The eucharistic doctrine of Apollinaris is of more than passing interest as illustrating the kind of piety of which his whole system is the fruit. However, we do not possess any systematic treatise on the Eucharist from his pen, still less any liturgy described as ‘Apollinarian’. In fact, in dealing with this subject, attention must be concentrated entirely on two fragments, where the eucharistic reference is unmistakable. To discuss the significance of these fragments, and to try to give some indication of their relation to the rest of the fourth century liturgical tradition as we know it, is the aim of this paper.

John Bale acquired the MS. of Fasciculi Zizaniorum sometime after he left the Carmelite Order and before 1540 when he went into exile in Germany taking it with him. He was already familiar with Fasciculi Zizaniorum long before he left his Order. Bodley MS. 73 is an autograph MS. of Bale's and is one of his earliest notebooks. The bulk of it was written before 1524, though there are several later additions, the latest of which is 1526. This notebook was compiled, therefore, whilst Bale was a zealous Carmelite student, and before he went abroad to Toulouse and Louvain. It is a mine of miscellaneous information about the Carmelite Order: a list of all the Carmelite houses in England with their dates of foundation; the names of all the Priors Provincial of the Order; descriptions of the antiquities of many Carmelite houses, of the friars buried in different convents, often with their epitaphs; a lengthy selection of the letters of Thomas Netter. Of special concern here are Bale's notes on Carmelite writers. The ascription of the authorship of Fasciculi Zizaniorum to Thomas Netter of Walden first appears in this notebook in Bale's notes on Walden, where he says that Netter wrote the Doctrinale Ecclesie and Fasciculus Zizaniorum. The incipit to the latter work he gives as ‘Colligite Zizania’, which appears on the second folio of our MS. Later there follow four folios of ‘Extracta quedam ex fasciculo doctoris fratris Thome Walden’. There can be no doubt that all these extracts are taken from our MS., which was well known to Bale. He summarises its contents as far as the condemnation of Wyclif at the Council of Constance. His summary is interesting.

In June 1432 Gerardo Landriani, the bishop of Lodi, visited England as an ambassador of the Council of Basel to address the king and parliament. The assembly in Basel, despite a late start, poor attendance and the threat of war in its immediate neighbourhood, had rebelled against Eugenius IV at the beginning of the year by continuing to meet in defiance of the papal bulls of dissolution. It persisted in its negotiations with the excommunicated Hussites and showed determination to achieve its other declared aims, the reform of the Church and the pacification of Christendom. Landriani found that a papal envoy bearing copies of the bulls of dissolution was also in London; he, nevertheless, succeeded in obtaining promises of English support and a delegation composed partly of Henry VI's ambassadors, partly of delegates of the English clergy, set out for Basel before the close of the year.

There are two anonymous treatises concerning the General Council that are left to us from the reign of Henry VIII: the one is Hatfield MS. No. 46, which has never been put into print, the other is A Treatise concernynge generall councilles, the Byshoppes of Rome and the Clergy, published by Berthelet in 1538, which was a development of Hatfield MS. No. 47. Though their existence has been known for some time, they have failed to receive the attention they deserve; the first treatise has been summarised by historians of the English Reformation, the second hardly ever mentioned, although its MS. draft was cursorily used by F. van le Baumer. Neither treatise has, thus, ever been studied in its entirety. The purpose of this paper is to give a fuller account of what these treatises are, to elucidate the circumstance of their composition, and to place them in the context of the general history of contemporary Tudor literature on the General Council.

The year 1961 witnesses the centenary of the Deaconess Community of St. Andrew, the only Religious Community in the Anglican Church whose full members are both professed Religious and ordained Deaconesses. In 1861, Elizabeth Catherine Ferard, with two like-minded ladies, began to live together under a common rule of life, dedicated to worship and to works of mercy. In July of the following year, the bishop of London ‘set apart’ Miss Ferard as the first deaconess of the English Church. Thus began the Community of Deaconesses, expanding and developing during the ensuing hundred years, but from the beginning maintaining its characteristic two-fold vocation to the Religious Life and to the Order of Deaconesses.

In the course of an article on these Responsiones in this Journal (x. (1559) 1–49), it was suggested that a text of these replies, long known to canonists as the ‘capitular’ text, was older than that in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede; and, also, that the fifth Responsio in the Bedan text, which contains the long controverted permission to marry within the third and fourth generation, was an interpolation made, possibly, if not probably, by the priest Nothelm. Nothelm had corresponded with Bede over many years, and he later became archbishop of Canterbury. The writers of the article did not know at the time that Dom Paul Meyvaert had in preparation an edition of the Responsiones based on the text as found in canonical collections. The publication of this edition is much to be desired; but, meanwhile, it seems permissible to point out that the ‘capitular’ text is found in the oldest MSS. and that the Bedan text is never found in any MS. earlier than Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written in 731. If it had been, the question of priority could not, of course, have arisen.