Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.

Since apostolic times Christians have treated the family as a micro-community which reflects the values and problems of the larger Christian community as a whole. Most communities, including Christian ones, are reluctant to contemplate the possibility that their own existence will end. But although Jesus is said to have promised St Peter that His Church would survive death, and although the notion of the Church as a community that never dies became a commonplace in subsequent ecclesiology, there was no such guarantee of immortality to the individual family. The breakup and restructuring of family units through death or the dissolution of marriage was a reality which medieval Christian communities had to face in each generation. Even so, high-ranking social groups sought to minimise generational disruptions by adopting the fiction of the family that never dies, a notion that is especially familiar to historians of the theory of monarchy in the Middle Ages. The medieval Church was a keen champion of the continuity of domestic units. As Georges Duby has recently pointed out, the Church in the early Middle Ages struggled mightily to make its own theory of marriage prevail over the alternative marriage theory popular among the laity. The ecclesiastical model of marriage, which emphasised the free consent of the contracting parties and the indissolubility of unions, triumphed over the lay model of marriage, which, according to Duby, valued family concerns above the wishes of the individual at the end of the eleventh century in France. The pattern of marriage arrangements that Duby calls the lay model seems to have persisted vigorously until much later in other places, including Catalonia and Aragon. This paper will examine a case from mid-thirteenth century Arago-Catalonia in which the conflict of lay and ecclesiastical marriage ideals features prominently.

At about noon on Thursday, 2 March 1905, Charles Gore knocked on the south-west door of St Philip's Birmingham, and, having been admitted, proceeded to be enthroned as the first Anglican bishop of Birmingham. A commemorative booklet described those ceremonies minutely, but only briefly alluded to the prolonged agitation for the creation of the diocese. Apart from passing references and a perceptive analysis, in an earlier pamphlet, of the reasons for the initial failure of the scheme, no substantial secondary literature on the subject exists.

According to Western canonists, husband and wife had a debt towards one another: they were obliged to render sexual intercourse on demand. This article looks at the differences and similarities of the ‘marital debt’ in Byzantium and the West in order to evaluate whether this concept can be applied to Byzantine couples. It argues that, contrary to the West, in Byzantium there was no fixed linguistic terminology or sophisticated rules to describe a sexual obligation between spouses. Ultimately, there was also less need for one as sexual intercourse within marriage was not considered sinful and needed no justification.

Early in March 1554 the three English reformers and later Oxford martyrs, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the former bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, and the bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, were transported to the supposedly safe location of Oxford to expedite their trials. Their stay in Oxford, however, turned out to be a long one, lasting until their execution by burning outside the Northgate there: Latimer and Ridley on 16 October 1555; Cranmer on 21 March 1556. During the time they spent in Oxford – between nineteen and twenty-four months – they were usually confined apart from one another, in a number of locations, by the municipal officials responsible to the crown for their safekeeping: the mayor and the two bailiffs of Oxford. Cranmer, the most important and politically the most sensitive of the prisoners, appears to have spent most of his long confinement in the Bocardo, the local prison over the town's Northgate next to St Michael's church. Latimer and Ridley, on the other hand, spent considerable time privately boarded in the houses of, respectively, the bailiffs and the mayor, and Ridley, in particular, seems to have been able to maintain regular written and personal contact with their supporters and sympathisers. Their confinement must have put the three reformers, all of them Cambridge graduates, into a variety of contacts with local residents, but records for only two of those relationships have survived, and from diametrically opposite sources.

This article examines British reactions to Stalin's deportation of over one million peasants and religious believers to the Soviet gulag. It follows events in Britain as the evidence mounted and public protests grew, first over the persecution of religious believers and then over the British government's refusal to halt imports of timber cut by camp inmates. It highlights the role played by Prebendary Alfred Gough's Christian Protest Movement and the worldwide protests against Soviet persecution which Gough's campaign inspired. It reveals how Labour ministers and other leading British Socialists obstructed the protest campaign and publicly denied accounts of crimes against humanity which they either privately admitted or, because of their enthusiasm for Soviet Communism, dismissed as right-wing fabrications.

This article looks at a largely neglected aspect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religio-political activism and public doctrine, the conservative politics of premillennialist Protestantism. It approaches this subject through a case study of the doctrines and activities of the Catholic Apostolic Church, a relatively small premillennialist and Pentecostal faith-community extant from the 1830s through to the mid-twentieth century. The translation of these doctrines into Conservative party politics by Henry Drummond MP and by the seventh and eighth dukes of Northumberland is given especial attention.

Phillips Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom described Brooks and the liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as ‘in a class by themselves, envied and emulated the country over’. Unlike Beecher, however, the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, subsequently Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. His few biographers have rarely attempted to place his thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts. With one recent notable exception, little of scholarly value has been written about Brooks. The older biographies have tended to portray him as initially rooted in the evangelical tradition, even though he subsequently became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Alexander V. G. Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary training, Brooks ‘freely accepted the leading truths which are known as Evangelical’. E. Clowes Chorley asserts simply that ‘Brooks never drifted from the heart of Evangelical religion’. Allen and others stress the evangelical origins of Brooks's thought in order to argue for the continuity between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism. This portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the essence of an early evangelicalism while later embracing his Church's liberal future has served what Allen Guelzo has aptly called the ‘myth of synthesis’ in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does not view Evangelicals as being forced out of the Church in the 1870s but posits a benign creative synthesis that enabled the Church to transcend the aberrant party battles of the mid century.