In 430, Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, wrote in his treatise Adversus Nestorium that we must put away idle questioning and “receive with faith the simple and undefiled tradition.” Which tradition did he have in mind? About the same time, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, defended a priest who denied the appellation theotokos to the Virgin Mary. Nestorius claimed the term was not in accord with the tradition. Which tradition did he have in mind?

The significant manuscript discoveries on medieval neo-Manichaeism in the last twenty-five years have raised the hope that the Albigensian riddle may now be more accurately and critically appraised. However, the problems are far from being solved. Despite penetrating essays and newly found sources, more clarification is needed on (a) the origins of Catharism. Henri-Charles Puech, of the Collége de France, has clearly summed up this question in “Catharisme mèdiéval et Bogomilisme,” Accademia nazionale dei lincei: XII Convegno “Volta” promossa dalla classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche (Roma, 1957), pp. 56–84; (b) religion, where the question is not merely whether the Cathari were dualists, but to what degree. There is an excellent essay, partly solving this problem, by Hans Söderberg, La religion des Cathares: Etude sur le Gnosticisme de la basse Antiquité et du Moyen Age (Uppsala, 1949); (c) the political situation. “Occitanie,” later called Languedoc, was at the time independent of the Capetian Kings of France who undertook to integrate it, by the sword of Simon of Montfort, as discussed by Jacques Madaule, Le drame albigeois et le destin français (Paris: B. Grasset, 1961); (d) Albigensianism coincided with courtly love, a subject which has not been sufficiently elucidated as to the relationship of the troubadours and Catharism, although numerous essays have been written about it.

The Concordat of Vienna (1448) was one of the most suggestive historical phenomena of the fifteenth century. Drafted in the midst of a century characterized by diplomatic intrigue and institutional flux, and ratified amid the pageantry of traditional ceremony, it implicitly suggested the restoration of order and stability. The agreement appeared to signify the re-establishment of papal supremacy, the destruction of conciliarism, and even the partial restoration of the medieval Christian Commonwealth by virtue of the submission of the Empire to Rome. Contemporary notions relating to the Concordat of Vienna are invariably drawn from the works of the papal historians Ludwig Pastor and Mandell Creighton. Both viewed it as a papal victory and a defeat of the Council of Basel. F. X. Seppelt took a more cautious position and suggested that the eventual implementation of the agreement brought many concessions to the territorial princes. Joseph Gill in his recent biography of Pope Eugenius almost entirely bypassed this phase of the pontiff's activity. Only Bertram's monograph on the concordats of the later middle ages devoted some space to the 1448 pact. While presenting some interesting conclusions, he failed to adequately interpret any one concordat in the light of its own peculiar political background.

This paper deals with the nature of the idea of “covenant” in English Puritan writings of the first half of the seventeenth century, and particularly as this bears upon the question of the assurance of salvation.

That this assurance could be obtained was a commonly accepted axiom and, indeed, the actual striving for such awareness was a commonly recognized obligation. When William Ames wrote, “The assurance of our calling and election is a thing greatly to be desired”, he also added the statement that this certainty “is not only possible for us to attaine unto, but also … it belongs to our duty to make this our calling and election sure”. There may well be many difficulties along the way, with serious agonies and doubtings. But excessive fearfulness is as great a sin as presumption, denying as it does the power of God's mercy. And so William Perkins could say, “we doe not teach that all and every man living within the precincts of the Church, professing the name of Christ is certen of his salvation, … but that he ought so to be, and must indeavor to attaine thereto”.