Twentieth-century scholars believed that Arnobius the Younger was an African monk living in Rome. This is untenable. There is now considerable doubt over the authorship of several works ascribed to him by Germain Morin: the Expositiunculae has been proved to date from the early medieval period, but the author of the anti-predestinarian Commentarii in Psalmos, one ‘Arnobius’, is also responsible for writing the mid fifth-century Praedestinatus, an attack on Augustine's predestinarian theology and its champion, Prosper of Aquitaine. The content of these works and related evidence point to Julian of Eclanum as the true author.

The Byzantine holy man and cult of saints are often seen as evidence that Christ had become the inaccessible Pantokrator. In this article, such assertions are challenged by a close reading of John of Ephesus’ Lives of eastern saints, where many monks are shown to be very close to Christ, even in references to him as divine. Viewing hagiography as literature of exhortation and example, Christ's proximity to John's monks is seen as available to all Miaphysite Christians. This analysis is also important for investigating the spirituality of the early generations of Miaphysites, painting them as more than polemicists.

The article is based on the case study of Sr Asklipiodata, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who became a member of the monastic community in one of Kiev's Orthodox convents in the second half of the eighteenth century. It explores the ways in which the non-communal way of life in Eastern Orthodox convents impacted both upon the praxis of monastic existence within the convent walls, and relations with the secular world without. Parallel to this consideration of a lasting centrality of property ownership in Orthodox female monasticism, the article addresses the largely neglected question of Jewish assimilation in the Russian Empire prior to the Partitions of Poland (1772–93), which brought the sizeable Jewish population of the Commonwealth's eastern borderlands into close contact with the Russian state.

Although largely overlooked by historians, the worldwide Anglican Communion proved to be a major force in mobilising support for the Allied cause throughout the First World War. This article examines the wartime career of Bishop Charles Henry Brent, a Canadian-born bishop of America's Protestant Episcopal Church, who is usually remembered as a missionary, an ecumenist, and as a campaigner against the international opium trade. This article revisits Brent's wartime career, illustrating his three-fold significance as a contemporary symbol of Episcopalian power and influence in the United States, as an epitome of Episcopalian Anglophilia, and as a morale-boosting presence in wartime Britain.

This article studies the Christian movement that occurred amongst the Luba of Katanga, Belgian Congo, from about 1915 to 1950, paying particular attention to how it was received by different social categories and mediated by local religious enthusiasts. The notion of conversion is examined across two generations with reference to ageing, revival and reprise via a case study of the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM), a Pentecostal faith body. The paper shows how the CEM's literary and pneumatic practices were understood both in terms of ruptures with what had gone before and through establishing continuities with pre-existing culture, particularly the search for social harmony.

This article identifies as the work of Richard Baxter a set of ecclesiastical directions and reading recommendations contained in fos 180–208 of St John's College, Cambridge, MS K.38, once tentatively ascribed to Thomas Barlow, but demonstrably a close analogue of British Library, MS Harleian 6009, which is a copy of a lost Baxter original. Internal evidence of MS K.38 and comparison with MS 6009 and Baxter's Christian directory imply both an earlier date and a wider circulation of Baxter's archetype than hitherto suspected, suggesting a new direction of inquiry into Baxter's scholarly and ecclesiastical associations.

Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation.