This article discusses a privately owned manuscript of St Francis's collection of addresses known as the Admonitions in the context of the nature of the work, the textual transmission of Francis's writings, his method of composition and other manuscripts of the Admonitions, especially those dating from the thirteenth century. It is argued that the manuscript antedates Francis's canonisation in 1228, is the earliest known manuscript containing the Admonitions and indeed the earliest manuscript of any of Francis's more substantial works. The article publishes the text and provides facsimiles of the manuscript.

Highlighting some of the tensions within Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania after the Council of Trent, this article offers a corrective to the traditional Jesuit-centred paradigm of Catholic renewal. While long held to be central to the successes of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits were opposed by large sections of the Catholic nobility, a paradox that has never been adequately explained. By exploring the conflicts between the Jesuits and the more established Dominican order, the phenomenon of Catholic anticlericalism can be understood as part of a wider dissonance in Catholic culture, and integral to the accommodation of noble and Catholic culture after Trent.

This article examines a previously unnoticed link between the Puritan John Burgess and the Calvinist conformist George Hakewill. In 1604 Burgess preached a court sermon so outspoken and critical of James i's religious policy that he was imprisoned. Nearly twenty years later, however, Hakewill chose to incorporate extended passages from Burgess's sermon into the series of sermons, King David's vow (1621), preached to Prince Charles's household. This article considers why Burgess's sermon became so resonant for Hakewill in the early 1620s and also demonstrates how Hakewill deliberately sought to moderate Burgess's strident polemic. In so doing the article provides important new evidence for the politically attuned sermon culture at Prince Charles's court in the early 1620s and also suggests how, as the parameters for clerical conformity shifted in the latter years of James's reign, Calvinist conformists found a new appeal in the works of moderate Puritans.

Gender ideologies have been shown to be an important element in creating national identity. The settler population of early colonial Queensland was largely drawn from Protestant England and Scotland, and Catholic Ireland. In the process of social formation, Anglican men contributed to building a Protestant hegemony that strove to marginalise the Irish Catholic part of the population. In doing so they bracketed Tractarianism with Catholicism in an attempt to assert the essentially Protestant nature of Anglicanism. This paper explores three debates that took place in the public domain in the period 1855–65, and their impact on the local Anglican community and on social formation in the fledgling colonial society.

The British experience of the First World War has given rise to a host of myths and misconceptions in both the folklore and the historiography of the war. The most damaging of these for the Church of England has been that its army chaplains skulked in the rear while a generation of British men fought and died in the trenches of the Western Front. This article exposes the falsity of this myth, tracing its origins to the inter-war boom in ‘war books’ and its longevity among ecclesiastical historians in particular to the pacifist sensitivities and flawed historiography of the 1960s and the 1970s.