The second general council of Ephesus was convened on August 8, 449, and adjourned some fourteen days later by the legates of Theodosius II, who promptly confirmed the council's canons and decrees.1 It had been as regular, or irregular, as Nicea I or Ephesus I had been, and far more general than the Constantinopolitan synod of 381. Its chief importance lay in registering another splendid victory for the Alexandrines. The “school” of Antioch was shattered beyond repair; Pope Leo and the Westerners were walled off and weakened; the bare notion of “two natures” was branded as Nestorian; every principal see in the East was manned by a henchman of Dioscoros. Moreover, the emperor and his grand chamberlain (the eunuch Chrysaphius, godson to Eutyches) were prepared to support Alexandrine policy with police power.

One of the curiosities of the scholarly enterprise is the fact that often what tends to advance the handling and interpretation of data with respect to one problem has the side effect of preventing adequate and imaginative treatment of related problems. This appears to be the case in recent creedal research. The question of the earliest text of vetus symbolum romanum has been obscured, rather than clarified, by the important recognition at the hands of many scholars of the richness and variety of creedal data surviving from the second century.

The middle of the twelfth century marked an upsurge in historical awareness and a revitalization of the practice of historiography.1 Exemplifying this trend were three men who flourished and died within twenty years of each other. Hugh of St. Victor projected a manysided view of history. Otto of Freising and Ordericus Vitalis were universalizing historians.2 None was an academic professional after the fashion of our modern guild. Each followed a monastic vocation. All protested any evisceration of time and history, every attempt to evacuate humanity therefrom. They extended the Augustinian emphasis on the key role of the Divine in the Hebrew-Christian tradition.

The two Rouen provincial councils that were held in May 1281 and October 1282 are known only from three petitions addressed to Pope Martin IV that survive in a single manuscript. One was printed by Champollion-Figeac in 1839, another by Professor Gaines Post in 1936, but the third remains unpublished because its historical interest has not been apparent. The first two can be readily related to famous events of their day: one urged the canonization of Louis IX, while the other protested the renewal of papal privileges to the mendicant orders. The third, however, has been neglected because its contents do not seem to rise above the commonplace and trivial.

Thomas Müntzer, in the well known words of the Apostle Paul, has come to be ‘all things to all men,’ albeit only after his death. But already during his lifetime opinion was strongly divided over this man. Certainly he had his staunch supporters1 as well as his bitter enemies, but there were also those who saw both good and evil in him. Müntzer's most adamant opponent was undoubtedly Martin Luther himself, who had no intention of standing idly by while his ‘Reformation’ went up in the smoke of revolution.2 Those, however, who saw both good and evil in Müntzer were not involved in the immediate struggle but witnessed events from a distance—the Anabaptists of Zurich under the leadership of Conrad Grebel.3

The immense importance of the idea of the covenant for the Puritans of England and New England has been thrown into sharp relief by recent Puritan studies. Many problems regarding the origin and function of the Puritan covenant-idea still await the careful attention of the student of Puritanism, but this much is clear: the notion of the covenant was decidedly a pervasive idea in Puritan theology, and the idea was developed in a rather elaborate scheme by a host of Puritan theologians. As Leonard J. Trinterud has discerned, the idea of the covenant so permeated the thinking of the Puritans that in “the first decades of the seventeenth century … scarcely a single important figure was not a covenant theologian” among “the Presbyterian and Independent Puritans.”1

Within the last decade, the history of the often obscure efforts made to reach some modus vivendi between the Established Church and the Protestant Nonconformists after 1662 has attracted renewed scholarly attention.1 Recent works have stressed that during the generation dividing the Stuart Restoration from the “Glorious” Revolution, proposals for both comprehension and toleration were repeatedly mooted—sometimes in combination, and at other times in opposition to one another. But it was a scheme of limited toleration which was enacted by the “Convention” Parliament of 1689, while plans for comprehension were shelved by the Houses. Thereafter, as the late Dean of Winchester put it, “Comprehension…faded out of the realm of practical politics with the Non-juror schism and the consequent inaction of Convocation in 1689.”2