Professor Margaret Deanesly and Père Grosjean have devoted some discussion to Dom Suso Brechter's study of the sources for the English mission of Gregory the Great. The debate which it has since provoked has centred almost exclusively on the question of the authenticity of the Responsa attributed to Gregory the Great in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People [H.E.], i, 27. Mr. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill has rightly insisted that ‘Dom Brechter's book discusses much more than the Gregorian Responsa’. It is my purpose in this paper to consider some of Dom Brechter's arguments concerning the course and the chronology of the English mission, and his attack on the accuracy of Bede's account and on his honesty.

No one doubts that the treatise on repentance published in 1648 as the sixth book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is by Hooker, but there has been considerable doubt that 1648 (as I shall call it) belongs in the Laws. Keble pronounced it ‘an entire deviation from its subject’, which should have been the Disciplinarian proposal that the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction be exercised by congregational lay-elders, while W. Speed Hill concludes his recent detailed discussion of the problems surrounding the posthumous three last books of Hooker's great work by calling on those who would include 1648 in the Laws to argue their case for its inclusion ‘in the face of a substantial body of evidence, internal and external, to the contrary’. The present note is a response on the ‘internal’ side to Professor Hill's call for argument.

This paper (a companion to an article published this Journal lxvii [2016]) considers a twelve-year campaign by some Church of England clergy to discredit Nonconformists as irrational enthusiasts. It began in 1668–9, to discourage concessions to Nonconformists through ‘comprehension’ and to prove the loyalty of men suspected of lukewarm attachment to the Church. Congregationalists responded by accusing the conformists of Socinianism. But Presbyterians were less willing to differ from churchmen, and claimed that orthodox Protestants did not disagree about reason. Any differences were exaggerated for polemical advantage, and the controversy drove conformists and Nonconformists further apart.

The Restoration was a victory for the governing classes, a victory for social stability and discipline. Dissent, the gentry argued, led to republicanism and social disintegration: Anglicanism and the monarchy meant order. Yet despite the ease with which Charles it returned in 1660 and the relative lack of bloodshed which accompanied his restoration, it was by no means certain that the settlement would be anything more than transitory. God, in his infinite and impenetrable

Hobbes's eschatology in Leviathan is one of the most striking aspects of this classic work and has received considerable scholarly attention. Nevertheless, its scriptural interpretation has rarely been examined. This article closely analyses Hobbes's scriptural case for two aspects of eschatology: the doctrine of mortalism and the terrestrial kingdom of God. It shows that, to a large extent, Hobbes's biblical exegesis for these two eschatological issues was preceded by that of his contemporaries, including Richard Overton and John Archer. It is likely, in particular, that the scriptural interpretation for Hobbes's mortalism was directly indebted to Overton's Mans mortalitie.

This article explores the reception of the European Protestant Reformation in the British Atlantic using the early Bermudan Church as a case study. It offers an alternative model for Puritan colonisation which was driven by a reformed vision for godly globalisation and evangelisation rather than flight from persecution in England. By shedding light on ecclesiastical ties between the reformed Churches on the continent and the British Atlantic, it extends the ideological foundations for the establishment of British America beyond the theories of empire and economic opportunism usually addressed by historians.

The momentous paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person provides us with the context for gaining a firm grasp of Luther's own redefinition of the range and role of philosophy. By no means the life-long combatant, distorter or victim of scholasticism as later scholarship often claims, Luther at once unfolded and redirected a tradition that stretched back through St Bonaventura to St Francis of Assisi, a tradition that rejected the Thomistic ‘Unmoved Mover’ and envisaged a covenantal ‘God who acts’. For Luther, the ‘God who acts’ became the ‘God who acts in Christ’, who is unpredictable and foils any systematic search, who contrary to ‘reason’ carries the cross from Christmas to Easter.

This article evaluates ordination lists preserved in bishops’ registers from late medieval England as evidence for the monastic orders, with special reference to religious houses in the diocese of Worcester, from 1300 to 1540. By comparing almost 7,000 ordination records collected from registers from Worcester and neighbouring dioceses with 178 ‘conventual’ lists, it is concluded that over 25 per cent of monks and canons are not named in the extant ordination lists. Over half of these omissions are arguably due to structural gaps in the surviving ordination lists, but other, non-structural factors may also have contributed.

This article examines the development of English Methodism during the formative period between 1738 and 1741, focusing upon the experiences of women, who made up the majority of Methodists both at this time and through much of the movement's history. In particular, the role that women and questions of gender played in the conflict between the Wesley brothers and the Moravian leadership in London is considered. Using accounts written by the male leaders of both groups and the women who supported them, it is argued that women's choices determined the outcome of this early battle, shaping the nascent movement in crucial ways.

The episcopate of John Morton has received little attention from historians, possibly because it falls in time between the traditional interests of medievalists and of reformation specialists. Previous treatments, notably that of dean Hook in his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the biography by Woodhouse, published in 1895 and heavily reliant on Hook, have concentrated on Morton's political role as ‘foster father of the Tudors’, and while Professor Claude Jenkins provided an excellent survey of the Canterbury register, he was more concerned with the evidence which it provides for die condition of the Church in die late fifteenth century than widi the archbishop himself. The purpose of this paper is to outline the salient characteristics of the episcopate and to examine the ecclesiastical policies pursued by Morton. Two qualifications must immediately be added. First, despite the wealth of material in the archiepiscopal register, supplemented by the records of the cathedral priory, there is almost nothing of a personal nature, and as always it is more difficult to estimate the character or sentiments of a fifteenth-century bishop than of his twelfth-century counterpart Secondly, it has been remarked how a hard and fresh look has upgraded the reputation of Hubert Walter, ‘that old model of secular prelacy’.

The early Wycliffite William Swinderby expressed some strong criticisms of excommunication. He was alarmed that churchman thought that it was their power, rather than God's power, that consigned a soul to hell. The rhetoric of sentences of excommunication in this period was indeed intended to frighten offenders into compliance with ecclesiastical judgements, but the theory and practice of excommunication was in fact far less simple that the Wycliffite criticism of it allowed. This article examines Swinderby's attitude towards ecclesiastical sanctions in light of Wyclif's own ideas, and the theory and practice of excommunication in the late medieval Church. Swinderby's links with early Wycliffism are elucidated and the relationship between Wycliffism and the Church is looked at in a new light.

The coronation of Edward VII at the beginning of this century was an unfamiliar scene in Westminster Abbey after the long rule of Victoria, and it elicited a spate of scholarly investigations into those ancient ceremonies. As one of the minor fruits of this renewed interest, a controversy was carried on concerning the ceremonial of the coronation of Elizabeth I on 15 January 1559. Three questions occupied the centre of the stage: Who celebrated the mass: Owen Oglethorpe, the bishop who anointed and crowned her, or George Carew, the priest whom she had made dean of the Chapel Royal? Were the consecrated elements elevated during the canon of the mass? Did Elizabeth withdraw during the consecration to the chapel of St. Edward behind the high altar?

It is surprising to find that Friends were included within the terms of the Toleration Act. The political situation they faced in 1689 was distinctly unpromising. They not only continued to experience the hostility and prejudice that they had suffered since their earliest days, but they were seriously compromised by the close identification of William Penn with the discredited Catholic policies of James II. An examination of the debates in parliament on the Toleration Bill reveals that Friends were by no means certain of being included in the act. Yet their acceptance of the terms they were offered is also surprising in view of their objection to any compromise with the state over matters of religious conscience, an objection which led to their refusal to seek licences under Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. Moreover, a number of recent studies have identified the continued insistence of many provincial Friends, particularly in the rigorous heartland of Quakerism in the north–west, upon the strict maintenance of their testimonies, and indeed a redefining of those testimonies partly in response to the growing compromises with the state made by the Quaker leadership.

A close reading of sources documenting the Vandal conquest (429–39 ce) reveals that contemporary authors did not present the event as a persecution. To be sure, they insisted on the devastation that the Vandals caused, the typical woes of war, but not on its religious motivation. The article argues that it was Augustine who, in his ep. ccxxviii, first presented a theological interpretation of the event that allowed later sources writing within the Augustinian tradition to frame the conquest retroactively as a persecution.

This article examines changes in content and tone in some polemical exchanges between Anglican conformists and Nonconformists in the reign of Charles ii. In response to the Dissenters' pleas for comprehension and/or toleration because of shared Protestant beliefs, some conformists accused them of holding an antinomian doctrine of justification that undermined morality and political order – and Dissenters retorted with accusations of Socinianism. The disputes were complicated by divisions over justification within rather than between Anglican and Nonconformist groups, and by the late 1670s the perceived threats from papists brought renewed emphasis on common ground

The events of 1688–9 forced English clergy to re-examine their understanding of the Divine Right of Kings. One solution was to distinguish between de facto and de iure kingship and maintain dual loyalty to James and William. Another involved shifting from ‘legitimist’ arguments towards a more immediate view of Providence. William Sherlock expounded both positions between 1689 and 1690. This article uses under-utilised manuscripts to show how, why and when his thought moved away from de iure and towards de facto expressions of Divine Right and hence became a cause célèbre for the Orange regime and a nightmare for the non-jurors.

The recent publication of Mr. Nicholl's ‘Life’ of Thurstan, archbishop of York (1114–1140), has made this subject once more topical: and, indeed, for twelfth-century historians at least it will always be interesting. One of the constant themes of the century, and of the 1120s and 1130s in particular, was the question of the state, position and purpose of monks. The ‘monastic centuries’ were ending and the age of the secular masters had begun. The social purposes that the monasteries had served in the tenth and eleventh centuries were becoming less obvious and outdated. It was necessary that the position of the whole monastic order in society should be reconsidered and this roused strong feelings and bitter controversy. This controversy took place not only outside the monasteries but inside them as well and the great abbey of St. Mary's York is one of the houses where such controversy can be seen and studied.

The Middle Ages remained serenely unaware that a dark problem might attach itself some day to the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. They knew their Gregory, studied his Moralia and other scriptural commentaries with uplifted hearts, read his Dialogues with equal veneration and devotion and never perceived even the glimmer of a contradiction between the two categories of works. Then came the Reformation with its stress on Scripture and its dislike of the ‘superstitious Romanist piety’ fostered by works like the Dialogues. A problem thus arose for the Reformers. They had little love for the papacy but retained a veneration for the Church Fathers, among whom they counted Gregory the Great, that great interpreter of Scripture, who had been instrumental in bringing Christianity to England. Was it possible to retain Gregory but divest him of an embarrassing work? It is important to note that the first attempts to deny Gregory's authorship of the Dialogues are rooted in the polemics of the Reformation period.

Tremellius' 1569 edition of the Syriac New Testament was a quite distinctive product of Heidelberg oriental scholarship, very different from other sixteenth-century editions produced by Catholic scholars. Tremellius produced his edition by first reconstructing an historical grammar of Aramaic and then, in the light of this, vocalising the text of Vat. sir. 16 which he took to be more ancient than that of Widmanstetter's editio princeps. Thus in this way he sought to construct the earliest recoverable linguistic and textual form of the Peshitta. The anonymous Specularius dialogus of 1581 is here used for the first time to corroborate this assessment of Tremellius' achievement and to cast light on the confessional polemics his edition provoked.