On 9 April 1514 Tamás Bakócz, archbishop of Esztergom and cardinal-legate of Pope Leo X, initiated the preaching of a crusade against the Turks in Hungary. On 24 April György Dózsa Székely, a minor nobleman serving with the garrison of Belgrade who had experience of fighting the Turks, was appointed as commander of the crusading army. Dózsa marched southwards from Pest on 10 May with the main body of crusaders, some 15,000 strong, for the most part peasants. Five days later Archbishop Bakócz and the Hungarian royal council called a halt to the preaching. Their cancellation was provoked by the fact that the crusade preaching had generated alarming social unrest, and on 22 May an encounter occurred at Várad in which an army of crusaders defeated a force of nobles. The crusade was now showing all the features of an uprising, and two days after the battle of Várad, coincidentally on the same day that György Dózsa inflicted another defeat on the nobles at Nagylak, the king called off the crusade and ordered the peasant crusaders to return home. His command was ignored and attempts to organise local resistance against the various crusade armies met with only partial success. It proved necessary to recall János Zápolyai and the troops who were engaged against the Turks in the east. At the end of June Zápolyai marched in relief of Temesvár (Timisoara), the fortress which Dózsa was besieging, evidently with the plan to establish a strategic base between the Maros and the Danube. Here, on 15 July, the vojvoda smashed the crusading army and turned the tide of the revolt, which lasted for just a few more weeks.

In the spring of 1593 Richard Hooker published the first part of his work Of the laws of ecclesiastical polity which has come to be known as the most famous attempt to persuade Elizabethan Puritans to conform to the laws of the English Church. Hooker's writings have received more scholarly attention than those of any other contemporary church polemicist but no consensus has, as yet, been arrived at regarding the nature of his argument or the way in which his ideas addressed the major issues of Elizabethan church controversy. It is my intention in this essay to focus on these issues and thus provide some insight into the details of Hooker's theory of law and its broader significance as an argument relating to the legislative authority of the Church of England.

Consider the central religious crisis in the life of each of three individuals. First, on 21 March 1748, in the belly of a ship in the dead of night, awakened by a raging North Atlantic storm which threatened to sweep all on board to a watery death, John Newton cries out to God for mercy. Second, at an insane asylum on 26 July 1764, William Cowper emerges from nearly a year of psychological derangement and repeated attempts at self-destruction, and, flinging himself into a window-seat in the parlour, he opens a Bible, reads, and falls into a spiritual reverie as a kind of divine light floods into his soul. And then third, after months of anxiety over his ineffectual pastoral ministry, and remorse over the levity with which he entered holy orders, Thomas Scott shuts himself up in his study with his Bible, the works of Richard Hooker and other Anglican divines, and by Christmas 1777 argues himself into evangelical conviction.

There are a number of excellent studies on the Protestant Churches in the Third Reich, but none contains a thorough treatment of the smaller Free Churches. Ernst Christian Helmreich included a short chapter on these in his 1979 work on The German Churches under Hitler: background, struggle and epilogue. The recent publication of a work by Andrea Strübind on the German Baptist Churches, Die unfreie Freikirche: der Bund der Baptistengemeinden im Dritten Reich (1995), and by Herbert Strahm on the Episcopal Methodist Church, Die Bischöfliche Methodistenkirche im Dritten Reich (1989), should encourage research on a topic that has been badly neglected in the past.

This article seeks to shed light on the relationship of German evangelicalism as embodied in the Free Churches to the mainline provincial churches as well as to the regime of National Socialism. It will show that evangelicals were actually far less united than is generally perceived to be the case.

Until recently, the Humiliati of northern Italy have not been fortunate in their historiography. If they are known to Anglophone medievalists, it is usually in walk-on parts, either as the heretics condemned in the bull Ad abolendam at the Council of Verona in 1184, or as the pious enthusiasts, precursors of the mendicants, who were recognised and approved by Innocent III in 1201. Although they went on to play a prominent role in many north Italian regions, the later history of the Humiliati has frequently been treated with indifference, except perhaps by those interested in the development of the north Italian wool industry. This is partly because, unlike their contemporaries the Waldensians, the Humiliati did not have to keep defending themselves: their orthodoxy was not long questioned and they became part of the backbone of the religious communities of north Italian cities, taken for granted and largely untrumpeted. Their lack of ‘history’ also reflects the failure of the order to survive the Counter-Reformation. When one of the brethren, objecting strongly to attempts by Carlo Borromeo to reform their much decayed houses, tried quite literally to shoot the messenger, the male order was abruptly disbanded and most of the sources for their communities were dispersed. They thus lack either the later brethren interested in the origins of their own congregation who have so often driven the history industry of other religious orders, or a convenient body of sources on which to base such work.