The episcopate of John Morton has received little attention from historians, possibly because it falls in time between the traditional interests of medievalists and of reformation specialists. Previous treatments, notably that of dean Hook in his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the biography by Woodhouse, published in 1895 and heavily reliant on Hook, have concentrated on Morton's political role as ‘foster father of the Tudors’, and while Professor Claude Jenkins provided an excellent survey of the Canterbury register, he was more concerned with the evidence which it provides for die condition of the Church in die late fifteenth century than widi the archbishop himself. The purpose of this paper is to outline the salient characteristics of the episcopate and to examine the ecclesiastical policies pursued by Morton. Two qualifications must immediately be added. First, despite the wealth of material in the archiepiscopal register, supplemented by the records of the cathedral priory, there is almost nothing of a personal nature, and as always it is more difficult to estimate the character or sentiments of a fifteenth-century bishop than of his twelfth-century counterpart Secondly, it has been remarked how a hard and fresh look has upgraded the reputation of Hubert Walter, ‘that old model of secular prelacy’.

Modern accounts of the Wycliffite movement and of the beliefs of its adherents have been based for the most part upon records compiled by opponents. Most obviously hostile are the episcopal registers and documents, though these have the advantage of being relatively prolific and almost always dated and localised; inevitably, secular records about the movement become more ample as Lollardy was identified with sedition. The surviving chronicles, such as those of Knighton or Walsingham, were largely written by members of those orders that Wyclif castigated throughout his teaching. The picture constructed from these records has sometimes been filled out with details from overtly hostile and polemical texts such as Netter's Doctrinale. Given such sources, it is hardly surprising that the accounts appear incomplete, even at times incoherent and contradictory. Episcopal registers, as has been suggested elsewhere, present only fragmentary records of the views they condemned; polemical authors, and even chroniclers, often wrote with hindsight, an advantage to their own argument, but a disqualification to their usefulness as historical sources. Particularly in the case of Lollardy, where increasing opposition from the ecclesiastical hierarchy was reinforced after about 1400 by suspicion of treason so amply confirmed in the Oldcastle revolt, late texts are peculiarly unreliable. McFarlane, in his posthumously published lectures, suggested that many aspects of the movement ‘are irremediably hidden from us’, unless ‘new material is found of a kind and quantity so far unsuspected’.

Thirty years ago, J. de Ghellinck suggested that an examination of the thought of St. Bruno, bishop of Segni, might reveal some parallels with the thought of St. Anselm. More recently, R. Gregoire has explored the notion in his study of St. Bruno. He concedes that some similarities are noticeable, particularly in the conservative monastic attitude which both Bruno and Anselm display towards the theologian's task. But he questions the worthwhileness of any attempt to compare the two on two grounds. First, diere is some question as to the authenticity of one of the works attributed to Bruno, whose thought most closely resembles that of Anselm's treatises. And secondly, he finds insufficient grounds for believing that Bruno can have borrowed from Anselm in composing this piece—even if it is, indeed, his; there are demonstrably other possible sources of their common ideas. If de Ghellinck had in mind any such direct borrowing, the evidence is certainly most unsatisfactory. But die term he chooses is ‘rapports’. It may be that we are dealing here, even if not always wim works of Bruno himself, with writings which are the product of the contemporary community of thought upon which Anselm himself drew. The interest of the ‘rapports’ which are undoubtedly present would then lie in the evidence they provide as to the climate in which Anselm himself thought and wrote.

As a historian and man of learning, William of Malmesbury has over the last century drawn the most diverse reactions from those scholars whose work has brought them into contact with him. On the one hand, praise has been lavished on his wide reading, critical acumen and historical judgement; on the odier, his credulity, carelessness, wilful mishandling of evidence and meandering irrelevance have been stigmatised. One group of scholars sees him as head and shoulders above, and in advance of his time, a ‘modern’ writer; others see him as the creature of his epoch and immediate environment in a pejorative sense. Yet it would surely be true to say that no-one since or apart from William Stubbs has attained such a command of William's output as to be in a position to make an overall assessment of it. Even Stubbs did not claim to be attempting this and, in any case, he was unacquainted with several of William's works, and misattributed others.

‘There is one Katherine Chidly an old Brownist, and her sonne a young Brownist, a pragmaticall fellow, who not content with spreading their poyson in and about London, goe down into the Country to gather people to them… Katherine Chidly and her sons Books (for the mother and the son made them together, one inditing, and the other writing) are highly magnified, and the brasen-faced audacious old woman resembled unto Jael …’.

Following the Reformation, the Inns of Court established a tradition of preaching inferior to none. The wealth and influence of-these centres of legal and genteel education attracted such noted preachers and divines as Richard Alvey, Thomas Gataker Jr., John Donne, Richard Sibbes and John Preston. In an age of religious disputation, their activities could easily provoke controversy. At the Temple in 1585 to 1586 the celebrated clash took place between Richard Hooker and Walter Travers. In subsequent years the puritan proclivities of William Crashawe and the Laudian pretensions of Paul Micklethwaite produced similar debate. Considering the prominence of their office, the parallel expansion of London preacherships and the attention given to events after 1585, the earlier development of divinity lectureships at the Inns of Court deserves particular treatment.

This paper is concerned widi the puritan in office. It sets out to deal with an incident that took place in the university of Cambridge in 1589, and, in analysing that incident, to examine the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the position of the puritan divine (and here I mean both presbyterians and ‘fellow-travellers’) involved in the traditional administrative and jurisdictional hierarchies of the university. At first sight the affair in question appears to be little more than another clash between two young dons, with precisian proclivities, and the university authorities. Its significance for the study of establishment or moderate puritanism lies in the fact that by 1589 those university authorities included in their ranks men like Laurence Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel, William Whitaker, newly installed as Master of St John's and Roger Goad, Provost of Kings, all of whom were noted for their puritan sympathies. It was in 1589, of course, that Whitgift's final attack on the classis movement really got under way. Here, then, we have the interesting spectacle of erstwhile puritans (one of whom, Chaderton, was an avowed presbyterian) being called upon, in their capacity as university administrators, to support, or at least not to oppose or obstruct, a new hardline anti-precisian policy which was totally at variance with their own principles and sympathies.

No one doubts that the treatise on repentance published in 1648 as the sixth book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is by Hooker, but there has been considerable doubt that 1648 (as I shall call it) belongs in the Laws. Keble pronounced it ‘an entire deviation from its subject’, which should have been the Disciplinarian proposal that the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction be exercised by congregational lay-elders, while W. Speed Hill concludes his recent detailed discussion of the problems surrounding the posthumous three last books of Hooker's great work by calling on those who would include 1648 in the Laws to argue their case for its inclusion ‘in the face of a substantial body of evidence, internal and external, to the contrary’. The present note is a response on the ‘internal’ side to Professor Hill's call for argument.

Richard Hooker's attitude to the Church of Rome has been widely misrepresented. This attempt to elucidate it will not only modify the traditional idea of Hooker's broad-minded ecumenism, but will also make possible a fresh evaluation of his theological development and his relation to die Elizabethan hierarchy in the period up to the writing of his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker scholarship has consistently interpreted his early career, especially his controversy with Walter Travers in 1586, in the light of his later authorship of the Polity, and has shown itself to be still in the grip of Isaac Walton's portrait of Hooker as official champion of Anglican orthodoxy against the Puritans. This portrait will be seen to be inapplicable to the Hooker of the 1580s. Difficult though it is to conceive a Hooker who was not yet the author of the Polity, die understanding of his theological development requires a resolute attempt to trace it forwards towards the Polity rather than backwards from the Polity.

Venetian religious literature of the Renaissance period presents an amorphous picture to the historian; there were few recurrent preoccupations among Venetian religious writers and they used a wide variety of theological styles. The topic of the officium episcopi, the bishop's duties and rule of life, did however recur with some frequency. There was, indeed, a considerable volume of literature on this subject in Catholic Europe as a whole between the Conciliar era and the post-Tridentine period. The best known, almost the only widely known Italian example of the genre is the work of a Venetian: the De officio episcopi of Gasparo Contarini. Other Venetian writings on this theme have been barely studied, however, although in some cases they are subtler and more redolent of spirituality, if less explicit, than Contarini's work. It may well be that Venetians, over a period of a century and a half, made a particularly important contribution to the genre and since the Venetian patriciate produced a large number of bishops (the major bishoprics of the Venetian Terraferma were normally held by Venetian nobles) this would not be altogether surprising. It should be said, however, that even in this genre of religious literature it is difficult to point to a specifically Venetian tradition or to any particular continuity of themes; to take the case of Gasparo Contarini, a search for the Venetian antecedents of his ideas yields rather sparse fruits.

The title requires some explanation. There is no satisfactory generic term to cover the institutions and groups discussed in this paper. I have opted for ‘International Protestant Community’, because it he seems on the whole less unsatisfactory than the term ‘ecumenical movement’, which in contemporary parlance at least must include within its scope Catholics as well as non-Catholics. Even the narrower term has its defects, however, since many of the Anglicans who played prominent roles within these international organisations would have considered themselves more Catholic than Protestant, while the Orthodox who figured in at least some of them would not have considered themselves Protestant at all. But in the period reviewed here the dominant influences within this international community were undoubtedly Protestant and the description, International Protestant Community, though inadequate, is probably the least inadequate available.

Sixteenth-century reformers, led by Martin Luther, justified their resistance to the Roman Church on the basis of Scripture literally understood. Were they influenced by the foremost medieval authority on the literal meaning of Scripture, Nicholas of Lyra? At one time, it seemed obvious that the answer was, ‘yes’. According to a couplet famous in the sixteenth century: Si Lyra non lyrasset, totus mundus delirasset, Lutherus non saltasset.

It is widely accepted among historians that the House of Lords in the eighteenth century was an obstacle to religious change. Its unfriendly mien appears to be confirmed by the fate of several Quaker tithe bills and Dissenting petitions. Despite the passage of limited relief acts for Roman Catholics and Dissenters in 1778 and 1779 respectively, it was unusual for such legislation to be well received, or even to find a sponsor, in that chamber. Yet, in the summer of 1789 the House of Lords and that House alone witnessed what has been a neglected episode in ecclesiastical and political history. This was the attempt by the third earl Stanhope to amend the law concerning religious toleration. Although admittedly far from an exception to the rule in the way in which it was greeted by the peers, it has received scant notice from modern historians of toleration. Stanhope himself, of course, has become known to the historically minded as one of the celebrated eccentrics of the period; the image of ‘Citizen Stanhope’ the defender of the French Revolution and the ‘minority of one’ is unlikely to be effaced. Accordingly such discussion as there has been of the earl's bill has tended to emphasise Stanhope's personal idiosyncrasies and peculiar brand of aristocratic radicalism rather than the detailed provisions of the measure.

The most subtle nineteenth century analysis of religious conviction was the work of John Henry Newman; but who would analyse Newman himself? The simplest, most brilliant and wicked interpretation was that of Henri Bremond, for whom the ‘mystery of Newman’ was an all-devouring ‘autocentrism’ and self centredness, evidenced in an impassioned sense of self-identity and intensified by a twofold conviction of the reality of God and of the unreality of the visible world. Bremond's proof text was Newman's account of his Calvinist conversion, ‘confirming me in my mistrust of material phenomena, and making me rest in die thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. ‘Myself and my Creator’—here, thought Bremond, was an appalling glimpse of Newman's egotism, die secret of a spirit alien to other men, for whom ‘every individual soul is a closed world’. Here was the making of that touchy hypersensitive melancholic, ‘the solitary by choice’, who ‘by confining his universe to two beings, his Creator and himself, made forever that void at the very bottom of his heart’.

In a little over 400 pages Robert T. Handy's volume of the Oxford History of the Christian Church surveys more than four hundred years, two countries of vast geographical extent, almost 300 million people, fifteen churches claiming over two million members each, innumerable smaller churches, denominations and sects. One cannot but admire the tenacity with which he has carried out this daunting task, and be grateful for a critical bibliography of over 30 pages which will be invaluable for anyone who requires a quick guide to the literature on almost any aspect of American or Canadian Church history. The presentation is clear, and the stream—or torrent—of information is handled with skill.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

Until recently, chapbooks lay in the domain of Victorian antiquarians and bibliographers. Few persons have ever taken them seriously. Not even their original owners could mention them without showing embarrassment and adding that they had abandoned the pamphlets for more respectable reading. A half-century later, Victorian collectors called them ‘quaint’ and ‘peculiar’. Successive generations of historians failed in trying to date them and determine patterns of production and distribution. Present-day scholars no longer apologise for neglecting them. Despite this abuse, chapbooks stubbornly survive, their bad bindings preserved by poor cataloguing.