Towards the end of the twelfth century an increasing number of the men entering Benedictine monasteries in England had already received a training in the secular schools. At Bury St Edmunds, for instance, there were at least five magistri in the community by 1183. This led to a certain amount of tension there, and Bury's chronicler, Jocelin of Brakelond, records the fierce dispute that arose when Abbot Hugh died between those who wanted a scholar as his successor and those who did not. One monk said, ‘God forbid that a dumb image should be set up in the Church of St Edmund, where it is known that there are many men of learning’, while another felt such strong antipathy that he prayed, ‘From all good clerks, O Lord, deliver us.’ Jocelin himself, ‘being a young man’ at the time, as he said, ‘would not agree to any man being made abbot unless he knew something of dialectic and could distinguish between false argument and true’. In the event, the man chosen was a scholar, the sub-sacrist, Master Samson.

The leading studies of the Hospital of St John in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have presented somewhat differing accounts of the power structure at the centre of the Order. Delaville Le Roulx in his brief analysis of government provides an essentially static picture and maintains that although in theory the plenitude of power rested with the chapter general, which delegated executive authority to the master, in practice the latter's power was almost absolute: although the master had few rights of his own and on most matters was expected to seek the counsel of the central convent or of the chapter general, these bodies would not refuse assent to measures which did not conflict with the statutes and usages of the Order; and, as the chapter general met only infrequently, the master enjoyed a considerable freedom of initiative. Therefore, despite the restrictions on his authority, ‘le róle du grand-maítre était prépondérant’. More recently, Riley-Smith has argued at greater length that the relationship between the master, the central convent and the chapter general did not remain unchanged and that during this period the convent and chapter general assumed predominance, as is shown by the convent's victory in 1299 over the master William de Villaret, who was obliged to travel out to the East and hold a chapter general there against his will. The power gained by the convent and chapter general was not the outcome of a process of gradual evolution, but resulted from a series of bitter constitutional conflicts, in which the convent and chapter general - influenced by current baronial ideas - demanded not only government in accordance with law and custom but also the right to be consulted.

Although the Reformation under Henry viii has received relatively extensive examination from recent historians, one of its most crucial elements has continued to evade adequate investigation. Yet its impact upon the average man or woman may have been as revolutionary as the legitimisation of the English bible or the dissolution of the monasteries, and was arguably far more disruptive than governmental propaganda, ecclesiastical reformulations of dogma, or even the transfer of the supremacy from pope to king. This remarkably neglected phenomenon is the Henrician assault upon images.

The conference between James i, some of the bishops and representatives of the puritans at Hampton Court palace in January 1604 was one of the most significant events in the political and religious history of England. But at the present time its significance is not clearly understood. The king's puritan policy did not begin or end there, but even in 1604 the conference was understood as a chance for the puritans to gain a measure of toleration or to begin a further reformation of the Church of England. As things turned out neither was the case. The classic accounts of Gardiner and Usher assumed that the conference was a failure for the puritan cause, but in 1961 Mark Curtis, in a widely accepted article, claimed that the king was more sympathetic to the puritans than Gardiner and Usher had allowed. Professor Curtis analysed the creation of the proclamation of October 1603 which announced the conference and claimed that its genesis showed a measure of serious criticism of the Established Church which has never been acknowledged by historians. He pointed out the episcopal bias of the official account of the conference, William Barlow's The Summe and Substance of the Conference… at Hampton Court, and noted the importance of what he felt was a neglected source, an ‘Anonymous Account’, which he believed showed marked differences between the king and the bishops, and emphasised the common ground between the king and the puritans. By considering the decisions made at the conference - whether they were put into effect or not - Professor Curtis was convinced that the conference itself was a puritan success in which the king made important concessions to them.

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.

Historians of the Church of England have paid little attention to the women's movement. There have been several serious studies of religious communities for women, and there is increasing interest in churchwomen's part in Victorian philanthropy and moral reform. Studies of Victorian marriage and family life have an important religious dimension. Alan Wilkinson's recent book on The Church of England and the First World War makes a number of references to women's work and aspirations, subjects virtually excluded from Roger Lloyd's standard history of the twentieth-century church. The history of women's place in the management and recognised ministry of the Church of England, in its institutional life at local, regional and national levels, has not been touched.