The second English delegation to the Council of Basel arrived there in August 1434 and remained until the summer of the following year. Its members, unlike their predecessors in the delegation of 1433, took the oath of incorporation and the brief period of their attendance was virtually the extent of England's official participation in the council. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the episode of the second delegation of which no comprehensive account has appeared since Dr. August Zellfelder published his study of England and the council in 1913.

The emotive associations of the epithet Tridentine reveal confusion over the Council of Trent, which has continued from the seventeenth century to the present day. The complaints of Sarpi, the attacks of Leibnitz, the apologia of Bossuet, the abuse of Protestants, and the recriminations of modern Catholics all reveal different views of the Council's nature, its intentions and its achievements. Implicit in all views, however, is the concept of a Council which had lasting effects.

The Spanish Church of the Golden Age has been much discussed but little studied. Certainly, its professional structure and internal administration are much less well understood than those of secular government. This paper seeks to correct some of the imbalance by applying to the 540 members of the Castilian episcopacy who served under Habsburg leadership the prosopographical techniques which in recent years have advanced our understanding of the State. But before doing so it might be useful to describe the structure of the episcopacy and the principles and procedures which governed appointments to it.

This article marks the completion of an online database catalogue of the records of taxation of the medieval and early modern clergy of England and Wales in the ‘E 179’ clerical series at The National Archives. It has two parts: an overview of the history of clerical taxation based upon the database's register of tax grants and an analytical guide to the contents of the series, with references to all key documents. The intention is to stimulate research in this important area of study by providing a blueprint for the future exploitation of this rich seam of neglected records.

Until recently, chapbooks lay in the domain of Victorian antiquarians and bibliographers. Few persons have ever taken them seriously. Not even their original owners could mention them without showing embarrassment and adding that they had abandoned the pamphlets for more respectable reading. A half-century later, Victorian collectors called them ‘quaint’ and ‘peculiar’. Successive generations of historians failed in trying to date them and determine patterns of production and distribution. Present-day scholars no longer apologise for neglecting them. Despite this abuse, chapbooks stubbornly survive, their bad bindings preserved by poor cataloguing.

Discussion of the errors combatted by Ignatius of Antioch of centred on the question of whether they were one or two in number. While some scholars have discovered opposition to a single, composite Judaeo-Christian-Docetic error, others have argued that Ignatius opposed two groups, viz. Docetists and Judaisers. Here I intend to discuss a third error which appears to be connected with the continuing tension, observable in other writings of the time, between the priestly and prophetic ministries.

Historians of eighteenth–century England have begun to reassess its relationship with the preceding century, creating in the process the now conventional periodisation of a ‘long eighteenth century’ from c. 1660 to 1832. Historical revisionism, however, needs constantly to be revised, and there remains the danger of creating too sharp a separation between this period and that which preceded it. This article aims to introduce just such a complicating factor by linking the turbulent theologies of the 1640s and 1650s with a particular strand of eighteenth century religious thought. This might be described as the legacy of ultra-Protestantism, the insistence on the priority of private judgement and the supremacy of Scripture which were allied with a suspicion of clericalism. Its survival among an articulate and academically well-placed group of eighteenth-century Anglican divines demonstrates that the attempt by the Restoration Church of England to distance itself from ultra-Protestantism was not uniformly successful; the problem of ‘heresy’ continued into a period of Anglican history more usually associated with comfortable doctrinal latitude.

The rapid increase in monastic acquisition of parish churches in the twelfth century reflected a number of trends, both temporal and spiritual, in the Christian society of western Europe. It was an expression of the laity's continuing devotion to the monastic ideal, now reinforced by the foundation and spread of new religious orders, and it was in part a consequence of the redefinition of relations between the laity and the clergy following in the wake of the Gregorian Reform. More than that, however, it raised within the Church questions as to the proper relationship between the monastic clergy and the pastoral and juridical structure of the Church. To understand the phenomenon, therefore, it is necessary to examine the motives of donors of parish churches and those of the religious who received them, to bear in mind the climate of respectable opinion (both lay and-ecclesiastical) which came increasingly to deny possession of parish churches to the laity and yet could countenance their passage into the hands of religious houses, and to consider the repercussions of widespread monastic acquisition of churches in the Church at large. This article is concerned in particular to re-examine the means by which monasteries obtained grants of churches, viewed against the background of the Church's assault on lay ownership of churches and tithes, and to reconsider the evolution of the vicarage system, as the ecclesiastical authorities strove to accommodate within the mission of the reformed Church monastic efforts to exploit the churches in their possession.

As the fieriest champion of the Radical Reformation Thomas Müntzer remains an enigma. A spate of recent works has greatly increased our knowledge of the development of his theology and of his contribution to the Peasants' War in central Germany, but they have failed to resolve the precise relationship between his theological convictions and his involvement in social revolution. A profusion of Marxist writings, above all from East Germany, has stressed the objective function of his religious radicalism in promoting and legitimating mass rebellion in Saxony and Thuringia at the expense of its subjective intention, whilst the bulk of Western scholarship, in particular Walter Elliger's massive though scarcely definitive biography, has emphasised the primacy of his theological vision, to which social and political concerns were at best subordinate or tangential.

I cannot but take my selfe to be particularly concerned both in duty, and conscience, when I see the peace, order and union of the church over which God hath sett me, broken, and divisions come to that degree that learned Camero calls the highest, and schisme [sic] even when those that hold communion with us, not onely depart from our communion, but alsoe sett upp and use prayers, preaching and sacraments apart, and at the same time that we doe, and in the same Towne.

The Epistola Widonis, or ‘Letter of Guido’, is a key source for the simony debates of the eleventh century, since it is usually considered the first major text to cast doubt on the validity of simoniacal ordinations. After examining the grounds for the letter's conventional dating to c. 1031 and attribution to Guido of Arezzo, this article makes the case for instead locating the letter's origins in the 1060s, and explores the implications of a re-dating for the dynamics of the eleventh-century ‘moral panic’ about simony.

Translating the Scriptures into the vernacular was a primary concern of Protestant reformers. This led to worries about the precise language-form in which they should be made accessible to lay folk. This article situates such evangelical debates within contemporary understanding of the nature and role of native tongues. Tudor and Stuart governments sometimes saw English as a tool of political control; humanists questioned the ‘copiousness’ of the vernacular; the Celtic tongues were readily identified with barbarity; the status of the written word might be contaminated by the use of dialect. Translators and authors sought to address these concerns, with great success in England, Lowland Scotland and Wales, but much less effectively in Gaelic-speaking Ireland and Scotland.

Discussions of the ‘Catholic Question’ of the early nineteenth century have concentrated almost exclusively upon developments in Ireland, where demagogues, priests, and peasants cleverly contrived to extort Emancipation from a protestant parliament. The historian's choice of focus scarcely requires explanation, what with the purport of Irish events and the relentless logic with which the O'Connellites had organised their following. And yet, despite the emphases of scholarship, the concessions of 1829 actually represented a triumph on both sides of St. George's Channel. The Catholic Saxon as well as the Catholic Celt, each in his own way, had contributed to the joyous outcome, and quite possibly neither would have succeeded without the other.

This article discusses Martin Luther's appropriation of the tradition of bridal-mysticism, and contrasts it with that of Bernard of Clairvaux. According to Bernard, through the power of divine grace, the human person and God both come to find each other objects of mutual desire. By contrast, Luther, in Freedom of a Christian (1520), uses the bridal motif to describe the divine-human relationship as one of promise and trust. In this, the Reformer both appropriates and significantly reinterprets the bridal-mystical motif in accordance with the claims of his newly-minted Reformation theology of justification through faith.

The correspondence of Augustine that Johannes Divjak recently discovered and then edited in CSEL lxxxviii has provided new grist for the scholarly mills of commentary and exegesis. One of these letters (Ep. 11*), sent to Augustine from Consentius, a learned Christian living on one of the Balearic Islands, has been hailed as an important source about ‘the Priscillianist cause’ and ‘secret Priscillianists’ in northern Spain during the early fifth century. In fact, the information in this letter is more teasingly inexplicit. Consentius had composed some anti-Priscillianist writings, but only on the basis of second- and third-hand sources. Fronto, a monk in northern Spain, then apparently used these writings in order to pose as a heretic and discover other heretics who included, he claimed, some local clerics; but once accused of heresy, his opponents insisted upon, and finally ‘proved’, their orthodox Catholicism. And although in his deposition about his heresy-hunt Fronto never once mentioned Priscillianism, Consentius nevertheless glossed the whole affair as one involving Priscillianism when he included a copy of Fronto's deposition in his letter to Augustine.

Jean Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian religion, wrote that ‘there is a twofold government of man; one aspect is spiritual…the second is political…. There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority’. He emphasised this further by stating that ‘we must keep in mind that distinction which we previously laid down so that we do not (as commonly happens) unwisely mingle these two, which have a completely different nature’. The idea of the separation of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions was, of course, no post-Reformation innovation but had been a theme over centuries of conflict between popes and secular princes throughout Europe. With the fragmentation of western Christendom in the sixteenth century, the issue came to prominence within individual states, not least Scotland. As early as 1559, during the civil war which led to the Reformation, a letter to the regent, Mary of Guise, from ‘the professouris of Christis ewangell’ mentioned two ‘kingdomes’. It asserted that there was ‘ane kingdome temporall’ and ‘Christis kingdome’, the Kirk, and that the former ought to be ruled by ‘mortell men’ and the latter by Christ alone. The regent was described as ‘ane servand and na quein havand na preheminence nor authoritie above the kyrk’.

Among the many ‘unions’ between the Roman Church and the various Eastern Churches, none, perhaps, has been more unknown than the Union of Suzdal, 1222–1252. How important this union really was, outside the ecclesiastical questions involved, will appear immediately upon reflexion that its span coincides with the Tartar conquest of Russia and the consolidation of Tartar power. All the more startling, therefore, is the neglect of this union by Russian and non-Russian historians.

The origins of the ‘montanist’ heresy are far from clear. This much is known, that it began in Phrygia (or Mysia) and that it must have originated before 172, when Montanus had his visions, and before 179, when the prophetess Maximilla is said to have died. It is also conjectured that ‘Montanism’, a name which does not occur before the fourth century, may have been a title attached to the heresy later, and that the earlier names ‘the New Prophecy’ and the ‘Phrygian or Kataphrygian heresy’ are more exact connotations for the movement. Of the two names I should prefer the first, for ‘the New Prophecy’ does not seem to have been a heresy in its beginnings: doctrinal aberrations came only in the later centuries. In view of these facts it is legitimate to ask whether ‘the New Prophecy’ was a Judeo-Christian group which broke off from the Church and still later became heretical, that is, that the movement existed in essence before the time of Montanus and his ladies but that it was only in his day that it became a separate movement.