In the summer of 1535 Anglo-German relatios assumed a new dimension. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic alliance on the continent and the possibility of a general council in the near future, Henry VIII was forced to consider more seriously than ever before a defensive alliance with the German Protestants. In August of that year, while Robert Barnes was approaching Wittenberg via Hamburg, commissioned by Henry both to prevent Melanchthon's rumoured visit to France and to make preparations for a full diplomatic mission to the princes of Lutheran Germany, Philip Melanchthon sent copies of the latest edition of his Loci Communes to the king of England, to whom they had been dedicated. The envoy on this mission was the Scottish Augustinian, Alexander Alesius, who was lecturing at the University of Wittenberg at that time. Alesius had received his own university education in St Andrews. Upon his graduation in 1515, he had entered the Augustinian priory there and subsequently proceeded to the study of theology. As a successful student of scholastic theology he had felt himself called to refute Lutheran theology as soon as it began to be debated in Scotland. In February 1528 he was commissioned to bring about the recantation of Patrick Hamilton, but the discussions with this first martyr of the Scottish Reformation as well as the latter's steadfast death at the stake led to a profound questioning of his own convictions. In the following year Alesius emerged as a severe critic ofthe old Church, for which he paid dearly by persecution and imprisonment. After an adventurous escape from St Andrews and months of travelling he finally reached Wittenburg, where he was inscribed in the faculty of arts in October 1532. So far very litde is known about Alesius' activities in Wittenberg. Yet there are two reasons why some elucidation of his academic activities and theological development during his three years at Wittenberg is highly desirable. First, it would be surprising indeed if his first experiences at this university, and especially the direct contact with Luther and Melanchthon, had not left a mark on his thought and career as a reformer. Second, his close friendship with the English reformers and his involvement in the doctrinal debates in England during the late 1530s suggests that Alesius formed an important link between the Reformation in England and in Germany.

Every student of plainsong in the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century is bound sooner or later to come up against problems of terminology. Some of the more puzzling ones are those connected with the practice of alternatim. It is not easy in every case to determine whether a writer is speaking of the organ or of a group of polyphonic singers when he mentions sections alternating with the plainsong.

As is well known, the Balfour Education Act of 1902 was the subject of bitter and prolonged controversy between Anglicans and Nonconformists. Ever since 1870 the Church schools had been struggling in unequal competition against the rate-aided School Board system, and many of them by the turn of the century were ‘dragging along a miserable existence’ with inadequate buildings and inadequate staff. Yet, believing their schools to be vital for their Church's survival, Anglicans hung on grimly, hoping that the Unionist government of Lord Salisbury would at last provide its long-promised succour. Fundamentally Anglicans were concerned not just for denominational teaching, but for the presentation of such teaching in a suitable atmosphere. ‘The necessity of a religious temper in teaching religion’ meant the subjection of teachers to religious tests and the retention of denominational control of the schools.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

At the beginning of 1844, the Revd John Flowerdew Colls, Anglican minister of Duke Street Chapel, St James's Park, London, published Utilitarianism unmasked, a vitriolic attack on Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the philosopher, jurisprudent, and advocate of reform. ‘The writer's main object’, the advertisement which prefaces the work grandiloquently announces, ‘has been to expose, in all its naked deformity, the hollowness and deceitfulness of the so-much-vaunted principle falsely called the Greatest happiness principle’, which formed the basis of Bentham's philosophical system. But apart from a few desultory remarks on utilitarianism – such as a belaboured attempt to connect it with Robert Owen's socialism (p. 33) – Colls devoted his energies to undermining Bentham's ideas by pouring scorn and ridicule on Bentham himself.

L'anamnèse des liturgies eucharistiques pose deux problèmes: celui de son origine et celui de son développement. Le premier se rattache à la question plus générale de la structure de l'anaphore. Celle-ci, telle qu'elle nous apparaît dès la fin du IVe siècle, comporte six parties, abstraction faite des prières d'intercession qui représentent un développement secondaire. Ce sont: i. l'action de grâces; 2. le Sanctus; 3. le Post-Sanctus; 4. le récit de l'institution; 5. l'anamnèse; 6. l'épiclèse.

Perhaps because the classification of religious behaviour in the Middle Ages has not received much attention, there seems to be no scholarly consensus concerning the number or nature of its genres. This means that at present we tend to have either inadequately differentiated, broad categories of medieval religious acts, or somewhat incoherent lists of highly specific religious practices. That a good number of these religious forms pre-existed and continued long after the Christian Middle Ages is not in doubt; nor is the fact that such religious behaviours are not necessarily confined to the Christian tradition. The present discussion, however, will focus exclusively upon the Latin Christian tradition, c. 1000–c. 1500.

Surveying the expressive modes of medieval religion presents less difficulty than grouping such behaviours within larger intelligible categories. Current scholarly literature makes it clear that certain varieties of medieval religious practice are almost universally acknowledged: veneration of the saints; attendance at sermons; private prayer; participation in public, collective liturgies (for example, processions on diverse occasions); acting under the influence of prophecy; setting off on pilgrimage, whether penitential or devotional; taking the Cross; performing formal or informal acts of devotion or piety (‘devotion’ is one aspect of the medieval religious life urgently in need of sharp definition); and attempting, often through ascetic exercises, to experience God (mysticism). By no means is this an exhaustive list. The titular subject of this essay, as the reader will have noticed, does not appear in it.

This article re-examines a controversial group in English religious history: the millenarian followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott. The identities of many of Southcott's supporters have remained unclear, despite notable academic attention. Their relative social dislocation is most disputed; greater consensus characterises debates over women's attraction to Southcottianism. This article uses a recently-opened archive of Southcottian material, and reinterprets previously-known sources, to revise all existing pictures of who Southcottians were. Southcottian occupations in industrial regions indicate a similar social makeup to contemporary Methodism; Southcottianism had no distinct appeal to women. New evidence of the personal experiences of Southcottians further suggests that they may be best understood as a branch of the ‘heart religion’ of the period, one taking a distinctive view of the ways and means of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

In a general history of modern England A. J. P. Taylor stated that by the 1920s England ‘had ceased to be, in any real sense, a Christian nation’. He was no doubt referring to declining membership and attendance figures in most Protestant Churches (not the Roman Catholic Church), and may have been implying that there had been substantial abandonment of traditional belief. In regard to traditional morality, based on Christian precepts, he found greater laxity but no very noticeable decline; and this conclusion seems to be generally supported by Church experience in trying to uphold established morality in the inter-war years. Church assembly records and church newspapers show constant concern with familiar moral enemies such as drunkenness and gambling, and possible new dangers in the shape of films, broadcasting and information about birth control. Gambling was increasing because of the popularity of football pools and greyhound racing, but drunkenness appeared less common than before 1914, and the cinema was reasonably harmless (a Cinema Christian Council and other bodies striving to keep it so), as also was television when its broadcasts began in 1936. None the less, the general decline in church attendance was an indication of an increasingly secularised society in which the Churches, taken as a whole, had diminishing influence, and arguably this had a weakening effect on traditional morality.

We state as a fact, which we have received, on what we deem undoubted authority, that the Puseyite party have bought up the BRITISH CRITIC, which publication accordingly will from henceforth be dedicated to the promulgation of their principles: The Record, 1 Jan. 1838

This article focuses on the Tractarian takeover and subsequent control of the British Critic, a politically and theologically conservative quarterly periodical, between 1838 and 1843. In doing so it claims several justifications. Firstly, and primarily, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Critic within first-generation Tractarianism and therefore to rehabilitate an extensive periodical journalism as a vital yet neglected source for historians of the movement. Though various Tractarians such as Richard Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey had all written for the British Magazine and William Sewell regularly for the Quarterly Review in the early 1830s, it was the Critic which came to serve as the principal medium for the movement's commentary. Historians' neglect of this commentary, it is suggested, has had important consequences in terms of our understanding of Tractarianism, for it has served to marginalise certain aspects of the movement's early thought – in particular the social criticism which was a consistent feature of the Critic's pages.

In the Middle Ages it was believed that the souls of those who died in a state of mortal sin were consigned to hell immediately after death, those that were free from sin went straight to heaven, while those guilty of venial sins, the majority, entered purgatory, a state in which sin was cleansed through suffering. Bodily death for most of the faithful was, therefore, seen as initiating a period of transition between life on earth and eternal bliss in heaven. The emphasis on the soul during this period of transition, and the complex variety of prayers for reducing the soul's sufferings in purgatory, have been extensively explored by historians.

The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius employs a variety of expressions in describing the episcopal successions of the important churches. Some of these are theologically colourless, as the forms of λαμβάνειν to declare that one has ‘received’ the episcopate, or often the ‘ministry’ (λειτουργία), of a given church. Other formulae are related to the most important motifs associated with ordination in the ancient Church.

This article examines, through the work and attitudes of its first four governors, the relations between Church and State in the last Australia colony to be established. It covers the period from the foundation of the colony in 1829 to the arrival of the first resident bishop of Perth in 1857. It challenges the prevailing historiography of a colonial administration wedded to Anglican privilege, and discusses the persistence of an erastian mind-set among the colonial governors in the 1840s despite the advent of a new paradigm of autonomous imperial engagement by the Church of England.

Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815–84) combined his ecclesiastical duties and liturgical interests with editing the fourteenth-century Middle English Lay folks’ mass book (1879) for the Early English Text Society, with the aim of showing the continuity of the English Church from the medieval period through the Reformation. In the light of modern scholarship, this article recontextualises both medieval text and Simmons's own editorial practice, and shows how Simmons, as a second-generation Tractarian churchman, sought in this text – and others associated with it – evidence for the Church of England's Catholic underpinning in an imagined medieval English Church.

Thus Gibbon opened the thirty-seventh chapter of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a lengthy chapter devoted to the twin topics of ‘the institution of monastic life’ and ‘the conversion of the northern barbarians’. The connection between the history of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church was indeed indissoluble. The Church was destined to follow the pattern of the empire by gradually degenerating as it grew in strength from original purity in the life of Christ and the Apostles to become a corrupt and baleful influence on the fortunes of secular society. Looking back over twenty years of research and writing (1767–87) he wrote near the beginning of his final chapter, ‘In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion and I can only resume in a few words, their real or imaginary connection with the ruin of ancient Rome.’ He goes on to list ‘potent and forcible causes of destruction’ by barbarians and Christians respectively. As he finally laid down his pen on 27 June 1787 at Lausanne, he concluded with a sentence whose strict accuracy has sometimes been doubted: ‘It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.’ The date of this decision was 15 October 1764. Here we survey briefly the role of ‘religion’, i.e. Christianity in the ruin of the Roman Empire.

‘Il est hors de doute qu'en 1789 les curés de France ont puissamment contribué au triomphe du patriotisme révolutionnaire. Par patriotisme on entendait alors, d'une manière précise, l'amour passionné de la liberté et de l'égalité des droits…. On sait que ces curés patriotes, au nombre de près de 200, formèrent environ les deux tiers de la députation du Clergé aux Etats Généraux, et que, dans les mois de mai et juin 1789, ils arrivèrent, malgré tous les efforts du haut Clergé de leur Chambre, à contrecarrer l'action de celui-ci, obstinément attaché à la séparation des ordres et au vote par ordre, à dissocier l'ordre même dont ils faisaient parti et à préparer ainsi la fusion dans l'unique Assemblée nationale….’

A major manuscript discovery of hitherto unknown letters of Augustine of Hippo is a scholarly event whose importance can hardly be exaggerated. It is as though one of the lost books of Livy had suddenly turned up in palimpsest among medieval manuscripts in a cathedral library. For a discovery in similar circumstances, one has to go back to December 1904 when the learned Rev. Dr Karapet Ter-Merkettshian found an Armenian manuscript of Irenaeus' Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching in the library of the church of the Blessed Virgin at Eriwan in Armenia.

In the history of medieval regal and imperial anointing the consecration of Edgar as king of the Angles and Saxons in 973 deserves very special attention. For the ceremony, performed seventeen years after Edgar's succession to the throne of Mercia and fourteen years after he had become king of Wessex, was apparently without precedent either in biblical or medieval times. How are we to make sense of a consecration which by its very nature should inaugurate the reign and constitute the king, and which now took place more than a decade and a half after Edgar had been firmly in power? If we consider the consecration against the background of contemporary continental customs then the magnitude of the problem emerges in all its clarity, for by the late tenth century inaugural anointing had assumed its place at the opening of the reigns of most of the kings of western Europe. Regal consecration had been customary among the Franks for well over a century and for nearly as long in Burgundy; there is evidence that anointing took place from an early date in the small Christian kingdoms of Spain, and finally, after the consecration of Otto 1 in 936, inaugural anointing also became established in the German kingdom. In each case the Old Testament provided the pattern for the anointings: it was the pouring on of the holy oil which worked the regeneration of the prince in virum alium (1 Kings x.6), giving him a new heart (1 Kings x.9) and thereby constituting him as ruler over God's people (1 Kings x.1). Henceforth the spirit of God was with the king (1 Kings x.8) and as the christus Domini he enjoyed divine sanction and protection (1 Kings xxiv.7).

This article examines the canonisation process of Clare of Assisi and seeks to contextualise it within the currents of early Franciscan history. It refutes recent scholarship on Clare that has focused upon her place in the history of medieval women and draws on Italian scholarship to argue for a more nuanced reading of the texts surrounding Clare that takes into account the deep-set divisions between the papacy and the friars about the role of women in the Franciscan order and compares the post-mortem treatment of Clare to that of Francis.

A strong case has been made for the appearance of a new kind of history in late sixteenth-century France. Whether or not it deserves the label ‘historicist’, it has been credited with a desire to discover the objective face of the past, with a critical approach to sources, and even, though more rarely, with attempts to explain historical process. Prominent among the new brand of historians are Jean du Tillet, Charles du Moulin, Pierre and François Pithou, Claude Fauchet and Etienne Pasquier. All these men of the robe are also celebrated as defenders of the liberties of the Gallican Church. The Gallican tradition shared an attitude towards the past that was quite contrary to the new history. It did not accept change for its own sake, nor did it see change as improvement pointing towards the present.