Gregorian scholars have been unable to reconcile widely differing views on Gregory the Great's ‘political thought’. The trend has been to view him as either ambivalent towards secular authority or completely indifferent to it. This article aims to demonstrate that Gregory the Great's conception of an ordered and hierarchic universe not only encompassed both secular and ecclesiastical spheres but also allowed each a positive role in the work of salvation. His ideas, influenced by neo-Platonic thought, differed substantially from those of St Augustine and were vital to the development of an early medieval partnership between secular and ecclesiastical authority.

The thirteenth century in Scotland witnessed a determined effort on the part of the crown and its ecclesiastical officials to initiate a series of reforms comparable to those that had so deeply altered the social and religious life of England and continental Europe. An important aspect of the transformation that occurred in Scotland was the consolidation of a network of parish churches throughout the kingdom. Scottish authorities, however, encountered several obstacles in their attempts to create parishes, and especially to assign sufficient revenues to them. In the lordships controlled by old Celtic families in particular the Church's designs sometimes clashed with the interests of great native land-holders and their kinsmen. In many of these lordships the process of parish formation was ultimately the result of negotiation and litigation which saw the Church forced to accommodate the claims of Celtic landowners. This article examines, in the context of the native lordship of Strathearn, the struggles that marked the creation and consolidation of some parishes in thirteenth-century Scotland.

Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.

This article investigates the development of the use of texts and images in commemorating the regicide of Charles I , from private commemoration among Royalists during the Republic, to its official institution after the Restoration. The article will argue that the Office gave official sanction to an image of the virtuous suffering king which had been in existence even before his execution. The Office also presented a particular view of the king's moral character, the causes of the Civil War and the Restoration which was to become the accepted account expounded in commemorative sermons for the next 150 years. Drawing on Old Testament themes, the Office also aimed to point a political moral used by successive governments, namely that attacks on the established order incurred divine punishment.

Victorian Cambridge diehards dismissed Harvard as Socinian. William Everett (1837–1910), establishment Bostonian and future Unitarian minister, graduated from Harvard in 1859, and matriculated at Cambridge, which had no doctrinal entry requirements, and since 1856 had allowed men not ‘bona fide members of the Church of England’ to graduate. He found college rules, especially compulsory chapel, restrictive, but was regular at chapel, and was encouraged to take communion. He deplored college ‘monasticism’, restriction of fellowships to Anglicans, inadequate clerical training and Puseyism. Back in Boston, he praised Cambridge's ‘spirit of liberality’, in lectures published as On the Cam, and Cambridge contacts continued, although with sometimes modified enthusiasm.