Venerated at Polesworth (Warws.) in the late Anglo-Saxon period, the identity of St Edith remains uncertain, with medieval chroniclers suggesting various candidates, but she is likely to have been a seventh-century Mercian princess, perhaps also connected with a church near Louth (Lincs.). Buried at Polesworth, where miracles were still being recorded in the thirteenth century, and perhaps with relics in the collegiate church at nearby Tamworth, her cult was very localised, with only a few outliers elsewhere in the Midlands, probably linked to the Marmion family, lords of Tamworth castle and the founders in the mid twelfth-century of a female religious house at Polesworth.

The Monothelete controversy, a Christological dispute that seemingly consumed the Eastern Roman Empire in the seventh century, also left its mark in Latin texts composed in Merovingian Gaul. By integrating the western evidence and recent revisions to the controversy's history, this study presents a new overview of how Frankish observers viewed the eastern ‘heresy’ and papal efforts to condemn the doctrine in 649. Though negative on the surface, western attitudes towards this Christological debate in the 650s are much more mixed and new evidence can be adduced for the continuation of positive exchanges between the empire and the Franks.

In the early fifth century, both Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo used Eusebius of Caesarea's Chronicle in the writing of their respective apologetic treatises – Against Julian for Cyril and The city of God for Augustine. The present study compares the use that these two authors made of their predecessor and argues for two continuities between these acts of reception: the use of synchronisms between biblical and non-biblical history and the tracing of Mosaic monotheism through time. In both these respects, Cyril and Augustine were carrying forward themes of Christian apologetic that reached back to the second-century apologists.

What is a photisterion? Translators usually render the Greek word phōtistērion (site of illumination) as ‘baptistery’ (site of immersion in water). This article reopens the study of phōtistēria, arguing that being ‘immersed’ or ‘illuminated’ evokes different senses of the concomitant meaning of the sites and rites of initiation. It situates late ancient phōtistēria from epigraphic and literary sources in their theological and liturgical contexts. The evidence from Galilee, Syria, Jordan and Cyprus corroborates the idea that many Christians of late antiquity preferred ‘illumination’ to express the composite rite of initiation in a phōtistērion, within which ‘baptism’ was one part.

The letters of the First Crusade have traditionally been read as authentic and trustworthy eyewitness accounts of the expedition and they contribute greatly to scholarly understanding of the campaign. But new research on them demonstrates that many of the documents are in fact twelfth-century confections produced in the monastic communities of the West as a means of supporting, participating in and engaging with the crusading movement. This article develops new approaches to the letters and new research questions which account for and accept the problematic authenticity of the corpus, pivoting away from traditional methodologies to explore the monastic scribal cultures that produced and consumed First Crusade letters.

The article establishes that the role of the Rus Archbishop Peter at the First Council of Lyon (1245) was not limited to conveying sensational information about the Tatars, as is usually believed. Peter was willing to resume negotiations between the Apostolic See and the rulers of the Byzantine (Nicene) Empire on the union of Churches, which continued with varying success throughout the thirteenth century. In the mid-1240s the Rus church hierarchs, who headed the Kiev (all Rus) Metropolitanate of the Byzantine Church, played an important, yet underestimated by researchers, role in establishing direct contacts between the Byzantine and Roman Churches and resuming negotiations for church unity.

Thomas of Edessa (d. c. 540), author of Explanations of the Nativity and of Epiphany, flourished as a teacher at the School of Nisibis in Sasanid Persia. By analysing his understanding of salvation history, exegesis and the idea of the human being as ‘bond of creation’, this article shows how Thomas took up and popularised concepts central to the theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia. The article posits that the Nisibene school theology of Thomas and others constituted – alongside liturgy, canonical decrees and biblical commentaries – one of the principal avenues by which Theodore's theology was transmitted to the Church of the East.

Monks writing at Saint-Clément, Metz, over roughly two hundred years produced conflicting images of Bishop Theodoric I (965–84). In earlier texts, he is the monks’ benefactor, in later sources, their foe. Historians have sought to flatten this contrast, partly because of their assumptions about monastic reform. This paper offers an alternative reading that questions those assumptions. It suggests that the evolution of Theodoric's image reflects changing ideas about monastic reform and the proper relationship between bishops and monks. It also cautions against accepting narratives – medieval or modern – that obscure the fluidity of such ideas and relationships.

This article surveys a collection of lay saints who were neither martyrs nor born into a royal family to show that, despite previous assumptions, this type of sainthood was possible before developments of the twelfth century. Two main themes emerge from their cults, namely an attempt to promote pious role models for the lay aristocracy and the growth of pilgrimage as an expression of wider devotion. The cults are also situated in the context of the Gregorian reform movement, showing that they contribute to a picture of clergy and laity working symbiotically rather than in opposition.

Trinity College, Cambridge, ms B.15.5, contains a copy of Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica, donated by Nigel of Canterbury to the library at Christ Church. This article focuses on the exegetical content of its dense annotations. Heavily dependent on the writings of theologians associated with the school of St Victor, they offer an insight into the kinds of sources which were read alongside the Historia scholastica in this period. The article also queries a note made on the flyleaf which identifies Nigel as the compiler, examining its credibility and its implications for the presumed chronology of his life.

In this study evidence is brought forth from large treasuries of scholastic manuscripts at Hereford and Lincoln that challenges R. M. Thomson's assessment of the importance of those collections during the High Middle Ages. As it turns out, as early as the twelfth century those libraries contained copies of the most important works in the developing Parisian theological curriculum, and the earliest copies of those works may reside in these and other English cathedral libraries. Manuscripts preserving early versions of the Sentences are especially interesting, since they make it possible to study the evolution of Peter Lombard's thought during his lifetime.

This essay examines the legal arguments in Wolf c. Abingdon, a tithes dispute from 1293–5 between the rector and the vicar of Aldington, Kent. The case records contain explicit citations to written law, a surprising find in a seemingly minor case. The presence of explicit citations in particular suggests first that the litigants had access to legal assistance in the provincial court, and second that advocates and possibly judges were turning to written legal sources to resolve disputed points. This essay shows how the litigants' arguments were constructed and determines whether or not these arguments were effective in court.

This article explores the killing of priests by supporters of Edward VI's Protestant regime during the Western Rebellion of 1549. It begins by considering what previous historians have had to say on the subject – and by noting that they have differed quite sharply about the number of priests who died. The article then moves on to re-consider the primary evidence in depth, in order to establish what a minimum figure for clerical fatalities might reasonably be said to be – and concludes that that figure may well have been a good deal higher than has been appreciated hitherto.

England's first Tudor monarchs were formally devoted to the cult of St Thomas of Canterbury. In popular memory, however, Thomas was a champion of law and custom, an opponent of untrammelled royal power, and – especially among the clergy – a martyr for ecclesiastical ‘liberties’. This suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was considerably less ‘monarchical’ than is sometimes supposed. In the 1530s Thomas became a powerful symbol of resistance to Henry VIII's royal supremacy. However, the fact that he could be portrayed as a patron of the clergy's sectional interests helps to explain how opposition was weakened and divided.

Although not liturgically mandated, the ostentatious microarchitectural font cover became one of the most significant ecclesiastical furnishings of the later Middle Ages. In fact, as a church fixture it survived well into the seventeenth century, not only in Catholic but also in Protestant regions, even though its eye-catching forms represented an obvious target for radical reformers and iconoclasts. Despite their enduring presence and their obvious importance to the communities that erected them, font covers remain little researched and understood. Revolving around a discussion of their intensely visual nature, this article is an attempt at a first outline of a history of this fascinating genre of church furnishing.

Cathedrals are usually thought to have had little role in the English Reformation and the reasons for their very survival in the new Church of England have been questioned. Instead of being an irrelevant and closed-off institution, Durham Cathedral was intellectually close to its Reformation-era bishop, the conservative Cuthbert Tunstall, and was involved in diocesan matters throughout his episcopate. Tunstall's evangelical successors also appreciated its potential for reform and the need to use its staff and resources. Cathedrals thus could be a tool to be used in the reformation of the diocese on both sides of the emerging confessional divide.

The principal aim of this article is to analyse the rise of a Latin American Catholic identity during the mid- to late nineteenth century. It examines the institutionalisation of this collective project via the foundation of the Latin American College in Rome in 1858 and the initiatives that led to the Latin American Plenary Council in 1899. This article also explores how this collective religious identity was imagined and how its limits were drawn. In doing so a new insight into how religions contributed to the imagining and defining of geographical spaces is offered.

This essay addresses several unresolved problems associated with the production, dissemination and reception of the King James Bible. It argues that James i’s initial enthusiasm was not sustained and that Archbishop Bancroft was the key figure for seeing the translation through to completion. His death, just before the Bible appeared, explains why there was no order for its purchase by parishes. Instead, its acquisition was left to individual bishops, so that it took until the Civil War for the new Bible to be widely available in worship. Its broad acceptability by that time was a result of its increasing use in household and private devotions as much as in public worship.

Sixteenth-century English separatists and Puritan conformists held a great deal in common but one simple distinction set them apart. Separatists recognised no other authority but Scripture: not logic, philosophy or reason; not tradition; not any human writing. Puritan conformists allowed a place for those authorities, though subordinate to Scripture. That distinction shaped printed debate over church government and worship. Separatists worked within an ‘all-or-nothing mentality’; in response, conformists were forced to adopt a ‘bare-minimum mentality’, which was quite different from how they argued in the opposite direction against the bishops of the Church of England.

This article examines the performance of music in a Maltese female Benedictine monastery in the early modern period in relation to prevailing attitudes towards monastic music and polyphony. By placing these letters in their social and cultural context, it also offers fresh insights into female literacy in early modern Malta. The discussion centres on a set of fifteen unpublished letters that provide a rare example of a woman in early eighteenth-century Malta engaged in a written exchange of theological and philosophical ideas.