerical population reached its peak in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu described the peninsula as a ‘monk's paradise’, and that it declined thereafter as reformist governments attempted to curb the religious orders and restrict new ordinations to the priesthood. According to Rosa, in the early eighteenth century the Italian Church had a ‘plethora’ of poorly trained priests who lived on the meagre sums provided by their patrimony and sought to improve their lot by obtaining benefices and endowments. In spite of the efforts of the hierarchy to improve clerical education, Rosa continues, Italian seminaries lacked adequate resources to train the great numbers of clerics.Rosa's observations about the expanding ecclesiastical population before the mid-eighteenth century are borne out by statistical evidence to be found in the archive of the northern diocese of Novara, where numbers of secular or diocesan priests tripled between the early seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the composition of the Novarese priests and to test the applicability of Rosa's observations about the economic status and education of the Italian clergy to the diocese of Novara.

The Austrian Protestants of the eighteenth century are not without their memorials; the noble series of Jahrbücher produced by the Society for the History of Austrian Protestantism and the bicentennial celebrations of Joseph II's Toleration Patent in 1981 have seen to that. But whereas the Hungarian Protestants are perceived as central to the history of their kingdom, the great Protestant emigration from Salzburg in 1731–2 receives a mention in general histories produced outside England, the Moravian propaganda machine has ensured that the religious fate of Bohemia and Moravia figures in the general myth of Protestant revival, and even the development of Silesian Protestantism has attracted new attention, the Austrian Protestants seem never to be centre stage, though their irritating presence in the wings is admitted to goad the Habsburgs in their search for new methods of government.

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.

The history of Anglican temperance movements before the First World War reveals working-class influences on English vicarages (not yet recognised by historians) and a corresponding influence of the lower clergy on the Anglican establishment. A study of Anglican initiatives against drink may help provide missing links between the Biblethumping evangelicalism of wine-drinking William Wilberforce's time and the social gospel era of his grandsons, the clerical teetotallers, Basil and Ernest. After 1855, a significant minority of Anglican clergymen, obsessed with the estrangement of the lower orders from organised religion, accepted teetotalism, often at the urging of labourers. In so doing, they reversed somewhat the proposition enshrined in the evangelical tradition that true moral reform depended on the leadership of the privileged classes and the compliance of their social inferiors. Working-class teetotallers continued to exercise influence in parochial temperance organisations; more ambitiously, low-placed teetotal clergymen attempted, through the Church's teetotal society, to convert the highest Anglican dignitaries to total abstinence.

Apostolic delegate in Turkey and Greece and archbishop of Messambria from January 1935 to December 1944, Angelo Roncalli was confronted from 1939 to 1944 with extraordinary situations of human suffering. His response to some of the challenges has received little attention. Yet both public and private archives contain materials sufficient to throw considerable light on Roncalli's activities during those years.