The history of the sermon that Matthew Parker preached at the funeral of Martin Bucer is more complicated than has been thought. It is generally known that the first printing of 1551 was subsequently translated from English into Latin for a European audience in 1562 (printed in that year and again in 1577), and then published in English a second time, in a 1587 imprint that is thought to be a second edition. What is not generally known is that the second English printing was a translation of the 1562/1577 Latin version, and that in the process of translation and re-translation, Parker's original sermon was stripped of nearly 60 per cent of its content, as a eulogy that followed the sermon was misattributed to Walter Haddon at some point just prior to 1562. The present article seeks to explain how this came to pass, and argues that the 1551 imprint should replace the 1587 as the primary text for what Parker said of Bucer.

This article calls into question a story that has become part of the folklore and indeed the official history of Cambridge University. Supposedly, the passage of the Chantries Act posed a threat to university colleges which was averted by the lobbying of Cambridge academics early in 1546, and this adroit intervention inspired Henry VIII to found new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Close reading of the sources, however, indicates that the universities were singled out for special treatment from the start and that Henry's new foundations were in his mind before the Chantries Act was passed.

This article builds upon recent scholarship on the role of church ‘reform’ and the cult of saints in English royal politics around the turn of the second millennium, arguing that the infamous ‘St Brice's Day massacre’ of 13 November 1002 may have been planned for that date in part because of the associations of the cult of Brice/Brictius. After outlining this hypothesis, the article explores the broader implications of the emergence of a universal martyrological calendar for historical writing and political action, and for the exercise and communication of violence in particular.