The history of English Catholic theology between the break with Rome and the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I remains relatively little-known, despite (or perhaps because of) the publication of two recent American studies by P. S. O'Grady and E. A. Macek respectively: Henry VIII and the conforming Catholics, Collegeville, Minn. 1990, and The loyal opposition: Tudor traditionalist polemics, New York 1996. The appearance of a work which proposes to undertake a fresh survey of the whole period must therefore be welcomed.

During his pontificate, Pius xi (1922–39) vigorously promoted the ‘export’ of the Italian model of Catholic Action to the rest of the Church as the organisational blueprint for Catholic lay activism, particularly in the battle against atheistic Communism. He was assisted by Mgr, later Cardinal, Giuseppe Pizzardo, the head of Italian Catholic Action. The successes and failures of this campaign are tracked through documents available since the opening of the files of the apostolic nunciatures and delegations and the Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs section of the Secretariat of State for Pius xi's pontificate in the Vatican Archives.

Cyprian's baptism is usually placed in 245–6, two to four years before he became bishop. The early treatise Ad Donatum is thus taken as a witness to the neophyte's spiritual ‘transition’. This article challenges this common biographical narrative. A date just before Cyprian's ordination in 248/9 fits the evidence better than 246. As comparison with Ad Quirinum suggests, the winsome portrait of Cyprian the true convert that Ad Donatum paints might have done more than exhort neophytes to zealous spirituality: it may also have been meant to silence the presbyters whom Pontius’ Vita and Cyprian himself portray as critics of his ordination.

The Society of Jews and Christians drew on relationships formed before 1918 in urban social work, the suffrage campaign and pacifist organisations. Its career was much less smooth than that of its successor, the Council of Christians and Jews, because Liberal Judaism's founding role largely antagonised the Orthodox Jewish mainstream, and Christian affiliates sometimes failed to observe the agreement not to proselytise. This paper discusses the influence of the Revd James Parkes, and the exceptional circumstances of the rise of Nazism, in changing views on both sides, and also reflects on why historians may have ignored a pioneering initiative.

This paper reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between gender, religion, authority and influence in the Victorian Church of England, using the example of the ecclesiastical response to the rise of Anglican religious communities for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Anglican sisterhoods occupied equivocal and disputed space within the Victorian Church of England, proclaiming their loyalty to the Church but unfettered by any ecclesiastical legislation or tradition that would have compelled them to obey the bishops. In a society that assumed that obedience to lawful authority was a natural attribute of godly women, their ambiguous and improvised relationship with the church hierarchy created enormous tension as well as considerable hostility.

Using John Trusler's unpublished memoirs, this article seeks to reconsider his trade in printed sermons using imitation manuscript print, which clergy could pass off as their own. While the trade smacks of corruption and dishonesty, and attracted considerable scorn for Trusler, it was in some respects a reflection of late eighteenth-century sermon culture. Trusler's defence to Bishop Terrick of London of trading in imitation manuscript sermons suggests that he was not embarrassed by the enterprise. Trusler's talents as a preacher were considerable, but Victorian Britain came to regard his commerce as reprehensible.

In the summer of 1543 King Henry VIII promised that he would send 40,000 ducats, the equivalent of £10,000, to Ferdinand, king of the Romans and of Hungary, archduke of Austria, to help his brother, Emperor Charles V, in his defence of Christendom against the Turk. Europe witnessed a strange alliance between Henry, himself a schismatic monarch, and Charles, who had effectively blocked Henry's attempts to have the pope annul his first marriage. The coalition of opposing forces was equally remarkable, comprising the Most Christian King of France and his non-Christian ally, the Turk. Francis's support for the Turks was contrasted by some with the king's attitude to Protestant reform. Francis seems to have regretted the presence in 1543–4 of a Turkish colony at Toulon, which appears to have possessed a slave market and mosque. The alliance between Charles V and Henry VIII attests to the persistence of the medieval concept of Christendom (Christianitas), groups of nations which shared basic religious and cultural values despite the religious divides being caused by the Reformation.

Henry made elaborate plans to furnish Charles with the promised £10,000 to support military action on the continent. The money, available either as cash or as bills of exchange, was released in two halves, the first on 16 August 1543 and the second on 18 September. In his usual way, the imperial ambassador in England, Eustace Chapuys, made things worse by harrying the Privy Council for speedy payment of the funds. The crown, none the less, hit on an interesting solution to the problem of recovering its money. Henry issued an appeal to every diocese in England to organise voluntary contributions from parishioners to recover the amount of money he disbursed abroad. Working from the financial returns among the exchequer subsidy rolls at the Public Record Office, Dr Kitching has calculated that such collections raised no more than £1,903 8s. 3d., less than a fifth of the money advanced to Charles V. The English parishes reimbursed the crown in late 1543 and early 1544.

As Dr Kitching himself has indicated, the background to the whole episode is poorly documented. Previously unknown to historians, however, important material concerning the king's plan survives in the diocesan archives of London and Westminster. The episcopal registers of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, and Thomas Thirlby, bishop of the short-lived see of Westminster, both shed valuable light on this scheme. Diocesan bishops recorded their formal administrative acts in registers, the compilation of which was supervised by the diocesan registrar. Unfortunately, the archiepiscopal archives at Lambeth are silent on the collections of 1543. The registers for the dioceses of London and Westminster, however, are particularly informative for the opening years of the Reformation. It is my purpose to consider the nature of the new evidence and to offer a transcript of the more important documents.

Throughout its history the institutionalised Church has sought in different ways to define its position with respect to the ‘world’, in order to give meaning to the injunction to be ‘in’ this world but not ‘of’ it. During the Middle Ages, the tension was acute because the Church, in its narrow definition of the clergy, claimed to be a separate, spiritual order, set apart from the temporal world. The tangible results of this dichotomy are particularly evident with respect to the real property held by ecclesiastical institutions. Property gave the Church the security to be independent from the lay power and the aristocracy; hence the Church claimed varying degrees of immunity for its property from secular jurisdictions.

This article examines how the Castilian conquest of Granada and the conversion of its inhabitants to Christianity affected the Catholic Church; specifically, it analyses the role played by parish churches as recipients and administrators of religious donations, first from Muslims and later from converts. This study shows that the Church was not the only beneficiary of the donations it received, since these gifts were part of a strategy on the part of converts to be accepted as legal members of Castilian society and on the part of the Crown in its campaign for the unity of the kingdom.

Scholarship by Barbara Harris, James Daybell and others has recently highlighted the role played by elite women as custodians of dynastic memory in early modern England. The Dissolution of the Monasteries interrupted the commemorative process and constituted a threat to the mausoleums of the elite. Moving or rebuilding tombs represented, to some extent, a decision to remake or even to rewrite the family's history, a process which it is often assumed was at this time controlled by men. This article, however, through the example of the Howard family, demonstrates that women were equally involved; it investigates why this was so and the mechanics of the processs.

What is a photisterion? Translators usually render the Greek word phōtistērion (site of illumination) as ‘baptistery’ (site of immersion in water). This article reopens the study of phōtistēria, arguing that being ‘immersed’ or ‘illuminated’ evokes different senses of the concomitant meaning of the sites and rites of initiation. It situates late ancient phōtistēria from epigraphic and literary sources in their theological and liturgical contexts. The evidence from Galilee, Syria, Jordan and Cyprus corroborates the idea that many Christians of late antiquity preferred ‘illumination’ to express the composite rite of initiation in a phōtistērion, within which ‘baptism’ was one part.

The intention of this article is to examine the principal features of John Stratford's Winchester episcopal register (Hampshire Record Office, 21M65/A1/5), recently edited for the Surrey Record Society, and hence to consider Stratford's reputation as a diocesan bishop insofar as this is determinable. Frequent absences on royal business, often abroad, are meticulously recorded, necessitating competent ‘central administration’ and a well-qualified and trusted familia. Both of these are in evidence. The impression given is of an efficiently run diocese with a surprising amount of pastoral work, particularly ordinations and visitation of monasteries, being performed by the bishop in person.

This article examines the ceremonial reception of papal legates in the early Middle Ages. It offers a precise, distinctive and normative portrait of their ritualised practice well before the existence of written canonical rules and procedures. The customs, principles, gestures and symbols conditioning legatine activities in this historical era became necessary pre-conditions to political communication, interaction and exchange. Their expression and representation, it is argued, help to explain the manifestation of Roman authority in distant Christian provinces, its varied meaning to contemporaries and the formative rules of political governance and diplomacy.

In 1660 the Quaker movement was confronted with a new political situation. In response, the leadership constructed a centralised system of bureaucracy designed to maintain solidarity in the face of persecution. Not all Friends, however, reacted positively to the changes, especially the new arrangements for women's meetings and the conduct of weddings. By the 1670s the movement was split by the Wilkinson–Story controversy, an internal dispute reflected in Quaker meetings throughout the country. This article examines the friction between Friends in Hertford and the claims made by some members of the meeting that George Fox was stifling individual spiritual freedom, the touchstone of Quaker doctrine.

If St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, was a fairly typical London parish in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its archive is unusually good. A reasonable number of its parishioners have surviving wills, which is true for the City's parishes generally; but St Andrew Hubbard is extraordinary in preserving churchwardens' accounts in a virtually unbroken run from c. 1450. It thus proves possible to gain a more than usually clear impression of parishioners' beliefs and conduct both for the period preceding the Reformation and then during subsequent upheavals. Scrutiny of testamentary practice either side of c. 1540 indicates a profound and rapid shift in the way in which individuals conceived of and exploited their parish. While, by comparison, churchwardens' accounts suggest institutional continuities, analysis of two mid sixteenth-century initiatives to keep property which had been devised to the parish sheds further welcome light on the reflexes that a community developed to safeguard its interests in this critical period.

The statute 4 Henry VIII, c. 2 denied benefit of clergy for particular crimes to certain offenders, and also modified due process in handling pleas of sanctuary. The statute's possible renewal in the parliament of 1515 triggered a confrontation between the crown and leading churchmen. The passage of the act through the parliament of 1512 illuminates this important episode. The law that was enacted is shown to have differed substantively from the measure that had been proposed. Extensive amendments reveal in what ways the bill provoked controversy. Positions adopted in 1512 may well have rehearsed those assumed three years later.

In the century following the death of St Francis, the Franciscan order underwent enormously rapid changes. As Franciscans became university masters, inquisitors, royal councillors and bishops, some confronted dilemmas in reconciling their religious vows with the duties of their offices. Yet whereas some friar-bishops and archbishops might have shied away from involving themselves in their churches' finances, Eudes Rigaud, the first Franciscan archbishop of Rouen, made significant investments in landed property, seigneurial rights and rents on behalf of his archdiocese. The Franciscan archbishop's commitment to ecclesiastical reform, evident in his meticulous visitations of his clergy as recorded in his episcopal register, is also visible in his efforts to augment his archdiocese's temporalities.