This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

Jerome was writing De viris illustribus in c. 393, and his verdict on Donatus of Carthage conceded that he had indeed ‘deceived nearly the whole of Africa’, an aim echoed by Augustine in his satirical anti-Donatist poem composed the same year. In fact, the year 393 had not been a good one for the Donatists. The high-handed acts of the new bishop of Carthage, Primian (391–412+), had provoked a schism among moderate and traditional members of the Church in proconsular Africa and Zeugitana (modern Tunisia). About one hundred bishops from these provinces had rallied to the cause of Maximian, a deacon in the Church at Carthage who was also a descendant of Donatus himself. In the meantime, the Catholic Church, condemned to minority status since the reign of Julian (361–3), had begun to reassert itself through Aurelius, its new bishop of Carthage (392–430). In 393 it held an important council at Hippo where Augustine, even though only a presbyter, had been the preacher.

On one of his numerous journeys, Sidonius Apollinaris, by now bishop of Clermont Ferrand, turned aside to visit an old acquaintance, a former Palatine official, by name Maximus. He found him much changed: his villa, a rather remote one several miles from the main road, was sparsely furnished, with three-legged stools, hard couches and simple hangings of goat hair. His diet was frugal, more vegetables than meat; his dress was simple, and his beard long. Clearly, this was not the result of poverty (Sidonius' reason for visiting him was to plead for flexibility in the matter of a loan made ten years earlier to a mutual friend), but rather of deliberate choice. Sidonius himself had little doubt that there was a religious explanation, and so it proved: Maximus had been compelled by his fellow citizens, somewhat against his will, to accept ordination to the priesthood.

On 27 November 395, shortly after the remains of Theodosius had been interred beside the tombs of Constantine and his successors in Constantinople, the eastern praetorian prefect Fl. Rufinus was murdered by troops outside the capital. Zosimus' narrative of the incident, deriving from Eunapius, adds that Rufinus' widow and daughter escaped with a safe conduct to sail to Jerusalem, ‘which had once been the dwelling of the Jews, but from the reign of Constantine had been embellished with buildings by the Christians’. As the only glimpse of the fourth-century development of Jerusalem from outside the Christian tradition, Zosimus' passing remark is not without interest – even if no more than a casual and seemingly unpartisan aside. We cannot unfortunately make comparisons with what, if anything, Eunapius' contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus had said on the subject in his lost narrative of Constantine; but to judge from the Constantinian back-references in the surviving books it is unlikely to have been sympathetic – certainly no more so than his lukewarm endorsement of Julian's later attempt at restoring the Jewish Temple to Jerusalem, which Ammianus attributed merely to a desire ‘to perpetuate the memory of his reign with great public works’.

‘Between Creator and creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity between them cannot be seen’. With these words the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 concluded its condemnation of the doctrine of the Trinity held by Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202). The council based its assessment on Joachim's use of biblical texts as analogies for divine unity. For Joachim had, in the opinion of those who judged him, reduced the irreducible gap between God and His creatures by making God like His creatures. He had allegedly emphasised the principle of similarity at the expense of that of dissimilarity. The result was the dilution of the type of unity appropriate to the Trinity from a unity of essence to a mere unity of collection, no more binding than the spiritual unity among the faithful as expounded in many passages in the Bible, most importantly in John xvii. 22: ‘And the glory which thou has given me, I have given to them: that they may be one, as we also are one.’

Orthodox criticism of Bishop Reynold Pecok began ten years before he recanted and resigned in 1457–8. It came from a group of consciously orthodox theologians whose views were outraged by Pecok's teaching in sermon, disputation and writings. Long before his trial and recantation, Pecok had offended two important movements: a pastoral movement, deeply committed to preaching, which he outraged by belittling the importance of preaching; and a patristic movement which had grown up in the universities from the 1420s and whose members were now undertaking pastoral work. Pecok's gradually revealed hostility to the Fathers was particularly offensive to his younger opponents. If differences in age thus gave rise to differences of emphasis among Pecok's opponents, so too did differences of academic background. Nevertheless, as learned, consciously orthodox theologians with pastoral interests, they shared a common theological culture. The changes in emphasis found their expression in the course of controversy.

A major problem for the student of a relatively new discipline or sub-discipline is the construction of a framework within which to operate. In the case of the economic, social and legal position of women in the Middle Ages the only clear thing is that the lines are slowly being redrawn, although more perhaps with respect to the central Middle Ages than to the earlier period. In fact, despite the paucity of evidence there has always been a surprising degree of agreement about the early Middle Ages. A wide range of authors from Lina Eckenstein to Eileen Power, Lady Stenton and Suzanne Wemple have regarded the period, from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries, as one of ‘rough equality’ (to use Stenton's words) between men and women in general, and as a period of veneration, even elevation, of female religious. As for the later period, there is a much wider range of opinion, much of it conflicting. Speaking of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, in a popular general work, conclude that: ‘Evidence of the general improvement in the status of women is fairly extensive.’ The elevation of marriage to sacrament status in the twelfth century is undoubtedly seen by some as part of this process: ‘C'est dans la réforme du mariage qu'il faut chercher les germes les plus vigoureux de l'amélioration dont bénéficie la condition féminine à partir du XIIe siècle, même si cette amélioration n'est ni continue ni générate.’ By contrast, other works suggest that an earlier golden age for women came to an end in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an even more male-dominated feudal society reached its zenith in terms of order and definition.

The First Crusade has been described as a ‘church in procession’ and a ‘military monastery on the move’. The progress of the first crusading armies to the Holy Land was indeed accompanied by regular liturgical practices, acts of devotion and intercessory rites. Before each battle and during sieges the crusaders fasted, prayed, celebrated mass and confessed their sins. They went in processions and sang psalms. This wealth of liturgical practices reported by contemporary commentators provided the rhythm to the crusaders' pilgrimage to Jerusalem and marked the sacred character of their undertaking. At the same time, the liturgy was a rallying point for the crusaders' identity: it represented and reinforced the special relationship between the milites Christi and their God, and gave expression to the spirituality and the ethos of the holy warrior. The crusaders' earnest participation in the liturgy of pilgrimage and holy war no doubt contributed to the image, already observed by contemporaries, of the crusade as a vehicle of piety and a means of salvation parallel to the vocation of the monastic life, which was traditionally considered the highest form of religious devotion.

The rigorous enforcement of religious discipline was a hallmark of Calvinist Churches in Reformation-era Europe. Wherever Calvinism took hold, ministers and elders went to extraordinary lengths to inculcate a Reformed morality among the members of local congregations. Since Calvinists identified the eucharistic community as the pure assembly of saints, it was necessary for Reformed consistories to defend the sanctity of the Lord's Table from all human corruption.

In composing the work known as The life and death of Cardinal Wolsey, some twenty-five years after the last event it describes, George Cavendish was not motivated by the ambitions of a secular annalist or historian. He wrote mostly from memory without verifying dates or the sequence of events, and he was not much interested in the sort of things historians ordinarily want to know. It is an odd biography of a great political figure. Up to the period of Wolsey's mid fifties (c. 1472–1527) it is little more than a loose succession of anecdotes and vignettes, and becomes more expansive only for the last three years of his life after his political career had first run into insuperable difficulties and then collapsed in disaster (1527–30). The whole second half of the book is taken up with the very last year of his life, one of frustration and dejection. This weighting towards Wolsey's last years might be explained as a bias towards the time when Cavendish was closest to his subject; Wolsey perhaps talked to his servants more when he had nothing else to do. This prompted A. F. Pollard, in his biography of Wolsey, to describe the Life as ‘the classic example of history as it appears to a gentleman-usher’.

In his biography of Archbishop William Courtenay published in 1966, Joseph Dahmus wrote that ‘until documented evidence to the contrary is provided, one may assume that the connection between Wycliffitism at Oxford and Lollardy was hardly more than accidental. Although the work of Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks has since shown that the link was anything but accidental, Dahmus’ scepticism is I am grateful to the participants in the three seminars at which this paper was read for their comments, and especially to Dr J. R. L. Highfield and Dr Paul Brand, both of whom offered helpful suggestions for its improvement. All remaining errors are my own. I thank also the Warden and fellows of Merton College, for allowing me access to their splendid archive, and Mr John Burgass, former assistant librarian, his successor Mrs Fiona Wilkes, Dr S. J. Gunn, and Dr Sarah Bendall for their assistance.

The lurches from Catholicism to Protestantism and back which occurred in the reigns of Henry VIII, his son and two daughters produced dramatic changes in the liturgies, decorative fittings, and even, on occasions, the architecture of the country's cathedrals. Yet, despite these changes, there was a real sense in which cathedrals were at the eye of the confessional storms which raged about them. It is true that, as part of the Henrician reform process, the monastic corporations at Carlisle, Durham, Peterborough, Ely, Norwich, Canterbury, Rochester, Osney, Winchester, Westminster, Gloucester, Worcester and Bristol had been first dissolved and then refounded as ‘cathedrals of the new foundation’, the monks replaced by minor canons and prebendaries. Once this upheaval was over, however, the new foundation cathedrals underwent little further institutional change. Those cathedrals which had been staffed by secular priests before the Reformation (known as cathedrals of the old foundation), moreover, survived almost wholly untouched. In both new and old foundations, the same administrative and financial structures continued to support dignitaries and liturgical officers whose only obvious function remained the celebration of liturgy, despite the rejection of opus Dei and its accompanying theology of good works.

Historians of religion and society are often confronted with the difficult task of defining the distinctive characteristics of the various adherents of Church and chapel. Certainly, one of the most useful as well as the most frequently employed analytical tools in this endeavour has been the correlation of occupation to religious preference.1 While this approach can be, and has been, enormously revealing, it still has several distinct drawbacks. First, of course, there is the common problem of appropriately identifying and grouping the enormous variety and gradations of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled occupations. While the grouping of occupations itself presents several inherent difficulties, its use as an analytical tool is further restricted by the fact that while occupational identification may provide a rough guide to status levels in society, it can in no way compensate for our lack of knowledge of, for example, the range of earnings within a specific occupational group at any particular time.

By and large, the western world received the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (23 August 1939) with horror and a sick apprehension of what would come next. Quite different was the response of Guy Crouchback, the fictional hero of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of honour trilogy on the Second World War:

News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capitals brought deep peace to one English heart [He had] expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

On 18 May 1843, the Established Church of Scotland was broken up by the Disruption, as most of the Evangelical party walked out of the annual meeting of the General Assembly. They left in protest over lay patronage in appointments to church livings and what they perceived as the State's refusal to recognise the Church's spiritual independence. In all over a third of the ministers and perhaps half the lay membership left the establishment. On the day of the Disruption, the prominent Edinburgh Dissenting minister, Dr John Brown of the United Secession Church, Broughton Place, felt called to play a part in the event. Early that afternoon, his biographer related, he was in a peculiarly solemn mood and ‘could not resist the impulse’ to enter the still empty Tanfield Hall where the outgoing ministers were to gather. He took a seat on the platform and waited. In time, the procession of outgoing ministers and elders arrived followed by the immense crowd. As they streamed into the hall, Brown stepped forward to greet them. He was, however, immediately enveloped in the crowd and his gesture passed unnoticed. It was a telling moment. During the past decade, Brown had been one of the most stern and unbending of the Scottish Voluntaries, those who believed that church membership must be entirely voluntary and who opposed in principle the connection of Church and State. A leading campaigner for the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland, Brown had refused to pay the Edinburgh church rate, or Annuity Tax, in highly publicised case of civil disobedience.

Queen Victoria had been crowned on 28 June 1838. When she died in January 1901 there can have been very few people indeed who had even the vaguest memory of what her coronation had been like. There was an opportunity for scholarship to influence the shape which the ceremonies for the new monarch would take and there was both a liturgical interest and a liturgical expertise which had not existed in the 1820s and 1830s.

On 24 December 1144 'Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured the Christian city of Edessa. This was the most serious setback suffered by the Frankish settlers in the Levant since their arrival in the region at the end of the eleventh century. In reaction the rulers of Antioch and Jerusalem dispatched envoys to the west appealing for help. The initial efforts of Pope Eugenius in and King Louis VII of France met with little response, but at Easter 1146, at Vézelay, Bernard of Clairvaux led a renewed call to save the Holy Land and the Second Crusade began to gather momentum. As the crusade developed, its aims grew beyond an expedition to the Latin East and it evolved into a wider movement of Christian expansion encom-passing further campaigns against the pagan Wends in the Baltic and the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. One particular group of men participated in two elements of the crusade; namely, the northern Europeans who sailed via the Iberian peninsula to the Holy Land. In thecourse of this journey they achieved the major success of the Second Crusade when they captured the city of Lisbon in October 1147. This article will consider how this aspect of the expedition fitted into the conception of the crusade as a whole and will try to establish when Lisbon became the principal target for the crusaders. St Bernard's preaching tour of the Low Countries emerges as an important, yet hitherto neglected, event.