The victory of Christianity in the last years of Constantine's was graphically described by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Life of Constantine. Clearly in Phoenicia, where he had excellent sources of reign information, the heart had gone out of the old religion. Every class in the community was prepared to accept Christianity and even to deride the deities that once they had held in awe. The victory there and ultimately over nearly the whole empire was so decisive that one is inclined to forget the tremendous struggle for the hearts and allegiances of the provincials that preceded it. Though in retrospect one might agree with von Harnack's view that even without Constantine's conversion Christianity would have triumphed, this was not how it appeared to most contemporaries. Down to the time of his victory over Licinius (September 324), Constantine seems to have aimed only at securing for Christianity the legal equality with the traditional cults, as envisaged by the Edict of Milan. The Council of Nicaea, however, summoned by the emperor in 325, proved to be decisive both for the establishment of orthodoxy and the victory of Christianity itself. Thenceforth, the history of the empire would also be the history of the Church.

It is notoriously difficult for biographers of late-medieval people to recapture the personalities of their subjects, and consequently motives often have to be deduced from actions. This fundamental difficulty prompted the great Professor Jacob Burckhardt to date the emergence of the individual from the Renaissance and to assert that, rulers apart, there were few developed personalities in the Middle Ages. Medieval people saw their world through a sort of ‘religious mist’, perceiving things distorted rather than as they really were. In spite of some recent support, Burckhardt's theory is not really tenable, but historians still find the prevalent religious aura difficult to penetrate. We may know the official doctrine and moral teaching of the Church, but we cannot safely assume that they were understood by the laity, when both contemporary sermons and literature proclaim the contrary. Even were the Church's teaching understood, historians would still not know in what ways and to what extent religion influenced other fields of individual activity – economic, social or political. Burckhardt's problem remains of more than purely religious importance.

The sermon which John Fisher preached at the month's mind of Lady Margaret Beaufort, on 29 July 1509, compared her with Martha, traditionally the woman of action and counterpart of Mary, the woman of contemplation. The virtues he stressed, in addition to nobility of character and lineage, were those of good order: the disciplining of Lady Margaret's body and manner of life through prayer and abstinence, her hospitality and charitable dealings with her neigh-bours. The bishop saw discipline also as the mark of her household: statutes for its government were read four times a year, her servants well cared for, her almsfolk regularly supported. Whenever factions arose among her servants she applied herself with great skill to keeping the peace and finding a solution to controversy. Fisher's account has recently been compared by Retha Warnicke with other memories of her household recorded by Henry Parker, Lord Morley. The same elements are found in both descriptions, but Morley complements Fisher's portrait of charity and able household management with a spectacle of splendid conviviality worthy of the great ladies of the past, Queen Elfleda and Matilda, wife of Henry 1. Morley's memories of the household he entered in the early 1490s are not all contemporary with Fisher's who did not become Lady Margaret's confessor until 1498 or later, and the bishop allocates more of her day to religious observance. But whether her piety grew more exacting and intense in her last decade, or was simply more closely observed by her confessor, she remained until her death the centre of a network of patronage and influence in which she took an active part. Her household was a society with many facets, defined not merely by the austere and charitable practices of its head, but by her importance as a tenant-in-chief of the Crown and mother of the king. It was the combination of all these elements that placed her so high in contemporary estimation. This article explores the life of her household not only as the home of works of charity and a pattern of worship whose special feature was devotion to the Name of Jesus, but also as a centre of justice and regional influence and as a source of support for the activities of the Crown.

The Spanish Church of the Golden Age has been much discussed but little studied. Certainly, its professional structure and internal administration are much less well understood than those of secular government. This paper seeks to correct some of the imbalance by applying to the 540 members of the Castilian episcopacy who served under Habsburg leadership the prosopographical techniques which in recent years have advanced our understanding of the State. But before doing so it might be useful to describe the structure of the episcopacy and the principles and procedures which governed appointments to it.

The year 1808 does not feature with any greater prominence in the history of Catholic relief legislation than it does generally in Irish history. It was an uneventful year for Anglo-Irish relations, and for the Irish Catholic community in particular it was – on the surface at least – a period of embarrassment, division and failure. The veto controversy, which dominated Catholic politics in 1808, was productive of mutual misunderstanding and was to cast a shadow over the later proceedings of Catholic interest groups. But the significance of the dispute, hidden even to the protagonists, lay in the very breadth and depth of the misunderstanding. With the veto controversy began the gradual loss of confidence in the traditional champions of Catholic relief, the equally gradual transfer of the initiative to new champions and, all unseen, the first faint crack in the union of Britain and Ireland. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the causes and course of an incident which was fraught with such long-term serious consequences.