In this article I shall republish a small corpus of epitaphs from the Roman imperial household, with apparently Christian features. These texts have not previously been published together. The dating of these inscriptions will be discussed, and inferences about the Christian community in the imperial service during the Severan period will be drawn from the points of comparison which can be made between the texts.

It has long been known from literary sources that there were Christians in the emperors' service in these years. For the generation after Justin Martyr's death, Christian literature provides three references to Christianity in the familia Caesaris. Hippolytus says that Callistus, later to be bishop of Rome, was the slave of Carpophorus, a Christian ‘of the emperor's household’ during the reign of Commodus (180–92). Irenaeus, writing in that reign, refers in the course of a theological argument to ‘those in the royal palace who are believers’, without giving any hint about the number of Christians involved. Then in the 190s Tertullian's Apologeticum lists the palace along with other commanding heights of Roman life in which, he asserts, Christians have established a presence. By this time it was evidently well-known in Christian circles, including in the provinces, that there were Christians in the familia Caesaris: of these three authors, only Hippolytus was based in Rome where the imperial household was centred.

In the two centuries before 1410 it was the custom for the king of Aragon to open a session of the cortes with a speech. These speeches were not merely simple statements of the reasons why the cortes had been summoned but were elaborately staged and ornately constructed orations, very often written in the style of sermons. Affairs of state were portrayed in terms of Christian morality with the aid of exempla drawn from the Old Testament and from other religious works, emphasising, above all, the king's God-given authority. Exempla were also derived from written royal histories of the Crown of Aragon, transmitted orally by the king to his people and used to create a feeling of national pride and unity between the king and his subjects. I propose to examine the use of these royal sermons in the Crown of Aragon first by discussing whether it is indeed right to call these politically motivated speeches sermons at all; second, by putting the Crown of Aragon into context by examining the evidence for royal preaching throughout Europe; third, by considering the evidence for a long-standing tradition of preaching by members of the royal house of Aragon; and finally, in order to illustrate in more detail the nature and content of royal Aragonese sermons, by providing a detailed analysis of the speeches by King Pedro iv ‘the Ceremonious’ to the Cortes of Tarragona (Catalonia) of 1370 and to the Cortes of Monzón (Aragon) of 1383, full texts of which were recorded in the official proceedings.

‘places consecrated to God [should] be venerated by all, and by no means profaned or in any way violated by a jarring or unsuitable activity, whether in working, jesting or playing …; [there should be] no laughter, shouting, immoderate mirth, indecent and indiscreet dances, indecent mockeries and harmful plays proper to the market-place or the stage’: letter of Bishop Edmund Lacy of Exeter, 1451

Old churchyards enshrine vast amounts of personal and social history, although most of it, sadly, is not recoverable. Furthermore, they often display a romantic and touching beauty. When exploring villages and towns in all parts of Britain, many of us have been moved by the sight of a raised platform of hummocky turf surrounding an ancient Christian church, walled and gated, crossed by narrow paths, shaded by mature trees, dotted with leaning headstones and lichened table-tombs, perhaps with the weathered stump of a medieval preaching cross. Above all we are impressed by the thought that most of the local population, over many centuries, lies here, ‘each in his narrow cell for ever laid’. For example, a rural churchyard of half an acre at Widford in Hertfordshire is estimated to hold more than 5,000 burials, laid to rest over a period of at least 900 years. Such places have witnessed many solemn rituals: consecration by a bishop, occasional claims of sanctuary, sad clusters of mourners around open graves, the commemorative prayers and bell-ringing of All Saints' and All Souls' days, parochial processions on Palm Sunday or Corpus Christi, and at all periods the lonely vigils of the bereaved. Repeatedly opened and re-filled by generations of gravediggers, churchyards are potent reminders of human mortality which the living have mostly treated with respect, deep reflection and some superstition.

In 1564 Artus de Cossé-Brissac, bishop of Coutances in Normandy, was a member of a French diplomatic mission to Queen Elizabeth. He took the opportunity to assert a claim to exercise episcopal jurisdiction in the Channel Islands. The claim was less preposterous than it might appear, since Coutances's jurisdiction in the islands had been acknowledged throughout Henry viii's reign, and again in that of Mary. Queen and Privy Council took the 1564 claim seriously enough to demand a response from the islanders. After a good deal of prevarication on their part, the crown eventually ruled against the bishop's claim, on the grounds, as argued by the islanders, that they were subject to the bishop of Winchester. In the event, Winchester was not to enjoy its newly rediscovered rights for long. The islands were already in the process of establishing their own churches, using French Calvinist forms of worship and a fully synodical system of church government. From 1576 the islanders governed themselves without reference to episcopal authority, which was not to be re-established, in Jersey, until the reign of James i, and in Guernsey that of Charles ii. When challenged the islanders defended their position by claiming that they were indeed part of the diocese of Coutances, and that they were following the best practice of the reformed churches in that diocese.

This story is well established in outline, largely through the labours of island historians, but above all through the work of two impressive nineteenth-century French historians. A. J. Eagleston made accessible a good deal of this work, including his own researches, but unfortunately his book had to be posthumously published and is therefore rather piecemeal. D. M. Ogier has now published a valuable study of the Reformation in Guernsey. It traces the internal history in depth, stressing the conservatism of the bulk of the population and skilfully elucidating the crucial question of ecclesiastical property, before going on to its main concern, the impact of the Presbyterian discipline on island society. Although Ogier acknowledges the significance of relations between the English crown and various French parties in explaining events, he does little to elucidate these interactions; nor does he display much interest in the personalities involved in his story. This article will attempt to explain both the reluctance of successive English governments to challenge the rights of the bishop of Coutances, and the apparent inability of the Elizabethan government to prevent French Protestant refugees moulding the island churches in their own image. It will also look at some of the leading figures involved, most notably one John Aster, dean of Guernsey, a prime mover in the events of the 1560s, whose career in military administration before his ordination at the age of fifty has not been noticed; and more generally it will emphasise the link between militant Protestantism and the worlds of diplomacy and espionage.

The role of Protestantism in the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) has been strongly disputed since the ‘turn’ and reunification of 1989/90. Many of the disagreements derive from different interpretations of the relationship between State, Church and Society in the GDR. This paper first describes the state institutions which formulated and executed church policies for the Communist Party of the GDR (the SED), and then surveys relations between Church and State, offering an explanation for actions and motivations on both sides. The thesis advanced is that the decisive phase of the transformation of a ‘bourgeois’ Church into a ‘Church within socialism’ took place between 1958 and 1978, and that the preceding and subsequent periods merely had the character of ‘past history’ and ‘epilogue’.

A variety of institutions influenced Church–State policies in the GDR. First, at government level, there was until 1957 a department for ecclesiastical affairs controlled by the deputy prime minister ; after that date, there was an official secretary for church affairs, answerable to the chairman of the government (Ministerrat). At party level in the SED, there was a working group for church affairs which was part of the secretariat of the SED's central committee, answerable to the first secretary or the secretary-general of the central committee. The central committee office included a member with specific responsibility for church affairs, generally the second in line after the party chairman. In the Ministry for State Security (MfS), those involved were the head of the so-called ‘main department for social superstructure’, together with a representative of the minister or the minister himself, and the heads of administration in individual ‘Lands’ or districts.