This article traces the history of twentieth-century Ethiopian Orthodox student movements formed in response to modernity, especially the influential Maḫbärä Qəddusan, ‘Association of Saints’, established in 1991 when Ethiopia's Communist regime fell. It explores parallels in Egyptian and Indian miaphysite Churches; balances the prevailing narrative of explosive Pentecostal growth which has obscured the influence of such movements; provides insight into networks that have stimulated renewal and responses to contemporary challenges through strong engagement with traditional literary and intellectual heritage; and explores training and publications promoting contemporary reflection on this heritage, the revival of important religious practices and the targeting of influential ecclesiastical and public positions.

The article focuses on a little-known expression of Orthodox conciliar practice in the Russian Empire, the Riga diocesan congress of 1905, and analyses the extent to which commitment to church renewal was spread in regions and provinces of the empire. The article draws attention to the self-presentation of this assembly as a true council, an embodiment of sobornost’. The article interprets the bold reforms proposed by the congress as a product of nineteenth-century ecclesiological ideas, the active participation of the native clergy and laity and the borderland position of Baltic Orthodoxy, a minority faith in a Lutheran region.

The formation of the General Council of Protestant Evangelical Missions in Korea in 1905 with the ultimate objective of achieving church union beyond denominational boundaries is a significant but neglected episode in the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. The council was reorganised in 1912 as the Federal Council of Protestant Evangelical Missions in Korea, which marked a significant shift of ecumenical objectives from institutional union to missionary cooperation. This article examines why and how this change happened and its implications for interpretations of the wider ecumenical movement in the twentieth century.

This article brings fresh perspective to the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State that sat from 1913 to 1916, emphasising the divisions in the Church that it both reflected and reinforced. The article focuses on the shadow that two competing legacies cast over the committee's appointment and recommendations, and the reception of its report. This is evident in the work of two prominent figures of the early twentieth-century Church: Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947) and J. N. Figgis (1866–1919). While Henson appealed to Hooker's legacy in upholding a national Church, Figgis drew on Tractarianism in defending a narrower, denominational ideal.

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.

The aim of this learned and enterprising book is to elucidate the structure and intention of Clement's Stromateis by comparing it with pagan texts from the first and second centuries of our era which belong, as we might now say, to the same genre. This term, which is chaperoned by quotation marks on p. 15, has proved itself heuristically indispensable, but has no closer equivalent in ancient Greek than genos, which is as likely to denote the style or metre of a work as its place in a critical taxonomy. Strict conventions governed versification and the composition of speeches for given occasions, but it is we who have all but invented the epyllion and coined our own names for the novel, the autobiography and the didactic poem. While Heath proposes on p. 138 to render Stromateis as ‘layout’, ‘miscellany’ is the term that is now most commonly applied to this and other ancient texts whose amorphous character seems to resist taxonomy. As Heath observes, however (p. 24), there are all too many specimens of Greek and Latin writing which are in some sense miscellaneous: she might have quoted the thesis of her namesake, Malcolm Heath, that abrupt transitions, divagations and surprises were not aberrations from the classical norm, but calculated devices to heighten the pleasure or whet the interest of the reader, both in poetry and in prose. The culture of ubiquitous imitation was also a culture of unceasing improvisation, and both practices are amply illustrated in Heath's comparison of the Stromateis with four books from the second century to which it bears an obvious resemblance: the Natural history of Pliny the Elder, the Convivial questions of Plutarch, the Attic nights of Aulus Gellius and the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus.

These two useful and beautifully-produced sets of conference and associated papers span 1200 years of theology and church archaeology in these islands and beyond. The volumes are complementary, comprising a thematic Venn diagram on the rood, its screen and the Reformation afterlife of screens. The area of Venn intersection around screens points to a missing fourth theme of great importance, which I will add to the rich store of data presented by the sixteen essayists, all of whose contributions are worthwhile in their own right.

This note identifies three dated sermons delivered at St Paul's Cross in 1597 which do not appear in Millar Maclure's Register of sermons. These sermons are recorded in an anonymous notebook probably written by a member of the Exchequer's staff.