This paper takes the case study of a well-known but also rather poorly-regarded text, Ratpert of St Gall's Casus Sancti Galli, to examine some of the methodological issues of modern historians reading medieval historians. It is argued that features of Ratpert of St Gall's monastic history which modern readers have found frustrating or even boring were actually the result of the author's specific rhetorical strategies and ideas of history. Ratpert developed an innovative way of writing the history of a Christian community in the mortal world. Unlike other monastic historians who were developing the genre at the time and who followed more hagiographical models, Ratpert chose to put the anonymous, timeless collective of the monks at the centre of his text. His idea of history suggests a lack of effective human agency in the world, in which ups and downs forever follow one another, and contrasts this with the eternity of God.

The article offers an analysis of the public debate on priestly marriage, conducted in the last decades of the eleventh century. This was the first debate on the subject in six hundred years, erupting in the context of the reform movement. Although the theme of priestly marriage was mentioned in the Carolingian period as well as in the tenth and first half of the eleventh century, it was the anonymous defence of clerical marriage, the Epistola de continentia clericorum, that gave rise to a wide-ranging public debate. The article examines this debate in terms of the argumentative approaches used by the participants, the aim being to emphasise an important undercurrent in the understanding of priestly marriage contrary to the official – or Gratian – view on the issue.

Studies of revivalism, from Calvin Colton's explanation of the ‘classic’ American experience to John Kent's recent unsympathetic work, have highlighted the use of children as instruments of adult conversion and have illustrated the way in which revivalism sought to influence the whole of domestic life by confirming the sect's alienation from wider society. Equally, children were evangelised in their own right, an important fact to remember in view of the large numbers who died before they reached late adolescence. Although it may strike us as precocious, Victorian children were considered the possessors of an instinctive religious sense, which revivalism sought to harness and develop. The notion of the ‘child-leader’, which was the mainstay of much religious literature throughout the nineteenth century and, propagated by the Sunday schools, was embedded in the growing revivalist ideology, grew out of an ambivalent attitude towards children. Against the older, theological assertion of the depravity of all human beings, there emerged in the late eighteenth century a ‘softer’, more sentimental attitude, which depicted children in particular as potential recipients and bearers of grace. The roots of this attitude lay as much in the theological tradition as in a reaction against it on the part of those who rejected any idea of the aboriginal sinfulness of children and stressed instead their essential innocence.

The medieval canon law of affinity as an impediment to marriage combined a large range of prohibited degrees with a wide power of dispensation. After the Reformation, however, English law, in line with mainstream Protestant opinion, prohibited marriages within the degrees mentioned in Leviticus, with no provision for dispensation. The prohibited degrees were set out in ‘Archbishop Parker's Table’ in the Prayer Book, beginning with the memorable declaration that ‘A man may not marry his grandmother’. In the nineteenth century, however, some of these restrictions came to be challenged. The classic case was that of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and it was under this title that successive bills were introduced to alter the law.

Until 1857 the law of marriage was administered by the ecclesiastical courts, according to the canon law. However, the civil courts modified and controlled this canon law by means of the writ of prohibition: canon law was now subordinate to common law, and where the two conflicted the civil courts would over-rule the ecclesiastical courts. Marriage with a deceased wife's sister was illegal, and, as with other impediments to marriage, a case could be brought in the ecclesiastical courts to have such a marriage declared void. A case on these grounds could only be brought during the lifetime of both spouses. Nevertheless, the marriage had theoretically been void ab initio, and even after one spouse had died the survivor could still be proceeded against for incest.

The journey to Mongolia of Giovanni de Plano Carpini and Benedict the Pole of Vratislavia (Wroclaw, Breslau) in 1245–1247 has been explored by historians. But the significance of their careers in Poland and Ruthenia has not yet been studied and remains a subject for future research. The Minorites, in addition to their chief mission—the peace negotiations with the Grand Khan in Karakorum—had been ordered to start conversations in Cracow (Kraków) and Halicz to bring about the union of Orthodox Ruthenia with Rome. Since he was vicedelegate and companion to friar Giovanni, Benedict's contribution to the achievement of the union seems to have been overlooked or insufficiently appreciated.

The subject of this article claims attention for two special reasons. Firstly, and without any doubt, Grabe was one of the greatest atristic scholars of his age and lent lustre to the scholarly tradition at Oxford where his later years were spent. Secondly, his phenomenal patristic scholarship was inspired by a religious motive, which derived from his attachment to Lutheran Syncretism, a movement begun by the Helmstedt theologian Georg Calixtus (1586-1656). The problem of Grabe's neglect by historians is compounded by the confusion created by a contemporary account of the vital episode which brought him from Germany to Oxford and from Lutheranism to the Church of England. This article will therefore, draw together the scattered information which exists on Grabe's career and thereby remedy the neglect of historians, and dispel some of the confusion surrounding him.

Of the literary bequest from the Middle Ages, homilies provide one of the more useful tools in helping us to understand the medieval mind, at least from the perspective of the Church. Homilies provide us with insight on a number of levels, extending well beyond the personal viewpoint of those who wrote and preached them. They also clearly reflect the values, aspirations, and concerns of an era. Homilies are particularly valuable, especially if one has them in large numbers, because they are generally addressed to people of both genders, of all ages, and from every stratum of society. This is especially true of the large corpus of homilies attributed to Bishop Caesarius of Arles who directed his attention to both laity and clergy of all ranks with the aim of encouraging reading in order to promote literacy and divine wisdom. The Caesarian homiliary that survives from the early Middle Ages, is an enviable collection of documents.: one need only consider the scarcity of this type of source for contemporary Visigothic Spain. Homilies did exist in that period in Spain, but the ravages of time and man have caused so much to disappear.

The colloque of Poissy, September–October 1561, was an important incident in the history of the Reformation, and a dramatic incident in the career of the cardinal of Lorraine. This subject was first studied in detail by H. O. Evennett in his book The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Council of Trent, published in 1930. More recently, Evennett provided the inspiration for Donald Nugent in his study Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloque of Poissy. It is upon these two important works that any reassessment must necessarily be based. In a concluding chapter on ‘the case of the cardinal of Lorraine’, Nugent wrote: ‘while the sources would seem to argue for a better view of Lorraine and his conduct at Poissy, an element of ambiguity remains’. This cautious comment refers to the introduction by Lorraine of the confession of Augsburg and a Lutheran formula on the eucharist. For Nugent, the ‘critical role of the enigmatic cardinal of Lorraine has never been resolved’. In order to concentrate on his subject, the colloque itself, Nugent skipped briefly over its historical background. This he believed to have been fully treated by others—doubtless Evennett in particular. It is, however, still necessary to study this historical background more precisely in order to clarify how and why the colloque arose. Only then does it become possible to interpret the all-important role of Lorraine.

In October 1826, an impassioned letter appeared in The Times, written by an outraged correspondent whose house had been entered unceremoniously by two offensive females who demanded first a donation towards the construction of a missionary training college and then a justification of his refusal to subscribe. He fulminated against the triumphalism of voluntary religious societies: ‘It seems “to grow by what it feeds on”’ The first half of the nineteenth century in Britain was certainly an age of ‘evangelical aggression’, and probably the modern missionary movement was making an impression on British society far deeper than it made on such countries as India and Africa, to which missionaries were sent. Missionary enthusiasm appears to have increased lay giving for home missions as well as foreign missions; it probably stimulated interest in home missions and increased the number of candidates for the ministry; it almost certainly provided a fillip to theological education; it reinforced the already existing tendency to express piety in activity rather than quiescence; it helped to bury fatalistic and deterministic theological systems; it appears to have appealed, like the later temperance movement, to all classes of society; and (perhaps related to the last claim) it declared war on denominational bigotry.

In February 1917 the Geographical Journal published a paper by C. B. Fawcett in which he analysed some principles which might underlie any successful division of England into those larger administrative areas which a new concept of devolution in government would require. His paper became a small book, The Provinces of England, which was published in 1919. Both the paper and the book are now regarded as classics in the English literature of this particular field of geographical studies. Ecclesiastical areas and the boundaries containing them are susceptible to a similar analysis and, prompted by the need for additional dioceses to meet pastoral problems arising from the growth and redistribution of the population, Anglican churchmen had been attempting such analyses many decades before the appearance of Fawcett's paper.

It is well known that the crusades were represented as wars sanctioned by God, who helped the crusaders. At the same time, according to crusade propaganda, the liberation of the Holy Land was most probably not the only purpose of the crusades. Some sources allow us to affirm that the papacy and preachers had the idea that God would allow the crusaders to settle in Outremer only when they would merit it by the absence of sin. Furthermore, in the second half of the twelfth and, to a greater extent, in the thirteenth century, there was a spread of the idea that God could destroy the Saracens on his own, but was testing his faithful. In fact, all these ideas together suggested that, according to the propaganda, the liberation of the Holy Land was not considered to be God's only goal, for he also wished to bring to this land faithful people without sin who would settle there, elected by God.

Edward Gee, rector at Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, from 1643 until 1660, was born in 1612 or 1613, at Banbury (Oxon.). During the years following the reorganisation of the Church in Lancashire along Presbyterian lines in 1646, he achieved recognition as a leading member of the clergy in that county. In 1650 he was said to possess the parsonage-house and glebe at Eccleston, with tithes and a water cornmill. Although he had agreed with the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, he opposed the more revolutionary changes carried out in 1648 and 1649, years in which the House of Commons was purged by the army, king Charles I executed, and the monarchy and the House of Lords abolished. The decision of the new republican Commonwealth regime to exact a promise of allegiance, known as the Engagement (first, in 1649 from a number of important Englishmen, and then in 1650 from all adult males in England) provoked a major pamphlet debate. This Engagement Controversy was the occasion of a lengdiy and detailed exchange of opinions and interpretations concerning the whole problem of how the subject should in conscience behave with respect to a drastic change of government, or, as many would have it, a usurpation of civil authority.

The century from the calling of the Council of Trent to the conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle stands out as one of the most creative in the pastoral history of Christian Europe. The great number of new apostolic orders, the devotional flowering in France which tamed and domesticated the mysticism of Spain for everyman, the renovation of the parish and the priestly life aspired to by Carlo Borromeo, Pierre Berulle and Vincent de Paul are all aspects of a transformation which is the spiritual face of the baroque. The practice of confession stands somewhere near the centre of this transformation. From an annual social rite concerned essentially with the restoration of peace and the guaranteeing of restitution, it became a monthly or even weekly private rite of reconciliation of the penitent with God. It became, too, the focus for the direction of souls which was now seen, supremely in the work of Francis de Sales, as a central part of the work of the priest. The Salesian tradition was to dominate the flood of devotional manuals published in every European language in the seventeenth century, and in it the practice of confession was developed beyond the juridical and canonical framework of Trent, and turned into a subtle and highly personal instrument of spiritual direction.

Was non-residence in benefices necessarily an abuse? It was an old problem, usually linked with pluralities, and even if the Councils of Constance and Basel had done nothing about it, non-residence had been denounced by Gerson, by Panormitanus and by Denys the Carthusian; it remained a live issue in the later fifteenth century. An interesting discussion of the subject emerges from the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83) with his father and brother, successive rulers of Mantua. It raises points of wider importance than the particular matters at stake and throws some light upon relations between the Italian powers and the papacy over Church appointments; in Italy there was no Pragmatic Sanction, and appointments would often depend upon official request and more or less informal ways and means of accommodation with the Roman court. It is, however, not only about appointment to, and absenteeism from, major benefices, but also minor ones. In the absence of any general treatment in depth of the subject, these documents contribute some specific and important evidence about practical problems and attitudes in Italian ecclesiastical life. Resentment in the small Lombard principality of Mantua towards non-resident ‘foreigners’ and papal reservations, professions of concern about pastoral standards and the social standing of the local clergy are among other themes which emerge; not least remarkable is that the cardinal's viewpoint as revealed in the correspondence was sometimes distinctly different from that of the lay rulers, in spite of his being their close relative and top-level agent in the papal court.

This article is based on the sermons of the moderate Puritan minister Richard Culverwell, preached in his parish of St Margaret Moses, London, from the mid-1620s to the early 1630s, and recorded in detail by one of his leading parishioners, the fishmonger John Harper. It uses this material to discuss the reception of demanding Calvinist divinity, and to contribute to scholarly debates on the nature and impact of the Laudian regime in London. Although Culverwell continued to preach a Calvinist message, his sermons show a process of adaptation to changing times, and reveal the constraints and tensions that he was facing.

The collapse of the British Student Christian Movement in the long 1960s is conventionally ascribed to its mimicking of student radicalism at a time of increasing secularisation. Yet analysis of the SCM's rhetoric demonstrates that in the early 1960s the movement imagined a religious crisis when student Christianity was still strong. By embracing a theological vision of ‘secularisation’, which demanded the deliberate transposition of Christian eschatologies into secular form, the SCM embarked on an early, original and influential journey into political radicalism. In this way, the SCM made a significant contribution to British student radicalism in the late 1960s.

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, issued by the leaders of the German Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) churches in October 1945, was a unique document in the recent history of the Christian Churches. This public acknowledgement of responsibility and guilt for their inadequate response to the criminal actions of the nation's political leaders was, and remains, unprecedented. The solemn proclamation included the by-now well-known sentences:

With great pain do we say: through us endless sufferings have been brought to many peoples and nations. What we have often borne witness to before our congregations, we now declare in the name of the whole church. We have for many years struggled in the name of Jesus Christ against the spirit which found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of tyranny, but we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously and for not loving more ardently.

When Richard Baxter arrived in the camp of the victorious New Model Army shortly after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, he was greatly distressed by the religious and political heterodoxies that found expression through the ‘few proud, self-conceited, hotheaded Sectaries’ who had become Cromwell's ‘Favourites’. He observed that these men held ‘vehement Disputes’ in behalf of ‘Liberty of Conscience’, the doctrine that the civil magistrate should have nothing to do with matters of religion. Furthermore, he noticed that they also talked of ‘State Democracy’ and ‘Church Democracy’ as well as ‘about Free-grace and Free-will, and all the Points of Antinomianism and Arminianism’. In other words, in Baxter's mind those men who were attacking the orthodox Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and election were the very same men who were demanding additional political liberties. A single test case may be framed of the compatibility and nurturing effect (each upon the other) of these two tendencies by an examination of the writings of the New Model Army chaplain, John Saltmarsh.