This paper explores the crisis of 596 which interrupted Augustine of Canterbury's mission to the Anglo-Saxons, necessitating his return to Rome. Bede's interpretation of this as a moment of psychological failure is discounted. Political changes in Merovingian Gaul associated with the death of Childebert are reconsidered. A new economic explanation is advanced based on the wording of Gregory the Great's letter of encouragement to Augustine and his fellow missionaries, consideration of the management of the papal estates in Gaul and the behaviour of Virgilius, metropolitan of Arles.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.

This article revises interpretations of the post-Reformation English Chapel Royal as a place for the performance of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ forms of the Book of Common Prayer and establishes its importance as a space for negotiating Protestant royal worship. By detailed analysis of the sound and appearance of royal chapels under Elizabeth i and James vi & i the Chapel Royal is emphasised not for its anticipation of a Laudian ascendancy, but its sensitivity to the ceremonial boundaries of the reformed Church of England, and ability to negotiate a form of Protestant majesty in royal worship.

Irenaeus has tended to be a bit player in modern narratives of the Nestorian controversy. Where the count features in accounts of the church politics of the 430s, it is as an essentially ‘secular’ figure: a conduit to the palace and supplier of coercive force for Nestorius and his Syrian episcopal allies. This article argues that Irenaeus was much more directly involved in doctrinal debate and the maintenance of ecclesiastical alliances than has been appreciated. The theological engagement and startling career shifts of this imperial count-turned-heresiarch-turned-bishop exemplify the significance of elite Christian patronage and official doctrinal engagement in 430s Constantinople.

Is the era of the reference book coming to an end? Publishers evidently don't think so. Not only have we seen an explosion in the number of handbooks, companions and dictionaries produced by the mainstream academic press in recent years, but even older, well-established ‘brands’ continue to flourish. Here is the fourth edition of Oxford University Press's ‘flagship’ Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC), considerably expanded and revised from the third edition. Yet although libraries continue to buy works such as this, and academic colleagues to use them and refer to them, students often – if my experience is anything to go by – prefer the easier, cheaper, faster route of online sourcing, and particularly Wikipedia. A review of this edition of the ODCC has to reckon, then, not only with evaluating the content of the work itself, but, more sharply than perhaps was necessary before, with the questions of who exactly is likely to use it, and how it stands up in comparison with the competition.

This article presents new manuscript evidence of one of the most widely read devotional texts of the Middle Ages – the Prayers and meditations (Orationes sive meditationes) of St Anselm, abbot of Le Bec and archbishop of Canterbury – to argue that some of these prayers were originally written and disseminated in the voice of a woman. Composed and copied in grammatically feminine forms, these prayers were, as I show here, deliberately designed to be used and recited by women. This new and hitherto completely overlooked evidence is transformative for our understanding of women's active voices in medieval cultures of devotion.

The 1814 memoir of missionary wife Harriet Newell was important for awakening the early nineteenth-century American Evangelical imagination on behalf of the burgeoning missionary cause. As young women ‘read the self’ and patterned their lives according to the literary examples they encountered, Newell's memoir used the language of ‘usefulness’ as a powerful theological plot. This article hopes to address the lacuna of scholarship regarding the theological aspects of Newell's writing and how it was those aspects in particular which subsequent generations venerated in the creation of missionary wife memoirs.

This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury's Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda's sources, the text's place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda's statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.

This article analyses a selection of archival material written by Paul Tillich, particularly his early parish sermons and sermons from World War I. Although the themes of ‘eternity’ and ‘the soul’ are rare in the early parish sermons and only appear in the context of death or suffering, they play a predominant role in the World War I sermons. This article suggests that this is because, for Tillich, suffering became the interpretative key. Through his sermons amidst the suffering and devastation of war Tillich employed what he called the immanent way of theology.

Scholars have debated how the themes discussed by Pomerius in his De vita contemplativa found ample resonance across Gregory the Great's work, and reflect similar concerns. While it is impossible to determine whether the Roman bishop read the treatise authored by the North African rhetor, their parallel authority on the matter was recognised by Carolingian copyists, who often reported their works alongside each other. The discovery of a glossa sourced from Gregory's literary production in Pomerius’ manuscript tradition might both substantiate this claim and shed some light on the networks of medieval scriptoria.

Agimund's Homiliary is extant in two eighth-century manuscripts in BAV, Vat. lat. 3835 and 3836 and is one of the very few Roman texts actually written in Roman script surviving from the early Middle Ages. This article argues that the Homiliary is a crucial piece of evidence for early medieval Roman liturgical and cultural life and the patristic resources of Rome. Agimund's Homiliary, and the late eighth-century additions which are actually part of another, hitherto unidentified Roman Homiliary, together constitute evidence of the degree to which patristic theology and exegesis were embedded in Roman culture, of the interchange between the Latin- and Greek-speaking communities in Rome and the Lateran in the early Middle Ages, and of the intellectual productivity and cultural versatility of early medieval Rome.

This article describes John Wesley's evolving visions of Christian singleness (celibacy) and three commitments related to his changing views: a commitment to celibacy in an Oxford college; a commitment to marriage with Mary Vazeille; a de facto commitment to single life after Mary's separation from him. Protestant Churches lacked structures to support celibate commitment, structures that might have discouraged his unguarded and intimate correspondence with married women that lay behind his separation from Mary. The article asks why Protestants, although formally allowing single life, have not found ways to honour commitments to it.

This article examines manuscript sermons to reveal how a Calvinist minister, Hugh Ramsden, preached predestination from his parish pulpit in the late 1620s. It shows how he adapted a scholarly work for this purpose, sought to balance inclusive and exclusive visions of the Christian community, and attempted to frame the doctrine as a comfort. By comparing two manuscripts for the same sermon, the extempore aspects of his live preaching are explored. Lastly, it considers the negotiation that allowed Hugh's like-minded brother, Henry, to continue with Calvinist preaching under the Laudian regime of Richard Neile in the 1630s.

Scholars have rightly identified the roles of literal/historical interpretation and noetic/spiritual interpretation in Cyril of Alexandria's exegesis of Scripture. This article argues that narrative contributes to both methods by using events in the past to explain Scripture's meaning. He applies concepts established historically by Exodus’ recount of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt to his interpretation of the prophetic books. On the one hand, his literal interpretation draws from the Israelites’ return to idolatry, detailed in Exodus xxxii. On the other hand, his noetic interpretation relates the Egyptians’ oppression of the Israelites detailed in Exodus i to humanity's limitations under the devil.

It may appear odd to write a review article focused on two books that are fundamentally different in intention and scope. The first is a self-conscious attempt by a moral theologian of conservative inclinations to contribute a Christian ethical perspective to the culture wars currently raging on both sides of the Atlantic on empire, race, and slavery. Its author, Nigel Biggar, is the Emeritus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. The second book is a collection of papers by imperial and mission historians given at a workshop at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2018. Its brief is more limited, namely to explore the professed commitment of nineteenth-century Christian missions to bringing a gospel of peace into contexts that were frequently sites of violence, not least between indigenous peoples and European settlers and other colonial actors. Its geographical remit is limited to Africa and the Pacific. Biggar's book has provoked a predictable storm of criticism, both within the historical academy and beyond it. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, for example, rapidly published a 15,000–word rebuttal of Biggar's arguments by Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, together with an almost equally lengthy reply by Biggar.1 In contrast, Geoffrey Troughton's edited volume, extremely valuable though it undoubtedly is, seems unlikely to attract notice beyond the limited constituencies of professional historians and scholars of mission studies. Although obviously differing in character, these two books, when set in juxtaposition, bring into focus some of the most pertinent issues raised for Christianity by the imperial past and the ambiguous role played within it by Christian missions.

This article argues that Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the founder of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, was a heterodox Anglican. Suspected of ‘Unitarian opinions’ in his youth, his religious writings in old age, including neglected notes on his copy of the New Testament, display a deep commitment to critical study of the Bible and a broadly Arian view of Christ. Knowing that Clarkson was a life-long but heterodox member of the Church of England challenges the conventional focus on Quakers and Evangelicals in the study of religion and abolitionism.

This article explores the politics which lay behind the Presbyterian petitioning campaigns in Lancashire and Cheshire during 1646. Focusing particularly upon clerical activists, this article traces the linkages back to the petitioning campaigns of 1641-2 and highlights the continuities in both personnel and an impulse for accommodation. The article unravels the networks which stretched between London and north-western England, and investigates how Presbyterian politics in London in 1646 might have influenced the Lancashire and Cheshire campaigns for a Presbyterian settlement of the Church. Finally, the article comments upon why the Lancashire campaign succeeded when the Cheshire campaign did not.

During the 1130 schism, the Anacletian Cardinal Pandulf wrote three Lives of Gelasius II, Calixtus II and Honorius II. Historiography has usually read these Lives literally, as biographies. However, if they are considered in the light of the context in which they were written, our working hypothesis is that Pandulf created these Lives in order to support Anacletus and delegitimate his enemies. They therefore function as propaganda rather than as biographies. In this article passages from each Life will be presented that are significant in reading these works from the point of view of an Anacletian supporter in the context of the schism.

Papal bulls transferring jurisdiction over the Channel Islands from the bishopric of Coutances (Normandy) first to the diocese of Salisbury and then to Winchester have an important place in the historiography of the allegedly centripetal forces of royal and ecclesiastical authority under Henry VII. This article corrects the chronology, and questions the disruptive impact of international tensions and the role of English bishops’ or governors’ ambitions. Instead, it points to the influence of Breton clergy. Further, that Henry abandoned the initiative for a financial contribution from the islanders sheds light on his policy towards his rights over the Church and beyond.

Jocelin of Brakelond's chronicle provides a remarkably detailed account of conflict within the monastic community of Bury St Edmunds over the course of two decades in the late twelfth century, tracing the convent's division into factions following the death of the negligent Abbot Hugh, the controversial election of his successor Samson, and the community's subsequent difficulty negotiating its relationship with him. This article examines the position of conflict within Jocelin's narrative, and argues that it played a fundamental role in shaping the monastic experience by mediating relationships within the convent and between the convent and the abbot.