Following the vote in favour of birth control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Church of England became the first major Christian denomination explicitly to condone the use of birth control. This paper argues that the bishop of Winchester, Theodore Woods, was the previously unheralded principal actor responsible for reversing the position of the Church. Woods was convinced that the Church needed to ‘modernise’ its position in order to secure a receptive audience for its higher-ordered teachings on marriage, sex and especially procreation. In turn, he hoped to bring about an increased birthrate amongst the eugenically ‘desirable’ English middle and upper classes.

In his long, untranslated treatise De adoratione, Cyril of Alexandria interacts with the mysteries of Isis in two places. In one place he describes a ritual involving female initiates dressed in linen holding sistra and mirrors, and in another he describes the rotating of torches as a purification ritual, albeit without naming Isis in either. These passages enrich our understanding of the mysteries of Isis, and of Cyril's engagement with the cult beyond his purported actions at Menouthis. The passages also suggest why and how Alexandrian Christians engaged in Isiac practices, and show Cyril the bishop constructing a pastoral response to these practices.

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.

This article offers a reconsideration of religious mobilisation in the inter- and postwar periods. It focuses on how the Church of Sweden gradually altered its catechetical activities aimed at children to meet changing needs. Built on a range of statistical sources, this article calls for a reconsideration of the ways in which larger Protestant denominations adjusted to meet declining religious practices. With a focus on how laypeople became involved in these efforts, it is argued that institutional history, rejuvenated by the introduction of a gender perspective, is essential for our understanding of postwar religious mobilisation in north-western Europe.

This article argues that the liturgical tradition of celebrating Christmas on 25 December travelled from the Latin West to the Greek East at the behest of Theodosius I upon his arrival in Constantinople in AD 380. From there it made its way to Cappadocia, Pontus and Syrian Antioch by means of travelling clerics who belonged to a pro-Nicene network. The essay also makes the larger methodological point that in late antiquity liturgical traditions did not travel of their own accord; rather, they were often carried by networks of travelling bishops and ‘radiated out’ from major sees to minor ones.

According to the standard narrative, although John Henry Newman was driven away from Oxford in the 1840s by the dominant Protestant consensus, by the end of his life in the 1890s he was back in favour, fêted in Oxford as a Roman Catholic celebrity and as an esteemed alumnus. This article challenges that interpretation by examining the forgotten controversy over Newman's national monument, a significant aspect of his reception history. It shows how Newman's memory and reputation remained hotly contested, provoking resistance by the dons and citizens of late Victorian Oxford, even in this recently secularised and professedly tolerant university city.

This article uses the history of Jewish-Christian relations in twentieth-century Britain to shed light on the theological and political changes which have shaped inter-faith dialogue, and explore religious responses to the perceived acceleration of secularism. In so doing it questions the centrality of antisemitism and the Holocaust as the key drivers of change in Jewish-Christian relations and highlights the importance of broader shifts in religious belief, and a growing perception of ‘common ground’ between faiths. While Jewish-Christian relations in Britain are now frequently presented as a model of inter-faith cooperation, this article argues that longstanding theological and political challenges have continued to problematise this role-model status.

Between about 1850 and 1940 the Dutch Protestant missionary movement reached its ascendancy and set out to establish the kingdom of God in overseas territories. In doing so, mission became inextricably linked with Dutch imperialism. This article investigates this connection through the lens of cartography. Missionary maps of the world in general and the colonies in particular were produced and distributed in schools and churches to inform a Dutch audience about mission and to gather support. This article concludes that mission and imperialism were different strands that became increasing entangled towards the end of the nineteenth century.

A challenge has recently been made to the venerable tradition that the passage of Henry VIII's first act for suppressing monasteries (1536) was facilitated by the presentation in parliament of details of monastic sexual misconduct gathered during the royal visitation of the monasteries in 1535–6. This article, by following up clues missed in the evidence cited for that challenge, precisely identifies a now lost source, last sighted in the hands of John Bale, which casts important new light on the visitation and, it is argued, was very probably the exact document presented to parliament in 1536.

As a relatively open academic atmosphere related to religious studies in general became manifest in the People's Republic of China in the early 1990s, new possibilities for studies of various forms of Christianity in greater China (the mainland and Chinese communities outside of the PRC) began to be realised both within China and overseas. Within the first decade of the twenty-first century, two major handbooks related to the study of Christianity in China were produced under the editorships of the Belgian Jesuit scholar, Nicolas Standaert (1959–)1 and the German Protestant scholar, R. G. Tiedemann (1941–2019),2 initiating what should be considered to be the most up-to-date and essentially new standard reference works regarding the study of all forms of Christianity that have had interactions with various Chinese persons over the period of time from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (seventh century) to the year 2000. Both volumes were large by any standard, the former being nearly a thousand pages in length, and the latter extending beyond a thousand pages. Both produced a state-of-the-art account of their particular historical coverage of varying forms of Christianity that came to or emerged within China during those periods. Notably, most of the supporting authors who contributed to those two massive volumes were foreign scholars of the history of Christianity in China and Chinese Christianity.3

This paper describes and analyses the remuneration arrangements of Church of Scotland ministers serving rural parishes between 1815 and 1974. It constructs and deploys a new longitudinal and cross-sectional dataset, materially more extensive in range and scope than those previously developed, calibrating the absolute and relative level of stipend throughout the period. It offers a preliminary analysis of the economic consequences for ministers and the established Church of the process of fixing, or standardising, stipends in money terms from 1925 onwards, highlighting how this undermined the financial foundations of the Church's principal means of stipendiary funding.

Preserved among the so-called ‘Armagh registers’ is an act book of the consistory and metropolitan court of Armagh that was compiled in the early sixteenth century. Its fortuitous survival facilitates a systematic study of how an Irish church court processed litigation concerning women's marriages or other sexual relationships, and their sexual reputations, and in doing so reveals a great deal about important aspects of the lives of women in early Tudor Ireland.

The nomination of Hensley Henson as bishop of Hereford in 1917 provoked a famous ecclesiastical controversy, the ‘Hereford scandal’, which threatened a split within the Church of England and a crisis between the Church and the State. The point of contention has always been understood to have been doctrinal, but this article argues that this was largely a proxy for disputes over Church policies, and that the outcome had significant consequences for the continuing character of the national Church. It also explains how the Hereford episode both stimulated and arrested demands for reform in the prime ministerial nomination of bishops.

While a great number of manuscripts of Augustine's De haeresibus add to the text chapters on the Christological heresies that arose after Augustine's death, modern editions offer only a confused picture of their transmission. This article identifies three distinct sets of additional chapters, and analyses their sources, possible origins and theological implications. It demonstrates that their authors were taking distinct positions in the debate over neo-Chalcedonianism, the interpretation of Chalcedonian Christology that started to became dominant in the early sixth century. The additions also provide evidence that many neo-Chalcedonians saw an Augustinian understanding of grace as complementary to their Christology.

This article demonstrates how transnational encounters and exchanges can shape and re-shape Christian beliefs and practices in a globalising world. It does this using the example of a transnational network of neo-charismatic churches called Newfrontiers that was founded in the small towns of Sussex during the 1970s but, by 2011, encompassed almost 850 churches in over sixty countries. Drawing on extensive primary research, this article shows how the theological and practical commitment of Newfrontiers churches to racial reconciliation and the building of diverse congregations was forged over thirty years through encounters between British, South African and Ghanaian Christians.

Arguably the most interesting source for the religious views of the early English evangelical Thomas Bilney (1495–1531) are the annotations in his copy of the Vulgate. Unfortunately, scholars have accessed these annotations almost exclusively through the error-riddled and selective summary provided in 1940 by J. Y. Batley. This study corrects Batley's most significant errors and provides transcriptions and translations of the most interesting annotations that he omitted. These include discussions of clerical celibacy, whether God is the author of evil, which biblical texts are authentically canonical and the nature of the law, justification and salvation.

Liberius of Rome is often portrayed as Athanasius’ strongest ally in the Latin West. His support for Athanasius is said to have begun by the end of his first year in office, when a synod in Rome accepted an Egyptian council's vindication of Athanasius against an Eastern council's excommunication. This article argues that the Roman synod did not ratify the Egyptian council's decisions but rather called for an appeals trial. In so doing Liberius did not defend Athanasius but preserved what he saw as the traditional duties and authority of the Roman see in matters of ecclesiastical discipline.

Violence is a crucial lens for inquiring historically into Christianity worldwide. The field of World Christianity, however, has been oriented by a paradigm of growth, success and Christian converts’ creative agency. This article establishes the need for a historiographical intervention in the literature on World Christianity through a critical analysis of texts that have formed the field, followed by examinations of anti-Evangelical violence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico, and Catholic-Protestant conflicts in colonial East Africa. These case studies identify lacunae in the field and suggest that violence has often been a constitutive part of the contextual formation of World Christianity.

This article analyses the Ecos sagrados de la fama gloriosa de Innocencio xi, an elaborate panegyric by the Spanish priest and musician Gaspar Sanz written in 1681 in praise of the reigning pope. The Ecos sagrados is built around the concept of an echo poem, which in turn inspires seven prose discourses that reflect on aspects of the pope's name and character. However, the text is also a unique resource for tracing transmission of ideas through the Spanish Church and for encountering a forgotten world of intellectual diversion amongst the priests of Baroque Madrid.

The Franciscan doctrine of absolute poverty became one of the most controversial matters under discussion in the 1320s. Even after John XXII's poverty decrees, it did not cease attracting the attention of prominent theorists. This article examines the so-far neglected contribution by the key theologian of the Avignon court and future pope, Jacques Fournier (c.1285–1342). His monumental Matthew commentary contains a lengthy discussion of evangelical poverty. Comparing this text with various counsels drafted for the pope, this article brings to light Fournier's stance on poverty, placing it within the debates held at Avignon during the conflict between John XXII and Ludwig the Bavarian.