Constantine's endorsement of and support for the Church left their marks in certain areas. His nephew Julian reacted against state-supported Christianity and promoted his own unique version of state-supported paganism. Previous scholarship had identified this as a ‘pagan Church’ co-opting features from Christianity, but this view has recently been challenged. This article argues that the traditional understanding of a ‘pagan Church’ is correct, and that it drew specifically upon some features of the Constantinian Church in the areas of theological content, leadership and symbols.

Lectionary and homiletic sources indicate that the Church of Jerusalem commemorated Stephen twice within the same two-week period (26/27 December and 7 January). Few studies have explored the origins of these feasts, the relationship between their appointed readings and the phenomenon of parallel, or redundant, feasts in fifth-century Jerusalem. This study will locate the development of these feasts within the struggle of the Church of Jerusalem to develop a local cult of martyrs after the Constantinian settlement.

Eastern scholars have long accused John VIII Palaiologos of sacrificing the faith for temporal gain when he oversaw the Union of Florence. Westerners have blamed him for the union's ultimate failure. These competing narratives both err by too sharply differentiating between religion and politics, and allowing the opinions of John's contemporary critics to colour their interpretations of his actions. A contextual analysis of John's activities during and after the council finds his behaviour in keeping with the best elements of his tradition and suggests the potential for a new historiography of Ferrara-Florence which might help to dislodge entrenched ecclesial animosities.

The discovery that Jeremy Taylor, the ‘Anglican’ divine, wrote much of the text of the Rutland Petition in Defence of Episcopacy in November 1641, and included many of the arguments that appeared in his ‘Of the sacred order and offices of episcopacy’, published in 1642, throws fresh light on the political and ecclesiastical implications of royalist petitioning. These petitions have sometimes been viewed as expressions of support for ‘prayer book Protestantism’. But, in line with other recent work, this article argues that they drew support from a very broad spectrum of religious opinion, which ranged from moderate Puritan supporters of further reform to avant-garde conformists. Each had their own agenda; but they could be mobilised behind the petitions because of the widespread fear of radical sectarian challenges to the established Church in late 1641.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust the elaboration of Catholic perceptions of the Jewish people has been particularly problematic. The weight of a long tradition of Christian antisemitism and its influence on the Nazi extermination programme, as well as the revision of this attitude before and after the Shoah in various Catholic circles as a means of promoting a rapprochement, made it difficult to redefine the image of Jewish people in the Catholic imagination, and gave rise to different and conflicting interpretations. Some members of the Latin Catholic Church of Jerusalem began to argue for an analogy between Nazism and Zionism. This assertion took different forms as the political situation in Palestine evolved and in response to changing attitudes within the Church towards the Jews. This paper will reconstruct the ‘new Nazis’ paradigm in the Jerusalem Church, analysing three key periods: the 1947–9 Arab-Israeli war; the consolidation of the State of Israel in the 1950s; and the Eichmann trial of 1961–2.

Collected essays are a popular and useful way of throwing light on their proclaimed subject matter or period, and of bringing recent research to a more general audience. They are, of course, inevitably limited in their scope, although this does not necessarily imply that they are at all parochial. ‘Europe’ is a frequent and obvious geographical limitation imposed upon matter dealing with magic and witchcraft, and ‘early modern’ a common chronological set of termini. Thus, the recent Oxford handbook of witchcraft (2013) declares itself confined – a very broad confinement – to early modern Europe and Colonial America. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark's earlier Athlone history of witchcraft and magic in Europe (1999–2002) again takes Europe as its principal theatre, although its spread over six volumes allows the editors to begin with the ancient Middle East and extend chronologically to the twentieth century. By adding ‘in the West’ to the title of his collection, Collins therefore appears to be confining himself geographically (although ‘the West’ is remarkably large), while ‘from antiquity to the present’ extends to his contributors a brave allowance of time in a single volume. This volume, then, more or less follows an established pattern for this kind of scholarly work. How far does it succeed in matching the endeavours and achievements of its predecessors?

The taunting question posed in the 1820s by the English critic Sidney Smith, ‘Who reads an American book?’, has long since tumbled into the dustbin of literary history. Yet it continues to reverberate in how Americanists describe the workings of Puritanism in their own country, its presence felt in two respects. One of these is resentment at the indifference to their own work of historians of the Puritan movement in Britain. Another is the assumption among Americanists that the Puritanism of the colonists who arrived in the early seventeenth century was singular in certain respects, be it their sense of ‘errand’, their modifications of Reformed orthodoxy, or perhaps their daring experiment with a congregation-centred polity, the ‘New England Way’. Whenever historians turn to the larger project of Church and State in colonial and modern America, assertions of singularity dominate the telling of our religious history. Do these endeavours warrant returning to Sidney Smith's question and rephrasing it to ask whether Americanists are making the most of European studies of Reformed theology, Puritanism in Britain, and conformity or dissent?