This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury's Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda's sources, the text's place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda's statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.

This article analyses a selection of archival material written by Paul Tillich, particularly his early parish sermons and sermons from World War I. Although the themes of ‘eternity’ and ‘the soul’ are rare in the early parish sermons and only appear in the context of death or suffering, they play a predominant role in the World War I sermons. This article suggests that this is because, for Tillich, suffering became the interpretative key. Through his sermons amidst the suffering and devastation of war Tillich employed what he called the immanent way of theology.

In the early twentieth century, Korean Catholic and Protestant Churches found themselves in a period of significant power transition, from a neo-Confucian dynasty to a colonial regime. Imperial Japan and Christianity thus posed a mutual challenge: church leaders worked to sustain and increase their Evangelical mission field within Korea's new socio-political environment, while, simultaneously, the Japanese depended on the cooperation of the Korean Christian communities to fulfil their colonial project. In this dynamic of State-Church relations, Catholics and Protestants constantly vied for ascendancy. This article examines how the two Christian denominations engaged with each other and with Korea's coloniser, as imperial Japan's policies varied and its international status fluctuated.

Scholars have debated how the themes discussed by Pomerius in his De vita contemplativa found ample resonance across Gregory the Great's work, and reflect similar concerns. While it is impossible to determine whether the Roman bishop read the treatise authored by the North African rhetor, their parallel authority on the matter was recognised by Carolingian copyists, who often reported their works alongside each other. The discovery of a glossa sourced from Gregory's literary production in Pomerius’ manuscript tradition might both substantiate this claim and shed some light on the networks of medieval scriptoria.

The article evaluates clerical professionalisation in the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by examining the division of labour within parishes. It argues that proponents of the Catholic Enlightenment endeavoured to achieve post-Tridentine reforms while also assigning to the clerical profession responsibilities for the material well-being of parishioners and service to the Commonwealth. It concludes that the process of clerical professionalisation remained incomplete. Firstly, approval for hiring assistant priests resulted in the delegation of many, if not all, ecclesiastical duties to them. Secondly, the improved professional education of priests occasionally led to unexpected withdrawal from pastoral duties seen as falling below their acquired competencies.

Agimund's Homiliary is extant in two eighth-century manuscripts in BAV, Vat. lat. 3835 and 3836 and is one of the very few Roman texts actually written in Roman script surviving from the early Middle Ages. This article argues that the Homiliary is a crucial piece of evidence for early medieval Roman liturgical and cultural life and the patristic resources of Rome. Agimund's Homiliary, and the late eighth-century additions which are actually part of another, hitherto unidentified Roman Homiliary, together constitute evidence of the degree to which patristic theology and exegesis were embedded in Roman culture, of the interchange between the Latin- and Greek-speaking communities in Rome and the Lateran in the early Middle Ages, and of the intellectual productivity and cultural versatility of early medieval Rome.

This article describes John Wesley's evolving visions of Christian singleness (celibacy) and three commitments related to his changing views: a commitment to celibacy in an Oxford college; a commitment to marriage with Mary Vazeille; a de facto commitment to single life after Mary's separation from him. Protestant Churches lacked structures to support celibate commitment, structures that might have discouraged his unguarded and intimate correspondence with married women that lay behind his separation from Mary. The article asks why Protestants, although formally allowing single life, have not found ways to honour commitments to it.

John Selden's 1642 edition and translation of an extract from a chronicle by Eutychius (Said ibn Batriq), the tenth-century Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, can be considered the first Arabic book printed in England. This article examines the early reception of Selden's Eutychius in the European republic of letters, exploring the ways in which its testimony about the early Alexandrian Church contributed to scholarly debates over episcopacy against the backdrop of the English Revolution. In doing so it demonstrates how Selden's edition made Eutychius a touchstone in seventeenth-century confessional disputes over ecclesiastical history while attracting readers in England and abroad.

This article examines manuscript sermons to reveal how a Calvinist minister, Hugh Ramsden, preached predestination from his parish pulpit in the late 1620s. It shows how he adapted a scholarly work for this purpose, sought to balance inclusive and exclusive visions of the Christian community, and attempted to frame the doctrine as a comfort. By comparing two manuscripts for the same sermon, the extempore aspects of his live preaching are explored. Lastly, it considers the negotiation that allowed Hugh's like-minded brother, Henry, to continue with Calvinist preaching under the Laudian regime of Richard Neile in the 1630s.

Thomas Kaufmann's The saved and the damned was first published in Germany in 2017. It was therefore one of many publications that year offered to mark the fifth centennial of Martin Luther nailing up his Ninety-Five Theses (quite possibly a legendary event, as the author notes). Kaufmann's work, now available in English translation, is an unapologetically blunt assertion that ‘In the beginning was Luther’ (p. 6). In this it is much the same as some other English-language scholarship from 2017, such as the monumental Oxford handbook of the Protestant Reformations, which also began with Luther. Although a comparatively recent entry in English-language Reformation scholarship, The saved and the damned has already generated academic discussion and was the focus of a panel at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in 2023.

Scholars have rightly identified the roles of literal/historical interpretation and noetic/spiritual interpretation in Cyril of Alexandria's exegesis of Scripture. This article argues that narrative contributes to both methods by using events in the past to explain Scripture's meaning. He applies concepts established historically by Exodus’ recount of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt to his interpretation of the prophetic books. On the one hand, his literal interpretation draws from the Israelites’ return to idolatry, detailed in Exodus xxxii. On the other hand, his noetic interpretation relates the Egyptians’ oppression of the Israelites detailed in Exodus i to humanity's limitations under the devil.

The Lutheran minority in Warsaw celebrated the 100th anniversary of its magnificent classicist church in 1881, under Russian rule, when the parish was predominantly culturally German; and the 150th anniversary in 1931/2, during the Second Polish Republic, when the clergy were to a large extent Polish-speaking. This article compares these two jubilees to show acts of commemoration as a tool, steering religious bonds and social identification, whether or not consciously. It highlights the social, ‘terrestrial’ aspects of the functioning of confessional minorities, showing how the community was constantly reinvented through common memory.

It may appear odd to write a review article focused on two books that are fundamentally different in intention and scope. The first is a self-conscious attempt by a moral theologian of conservative inclinations to contribute a Christian ethical perspective to the culture wars currently raging on both sides of the Atlantic on empire, race, and slavery. Its author, Nigel Biggar, is the Emeritus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. The second book is a collection of papers by imperial and mission historians given at a workshop at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2018. Its brief is more limited, namely to explore the professed commitment of nineteenth-century Christian missions to bringing a gospel of peace into contexts that were frequently sites of violence, not least between indigenous peoples and European settlers and other colonial actors. Its geographical remit is limited to Africa and the Pacific. Biggar's book has provoked a predictable storm of criticism, both within the historical academy and beyond it. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, for example, rapidly published a 15,000–word rebuttal of Biggar's arguments by Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, together with an almost equally lengthy reply by Biggar.1 In contrast, Geoffrey Troughton's edited volume, extremely valuable though it undoubtedly is, seems unlikely to attract notice beyond the limited constituencies of professional historians and scholars of mission studies. Although obviously differing in character, these two books, when set in juxtaposition, bring into focus some of the most pertinent issues raised for Christianity by the imperial past and the ambiguous role played within it by Christian missions.

Bryan Mackey (1770–1847) was for years the unremarkable, unremarked rector of a rural parish in Gloucestershire. He has, however, the distinction of apparently being the first priest with African ancestry to be ordained into the Church of England and who then served his entire career in Britain. His life history raises questions about historical racism within the Church and the wider society.

Roman Catholic missions preceded Protestant missions in Burma by three hundred years. Scripture extracts is the only known extant Burmese translation of portions of the Bible by the earlier Catholic missionaries. Produced by the Italian Barnabite missionary Guiseppe d'Amato, Scripture extracts represents the Catholic missionary strategy of inculturation. It was printed by the British Baptist missionaries to Burma, Felix Carey and James Chater, in Serampore in 1811, and passed on to the American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson. Scripture extracts was an important resource for Judson's translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, although he employed a different translation approach.

This article argues that Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the founder of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, was a heterodox Anglican. Suspected of ‘Unitarian opinions’ in his youth, his religious writings in old age, including neglected notes on his copy of the New Testament, display a deep commitment to critical study of the Bible and a broadly Arian view of Christ. Knowing that Clarkson was a life-long but heterodox member of the Church of England challenges the conventional focus on Quakers and Evangelicals in the study of religion and abolitionism.

This article presents a new account of Richard Simon's work as a biblical translator. Having first contextualised Simon's views on the vernacular Bible in the contested world of late seventeenth-century French Catholic biblical translation, it then examines how they were engaged with and disputed by contemporaries (in particular, Antoine Arnauld). It contends that Simon's novelty did not consist in applying history and philology to the Bible in order to reach a confessionally neutral version, but rather in reconceptualising the relationship between multiple legitimate biblical translations to craft a new form of Catholic vernacular Bible.