‘Because of the obedience by which I am bound to the Apostolic See…filially and obediently, I do not obey, I oppose, I rebel.’ The more we learn of Robert Grosseteste's achievements as theologian and scientist the less likely does it seem that he will be remembered in the future—as he used to be in the past—principally for this letter of defiance concerning papal provisions in the diocese of Lincoln. Yet the letter itself remains something of an enigma in spite of all the attention it has received from a long line of scholars. It may seem an unprofitable task to go gleaning in a field where workers like Maitland and Sir Maurice Powicke have helped with the harvest, but we would suggest that Grosseteste's direct refusal to obey an unambiguous papal command has never been adequately analysed from one obvious point of view—as an extreme instance of a classical problem of political theory, the right to resist an unjust command of a divinely ordained power.

In order to understand the crusading movement it has always been necessary to define what was understood by the ‘crusade’ as a religious exercise within the Christian tradition. This attempt to identify the ‘crusade idea’ goes back to the earliest commentators on the First Crusade, but has gained increasing vitality during the last thirty years. It is not a matter of weighing the relative importance of, on the one hand, the religious and, on the other, the secular or political motives, but of describing the content of the nova religio as such. In this sense Erdmann, who first set up the subject as capable of disciplined study, traced the antecedents in socio-religious forms of behaviour without which the Kreuzzugsidee could not have been conceived, regarding it as in its essentials formulated at the launching of the First Crusade, with Jerusalem as only a minor and ancillary target. Alphandéry, to single out another notable contributor to this type of study, diagnosed the dramatic emergence of a distinctive idée de croisade during the very course of the First Crusade, concentrated on the deliverance of the Holy Places, a unique experience never to be wholly repeated. Another notion of the ‘crusade’ was developed by Rousset—an institution de salut with its characteristic ideology, entertained generally during the first half of the twelfth century.5 There are studies also of the ideas associated with crusading in the crusade appeals, preaching, justification and criticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the forms of procedure, and in Latin and vernacular poetry.

The idea of converting Scandinavia to Christianity had been enthusiastically pursued by the Emperor Louis the Pious and Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims in the 820s. Optimism such as theirs was, however, not to last, and little progress was made between the death of Archbishop Rimbert of Hamburg-Bremen in 888 and the conversion of Harald Bluetooth a century later. This article examines how Rimbert wrote a saint's Life about Anskar, his predecessor and ‘apostle of the north’, in an attempt to arrest the waning support for the mission. It considers how this was achieved by placing the text in the context of the clashes between Ebbo and his successor, Hincmar, the predestination debate and the idea that mission was fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies.

The distinction between a Puritan ‘plain’ and a Laudian ‘metaphysical’ preaching style rests on secular rhetorical theories of persuasion that are relatively unimportant to early Stuart homiletics but are central to later Latitudinarian polemics on preaching. Instead, the ‘English Reformed’ theory and method of sermon composition rests on the didactic function of preaching and the need for the Holy Spirit and hearers to co-operate with the preacher. Although Andrewes and some avant-garde conformists questioned this theory, they developed no alternative method of composition. Arguments made in the 1650s for direct inspiration by the Spirit contributed to the decline of both theory and method.

The question of why the Reformation failed to win any significant number of adherents from among the native population in Ireland has, since the nineteenth century, been posed frequently by historians and, until very recently, the question has been accepted as valid and the answers provided have generally been considered plausible. That the problem of the Reformation in Ireland should be approached in this way is at least a concession by scholars that Irish history is a part of European history and that Irish society has always been influenced to some degree by general European movements. Historical practice has unfortunately not conformed with appearance, and historians have lost sight of the broad comparative perspective implied in the question and, as a consequence, have shirked the fundamental issue of whether or not a reform movement developed within Ireland, or whether the necessary conditions for such a development existed. Instead, the problem has been pondered almost exclusively within the context of the Reformation in England with die result that historians, while appearing to be embarked upon a general discussion of the pre-conditions for reformation, have in fact confined their attention to the much more specific issue of why measures which in a relatively short time produced a solidly Protestant society in England failed to achieve anything like the same result in Ireland.

For the great majority of English men and women in the Reformation the principal indication of individual religious beliefs is the initial clause in their testaments, bequeathing their souls to God. Cast in the form of a personal bequest and frequently composed on the testator's deathbed, the religious statement appears to provide a revealing personal comment upon the individual's beliefs, unlike seemingly more public acts or protestations of faith. Unfortunately for the historian interested in tracing the presence of early Protestantism, Calvinism or religious conservatism within individuals or communities, will-making by the early modern era had become a cultural ritual. With a strong potential for ritualised statements, the pitfalls in using these preambles in isolation as indications of faith are generally well known. It is the intention of this paper to outline evidence for considering testamentary declarations as formulae, in indeterminate relationship with the specific religious convictions of the testators.

The British experience of the First World War has given rise to a host of myths and misconceptions in both the folklore and the historiography of the war. The most damaging of these for the Church of England has been that its army chaplains skulked in the rear while a generation of British men fought and died in the trenches of the Western Front. This article exposes the falsity of this myth, tracing its origins to the inter-war boom in ‘war books’ and its longevity among ecclesiastical historians in particular to the pacifist sensitivities and flawed historiography of the 1960s and the 1970s.

The present paper is intended as a contribution to the recent debate on the failure of the Irish Reformation. It commences with a critical summary of the modern historiography of the subject which serves also to highlight a potentially significant imbalance between the early and later Reformation periods in the identification and exploitation of relevant source material by historians. Arguably, the nature of the evidence hitherto deployed goes far towards explaining the dimensions of the present controversy. The paper addresses this controversy mainly in two ways. First, it aims to draw attention to, and analyse, a neglected source compilation which is of central importance in assessing the reasons for the failure of the Irish Reformation. Second, and partly in order to.establish the full significance of this evidence, it seeks to develop a wider perspective from which to assess the potential for, and chronology of, religious change in Ireland.

Much has been written about the masters of theology at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and their views on the nature of theology. Less work has been done on their view of themselves as a social group and what they were supposed to do with their distinctive kind of knowledge, however they defined it. Furthermore, analysis of their self-image has remained very general, included within studies of masters in all subjects in all universities over several centuries. This broad approach is entirely justified in that many sources deal with learning in general and because study of the Paris theologians contributes to wider debate about the social and political significance of medieval universities and intellectuals. It is, however, important to examine the self-image of the masters of theology at Paris specifically because, whatever the wider contemporary ideals, the world of learning was in reality far from homogeneous and harmonious.

As an episode in the history of Puritan ideas on liberty of conscience, the importance of the Whitehall Debates has long been acknowledged. Their publication at the end of the last century by Sir Charles Firth, who discovered them among the Clarke MSS., and their republication in the 1930s by A. S. P. Woodhouse, who made extensive additions to the original text, are evidence of their high regard. As Professor Woodhouse saw them, the Debates dealt with one of ‘the most significant issues of Puritan political thought:…the question of religious liberty’. Other historians have attributed even greater value to the Debates, acclaiming them as a major contribution to Puritan thought on this subject. W. K. Jordan, in his monumental study of religious toleration in England, hailed them as ‘momentous’; and, more recently, Christopher Hill has coupled them with the debates concerning James Nayler as ‘the two great set debates on religious toleration’ which survive from the revolutionary period. In view of this long-standing recognition, it is paradoxical that there exists no coherent and comprehensive discussion of the Debates: or rather, of the debate on 14 December 1648, this being the only day for which a detailed account survives. Although the arguments of various speakers have been summarised, no attempt has been made to offer an interpretation of the debate as a whole, on the grounds of the ‘confused and fragmentary’ state of the records.

Late in 1831 a number of Jamaican slaves began a movement of passive resistance in which all work on the island was to be ended on 25 December. By the time that the subsequent chain of events had been played out, perhaps as many as a thousand slaves had died, although the official figures listed 207 killed during the ensuing insurrection and 312 executed in the aftermath. The white colonials immediately turned against the Baptist and Wesleyan missionaries, accusing them of fomenting the rebellion. As a result of this violent and-missionary reaction six Baptist missionaries were jailed, a Wesleyan was tarred, five Wesleyan chapels and ten Baptist chapels were destroyed, while the latter had another four chapels suffering partial destruction.

‘New Learning’ is a phrase familiar to historians of Tudor England as an archaic and somewhat arch synonym for ‘Renaissance humanism’, that is, for the revival of classical languages and literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its speciously authentic flavour derives from its frequent occurrence in sixteenth-century sources. However, in its original context it had radically different connotations from those attached to it by recent generations of historians. For in the sixteenth century it was employed without exception as a description of religious error – predominantly as a pejorative term for what is now variously called ‘reformed’, ‘radical’, ‘evangelical’, or ‘Protestant’ religion. It is emphatically not the case, as is still often asserted or, more usually, assumed, that the phrase was originally coined to describe humanism and was only later extended to Protestantism.1 On the contrary the modern usage, given general currency by J. R. Green and Frederick Seebohm, arose from a mere misunderstanding of the original sources. This anachronistic and potentially misleading usage remains prevalent and has helped to sustain barely articulated but none the less powerful undercurrents beneath much recent work on early Tudor humanism, namely the notions that humanism was inherently a challenge to the doctrinal status quo, that it was inherently favourable to the cause of the Reformation, and that its progress was therefore resented or even resisted by the clerical establishment. Given the meaning now attached to ‘new learning’, such notions cannot but be buttressed by the myriad instances in which conservative clergy attacked it. The scope for confusion and the need for clarification can be illustrated by juxtaposing two statements, one from the sixteenth century and one from the twentieth, in which the term is used in apparently contradictory judgements of one and the same person. In a recent and perceptive article on Thomas Bilney, Cuthbert Tunstall was in passing described in the following terms, ‘A scholar and humanist, he favoured the New Learning and its advocates; and, although he was horrified by Luther, he was not closed to reforming ideas.’

Writing from prison during the Marian persecution, Nicholas Ridley praised the elderly Dr Edward Crome to his friend John Hooper, who was incarcerated with Crome. Ridley had heard of Crome's ‘most godly and fatherly constancy in confessing the truth of the gospel’, and declared, ‘For the integrity and uprightness, the gravity and innocency of that man, all England, I think, hath known long ago.’ Ridley also wrote to John Bradford in 1555 that Crome was a ‘fatherly example of patience and constancy, and all manner of true godliness’.

Focusing on the rural zones of Palestine and exploiting extensive archaeological research permits a re-examination of the traditional view that much of Palestine had been Christianised by the late fourth century. This article suggests that the process of adopting Christianity in the countryside was far more gradual than previously believed. While the map of holy sites in Palestine had largely taken shape by the end of the fourth century, the conversion of the population only achieved real momentum during the fifth and sixth centuries. Research on the community churches of Palestine, in particular on their location in the villages, reveals that Christian penetration into the countryside stemmed from internal social developments and was not institutional in inspiration.

Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion is chiefly familiar to English historians on account of his brief but important intervention in the Anglo-Norman kingdom in the year 1070. However, he occupied his see for more than thirty years during a momentous period of ecclesiastical and political history. Little evidence about him survives, and it has never been fully assembled and discussed; yet it is enough to give more than passing interest to the course of his career and to the details of his activities. This is especially true of Anglo-Norman affairs, Ermenfrid's part in which needs to be explained and subjected to a detailed examination. But, more generally, the wider evidence about him deserves to be brought into the picture, for it sheds light on some of the factors which governed men's minds and loyalties in the second half of the eleventh century.

One of the principal arguments against the authenticity of the Constantinian documents, and of the Life in which they are incorporated, has been the phrase used by Constantine in one of them to describe his age at the opening of the Great Persecution in a.d. 303—ττε κομιδ παῖς ἔτι ὑπρχων. According to data provided by the author of the Life—and by other sources—Constantine was about 63 when he died in 337, and would therefore have been about 29 when the Persecution opened. A man of 29 could not possibly be described as a παῖς, and the phrase was, therefore, it was argued, evidence that the document in which it occurred was a forgery. As there is now strong presumptive evidence that the document is in fact genuine, it may be worth while to reconsider the passage.

Cassian was not a systematic writer; or, perhaps to be more just, he was not afraid to allow his ideas to develop, and even change. He suffers, therefore, more than some at the hands of historians of spirituality. It is temptingly easy to present him as the instigator of a twotier system: of an asceticism that distinguished contemplation from the ‘practical’ eradication of vice, or the régime of the hermit from that of the coenobite; and that distinguished them as activities of greater and lesser merit, raising the contemplation of the hermit above the more preoccupied discipline of community life. Those who think of Cassian in these terms have also to face the fact that most western ascetics, in the centuries that followed, came together in groups to conquer sin; and yet they thought Cassian (as did Benedict) in some sense their master. Indeed, there are signs that Cassian himself witnessed the growing popularity of the coenobitic life. Given this apparent contrast, therefore, between his supposed interpretation of the spiritual life and the relentless development of communal asceticism, many feel impelled to regard him as a remote perfectionist, or at best—where signs of resignation to community life appear—as a weary and reluctant realist.

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.

Calvin's teaching on the authority of magistrates to resist a tyrannical ruler has been much debated. The main ground of debate has been his discussion of the source of that authority, in the penultimate paragraph of the Institutes. Some commentators have stressed that for Calvin magisterial ‘authority comes from God and not from the people’. Others have insisted that on this question his thought has ‘democratic aspects’, and have argued that these influenced his immediate protestant successors.

This article consists of a detailed study of a series of extraordinary diplomas issued by King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ during the 990s. These diplomas restore lands and rights to churches which had earlier been despoiled by the king and his advisors and their wording indicates that they were intended as a conscious gesture of penitence. As such, the documents were of central political importance and it is argued that they can be fruitfully mined for evidence of Æthelred's own thoughts and feelings in these years; these diplomas might well be considered to preserve Æthelred's own ‘voice’.