Bede in his letter to Bishop Ecgberht of York expresses his worries over the greed and lack of Latin learning among the clergy, and over lay control in certain monasteries. He stresses the need for the basic texts of the Christian faith to be translated into English. Here he shows that it was not the case that all the clergy were competent in Latin.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

This chapter argues that the indictment of idolatry and immorality in Romans 1:18–32 is not limited to gentile sins but instead, building on biblical prophetic declarations that Israel has effectively “gentilized,” systematically includes Israel as having broken the two great commands by engaging in the behaviors condemned throughout the passage, effectively breaking down any distinction between Israel and the nations. The first chapter of Romans thereby sets up the rhetorical shift in Rom 2, which argues that Jews and gentiles alike are subject to God’s impartial judgment.

Chapter 8 is about the trial of Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who in 1739 was arraigned before the Vice-Chancellor’s court in Cambridge accused of atheism on the basis of a letter he had written four years earlier, in which he gloried at having reached ‘the Top, the ne plus ultra of atheism’. The case was dominated by the testimony of Mary Richards, who accused Ducket of attempting to seduce her, and less attention was paid to a remarkable defence speech that Ducket made, in which he argued for the right to freedom of thought and private judgement and claimed that an atheist might be a perfectly moral being. Various witnesses were called, most of whom attested to Ducket’s good character, but the court declared him guilty, and he was expelled from the university. It is argued that the case illustrates a degree of complacency, combined with sensationalism, on the part of the authorities, which made its outcome a foregone conclusion. An appendix lists the various accounts of Ducket’s trial.

This chapter addresses how DPs’ physical and mental needs were assessed in the French zone and how relief workers responded to them. It considers what ‘rehabilitation’ meant to occupation officials and relief workers and what ‘therapies’ and ‘rehabilitative’ treatments they experimented. It focuses, in particular, on the hopes that they invested the remedial effects of the nuclear family and explores how DPs respond to these various experiments and gendered expectations. In the French zone, the emphasis was mainly placed on vocational rehabilitation, the re-education of mothers and rest in the countryside as a means to improve mental and physical health. The range of treatment offered revealed the influence of the inter-war ‘social hygiene’ crusade, occupational therapy and the professional reorientation movement. Crucially, this chapter uncovers the tensions between the utilitarian (turning DPs into productive future citizens) and recreational (providing soothing and restful activities) roles of rehabilitation, between the disciplinary (controlling DPs’ bodies) and empowering nature (encouraging DPs’ expression and initiatives) of relief activities.