Perhaps because the classification of religious behaviour in the Middle Ages has not received much attention, there seems to be no scholarly consensus concerning the number or nature of its genres. This means that at present we tend to have either inadequately differentiated, broad categories of medieval religious acts, or somewhat incoherent lists of highly specific religious practices. That a good number of these religious forms pre-existed and continued long after the Christian Middle Ages is not in doubt; nor is the fact that such religious behaviours are not necessarily confined to the Christian tradition. The present discussion, however, will focus exclusively upon the Latin Christian tradition, c. 1000–c. 1500.

Surveying the expressive modes of medieval religion presents less difficulty than grouping such behaviours within larger intelligible categories. Current scholarly literature makes it clear that certain varieties of medieval religious practice are almost universally acknowledged: veneration of the saints; attendance at sermons; private prayer; participation in public, collective liturgies (for example, processions on diverse occasions); acting under the influence of prophecy; setting off on pilgrimage, whether penitential or devotional; taking the Cross; performing formal or informal acts of devotion or piety (‘devotion’ is one aspect of the medieval religious life urgently in need of sharp definition); and attempting, often through ascetic exercises, to experience God (mysticism). By no means is this an exhaustive list. The titular subject of this essay, as the reader will have noticed, does not appear in it.

The importance to scholars of the papal registers and other records in the Vatican Archives as a source for later medieval history scarcely needs to be emphasised. From the thirteenth century onwards, the different series of records proliferated. They begin with registers of outgoing correspondence, known as the Vatican Registers, in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) and financial accounts of the apostolic chamber under Nicholas III (1277–80). For the fourteenth century, there are new series of registers of outgoing letters (the Avignon Registers and the Lateran Registers) and a vast increase in the quantity of surviving records of the apostolic chamber. However, with the increasing abundance of such records, the proportion to have been published diminishes. It is in the fourteenth century that the sheer wealth of the surviving sources (there are, for instance, sixty registers of papal letters from the pontificate of Gregory XI, which lasted seven years and three months) first becomes a serious problem for those pursuing the publication of papal records.

Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII, was a man both personally extraordinary and yet representative of his age. He abandoned the normal cursus honorum of the legal profession to enter the king's service more suddenly than any of his contemporaries; yet he was one of many common lawyers newly influential in the king's councils of the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. He was probably the only layman in Henry's inner circle to have studied at a university; yet within fifty years of his death most English statesmen of the first rank would have done so. In pursuing the king's interests, Dudley generated sufficient animosity to make himself one of the two scapegoats for Henry's policies tried and executed in 1509–10; yet it was more his manner, his efficiency and his political isolation than any difference of intent that distinguished him from Henry's other ministers. In pursuing his own interests he built a large landed estate faster than any of his colleagues, but their aims and eventual achievements were not so different from his. The one respect in which Dudley was unique was that he had leisure, while under arrest in the Tower of London, to commit to paper his thoughts on English government and society. The resulting treatise, The tree of commonwealth, enables us to juxtapose his stated ideals with his actions as a royal minister and as an influential layman. Thereby we may hope to shed new light on the relations between Church, State and lay elites on the eve of the English Reformation.

In his greatest piece of political philosophy, the Leviathan of 1651, Thomas Hobbes dedicated the astonishing mass of eighteen voluminous chapters solely to the discussion of religious matters. Although his earlier political treatises, The elements of law of 1640 and the De cive of 1642, discussed theological doctrines at some length, they never accorded so great a role to questions of religion and theology as did Leviathan. The two books of Leviathan in which Hobbes promulgated his theological doctrines are almost exactly equal in length to books I and II, and one of the chapters in book III (‘Of power ecclesiasticall’) is in some ways the longest chapter in the work. The kind of contentious eschatological doctrines which Hobbes had been careful to leave unchallenged in his early works, namely the question whether the soul had an independent existence after the death of the body, figured particularly high in Leviathan. Why was it that Hobbes's interest in theology increased so sharply between 1642 and 1651, and what was the particular point of the theology of Leviathan?

The Catholic Church in Korea dates its foundation from 1784 when Yi Sŭng-hun returned from Beijing where he had been baptised by a member of the resident Catholic mission. He had sought out the Catholic priests at the instigation of Yi Pyok who, in the winter of 1777, had been a member of a meeting of young, reform-minded Shirhak (‘New Learning’) scholars. This meeting had been called to examine scientific, mathematical and religious treatises written by the Jesuits in China. On his return, Yi Sung-hun brought with him books and religious articles which he shared with Yi Pyok, and together they began to evangelise among their friends and neighbours. It was not very long, however, before their activities began to meet with opposition from other Confucian scholars and to arouse the suspicions of the authorities. In 1785 Yi Pyok and other Christians were arrested at a meeting in the house of Kim Pom-u, a member of the chungin class of technical specialists. Those present were given a lecture on proper Confucian conduct and released, apart from Kim Pom-u who was severely beaten and sent into exile where he died from his injuries. Worse was to follow in 1791 with the execution of Yun Chi-ch'ung and his cousin, Kwon Sang-yon, for their refusal to perform the chesa ancestral rites for Yun's dead mother. Nevertheless the Church continued to grow during the 1790s, and its members pressed the bishop of Beijing to send a resident priest. This was achieved in 1795 when a Chinese priest, Fr Chou Wên-mu, arrived in Seoul. Under his ministry, and with the assistance of members of the laity, the Church grew from around 4,000 believers to nearly 10,000 at the outbreak of the Shinyu persecution in 1801. This persecution cost the lives of Fr Chou and at least 300 of the laity, but the Church survived.

The Irish Reformation remains a troubled subject, and not from lack of recent scholarly attention. It has attracted an abundance of high-quality work, but its vexed nature as a topic is illuminated by a long, authoritative essay published in 1998 by Brendan Bradshaw, one of the foremost students of early-modern Irish history. The essay is entitled ‘The English Reformation and identity formation in Ireland and Wales’, as befits the volume in which it appeared: British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533–1707. But the pageheads of the sixty-nine-page article call it ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, and this is a much more accurate description of its contents, as even its author might agree.

Whether denominated ‘The Irish Reformation’ or ‘The Reformation in Ireland’, the event lacks the familiarity of historical chestnuts like the Congress of Vienna or The Thirty-Years War, well-worn, frequently-taught subjects (at least in the old canon of European history) about which there was a modicum of consensus, sufficient at least to allow them to be discussed. But in order for events to be debated, there needs to be agreement that they happened, and in that respect the Irish Reformation is something of a non-starter.

Karl Bottigheimer succeeds in consigning my study of the ‘English Reformation in Wales and Ireland’ to a genre of outmoded nationalist historiography by means of a distortingly reductionist account of it. In the first place, despite its title and large sections of the analysis, he assures the reader that its concern is simply the Reformation in Ireland. In fact it seeks to address a problem presented by the Reformation as a phase of what is variously called the ‘new British history’ or the ‘history of the Atlantic archipelago’, namely the contrasting outcome of the attempt to extend the state-sponsored reform of religion to the English crown's two Celtic borderland dominions, to Wales, where it succeeded, and to Ireland where it failed. Prima facie that outcome seems puzzling since it faced similar obstacles in both places, a deeply traditionalist society, remote from the intellectual currents that helped prepare the ground for the religious changes in England, and beyond the reach of effective government from the centre. Two questions arise therefore. How were these obstacles overcome in Wales, and since they proved surmountable there why not so in the case of Ireland?

Second, Bottigheimer makes my explanation for the Irish outcome seem naively idealistic by representing it as attributing the failure totally to the pastoral zeal with which the Franciscan Observants campaigned against the change, and to the devotion of the Irish to ‘faith and fatherland’.