This article deals with the practice and theory of penances imposed on heretics by inquisitors in southern France before 1250. At first inquisitors offered a simple choice between penance as proof of conversion or death by burning. Lay resistance forced a subtler approach whereby penitents were removed from the local community in order to be gradually reintegrated into the wider Catholic one. The construction of prisons and the imposition of crosses helped turn inquisitors into an institution. From being a means to the destruction of organised heresy, they became a permanent police force of doctrinal orthodoxy.

The Vestiarian Controversy of 1564–6, during which Archbishop Matthew Parker pressed for full conformity to the provisions of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, is generally taken to mark a watershed in the fortunes of the English Protestant tradition. This study seeks to show that the realities of Elizabethan churchmanship in the 1560s and 1570s were rather more complex. By reference to the career of Thomas Cole, former ‘freewiller’ and returned Marian exile, who was appointed archdeacon of Essex by Edmund Grindal and was Parker's own commissary in Essex and Suffolk as dean of Bocking, it hopes to demonstrate that Parker's efforts at a national campaign for uniformity were inevitably doomed to failure because of pressures both political and jurisdictional. Cole and his allies did not consider the battle lost in 1566; it was the Presbyterian campaign of the 1570s and 1580s, which Parker's efforts helped to provoke, that marked the real turning point in the government's relations with senior churchmen who wished to see the Elizabethan Settlement advanced by means of further parliamentary legislation.

The ideological valence or resonance of Hooker's Ecclesiastical polity has proved to be a controversial subject. This article attempts to bring to bear on the problem the immediate response to Hooker's book of a number of contemporaries – moderate Puritans, avant-garde conformists and Catholics. It concludes that none of these groups saw the Polity as a mere restatement of English reformed orthodoxy, the continuation of English conformist business as usual, and suggests that modern commentators should take these contemporary evaluations into serious account in their own analyses of Hooker.

In the mid-1940s a Catholic lay organisation, Maria Duce, emerged in Ireland which vigorously promulgated the idiosyncratic writings of Revd Denis Fahey, a Holy Ghost priest. Amongst other activities, Maria Duce campaigned in the late 1940s for an amendment of the Irish constitution of 1937 by which the Roman Catholic Church would be recognised as the ‘one true Church’ rather than the ‘special position’ enshrined in article 44 of the constitution. The origins and development of Maria Duce are charted in some detail and particular attention is paid to Fahey's role in the group. The campaign to amend article 44, which ultimately led to the demise of the organisation in 1954, is examined, as is the lack of widespread support for the activities of Maria Duce in post-war Ireland.

Henry VIII's appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps his finest hour. In what has been called a ‘pioneer royal Christmas broadcast’, the king delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech lamenting the religious divisions that afflicted his kingdom, and urging his subjects towards unity and charity.The phrase is Diarmaid MacCulloch's: Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven–London 1996, 348. According to William Petre, the king himself wept as he recounted how ‘charity between man and man is so refrigerate’, and few of his audience could restrain themselves from doing likewise.PRO, SP 1/212, fos 110v–11r (Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, London 1862–1910 [hereinafter cited as LP], xx/2, 1030). Another eye-witness, the chronicler Edward Hall, wrote down the speech ‘worde for worde, as near as I was able to report it’. This account gives details of how Henry illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: ‘the one calleth the other Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Yypocrite and Pharisey’; rival preachers inveighed against each other ‘without charity or discrecion’. To the king's mind, the blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and, to reinforce the point, Henry brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse: ‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be to busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’.E. Hall, Hall's Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis, London 1809, 864–5. The charge of religious name-calling was hardly new in 1545. In an earlier exhortation to unity and charity, Thomas Starkey had lamented the fact that ‘eche one in hart iugeth other to be eyther pharisee or heretyke, papist or schismatike’: An exhortation to the people instructynge them to unitie and obedience, London ?1536, fo. 27v.

Recent historians of the reign have understandably devoted considerable attention to his speech, arguably the most famous of all Henry VIII's public pronouncements, and most have quoted the mumpsimus–sumpsimus idiom, with varying degrees of wry amusement.J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, London 1968, 470–1; S. E. Lehmberg, The later parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547, Cambridge 1977, 229–31; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation, Oxford 1989, 378; G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd edn, London 1991, 200; C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 164; R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1993, 172; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 348; G. W. Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the search for the middle way’, Historical Journal xli (1998), 348. Yet there has been little attempt to explain why the king should use precisely these words to epitomise the polarisation of religious positions in the early 1540s.The exception here is Lehmberg, Later parliaments, 231, which notes that the phrase was derived from a 1517 treatise by Richard Pace. As I shall show, this does not give the complete picture. It is not always apparent from modern accounts that the terms ‘mumpsimus’ and ‘sumpsimus’ did not represent the king's own assay at faux-bucolic neologism, but were an established (though not long-established) literary trope. In the following short discussion, I hope to demonstrate how an investigation of the derivation and precedents of the phraseology employed by Henry in his Christmas speech can throw some revealing light on the processes by which religious typologies were constructed and utilised in the course of the Henrician Reformation, as well as providing some points of orientation in that most formidable of terrae incognitae, the mind of Henry VIII himself.For two recent stimulating, though contrasting, attempts to locate Henry's religious centre of gravity see Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy’; D. MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the reform of the Church’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, Basingstoke 1995, 159–80.