The letters of the First Crusade have traditionally been read as authentic and trustworthy eyewitness accounts of the expedition and they contribute greatly to scholarly understanding of the campaign. But new research on them demonstrates that many of the documents are in fact twelfth-century confections produced in the monastic communities of the West as a means of supporting, participating in and engaging with the crusading movement. This article develops new approaches to the letters and new research questions which account for and accept the problematic authenticity of the corpus, pivoting away from traditional methodologies to explore the monastic scribal cultures that produced and consumed First Crusade letters.

In 1966 Keith Thomas wrote an article in the Times Literary Supplement which laid down the axiom, ‘All historical propositions relating to the behaviour of large groups, for example… religious activity, are susceptible of treatment in this [statistical] way, and indeed permit of no other.’ Social historians have increasingly adopted this approach ever since. It has obviously great merits: I am sometimes afraid, indeed, that the principle is in some ways not being carried far enough, and that only the letter, and not the law, is being implemented. For instance, in my own field, individual village studies, often of high quality, are produced. But their authors frequently omit to indicate the nature of the agricultural and marketing region in which their community lies, and therefore fail to establish either its probable social structure or its ‘normality’ or ‘abnormality’ within its area. Quantified studies of great complexity and considerable value are therefore produced; but this value is diminished by the total ignorance of the reader, and sometimes it seems of the author, of the ‘typicality’ of the example.

The Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts by M. L. W. Laistner and H. H. King is not definitive, since it is based partly on the evidence of catalogues and other printed material and not on the manuscripts themselves. However, it provides a useful rough guide. It lists approximately 160 surviving manuscripts of the Historia Ecdesiastica. Laistner constructed a table showing the percentage of the total number copied in each century:

This article aims to reassess current historical judgements on the Czech Utraquist Church during the second century of its existence, from 1517 to 1621. It seeks to outline the special problems which Bohemian Utraquism faced as a religious via media, partly viewed from the comparative perspective of the kindred phenomenon of the post-Reformation Church of England. After a discussion of the historiographic issues, the focus is on the distinctive development of sixteenth-century Utraquism and its relations to English theology and eastern Orthodoxy. The Church's intermediate position between the Church of Rome and the fully reformed Protestant Churches is then explored more systematically through the writings of the authoritative, but neglected, theologian of sixteenth-century Utraquism, Bohuslav Bílejovský.

Leo Tolstoy was one of the most prolific religious figures of his time. Yet his religious thought and its influence have seldom been explored by church historians. Drawing upon themes within his literature, non-fiction and previously unconsidered primary sources, this paper considers Tolstoy's religious position in relation to other similar nineteenth-century religious movements. It exposes Tolstoy's links with British Unitarians and also considers Tolstoy's influence upon the founder of Britain's first interfaith organisation, the World Congress of Faiths. It is argued that Tolstoy provides a paradigmatic example by which to examine the relationship between the legacy of the Enlightenment and changing attitudes towards non-Christian religions.

Herbert Thorndike's Of the covenant of grace (1659) was the largest and last substantial word on its subject from a priest of the seventeenth-century English Church. Recasting elements of practical divinity that are commonly associated with evangelical Puritanism, attacking the error of absolute and immediate predestination by decree and shifting stress from baptism to regeneration, Thorndike defended God's honour and majesty by affirming human freedom of choice in the ordo salutis and the moral life. His argument centred in a programme of reciprocal ‘helps’ that unites Arminian synergism with the early modern scholastic concept of scientia media, God's ‘middle knowledge’.

In this article I shall republish a small corpus of epitaphs from the Roman imperial household, with apparently Christian features. These texts have not previously been published together. The dating of these inscriptions will be discussed, and inferences about the Christian community in the imperial service during the Severan period will be drawn from the points of comparison which can be made between the texts.

It has long been known from literary sources that there were Christians in the emperors' service in these years. For the generation after Justin Martyr's death, Christian literature provides three references to Christianity in the familia Caesaris. Hippolytus says that Callistus, later to be bishop of Rome, was the slave of Carpophorus, a Christian ‘of the emperor's household’ during the reign of Commodus (180–92). Irenaeus, writing in that reign, refers in the course of a theological argument to ‘those in the royal palace who are believers’, without giving any hint about the number of Christians involved. Then in the 190s Tertullian's Apologeticum lists the palace along with other commanding heights of Roman life in which, he asserts, Christians have established a presence. By this time it was evidently well-known in Christian circles, including in the provinces, that there were Christians in the familia Caesaris: of these three authors, only Hippolytus was based in Rome where the imperial household was centred.

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the SPCK, has been much discussed as the epitome of Anglican evangelistic zeal and is well known for its dedicated work in the distribution of Christian literature. Whereas the fact that continental Protestants were in regular contact with the SPCK has been noted, few attempts have so far been made to examine SPCK relations with continental Protestants. In fact, the SPCK emerges as more and more concerned with its responsibilities towards its persecuted foreign brethren. Thus it is important to place the SPCK in the context of the Europe-wide Protestant Reformation.

Porphyry and Eusebius, antagonistic witnesses, agree that one of Origcn’s early tutors was called Ammonius. This was also the name of the tutor of Origen’s younger contemporary Plot in us, and it. has long been the fashion to argue or assume that they were pupils of the same man. Heinrich Dörrie perhaps remains alone in his view that the two men called Ammonius were distinct, a view for which I shall argue in this article, though not entirely on Döme’s grounds. In the first part I shall present the available evidence, and in the second use it to defend Döme’s position against its detractors; in the third part I shall argue that the confusion of the two began in the early Christian centuries, through a mixture of knowledge and pardonable ignorance, and finally I shall advance another candidate, whose credentials for the position of Origen’s tutor have not been adequately examined in modern discussion.

If it is true that the built-in principle of radical self-criticism is one of the marks of the Reformation tradition, contemporary students of Reformation thought have a valid claim upon their place in its authentic succession. Though more slowly and with occasional relapses into an earlier stance of confessional apologetics, this applies increasingly also to studies dealing with the relation of the theology of Luther and Calvin.

In the Scottish General Assembly of 1638 the Covenanters, openly defying Charles I, reformed the kirk to remove what they saw as its corruptions. Bishops and the Court of High Commission were abolished. The Five Articles of Perth (regulating certain points of worship), the 1636 Book of Canons and the hated Prayer Book of 1637 were all condemned.

Recent studies of English Catholicism from the accession of Elizabeth i onwards demonstrate quite clearly the value and necessity of intensive studies of Catholicism at the local level. H. Aveling's detailed studies of Catholicism in the Yorkshire Ridings are excellent examples of the way in which local studies have contributed to a fuller understanding of how and why Catholicism survived in England after the Reformation. The present study of the Catholic laity under Charles i is based upon an investigation of Catholicism in London and eight counties, drawing mainly upon central sources. The counties have been chosen with the object of including as much variety as possible, both in geographical region and in the state of Catholicism in the country as a whole. Not only have counties with a large and, in some cases, flourishing Catholic survival been selected, but counties where Catholics formed a tiny, and even dwindling minority have also been included. If these local studies are a reasonable sample of the country as a whole, in both extent and variety, then they could be regarded as anindication of the national picture.

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.

Since the destruction of the Temple the synagogue has been at the heart of every Jewish community. Here the individual could affirm his obedience to the laws (kalakkot) through prayer and ceremony. In this way he sought the salvation of the soul and the resurrection of the body in the messianic age. In addition the community, through the offices of the synagogue, was able to exercise close control over the social lives of all its members, by excommunication if necessary but this was rarely required for ‘the social consequences of nonconformity brought irresistible pressure to bear upon the transgressor’.

I believe that the Henrician Reformation was a thoroughly revolutionary event, or set of events. It was revolutionary in a constitutional sense in declaring Henry head of the nation-church—as also in an ecclesiological one. It was revolutionary, ere long, in a further theological sense and, ere long again, revolutionary in its effect on property ownership and all that that implied. And, on top of this, it was a landmark in political and administrative history.

This essay challenges the criticism usually levelled at the early Fathers prior to Augustine for not articulating a view of justification by faith that corresponded with Pauline Christianity as reflected in the formulas of the sixteenth-century reformers. Not only is such a view anachronistic and tends to assume that there was (or is) a uniform definition of justification, but there is evidence that Latin theology before Augustine promulgated the tenets of unmerited grace and the necessity of righteousness that come only through justifying faith. In particular, the Matthew commentary of Hilary of Poitiers explicitly formulates a biblical theology of ‘fides sola iustificat’, and probably contributed to a revival of interest in the Pauline Epistles by the end of the fourth and early fifth centuries.

‘Raptus’, the abduction of women in order to marry them, was seen as a serious problem in Carolingian Francia. This article examines the only Frankish text that provides a theological justification for condemning raptus, Hincmar of Rheims's De coercendo et exstirpando raptu viduarum, puellarum ac sanctimonialium. It shows the difficulties that Hincmar found in providing a coherent theological argument against a practice normally condemned for its social and familial disruption. In particular, it suggests that Hincmar was worried that laymen, who had been encouraged by Carolingian reformers to study the Bible, might use Old Testament precedents to justify raptus.

From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, many archbishops in the western Church turned to the papacy to obtain confirmation of supra-metropolitan prerogatives in harmony with the hierarchical principles of the Gregorian Reform. The study of the proofs produced by these primates makes it possible to identify distinct, contrasting encounters between local ecclesiastical structures and the False Decretals, a canonical collection (c. 836–8/c. 847–52) which was widely disseminated in the central Middle Ages. This process reveals the opposition between two types of territorial primacies, based, on the one hand, on kingdoms searching for unity or, on the other, on the civil provinces of the late Roman Empire.

The role of Scottish Churches in the decision not to include Scotland in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act requires scrutiny. This article examines the role of the Church of Scotland, and other Churches, in debates regarding homosexuality in the years following publication of the Wolfenden Report. It argues that although Scotland's Churches appeared steadfast in their determination to prevent homosexual law reform during the 1950s and 1960s, there was much ambivalence, contradiction and debate and that, in fact, Scotland's two main Churches played a significant role in the development of Scotland's foremost homosexual rights organisation, the Scottish Minorities Group.

Bishop Reginald Pecock (c. 1390–1461) is remembered for vernacular works formulated to combat Lollardy using reason, not the force of ecclesiastical authority. He argued that Scripture's teachings are true not because they are in Scripture, but because they are evident to unassisted reason. While scholars have explored his arguments in ecclesiastical and historical context, little analysis exists of the scholastic background to Pecock's conception of the relation of reason to faith. This article suggests that Pecock's arguments are grounded in the thought of Aquinas and Scotus, and illustrates how his understanding of reason's capabilities directs his conception of the authority of Scripture and church tradition.