If we affirm against recent criticism the authenticity of the Middle Recension of the Ignatian letters, we are nevertheless left with the enigma of Ignatius' relations with Polycarp. This paper explains that enigma in terms of two distinct cultural worlds of early second-century Christianity that come together in the meeting of these two church leaders. Ignatius was the first great missionary bishop who reinterpreted church order, the eucharist and martyrdom against the backcloth of the Second Sophistic in Asia Minor, with its pagan processions, cult and embassies that celebrated the social order of the Greek city state in relation to imperial power. Much of Ignatius' iconography was alien to Polycarp, though the latter was finally to canonise both him and his writings by focusing on his impressively enacted refutation of Docetism through his portrayal of his forthcoming martyrdom.

This essay challenges the criticism usually levelled at the early Fathers prior to Augustine for not articulating a view of justification by faith that corresponded with Pauline Christianity as reflected in the formulas of the sixteenth-century reformers. Not only is such a view anachronistic and tends to assume that there was (or is) a uniform definition of justification, but there is evidence that Latin theology before Augustine promulgated the tenets of unmerited grace and the necessity of righteousness that come only through justifying faith. In particular, the Matthew commentary of Hilary of Poitiers explicitly formulates a biblical theology of ‘fides sola iustificat’, and probably contributed to a revival of interest in the Pauline Epistles by the end of the fourth and early fifth centuries.

Cyprian believed that the maintenance of ecclesial disciplina was the prime responsibility of a bishop's pastoral ministry, particularly in a time of persecution when people's loyalty was under threat. Throughout his episcopate Cyprian ministered to women as well as men who experienced persecution. Not only was he attempting to secure socio-political support through patronage for his position as bishop but he was applying the prescriptions of the Gospels. He praised women who remained faithful as role models for others, instructed and encouraged them in their perseverance and aided them in their need. Women who lapsed were dealt with according to ecclesial disciplina no differently than were the men who lapsed. While lay women and men had their own share in pastoral ministry, the issue of what to do with lapsed Christians raised the question of the extent to which a bishop's responsibilities were primary. In some letters not by Cyprian we sense not only a greater degree of familiarity with lay people but less of a concern with the importance of disciplina. In response to a recent paper in this JOURNAL by Allen Brent, it is argued here that a close reading of these non-Cyprianic letters in the corpus reveals that the male and female confessors who wanted the lapsed to be reconciled did not consider themselves to be presbyters who could reconcile but thought of themselves as confessors with the right to tell the bishop of those whom he was to reconcile.

Apologetics take their place beside miracles of healing and courage in the face of persecution as an important means of furthering the early Christian mission. In the first two centuries AD, when the popular perception was that Christianity was closely allied to Judaism, the argument from Old Testament prophecy was important. In the third century, however, as the Church gained ground among the educated classes in east and west, the emphasis changed to an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over its pagan rivals as a philosophy with a more convincing understanding of the role of providence. Apologists in the north African tradition, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius and Lactantius, all played their part in this process. The prophecies of the Old Testament had to be confirmed by other prophecies, notably the Sibylline oracles and the sayings of Hermes Trismegistus. Finally, in the fourth century, many north Africans who, like Augustine for ten years, adhered to Manichaean Christianity relied wholly on these authorities, rejecting the Old Testament altogether.

Abelard discussed the status and history of the ordo sanctimonialium in several of his works. In them he identified abbesses as the successors to the ancient order of deaconesses and thus sacramentally ordained and equal to any male order. This understanding followed a venerable tradition that stood in stark contrast to the more recent claims of the Glossa ordinaria, Gratian and Peter the Lombard that the only true sacramental orders were the subdiaconate, the diaconate and the presbyterate. Abelard's work then can be understood in part as a response to these claims and a defence of the older tradition.

Scholars generally associate the Order of Apostles, founded around 1260 by Gerardo Segarelli in Parma, Italy, with medieval heresies. This article analyses the leading source for the first three decades of the Apostles, the chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene de Adam of Parma, and casts Segarelli and the Apostle friars instead as thirteenth-century mendicants who rivalled the Franciscans in the Emilia, the Romagna and the March of Ancona. Salimbene's depiction of Gerardo Segarelli focuses on the chronicler's desire to recreate his rival as an inversion of Francis of Assisi and Franciscan ideals. Gerardo Segarelli emerges in the account as an anti-Francis. Yet only after 1274, when the Second Council of Lyons ordered a general suppression of all religious movements founded after Fourth Lateran in 1215, did the situation change slowly for Segarelli's followers as opponents began to question their obedience to papal authority. Gerardo Segarelli and the Apostle friars ultimately faced condemnation as heretics, but not before the 1290s. Salimbene's chronicle, written in the 1280s, should not be taken as a source for a ‘Segarellian heresy’ launched by a ‘heresiarch’ in the Joachite year 1260, but as a source for mendicant rivalry in the thirteenth century that was deeply passionate in its rhetoric and invective.

Very little work has been done on Iberian queens and even less on Iberian saints. This study of Isabel of Aragon (c. 1270–1336), wife of King Dinis of Portugal (1279–1325), who was venerated as a saint from shortly after her death, aims to explore the relationship between Isabel's queenship and her sainthood. It engages with recent research, and critiques obvious comparisons between Isabel and her great-aunt St Elizabeth of Thuringia. Isabel may also be compared with numerous other medieval European queens and her main vita displays striking similarities to royal courtesy literature found elsewhere.

This paper does not discuss the authenticity or antiquity of the Holy Shroud. It addresses the problem of its historical appearance in the 1350s and its antecedents, if any, before that date. It is suggested that the object owed its creation (if a replica) or its transmission into Europe (if genuinely a relic) to the efforts of members of the Franciscan order. It speculates particularly on the role of Spirituals of that order aligned with Fra Angelo Clareno and his associates. The conclusions do not assert but suggest the thesis, and advance it as a line of inquiry meriting further pursuit.

William Perkins, usually described as an Elizabethan Puritan, was significant in ways that are only beginning to be recognised by historians. His writings, published in numerous editions in England and on the continent and translated into Latin and half a dozen vernacular languages, made him the most prominent English theologian of his day. This article contends that his career was devoted not to bringing about changes in the Established Church but to making that Church's teachings better known and appreciated. Perkins should be seen as a leading apologist for the Elizabethan Church of England.

This study sets the history of a friendship in the context of religious reform in Italy in the 1530s. Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton were friends at the University of Padua but gradually became foes. In 1536 Morison returned to England to become Cromwell's propagandist and later Throckmorton began his dramatic career as Pole's agent. In Italy, however, both these young humanists had links with a group of reformers later called ‘spirituali’. Morison met them through contacts with Edmund Harvel and Bishop Cosimo Gheri. The discovery of Throckmorton's inventory shows that he owned books associated with Italian reform, including banned publications containing writings of the Northern Reformers. The rift between them was caused by political reformation in England, not religion in Italy.

When it first appeared in Germany, Gottfried Arnold's History of heretics (1699) was a publishing sensation, immediately causing a stir due to its radical reinterpretation of the Christian past. Numerous scholars wrote against it, but the most determined was the Orthodox Lutheran Ernst Salomon Cyprian, who considered the central thesis of the work – that the history of the Christian Church was a history of decline – a deliberate attack on the principles of Lutheran belief. In Cyprian's view, Arnold's reading of the past was shaped by a cast of personal faith which not only rewrote the Protestant narrative of Christian history, but threatened the very fabric of Lutheran belief.

Over the past forty years historians have demonstrated continued interest in tracing the development of radical early modern English apocalypticism. The Tudor and Stuart eschatological scene, however, encompassed more than just millenarian activism. This article emphasises the pastoral ends to which Revelation was used by a group of late sixteenth-century writers as they sought to make it accessible to the ‘common sort’ of Christian. Viewing interest in the Last Days through this pastoral lens highlights both the tense complexities present in the Elizabethan Church and the usefulness of eschatological themes in studying ordinary and normative aspects of religious experience.

This article explores the various factors that both encouraged Irish Presbyterian involvement in mission and shaped how they understood their missionary calling. It contributes to the recent growth of interest in the Protestant missionary movement and takes issue with the predominant interpretation of Irish Presbyterianism offered by David Miller who misunderstands the complex relationship between traditional Presbyterianism, evangelicalism and modernity. After an overview of the main developments between 1790 and 1840, a consideration of the influence of the Reformed theological tradition, eschatology and the growth of evangelicalism is followed by an examination of the Enlightenment, the expansion of the British empire and the Presbyterian sense of patriotic duty. Though various non-religious factors shaped Presbyterian attitudes to mission, it will be argued that their active involvement was a product of sincere religious conviction and an eschatological reading of the signs of the times.

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.

This essay examines the political and religious impetus behind Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis's recognition of Anglican orders in 1922. The furore surrounding recognition, the events that led up to it and the fall-out that followed shed light on the many difficulties faced by religious leaders in the post-war Orthodox world, difficulties that led to fierce jockeying among Orthodox clerics as they tried to establish themselves in relation to their coreligionists and to the larger Christian world. The controversy also offers insight into the problems inherent when a ‘comprehensive’ Church such as the Church of England enters into discussions with a more uniformly dogmatic confession such as Orthodoxy.

The Isle of Man was a distinct diocese before it became a possession of the English crown in 1399. In the following centuries it retained not only a national legislature, the Tynwald, but the lord bishop of Sodor and Man. Ecclesiastical officers were to be found in Tynwald as early as 1614, and throughout the nineteenth century it included the lord bishop, the vicars-general and the archdeacon of the diocese. During the twentieth century the number of ecclesiastical officers in the legislature dwindled, until today only the lord bishop survives, and his position remains controversial.

‘Habent sua fata libelli’. Had Einhard been able to contemplate the fate of his own libellus of 41 pages (in the standard modern edition) as revealed in Matthias Tischler's 1,828-page two-volume liber, the gamut of his responses from angst to wonderment would surely have included gratitude. In all the voluminous historiography on the Vita Karoli, no one has paid Einhard the compliment of taking his little book as seriously as has Tischler in bringing this Heidelberg doctoral thesis of 1998, now in expanded form, to a wider audience. The subtitle indicates the three dimensions of Tischler's vast enquiry: the immediate context of the VK's original writing, as Einhard responded creatively to an urgent political situation; the VK's own evolving life (if books have fates, Tischler says they also have lives) through preservation and transmission in an extraordinary number of manuscripts; and the VK's afterlife in its variegated reception across eight centuries by scribes, scholars and patrons. Tischler has taken his cue from the literary historian Paul Aebischer: ‘la Vita Karoli est un immense continent’. In Tischler, the improbable continent – vaster than ever realised before and with larger prospects of cultural riches – has found its hinterland explorer and topographer.

The Welsh religious revival of 1904–5 was a remarkable event which has evoked a number of contradictory responses. These were in some ways fuelled by the content of a folk memory which often appears to be divorced from the events of the revival itself. As a result, ambiguity has surrounded the revival and particularly the contribution of Evan Roberts, probably its most interesting and colourful leader. This article explores some aspects of that folk memory and seeks to ‘demythologise’ them by drawing on accounts of the revival meetings published by those who were involved at the time.

Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) was arguably the foremost theologian at the Paris of his day. Envisaging the house of theology as composed of lecturing, disputing and preaching, he himself was the first to compose lectiones on all the books of the Bible; his questiones were collected in a large Summa de sacramentis; and although few of his sermons have survived, he wrote a popular manual of moral theology for preachers, the Verbum abbreviatum (VA), that has survived in nearly a hundred manuscripts across western Europe. The VA was the first of the Chanter's works to be published, in 1639 by the Belgian monk Georges Galopin in a serviceable edition from three northern French manuscripts. It was given wide circulation when abbé Migne republished it in the Patrologia Latina in 1855. In 1905 Camille Miroux was the first to recognise that the VA had survived in two versions, a long one in six manuscripts and a short one in at least forty manuscripts that became the vulgate version and was that edited by Galopin. In a Handschrift Reise in 1959 I examined seventy-three of the eighty-five manuscripts known to me and published my findings, classifications and conclusions in Masters, princes and merchants. Galopin had also found a fragment of the long version which he published as an appendix to his own edition. Although it is futile to determine how many have consulted this fragment in Migne's reprint, to my knowledge I am the only one who has printed extracts from the complete long version.