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.

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.

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.

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.

As founder of ‘the first continuing Congregational church on English soil’ in the London suburb of Southwark in 1616, Henry Jacob has figured prominently in denominational hagiography. His place in the wider circle of puritan scholarship has also been secured by virtue of this radically new ecclesiological experiment in puritan Congregationalism which, by most historical accounts, signalled a drastic departure from the prevailing presbyterianism of the Cartwright generation of left-wing puritanism. While his shift into a more progressive, democratic ecclesiological mode has appeared self-evident to many historians, those scholars intrigued by Jacob's churchmanship have often puzzled over the source of his new polity. Among an earlier generation of historians, the obvious solution seemed to be that Jacob had at some point borrowed from the Separatists, adopting their ecclesiology while declining their practice of separatism. This conclusion arose primarily from the assumption (which persists today) that before Jacob's Southwark church formed, Congregationalism was alone the preserve of late Tudor and early Stuart separatism. Daniel Neal became one of the first to suggest this, explaining that Jacob probably derived his Congregationalism from the Separatists by way of John Robinson at Leyden, where the two had met in 1610.

Why did Christianity decline relatively to Islam in wide areas of the Mediterranean world during the European Middle Ages? The problem has deserved more attention than it has received from historians, for the pattern is not a consistent one and the decline where it took place, cannot be explained on the grounds of Moslem military superiority alone. The first generation of Moslem conquerors that so decisively defeated the Byzantine armies were plunderers who sought booty and revenge for past wrongs suffered at the hands of the Byzantine authorities or simply from the agricultural and urban populations of the east Roman frontier provinces. Confronted with undreamed of success, they had little idea of establishing either civil government or settling in the areas they had conquered. They had little desire also to convert their new Christian subjects, for that would diminish the flow of tribute exacted in exchange for protection. Yet as time went on, Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean showed none of the survival and recuperative power that characterised the Orthodox Church in the Balkans during the five centuries of Ottoman occupation from 1390–1912. Of the areas overrun by successive Moslem invaders down to 1400 only Spain, Sicily and Crete re-emerged as Christian territories.

Female religious, especially holders of benefices, made significant contributions to aristocratic family strategy and fortune in early modern France. This study of members of the wider Montmorency family in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries demonstrates the financial and political benefits derived from female benefice holding. Abbey stewards and surintendants of aristocratic households collaborated in the administration of religious revenues. Montmorency control of Sainte Trinité, the Abbaye aux Dames, Caen, for over a century was associated with attempts to assert political influence in Normandy. Conflict ostensibly over religious reform could have a political dimension. Yet reform could be pursued vigorously by those originally cloistered for mercenary or political reasons.

C'est en pleine guerre,—en août 1941—que fut trouvé à Toura, aux environs du Caire, l'intéressant document que j'ai l'honneur de présenter ici. C'est même la guerre qui en a provoqué la découverte. L'armée anglaise faisait aménager d'anciennes carrières de pierre pour y abriter des munitions. En l'une d'elles on découvrit, déposée dans un coin, sans aucune protection, une assez forte liasse de papyrus anciens. Comme il fallait s'y attendre, les ouvriers cherchèrent aussitôt les moyens de vendre à leur profit la trouvaille inespérée, mais le gouvernement égyptien, assez tôt alerté, finit par en récupérer la majeure partie, qui figure maintenant au musée du Caire. M. Octave Guéraud et M. Jean Scherer firent un premier inventaire du trésor. Après la guerre, M. Guéraud en a donné un signalement détaillé.

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.

On 10 October 1216, eight days before his death, King John sent instructions to Walter de Lacy, sheriff of Hereford, by letters patent:

Know that for the sake of God we have conceded to Margaret de Lacy three carucates of land to be assarted and cultivated in our forest of Aconbury, to build there a certain religious house for the souls of William de Braose her father, Matilda her mother and William her brother. And we instruct you to assign those three carucates of land in the aforesaid forest to the same Margaret.

For the historian of King John, this concession indicates that the king was at last prepared to restore to his favour the Braoses and the Lacys, Welsh Marcher lords and barons of Ireland, who had spectacularly fallen from favour in 1208. Yet for the historian of the military orders and of monastic orders in general, it marks the beginning of a relationship between a patron and a religious house which gives a valuable insight into how that relationship could go badly wrong.

In the received narratives of Anglican-Roman Catholic tensions in the nineteenth century, claims to a sacrificial priesthood are presented as an Oxford Movement development, and Apostolicae curae is treated as the ultimate Roman Catholic response. This article tells a very different story. Locating the origins of the preoccupation with sacrificial priesthood in the early nineteenth-century American Episcopal Church, and the central Roman Catholic response in the polemics of the archbishop of Saint Louis in 1841, the narrative is recast as an example of how theology done at the ‘margins’ affects the discourse at the ‘centres’ of ecclesial communities.

Boniface VIII probably spent some half a million gold florins on the acquisition of lands for the Caetani. But of that money not a word is said in the Introitus and Exitus volumes, the main account books of the Apostolic Chamber. Where was it accounted for and from whence did it come? The pope had certain special sources of income which would not ordinarily be reckoned in the main account books, and of these, some could properly be termed his fortune as a private person, while others attached to his office as pope. There was the private fortune which he had before he assumed the tiara. There were the incomes of benefices personally reserved to him, gifts made him by prelates and laymen, legacies, sometimes the goods of deceased prelates, and the so-called ‘private visitations’ and ‘secret services’. Later in the fourteenth century many other sources were tapped for the benefit of a secret fund, and all in all the sums which it disposed of were formidable and sometimes enormous. The ends to which the money was directed were as various as the characters and policies of the pontiffs: it was used for nepotistic ends on a princely scale, as a mere convenient subsidiary to the main financial machine, as a war account, as a means of making enormous loans to lay rulers, or simply as a petty cash account. The earliest records of the secret accounts to survive are from the midfifteenth century, but the large sums involved, and its covert but great importance in papal policy in general make the earlier history of this institution as interesting as it is obscure.

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.