Private correspondence between Rome and England in the fifteenth century is not unknown but is usually to be found among the business papers of proctors permanently resident at the Curia, such as William Swan and Thomas Hope. By contrast, the three letters printed below were written by an occasional visitor to Rome, charged with a specific errand. They tell us more about England than Italy, and more about the everyday concerns of a moderately successful clerical careerist than the procedures of the papal court, but they are unusual and valuable precisely for that reason. The author of these letters was Master Robert Thornton. A canon lawyer in the service of Archbishop Kempe, he began his career as an advocate in the prerogative court of York and, during the 1440s, established himself as one of the mainstays of the diocesan administration there: he acted as commissary-general to the court of York and official of the absentee archdeacon of York, besides serving on many ad hoc commissions. By the time these letters were written, Thornton's diligence in the archbishop's service had brought him several desirable benefices: already perpetual vicar of Silkstone (Yorkshire, West Riding), he became rector of Almondbury (Yorkshire, West Riding) in 1451 and was presented by William Bothe, Kempe'ssuccessor as archbishop, to a prebend at St. John's, Chester, in the following year. It was his membership of Kempe' familia that, indirectly, set him on the road to Rome. In May 1452 he was dispatched with a bundle of papers and sixteen marks in cash to pursue the claims of John Berningham, resident canon and treasurer of York, to the vacant deanery.

The general opinion of historians has been that the East India Company was opposed to the presence of Christian missionaries in India. It is generally held also that when the Charter Act of 813 left the Company with no option but to admit them, its governments in India maintained a fairly consistent posture of religious neutrality. These notions have recently been reinforced by Penelope Carson. But thisignores the Company's policies towards Roman Catholic missionaries. In the eighteenth century the Company welcomed Roman Catholic missionaries. It was at the nvitation of the Bombay government that Italian Carmelite missionaries settled there in 1718. It was at the invitation of the authorities of Fort St George that a French Capuchin mission was established in Madras in 1742. When the Company came into Kerala towards the end of the eighteenth century an Italian Carmelite mission was already established there, with a bishop and two priests. The mission was soon receiving material support from the Company.

German Pietism and cognate movements in the Reformed world, especially in the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Switzerland and Hungary, continue to be one of the most strenuously contested and assiduously worked fields not only of modern church history, but of the history of religious belief and practice not ecclesiastically orientated. Their bibliography is augmented by some 300 contributions a year by scholars from Finland to the United States, though the bulk of the work is German, and much of the rest is presented in German. A brief survey (which must necessarily exclude the literature relating to Austria and Salzburg) can do no more than sample what has been happening in this area since the Second. World War, and suggest its connexions with the older work, some of which remains of first class significance. Fortunately the journal Pietismus und Neuzeit (now published at Gottingen by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht) has since its inception in 1974 carried not only papers of high quality, but a bibliography of the year's work. This was the achievement, until his untimely death in 1990, of Klaus Deppermann, and aimed strenuously to be complete. His successors have been daunted by the magnitude of this task, and do not promise to compass all the non-German literature; but no doubt will trace most of what is really important.

During the seven years between 1555 and 1562, a transformation took place in the character of early French Protestantism. Before 1555 reformed communities in the kingdom of France were relatively scarce, and only loosely affiliated; by 1562 they had become more numerous, and more centralised. Before 1555 a typical congregation would meet, without either a minister or a system of ecclesiastical discipline, for prayers, the singing of hymns and bible-reading; by 1562, the same group would probably have not only its own pastor to preach and administer the sacraments, but also a consistory to enforce church discipline. In the most recent secondary literature this development is commonly described as the transformation of églises plantées into églises dressées. It is said, for example by Prestwich, that ‘the consistory became the mark of a true church, termed an église dressée, in contrast to the amorphous Bible gatherings, known as églises plantées’. The purpose of this brief article is to question whether these terms were ever contrasted in this way in the mid-sixteenth century, and to suggest that other phrases express the development more accurately.