Since apostolic times Christians have treated the family as a micro-community which reflects the values and problems of the larger Christian community as a whole. Most communities, including Christian ones, are reluctant to contemplate the possibility that their own existence will end. But although Jesus is said to have promised St Peter that His Church would survive death, and although the notion of the Church as a community that never dies became a commonplace in subsequent ecclesiology, there was no such guarantee of immortality to the individual family. The breakup and restructuring of family units through death or the dissolution of marriage was a reality which medieval Christian communities had to face in each generation. Even so, high-ranking social groups sought to minimise generational disruptions by adopting the fiction of the family that never dies, a notion that is especially familiar to historians of the theory of monarchy in the Middle Ages. The medieval Church was a keen champion of the continuity of domestic units. As Georges Duby has recently pointed out, the Church in the early Middle Ages struggled mightily to make its own theory of marriage prevail over the alternative marriage theory popular among the laity. The ecclesiastical model of marriage, which emphasised the free consent of the contracting parties and the indissolubility of unions, triumphed over the lay model of marriage, which, according to Duby, valued family concerns above the wishes of the individual at the end of the eleventh century in France. The pattern of marriage arrangements that Duby calls the lay model seems to have persisted vigorously until much later in other places, including Catalonia and Aragon. This paper will examine a case from mid-thirteenth century Arago-Catalonia in which the conflict of lay and ecclesiastical marriage ideals features prominently.

The Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom (APUC), a joint Anglican/Roman Catholic association of prayer, was founded on 8 September 1857. Seven years later it was condemned by the Holy See for encouraging indifferentism by claiming that the Roman, Greek and Anglican Churches had an equal right to the title ‘Catholic’, the distinctive mark of a true Church. The papal rescript in which the condemnation was contained, Ad omnes Angliae episcopos, also offered a precise definition of the nature of the ‘Catholic Church’ which, in effect, excluded all possible schemes for reunion between the Churches except on the basis of unconditional submission to the Holy See.

The career and personality of Peter the Iberian, bishop of Mayuma, near Gaza, present exceptional interest for the history both of the Monophysite movement of the fifth century and of the Georgian Church. At the same time, the hagiographical writings recording his life raise documentary problems of a complex nature.

The Confessions of Augustine carry his life down to the age of thirtythree, from his birth at Tagaste in Numidia in A.D. 354 to A.D. 387, when he was converted to Christianity by Ambrose in Milan. He wrote the Confessions ten years later, in A.D. 397–8, at the age of forty-three or forty-four, when he had just been made Bishop of Hippo Regius, the modern Bône, in North Africa. The work is an autobiography, the one exstant autobiography in Latin literature: but it is peculiar in being addressed primarily to the Deity and in being a record not of the writer's own achievements intended for his own glory, but of all the way by which the power of God had led him. So while in places it does narrate the events of his life and the development of his mind and thought, at other places it breaks out into rapturous praise and adoration of his Redeemer and becomes not so much a narration as a prose hymn, sometimes in a minor key of contrite repentance for the sins and faults of youth now pardoned, sometimes in an exalted strain of ecstatic love, worship, and devotion towards the One to whose service he is now wholly surrendered. Under the eye of the Omniscient, Augustine reviews his life from childhood till his conversion: it is a stern and unflinching self-examination: the pranks of his boyhood are tested for early evidences of sin with the same relentless analysis as the vices, the ambitions, and self-will of his youth and manhood. We have his school-days at his native Tagaste and at the neighbouring town of Madaura: we have the turbulence of his adolescence at Carthage: we see him as a student of rhetoric at Carthage and as a professor of rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan: we are told how the beginnings of his spiritual awareness were excited by the reading of Cicero's Hortensius: we learn of his long association with the quasi-Christian sect of the Manichaeans, of his growing dissatisfaction with their doctrine of a material and finite Deity, and of his long perplexity about religious problems—until through the preaching of Ambrose at Milan and through a study of Neo-platonism, he comes to a realization of an immaterial, non-temporal, non-spatial One.

This essay addresses several unresolved problems associated with the production, dissemination and reception of the King James Bible. It argues that James i’s initial enthusiasm was not sustained and that Archbishop Bancroft was the key figure for seeing the translation through to completion. His death, just before the Bible appeared, explains why there was no order for its purchase by parishes. Instead, its acquisition was left to individual bishops, so that it took until the Civil War for the new Bible to be widely available in worship. Its broad acceptability by that time was a result of its increasing use in household and private devotions as much as in public worship.

At the end of the eighth century Alcuin of York adapted an Augustinian catechetical programme for missionary use among the Avars of central Europe. This article explores how and why Alcuin went about adapting Augustine's plan, focusing on the place of his effort in the early medieval tradition. Special emphasis is placed on the idea of ‘innovative deference’ whereby Alcuin distinguished his work from that of his predecessors while consciously preserving a Christian tradition. The article also considers the importance of adaptation to the Carolingian world, including the influence of Alcuin's programme upon other Carolingian thinkers.

This paper examines the process of radicalisation of Monsignor Ivan Illich during the 1960s, having as its setting Cuernavaca, Mexico – a creative, fluid space where Illich was in contact with Bishop Méndez Arceo, Erich Fromm and Gregorio Lemercier. Illich's writings and the reports from the centres led by him are placed here in context, and it is argued that his encounter with psychoanalysis in Cuernavaca shaped his critique of the Church as an institution. The radicalisation of his concept of the Church reached a high point with the publication of ‘The seamy side of charity’ and ‘The vanishing clergyman’, both in 1967.

Few conflicts in imperial Germany were more important than the Kulturkampf, a major dispute between the Catholic Church and the Prussian State and a notorious example of the destructive character of Bismarckian politics. The Kulturkampf began in 1871, gathered in intensity and bitterness until 1878, and then continued with slowly diminishing severity down to 1887. Despite all its drama (the attempted assassination of governmental officials, the arrest and trial of prominent churchmen, even riots and mass demonstrations) and its undeniable political importance, the Kulturkampf remains among the neglected problems of nineteenth-century German history. For the most part what has been written is so contradictory and prejudiced that even now – more than one hundred years later – the issues remain controversial and, in many respects, obscure.