This essay, which stems from a broader project on religion in the nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, seeks to recreate the experiences of the thousands of Protestants who struggled tenaciously to retain or hide their faith in colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico before the declaration of religious tolerance in 1869 and before the establishment of the region's first Protestant churches, the Anglican congregation of Ponce, organised in 1869, the Episcopal mission of Havana, started in 1871, and the Anglican congregation of Vieques, an island located eight miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, founded in 1880.

Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.

The adoption of socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for many an experience akin to religious conversion. Katherine St John Conway's path to enlightenment provides a stark example. While sitting in her fashionable Bristol church ‘praying for a fuller consciousness of the Presence’, she was confronted by a group of workers adopting the socialist tactic of the ‘church parade’, the invasion of churches during Sunday services to highlight labour disputes and the plight of the unemployed:

[I]n they came, lassies out on strike against starvation wages and for the right to combine … there they stood, sister-women, … ill-clad, wet through with the driving rain, hungry … ‘They stand between me and the Christ.’ So the thought smote me; so I see it still … . For the first time in my life I heard and began to understand.

The experience of Jean-Pierre Camus, a reforming bishop in seventeenth-century France, highlights the problematic ambivalences present within French Catholic reform after the Council of Trent: the persistent tensions between bishops, the papacy and lower clergy over the most effective means of achieving renewal and the most appropriate forms of ecclesiastical government, as well as the growing emphasis upon episcopal perfection within an episcopate that was, paradoxically, closely linked to politics and secular society. His publications on episcopacy provide an insight into the motivations and beliefs of a prominent episcopal reformer and into the ecclesiastical culture of seventeenth-century France. This article seeks to demonstrate that Camus' episcopal ideal was a coherent adaptation of traditional and contemporary views produced in response to post-Trent circumstances and that the bishop's published views had a significant impact upon his fellow prelates and their relationship with the papacy.

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

This article investigates the financial arrangements put in place by Pope Urban V to pay for his household on his journey from Avignon to Rome in 1367. It shows that the curia's move had a disruptive effect, since its normal routine of paying expenses at the end of each month could not be continued while the court was in transit. In order to deal with these exceptional circumstances, household officials were given a special advance payment in anticipation of the costs that would be incurred on the journey, which in effect set a budget for the pope's domestic expenditure.

This article argues that the liturgical tradition of celebrating Christmas on 25 December travelled from the Latin West to the Greek East at the behest of Theodosius I upon his arrival in Constantinople in AD 380. From there it made its way to Cappadocia, Pontus and Syrian Antioch by means of travelling clerics who belonged to a pro-Nicene network. The essay also makes the larger methodological point that in late antiquity liturgical traditions did not travel of their own accord; rather, they were often carried by networks of travelling bishops and ‘radiated out’ from major sees to minor ones.

Two roads diverged in Roman Africa. One led to the movement that came to be known as Donatism, and the other to the so-called Catholic party. The controversy emerged soon after the Diocletian persecution, one side selecting Caecilius as the bishop of Carthage, the other eventually selecting Donatus (and therefore dubbed ‘Donatist’). The schism widened when Constantine supported the former and attempted to enforce his party's status. Violence sporadically erupted between these two parties for the next century, around which time Augustine led the charge to bring about unity, ultimately through legal and coercive means. The success of this unification, however, and the ultimate fate of the Donatists is open to debate, along with virtually every other datum from this controversy. The debated nature of the controversy, therefore, needs to be closely examined, for just what paradigm one takes from the outset could make all the difference.

This first publication of the newly-found letter to Gandhi from Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a window into his thinking in the early 1930s, a time of personal formation and of resistance to National Socialism. Western Christianity needed ‘a Christian peace movement’, and Bonhoeffer wanted to learn from Gandhi's movement ‘the meaning of Christian life, of real community life, of truth and love in reality’. The letter includes Bonhoeffer's critique of Western culture and the Church in Europe and America, his hopes for a Church regenerated by the Sermon on the Mount, and his appreciation and critique of Karl Barth

While Bede did not know the year of Augustine's death, he possessed papal letters which provide sufficient information to deduce it with some confidence. The early epistles from popes which Bede quoted or referred to in the ‘Historia ecclesiastica’ associated journeys by delegations sent by the early Church in Kent to Rome with the request for, and collection of, the pallium for the new bishop of Canterbury. In this light the likely purpose for the otherwise unexplained visit of Mellitus to Rome in 610 becomes clear: he had come to ask Pope Boniface IV for the pallium for Laurence, following the death of Augustine on 26 May 609.

This article examines the political thought of the twelfth-century papacy, considering how popes of this era responded to the establishment of the kingdoms of Jerusalem, Sicily and Portugal. It compares the intellectual strategies used by popes to justify why these three polities were kingdoms rather than any other type of political unit. It is suggested that, to make their cases, popes advanced a range of arguments, many of which echoed the political ideas of Gregory VII. The article concludes by linking its findings to the wider question of how the twelfth-century papacy responded to the expansion of Latin Christendom.

In the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (590–604), the devil is sometimes given direct speech in which he is shown protesting his innocence. The devil in these stories is frequently interpreted as comical, trivial and somewhat underwhelming. However, when re-read through the lens of Gregory's exegesis of Genesis iii, and his ideas regarding the devil, sin and language, what emerges is that it is the devil's verbal skill and appearance of harmlessness that make him dangerous. This failure to see the devil's words as a deceptive recapitulation of Genesis iii cannot be separated from the Dialogues’ complex historiography.

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 combines prosopographical analysis of the episcopate between 1307 and 1330 with examination of its participation in the politics of the time – baronial unrest, the deposition of Edward II and a regency dominated by his queen and her paramour. Elevation to the episcopate brought status, an opportunity for career clerks. Nobles were not prominent among bishops, nor were regular clergy; curiales were, but more numerous were university men. The differing roles of archbishops Winchelsey, Reynolds, Mepham, and to a marginal extent Stratford, are reviewed. Crucial is the reaction of prelates to the crisis of 1326–7. Diagrams and tables help to quantify the conclusions reached.

Despite the great attention which the puritan movement has received, many historians have been reluctant to afford religion a major role as an immediate precipitant of the English civil war. There has been a tendency to settle the matter by quoting Oliver Cromwell's statement: ‘Religion was not the thing at first contested for …’, although he put forth this interpretation more than a decade after the event. Recently attention has been focused upon the early 1640s as a period in which puritans became highly militant; at the same time, the key to this aggressiveness has been provided by a series of studies of the hitherto neglected apocalyptic ideas of English protestants. Dr. Burrell has shown a close relationship between apocalyptic thought and the outbreak of the Scottish rebellion, while other scholars have indicated that such a connexion existed at the start of the English civil war. This article will attempt to chart the development of puritan militance by examining the apocalyptic interpretations put forward by prominent English reformers during the crucial period which began with the opening of the Long Parliament on 3 November 1640 and ended with the first great battle of the civil war at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. The importance of religion in the outbreak of that conflict should thereby be demonstrated.

It has long been recognised that one of the most valuable documents about pluralism is the lengthy return of pluralists made in 1366 in accordance with a constitution of pope Urban V. In this return detailed information was sent in to archbishop Simon Langham by the various diocesans, containing the names of pluralists residing at the time in their dioceses, the value of their emoluments, their benefices and academic titles. It has an obvious value as a clergy-list, containing the names not only of several distinguished clerks who held office in the government service, but also of humbler men, as well as of that interesting class of university graduates to whom the acquisition of ecclesiastical benefices became a financial necessity.