The Middle Ages remained serenely unaware that a dark problem might attach itself some day to the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. They knew their Gregory, studied his Moralia and other scriptural commentaries with uplifted hearts, read his Dialogues with equal veneration and devotion and never perceived even the glimmer of a contradiction between the two categories of works. Then came the Reformation with its stress on Scripture and its dislike of the ‘superstitious Romanist piety’ fostered by works like the Dialogues. A problem thus arose for the Reformers. They had little love for the papacy but retained a veneration for the Church Fathers, among whom they counted Gregory the Great, that great interpreter of Scripture, who had been instrumental in bringing Christianity to England. Was it possible to retain Gregory but divest him of an embarrassing work? It is important to note that the first attempts to deny Gregory's authorship of the Dialogues are rooted in the polemics of the Reformation period.

No original Anglo-Saxon charter bearing an AD date earlier than 736 is extant, which seems to suit the traditional view that dating by the Era of the Incarnation, as opposed to the indiction or regnal years, was due to its popularisation by Bede's treatise De temponim ratione and his Historia ecclesiastica. ‘Consequently,’ in R. L. Poole's words, ‘not a few Anglo-Saxon charters which contain the date from the Incarnation have been condemned as spurious or corrupt.’ He then added that ‘there seems, however, to be no reason to suppose that the adoption of this era was originated by the treatise of Bede’, maintaining that it is ‘much more likely’ that it was derived from the Easter Tables of Dionysius Exiguus, arguing on the basis of the accounts of St Wilfrid's instruction at Rome and his speech at the Synod of Whitby in 664, that the saint championed the use of the Dionysian computation. Kenneth Harrison has shown how likely this is on various grounds. These include a defence of four charters bearing AD dates in the seventh century and arguably connected with Wilfrid. Harrison's case has been accepted by Nicholas Brooks, though not by Anton Scharer, and Harrison later brought two more charters into the discussion. The earliest of Harrison's charters, the foundation charter of Bath, dated AD 676 and attested by Wilfrid, and a charter concerning Ripple, Worcestershire, dated AD 680, will be discussed in detail below. Three others, all attested by Wilfrid, belong to the group of charters which Anton Scharer and Patrick Wormald associate with Eorcenwald, bishop of London, who also attests: Casdwalla of Wessex's grant of Farnham, Surrey, dated (problematically)AD 688, Eorcenwald's grant of Battersea, Surrey, dated AD 693, and his charter for Barking monastery, in which his visit to Rome is dated (again problematically) to AD 677. It is entirely possible that Wilfrid was responsible for the inclusion of the annus Domini in these charters, even if their actual drafting was done by Eorcenwald or one of his circle; the absence of the annus Domini from the other credible ‘Eorcenwald’ charters is significant. (Eorcenwald attests the Bath foundation charter, but so does Wilfrid.) Harrison's remaining charter is Æthelred of Mercia's confirmation of a grant in Thanet to the Kentish abbess Æbbe, dated AD 691 in the best manuscript.6 Significantly, this is the only one of the thirteen charters between 675 and 737 in Elmham's Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis to bear an AD date. Wilfrid does not attest — the confirmation carries no witness list — but Brooks comments that, of the four charters originally discussed by Harrison (Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, nos 42, 43, 51 and 72), only BCS 42 [the Thanet charter] has no evident connection with Wilfrid. Yet it shows Wilfrid's friend and protector, King Æthelred of Mercia, intervening in Kent by force in January 6gi (‘dum ille infirmaverat terram nostram’) at a time when the see of Canterbury was vacant. Wilfrid was by this time again running into difficulties with the Northumbrian king, and his biographer claims that he had been offered the succession to the see of Canterbury by Archbishop Theodore himself.

Walter Stapledon, bishop of Exeter 1308-26, treasurer of England and victim of the downfall of Edward 11, was a notable benefactor of the Church. As well as giving generously to the rebuilding of Exeter Cathedral (where he was buried in a splendid tomb beside the high altar), he founded or planned three institutions for the clergy of his diocese: a school foundation for a tutor and twelve pupils in the hospital of St John at Exeter; a college for a chaplain and twelve scholars at Oxford (now Exeter College); and a hospital for two chaplains and twelve infirm priests at Clyst Gabriel in Bishop's Clyst, four miles east of Exeter. Unlike the college, the hospital has long since disappeared, but its records survive in unusual profusion for such a small foundation. Not only do they reveal the constitutional and financial history of the house, they also preserve the names of many of its inmates, the dates of their entry and of their deaths or departures. Clyst Gabriel possesses, in effect, one of the oldest registers of patients in an English hospital, commencing as early as 1312.

The two works of Rodulfus Glaber, the Histories and the Life of St William, have always been held to be of special importance because of the supposed Cluniac origins of this writer. Glaber is commonly referred to as a Cluniac monk, as can be seen from the title of an important modern series of articles about him, while Delaruelle's famous essay about Cluny and Holy War leans heavily upon his ‘Cluniac connections’. The lack of literary sources about the history of Cluny in the reign of Odilo accounts in part for the extensive use of his Histories by the numerous corps of historians of Cluny. By contrast the Life has been somewhat neglected, and indeed the literature on St William of Dijon in English is very limited. It is important, therefore, to discover in what sense, if any, Glaber can be called a Cluniac.

This essay is an attempt to find out what Winstanley meant by certain terms, using close textual analysis. Extensive work has already been done in locating Winstanley in political, theological and, as far as possible, intellectual terms. This will receive only cursory treatment here. A scholarly tradition can be traced from Bernstein, through Petergorsky and Margaret James to Christopher Hill, which places Winstanley at the beginning of the development of materialist socialism although, it is suggested, his ideas proved to be a false start and went underground for a century or more. This view derives from his later works, especially The Law of Freedom, with its practical design of tilling the land communally, and sees his mysticism either as a cloak for revolutionary aims or as an undeveloped stage in his thought which he later left behind and which is thus of secondary importance. Work has been done, sometimes by the same scholars, to map out the tenets of his religious beliefs in the context of contemporary radical Puritanism, considering whether he was, for instance, a mortalist, a universalist or a millenarian, and how far he was any of these. For such doctrinal identification one can look to W. S. Hudson, the co-operative study of L. Mulligan, J. K. Graham and J. Richards and to Christopher Hill, for all of these have compared and contrasted his beliefs with those of Seekers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. Hill himself, however, has pointed out the difficulties of placing Winstanley in a particular group because of the fluidity of the borders between one sect and another; sects sharing certain beliefs while differing in others and changing character internally with changing political circumstances.

The disagreement between Thomas More and William Tyndale has often been deplored. It has been felt that the controversy failed to bring out the best in More as a writer – that he became bitter, bullying and, worst of all, tedious. Alistair Fox, in his recent book on More, while rightly assigning an important place to the controversial works, writes of them, on the whole, with distaste, finding ‘a pattern of progressive deterioration; dialogue gives way to debellation, self-control yields to loss of proportion and perspective, candour is replaced by dishonesty, and charity is displaced by violence’. More's latest biographer, Richard Marius, finds ‘ferocity and deadly dullness’ in More's polemic, ‘monumental self-righteousness and viciousness’ in Tyndale's. Other modern readers have agreed; C. S. Lewis, in particular, pointed to the tragic irony of such a lengthy quarrel between two men who shared many intellectual assumptions and were to have strangely similar fates. It is true that the opponents have much in common, true also that the scolding of scholars is no longer regarded as first-class intellectual entertainment. And the reader, while admitting the importance of the long-distance debate in the Renaissance as a means of clarifying and disseminating ideas, misses, in More's writings against Tyndale, the pleasing courtesy of his Letter to Martin Dorp in defence of Erasmus and, more acutely perhaps, the ability to compress and control his subject which gives his earlier polemical letters their attractive blend of lightness and earnestness.

In Rome the Inquisition was not above that of other places, but applied it self only to that City, as others did in their Cities. The Pope indeed was superintendent and overseer of them all, maintaining nevertheless the agreements, immunities, and lawful Customs of every one, and so it continued until Paul the third, who did institute a Congregation of Cardinals in Rome, giving them the Title of Inquisitors General, who nevertheless do not command the Inquisition of Spain, which by agreement was first instituted: So likewise they ought not to take away the authority of this States Inquisition, also instituted by agreement some hundred years since. Which thing I have considered for to conclude, that it is not reasonable that Inquisition should take that which belongeth unto this.

‘C'est à vous, Madame, à qui je parle.’ So wrote the distinguished church statesman and reforming bishop of the Meaux diocese to Marguerite d'Angoulême, duchess of Alençon (later queen of Navarre), powerful sister of the Renaissance monarch François I, on 22 December 1521. The personal and emphatic form of address employed here by Guillaume Briçonnet arose from his concern that Marguerite should grasp firmly a neglected aspect of Christian doctrine: the role of the Spirit in the life of each believer as well as within the Ecclesia. By grace, came the episcopal injunction, Marguerite must recognise ‘le vray feu qui s'est logé, long temps a [i.e. il y a longtemps déja] dans vostre cceur’;and by this same grace French Christendom must acknowledge its state of desolation. An analysis of the 1521–4 exchange of letters between the duchess of Alençon and the bishop of Meaux reveals both the extent of Briçonnet's distress at what he saw as basic weaknesses in the French Church and his spiritual counsel aimed at rectifying a situation he held to be desperate.

John Foxe's De censura, sive excommunicatione ecclesiastica, rectoque eius usu, published in 1551, was the earliest tract to be written by an English Protestant on the subject of ecclesiastical discipline and, as such, deserves a closer examination than it has received to date. Given that continental Protestants and, later on, Puritan apologists alike accepted as axiomatic that the Reformation could only be established on the twin pillars of pure doctrine and right discipline, the appearance at this time, amid a stream of doctrinal polemic, of a tract on discipline, was significant. It indicated that Protestants had become confident enough, after waging war on the claims of the Church of Rome, to regulate the lives of its members, to assert similar claims in the name of Scripture and reformed ‘true religion’. That this tract should appear in Edward VI's reign, and not earlier, was important in this respect, for the effect of the Henrician Reformation had been to render impossible any suggestion that the Church should or could be autonomous in discipline. The psychological climate - as well as the theoretical framework - of the Supremacy persisted throughout Edward's reign, but the fact that the king was a minor gave Protestants a breathing space in which to approach the problem of trying to bring the Church into line with pure, apostolic models. In terms of quantity of published material, doctrine, rather than discipline, was undoubtedly much the more important of the issues discussed; by dealing with discipline a Protestant writer was grasping the nettle, for the subject raised questions about the relative roles of Church and State in the reformation of society and, ultimately, about the structure of the national Church. Foxe's tract was the first attempt to face the question of discipline; that it was the only one, even in Edward vi's reign, showed what a hold the Supremacy had taken. The aim of this article, therefore, is to bring out the significance of Foxe ‘s tract and to explore some of the tensions in mid-Tudor Protestant thought which it reflects. The first part (by Catharine Davies) aims to set it more precisely in its Edwardian context; the second (by Jane Facey) uses it to illuminate the changed emphasis of Foxe's thought on the relationship of Church and State required by the writing of the Acts and Monuments.

The bishops of the medieval English Church were among the greatest landowners in the kingdom. The list of their estates in the Valor ecclesiasticus of 1535 eloquently testifies to their extensive holdings. But concentration on temporalities as the source of episcopal wealth ignores the extent to which the Church's own jurisdictional and administrative structure provided a means for generating wealth. This income, which the Church itself provided for bishops as a part of their office, distinct from the revenues generated by land-holding and other resources ancillary to their ecclesiastical functions, deserves more attention than it has so far received. The neglect of income from spiritualities is partly explicable by the nature of the sources, which are usually very incomplete and, in most cases, limited in chronological coverage. Nevertheless, usable evidence does survive from many dioceses, which eventually may be brought together to produce a worthwhile general statement.

The material presented below grew out of a study of episcopal administration in the diocese of Barcelona in the mid-fourteenth century. Among the bishops' registers which were analysed for the study, three proved especially important: two from the communia, or general, series, Notule communium 15 and 16 (NC 15 and NC 16); and one from the collations series, Registrum collationum 9 (CO 9), covering the years 1345–51. The registers record both a period – 1345–8 – of presumably normal diocesan administration, and the plague period – the so-called Black Death struck Barcelona in spring 1348. The communia and collations series were selected both because they provided information about general diocesan administration and because the two series were conflated beginning with NC 15 in 1348, and remained separate until 1361.

The public controversy over ritualism in the Church of England reached its peak in the 1870s, with the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act and the attempts, eventually abandoned through use of the episcopal veto, to prosecute ritualist clergy for the use of technically illegal ceremonial ornaments or vestments. One other related subject that caused a similar degree of controversy at the time, though it has been less well remembered since, was the emphasis within ritualist circles on auricular or sacramental confession. The subject of auricular confession, made privately to a priest, was one of the most explosive religious issues, both morally and theologically, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In recent years the doctrine of providence has attracted increasing attention from secular historians. They have come to realise that it cannot be regarded as the exclusive domain of their religious colleagues, nor as an intellectual oddity, picturesque but irrelevant to serious analysis of political movements and choices. In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas showed the pervasiveness of the belief in providence in early modern England and its function as explanation, consolation and reassurance in a world often unpredictable, inexplicable and unjust. Other historians have shown its place in the rise of Puritan activism. Most recently, Blair Worden has elucidated the doctrine and has powerfully demonstrated its importance as an engine of political action in the ‘politics of Cromwellian England’ as well as its part in crucial decisions in the career of Cromwell himself.

The years 1764-8 form a rare unity in Polish history, distinguished by an unprecedented attempt at constitutional and economic reform on a scale not to be repeated for another two decades. The fragile nature of the reforms which accompanied the election, in September 1764, of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-95) was revealed as early as autumn 1766, when internal opponents, supported by Russia and, to a lesser degree, Prussia, imposed the first serious checks on the reformers and then proceeded to try to secure their total defeat. The tensions between reformers and conservatives, compounded by large-scale Russian military and diplomatic intervention, were to plunge Poland into ungovernability and civil war by March 1768 and to drag it inexorably towards the First Partition.

The document presented here makes available a hitherto unknown version of an anonymous vernacular tract dating from the middle years of the sixteenth century. The only known version of the tract until now — extant in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge — was first published by Dr P. N. Brooks in an appendix to his monograph on Thomas Cranmer's eucharistic doctrine (1965).Beyond placing it in the ‘mid-sixteenth century’, Brooks did not attempt t 0 attribute it to an author or indicate its precise historical context beyond suggesting that it provided a ‘valuable period example of the Lutheran understanding of the eucharistic presence’ such as was favoured by Richard Cheyney (bishop of Gloucester, 1562-79) and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the period between abandoning transubstantiation and embracing a version of the Reformed doctrine. The longer version of the tract which has since come to light in the Bodleian would seem to call for some reassessment of that estimate. For while consistent with a Lutheran doctrine of the eucharistic presence, the Bodleian version concludes with sections on eucharistic adoration and oblation (not found in the Corpus MS). This suggests a closer affinity with the position championed by opponents of the religious changes in the reign of Edward VI, or at least an attempt at a doctrinal consensus between those of the ‘old’ persuasion and those of the ‘new’.

In the 1740s, despite personal and doctrinal disagreements, the leaders of the Revival were still at one. Between old Dissent and new Methodism suspicions were not absent but were absorbed in a common enterprise. Wales had not yet gone its separate path. The Wesleys, Whitefield, Doddridge and Howel Harris (1714–72), whom some of his countrymen consider the greatest Welshman of his age, were all actively in touch. One form of co-operation was in visits to Lady Huntingdon at her home in Chelsea. Here Whitefield, Doddridge and Harris took turns in preaching before a circle of the countess'ss noble friends. These they hoped to win for the Revival. They also hoped to gain a wider religious, and even political, influence for themselves.

A well-to-do prebendary of the eighteenth century might spend a part of his time in his cathedral close, a part in his other benefices, a part in some favourite country home, a part in London seeking favour in the court which could lead to a bishopric. He might even, like Dr Vesey Stanhope in Barchester Towers, spend years abroad, never doing a day's duty in Barchester Close – ‘and yet there was no reason against his doing duty except a want of inclination on his own part’. Dr Stanhope was doubtless intended to represent standards of the eighteenth century surviving into the nineteenth; and there is no doubt that non-residence was widespread, pluralism common in the eighteenth century. It has often and reasonably been said that these were no novelty: their roots go back to the refoundation of secular cathedrals after the Norman Conquest; non-residence and pluralism rose and fell in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rose again to remarkable heights in the fifteenth; Thomas Wolsey set a standard of pluralism no later prelate could scale, yet the reformers – for all their squeamish phrases – made little permanent impression on these practices, which survived into the age of Trollope. But it is exceedingly difficult to find any precise evidence as to how the pluralists of any age filled their time. The interest of Thomas Gooch (1675–1754) nes precisely in this: until he became bishop of Norwich he was a canon of Chichester and of Canterbury, whose cathedral records throw some light on his residence, and Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his periods of residence are exactly known. These three offices divided his attention. It is true that he was also archdeacon of Essex, and held other preferment besides, but such evidence as we have suggests that this involved him in only occasional duties: we have found evidence of six occasions when he held archdeacon's visitations in person.

The political turmoil which characterised the decade from 1825 to 1835 is interestingly reflected in a religious crisis, as a result of which Established Church and traditional nonconformity alike were found by seceders to be spiritually wanting. Millenarian and charismatic movements are often, in part, an expression of social uncertainty. Any analysis of such movements as the Plymouth Brethren or the self-styled ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’ must take into account their social milieu which, at that time, included a great deal of political agitation - for causes like Roman Catholic Emancipation, parliamentary reform, currency reform and nascent socialism - as well as anxiety arising from the outbreak of cholera and social unrest, with several European revolutions in the background. It may not be entirely fortuitous that, when Edward Irving was expelled from his church in Regent Square in 1832, his congregation (not without some misgivings) met for a while in Robert Owen's socialist Rotunda in the Gray's Inn Road.

To the mixed relief and regret of the scholarly community, Lutherjahr 1983 is fading into the distance but the tide of writings stimulated by the quincentenary shows little sign of abating. Some of the works here reviewed fall into the category of ‘late pickings’ from the 1983 harvest, including three collections of essays which originated at scholarly conferences or colloquia held specifically to mark the quincentenary.