Justin and the other second-century Christian apologists endeavour to present their beliefs and life-style as a ‘ philosophy’ best compared with that of Plato, and Christians as a philosophical sect. This was a ‘quite implausible’ suggestion according to R. L. Wilken, commenting on Justin. Yet a number of outsiders in the second century do seem to have seen the Christians in such terms, although not as intellectually respectable as the apologists would have liked.‘What distinguished them from wandering Cynic philosophers?’, asks Stephen Benko, and replies, ‘Outwardly, probably nothing’. The evidence for these preliminary assertions will be sketched at the end of this discussion. But if this is a plausible reading of the reaction to Christians of such outsiders as Aristides, Galen, Celsus, and Crescens, and of Lucian's Peregrinus, it provides a context in which better sense may be made of the charges widely evidenced at least from Justin's time onwards and levelled against the early Christians, of indulging in Oedipoean intercourse and Thyestean feasts.. Accused of incest and cannibalism the Christians are thought to be practising a Cynic philosophical ‘naturalism’ that deliberately flouts mere social conventions. This affords a more plausible explanation for the indictment than that generally offered, namely the suspicions thought likely to have been aroused by any secretive religious group, a suggestion for which the evidence profferred is far from convincing.

Porphyry and Eusebius, antagonistic witnesses, agree that one of Origcn’s early tutors was called Ammonius. This was also the name of the tutor of Origen’s younger contemporary Plot in us, and it. has long been the fashion to argue or assume that they were pupils of the same man. Heinrich Dörrie perhaps remains alone in his view that the two men called Ammonius were distinct, a view for which I shall argue in this article, though not entirely on Döme’s grounds. In the first part I shall present the available evidence, and in the second use it to defend Döme’s position against its detractors; in the third part I shall argue that the confusion of the two began in the early Christian centuries, through a mixture of knowledge and pardonable ignorance, and finally I shall advance another candidate, whose credentials for the position of Origen’s tutor have not been adequately examined in modern discussion.

In 561/2, a few years before the death of the Emperor Justinian, Roman envoys concluded a peace treaty with the Persian Empire. A detailed account of the negotiations and terms is preserved among the surviving portions of the sixth-century history by Menander Protector. For the immediate purposes of this paper, the most important features of this treaty were that it ended more than twenty years of intermittent warfare between the two empires, that the treaty was to remain in force for fifty years, and that the Romans were required to make substantial payments of gold to the Persians at a rate of 30,000 solidi per year.

The cultural and historical location of the concept of ςιαςοϰή in second century claims about the apostolic succession has been widely debated. In England, under the influence of Ehrhardt, the term is generally taken to be used by analogy with the sacerdotal succession of Jewish high priests, and to derive from the influence of James the Just on Jewish Christianity. In Germany, on the other hand, following Campenhausen, ςιαςοϰή has been understood in terms of continuity of doctrine, in which references to James in the sources are regarded as pure legend constructed to make the point of such continuity in a picturesque way. Both Ehrhardt and Campenhausen, and their respective followers, regard the ςιαςοχή of teachers in the literature of the Hellenistic philosophical schools as quite incidental, without any close relation to the Christian usage. In this article I will argue the contrary, that there are in fact integral connections between the Hellenistic literature of the philosophical successions, and the development of the idea of the apostolic succession in the late second century, where perhaps the true origin of the Christian concept is to be found.

Since the destruction of the Temple the synagogue has been at the heart of every Jewish community. Here the individual could affirm his obedience to the laws (kalakkot) through prayer and ceremony. In this way he sought the salvation of the soul and the resurrection of the body in the messianic age. In addition the community, through the offices of the synagogue, was able to exercise close control over the social lives of all its members, by excommunication if necessary but this was rarely required for ‘the social consequences of nonconformity brought irresistible pressure to bear upon the transgressor’.

Syon Abbey was a royal foundation established by Henry v in 1415. It was situated at Isleworth on the Thames, just across the river from the royal palace of Richmond and the Charterhouse of Sheen, and some three hours rowing time upstream from London Bridge. It was the only Bridgettine foundation in England. It was a double house consisting of sixty nuns and twenty-five men, of whom thirteen were to be priests; the abbess ruled over the whole establishment, but the confessor general, one of the priests, had spiritual jurisdiction. From the time of its foundation until its dissolution in 1539, the prestige of Syon stood high. The nuns included daughters of many well-connected families; many of the monks, like William Bonde and John Fewterer, had previously been fellows of Cambridge colleges or, like Richard Whitford, had served as chaplains to prelates and noblemen. The royal foundation and its wealth, the convenient situation close to a royal palace and within easy reach of London, the social status of the nuns and the intellectual calibre of the priests, and its high standard of religious observance all contributed to the abbey's prestige.

It was a commonplace of the times, featured in royal letters despatched abroad, and of course in the chronicles, that during the reign of Edward II the ‘indiscretum regimen’ of bishops coupled with their ‘taciturnitas’ lay at the root of the manifest political troubles.

In 1944 Kathleen Edwards produced two articles on Edward II's bishops, relating respectively to their ‘learning’ and to their ‘political importance’. Fifteen years later, she treated another aspect of the topic, their ‘social origins and provenance’. These articles, based on her 1937 London MA thesis, provide the point of departure for further study, in particular for any prosopographical analysis. However, apart from transcripts of parliamentary proxies (PRO, SC 10) provided by Professor Johnstone and the brief Meditacio de Statu Prelati (BL, MS Royal 5 C. iii), ascribed to Simon de Ghent, printed sources only were used.

The proliferation of new monastic orders in the twelfth century presented the Church with a dilemma which had previously challenged the theologians of Christendom: the flowering of diversity within the unity of the faith. Just as theologians had had to resolve contradictions among the writings of the Fathers – the primary authorities for the interpretation of the Bible, and hence the elucidation of God's truth as it was perceived – so, in the new climate of monastic revival, ecclesiastical leaders had to come to terms with the existence of a variety of new interpretations of the Rule of St Benedict, and indeed that of St Augustine – the primary guides to the living of a true Christian life.

The orthodoxy which dismissed the pre-Reformation parish as the point where the many failings of the Church met to blight ordinary lives has exercised a tenacious grip on the historical imagination. Current opinion, on the other hand, perceives the parish as deserving of inquiry, not least because of a dawning realisation that it was a point where managerial expertise and a noteworthy buoyancy of spirit intersected. Ostentatious programmes of church rebuilding and embellishment testify both to competence and to a vitality bordering on exuberance in many parish communities. If more difficult to appraise, the liturgical life of many parishes seems to have flourished and was enhanced by the steady accumulation of vessels, vestments, lights, embroidered cloths and painted images. Many wealthier parishes also supported numerous auxiliary clergy and a sophisticated musical repertory and performance. But building and liturgical elaboration were not products merely of whim. In addition to an obligation to support the incumbent by regular payment of tithe, responsibility for maintaining church fabric and the wherewithal for worship within the church had been assigned to the parish community by canon law in the thirteenth century. Many parishes conspicuously exceeded their brief. In matters of securing revenues it seem at the very least safe to assume widespred competence. Historians, however, have by and large failed to respond to the laity's achievement and that in spite of abundant surviving documentation. Investigation of the financial regime of the late medieval parish is long overdue. If it has received any attention at all, parish finance has been charaterised in very general terms of corporate levy and ad hoc donation.

Wills have become one of the most widely used sources for students of the English Reformation. There has been an ever increasing literature tracing testators' religious beliefs, the role and influence of scribes and clerics, the various copies and manifestations of a particular testament and the often formulaic character of this legal document. Little attention has been paid by students of wills to the polemical and propagandistic qualities of such documents and rightly so, for most testators exhibited greater concern for property than polemics.

‘New Learning’ is a phrase familiar to historians of Tudor England as an archaic and somewhat arch synonym for ‘Renaissance humanism’, that is, for the revival of classical languages and literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its speciously authentic flavour derives from its frequent occurrence in sixteenth-century sources. However, in its original context it had radically different connotations from those attached to it by recent generations of historians. For in the sixteenth century it was employed without exception as a description of religious error – predominantly as a pejorative term for what is now variously called ‘reformed’, ‘radical’, ‘evangelical’, or ‘Protestant’ religion. It is emphatically not the case, as is still often asserted or, more usually, assumed, that the phrase was originally coined to describe humanism and was only later extended to Protestantism.1 On the contrary the modern usage, given general currency by J. R. Green and Frederick Seebohm, arose from a mere misunderstanding of the original sources. This anachronistic and potentially misleading usage remains prevalent and has helped to sustain barely articulated but none the less powerful undercurrents beneath much recent work on early Tudor humanism, namely the notions that humanism was inherently a challenge to the doctrinal status quo, that it was inherently favourable to the cause of the Reformation, and that its progress was therefore resented or even resisted by the clerical establishment. Given the meaning now attached to ‘new learning’, such notions cannot but be buttressed by the myriad instances in which conservative clergy attacked it. The scope for confusion and the need for clarification can be illustrated by juxtaposing two statements, one from the sixteenth century and one from the twentieth, in which the term is used in apparently contradictory judgements of one and the same person. In a recent and perceptive article on Thomas Bilney, Cuthbert Tunstall was in passing described in the following terms, ‘A scholar and humanist, he favoured the New Learning and its advocates; and, although he was horrified by Luther, he was not closed to reforming ideas.’

It is well known that the Council of Constance (1414–18) was concerned with reform, heresy and – above all – the ending of the Great Schism of the papacy. However, comparatively few realise how many personal and institutional suits were heard at tribunals there. Christopher Crowder has asserted with justifiable exaggeration that more ‘ecclesiastical carpetbaggers’ were in attendance than ‘ecclesiastical statesman’. This article, based on hitherto unused material, is a case study which presents the activities of certain ‘carpetbaggers’ and their agents in some detail. It is offered partly because it further documents Crowder's assertion, partly because it supports his conclusion that judicial procedures at the papal curia in the late Middle Ages operated with great continuity, and partly because it suggests how closely King Henry v could concern himself with the details of ecclesiastical business. It also throws unusual light on medieval English hospitals, especially on alien priory establishments. Furthermore, it exemplifies the inordinate amounts of time, documentation, money and gifts required in order to pursue cases at the papal curia; difficulties stemming from reliance on proctors there; the time lags and other problems related to international correspondence and financial transactions in the early fifteenth century; and connections between ‘carpetbaggers’ and ‘ecclesiastical statesmen’ that sometimes affected curia cases.

Writing from prison during the Marian persecution, Nicholas Ridley praised the elderly Dr Edward Crome to his friend John Hooper, who was incarcerated with Crome. Ridley had heard of Crome's ‘most godly and fatherly constancy in confessing the truth of the gospel’, and declared, ‘For the integrity and uprightness, the gravity and innocency of that man, all England, I think, hath known long ago.’ Ridley also wrote to John Bradford in 1555 that Crome was a ‘fatherly example of patience and constancy, and all manner of true godliness’.

It is well known that following the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 English Catholic and Protestant polemicists turned to the Church Fathers, and particularly to St Augustine, for source material with which to bolster their doctrinal arguments. Augustine's works were, of course, the basis for so many Reformation controversies, yet the theological disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were entirely different from those of the Early Church. Further development and refinement of doctrine had created a wide gulf between the two periods. Early modern polemic was therefore relying on patristic sources which at times were patently inappropriate. It might therefore be thought that there would be little to be gained from an examination of its use of the Fathers, particularly as there was no reason for bitterly opposed polemicists to take a restrained, objective, or even particularly discerning approach to the patristic sources in order to refute the ‘errors’ of the other side. Historians of the English Reformation have indeed shown little interest in the seventeenth century's preoccupation with St Augustine, the most widely cited of the patristic writers. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that in this period ‘the true meaning of St Augustine was the object of as much unprofitable speculation as has ever been expended on the equally inscrutable mind of God’. Those historians who have dealt briefly with polemical technique in this period have suggested that seventeenth-century uses of patristic texts were likely to be primitive. J. C. H. Aveling argued that both Catholic and Protestant writers were afflicted by the same weaknesses: their understanding of source texts was undermined by a ‘cult of great erudition’ which was essentially shallow.

In the course of the 1690s and into the early eighteenth century a number of English divines and laymen became embroiled in a pamphlet war on the doctrine of the Trinity. It was a wide-ranging debate and its participants included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Socinians, deists and Arians. Until recently, however, this controversy had received scant attention from historians. It is only within the last few years that an interest in the trinitarian controversy has emerged: a number of works have appeared on the more notable of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century anti-trinitarian thinkers, and J. C. D. Clark has pointed out the political implications of anti-trinitarian views. There is, nevertheless, one aspect of the trinitarian controversy which has remained relatively untouched, and that is the debate on the Trinity which raged within the Established Church.

In 1813, a century after the death of John Locke, an anonymous pamphleteer in London, writing under the pseudonym of ‘Abraham, saac and Jacob’, complained about the restrictions which were placed on the Jews. In The Lamentations of the Children of Israel representing the Hardships they suffer from the Penal Laws, the author recalled John Locke as a defender of the Jews, and quoted one of the philosopher's favourable comparisons between Jews and Gentiles. The author evidently felt that Locke's advocacy of toleration for dissenters in the second half of the seventeenth century could be applied to the Jews of nineteenth–century England: having argued in defence of non–Anglicans, Locke was believed to have argued for non–Christians too.

‘For a bishop to live at one end of the world, and his Church at the other, must make the office very uncomfortable to the bishop, and in a great measure useless to the people.’ This was the verdict of Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London from 1748 to 1761, on the provision which had been made by the Church of England for the care of its congregations overseas. No Anglican bishopric existed outside the British Isles, but a limited form of responsibility for the Church overseas was exercised by the see of London. In the time of Henry Compton, bishop from 1675 to 1713, Anglican churches in the American colonies, in India and in European countrieshad all sought guidance from the bishop of London. By the 1740s the European connection had been severed; the bishop still accepted some colonial responsibilities but the arrangement was seen as anomalous by churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic. A three-thousand-mile voyage separated the colonists from their bishop, and those wishing to seek ordination could not do so unless they were prepared to cross the ocean. Although the English Church claimed that the episcopate was an essential part of church order, no Anglican bishop had ever visited America, confirmation had never been administered, and no church building in the colonies had been validly consecrated. While a Roman Catholic bishopric was established in French Canada at an early date, the Anglican Church overseas had no resident bishops until the end of the eighteenth century. In the words of Archbishop Thomas Seeker, this was ‘a case which never had its parallel before in the Christian world’.

The vital contribution of women to the early development of English dissent, especially during the era of the Civil War and Interregnum, has received considerable scholarly attention since the appearance of Keith Thomas's seminal study in 1958. However, the focus of interest has chiefly been on the roles played by individual women as preachers or church founders, and no concerted attempt has yet been made to replicate analyses of New England Puritanism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which have highlighted the disproportionate numbers of women in church membership. There has been a similar lack of effort to document the effects of gender in determining English religious practice in the period after 1700, despite the beginnings of academic preoccupation with women's experience of Christianity in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and despite an abundance of evidence from sociologists and statisticians since the Second World War about women's greater performance on most indicators of religious belief and behaviour. This brief article therefore hopes to break new ground in assembling evidence about the strength of female support for Protestant Nonconformity in England from 1650 to the present day, using three distinct assessment criteria: membership, attendance, and profession.

When asked why he objected to the preaching of George Whitefield, Parson Adams, Henry Fielding's paradigmatic parish priest in Joseph Andrews, replied that Whitefield ‘set up the detestable doctrine of faith against good works’. He went on to say that in his opinion ‘a virtuous and good Turk, or heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator than a vicious and wicked Christian, though his faith was as perfectly orthodox as St Paul's himself’. This literary anecdote illustrates the caricatures that developed in the wake of the Methodist revival: Methodists were portrayed as ‘solafideists’ and antinomians while traditional Anglicans were characterised as moralists. Both sides in the dispute felt obliged to attack the other, with the result that straw men were often set up in order to be knocked down. There were substantive differences between the Methodists and other Anglicans, but these were frequently exaggerated on both sides for the purpose of emphasising the severity of the opponent's error. And often these substantive differences were ignored altogether in favour of contrived and inflammatory charges.

Early modern Ireland defied its English and Protestant rulers and remained largely Catholic. Historians have explained this situation variously: in terms of Protestant feebleness, official indifference or Catholic vigour. Among Protestant failings, scant use of the Irish language has been listed. An attitude to the Irish tongue, at best ambiguous and at worst hostile, can be connected first with English concepts of civility and then with the severe Calvinist theology which pulsed through the Established Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, and which, by equating those already Protestant with the elect, justified devoting its sparse resources to them. In contrast, the Catholic Irish, because irredeemably reprobate, together with their language, could be ignored.