The political situation in Ireland during the pontificate of Innocent III was highly complicated and, if we are to understand the relationship between the pope and the native Irish kings, it is necessary to make a short historical retrogression.

The career and personality of Peter the Iberian, bishop of Mayuma, near Gaza, present exceptional interest for the history both of the Monophysite movement of the fifth century and of the Georgian Church. At the same time, the hagiographical writings recording his life raise documentary problems of a complex nature.

Although the first Quakers aligned history with superfluous tradition, detrimental to true appreciation of the inward voice of God, by the early eighteenth century they had produced their first histories as a defence against Anglican allegations of continued disorder and enthusiasm. At the same time, pressure to publish the collected works of James Nayler, a convicted blasphemer, proved particularly contentious. Leo Damrosch has sought to understand what Nayler thought he was doing in the 1650s; this study considers what motivated later Quakers to censor his works and accounts of his life, and demonstrates how English Friends in particular sought to revise the popular image of Quakerism by rewriting history.

Out of an approximate total of four hundred, the number of livings in Kent from which clergy are known to have been ejected under the Act for Confirming and Restoring of Ministers of 13 September 1660 and the Act for the Uniformity of Public Prayers of 19 May 1662 is sixty-five. For comparative purposes it may be observed that the number of Kentish benefices known to have been under sequestration during the period between 1643 and 1660 was one hundred and twenty, i.e. almost double. These figures follow fairly closely the pattern for England in general: the proportion of sequestrations (30 per cent.) is almost identical, the proportion of ejections a little lower in Kent (16 per cent.) than in the country as a whole. Since thirty-six parishes in Kent were affected by both sequestration and ejection, the number of parishes unaffected by either was even larger than is suggested at first sight by the figures given above. Dr. Whiteman's conclusion from her consideration of the statistics for sequestrations throughout the country would certainly seem to be true of the situation in Kent: ‘continuity was much greater … than used to be thought’.

Phillips Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom described Brooks and the liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as ‘in a class by themselves, envied and emulated the country over’. Unlike Beecher, however, the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, subsequently Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. His few biographers have rarely attempted to place his thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts. With one recent notable exception, little of scholarly value has been written about Brooks. The older biographies have tended to portray him as initially rooted in the evangelical tradition, even though he subsequently became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Alexander V. G. Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary training, Brooks ‘freely accepted the leading truths which are known as Evangelical’. E. Clowes Chorley asserts simply that ‘Brooks never drifted from the heart of Evangelical religion’. Allen and others stress the evangelical origins of Brooks's thought in order to argue for the continuity between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism. This portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the essence of an early evangelicalism while later embracing his Church's liberal future has served what Allen Guelzo has aptly called the ‘myth of synthesis’ in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does not view Evangelicals as being forced out of the Church in the 1870s but posits a benign creative synthesis that enabled the Church to transcend the aberrant party battles of the mid century.

Early in March 1554 the three English reformers and later Oxford martyrs, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the former bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, and the bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, were transported to the supposedly safe location of Oxford to expedite their trials. Their stay in Oxford, however, turned out to be a long one, lasting until their execution by burning outside the Northgate there: Latimer and Ridley on 16 October 1555; Cranmer on 21 March 1556. During the time they spent in Oxford – between nineteen and twenty-four months – they were usually confined apart from one another, in a number of locations, by the municipal officials responsible to the crown for their safekeeping: the mayor and the two bailiffs of Oxford. Cranmer, the most important and politically the most sensitive of the prisoners, appears to have spent most of his long confinement in the Bocardo, the local prison over the town's Northgate next to St Michael's church. Latimer and Ridley, on the other hand, spent considerable time privately boarded in the houses of, respectively, the bailiffs and the mayor, and Ridley, in particular, seems to have been able to maintain regular written and personal contact with their supporters and sympathisers. Their confinement must have put the three reformers, all of them Cambridge graduates, into a variety of contacts with local residents, but records for only two of those relationships have survived, and from diametrically opposite sources.

With one minor exception, it was not much more than a series of coincidences which linked Jowett and Colenso. The one exception was when Colenso was in England after being excommunicated by Robert Gray, bishop of Capetown, as metropolitan. Samuel Wilberforce refused to allow Colenso to function in the diocese of Oxford but Jowett invited him to preach in Balliol chapel, which was not under the bishop's jurisdiction. Apart from this there seems to be no evidence of direct personal contact between the two men.

John Bale acquired the MS. of Fasciculi Zizaniorum sometime after he left the Carmelite Order and before 1540 when he went into exile in Germany taking it with him. He was already familiar with Fasciculi Zizaniorum long before he left his Order. Bodley MS. 73 is an autograph MS. of Bale's and is one of his earliest notebooks. The bulk of it was written before 1524, though there are several later additions, the latest of which is 1526. This notebook was compiled, therefore, whilst Bale was a zealous Carmelite student, and before he went abroad to Toulouse and Louvain. It is a mine of miscellaneous information about the Carmelite Order: a list of all the Carmelite houses in England with their dates of foundation; the names of all the Priors Provincial of the Order; descriptions of the antiquities of many Carmelite houses, of the friars buried in different convents, often with their epitaphs; a lengthy selection of the letters of Thomas Netter. Of special concern here are Bale's notes on Carmelite writers. The ascription of the authorship of Fasciculi Zizaniorum to Thomas Netter of Walden first appears in this notebook in Bale's notes on Walden, where he says that Netter wrote the Doctrinale Ecclesie and Fasciculus Zizaniorum. The incipit to the latter work he gives as ‘Colligite Zizania’, which appears on the second folio of our MS. Later there follow four folios of ‘Extracta quedam ex fasciculo doctoris fratris Thome Walden’. There can be no doubt that all these extracts are taken from our MS., which was well known to Bale. He summarises its contents as far as the condemnation of Wyclif at the Council of Constance. His summary is interesting.

Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.

The Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom (APUC), a joint Anglican/Roman Catholic association of prayer, was founded on 8 September 1857. Seven years later it was condemned by the Holy See for encouraging indifferentism by claiming that the Roman, Greek and Anglican Churches had an equal right to the title ‘Catholic’, the distinctive mark of a true Church. The papal rescript in which the condemnation was contained, Ad omnes Angliae episcopos, also offered a precise definition of the nature of the ‘Catholic Church’ which, in effect, excluded all possible schemes for reunion between the Churches except on the basis of unconditional submission to the Holy See.

According to Western canonists, husband and wife had a debt towards one another: they were obliged to render sexual intercourse on demand. This article looks at the differences and similarities of the ‘marital debt’ in Byzantium and the West in order to evaluate whether this concept can be applied to Byzantine couples. It argues that, contrary to the West, in Byzantium there was no fixed linguistic terminology or sophisticated rules to describe a sexual obligation between spouses. Ultimately, there was also less need for one as sexual intercourse within marriage was not considered sinful and needed no justification.

‘D'une manière générate, on peut dire que les littératures chrétiennes de l'Orient sont largement tributaires de la littérature grecque.’ This statement of the late Paul Peeters concerning oriental hagiographical literature may equally well be applied to that of the Slavs. At the same time it does not in any way detract from the merits of original Slavonic hagiography to admit its debt to the Byzantine influences which it preserved and enriched. The principal channels by which these influences were transmitted were Slavonic translations of Greek works, mainly ecclesiastical, which were made from the late ninth century onwards. Among these translated works, which formed the nucleus of early Slavonic literature, were the most important Byzantine hagiographical compilations and ascetical treatises produced between the fifth and seventh centuries: the Apophthegmata Patrum; the Ἀνδρν γων ββλος (=The Book of Holy Men); the Lausiac History of Palladius; the Historia Monachorum; the Historia Religiosa of Theodoret of Cyrus; the Pratum Spirituale of John Moschus; and the Scala Paradisi of St. John Climacus. There is also evidence that the Paraenesis of Ephrem the Syrian was translated, and at least one treatise by, or attributed to, Evagrius, as well as the Latin Dialogues of Gregory the Great, this last from its Greek version.

This article considers the radical contribution of Edward Irving to mid-Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism, in an analysis of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical theology and spirituality, political and social thought and missionary activity. While historians of doctrine have acknowledged the influence of aspects of Irving's thought upon liberal Anglicans like F. D. Maurice, they have paid scant attention to Irving's influence upon the theology of Evangelical churchmen. Irving's legacy was, in fact, an important and positive force for theological change. This article also challenges the conventional historical view that Evangelical churchmen produced only negative polemical works in response to the innovatory approaches of Oxford Movement and ‘Broad Church’ theologians. It considers, in particular, the work of the leading Anglican Evangelical theologian Thomas Rawson Birks, which was shaped by the legacy of Irving and has many significant parallels with that of Maurice.

The Confessions of Augustine carry his life down to the age of thirtythree, from his birth at Tagaste in Numidia in A.D. 354 to A.D. 387, when he was converted to Christianity by Ambrose in Milan. He wrote the Confessions ten years later, in A.D. 397–8, at the age of forty-three or forty-four, when he had just been made Bishop of Hippo Regius, the modern Bône, in North Africa. The work is an autobiography, the one exstant autobiography in Latin literature: but it is peculiar in being addressed primarily to the Deity and in being a record not of the writer's own achievements intended for his own glory, but of all the way by which the power of God had led him. So while in places it does narrate the events of his life and the development of his mind and thought, at other places it breaks out into rapturous praise and adoration of his Redeemer and becomes not so much a narration as a prose hymn, sometimes in a minor key of contrite repentance for the sins and faults of youth now pardoned, sometimes in an exalted strain of ecstatic love, worship, and devotion towards the One to whose service he is now wholly surrendered. Under the eye of the Omniscient, Augustine reviews his life from childhood till his conversion: it is a stern and unflinching self-examination: the pranks of his boyhood are tested for early evidences of sin with the same relentless analysis as the vices, the ambitions, and self-will of his youth and manhood. We have his school-days at his native Tagaste and at the neighbouring town of Madaura: we have the turbulence of his adolescence at Carthage: we see him as a student of rhetoric at Carthage and as a professor of rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan: we are told how the beginnings of his spiritual awareness were excited by the reading of Cicero's Hortensius: we learn of his long association with the quasi-Christian sect of the Manichaeans, of his growing dissatisfaction with their doctrine of a material and finite Deity, and of his long perplexity about religious problems—until through the preaching of Ambrose at Milan and through a study of Neo-platonism, he comes to a realization of an immaterial, non-temporal, non-spatial One.