This article brings fresh perspective to the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State that sat from 1913 to 1916, emphasising the divisions in the Church that it both reflected and reinforced. The article focuses on the shadow that two competing legacies cast over the committee's appointment and recommendations, and the reception of its report. This is evident in the work of two prominent figures of the early twentieth-century Church: Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947) and J. N. Figgis (1866–1919). While Henson appealed to Hooker's legacy in upholding a national Church, Figgis drew on Tractarianism in defending a narrower, denominational ideal.

Ambrose's funeral sermons on the emperors Valentinian and Theodosius have been analysed as texts borrowing from classical rhetorical traditions, and as repositories of detail about contemporary politics. However, the crucial context for these texts was ecclesiastical; they were sermons, preached in church in services during which lessons were read from the Bible. This article shows that a consideration of this particular historical and liturgical context helps to elucidate Ambrose's ‘levelling’ political thought, and that identifying the biblical cadences of the sermons, far from being obfuscatory, is the key to understanding them.

This paper re-examines three of the major arguments on the validity of Henry VIII's first marriage, suggesting that, though the king misplayed his cards, he held a much better hand than his contemporary or modern critics have allowed. With a better presentation of his cause, an unbiased court might well have concluded that, on canonical principles and precedents, the union with Katherine should not have been permitted.Unfortunately for Henry, however, even such a favourable verdict could have failed to free him from his Spanish consort.

T. W. Manson posed the following problem:

…quotations are absent in those places where we should most confidently look lor them it the Fourth Gospel was composed in Ephesus about A.D, 100 by John the Apostle. No theory about the Gospel that fails to give an explanation of the phenomenon presented by the writings of Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin has much chance of survival.

No information about the Fourth Gospel or its author appears in the Pastoral Epistles.

This examination of John Wesley's emendation and elaboration of John Foxe's Acts and monuments, shows how Wesley constructed Foxe's text and himself within a tradition of learned English ministry. Offering an expanded vision of the role and function of the popularly styled Book of Martyrs, this article combines readings of Wesley's journals and secondary analyses to permit insights into Wesley's relationship with the established Church of England, his intentions in taking up Foxe's text and his conceptions of hierarchy, pastoral duty and ministry. It contradicts scholarly expectation of anti-Catholic impulses behind Foxeian publications and their effects, and encourages a more nuanced appreciation of the contemporary application of the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘papist’.

Of the many testimonials to the importance of the role assumed by the European universities in the political and ecclesiastical machinations which accompanied attempts to find a solution to the problems created by the elections of the rival popes Urban VI and Clement VII in 1378, there is none more striking than the tract written by Boniface Ferrer (brother of the saint) in 1411, after the Council of Pisa in 1409 had declared both the then rivals deposed, and had replaced them by Alexander v. This tract, intended as a defence of the Avignonese claimant, Benedict XIII is an extremely bitter attack on the academics of the day, both individually and generally. Several of them are singled out for criticism, especially those who had taken a major part in producing the conciliarist viewpoint. Thus, Simon de Cramaud, patriarch of Alexandria and acting president of the Council of Pisa for most of its sessions, is twice called an heresiarch. Many of the other major thinkers of the day have their integrity attacked, notably Pierre d'Ailly, bishop of Cambrai, and Baldus de Ubaldis, one of the major lawyers of the period.

Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

With one minor exception, it was not much more than a series of coincidences which linked Jowett and Colenso. The one exception was when Colenso was in England after being excommunicated by Robert Gray, bishop of Capetown, as metropolitan. Samuel Wilberforce refused to allow Colenso to function in the diocese of Oxford but Jowett invited him to preach in Balliol chapel, which was not under the bishop's jurisdiction. Apart from this there seems to be no evidence of direct personal contact between the two men.

This article re-examines the development of the chorepiscopoi using hagiographic sources in Syriac. These suggest that more peripheral regions of the Roman world, such as Osrhoene, with an ‘open frontier’ with local pagans, retained these subepiscopal structures into the sixth century. Furthermore, these structures fostered the independent activity of the parts of the institutional Church in defiance of their bishops in times of disagreement over doctrine. This localised emphasis explains in turn the defence of ascetic customs that had once been categorised as heteropraxy.

‘D'une manière générate, on peut dire que les littératures chrétiennes de l'Orient sont largement tributaires de la littérature grecque.’ This statement of the late Paul Peeters concerning oriental hagiographical literature may equally well be applied to that of the Slavs. At the same time it does not in any way detract from the merits of original Slavonic hagiography to admit its debt to the Byzantine influences which it preserved and enriched. The principal channels by which these influences were transmitted were Slavonic translations of Greek works, mainly ecclesiastical, which were made from the late ninth century onwards. Among these translated works, which formed the nucleus of early Slavonic literature, were the most important Byzantine hagiographical compilations and ascetical treatises produced between the fifth and seventh centuries: the Apophthegmata Patrum; the Ἀνδρν γων ββλος (=The Book of Holy Men); the Lausiac History of Palladius; the Historia Monachorum; the Historia Religiosa of Theodoret of Cyrus; the Pratum Spirituale of John Moschus; and the Scala Paradisi of St. John Climacus. There is also evidence that the Paraenesis of Ephrem the Syrian was translated, and at least one treatise by, or attributed to, Evagrius, as well as the Latin Dialogues of Gregory the Great, this last from its Greek version.

This article considers the radical contribution of Edward Irving to mid-Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism, in an analysis of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical theology and spirituality, political and social thought and missionary activity. While historians of doctrine have acknowledged the influence of aspects of Irving's thought upon liberal Anglicans like F. D. Maurice, they have paid scant attention to Irving's influence upon the theology of Evangelical churchmen. Irving's legacy was, in fact, an important and positive force for theological change. This article also challenges the conventional historical view that Evangelical churchmen produced only negative polemical works in response to the innovatory approaches of Oxford Movement and ‘Broad Church’ theologians. It considers, in particular, the work of the leading Anglican Evangelical theologian Thomas Rawson Birks, which was shaped by the legacy of Irving and has many significant parallels with that of Maurice.

This paper is concerned widi the puritan in office. It sets out to deal with an incident that took place in the university of Cambridge in 1589, and, in analysing that incident, to examine the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the position of the puritan divine (and here I mean both presbyterians and ‘fellow-travellers’) involved in the traditional administrative and jurisdictional hierarchies of the university. At first sight the affair in question appears to be little more than another clash between two young dons, with precisian proclivities, and the university authorities. Its significance for the study of establishment or moderate puritanism lies in the fact that by 1589 those university authorities included in their ranks men like Laurence Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel, William Whitaker, newly installed as Master of St John's and Roger Goad, Provost of Kings, all of whom were noted for their puritan sympathies. It was in 1589, of course, that Whitgift's final attack on the classis movement really got under way. Here, then, we have the interesting spectacle of erstwhile puritans (one of whom, Chaderton, was an avowed presbyterian) being called upon, in their capacity as university administrators, to support, or at least not to oppose or obstruct, a new hardline anti-precisian policy which was totally at variance with their own principles and sympathies.