The early modern Japanese Church developed syncretistic practices in which Roman Catholicism came to function similarly to Buddhism and Shintō. This study examines the development of such practices, with particular focus on penitential rituals. It argues that certain of these rites were produced in the very early years of the mission through extensive discussions between European priests and Japanese Christians. They were compromises that were both hard-fought and intentional.

The statutes of the Gilbertine order, established by Gilbert of Sempringham in the second half of the twelfth century, underwent modification during the following century as a consequence of two legatine visitations, in 1238 and 1267. This paper examines these new regulations in the context of growing episcopal concern for the internal discipline of nunneries and considers the possible inter-relationships between the ‘self-regulating’ and internally-disciplined Gilbertine order and the synodal legislation of reforming bishops and their episcopal visitation of non-Gilbertine nunneries, particularly in Yorkshire. It suggests that the visitation by Ottobuono Fieschi of the Gilbertines in 1267 and his legatine council of London in 1268 informed the outcomes of both, leading to a convergence of Gilbertine legislation with the wider legislation that applied to all nunneries.

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.

Of all European states in the nineteenth century, Spain was among the slowest to respond to the great changes, social, political and economic, which were transforming Western civilisation. The Spaniard's reluctance to adopt the innovations of his neighbours, or to abandon the habits and outlook of a past age were a frequent source of friction between Spain and other nations; so much so that Lord Clarendon, whilst British foreign secretary, once likened Spain to a North African state with which Britain could have little in common on account of her failure to do ‘any of the many things which bind nations together’. Among the most persistent causes of dissension of this nature was the Spanish reluctance to tolerate the free practice of the protestant faith, and it is the object of this article to trace the gradual establishment of freedom of worship in Spain, and to estimate the respective contributions of the Spaniards themselves and of foreign pressure.

In one passage of his A Chapter of Autobiography (1868), Gladstone looked back thirty years to the time when he had published The State in its Relations with the Church. Then he had ‘believed that the Church of England, through the medium of a regenerated clergy and an intelligent and attached laity, would not only hold her ground, but would even in great part probably revive the love and allegiance both of the masses who were wholly falling away from religious observances, and of those large and powerful nonconforming bodies’. Yet, within a dozen years of 1838 ‘at least a moiety of the most gifted sons, whom Oxford had reared for the service of the Church of England, would be hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican; that, with their deviation on the one side, there would arise a not less convulsive rationalistic movement on the other. Since that time, the Church of England may be said to have bled in every pore; and at this hour it seems occasionally to quiver to its very base’.

‘The Church History of Joseph Milner is one of those books which may perish with some revolution of the moral and religious character of the English race, but hardly otherwise.’ Sir James Stephen's prophecy reads alarmingly to-day when the book has vanished even from the dustiest and highest shelf of the rectory library. But it was of Milner's History that Cowper also wrote enthusiastically ‘the facts are incontestible, the grand observations upon them are all irrefragible, and the style, in my judgment, incomparably better than that of Robertson or Gibbon’. Translated into German, Swedish and Spanish, relayed to Grundtwigian pietist circles through the histories of Rasmus Sørensen, Milner was read as far north as Greenland and as far east as the Volga. His book was instrumental in converting half a dozen Members of Parliament. It was long considered—as Milner intended it to be—as the replacement of Mosheim's famous History, and as such it was prescribed reading in the educated Evangelical home and beyond. In 1847 Julius Hare regarded it as still ‘the main, if not the sole, source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history’. Ironically, it was from Milner's soundly Evangelical pages that young Newman got his first love of the Fathers. The History of the Church of Christ must thus be reckoned as a book of first importance in the religious history of early nineteenth-century England. Yet, save for a few pages in Abbey and Overton (still the most reliable survey of Evangelicalism, after eighty years) Milner's book is now unknown.

According to several distinguished historians Katherine of Aragon could have averted the Henrician reformation by accepting Cardinal Campeggio's suggestion that she take vows of religion and enter a nunnery, thus facilitating her husband's remarriage. Here it is argued that, even if Katherine had agreed, the fulfilment of such a project would pose serious problems. Once he recognised the enormity of what the legate intended, Henry rapidly lost interest: his craving for an undisputed succession could hardly have been satisfied by adding a second potentially contentious papal bull to that which had allowed his first marriage.

When Jean Lemaire de Belges composed his Traité de la différence des schismes et des conciles de l'eglise in 1511, the purpose of the text was to support Louis XII in his struggle with Pope Julius II, to promote the conciliar ideology which the French king was exploiting, and in general to set Christian kings and emperors in favourable contrast with the popes of Rome. Read beside vernacular texts by other authors – Jean Bouchet, Pierre Gringore, Jean Marot, Jean d'Auton – who were writing during France's war with Julius II, it appears more effective propaganda and in some ways bolder and more far-reaching. However, the contrast is not sufficient to mark its author out as heterodox in comparison with the rest, two of whom, Bouchet and Gringore, were later to attack Lutheranism with some vigour. Lemaire's text established itself as an acceptable Gallican–monarchical view of history. It sold well and was printed twice in both 1511 and 1512. It continued to be printed after the crisis which produced it had abated. Increasingly it was included in the collections of Lemaire's works which remained popular long after the author himself dropped out of public view in about 1515. As the Lutheran Reformation developed readers brought new perceptions to the text, and we may deduce a sharpened sense of its relevance from a new edition which appeared in Lyons in 1532. Romain Morin published the text in a new small format, and with a new title, Le Promptuaire des conciles de l'eglise catholique, avec les scismes et la difference d'iceulx. The text itself was very little modified. Morin himself reissued the Promptuaire in 1533 and ten years later Paris printers took it up, showing that the text continued popular in France into the 1550s, when it was finally placed on the Sorbonne's list of forbidden books.

Gregorian scholars have been unable to reconcile widely differing views on Gregory the Great's ‘political thought’. The trend has been to view him as either ambivalent towards secular authority or completely indifferent to it. This article aims to demonstrate that Gregory the Great's conception of an ordered and hierarchic universe not only encompassed both secular and ecclesiastical spheres but also allowed each a positive role in the work of salvation. His ideas, influenced by neo-Platonic thought, differed substantially from those of St Augustine and were vital to the development of an early medieval partnership between secular and ecclesiastical authority.