In 1564 Artus de Cossé-Brissac, bishop of Coutances in Normandy, was a member of a French diplomatic mission to Queen Elizabeth. He took the opportunity to assert a claim to exercise episcopal jurisdiction in the Channel Islands. The claim was less preposterous than it might appear, since Coutances's jurisdiction in the islands had been acknowledged throughout Henry viii's reign, and again in that of Mary. Queen and Privy Council took the 1564 claim seriously enough to demand a response from the islanders. After a good deal of prevarication on their part, the crown eventually ruled against the bishop's claim, on the grounds, as argued by the islanders, that they were subject to the bishop of Winchester. In the event, Winchester was not to enjoy its newly rediscovered rights for long. The islands were already in the process of establishing their own churches, using French Calvinist forms of worship and a fully synodical system of church government. From 1576 the islanders governed themselves without reference to episcopal authority, which was not to be re-established, in Jersey, until the reign of James i, and in Guernsey that of Charles ii. When challenged the islanders defended their position by claiming that they were indeed part of the diocese of Coutances, and that they were following the best practice of the reformed churches in that diocese.

This story is well established in outline, largely through the labours of island historians, but above all through the work of two impressive nineteenth-century French historians. A. J. Eagleston made accessible a good deal of this work, including his own researches, but unfortunately his book had to be posthumously published and is therefore rather piecemeal. D. M. Ogier has now published a valuable study of the Reformation in Guernsey. It traces the internal history in depth, stressing the conservatism of the bulk of the population and skilfully elucidating the crucial question of ecclesiastical property, before going on to its main concern, the impact of the Presbyterian discipline on island society. Although Ogier acknowledges the significance of relations between the English crown and various French parties in explaining events, he does little to elucidate these interactions; nor does he display much interest in the personalities involved in his story. This article will attempt to explain both the reluctance of successive English governments to challenge the rights of the bishop of Coutances, and the apparent inability of the Elizabethan government to prevent French Protestant refugees moulding the island churches in their own image. It will also look at some of the leading figures involved, most notably one John Aster, dean of Guernsey, a prime mover in the events of the 1560s, whose career in military administration before his ordination at the age of fifty has not been noticed; and more generally it will emphasise the link between militant Protestantism and the worlds of diplomacy and espionage.

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.

Amongst those who have devoted their studies to the registers of archbishops and bishops, there has been a natural tendency to select for notice or publication those registers which will be most amply useful to scholars in the provision of historical evidence, and to set aside those volumes which are imperfect or in any way defective. The reasons for this are obviously cogent, yet complete neglect of the less satisfactory registers would be unfortunate. There is much to be learned even from the omissions and defects due to a decadent registry or a period of institutional confusion. In the hope, therefore, not only of indicating the nature of some of these less satisfactory registers, but also of showing in what directions they may include matters of interest, the registers chosen for notice in this paper are not those of Melton or Thoresby, not even that of Wolsey, which although late in date is a volume of great regularity, showing a well-conducted registry; the selected registers are those of Edward Lee (1531–44) and of his successor Robert Holgate (1544–53). They are volumes which cover the early part of the changes in ecclesiastical constitution in Tudor times, and may therefore be expected to show some reflexion, perhaps many reflexions, of the effects of those religious changes.

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.

This article looks at a largely neglected aspect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religio-political activism and public doctrine, the conservative politics of premillennialist Protestantism. It approaches this subject through a case study of the doctrines and activities of the Catholic Apostolic Church, a relatively small premillennialist and Pentecostal faith-community extant from the 1830s through to the mid-twentieth century. The translation of these doctrines into Conservative party politics by Henry Drummond MP and by the seventh and eighth dukes of Northumberland is given especial attention.

Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

This note is a transcription of two hitherto unknown letters of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester (c.1497–1555), found in an early seventeenth-century Catholic commonplace book (Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng. th. b. 2). Composed in late August or early September 1547 and addressed to several of the royal Visitors of Winchester, the letters are a delaying tactic in Gardiner's ongoing resistance to the Edwardian Injunctions and the ‘Book of homilies’, an attempt to win time until the calling of the parliamentary session. The strongly theological content of the letters challenges traditional characterisations of Gardiner as primarily a legalist.

According to the Byzantine sources, the reign of the iconoclastic emperor Constantine v (741–775) was characterised by an attack on the very institution of monasticism, and the brunt of the persecution directed against the ‘orthodox’ was borne by the monastic order. This anti-monastic phase of iconoclasm has not passed unnoticed in modern attempts to clarify the origins and motive forces of the iconoclastic movement as a whole. The gamut of explanations ranges from an extreme position which maintains that die iconoclastic movement itself was merely a pretext for attacking parasitic monasteries and to confiscate their land holdings, through more balanced views which claim that the enthusiastic and determined propagation and defence of image-worship by monks was an obstacle which had to be removed by breaking the power of monasticism if the official iconoclastic policies were to be effective, to a recent more sophisticated approach which claims to recognise in both monasticism and icon-worship illegitimate, unlicensed forms of spirituality, signs of separatist tendencies which die State battling against Islam for survival could not afford to tolerate.

Despite the prominence of religious issues in the historiography of Restoration Scotland, understanding of the position of the Kirk in the Highlands remains sparse. This article seeks to address this lacuna through analysis of two related themes. Firstly, it looks at provision, discussing the Kirk's financial, material and manpower resources, as well as the challenge posed by Gaelic. Secondly, it traces the extent of Nonconformity, both Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, with a view to judging the degree of adherence to the established Episcopalian structure. It concludes that the Kirk, while facing challenges, retained a position of unrivalled religious dominance.

Laurence Tomson is, perhaps, best known for his translation of L'Oiseleur's edition of Beza's Latin New Testament into English. He was also secretary to Walsingham from 1574 and a member of the English ‘Presbyterian’ party.

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’.

‘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.