This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

Orthodox criticism of Bishop Reynold Pecok began ten years before he recanted and resigned in 1457–8. It came from a group of consciously orthodox theologians whose views were outraged by Pecok's teaching in sermon, disputation and writings. Long before his trial and recantation, Pecok had offended two important movements: a pastoral movement, deeply committed to preaching, which he outraged by belittling the importance of preaching; and a patristic movement which had grown up in the universities from the 1420s and whose members were now undertaking pastoral work. Pecok's gradually revealed hostility to the Fathers was particularly offensive to his younger opponents. If differences in age thus gave rise to differences of emphasis among Pecok's opponents, so too did differences of academic background. Nevertheless, as learned, consciously orthodox theologians with pastoral interests, they shared a common theological culture. The changes in emphasis found their expression in the course of controversy.

In composing the work known as The life and death of Cardinal Wolsey, some twenty-five years after the last event it describes, George Cavendish was not motivated by the ambitions of a secular annalist or historian. He wrote mostly from memory without verifying dates or the sequence of events, and he was not much interested in the sort of things historians ordinarily want to know. It is an odd biography of a great political figure. Up to the period of Wolsey's mid fifties (c. 1472–1527) it is little more than a loose succession of anecdotes and vignettes, and becomes more expansive only for the last three years of his life after his political career had first run into insuperable difficulties and then collapsed in disaster (1527–30). The whole second half of the book is taken up with the very last year of his life, one of frustration and dejection. This weighting towards Wolsey's last years might be explained as a bias towards the time when Cavendish was closest to his subject; Wolsey perhaps talked to his servants more when he had nothing else to do. This prompted A. F. Pollard, in his biography of Wolsey, to describe the Life as ‘the classic example of history as it appears to a gentleman-usher’.

Historians of religion and society are often confronted with the difficult task of defining the distinctive characteristics of the various adherents of Church and chapel. Certainly, one of the most useful as well as the most frequently employed analytical tools in this endeavour has been the correlation of occupation to religious preference.1 While this approach can be, and has been, enormously revealing, it still has several distinct drawbacks. First, of course, there is the common problem of appropriately identifying and grouping the enormous variety and gradations of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled occupations. While the grouping of occupations itself presents several inherent difficulties, its use as an analytical tool is further restricted by the fact that while occupational identification may provide a rough guide to status levels in society, it can in no way compensate for our lack of knowledge of, for example, the range of earnings within a specific occupational group at any particular time.