The primary account of the martyrdom of Maurice and the Theban legion occurs in a letter addressed by Eucherius, bishop of Lyons c. 434–50, to a fellow bishop, Salvius. This relatively brief document has attracted a degree of scholarly attention out of all proportion to its length, the purpose of which has been to investigate its historical basis. There are those who believe with varying degrees of certainty that there is a historical basis to the story which Eucherius relates, that there did indeed exist a group of Theban soldiers who were executed in the Alps during the early years of the reign of Emperor Herculius Maximianus because they refused, for religious reasons, to obey his commands. However their arguments have left many unconvinced. Denis Van Berchem's thorough examination of the story has raised many doubts about its veracity, and many commentators now incline to believe, with him, that no such martyrs ever existed.

On 23 January 295 a young recruit named Maximilian, a Christian by religion and twenty-one years old, appeared in court before Dion, proconsul of Africa, in the town of Theveste in Numidia. He was accused of refusing a summons to serve in the Roman army. Maximilian was accompanied to court by his father, Fabius Victor, described in the record as a temonarius, i.e. ‘an agent who collected the temo, or tax levied for the outfitting of military recruits’; the latter was obliged to present his son for army service if he could not find another suitable recruit. Maximilian, although pressed by the proconsul to submit himself to the formalities leading to induction into the army, stubbornly resisted and was finally sentenced to death. His execution followed immediately.

The Emperor Julian the Apostate (361–3) tried to reverse the policy of his kinsman Constantine the Great by restoring the pagan cults which he had subverted. One of his measures was to appoint chief priests for each province. Towards the end of his brief reign Julian wrote to Arsacius, the high priest of the province of Galatia. The emperor said he was pleased to see the worship of the gods so magnificently revived, but yet more could be done. Arsacius was invited to consider and attempt to imitate the practices which had made Christianity so successful, in particular Christian hospitality towards strangers, reverence for the dead and the pretended piety of Christian lives. Pagans too should practise works of charity. Provision should be made for the poor and hostels furnished in every city, so as to form a chain of confessional caravanserais.

At the beginning of Langland's poem Piers Plowman, the narrator, having glimpsed the field of folk and the two castles, meets a lady with a beautiful face, clothed in linen. When he fails to recognise her, she gently chides him. ‘I am Holy Church; you ought to know me. I received you at the first and taught you faith. You brought me pledges to fulfil my bidding and to love me loyally while your life lasts.’ In these few words, Langland affirms the importance of childhood as inaugurating the relationship between human beings and the Church. Every child becomes a member of the Church by baptism soon after birth. The Church teaches its faith to the child, and the child is committed by its godparents to carry out the Church's requirements in a loving way. This view of childhood is a limited one. It centres on the outset of life—birth and baptism – not on the following fifteen years or so, and it does not perceive the status of children in the Church to differ in principle from that of adults, who also received teaching and owed commitments. Nowhere in his work has Langland much to say about children and in this respect he is typical of most medieval writers. Little was written about the work of the Church with children or the involvement of children in Church, despite the extent to which children – actually or potentially – made up the membership of Christendom.

In any evaluation of the character and accomplishments of the English Reformation, an essential ingredient must be a sympathetic but, so far as possible, objective assessment of the nature – in all its strengths and weaknesses – of the unreformed Church and religion upon which the Reformation was wrought. Among the multifarious operations of the pre-Reformation Church, perhaps the most central to its fundamental purposes was the conduct by its clergy of the worship of God and the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, as effected on the small scale by the parish clergy and on the grand scale by the priests and clerks of the greater collegiate churches and the religious of the monasteries. As acts of worship, commemoration and intercession, the efficacy of these rituals lay in the simple fact of their enactment by those to whom their conduct was committed, irrespective of the grandeur of the setting or the presence or absence of any congregation or other attendance. Nevertheless, credit both terrestrial and celestial was perceived to redound upon those institutions which endeavoured to clothe their acts of devotion and worship with the finest products that the artisans of the day could create, within the grandest achievements of their contemporary architects. In respect of the conduct of the liturgy, it was, in the event, those institutions which had carried these arts to their highest levels that eventually proved to be the principal casualties of the Reformation process; a period of less than fifteen years (1535–49) sufficed to effect the extinction of all the monastic churches, and of all the collegiate churches except for some thirty which enjoyed cathedral status, academic function or extremely close royal connection.

It has frequently been observed that the intellectual activities of the English Black Monks were in decline during the last two-and-a-half centuries before the Dissolution. There is, indeed, a remarkable contrast between the fecundity of the monastic scriptoria in the two centuries after the Conquest and the apparent inertia of later years, when the creative stimulus seems to have dwindled to the verge of extinction and few, if any, original minds are found at work within the cloister. This generalisation cannot be challenged, as the evidence leaves little room for doubt, but the ‘apparent inertia’ may be questioned since it is a contradiction of the emerging facts. The latter suggest not apathy but persistence in the pursuit of learning, that is, a continuing concern for study on the part of the monastic community; and this should not be disparaged because it bore little more than the practical, commonplace fruits of preaching and teaching. We cannot regard these as fruits of scholarship to be compared with the original compositions which grew out of the philosophical and theological disputations at the centre of university life; they were daily or weekly activities, quite unremarkable, and probably for this very reason left scant record of their occurrence. Moreover, the Black Monk Chapter was promoting these fruits by stating unequivocally, in its statutes of c. 1363, that the principal reason behind the joint decision to send one monk in twenty for further study at the university was to fulfil these precise and practical requirements. A clear indication of the enduring commitment to this policy on the part of most of the cathedral monasteries is to be found in many of the surviving documents, which affirm a consistent adherence to their obligations.

Studies of medieval society in recent years have laid increasing stress on the effectiveness of the power of the saints. They enriched their churches, defended their possessions, created great centres at once of pilgrimage and commerce and provided for the healing of the sick and the care of the poor. The cults of the saints formed a model for secular government. Kings appeared before their people as walking reliccollections and exercised the power of healing, and patron saints (like St Mark at Venice and St Denis in France) helped to define the identity of the political communities over whose well-being they were thought to preside. Often such saints, even those whose cults were rapidly developing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were figures from the New Testament or from the ages of conversion: St James at Compostella, Mary Magdalen at Vézelay, and Benedict at Fleury. On occasions, however, a charismatic figure in contemporary society emerged as the centre of a healing cult and a focus for widespread devotion.

Under the heading ‘transubstantiation’ in the Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church, one finds that the word was in widespread use in the later part of the 12th cent., and at the Lateran Council of 1215 belief in Transubstantiation was defined as de fide; but the elaboration of the doctrine was not achieved till after the acceptance of the Aristotelian metaphysics later in the 13th cent., when it found classic formulation in the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas.

It is now commonplace for historians of religion to treat the creation of saints as a political process that included such issues as doctrinal orthodoxy, church authority and popular practices and beliefs. The early twentieth-century Bollandist scholar of sanctity, Hippolyte Delehaye sj, touched on these when he considered the problems facing the critical, but devout, hagiographer in his history, The work of the Bollandists:

To question the lawfulness of the cult of a saint, or to raise doubts as to the authenticity of his relics, were issues which could not in most cases remain theoretical, but which demanded practical measures, and in the application of these more than usual tact was required. How was it to be made clear to the faithful that the authority of the Church was not responsible for certain vagaries? How were devotions which had taken root in the heart of the people to be suppressed without causing serious disturbances? On the other hand how were they to be upheld, in the face of the conviction that they were without foundation?… Of course the faithful have never been taught that the lives of the saints are to be believed in the same measure as the Gospel, but it is a fact that they incline to this belief. Hence was it not dangerous, from the standpoint of faith, to destroy certain pious illusions?

It is surprising to find that Friends were included within the terms of the Toleration Act. The political situation they faced in 1689 was distinctly unpromising. They not only continued to experience the hostility and prejudice that they had suffered since their earliest days, but they were seriously compromised by the close identification of William Penn with the discredited Catholic policies of James II. An examination of the debates in parliament on the Toleration Bill reveals that Friends were by no means certain of being included in the act. Yet their acceptance of the terms they were offered is also surprising in view of their objection to any compromise with the state over matters of religious conscience, an objection which led to their refusal to seek licences under Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. Moreover, a number of recent studies have identified the continued insistence of many provincial Friends, particularly in the rigorous heartland of Quakerism in the north–west, upon the strict maintenance of their testimonies, and indeed a redefining of those testimonies partly in response to the growing compromises with the state made by the Quaker leadership.

That many divines during the middle decades of the seventeenth century were filled with high hopes for the Church's future, and that many of these high hopes were expressed in millenarian terms is by now a commonplace. That, furthermore, this phenomenon did not appear out of the blue and must have had a prehistory would be evident to most. But how far back should one go to find its roots? More than twenty years ago William Lamont argued in his controversial study Godly rule that Elizabethan reformers shared with their more radical brethren of the revolutionary years the hope of ‘godly rule’, a term he never clearly defined but which he nevertheless called millenarian. He singled out John Foxe as the chief spokesman of the ‘godly rule’ idea, and moreover claimed that Foxe was the one who above all ‘made the pursuit of the millennium respectable and orthodox’ in England. The idea that Foxe was a millenarian, even the chief spokesman of millenarianism in Elizabethan England, has not found general approval. In well-documented studies on Foxe, the British apocalyptic tradition, or the English Reformation, scholars such as Bernard Capp, Viggo Norskov Olsen, Richard Bauckham, Katharine R. Firth and Patrick Collinson have all denied that Foxe believed in a this-worldly and future period of peace and ecclesiastical felicity; they have instead drawn attention to his view of end-time persecution, and to his belief in the imminent end of the world.

It appeareth (I saye) what an exacte lyfe the trew lyfe of a Christian is: which is a continuall resistance of all sinne, bothe in thought, word and deede, and a performance or exercise of all good woorkes, that possiblie he can deuise to doe.

God requireth at our handes, that we should make his lawes and preceptes our studie and cogitations: that we should think of them continuallie, & meditate vpon them bothe day and night, at home and abrode, early & late, when we go to bedde, and when we rise in the morning: this is his commaudement, & there is no dispensation therin.

At the beginning of 1844, the Revd John Flowerdew Colls, Anglican minister of Duke Street Chapel, St James's Park, London, published Utilitarianism unmasked, a vitriolic attack on Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the philosopher, jurisprudent, and advocate of reform. ‘The writer's main object’, the advertisement which prefaces the work grandiloquently announces, ‘has been to expose, in all its naked deformity, the hollowness and deceitfulness of the so-much-vaunted principle falsely called the Greatest happiness principle’, which formed the basis of Bentham's philosophical system. But apart from a few desultory remarks on utilitarianism – such as a belaboured attempt to connect it with Robert Owen's socialism (p. 33) – Colls devoted his energies to undermining Bentham's ideas by pouring scorn and ridicule on Bentham himself.

At a time when European missionaries were active in the New World to capture the souls of the ‘heathen’ for Catholicism, their confrères were conducting missions throughout Europe itself. For more than two centuries these missions – variously known as internal, parish or popular – were a crucial aspect of religious life, with numerous religious orders and congregations seeking to weave a fabric of evangelisation and catechetical instruction in areas of Europe that were nominally Catholic but were in many ways cut off from orthodox Tridentine Catholicism. This was particularly so in isolated areas on the European periphery. Southern Italy is a case in point. The persistent absence of an efficient parish structure and the dominance of a rather worldly collegiate clergy in the Kingdom of Naples left a large gap in organised religious life in the years following the end of the Council of Trent (1563), a gap that the missions attempted to fill. The mobilisation of preachers, confessors and instructors was vast, concentrated and unceasing. Such is the significance of the missions that they have been identified as the ‘most characteristic and important’ phenomenon of Italian religious history in the seventeenth century. One way to examine their scale and impact would be to map the areas missionised by the various congregations. But this serial approach would tell us very little, other than the fact that all of the towns and villages were visited, most of them repeatedly, over the centuries. Moreover, the varying quality of the surviving records would permit only partial results.

Ever since Henry VIII, the law of marriage has occupied a special place in the relationship between the Church of England and the state. Changes made to the law since 1857 have raised far-reaching and difficult questions about the nature of this relationship, involving the status of canon law. Marriage in church has remained, perhaps even more than the other rites of passage, an essential point at which the Church of England still touches the lives of great numbers of the otherwise unchurched, and these questions have thus impinged on the practical reality of the Church's work.

Historians of eighteenth–century England have begun to reassess its relationship with the preceding century, creating in the process the now conventional periodisation of a ‘long eighteenth century’ from c. 1660 to 1832. Historical revisionism, however, needs constantly to be revised, and there remains the danger of creating too sharp a separation between this period and that which preceded it. This article aims to introduce just such a complicating factor by linking the turbulent theologies of the 1640s and 1650s with a particular strand of eighteenth century religious thought. This might be described as the legacy of ultra-Protestantism, the insistence on the priority of private judgement and the supremacy of Scripture which were allied with a suspicion of clericalism. Its survival among an articulate and academically well-placed group of eighteenth-century Anglican divines demonstrates that the attempt by the Restoration Church of England to distance itself from ultra-Protestantism was not uniformly successful; the problem of ‘heresy’ continued into a period of Anglican history more usually associated with comfortable doctrinal latitude.

The letter Benedictus Deus, which forms the basis of this study, was first printed by J. A. Giles in his 1845 edition of the letters of Thomas Becket, and the Abbé Migne later reproduced it in the same context in Patrologia Latina, without comment. Neither ventured identification of the author or recipients, although some connexion with the Becket controversy must have been presumed, since they included the text with his correspondence. In fact, it has no connexion with Thomas Becket, despite its inclusion in one of the large manuscript collections of Becket correspondence assembled in the late twelfth century. It was neither written nor received by any of the participants, nor is it concerned with the matters at issue in the controversy. It concerns the removal of the unnamed superior of a religious house, and the circumstances of its composition are obscure. The heading and protocol are damaged, and although the author's name can be clearly read as Frater R., and the recipients' initials as G. and R., the address is incomplete, and there are no internal clues to date and context.

Early in April 1945 a little collection of political prisoners, including a British secret agent, a Russian air force officer and a German general, were driven by their guards across the diminishing face of the Third Reich. Among them was the thirty-nine year old theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was curious company for a German pastor. Bonhoeffer had joined the group at Buchenwald concentration camp on 7 February. In April he and his new friends were moved to Regensburg, and from there to Schönberg. On 8 April 1945 Bonhoeffer was abruptly separated from the other prisoners. As he was about to leave, he turned to the British agent, Captain Payne Best, and said a few words. The next day he was hanged at Flossenburg with the former head of German Military Intelligence, Admiral Canaris, and Colonel Hans Oster. An SS doctor saw the execution, and was struck by the religious devotion, and the spiritual trust, of the victim.

During the Great War, leaders in the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland – the established Church of Scotland and the United Free Church – struggled to provide moral and spiritual leadership to the Scottish people. As National Churches which together claimed the adherence of the large majority of the Scottish people, the two Churches were seen as responsible for interpreting the meaning of the war and defining war aims, as well as for offering consolation to the suffering and the bereaved. At the beginning of the war, leaders of the two Churches had been confident of their ability to fulfil these national responsibilities. Both Churches had experienced a flowering of theological and intellectual creativity during the forty years before the war, and their colleges and theologians had exercised profound influence on the Reformed tradition throughout the world. Both had been active in the ‘social gospel’ movement, with their leaders advancing bold criticisms of the social order. The two Churches, moreover, had been moving toward ecclesiastical union when the war began, a union which their leaders hoped would restore the spiritual and moral authority of the Church in a covenanted nation.