Manuscript Douce 103 in the Bodleian Library is one. of three manuscripts compiled in the late fifteenth century by a priest of Hereford diocese, the others being MSS Douce 60 and Douce 108. The manuscripts contain elementary grammatical texts such as an English version of Donatus's Ars minor, with rearrangements and expositions of hymns, psalms, canticles and sequences (often using material peculiar to the Hereford Use in this country, and showing a particular interest in St Anne and the Virgin), and copies of John Mirk's Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests. A note in the hand of this compiler on fo. 228v of MS 60 may give some clue as to his identity;

Simon Sudbury is one of the more obscure archbishops of Canterbury.He should be better known, if only because he was archbishop during a particularly confused but important period of English history—the period of Edward III's dotage and Richard II's minority. Anything which casts a little light upon the politics and personalities of that period should be welcome to historians.

This paper traces the history of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, one of the most successful of the eccentric and idiosyncratic private ecumenical initiatives of the mid-nineteenth century. The principal motivation behind the venture was a Romantic medievalism inspired by the lay Roman Catholic Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle and the Anglican ritualist priest, Frederick George Lee. While initially attracting widespread support, the leaders failed to recognise the power of vested interests in both Churches. After a vigorous denunciation by Henry Manning, the hopes of reunion proved to be little more than a dream.

On 24 June 1504, being the Feast of St. John the Baptist, Brother William Ingram, of the Cathedral Priory of Christ, Canterbury, paid 3d. ‘pro reparacione inferioris hostii prope claustrum vocati le red dur et pro una clave pertinente ad eundem’. Such was the first expenditure of a cautious man who had taken over the charge of Custos Martirii, which, together with the two custodes at the shrine of the Saint, and two others at the Corona and the site of the first tomb, in the Crypt, was one of the greater offices in the cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

This article investigates the development of the use of texts and images in commemorating the regicide of Charles I , from private commemoration among Royalists during the Republic, to its official institution after the Restoration. The article will argue that the Office gave official sanction to an image of the virtuous suffering king which had been in existence even before his execution. The Office also presented a particular view of the king's moral character, the causes of the Civil War and the Restoration which was to become the accepted account expounded in commemorative sermons for the next 150 years. Drawing on Old Testament themes, the Office also aimed to point a political moral used by successive governments, namely that attacks on the established order incurred divine punishment.

Those who have written about William the Conqueror and the English Church have usually implied that in the beginning it was the king's wish to reform his conquest with the help of a Cluniac mission, and that it was the refusal of Hugh of Semur, abbot of Cluny (1049–1109), to supply a contingent of monks which forced William to look elsewhere for helpers.1 This diplomatic failure therefore determined the effect of the Norman Conquest on the English Church. It led to Lanfranc, and so Anselm. Indeed, the consequences could be regarded as so vast as to be incalculable. There has, however, been a good deal of erroneous reference and general uncertainty on this matter; and diere are, indeed, some grounds for thinking that the king's approaches to Cluny occurred in the second half of his reign. A re-examination of all the evidence is required.

In the twelfth century the cult of St Agatha of Catania was revived on the island of Sicily. This article explores the development of the cult within the wider process of the re-Christianisation of an island which had, in the previous century, been removed from Muslim control by Norman conquerors. It demonstrates that the revival of St Agatha's cult occurred through its connection to powerful political circles and to a range of emergent communication networks. The increasing renown of this shrine centre contributed to Sicily's integration into the Latin Christian world, and countered suspicious external perceptions of the island.

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation.

A major problem for the student of a relatively new discipline or sub-discipline is the construction of a framework within which to operate. In the case of the economic, social and legal position of women in the Middle Ages the only clear thing is that the lines are slowly being redrawn, although more perhaps with respect to the central Middle Ages than to the earlier period. In fact, despite the paucity of evidence there has always been a surprising degree of agreement about the early Middle Ages. A wide range of authors from Lina Eckenstein to Eileen Power, Lady Stenton and Suzanne Wemple have regarded the period, from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries, as one of ‘rough equality’ (to use Stenton's words) between men and women in general, and as a period of veneration, even elevation, of female religious. As for the later period, there is a much wider range of opinion, much of it conflicting. Speaking of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, in a popular general work, conclude that: ‘Evidence of the general improvement in the status of women is fairly extensive.’ The elevation of marriage to sacrament status in the twelfth century is undoubtedly seen by some as part of this process: ‘C'est dans la réforme du mariage qu'il faut chercher les germes les plus vigoureux de l'amélioration dont bénéficie la condition féminine à partir du XIIe siècle, même si cette amélioration n'est ni continue ni générate.’ By contrast, other works suggest that an earlier golden age for women came to an end in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an even more male-dominated feudal society reached its zenith in terms of order and definition.