T. W. Manson posed the following problem:

…quotations are absent in those places where we should most confidently look lor them it the Fourth Gospel was composed in Ephesus about A.D, 100 by John the Apostle. No theory about the Gospel that fails to give an explanation of the phenomenon presented by the writings of Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin has much chance of survival.

No information about the Fourth Gospel or its author appears in the Pastoral Epistles.

The privilege Caritatis Bonum (JL 6831), addressed to Archbishop Tliurstan of York and his successors, was issued on 11 March 1120. By this privilege, Pope Calixtus 11 forbade the archbishops of Canterbury to demand a profession of obedience from the archbishops of York and the archbishops ol York to make any such profession. The object ol this paper is to consider the importance of the privilege and to examine (and reject) suggestions that the known text was forged or interpolated; in the course of this examination we shall consider an abbreviated text in a Rouen manuscript, which has been treated as a separate document of an earlier date. We shall also consider the brief account given twice over by Hugh the Chantor in slightly different terms, of the scene at the papal court when the privilege was brought before the pope for subscription, both because such accounts are rare, and because this account throws some light on the curious fact that one of the cardinals who subscribed was not at the curia at the appropriate time. No attempt will be made to tell yet again the story of the conflict between the two English archbishops, but it will be necessary to examine in detail some of the evidence relating to events in the winter of 1119-20. Some small amount of repetition has been unavoidable, as different aspects of the matter are considered in turn.

The role of women in heresy has long been a matter for observation and comment. It must be attributed to historians' lack of interest, rather than lack, of evidence, that the Lollards have until now escaped analysis on this front. There are certainly grounds for supposing that they, like Cathars and Waldensians, derived a large measure of support from members of the female sex. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as earlier, unorthodoxy offered women outlets for religious activity that were not to be found in the established church.— But, while the sources can tell us a good deal about women participating in the Lollard movement as learners, readers and expounders of the gospel and other vernacular texts, the question of whether they ever advanced to the point of acting as priests is less easily answered. We know, indeed, very little about Lollard rites of any kind, and this makes it all the more worth while exploring fully what evidence we have. This little is enough to show that at one formative stage at least in Lollard development, claims were being advanced for women as capable of priesthood.

During the past forty years, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England has received a great deal of attention from intellectual, social and Church historians. Because of the nature of the general interpretation traditionally followed, most scholars have found it fruitful to concentrate their research upon particular groups or individuals and to fit the ensuing studies into either a rather narrow stream labelled ‘Anglican’ or a very broad one named ‘Puritan’. While the number of biographies of English bishops and analyses of ‘Anglican’ divines has increased at a more than respectable rate recently, studies of English ‘Puritans’ and their brethren in New England have grown to almost unmanageable proportions. With all of these riches at hand, however, no recent historian has published an overall synthetic history of the Church of England under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts to match that completed by W. H. Frere more than two-thirds of a century ago. Indeed, a good deal of controversy still ranges over the boundaries and validity of such terms as ‘Anglican’ and—especially— ‘Puritan’. Plunging into that dispute, this paper will examine the nature and historiographical origins of these categories, redefine them so that they better apply to the evidence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and spell out some of the social and political implications that spring from this modified point of view. While the argument presented here, no doubt, will neither please nor satisfy all historians working in the field, one hopes that it will provide some with a glimpse at the outlines of a new synthesis.

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.