The bishops of Liège became concerned with Christianisation throughout the whole diocese in the Carolingian period. This study examines the concrete measures that they took. The field chosen is the Ardennes region in the south of the diocese, where they reorganised the abbey of St-Hubert as a religious centre. The bishops reformed the community and offered it economic support. They also encouraged the cult of St Hubert and introduced the new custom of annual processions. This approach throws light on the pastoral situation in a way that their episcopal capitularies cannot.

John Foxe and the English Reformation. Edited by David Loades. Pp. xii+340 incl. 54 figs. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997

This volume, a collection of papers presented at a colloquium held in Cambridge in 1995 on John Foxe and his seminal work, the Acts and monuments (popularly known as Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’), has the chief virtue of any good collection of conference papers: it presents a range of diverse topics approached from a variety of disciplines and methodologies by a number of respected scholars. This volume also succeeds in avoiding one of the paramount shortcomings of such collections, a lack of focus and common themes. In fact, Loades's book is so tightly focused that its title is slightly misleading inasmuch as the articles in it tend to ignore Foxe's life and career (indeed several of the contributors write about periods, decades or even centuries after Foxe's death), while only one article in it discusses any of the other works, apart from his martyrology, that Foxe wrote. Instead the contributions to this collection largely address three topics: the composition or manufacture of the Acts and monuments, the influence of continental writers and craftsmen on the book and, finally, its influence on Foxe's contemporaries or on subsequent generations. As such this is the most important book on the Acts and monuments, that most important of books, since William Haller's influential study was published over three decades ago.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, most European nations experienced a period of state-sponsored anti-Catholic legislation that has come to be known by the German term Kulturkampf. The question that this article seeks to address is whether or not the United Kingdom, and specifically Ireland, can be said to have experienced such a phenomenon. By examining the case of Robert O'Keeffe, a Roman Catholic parish priest who sued the cardinal archbishop of Dublin in the civil courts, it is possible to determine both whether Britain experienced a Kulturkampf, and to offer some suggestions as to why the United Kingdom appears to have been different in this regard from its European neighbours.

The Welsh religious revival of 1904–5 was a remarkable event which has evoked a number of contradictory responses. These were in some ways fuelled by the content of a folk memory which often appears to be divorced from the events of the revival itself. As a result, ambiguity has surrounded the revival and particularly the contribution of Evan Roberts, probably its most interesting and colourful leader. This article explores some aspects of that folk memory and seeks to ‘demythologise’ them by drawing on accounts of the revival meetings published by those who were involved at the time.

In the late twelfth century, Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161–84), identified astrology as the most serious heresy facing the English Church. The evidence of Bartholomew's writing suggests that astrology became more widely accepted among the English clergy during his episcopal tenure. It also supports the view that popular heretical movements enjoyed little success in England during this period, in contrast to some regions in mainland Europe. Instead, it was scholars deemed guilty of intellectual error, and above all the astrologers, who became the focus of Bartholomew's anxieties about heresy and the intellectual culture of his day.

Alexander Crummell's application to enter the General Theological Seminary in 1839 was problematic for the Episcopal Church. Admitting the African American abolitionist would have exacerbated divisions over slavery within a denomination still recovering from the American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. The Church's increasing financial dependence on its upper-class members was a further complication. In Northern states the social elite supported anti-abolitionist violence, whilst in the South support for the Church came predominantly from slaveholders, who opposed any form of abolitionism. In order to safeguard the Episcopal Church's future, the denomination had to reject Crummell's application.

Parish priests in late eighteenth-century Malta often grumbled about their poverty, but their excuses were generally self-serving and related to the financial demands of their bishop; like incumbents in mainland Europe, they were not in a bad financial situation. Their relative affluence was a result of revenues such as tithes, mass legacies and surplice fees. In small communities this income may have been tiny, but parish priests were not entirely dependent on parochial revenues, since they were generally drawn from middle-rank families and might possess personal wealth in addition.

Few biblical episodes have generated more theological interpretation across the centuries than that of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he appears fearfully to resist the divine will in the moments before the passion sequence is initiated. Scholars of the early modern period, however, have tended not to notice how central the scene became in the wake of Protestant and Catholic reformation developments, renewed calls for spiritual self-examination and the resurgent phenomenon of martyrdom. This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that, in the case of England, Jesus in Gethsemane not only held acute resonances across different confessions, but resulted in interpretations that perpetuated a new kind of subjectivity, and one that influenced modernity and its notions of the divided self in a state of faith and doubt.

‘Out with history,’ Kierkegaard wrote in an 1848 journal entry, ‘in with the situation of contemporaneity’, he continued. ‘This is the criterion: as I judge anything contemporaneously, so am I judged. All this chatter afterwards is an illusion.’ In this entry, as in many others, Kierkegaard put forward his own concept of ‘contemporaneity’, while simultaneously levelling criticism both at the historicist impulse in nineteenth-century philosophy and theology and his contemporaries in Copenhagen. In numerous other entries he condemns his intellectual colleagues for envying his genius, failing to respect his worth and for subjecting him to endless abuse.

‘About that time [1567–8] there were many congregations of the Anabaptists in London, who called themselves Puritans or Unspotted Lambs of the Lord. They kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’.

This paper is an attempt to develop the clue handed down to us by John Stow to the location of an early—if not the earliest—thoroughgoing nonconformist congregation within the Elizabethan Church. Considering the length of time it has been in print, it is a clue strangely neglected by historians both of nonconformity and of London during this period.

One of the most interesting of the various groups of Orthodox Christians that constituted the Rum Milleti within the Ottoman Empire were the Karamanli Christians of Asia Minor. These Karamanli Christians, or Karamanlides, were a substantial body of Christians Orthodox in religion but Turkish in speech. During the Ottoman period they were largely concentrated in the interior of Asia Minor, although they were also to be found in the Crimea and on the shores of the Sea of Azov. The question of their origin is a matter of controversy and is likely to remain so. Greek scholars incline to the view that the Karamanlides were of Greek descent and adopted Turkish as their vernacular, either by force or as a result of their isolation from the Greek speaking Orthodox Christians of the coastal regions. Turkish scholars regard them as the descendants of Turks who had migrated to Byzantine territories before the conquest or had served as mercenaries in the Byzantine armies and who had adopted the religion but not the language of their new rulers.

Lord Acton believed that there was a dichotomy in English history between the life expressed in the Church and the principle of nationality. It is evident from a study of the writings of John Wyclif (c. 1320–84) that at least one medieval English theologian asserted that a principle of English nationality was fused into the life of the English Church. Regardless of how the next fifty years of scholarship may judge the connexion in medieval Christianity between national traditions and the universal Church, the English aspect of it is important at present. Wyclif provided the original impetus to the Lollard movement. Increasing scholarly attention has been given to Lollardy and its possible influence on the English Reformation. It now seems important to survey systematically the texts of Wyclif's treatises themselves for what light they may shed on the relationship between ecclesiastical and temporal history in the English tradition.

There are four major interpretative themes in historical writing about nineteenth century English politics whose exposition has customarily involved a bald allusion to Gladstone's abolition of compulsory church rates in 1868. In reality the facts do not justify any of these familiar uses. What follows is intended not only to demonstrate that this is so by briefly describing ‘how it really happened’, but also to consider how it has come about that this legislation has been so often pressed into service in inappropriate contexts ever since it was passed, and to speculate a little upon this as part of the general problem of the delays and paradoxes in the development of historical writing on nineteenth-century England.

Abraham's encounter at Mamre (Genesis xviii.1–16) captivated the Christian imagination from the tradition's very origins. The story hints at God's self-disclosure in a triad of visitors – a theophany that evoked the presence of the Logos or even the Trinity. This article examines late antique exegetical trajectories, focusing upon the interaction between text and expositor in light of the latter's socio-historical context. For patristic exegetes, the Mamre account contained profound spiritual truth if read through the correct doctrinal lens, while presenting a foothold for heresy to the unwary. Changing visions of Trinitarian orthodoxy thus gave rise to new strategies of reading.

This article assesses how Lutheran and other Reformation doctrines spread and were countered in the Portuguese seaborne empire. Portugal's inquisitorial and episcopal repression of ‘Lutherans’ was extended to Brazil and Asia, where it was supported by the Society of Jesus. The Portuguese empire's transcontinental connections favoured the emergence of interconnected histories, facilitating the circulation of books, engravings and beliefs and thus provided non-Portuguese people with links to the reformed world that spread amongst and disturbed the Portuguese living in India and Portuguese America. By opening up routes the Portuguese, paradoxically, functioned as vectors for other ways of interpreting Christianity.

Highlighting some of the tensions within Catholicism in Poland-Lithuania after the Council of Trent, this article offers a corrective to the traditional Jesuit-centred paradigm of Catholic renewal. While long held to be central to the successes of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits were opposed by large sections of the Catholic nobility, a paradox that has never been adequately explained. By exploring the conflicts between the Jesuits and the more established Dominican order, the phenomenon of Catholic anticlericalism can be understood as part of a wider dissonance in Catholic culture, and integral to the accommodation of noble and Catholic culture after Trent.

The Appendices to the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, published in the great reforming era of the eighteen-thirties, provide rich fields for the exploration of fossil-hunters. There, enrolled and briefly described, are the Church courts of the country. Their practice had, by that time, shrunk considerably; but few, or none, of the old courts had disappeared entirely.