Although much has been written about Hooker's thought in recent years, particularly since the preparation of the Folger edition of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, surprisingly little has appeared on the relationship between Hooker's ideas and those of contemporary defenders of the Elizabethan establishment. Hooker's Laws was a controversial work, and we can expect to learn much about its meaning by comparing it with the works of his fellow controversialists. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the insight that can be gained from a comparison of his thought with that of his contemporaries, by examining one major problem in its exegesis – that is, his attitude to the role of bishops in the government of the Church.

In contrast to the extensive research devoted to the Marian exiles, little detailed attention has been paid by modern historians to the Englishmen who simply tried to continue Protestant worship during 1553–8 within the country. Yet developments in these years provide unusual insights into mid-Tudor Protestantism at its grass roots, particularly into what remained after the Edwardian Church of England had suddenly had the power of the state not merely removed from its support but actively turned against it. Not surprisingly, the change from Edward to Mary is referred to in contemporary Protestant tracts in something of the tone used toward an inexplicable natural disaster like an outbreak of the plague, for Mary's measures to return England to Roman Catholicism were indeed radical in their impact. Among other things, most of the Protestant hierarchy was soon in prison or in exile, and men and women intent on continuing the communal worship of the Edwardian Church were in effect cast into the same boat with religious groups like the Freewillers which that Church had previously repressed. Legally, all of them were now religious separatists – that is, persons who persistently conducted worship apart from the established Church – and any gatherings for Protestant worship were mere conventicles – that is, periodic meetings of self-selected persons worshipping without the participation of an authorised cleric.

By the 1230s Latins and Greeks were riot short of issues for debate or polemic, but the topic of purgatory did have a novel feel about it. The doctrine seems to emerge on the common agenda fairly suddenly, finding no place, for example, in the wide-ranging list of 104 points of divergence drawn up by the Byzantine prelate, Constantine Stilbès, in the wake of the cruel sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. The subject did, however, establish itself as a hardy perennial, and it is proposed to trace its main ramifications up to the death of Emperor Michael viii in 1282, and then to concentrate on the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–9). Without a doubt the debates and the constant attempts at reunion were not conducted in isolation from wider cultural, political and military considerations, the kind of considerations that in 1400 would lead the Byzantine emperor to journey as far as England. But here the emphasis will fall on the theological aspects. Moreover, there were also in play forces of inertia, ignorance and mutual incomprehension difficult to assess rationally. The thirteenth-century friar, Humbert of Romans O.P., in discussing what would make for reunion with the Greeks noted how a schism might be continued simply because it had existed for a long time, just like the feud between Guelf and Ghibelline.

Any period of history which later ages deem to have been significant is apt to gather to itself a mythology. To the medieval Church the first three Christian centuries appeared as a period of continuous slaughter, in which legions of martyrs preferred to perish rather than deny their faith in Christ. With such an assumption it was inevitable that the extinction of paganism during the years which followed the conversion of Constantine should be seen as a pious work undertaken in conformity with God's will – gesta Dei per Christianos – and when Julian the Apostate attempted to turn back the tide, he was duly slain by two warrior saints sent for the purpose from heaven – a legend which had sufficient vitality eventually to find its way into the Ethiopic Miracles of the Virgin Mary, with Julian transformed into a gigantic artisan named Gôlyâd, who threatens to destroy a monastery and is slain by a martyred knight raised by Our Lady to that end. On the pagan side we have the well-known story of how Serena, wife of Stilicho and favourite niece of Theodosius the Great, took a necklace from the image of the Great Mother for her own adornment and mocked and humiliated an aged vestal virgin who denounced her. At a later date, when Alaric the Goth threatened Rome, Serena was suspected of treachery and strangled. To the pagan historian Zosimus her fate was the reward of her impiety, and it seemed fitting that the neck which had usurped the goddess's ornament would at the last be encircled by the executioner's rope. The factual truth of these stories is not, for our purposes, important. What matters is the witness that they provide to the mythological – or, if you prefer it, the theological – interpretations which were early given to the victory of Christianity.

All sources of Cistercian history avow repeatedly that the primary aim of the founders was a stricter adherence to the Rule. Most scholars accept this but disagree considerably over what this implied in practice. Against an older view that the Cistercians were determined to observe the Rule in every detail and to prohibit not only what St Benedict condemned but even what he failed to mention, a number of more recent commentators, including P. Salmon, B. K. Lackner and J. Leclercq, have argued that the ideal was not a complete literalism so much as a complete fidelity to its spirit of renunciation, penitence, prayer and work. L. B. Lekai has taken this argument several steps further to claim that the Cistercian movement had little to do with a return to the Rule for its own sake. It derived rather from a general desire among the more advanced spirits of the eleventh century ‘to create a life of perfect austerity and seclusion from the world’. The founders ‘handled that venerable document of monastic legislation with remarkable liberality. They invoked and applied it when it suited their purpose; they ignored or even contradicted it when it could not be fitted into their concept of monasticism, largely based on the ideals of the eleventh-century reforms’. The increasing emphasis on the Rule, which Lekai does not deny, is to be explained by two secondary objects: to establish the movement on an indisputably legal foundation and to defend the Cistercians against charges of novelty. In fact, so little were the first Cistercians concerned with literal adherence to the Rule that they immediately departed from it in several important respects. Other deviations followed quickly, not as is often alleged because the Cistercians betrayed their ideals almost as soon as they proclaimed them, but because a literal interpretation of St Benedict had never been their intention in the first place.

Richard Baxter (1615–91) was possessed of that all-embracing curiosity, indefatigable energy and tenacious idealism which, as Reformation and Renaissance passed into the sober Augustan certainties of the Enlightenment, became ever rarer among Englishmen. His many-sidedness is reflected in the very different kinds of interest his career attracts. The ecclesiastical historian meets in Baxter both puritanism's most committed apologist and its most idiosyncratic representative, a man who, involved in every doctrinal controversy and every negotiation or conference convened to discuss a national church settlement, was to have a lasting influence on English Dissent. His participation in these debates is, however, more than a chapter in the history of later puritanism: it contributed to the development of seventeenth-century rationalism and liberalism and shows suggestive affinities with the thought of the Cambridge Platonists. There is, furthermore, contemporary relevance in Baxter's conception of ‘mere Christianity’: ‘the first exponent of Ecumenism in England’, he promoted ecclesiastical reconciliation, both practically, in the Worcestershire Association, and theologically, in the attempt of such treatises as Richard Baxter's Catholick Theologie (1675) to harmonise Calvinism and Arminianism.

Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.

An increasing number of men wanted, or needed, to transact business at the papal curia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The contemporaneous development of the papal administration – partly responding to and partly encouraging the growth of business – made its transaction a more elaborate affair for those engaged in it. In a sense, the office of proctor came to the rescue of men faced with the greater frequency and complexity of business at the curia.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of political mobilisation for religious organisations. This is a well-established fact in the case of English nonconformity – not quite such a well-established fact in the case of the Established Church. My concern in this paper is to trace the response of the Church of England to the extension of electoral politics, a response chiefly evidenced in the work of the Church Institution. This body, founded in 1859 and reconstructed as the Church Defence Institution in 1871, survived until 1896 as the most important independent pressure group acting on behalf of the Established Church in English politics.

Faced with the problem of ministering to the pastoral needs of a rapidly expanding Catholic population, the restored English hierarchy naturally turned its attention to the training of candidates for the priesthood. The immediate problem after 1850 was to devise a constitution for the three existing colleges or seminaries, and it is to this issue that historians have given most attention. Of greater importance, however, were the ideals and standards which the bishops laid down to guide those who were running the colleges, for here they were setting a pattern of training which determined what was to happen for almost a century. In general terms, they advocated a training which isolated the seminarians from contemporary developments in secular education and which was marked by a deep suspicion of the world; it reflected a very narrow view of theology, and was partly responsible for the failure to develop a commitment to continuing study after ordination in many of the clergy. The present article investigates some of these issues by examining the decrees of the provincial synods of Westminster and the situation in the new diocese of Liverpool under its energetic second bishop, Alexander Goss.

The conciliar movement is often seen as the major political issue in which the universities of Oxford, Paris and the newer universities became actively embroiled during the fourteenth century and thereafter. It was the last and most ambitious product of the medieval vision of government by consent and representation that had evolved during the fourteenth century, and it marshalled the resources of theorists and practitioners of politics, of arts and theology faculty lecturers, of canon and civil lawyers, of monarchical publicists and papal hierocrats. In general, conciliarism drew upon the university-trained in a manner not previously seen on such a scale. During the Great Schism (1378–1449), the universities assumed exceedingly important roles in the affairs of the universal Church, with the University of Paris playing a dominant part from the start in proposing the via concilii. Pierre d'Ailly was, like Gerson, Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, and like the earlier Marsilius of Padua, a Paris scholar. And it has recently been argued that university support for the Basle conciliar programme was motivated not only by an attachment to the ideal of conciliar government but also by the hope of reforms which would improve the status of university-trained doctors in the Church. While the bulk of controls proposed by the conciliar movement concerned the reduction of papal control, a few aimed more explicitly at promoting the interests of graduates.

In 1530 or 1531 Thomas Alwaye, an otherwise obscure evangelical prosecuted by Wolsey and the bishops for buying English new testaments and other prohibited books, petitioned Anne Boleyn for intervention in his affairs in the following extraordinary terms:

When extreme need began to compel me, right honourable lady, to make me friends by whose means I might be released out of my miserable thraldom, I could not find one in all this realm in whom I had any hope or looked for any comfort until your gracious ladyship came unto my remembrance. But anon I remembered how many deeds of pity your goodness had done within these few years, and that without respect of any persons, as well to strangers and aliens as to many of this land, as well to poor as to rich: whereof some looking for no redemption were by your gracious means not only freely delivered out of costly and very long imprisoning, but also by your charity largely rewarded and all thing restored to the uttermost, so that every man may perceive that your gracious and Christian mind is everywhere ready to help, succour and comfort them that be afflicted, troubled and vexed, and that not only in word and tongue, but even after the saying of St John.

Studies of revivalism, from Calvin Colton's explanation of the ‘classic’ American experience to John Kent's recent unsympathetic work, have highlighted the use of children as instruments of adult conversion and have illustrated the way in which revivalism sought to influence the whole of domestic life by confirming the sect's alienation from wider society. Equally, children were evangelised in their own right, an important fact to remember in view of the large numbers who died before they reached late adolescence. Although it may strike us as precocious, Victorian children were considered the possessors of an instinctive religious sense, which revivalism sought to harness and develop. The notion of the ‘child-leader’, which was the mainstay of much religious literature throughout the nineteenth century and, propagated by the Sunday schools, was embedded in the growing revivalist ideology, grew out of an ambivalent attitude towards children. Against the older, theological assertion of the depravity of all human beings, there emerged in the late eighteenth century a ‘softer’, more sentimental attitude, which depicted children in particular as potential recipients and bearers of grace. The roots of this attitude lay as much in the theological tradition as in a reaction against it on the part of those who rejected any idea of the aboriginal sinfulness of children and stressed instead their essential innocence.

‘Popular religion’ has of late been a much-discussed subject among historians of early modern Europe. Most of the best work has been on France, by French and North American scholars, while for Germany the subject is virtually ignored. Oddly enough, serious scholarship on ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ religion began in Germany at the opening of this century, and by the 1920s a major new field of historical enquiry had been established under the banner of religiöse Volkskunde. However, historians left the study of German popular religion to folklorists, a tendency perhaps reinforced by the rather dubious reputation the discipline of Volkskunde acquired under the Nazi regime. Both before and after 1945, folklore scholars have contributed numerous important studies of popular religion in early modern Germany, but historians have been reluctant to follow in their footsteps. Some of this reluctance may be explained by the absence of precise definition as to what is meant by ‘popular religion’. It is often defined through the use of polar opposites, in terms such as ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religion. The former is institutional religion, the latter that which deviates from institutional norms. Another definition invokes an opposition between theory and practice.

Dr Samuel Johnson, despite his dying exactly a century before this I Dixie Chair was founded, is linked with it individually and in three ways. The first is, that the only time he came to Cambridge he came to see Dr Richard Farmer of Emmanuel College – one of the two or three most celebrated Masters of Emmanuel College. When Johnson came to Cambridge, Farmer was not yet Master, being junior proctor that year, which was March 1765. He and Johnson had a common interest in Shakespeare, and Johnson used Farmer as his informant for some of the lives of the poets. They also had a common quality of both being lovers of London club conversation; and both totally careless of their appearance, so that at times observers could mistake each of them for being half-crazed; and both finding it impossible to get up in the morning.

In an article published in Past and Present some years ago, Professor Strauss drew attention to an area of activity that early sixteenth-century reformers considered to be of vital importance - evangelical effort amongst the young. The overwhelming impression left by this article and by a subsequent full-scale study of the indoctrination of the young in the German Reformation is that – in Professor Strauss's terms – failure, not success, was the dominant note.

Last year the world celebrated Martin Luther's quincentennial birthday anniversary with postage stamps, parties and publications. Scholars had been gearing up for the quincentennial for some years and began filling bookstores with quincentennial biographies and monographs in 1980 or 1981.1 Their production was impressive, yet in an odd way relatively little new ground was broken. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of Luther biography.

It is more than twenty-one years since Professor John Bossy wrote his stimulating and controversial article on ‘The character of Elizabethan Catholicism’. His article made familiar to a wide range of students the concepts of ‘seigneurial Catholicism’ and ‘survivalism’. It concluded, tendentiously, that ‘the history of Elizabethan Catholicism is a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations’. Professor Bossy subsequently developed his ideas about the new kind of Counter-Reformation Catholicism which was affecting other countries outside England, and then in 1975 he produced a major work on The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. In this he advanced the view that the English Catholic Community really began in the 1570s. What happened between the 1530s and the 1570s was merely ‘the posthumous history, if you will, of “medieval” or “pre-Reformation” Christendom in England’. He agreed that the English Catholic community launched about 1570 had some continuity with the past, but he argued that it was ‘in most respects a new creation’. Before then, there existed a hangover from the past labelled ‘the Old Religion’, but this was ‘less concerned with doctrinal affirmation or dramas of conscience than with a set of ingrained observances which denned and gave meaning to the cycle of the week and the seasons of the year’. This, according to Professor Bossy, had been aptly termed survivalism. He argued that: ‘As a complex of social practices rather than a religion of internal conviction, it offered no barrier to the degree of attendance at the parish church required to preserve the integrity of the household.’

Derek Holmes, proposing a fresh investigation of the history of Catholics in nineteenth-century England, largely by reference to a tiny group of national clerical leaders, has justified his approach by arguing that it is impossible to imagine the development of English Catholicism without them. This seems a strange apology with which to introduce the history of so numerous and diverse a community. Is it to be assumed that that same community has little or no life apart, or that it had little significance except as backdrop to the drama of episcopal politics? This objection is particularly apropos of nineteenth-century Catholicism, which came to enjoy an enormous following in circumstances that appear to bear but a marginal relationship to the activity of the elite. In short, there is surely a popular dimension here, independent of figurehead biography, which is possibly best captured in the nineteenth-century legend of English Catholic history.