Arecent scholar has written of ‘the widespread belief, by no means the monopoly of high Anglicans only, that it was to Glastonbury, first of all places in these islands of ours, that the Christian faith first came, and that Glastonbury is therefore the fountain and headspring of Christianity in England, and indeed in the whole of the British Isles’.

This article consists of a detailed study of a series of extraordinary diplomas issued by King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ during the 990s. These diplomas restore lands and rights to churches which had earlier been despoiled by the king and his advisors and their wording indicates that they were intended as a conscious gesture of penitence. As such, the documents were of central political importance and it is argued that they can be fruitfully mined for evidence of Æthelred's own thoughts and feelings in these years; these diplomas might well be considered to preserve Æthelred's own ‘voice’.

The posthumous reputation of Gregory the Great presents a sharp but possibly insufficiently appreciated contrast. On the one hand, there is the Anglo-Saxon historical tradition which, through the Carolingian world and the eleventh-century reformers, has prevailed to the present day. The Gregory of Aldhelm of Malmesbury and of the Anonymous of Whitby, is ‘the teacher of the English’, ‘our own St. Gregory’, ‘this apostolic saint of ours’ who ‘on the Day of Judgement … will bring us, the English nation whom he has taught, to present us to the Lord’. By the English mission he had brought the English into the community of Christian nations and was seen as the initiator of the new missionary apostolate which Bede's contemporaries were consciously perpetuating on the Continent; as the source for the life of St. Benedict he was of major interest to those who had made peculiarly their own Benedict's monasticism. He is in a sense the immediate founder of all things; in an age which was losing the perspective of the secular as its historical horizons shrank, he was a principal link in a new chain of authority and legitimacy which extended back to St. Peter. His legend and prestige as a founding authority spreads and assumes diverse forms in unlikely places.

‘It is now disputed at every table’, declared Whitgift in 1574, ‘whether the magistrate be of necessity bound to the judicials of Moses’. Edwin Sandys told Bullinger of Zürich in the previous year that it was being maintained, to the great trouble of the Church, that ‘The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them’. Though often neglected by historians as an important factor in the Reformation, the question of the validity of the Old Testament judicial (as opposed to moral or ceremonial) law frequently arises in the writings of the Reformers, and their various answers made no slight impact on the course of events. It bears directly on Henry VIII's divorce and the bigamy of Philip of Hesse; the treatment of heresy and the possibility of toleration; the persecution of witches; usury and iconoclasm; Sabbatarianism and the rise of the ‘puritan’ view of the Bible as a book of precedents, and the corresponding shift to legalism in Protestant theology. The question is also of fundamental relevance to the thought of the Reformers on natural law, the godly prince and magistrate, and the so-called ‘third use of the law’. This article is an attempt to survey, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the various interpretations of the Mosaic penal and civil laws, with particular reference to the development of legalistic tendencies after Luther.

The basic details of the portrayal by the sources of the episcopate of John Chrysostom have long been accepted in the literature. So also the perspective from which his episcopate is viewed, which is both Constantinopolitan and partisan. By examining what happened from another angle, namely from Antioch, it can be seen that the standard portrayal needs to be treated with caution. At the same time, an Antiochene perspective offers new insight into the sequence of events as they unfolded.

In order to tackle the problem of ecclesiastical heresy, late medieval theologians elaborated on the idea of fraternal correction. Alexander of Hales laid the foundation of the standard theological discourse, which was developed by Thomas Aquinas. In applying this concept to the problem of papal heresy, William of Ockham questioned and reversed the hierarchical assumptions and premises in the traditional discourse. Drawing on his ethical theory of invincible ignorance, he also provided a moral basis for an inferior's dissent from ecclesiastical authority. Ockham's emphasis on the inalienable obligation of conscience in defence of ecclesiastical disobedience shows a striking similarity to some of John Locke's ideas on religious toleration.

Early modern Ireland defied its English and Protestant rulers and remained largely Catholic. Historians have explained this situation variously: in terms of Protestant feebleness, official indifference or Catholic vigour. Among Protestant failings, scant use of the Irish language has been listed. An attitude to the Irish tongue, at best ambiguous and at worst hostile, can be connected first with English concepts of civility and then with the severe Calvinist theology which pulsed through the Established Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, and which, by equating those already Protestant with the elect, justified devoting its sparse resources to them. In contrast, the Catholic Irish, because irredeemably reprobate, together with their language, could be ignored.

The Vita of Christina of Markyate has been celebrated as ‘perhaps the twelfth century's most effective and revealing personal history of a woman’. Indeed, the Vita's account of Christina's early career is vivid and remarkably detailed: one can read at length of Christina's saintly childhood, her efforts to escape an unwanted marriage, her ascetic hardships living with the hermit Roger and her intimate spiritual friendship with Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans. But while we know a great deal about Christina's early career, more than for almost any other contemporary woman, we know almost nothing about her later life. Her Vita is incomplete, its text known only from a single fire-damaged fourteenth-century manuscript, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E i. Christina's Vita is the very last item in the Tiberius manuscript. On the final folio, as Christina is reproving Geoffrey for incorrect behaviour, the text breaks off at the bottom line in the middle of a word: ‘que minus recte videbatur gerere sapienter increpando, sa…’. As the last datable reference in the Vita is to 1139, and Abbot Geoffrey died in 1146, the existing text of the Vita appears to cover events no later than the early 1140s.

Laudian divines cried up the king's prerogative. But they also affirmed that episcopacy was by divine, not human right. Was jure divino episcopacy, which many clerics asserted in the decades after Bancroft's famous sermon of 1589, in fact incompatible with the traditional English theory of the Royal Supremacy? Catholics and extreme puritans answered this question in the affirmative, and many recent commentators have accepted their judgement. The purpose of the present study is to question this interpretation, and to suggest that the first two Stuarts endorsed the theory of jure divino episcopacy not because they were misled by the rhetoric of such men as Bancroft, Barlow and Laud, but because they correctly perceived that these divines were vigorous supporters of the king's Supremacy in ecclesiasticals.

‘I know’, says St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, ‘that if this earthly I tent of mine is taken down, I get a home from God made by no human hands, eternal in the heavens. It makes me sigh, indeed, this longing to be under cover of my heavenly habitation … to have my mortal element absorbed by life…. I know that while I reside in the body I am away from the Lord….’ St. Paul is considering the body as a flimsy tent, which may at any moment be taken down, and St. Columbanus takes up this passage in his eighth sermon on the essential instability, the transitory nature of earthly life. Here and elsewhere he speaks of life as a roadway, where Christians must travel in perpetual pilgrimage as guests of the world (hospites mundi), content with a sort of travelling allowance. The same spirit of detachment and urgency infuses much of the hagiographical literature: “Leave thy fatherland for my sake, and get thee out’, ‘This is not the place of thy resurrection’, or the wandering scholar to Brigid when she asks him to stay a while with her, ‘O nun, I have no leisure, for the gates of heaven are open now, and I fear they may be shut against me’.

The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with ‘vindications’ of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events.

Wills have become one of the most widely used sources for students of the English Reformation. There has been an ever increasing literature tracing testators' religious beliefs, the role and influence of scribes and clerics, the various copies and manifestations of a particular testament and the often formulaic character of this legal document. Little attention has been paid by students of wills to the polemical and propagandistic qualities of such documents and rightly so, for most testators exhibited greater concern for property than polemics.

In the early eighteenth century, the legacy of conflict among English Protestants found an outlet in the controversy over ‘occasional conformity’. During the years 1702–4, Tory backbenchers in the House of Commons introduced a series of bills designed to strengthen the Corporation and Test Acts (1661, 1673), which had required all officials of local government and holders of Crown appointments to adhere to the established Church of England. Since the passage of these legal tests, Protestant Nonconformists seeking office had circumvented their intent by taking communion in an Anglican parish as seldom as once a year, while attending meetings of their fellow dissenters for worship. So long as they procured a certificate of conformity from the minister, they were eligible for government positions, and dissenters had gained control of several parliamentary boroughs.

There have been of late two important books dealing with Theodosius and the Christian Church—one by W. Ensslin and the other by N. Q. King. To a large extent these two authors are agreed that the emperor from the time when he was called by Gratian, the senior Augustus, after the catastrophic defeat of Valens at Hadrianople in 378, where the Roman army of the Balkans together with its emperor was annihilated, gave most of his time and mind to the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in the East. King (op. cit., 18) makes the point that upon a man like Theodosius, brought up as a devout Western Catholic, the enormous change of fortune which took him from voluntary exile to the imperial throne, must have left a profound religious impression: Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.

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.

This article explores the Catholic exile experience in the Dutch revolt of the 1570s and 1580s. It shows how Catholic refugees negotiated their stay in places such as Cologne and Douai and developed a more militant, Tridentine identity. This process of religious radicalisation is reflected in a series of white papers by leading refugees about Catholic renewal in the contested Netherlands. This article argues that Catholic exiles became the mobilising forces of a popular Counter-Reformation movement in the southern Netherlands, thereby facilitating the eventual split of the Low Countries into a northern and southern state.

The year 1048 is generally recognised as a decisive date in the history of the medieval papacy. In that year the emperor Henry III appointed Bruno, bishop of Toul, to succeed to the papal throne, who accepted only on condition that his election be confirmed by the people and clergy of Rome. The significance of this act depends on seeing it against previous elections. Despite often re-iterated claims to spiritual supremacy the papacy had for long been the tool of political factions, so much so that the period 801–1049 is regarded as the era of Caesaropapism. Reacting against this temporal domination the new pope Leo IX and his successors, especially Gregory VII (1073–85), laid the foundations of a different relationship (called by Ullman ‘the hierocratic system’) in which the temporal powers, under the leadership of the emperor, were subservient to the spiritual under the leadership of the papacy, a unity, so it was argued, for the commonweal of Christendom. By the fourteenth century the system had repeatedly proved itself unworkable, and the concept received its final blow from Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor pads. But, until that time, the concept with all its ramifications constituted both the object and the context of medieval political thought. The outlines of this thesis are by no means new, but what is only now becoming realised is the part played by the canonists in both determining the theory and advancing the arguments for its support.