On 4 May 1897 more than a hundred Parisians – mostly women of high society – perished in the Charity Bazaar fire. The records of this terrible accident reveal much about the charitable practices of the nobility in France of the Third Republic. This article explores the place of religion in upper-class charity within the context of republican anticlericalism. It focuses especially on issues of inter-faith collaboration and the role of aristocratic women in supporting the work of the Catholic Church.

This article combines prosopographical analysis of the episcopate between 1307 and 1330 with examination of its participation in the politics of the time – baronial unrest, the deposition of Edward II and a regency dominated by his queen and her paramour. Elevation to the episcopate brought status, an opportunity for career clerks. Nobles were not prominent among bishops, nor were regular clergy; curiales were, but more numerous were university men. The differing roles of archbishops Winchelsey, Reynolds, Mepham, and to a marginal extent Stratford, are reviewed. Crucial is the reaction of prelates to the crisis of 1326–7. Diagrams and tables help to quantify the conclusions reached.

The adoption of socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for many an experience akin to religious conversion. Katherine St John Conway's path to enlightenment provides a stark example. While sitting in her fashionable Bristol church ‘praying for a fuller consciousness of the Presence’, she was confronted by a group of workers adopting the socialist tactic of the ‘church parade’, the invasion of churches during Sunday services to highlight labour disputes and the plight of the unemployed:

[I]n they came, lassies out on strike against starvation wages and for the right to combine … there they stood, sister-women, … ill-clad, wet through with the driving rain, hungry … ‘They stand between me and the Christ.’ So the thought smote me; so I see it still … . For the first time in my life I heard and began to understand.

Joseph Milner's ‘History of the Church of Christ’ (1794–1809) was the most popular English-language church history for half a century, yet it remains misunderstood by many historians. This paper argues that Milner's Evangelical interpretation of church history subverted Protestant historiographical norms. By prioritising conversion over doctrinal precision, and celebrating the piety of select medieval Catholics, Milner undermined the historical narratives that undergirded Protestant exceptionalism. As national religious identities became increasingly contested in the 1820s and 1830s, this subversive edge was blunted by publishers who edited the ‘History’ to be less favourable toward pre-Reformation Christianity.

Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.

Robert Barnes is a name well known to historians of the English Reformation. He receives brief mention in most historical surveys, being variously discussed as Coverdale's prior, Luther's friend, Cromwell's protégé, or Henry VIII's martyr. Among scholars whose interests lie primarily with the theology of the Reformation, Barnes has at times received further, more focused attention, his written works being examined in some detail and he himself being painted as a rare English Lutheran. Those interested in the politics of the Henrician Reformation have also found reason to assign Barnes a place of some importance, giving particular attention to his later role as royal ambassador to the princes and theologians of the German Protestant League of Schmalkalden. In contrast to these portraits of Barnes as a theologian and diplomat, and in spite of the fact that Barnes regularly mounted the pulpit while in England, there has been no comparable emphasis on Robert Barnes the preacher. The reason for this lacuna is quite simply that, despite the amount of contemporary commentary on his preaching, none of Barnes's actual sermons has been preserved. This is a fact all the more lamentable since, as those friends and foes who did comment upon his preaching make clear, he was known by contemporaries to be an extraordinarily zealous and effective preacher.

John Wesley required detailed records to be compiled of Methodist society members. One extant list is that of the Keighley circuit for 1763–5. This article, breaking new ground in Wesley studies, argues that symbols in this and other catalogues recorded members’ spiritual condition. These symbols are used to analyse recruitment, losses and spiritual change on a quarterly basis. They reveal that although recruitment in the circuit was high during a revival at the start of a new preaching regime, it fell quickly, many members departed and there was little overall improvement in spiritual condition. Recruitment and changes were not uniform across the circuit, pointing to local rather than regional or national influences.

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust the elaboration of Catholic perceptions of the Jewish people has been particularly problematic. The weight of a long tradition of Christian antisemitism and its influence on the Nazi extermination programme, as well as the revision of this attitude before and after the Shoah in various Catholic circles as a means of promoting a rapprochement, made it difficult to redefine the image of Jewish people in the Catholic imagination, and gave rise to different and conflicting interpretations. Some members of the Latin Catholic Church of Jerusalem began to argue for an analogy between Nazism and Zionism. This assertion took different forms as the political situation in Palestine evolved and in response to changing attitudes within the Church towards the Jews. This paper will reconstruct the ‘new Nazis’ paradigm in the Jerusalem Church, analysing three key periods: the 1947–9 Arab-Israeli war; the consolidation of the State of Israel in the 1950s; and the Eichmann trial of 1961–2.

During the first half of the fourteenth century titles granted by English religious houses replaced patrimonial titles and titles granted by laymen and women as the predominant titles for unbeneficed secular clergy in most dioceses. This probably reflects the greater security an undying corporation provided for the ordaining bishop; but none of the various kinds of title as described in episcopal registers can necessarily be taken at face value and in practice ordinands were not expected to depend on the grantors of their titles for their future careers or for long-term financial support.

Alien priories, the small dependencies of foreign religious houses established in the years following the Norman Conquest, were partly thank-offerings for military success and partly civilising centres and reminders of home for England's new rulers. Their foundation in the newly-conquered lands mirrored the success of the Anglo-Normans in colonising the British Isles, since later examples were planted in southern Scotland and in Ireland too. In England their establishment dated from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries. They passed out of existence over a time-scale which was almost as long, for from the late thirteenth century, during periods of Anglo-French war, they were under attack from the crown as alleged nests of spies and as exporters of wealth to the enemy. The consequent seizure of these small houses by the crown and their vigorous exploitation by the exchequer reduced monastic life in all these houses and extinguished it in many, so that the mother houses found it advantageous to sell smaller properties while some of the larger priories were prompted to seek denization. Such solutions are evident from the last two decades of the fourteenth century. Apparent landmarks in this process of disintegration and change prove, upon close inspection, to be illusory; neither the ‘expulsion’ of 1378 nor the Act of Dissolution of 1414 were such decisive moments in the history of these houses as was once thought. Instead, we may suggest, each of these small houses must be examined separately, for the later history of each was distinctive. The religious life was entirely extinguished in some, which had become merely manors, by the later fourteenth century. Courtiers under Edward III and Richard II acquired a number which they used for the endowment of new religious houses; the Carthusian order was an especial beneficiary. Henry V endowed his new foundation of Sheen with alien priories, while some others were used to augment the endowments of existing monasteries and even hospitals. Pontefract (Yorkshire), thanks to the good offices of John of Gaunt, became denizen in 1393.

The writings of Gregory of Elvira are among the most important sources for understanding early Latin biblical exegesis as well as the culture and theology of the Spanish Church in the fourth century. The paucity of ancient sources on Gregory's episcopal career, however, renders a proper assessment of these works difficult, and he has not been well served by historians. In this essay, I propose a modified account of Gregory's life and career, arguing that the dates of his birth, ordination and death are fixed later than they should be and that his involvement with the ‘Luciferians’ has been significantly overestimated.

This essay, which stems from a broader project on religion in the nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, seeks to recreate the experiences of the thousands of Protestants who struggled tenaciously to retain or hide their faith in colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico before the declaration of religious tolerance in 1869 and before the establishment of the region's first Protestant churches, the Anglican congregation of Ponce, organised in 1869, the Episcopal mission of Havana, started in 1871, and the Anglican congregation of Vieques, an island located eight miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, founded in 1880.

This article investigates the financial arrangements put in place by Pope Urban V to pay for his household on his journey from Avignon to Rome in 1367. It shows that the curia's move had a disruptive effect, since its normal routine of paying expenses at the end of each month could not be continued while the court was in transit. In order to deal with these exceptional circumstances, household officials were given a special advance payment in anticipation of the costs that would be incurred on the journey, which in effect set a budget for the pope's domestic expenditure.