In his long, untranslated treatise De adoratione, Cyril of Alexandria interacts with the mysteries of Isis in two places. In one place he describes a ritual involving female initiates dressed in linen holding sistra and mirrors, and in another he describes the rotating of torches as a purification ritual, albeit without naming Isis in either. These passages enrich our understanding of the mysteries of Isis, and of Cyril's engagement with the cult beyond his purported actions at Menouthis. The passages also suggest why and how Alexandrian Christians engaged in Isiac practices, and show Cyril the bishop constructing a pastoral response to these practices.

This paper focuses on one of the elements employed in their defence by individual Knights Templar during the trials preceding the dissolution of the order: making reference to a previous confession made long before the start of the trials, in the course of which a brother divulged the sin of heresy. Questions are raised about the reliability of fragments of testimonies pertaining to this, the potential benefits that the Templars could have gained and the risks involved. An attempt is also made to indicate the source of this defence strategy, as well as the way in which it was disseminated among brothers interrogated at various times and in various places.

A challenge has recently been made to the venerable tradition that the passage of Henry VIII's first act for suppressing monasteries (1536) was facilitated by the presentation in parliament of details of monastic sexual misconduct gathered during the royal visitation of the monasteries in 1535–6. This article, by following up clues missed in the evidence cited for that challenge, precisely identifies a now lost source, last sighted in the hands of John Bale, which casts important new light on the visitation and, it is argued, was very probably the exact document presented to parliament in 1536.

The paths to sainthood of the cults of Isidore Agricola and Ferdinand III exhibit a unique phenomenon of collaboration across the Spanish empire for the canonisation of multiple Counter-Reformation saints. An analysis of their financial records may reveal a network of alliances that could account for the overwhelming number of Iberian saints canonised in the seventeenth century. The role of Spanish America in the construction of a renewed imperial identity is also examined, demonstrating that it capitalised on the urgency of these devotions to advance its own cults while arguing for the centrality of their territories to the expansion of Catholicism.

This article discusses how religious comprehension was promoted by the Scottish authorities after the revolution of 1688–9 to reach a compromise between the nation's two main religious groups: the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians. Unlike the failed attempt to enact comprehension in England in 1689, in Scotland five attempts were made from 1689 to 1694 to accommodate Episcopalians into the Church. The article argues that comprehension forced the Scots to confront the practical limits of their commitment to religious uniformity, and was central to their transition from a Reformed nation that cherished uniformity to one that begrudgingly accepted the existence of pluralism.

According to the standard narrative, although John Henry Newman was driven away from Oxford in the 1840s by the dominant Protestant consensus, by the end of his life in the 1890s he was back in favour, fêted in Oxford as a Roman Catholic celebrity and as an esteemed alumnus. This article challenges that interpretation by examining the forgotten controversy over Newman's national monument, a significant aspect of his reception history. It shows how Newman's memory and reputation remained hotly contested, provoking resistance by the dons and citizens of late Victorian Oxford, even in this recently secularised and professedly tolerant university city.

This article looks at how ZANU and ZAPU, the two main Zimbabwean nationalist groups in UDI-era Rhodesia, sought to present and engage with Christianity in their propaganda. Given that the Rhodesians cast themselves as defenders of ‘Christian civilisation’, it was inevitable that the media war would touch heavily upon ecclesiastical issues. It is contended here that the nationalists developed a powerful argument: that the Rhodesian government and the Churches of southern Africa were falling far short of the ideals of Christianity. This message then in turn served as an important part of their critique of the white minority regime.

As a relatively open academic atmosphere related to religious studies in general became manifest in the People's Republic of China in the early 1990s, new possibilities for studies of various forms of Christianity in greater China (the mainland and Chinese communities outside of the PRC) began to be realised both within China and overseas. Within the first decade of the twenty-first century, two major handbooks related to the study of Christianity in China were produced under the editorships of the Belgian Jesuit scholar, Nicolas Standaert (1959–)1 and the German Protestant scholar, R. G. Tiedemann (1941–2019),2 initiating what should be considered to be the most up-to-date and essentially new standard reference works regarding the study of all forms of Christianity that have had interactions with various Chinese persons over the period of time from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (seventh century) to the year 2000. Both volumes were large by any standard, the former being nearly a thousand pages in length, and the latter extending beyond a thousand pages. Both produced a state-of-the-art account of their particular historical coverage of varying forms of Christianity that came to or emerged within China during those periods. Notably, most of the supporting authors who contributed to those two massive volumes were foreign scholars of the history of Christianity in China and Chinese Christianity.3