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.

The recent work of Professor W. K. Jordan on charitable benefactions in the period between 1480 and 1660 has focused the attention of historians on this aspect of social history, and there is no doubt that his studies have made a significant contribution to the understanding of these years. Certain aspects of the work have, however, been criticised by reviewers, and. the purpose of the present paper is to examine the subject from the viewpoint of the medievalist to see if this throws light on general problems of the study of charity as well as on the more specific topic of late medieval charity.

Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.

The First Crusade has been described as a ‘church in procession’ and a ‘military monastery on the move’. The progress of the first crusading armies to the Holy Land was indeed accompanied by regular liturgical practices, acts of devotion and intercessory rites. Before each battle and during sieges the crusaders fasted, prayed, celebrated mass and confessed their sins. They went in processions and sang psalms. This wealth of liturgical practices reported by contemporary commentators provided the rhythm to the crusaders' pilgrimage to Jerusalem and marked the sacred character of their undertaking. At the same time, the liturgy was a rallying point for the crusaders' identity: it represented and reinforced the special relationship between the milites Christi and their God, and gave expression to the spirituality and the ethos of the holy warrior. The crusaders' earnest participation in the liturgy of pilgrimage and holy war no doubt contributed to the image, already observed by contemporaries, of the crusade as a vehicle of piety and a means of salvation parallel to the vocation of the monastic life, which was traditionally considered the highest form of religious devotion.

Neither charity nor charity sermons were new to the eighteenth century. Giving to the needy was a long–established feature of Christianity. In his ‘Rule and Exercise of Holy Living’ (1650), an extreme expression of such Christianity, Jeremy Taylor urged good Christians to ‘Give, looking for nothing again, that is, without consideration of future advantages: give to children, to old men, to the unthankful, and the dying, and to those you shall never see again; for else your Alms or courtesie is not charity, but traffick and merchandise.’ By the eighteenth century the City of London already had a tradition of sponsored annual sermons, called ‘spital’ sermons, for its own hospitals, i.e. St Thomas's, Barts, Bethlem, etc. However, as associated charities, charities conceived by, supported and directed by contributors, grew increasingly numerous in the course of that century, charity sermons also increased in number and importance. Associated or joint–stock voluntary charity welcomed its need for ongoing financial support; this, its supporters claimed, would ensure efficiency and accountability. The problem with such support, however, was not only that the charity needed to attract, and continue to attract, large numbers of donors, but also that it needed to convince those donors to repeat their contributions annually. The charity sermon became a central instrument in this process. Thus, usually on the anniversary of the establishment of the charity, the society would invite a prominent or popular clergyman to address present and potential donors, and a collection would be taken afterwards. After one such sermon on 9 July 1762, the governing committee of the Asylum for Orphaned Girls congratulated itself, well pleased with a collection of over £226 ‘and many new subscribers added’.1

The rising in France in 1320 known as the Pastoureaux, or Shepherds' Crusade, receives little attention in most histories, and it is, indeed, a relatively small-scale event for which there are limited sources. Nevertheless, it has wider implications than have been generally recognised. The purpbse of this paper is therefore two fold: to describe these events through khe available sources and to offer some ideas concerning their historical! importance.

The ‘Act for Registering Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England’ of 1836 was a significant Act in at least four respects. First, it may be regarded as marking the foundation of the modern era in vital statistics in England and Wales. By it the General Register Office was created which ever since has proved a major source of both data and analysis concerning the demographic structure of England and Wales. Secondly, the Act was of importance in the process of the growth of government in nineteenth-century Britain. Thirdly, it remedied one of the major grievances of Dissenters by providing a civil, not ecclesiastical, registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Finally, the story of its passage casts much light on the fragility of the unity amongst the Dissenters in the period from 1829 to 1836.

A commonplace which arises early and persists long in patristic literature is that doctrinal aberrations are generally traceable to the influence of Greek philosophical schools. But particularly in Epicureanism do the Fathers find a useful club with which to beat an astonishing variety of heretics.

It will be convenient to mention at the outset the way in which Origen ascribes to Epicurean influence the unorthodox views of his pagan opponent, Celsus. The opinions of Celsus in which Origen claims to detect latent Epicureanism concern a variety of topics.

Justin and the other second-century Christian apologists endeavour to present their beliefs and life-style as a ‘ philosophy’ best compared with that of Plato, and Christians as a philosophical sect. This was a ‘quite implausible’ suggestion according to R. L. Wilken, commenting on Justin. Yet a number of outsiders in the second century do seem to have seen the Christians in such terms, although not as intellectually respectable as the apologists would have liked.‘What distinguished them from wandering Cynic philosophers?’, asks Stephen Benko, and replies, ‘Outwardly, probably nothing’. The evidence for these preliminary assertions will be sketched at the end of this discussion. But if this is a plausible reading of the reaction to Christians of such outsiders as Aristides, Galen, Celsus, and Crescens, and of Lucian's Peregrinus, it provides a context in which better sense may be made of the charges widely evidenced at least from Justin's time onwards and levelled against the early Christians, of indulging in Oedipoean intercourse and Thyestean feasts.. Accused of incest and cannibalism the Christians are thought to be practising a Cynic philosophical ‘naturalism’ that deliberately flouts mere social conventions. This affords a more plausible explanation for the indictment than that generally offered, namely the suspicions thought likely to have been aroused by any secretive religious group, a suggestion for which the evidence profferred is far from convincing.

Writers in the early centuries of the Christian era were accustomed to employ the term διάκονος with either the masculine or the feminine definite article. In the former case it is to be translated ‘deacon’ and in the latter ‘female deacon’ or ‘deaconess’. This usage suggests a close relationship, if not an identity, between the diaconate and the order of deaconesses and it is the purpose of this Note to explore this subject, beginning with the vexed question of the obscure origin of this order for women.

At a time when European missionaries were active in the New World to capture the souls of the ‘heathen’ for Catholicism, their confrères were conducting missions throughout Europe itself. For more than two centuries these missions – variously known as internal, parish or popular – were a crucial aspect of religious life, with numerous religious orders and congregations seeking to weave a fabric of evangelisation and catechetical instruction in areas of Europe that were nominally Catholic but were in many ways cut off from orthodox Tridentine Catholicism. This was particularly so in isolated areas on the European periphery. Southern Italy is a case in point. The persistent absence of an efficient parish structure and the dominance of a rather worldly collegiate clergy in the Kingdom of Naples left a large gap in organised religious life in the years following the end of the Council of Trent (1563), a gap that the missions attempted to fill. The mobilisation of preachers, confessors and instructors was vast, concentrated and unceasing. Such is the significance of the missions that they have been identified as the ‘most characteristic and important’ phenomenon of Italian religious history in the seventeenth century. One way to examine their scale and impact would be to map the areas missionised by the various congregations. But this serial approach would tell us very little, other than the fact that all of the towns and villages were visited, most of them repeatedly, over the centuries. Moreover, the varying quality of the surviving records would permit only partial results.

The term ‘Semipelagianism’ is usually taken to refer to fifth- and sixth-century teachings of Hadrumetum and Massilian monks. The term originated, however, with sixteenth-century Protestants who used it to describe a view of salvation by human effort in combination with grace. Theodore Beza invented the term in about 1556, applying it to the Roman Catholic view of grace and human will. The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577) used it to designate Lutheran synergists. Initially, therefore, the term referred to contemporaneous teachings. Starting with Nicholas Sanders (1571), however, Roman Catholics introduced a shift of meaning, with fifth-century Massilians becoming the central connotation.

The proud boast of Bishop John Jewel in Apologia Ecdesiae Anglicanae that ‘we lean unto knowledge, they unto ignorance’ a swift retort from his catholic opponent: ‘Ye lean to the favour of secular princes.’ To which Jewel replied: ‘We flatter our princes, M. Harding, as Nathan flattered King David; as John Baptist flattered Herod; as St Ambrose flattered Theodosius; and as salt flattereth the green sore.’ How much credibility was there in this resounding riposte when it was made in 1567, and how much would survive three more decades of Tudor royal supremacy? Not many Nathans in bishops' clothing were prepared to confront monarchy itself with a bold ‘Thou art the man’, and it was scarcely in the Tudor character to confess with King David: ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ Nor were the sins of Henry VIII's children of the kind to provide many occasions to play Nathan or John the Baptist. But the integrity of the Church and its faith are always in need of defence, even against misguided Christian princes. Or, to put the case less prejudicially, the possibility of a difference of opinion between Christian princes and Christian bishops can never be excluded. For all such occasions the appropriate model was the third of Jewel's exempla, that notable father of the Church, St Ambrose. In the words of Jewel: ‘We say to the prince as St Ambrose sometime said to the emperor Valentinian: “Noli te gravare, imperator, ut putes te in ea quae divina sunt imperiale aliquodjus habere: Trouble not yourself, my lord, to think that you have any princely power over those things that pertain to God.”’

As Elizabeth's reign neared its end, the futility of Puritan efforts to restructure the Church of England finally became apparent. By the early 1590s, with a strong conservative shift in the ecclesiastical leadership, the death of powerful patrons and friends at court, and the decisive defeat of the Presbyterian movement, the effect upon Puritan fortunes was devastating. What conservative churchmen did not suspect, however, was that even as they savoured victory, a creative rechannelling of the quest for further reformation was underway. In some quarters, frustration over the failure to gain power had led in different directions, to more radical moves like separatism or the Martin Marprelate project; but non-separating Puritans, few of whom had tied their fortunes to dogmatic Presbyterianism or were prepared to abandon the national Church, improvised a quieter response. If the Church was unreformable, they would reach the citizenry at personal and local levels with a ‘more spiritual and interior religion’. Thus the paradox that ‘the miscarriage of the further reformation coincided with the birth of the great age of Puritan religious experience’: coincided, that is, with the rise of a new, introspective, pietist phase of Puritan initiative.

Notwithstanding the many precedents for economic boycott before the crusader period, the first evidence of a Christian offensive other than on the battlefield appears only in the second half of the twelfth century, almost seventy years after the Council of Clermont. This paper aims to complement Moore's theory about the emergence of the Christian persecuting society with an additional case that, from a medieval Christian point of view, associates two of the Devil's main partners: first and foremost Muslims but also Christian merchants who profited from trading with them. It is the premise of this study that the many bans on trade with the Muslims in the crusader period – both in their essence and timing – and the reactions that they aroused reveal conflicting attitudes toward Muslims and Islam, thus contributing new perspectives for the study of the crusades.

For forty years, the sisters of St Katherine's, Augsburg, resisted the introduction of strict enclosure as a consequence of Dominican reform. This article examines the initial reactions of the sisters, explores the Dominican practice of enclosure and its connections with obedience, and the influence it had on the sisters' spirituality. After the community had finally accepted enclosure, they managed to gain a papal privilege granting them all the indulgences usually acquired through pilgrimage to Rome and commissioned a cycle of monumental paintings of the seven Roman pilgrim churches. Thus the sisters could ‘jump’ their convent's walls by embarking on substitute pilgrimages.

In the last century the school of Tübingen held that Montanism is only a name invented by historians to describe certain currents of thought in the second century and later. But although the evidence for the movement is not so full as one might like, there is no more reason to doubt its historicity than most other contemporary movements or even persons. It is not easy to get rid of the later legal prescriptions of the Theodosian and Justinian Codes; while Aelius Publius Julius, bishop of Devultum in Thrace, expressed himself in no uncertain fashion: ‘As God in heaven liveth, I swear that the blessed Solus of Anchialus wished to cast out Priscilla's demon, and the hypocrites would not allow it.’ The Montanists were real enough to him.

By the 1230s Latins and Greeks were riot short of issues for debate or polemic, but the topic of purgatory did have a novel feel about it. The doctrine seems to emerge on the common agenda fairly suddenly, finding no place, for example, in the wide-ranging list of 104 points of divergence drawn up by the Byzantine prelate, Constantine Stilbès, in the wake of the cruel sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. The subject did, however, establish itself as a hardy perennial, and it is proposed to trace its main ramifications up to the death of Emperor Michael viii in 1282, and then to concentrate on the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–9). Without a doubt the debates and the constant attempts at reunion were not conducted in isolation from wider cultural, political and military considerations, the kind of considerations that in 1400 would lead the Byzantine emperor to journey as far as England. But here the emphasis will fall on the theological aspects. Moreover, there were also in play forces of inertia, ignorance and mutual incomprehension difficult to assess rationally. The thirteenth-century friar, Humbert of Romans O.P., in discussing what would make for reunion with the Greeks noted how a schism might be continued simply because it had existed for a long time, just like the feud between Guelf and Ghibelline.

When the Westminster Assembly convened in 1643, English puritans were confident that their effort to reform the government and liturgy of the Church of England would at last be completed. Their expectations were not fulfilled. In the early sessions of the Assembly the ‘dissenting brethren’, a group of clerical Independents led by Thomas Goodwin, opposed the establishment of a national Church on a Presbyterian model. The Independents claimed to be as orthodox as the other members of the Assembly in matters of doctrine, but they could find in scripture no ground for synods exercising the authority of excommunication. So deep was the dissension they created that, in spite of all Presbyterian attempts at reconciliation, spiritual harmony was not restored to the puritan crusade.