Christianity is a religion of the book, and in particular of one book, the Bible. More precisely, it is a religion of a library of plural books (biblia) that eventually became one single book. It is possible to view the history of all Christian traditions, and not Protestantism alone, as a history of the canonical formation, liturgical and devotional use, cultural influence, contested theological interpretation and geographical diffusion of the Bible. In view of the magnitude of the subject, it is not surprising that very few historians have set out to encapsulate this grand narrative in a single volume. Bruce Gordon, the distinguished historian of early modern European Protestantism, has now made the attempt, and it is a valiant effort of stupendous chronological and geographical range, extending across the entire span of Christian history and covering all continents, though Australasia receives only a paragraph, oddly devoted to the New Hebrides. Not quite so rare are historians who have set out to chart the impact of one translation of the Bible on a single nation or family of nations – notably the role of the King James Bible of 1611 (the Authorised Version) in shaping the language and religious culture of English-speaking peoples, including those in the New World of North America.1

This article examines the fear of death in fourteenth-century Italy by analysing miracle testimonies through the methodological frameworks of terror management theory (TMT) and lived religion. It argues that devotion to saints served as a key coping mechanism for existential anxiety. Examples from the canonisation processes of Clare of Montefalco and Nicholas of Tolentino reveal how individuals turned to saints for protection, seeking to prolong life rather than accept death. This study provides both empirical and methodological insights into the medieval fear of death, illustrating its parallels with contemporary experiences of death anxiety.

This article examines three highly successful English broadside-ballads about Protestant martyrs of the mid-sixteenth century and seeks to explain their evident popularity. It argues that ballads were very important in encouraging people to think about martyrs and identify as Protestants, and that the highlighted examples have been either overlooked or underestimated by scholars. The songs also shed new light on commonplace religious tastes and preoccupations, revealing an apparent preference for female martyrs and an apparent distaste for gruesome detail. In both respects, the ballads are contrasted with John Foxe’s much more famous ‘Book of martyrs’.

This article argues that we must look beyond Paolo Sarpi's infamous history of the Council of Trent to understand the culture of reading about the council in early modern Italy. We unearth prohibited works that garnered more attention from Rome than Sarpi's, and we show that these were widely read in multiple formats across Italy from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century. By recovering this history, we can see Sarpi's magnum opus in a new light: as one of many works that sought to make sense of the council, working within and around serious constraints.

Preserved within the corpus of the East Roman polemicist Peter the Sicilian, several unassuming statements subtly contradict the historical consensus that the Paulicians espoused absolute dualism. According to their own testimony, rather than literally upholding two gods, as their Roman adversaries alleged, the Paulicians worshipped the heavenly Father but contended that the devil was merely a false god to whom the Romans were subject. This article therefore contributes to a broader critique of several received truths: that the Paulicians were absolute dualists, or dualists more generally, and that their thought informed that of later dualist groups.

The Codex Angus (Add. MS 40 in the University of Sydney Library's Rare Books and Special Collections) is a Byzantine Gospel lectionary meant for liturgical use. The findings presented here corroborate this catalogue description. There is ample evidence of its heavy use, which indicates a public not a private setting. After a brief description of the manuscript, particularities of its content and appearance are discussed, all of which point to a small rural community, in Northern Greece, as its original owner and user. Together with introducing the codex, this article casts light on the Christian community that might have used it.

This article examines the context for the establishment of the non-denominational Port of London Society, and the dissenting Bethel Union, which came together to form the British and Foreign Sailor Society in 1833. Making forensic use of the surviving archives as well as contemporary reports in regional and national newspapers, it challenges the traditional historiography which focuses on the charismatic, but disruptive, figure of George Charles (‘Boatswain’) Smith (1782–1863). It suggests that the cult of the founder is misplaced for Smith, and that marine religious charities flourished despite, rather than because of, his contribution.

This paper explores the crisis of 596 which interrupted Augustine of Canterbury's mission to the Anglo-Saxons, necessitating his return to Rome. Bede's interpretation of this as a moment of psychological failure is discounted. Political changes in Merovingian Gaul associated with the death of Childebert are reconsidered. A new economic explanation is advanced based on the wording of Gregory the Great's letter of encouragement to Augustine and his fellow missionaries, consideration of the management of the papal estates in Gaul and the behaviour of Virgilius, metropolitan of Arles.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.

This article revises interpretations of the post-Reformation English Chapel Royal as a place for the performance of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ forms of the Book of Common Prayer and establishes its importance as a space for negotiating Protestant royal worship. By detailed analysis of the sound and appearance of royal chapels under Elizabeth i and James vi & i the Chapel Royal is emphasised not for its anticipation of a Laudian ascendancy, but its sensitivity to the ceremonial boundaries of the reformed Church of England, and ability to negotiate a form of Protestant majesty in royal worship.

Irenaeus has tended to be a bit player in modern narratives of the Nestorian controversy. Where the count features in accounts of the church politics of the 430s, it is as an essentially ‘secular’ figure: a conduit to the palace and supplier of coercive force for Nestorius and his Syrian episcopal allies. This article argues that Irenaeus was much more directly involved in doctrinal debate and the maintenance of ecclesiastical alliances than has been appreciated. The theological engagement and startling career shifts of this imperial count-turned-heresiarch-turned-bishop exemplify the significance of elite Christian patronage and official doctrinal engagement in 430s Constantinople.

Is the era of the reference book coming to an end? Publishers evidently don't think so. Not only have we seen an explosion in the number of handbooks, companions and dictionaries produced by the mainstream academic press in recent years, but even older, well-established ‘brands’ continue to flourish. Here is the fourth edition of Oxford University Press's ‘flagship’ Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC), considerably expanded and revised from the third edition. Yet although libraries continue to buy works such as this, and academic colleagues to use them and refer to them, students often – if my experience is anything to go by – prefer the easier, cheaper, faster route of online sourcing, and particularly Wikipedia. A review of this edition of the ODCC has to reckon, then, not only with evaluating the content of the work itself, but, more sharply than perhaps was necessary before, with the questions of who exactly is likely to use it, and how it stands up in comparison with the competition.

This article presents new manuscript evidence of one of the most widely read devotional texts of the Middle Ages – the Prayers and meditations (Orationes sive meditationes) of St Anselm, abbot of Le Bec and archbishop of Canterbury – to argue that some of these prayers were originally written and disseminated in the voice of a woman. Composed and copied in grammatically feminine forms, these prayers were, as I show here, deliberately designed to be used and recited by women. This new and hitherto completely overlooked evidence is transformative for our understanding of women's active voices in medieval cultures of devotion.

The 1814 memoir of missionary wife Harriet Newell was important for awakening the early nineteenth-century American Evangelical imagination on behalf of the burgeoning missionary cause. As young women ‘read the self’ and patterned their lives according to the literary examples they encountered, Newell's memoir used the language of ‘usefulness’ as a powerful theological plot. This article hopes to address the lacuna of scholarship regarding the theological aspects of Newell's writing and how it was those aspects in particular which subsequent generations venerated in the creation of missionary wife memoirs.

This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury's Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda's sources, the text's place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda's statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.

This article analyses a selection of archival material written by Paul Tillich, particularly his early parish sermons and sermons from World War I. Although the themes of ‘eternity’ and ‘the soul’ are rare in the early parish sermons and only appear in the context of death or suffering, they play a predominant role in the World War I sermons. This article suggests that this is because, for Tillich, suffering became the interpretative key. Through his sermons amidst the suffering and devastation of war Tillich employed what he called the immanent way of theology.

Scholars have debated how the themes discussed by Pomerius in his De vita contemplativa found ample resonance across Gregory the Great's work, and reflect similar concerns. While it is impossible to determine whether the Roman bishop read the treatise authored by the North African rhetor, their parallel authority on the matter was recognised by Carolingian copyists, who often reported their works alongside each other. The discovery of a glossa sourced from Gregory's literary production in Pomerius’ manuscript tradition might both substantiate this claim and shed some light on the networks of medieval scriptoria.

Agimund's Homiliary is extant in two eighth-century manuscripts in BAV, Vat. lat. 3835 and 3836 and is one of the very few Roman texts actually written in Roman script surviving from the early Middle Ages. This article argues that the Homiliary is a crucial piece of evidence for early medieval Roman liturgical and cultural life and the patristic resources of Rome. Agimund's Homiliary, and the late eighth-century additions which are actually part of another, hitherto unidentified Roman Homiliary, together constitute evidence of the degree to which patristic theology and exegesis were embedded in Roman culture, of the interchange between the Latin- and Greek-speaking communities in Rome and the Lateran in the early Middle Ages, and of the intellectual productivity and cultural versatility of early medieval Rome.

This article describes John Wesley's evolving visions of Christian singleness (celibacy) and three commitments related to his changing views: a commitment to celibacy in an Oxford college; a commitment to marriage with Mary Vazeille; a de facto commitment to single life after Mary's separation from him. Protestant Churches lacked structures to support celibate commitment, structures that might have discouraged his unguarded and intimate correspondence with married women that lay behind his separation from Mary. The article asks why Protestants, although formally allowing single life, have not found ways to honour commitments to it.

Scholars have rightly identified the roles of literal/historical interpretation and noetic/spiritual interpretation in Cyril of Alexandria's exegesis of Scripture. This article argues that narrative contributes to both methods by using events in the past to explain Scripture's meaning. He applies concepts established historically by Exodus’ recount of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt to his interpretation of the prophetic books. On the one hand, his literal interpretation draws from the Israelites’ return to idolatry, detailed in Exodus xxxii. On the other hand, his noetic interpretation relates the Egyptians’ oppression of the Israelites detailed in Exodus i to humanity's limitations under the devil.