In the last decade of the reign of Emperor Constantius (351–61), Christians in Antioch in Syria were still in a state of turmoil. This turmoil had ecclesiastical overtones, but was essentially doctrinal in origin. The doctrinal issues were of two kinds, one theological and the other Christological, the former centring around the relationship of the Son to the divine Father and the latter around the nature of Christ's humanity. Regarding the first there was a contest for supremacy between the theologies of the hard-line Nicene party, the successors of Bishop Eustathius, who supported the Nicene assertion of consubstantiality of Father and Son, the Meletians, who to all intents were Nicene, and the Arians under their bishop Eudoxius, who resisted the Nicene thinking. The Christological issue, a concern of Eustathius for some time, was given new impetus in Antioch by Eudoxius when he denied Christ's human soul. Meanwhile, in Laodicea, not far south of Antioch, Apollinarius was active. He was an orthodox Nicene trinitarian in his fight against the Arian theology of George of Laodicea.

Every reader of Abelar's Historia Calamilatum, the ‘story of his misfortunes’, knows how he mocked histnaster, Anselm of Laon. What has not been made clear is that he mocked in a comparable way a master of even greater standing, St Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury. The reason why this latter attack has not been emphasised is that it appears in one version only of Abelar's Theologia, and its interpretation as mockery depends on detailed scrutiny. Abelard delighted in jokes, particularly when they were dangerous. ‘He cannot restrain his laughter,’ St Bernard warned, ‘listen to his guffaws.’ Jokes depend so much for their effect upon tone and context that it is difficult for an historian to keep an ear out for them when he only has formal texts as evidence; furthermore, a joke loses its cutting edge once it has been laboriously explained. Nevertheless, Abelar's mockery of St Anselm does have to be explained step by step if it is to be appreciated at all. The circumstances are as follows.

On 25 April 1244 Pope Innocent iv granted Henry III's petition for absolution from any sentence of excommunication he might incur for violence against clerks. At first sight it might seem unlikely that the king of England would get involved in scuffles with clerks. He was in his thirty-seventh year and has been described by Sir Maurice Powiek? as devout, if not spiritually minded. He was of a fiery temperament, however, and may have been aware of the opinion of some canonists as to the culpability of those who instructed or ordered others to violence.

Monastic renewal of the eleventh century used to be treated by scholars as essentially Cluniac : Cluny, as the head of an order totalling hundreds of houses, spread its reform across Europe as the tide spreads across a beach. More recently, since Kassius Hallinger demonstrated the existence of multiple centres of reform in his classic study of Gorze, it has become common to draw distinctions between ‘Cluniac’ and ‘young’ (or ‘second-generation’) Cluniac influences, and Cluny's ‘order’ has been redefined to include only priories directly dependent on Cluny's abbot, encompassing not hundreds of houses but only dozens. However, Cluny's order is still commonly treated as something new and unprecedented and Cluniac reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries as prefiguring the monastic renewal of the High Middle Ages.

The problem of ascertaining by what means and what authority true teachings may be distinguished from false is fundamental to any ecclesiology, since the ecclesiastical community is based, above all, on commonly accepted doctrine. It is a community whose limits are defined — and the parameters within which it operates set — by the body of teachings which is accepted within it as true. Thus, the fundamental practical question which any ecclesiology must address becomes, in effect, who has authority to determine what is taught and what is not; and the answer reveals the main thrust ofthat ecclesiology. In broad terms, two principal, and often conflicting, emphases may be noted: on the community of Christian pilgrims (whom any structure exists to serve), and on the formal ecclesiastical structure (within which the faithful may find security). Pastorally, these emphases are associated to some degree with two different assumptions: either that the believer gains confidence in the institution because of the truth that is taught in it, or that a teaching will be received with confidence by believers ior he reason that it is taught within the institution. In the second case, the pursuit of truth may be subordinated to the support of the expedient.

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

The lavish patronage bestowed on Westminster Abbey by Edward the Confessor, and later by Henry III, ensured its status as the church which pre-eminently enjoyed royal favour and was designated by each as his mausoleum. During the intervening reigns the prestige of the abbey was less assured. The present paper seeks to examine the extent to which the genuine charters issued from, or for, Westminster between 1066 and 1216 testify to any special relationship with the monarchy.

Throughout its history the institutionalised Church has sought in different ways to define its position with respect to the ‘world’, in order to give meaning to the injunction to be ‘in’ this world but not ‘of’ it. During the Middle Ages, the tension was acute because the Church, in its narrow definition of the clergy, claimed to be a separate, spiritual order, set apart from the temporal world. The tangible results of this dichotomy are particularly evident with respect to the real property held by ecclesiastical institutions. Property gave the Church the security to be independent from the lay power and the aristocracy; hence the Church claimed varying degrees of immunity for its property from secular jurisdictions.

A strong case has been made for the appearance of a new kind of history in late sixteenth-century France. Whether or not it deserves the label ‘historicist’, it has been credited with a desire to discover the objective face of the past, with a critical approach to sources, and even, though more rarely, with attempts to explain historical process. Prominent among the new brand of historians are Jean du Tillet, Charles du Moulin, Pierre and François Pithou, Claude Fauchet and Etienne Pasquier. All these men of the robe are also celebrated as defenders of the liberties of the Gallican Church. The Gallican tradition shared an attitude towards the past that was quite contrary to the new history. It did not accept change for its own sake, nor did it see change as improvement pointing towards the present.

In January 1454 Sultan Mehmet II (1451–81), ruler of much of the Orthodox Christian Balkans and lately conqueror of Byzantium, vested the patriarch of Constantinople, George Scholarius, with full ecclesiastical authority over all the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire.

This ‘donation’ of Mehmet, long accepted by the scholarly consensus, now stands revealed as a ‘foundation myth’, concocted long after 1454 by the Great Church to justify the over-arching authority it wielded or aspired to wield under the Ottoman imperium.

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.

I cannot but take my selfe to be particularly concerned both in duty, and conscience, when I see the peace, order and union of the church over which God hath sett me, broken, and divisions come to that degree that learned Camero calls the highest, and schisme [sic] even when those that hold communion with us, not onely depart from our communion, but alsoe sett upp and use prayers, preaching and sacraments apart, and at the same time that we doe, and in the same Towne.

The present paper is intended as a contribution to the recent debate on the failure of the Irish Reformation. It commences with a critical summary of the modern historiography of the subject which serves also to highlight a potentially significant imbalance between the early and later Reformation periods in the identification and exploitation of relevant source material by historians. Arguably, the nature of the evidence hitherto deployed goes far towards explaining the dimensions of the present controversy. The paper addresses this controversy mainly in two ways. First, it aims to draw attention to, and analyse, a neglected source compilation which is of central importance in assessing the reasons for the failure of the Irish Reformation. Second, and partly in order to.establish the full significance of this evidence, it seeks to develop a wider perspective from which to assess the potential for, and chronology of, religious change in Ireland.

It is well known that Thomas Reid, premier exponent of the Common Sense school of Scottish philosophy, was an ordained and active minister. Less clear is the role played by theology in the deve opment ofthat philosophy as it matured slowly under his pen, particularly in me most prominent of his works, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788), works which range widely over the field of human experience and the nature of reality. When philosophy and theology assumed more distinct and separate identities in the generations which succeeded Reid, it became common for critics of the Common Sense school to base their analyses solely on philosophical foundations and to neglect the theological underpinning which is essential to a fuller and clearer grasp of Keid s position. It would be a useful contribution to more than one discipline were Thomas Reid's philosophy linked more closely to the development and extent of his theological thinking. While his philosophical writings are strewn with theological references in the way typical of the eighteenth century, there is more substance in these references than is usually the case, when divines ofthat age wrote philosophy. That they are much more than casual, conventional embellishments becomes apparent from a careful reading of his works.

Uber dem Berg gibst auch Leute. This ultramontane remark made in 1742 by Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, professor of theology and chancellor of Tübingen University between 1720 and 1756, was intended to shake students out of their cosy, provincial and exclusive Lutheran theology. It was time, so Pfaff argued, they opened windows, put aside their arrogant hair-splitting about correct Lutheran doctrine, and looked at the wider Protestant world beyond Württemberg. Knowledge of the sources of the Christian Church, and of the customs and legal shape of Protestantism in Germany as it had developed since the Reformation, provided the only sure defence of the Protestant Church in an age when autocratic behaviour was fashionable with princes, and the temporal authority of Popes Clement xi and Clement XII was still an inescapable fact.

The 1859 revival has been granted a special place in Ulster's religious history. It is most often portrayed as a spontaneous and dramatic outpouring of the Holy Spirit, leading to the conversion of many thousands of men and women, and resulting in the moral and social reformation of a formerly sinful society. While this popular image requires a degree of modification in the interests of historical accuracy, the importance of the movement itself is not questioned. As Peter Gibbon ha pointed out, ‘the Ulster religious revival of 1859 involved larger numbers of people in sustained common activity than any movement in rura Ulster between 1798 and 1913’. Its value to the historian lies in its revelation of the attitudes of Ulster society — both religiouss and secular — to the popular, evangelical style of Protestantism which had been making steady progress in Ireland from the late eighteenth century. The dramatic visible and well-publicised nature of religious activity in 1859 serves to highlight the more controversial aspects of that faith, and indicates the degree of adjustment made by churchmen and laity to a movement wich largely ignored conventional ecclesiastical and social boundanes. It is the purpose of this paper to assess the impact of the events of 1859 on Ulster society and to consider its significance in the light of modern sociological approaches to the study of revivalism.

Most Anglican crises, including recent ones, seem to boil down in the end to two linked questions — those of identity and authority. Is the Church of England pre-eminently a national or a catholic Church, a Protestant Church (and if so, of what kind?) or Anglican and sui generis? With which of these types of Church should it align itself? Where lies the famed via media, and which are the extremes to be avoided? And who has the authority to decide: as a national Church, parliament, the government, the monarch personally; as an episcopal Church, the bishops? Or should the clergy in convocations (or, latterly, the General Synod, including representatives of the pious laity) take decisions? Anglican crises have always raised these twin problems of identity and authority. In the mid-eighteenth century — from the end of the 1730s and particularly in the 1740s — the Church of England faced another crisis. The Anglican bishops had to come to terms with the movement known as the ‘evangelical revival’. Principles had to be applied to a new situation. The bishops had to decide how to categorise the new societies (or would they become new churches?) which were springing up all over England.

For the most part historians of the nineteenth century have tended to categorise the Whigs as the party of reform and the Tories as the party opposed to it. This trend has been strongest in the spheres of political and ecclesiastical history and has been supported by reference to events that led to the reforms of Church and State in the 1830s. The Whig commitment to ecclesiastical reform under Grey and Melbourne has established their reputation in the minds of historians as Church reformers without equal in the era.