In early medieval Iberia, Suevic and Visigothic conversions to Nicene Christianity in the 560s and 580s generated ongoing episcopal and royal attention to cathedral liturgies and to the clerics who performed them. This article turns to this Iberian context to illuminate how lectors and cantors and their aural duties became increasingly central to the production of Christian orthodoxy. It is argued that in the early 600s Visigothic anxieties over the production of correct liturgical sound eventually became a focal point of longstanding episcopal efforts to clericalise the minor officers of the Church.

Studies of the ecclesiastical reform of the eleventh century have often highlighted conflict between reforming monks and simoniac clerics. This was especially true in the urban contexts of Milan and Florence, cities that played a leading role, at the time, in the history of Italian religious life. Through the presentation of an exemplary case study, this paper shows how around an important Florentine monastery, an episcopal foundation, the conflict between ‘conservatives’ and reformers did not obliterate the genesis and permanence of long-term devotional and cultural traditions. Although these traditions emerged in a context of conflict, they were able to overcome it and develop into a new and enduring form of religiosity that lasted from the Romanesque period to the Early Renaissance.

Due to their different doctrinal positions, the various Syriac-using Churches of the Middle East have generally been understood as rivals to each other, with separate histories that can be studied in isolation. This article argues that doctrinal differences should not be given undue prominence, and that in the sixteenth century there was in reality considerable interaction between the different Churches. Increased contacts with Catholicism in this period may have encouraged these interactions, particularly in Rome itself, but connections were already present within the Ottoman Empire. These contacts had a significant effect on the Churches’ historical development.

This essay studies Robert Persons's understanding of the reforms of Mary i of England within the continental discursive context in which he worked. By describing his critiques of Marian reforms together with similar reformist discourses in France and Spain, it is argued that his ideas represent a common Counter-Reformation polemical stance and a set of normal Catholic assumptions about the ‘political’ and institutional reforms necessary to combat heresy. Persons's thoughts about the ‘political’ reforms within a broader field of spiritual imperatives serve as a reminder that the Counter-Reformation was necessarily about politics despite scholarly emphasis on issues of theology and religious practice.

The academic commemoration of Philip Melanchthon, humanist, reformer and ‘teacher of Germany’ (‘praeceptor Germaniae’), occurred for the first time on a large scale in 1760, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. This article offers a first exploration of the bicentennial. It explores how Melanchthon's commemorators in central Europe positioned him as a hero of the early German Enlightenment (Aufklärung), singling out and reinterpreting his labours for the ‘improvement of humanity’. Shorn of context, divested of theological and ecclesiastical commitments, Melanchthon became the model scholar and the pride of Lutheran Germany, who transcended confessional particularities to instruct all of Europe.

The article sheds light on the significant fundraising and relief activities for Ireland during the Great Famine (1845–50) initiated in 1847 by the Italian philosopher and cleric Antonio Rosmini and his network in Savoy-Piedmont, Lombardy-Venetia and England. By analysing Rosmini's philosophical and political writings, the article demonstrates that Rosmini considered aid in times of crisis as an act of social justice for which individuals have to take responsibility. By analysing documents from the Italian and Irish archives, the article gives an account of the fundraising effort's practices of networking, appealing, almsgiving and delivery.

This article examines the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia following the Communist takeover in February 1948. The Greek Catholic Church was to be separated from the mother Catholic Church and incorporated into the Orthodox Church. The process culminated at the irregular Sobor (synod) of Prešov held on 28 April 1950. The synod was orchestrated and headed by the ruling Communist party, which enforced its conclusions. Greek Catholics were either outlawed or compelled to become Orthodox, although their situation slightly brightened during the Prague Spring of 1968 when their Church became legal again.