Few phrases in an English Statute can have left such an indelible imprint as the opening words of the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533: they have evoked a literature of their own. If on this occasion a mere medievalist has the temerity to enter the precincts of the Henrician Reformation measures it is not because he is unaware of the pitfalls that may be in store for him, but because he believes that an exegesis which sets these famous words in their strictly confined historical context may possibly contribute to a better comprehension of the matrix of what came to be the Ecclesia Anglicana of the Reformation era. In offering the jubiland a modest essay on this topic, I hope he will accept it in the spirit in which it is submitted to him: as a token of gratitude for the services he has conspicuously rendered to ecclesiastical history. Specifically, this brief sketch is to pay respect to Clifford Dugmore as the parent and editor of the JEH which for long will remain a monument to his initiative, courage and perseverance: he has tended his own creation in an exemplary way for 30 years and saw the Journal grow to an internationally acknowledged organ of ecclesiastical history. It is a self-evident duty to pay tribute, however inadequate it may be, to his single-minded devotion to historical scholarship and dedicated editorship. Rarely can an occasion so clearly have offered a three-fold cause for rejoicing: the celebration of his seventieth birthday, the celebration of the thirtieth birthday of the JEH, and the conclusion of thirty years of his editorship. Quid plura?

Did the twelfth century discover the individual? For a number of years now medievalists have claimed that it did. Indeed, over the past fifty years, in what Wallace Ferguson calls ‘the revolt of the medievalists’, scholars have claimed for the twelfth century many of the characteristics once given to the fifteenth century by Michelet and Burckhardt. As a result, standard textbook accounts now attribute to the twelfth century some or all of the following: ‘humanism’, both in the narrow sense of study of the Latin literary classics and in the broader sense of an emphasis on human dignity, virtue and efficacy; ‘renaissance’, both in the sense of revival of forms and ideas from the past (classical and patristic) and in the sense of consciousness of rebirth, and historical perspective; ‘the discovery of nature and man’, both in the sense of an emphasis on the cosmos and human nature as entities with laws governing their behaviour and in the sense of a new interest in the particular, seen especially in the ‘naturalism’ of the visual arts around the year 1200. In the past fifteen years, however, claims for the twelfth century have increasingly been claims for the discovery of ‘the individual’, who crops up–with his attendant characteristic ‘individuality’—in many recent titles. In the area of political theory, Walter Ullmann has seen the individual emerging in the shift from subject to citizen. Peter Dronke, Robert Hanning and other literary critics have argued for the emergence of the individual both as author and as hero of twelfth-century poetry and romance. And, in the area of religious thought, R. W. Southern, Colin Morris and John Benton have called to our attention a new concern with self-discovery and psychological self-examination, an increased sensitivity to the boundary between self and other and an optimism about the capacity of the individual for achievement.

Among the topics of Constantine's governmental measures affecting the Church there is one which has received little or no attention in modern scholarship. And yet this topic would seem at least as important as the numerous disquisitions relative to his motivations, sincerity, honesty of purpose and similar questions which have virtually suffocated modern Constantinean research. The problem which would appear to demand an exhaustive analysis, is so much conditioned by the ramifications of antecedent history as well as by the constitutional development that on this occasion I can do no more than tentatively indicate its extent and scope.

This paper argues that Puritanism and gender interacted in dialectic fashion in seventeenth-century England and changed one another significantly as a result of that interaction.1 Such Puritan strategies as reliance on the experience of the individual, extensive use of literacy, and infusion of spiritual issues into all activities deeply affected women's spirituality and their conventional roles in the community. At the same time, changes in the traditional practices of gender altered the Puritan experience. Gender gave new reality to the Puritan emphasis on spiritual egalitarianism, the Puritan practice of godly communion and counsel, and the development of lay–clerical relationships. From the interaction between Puritanism and gender, new forms of reciprocity and alternative sources of authority emerged among the godly.

Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh (c. 1300–60), is a well-known but ill-defined figure in the history of fourteenth-century thought. Two aspects of his writings have chiefly attracted the attention of modern scholars: his theory of dominium and grace, and his polemics against the mendicant orders. In the former role, he is considered the source of one of the major doctrines of Wyclif; in the latter, a continuator of the polemic of William of Saint-Amour, and a source of the anti-mendicant sentiment prevalent in English literature in the age of Chaucer.

Many missionaries in the nineteenth century came from the lower middle and artisan classes. From this two deductions have been drawn. Firstly, it has been pointed out that these were the social origins of many of the most dynamic and discontented elements of Victorian society, for example, trade union leaders. This parallel has led t o the suggestion that the typical nineteenth-century missionary was a potential radical who could easily become a threat to the status quo. Secondly, the employment of so many men from the skilled mechanic class has been taken to indicate some awareness by missionary administrators of the wider dimensions of the gospel message; that they were concerned with the material as well as the spiritual, with the passing on of practical skills as well as with the inculcating of a new religious understanding. It will be argued below, on the evidence from four British missionary societies, the Church Missionary Society, the London Missonary Society, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society and the China Inland Mission, that these deductions require substantial qualification.

The history of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in the modern imperial period (1700–1917), has been a woefully neglected field of scholarly research. That neglect antedates the collapse of the ancien regime in 1917, for pre-revolutionary historiography on the Church was neither abundant nor sophisticated; rarely did it produce more than myopic diocesan histories, fatuous accounts of the local seminary, or hagiographic paeans devoted to some prominent clergyman. The reasons for this neglect of so fundamental an institution in ‘Holy Rus’ are many – restricted access to ecclesiastical archives, difficulties in publication because of vigilant censors, but above all the intelligentsia's indifference to an apparently moribund and state-controlled institution. Paradoxically enough, Catholic polemicists, Orthodox Slavophiles, anticlerical intellectuals and reform-minded clergy all concurred – from different motives, for different reasons – in believing that the Church had become a mere instrument of the secular state, and that this change derived from ‘revolutionary’ and ‘Westernizing’ reforms in the Church imposed by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century.

From its foundation the Carthusian Order cultivated letters as the most fitting form of labour for those who dwell apart in the desert; for although they lived and worked in strict solitude, they still spoke to the Christian world through the books which they wrote, copied and transmitted. Adam of Dryburgh (†1212 at Witham), one of the first and best-known English Carthusian authors, wrote of this activity in his work On the Quadripartite Exercise of the Cell, recalling a passage of the Consuetudines of Guigo 1 which is often cited as evidence of the Carthusian attitude to letters:

‘If the prior has so provided, there is one work to the performance of which you ought especially to attend; that is either that you learn to write (if, of course, you can learn), or if you can and know, that you do write. This work is, as it were, immortal work; work, if one may say so, not passing but lasting; work certainly, may we say, and yet not work; the work, finally, which, among all other works is most fitting to literate religious men …

It has been maintained by E. R. Norman that:

…the social attitudes of the Church have derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture, and not, as Christians themselves always seem to assume, from theological learning. The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost exactly to the values of their class and generation. Thus theological scholarship justified the structural social obligations of the eighteenth century world; thus it provided a Christian basis for Political Economy… [my italics]

In 1979, in a study of the ‘inquisitors of heretical depravity” and their work against heresy in medieval Germany, I urged rethinking of the term ‘the Inquisition” and the concept behind it. There is no clear evidence, I argued, that people in medieval Europe used either inquisitio or officium inquisitionis with reference to an agency or institution. The former term was used for specific trials following inquisitorial procedure, while the latter was essentially parallel to officium predicationis, and referred to the office or function of an individual inquisitor, not to an institutional structure. Furthermore, I argued that there is no reason to suppose there actually was an institution in medieval Europe to which the term ‘the Inquisition” might meaningfully be assigned. Heresy inquisitors during the Middle Ages were not held together by a structure of inquisitorial authority, which could ensure vigorous action, procedural regularity, or interaction of members. ‘In these circumstances”, I tentatively concluded, ‘it would perhaps be advisable to avoid speaking of even papal inquisitors as if they formed a suprapersonal agency, or an Inquisition.”

A Lutheran settlement was the natural outcome for a politically imposed Reformation such as that of Henry VIII. Some aspects of his settlement pointed in that direction, and English evangelicalism during his reign leaned more towards Lutheranism than has been hitherto appreciated. Reformed views only came to dominate the movement at the very end of the reign. This shift reflects the waning influence of German Lutheranism in England, and arguably also the influence of Lollard sacramentarianism. Henry VIII's radical attitude towards images also brought some quasi-Reformed ideas into his settlement. Most important, from 1543 onwards the regime drove Lutheran-leaning evangelicals into open opposition, forcing them towards more confrontational Reformed doctrines.

When the redoubtable Presbyterian Richard Baxter came to write his engagingly biased autobiography he distinguished three broad categories of conformists to the Restoration Church Settlement of 1662. There were those who had been forced to conform out of need, or had casuistically placed their own meaning on the words of the Subscription; next there were the Latitudinarians, who were ‘mostly Cambridge-men’ and of ‘Universal Principles and free’; and then there were those of the ‘high and swaying Party’ who were ‘desirous to extirpate or destroy the Nonconformists’.

In recent years some of the most interesting statements about medieval Christianity have come not from medieval but early modern historians, Jean Delumeau, Keith Thomas, John Bossy and others, in the broad descriptive accounts which form the backcloth to discussions of reformation or counter-reformation developments in ‘religion’ – provocative statements which have not, however, evoked a large response from the English world of medieval scholarship. The latest of such statements is contained in an article by John Bossy. In part of this Bossy puts forward contentions and arguments which are of considerable importance for the study of medieval Christianity. If his arguments and the evidence he advances in their support were to be accepted the historian of medieval Christianity would be pressed to reconsider the words and concepts he deploys in his definition, descriptions and explanations of his subject. Even if modified or rejected they are acute and fruitful points, and their examination may sharpen understanding of medieval thought about religion. Bossy's arguments also point to a gap in modern scholarship: a general account of one area (assuming it was an area) of thought – the development of medieval description, classification and explanation of ‘religious’ phenomena.

Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous, woman of her age. For much of the 1870s and 1880s she promoted the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She became a vice- president of the National Secular Society, the members of which thought almost as highly of her as they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president. In 1889, however, she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became president of the Theosophical Society, the members of which again revered her almost as much as they did its prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from the materialist atheism of the secularists to the New Age thought of the theosophists. All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable to recover any coherence in her activities within the secularist, Fabian and theosophical movements. Indeed, they have spoken of her many lives, as though she wandered aimlessly, if enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no guiding theme whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life, they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she did, but rather to her hidden needs, such as to follow a dominant man or to exercise her powers. They turn to her emotional make-up to explain her final flight from reason, and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope to represent Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with her secularism, Fabianism and theosophy, was very much of her time, for whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped by a religious movement to make Britain a truly Christian nation and a political movement to make Britain a democratic nation, the later part of her reign took its shape from the need to find both a faith capable of surviving the rationalist onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended franchise had failed to solve.

‘There is one Katherine Chidly an old Brownist, and her sonne a young Brownist, a pragmaticall fellow, who not content with spreading their poyson in and about London, goe down into the Country to gather people to them… Katherine Chidly and her sons Books (for the mother and the son made them together, one inditing, and the other writing) are highly magnified, and the brasen-faced audacious old woman resembled unto Jael …’.

There is a general consensus among historians that there was something quite special about the church policy of the Ottoman and Salian rulers of Germany from Henry i to Henry m. The normal reliance of the medieval king on his prelates was here turned into a deliberate and systematic exploitation of the potential of the Church as an instrument of government. These rulers used bishops and abbots, whom they appointed, as a counterweight to a turbulent and unreliable lay nobility. Many historians have, so to speak, followed them in this, have turned from the Ottomans' and Salians' complex and seemingly unsatisfactory relations with their aristocracy to their church policy. Here they have seen plan, system and harmony, so much so that the Church has come to be regarded as the principal instrument of government available to these rulers. Our picture of the Ottoman and Salian 'imperial church system', the Reichskirchensystem of German historians, has been much refined by recent scholarship, but the essential outlines have not greatly altered since the time of Waitz and Giesebrecht. The purpose of what follows is to re-examine these outlines. The qualifications, doubts and re-interpretations offered are not all new; many have been expressed or at least hinted at in the existing literature. But they have never been fully articulated, and it seems worth looking again at the Reichskirchensystem as a whole to ask how far in fact it did or could have performed the functions usually attributed to it, and to ask also how far it was a system. The focus of attention will inevitably be on the German bishoprics (and to a lesser extent the royal abbeys) before the Investiture Contest, but it will also be necessary to look at the position elsewhere in Europe at this period, because an appearance of uniqueness and system has been fostered by considering conditions in the Reich in isolation

Scholars have tended to ignore Elizabeth's letters as a potential source for evidence of her religious beliefs, and have turned elsewhere to find a ‘window into her soul’. A few fixed on her personal Book of devotions as the most valuable route into her inner life, since it was generally assumed that she had composed the prayers within it herself. From this kind of evidence, the queen emerged as a deeply pious princess, far different from the politique figure who dominated the writings of A. J. Pollard, J. E. Neale and J. B. Black. J. P. Hodges, for example, thought these private prayers revealed both ‘a spiritual perception’ and ‘a deep personal faith which has every token of sincerity’, while William P. Haugaard, likewise, detected a ‘spiritual depth and unity to her character’. As the prayers also manifested a belief in solifidianism, Haugaard identified Elizabeth's piety as unmistakably Protestant, a view which Christopher Haigh endorsed. More recently, however, Patrick Collinson has questioned the historical value of the Book of devotions. He first speculated that the prayers within it might well have been written for Elizabeth by others, and in a clever piece of deconstruction, went on to suggest that, in any event, the book itself (together with one or two other small devotional books) was probably a fashion accessory rather than an object encouraging personal piety. To find clues to her religion, Collinson preferred to rely on the queen's actions and private behaviour. There he saw so many illustrations of religious conservatism, including her dislike of married clergy, hostility to the destruction of crosses and church monuments, her use of Catholic oaths and her ‘unusually negative prejudice against the preaching ministry’ that he dismissed the queen as ‘an odd sort of Protestant’, arguing that her conservative policies probably reflected her religious preferences rather than simply political expediency. Collinson has not been alone in playing down Elizabeth's Protestantism, although only a small minority of historians today describe the queen as a Henrician Catholic, who would have been content in 1558 ‘to return to the Church of her father’.

Few have studied the early eighteenth-century Church. Caught between puritan triumphs and the Methodist revival, its polemics and efforts at rejuvenation have gone largely unnoticed. Those historians who have noticed describe an Anglican hierarchy lacking in talent and drive and a population devoid of piety and religious fervour. Both of these images are incorrect, as more recent scholarship has begun to suggest. Church historians now concentrate primarily on biographies of famous ecclesiastics and monographs (and articles) on some of the more lively events such as SacheverelPs trial and the Convocation controversy. But no one has systematically explored the Church's attempts to combat the decline brought about by the Toleration Act of 1689 and by its own avoidance of earlier enthusiasms.

The contrast between institutional and popular (or folk) religion is used by some social historians to rebut the sociological secularisation thesis. This article uses a re-examination of religion in the north Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes to consider how some elements of popular religion change with the decline of institutional religion. It concludes by suggesting that, far from enduring despite the decline of the Christian Churches, popular religion is doubly vulnerable to secularisation: it is directly eroded by secularising forces and it is indirectly undermined by the decline of the Churches. Without an institutional core, a popular religious culture cannot be sustained.

Anti-Catholicism was a pervasive influence on religious and political life in nineteenth-century Wales. Contrary to the views of Trystan Owain Hughes, it mirrored the chronology of anti-Catholic agitation in the rest of Great Britain. Welsh exceptionalism lies in the failure of militant Protestant organisations to recruit in Wales, and the assimilation of anti-Catholic rhetoric into the frictions between the Church of England and Nonconformity over the disestablishment of the Church. Furthermore, whereas the persistence of anti-Catholicism in twentieth-century Britain is primarily associated with cities like Liverpool and Glasgow, its continuing influence in Wales was largely confined to rural areas and small towns.