The Codex Angus (Add. MS 40 in the University of Sydney Library's Rare Books and Special Collections) is a Byzantine Gospel lectionary meant for liturgical use. The findings presented here corroborate this catalogue description. There is ample evidence of its heavy use, which indicates a public not a private setting. After a brief description of the manuscript, particularities of its content and appearance are discussed, all of which point to a small rural community, in Northern Greece, as its original owner and user. Together with introducing the codex, this article casts light on the Christian community that might have used it.

Scholars have debated how the themes discussed by Pomerius in his De vita contemplativa found ample resonance across Gregory the Great's work, and reflect similar concerns. While it is impossible to determine whether the Roman bishop read the treatise authored by the North African rhetor, their parallel authority on the matter was recognised by Carolingian copyists, who often reported their works alongside each other. The discovery of a glossa sourced from Gregory's literary production in Pomerius’ manuscript tradition might both substantiate this claim and shed some light on the networks of medieval scriptoria.

Irenaeus has tended to be a bit player in modern narratives of the Nestorian controversy. Where the count features in accounts of the church politics of the 430s, it is as an essentially ‘secular’ figure: a conduit to the palace and supplier of coercive force for Nestorius and his Syrian episcopal allies. This article argues that Irenaeus was much more directly involved in doctrinal debate and the maintenance of ecclesiastical alliances than has been appreciated. The theological engagement and startling career shifts of this imperial count-turned-heresiarch-turned-bishop exemplify the significance of elite Christian patronage and official doctrinal engagement in 430s Constantinople.

Scholars of late antique liturgy usually find the origins of baptismal imagery in the Bible and the daily life of early Christians. This article reveals that some metaphors, such as the ‘furnace’ image, may also come from pre-Christian literature. In ancient Greek and Mesopotamian sources, the female uterus is compared to a furnace. This article argues that, based on its use in pre-Christian literature, the furnace image might also be considered feminine. This image describes a broader range of activities in baptism than that ascribed to female agency until now and seems more empowering for today's women.

This article presents new manuscript evidence of one of the most widely read devotional texts of the Middle Ages – the Prayers and meditations (Orationes sive meditationes) of St Anselm, abbot of Le Bec and archbishop of Canterbury – to argue that some of these prayers were originally written and disseminated in the voice of a woman. Composed and copied in grammatically feminine forms, these prayers were, as I show here, deliberately designed to be used and recited by women. This new and hitherto completely overlooked evidence is transformative for our understanding of women's active voices in medieval cultures of devotion.

This paper explores the crisis of 596 which interrupted Augustine of Canterbury's mission to the Anglo-Saxons, necessitating his return to Rome. Bede's interpretation of this as a moment of psychological failure is discounted. Political changes in Merovingian Gaul associated with the death of Childebert are reconsidered. A new economic explanation is advanced based on the wording of Gregory the Great's letter of encouragement to Augustine and his fellow missionaries, consideration of the management of the papal estates in Gaul and the behaviour of Virgilius, metropolitan of Arles.

This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury's Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda's sources, the text's place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda's statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.

In 1120 Notre Dame of Paris received a fragment of the True Cross from a former canon, Ansel, who had joined the First Crusade and become cantor of the Holy Sepulchre. The history of the relic was sought out, documented, inserted into the liturgy and in time revised according to political and cultural developments. This article reconstructs the story of the relic's arrival in Paris, and the way in which, through the successive narratives attached to it, it slowly gained and grew in meaning, giving definition to the Church of Paris and ultimately to the kingdom of France.

In the second half of the ninth century, a new period of confrontation between the Armenian and Byzantine Churches began. The goal of Byzantine religious policy was the abolition of the independence of the Armenian Church and its unification with the imperial Church. In his letters addressed to the ecclesiastical and political leaders of Armenia, the patriarch Photios proposed that they abandon Monophysitism and accept Chalcedonianism. Under this religious veil were disguised the empire's real political, cultural and socio-economic goals. Although Photios could not achieve the final unification of the two Churches, his mission did bring about a temporary religious rapprochement between the Armenians and the Greeks.

Jacobean visitation articles reveal increasing anxiety about preserving sacred space and material things from profane use. New churches and churchyards were consecrated by novel rites as sacred space was increasingly prioritised and emphasised in visitation. More and more prelates labelled the church building ‘the house of God’. By 1612, the archbishop of Canterbury's metropolitical visitation articles identified ecclesiastical space and furniture, notably the communion table, as ‘consecrated’ to God. English prelates widely adopted this sacralising rhetoric. These innovations originate not in the prescriptions of avant-garde prelates awaiting the advent of Laud but more commonly in those of Reformed conformist bishops.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.

This article examines manuscript sermons to reveal how a Calvinist minister, Hugh Ramsden, preached predestination from his parish pulpit in the late 1620s. It shows how he adapted a scholarly work for this purpose, sought to balance inclusive and exclusive visions of the Christian community, and attempted to frame the doctrine as a comfort. By comparing two manuscripts for the same sermon, the extempore aspects of his live preaching are explored. Lastly, it considers the negotiation that allowed Hugh's like-minded brother, Henry, to continue with Calvinist preaching under the Laudian regime of Richard Neile in the 1630s.

This article revises interpretations of the post-Reformation English Chapel Royal as a place for the performance of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ forms of the Book of Common Prayer and establishes its importance as a space for negotiating Protestant royal worship. By detailed analysis of the sound and appearance of royal chapels under Elizabeth i and James vi & i the Chapel Royal is emphasised not for its anticipation of a Laudian ascendancy, but its sensitivity to the ceremonial boundaries of the reformed Church of England, and ability to negotiate a form of Protestant majesty in royal worship.

The article evaluates clerical professionalisation in the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by examining the division of labour within parishes. It argues that proponents of the Catholic Enlightenment endeavoured to achieve post-Tridentine reforms while also assigning to the clerical profession responsibilities for the material well-being of parishioners and service to the Commonwealth. It concludes that the process of clerical professionalisation remained incomplete. Firstly, approval for hiring assistant priests resulted in the delegation of many, if not all, ecclesiastical duties to them. Secondly, the improved professional education of priests occasionally led to unexpected withdrawal from pastoral duties seen as falling below their acquired competencies.

John Selden's 1642 edition and translation of an extract from a chronicle by Eutychius (Said ibn Batriq), the tenth-century Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, can be considered the first Arabic book printed in England. This article examines the early reception of Selden's Eutychius in the European republic of letters, exploring the ways in which its testimony about the early Alexandrian Church contributed to scholarly debates over episcopacy against the backdrop of the English Revolution. In doing so it demonstrates how Selden's edition made Eutychius a touchstone in seventeenth-century confessional disputes over ecclesiastical history while attracting readers in England and abroad.

This article explores the ways that ecclesiastical record books produced by national and local Church courts in Scotland were bound up in the contests for legitimacy around the Scottish Revolution. The article argues that adherents to the National Covenant used paper record books and the practices that surrounded them, as well as their printed output, to legitimise their protest movement and to attack their opponents. Reconstructing the Church in paper represented an essential part of the Covenanters’ protest, reconstructing the Church after the fall of episcopacy.

This article assesses the relationship between the first four bishops of the English Mission in Korea, Japanese colonial rule and the Korean independence movement from 1905 to 1945. It is proposed that the bishops attempted to walk a precarious tightrope between the demands of the colonial government, bent on assimilating Korea, including the Churches, and the ardent aspirations of Koreans, including Christians, who sought to resist colonial rule. The authors conclude that this was a complicated policy which they did not always pull off but one which can be judged as successful overall.

This article notes the appearance of the same sermons on Romans viii.15–16 in the nineteenth-century editions of both James Ussher and Richard Sibbes. It explores the sources on which these editions rest and the publication history of The saints cordials, the contents of which were too uncritically accepted by Sibbes's nineteenth-century editor, A. B. Grosart. Manuscript evidence is employed to argue that three items in Grosart's edition of Sibbes should be attributed to Ussher, and the provenance of a further eleven is questioned. The article concludes with a survey of the appearance of the disputed material in modern Sibbes scholarship.

This article describes John Wesley's evolving visions of Christian singleness (celibacy) and three commitments related to his changing views: a commitment to celibacy in an Oxford college; a commitment to marriage with Mary Vazeille; a de facto commitment to single life after Mary's separation from him. Protestant Churches lacked structures to support celibate commitment, structures that might have discouraged his unguarded and intimate correspondence with married women that lay behind his separation from Mary. The article asks why Protestants, although formally allowing single life, have not found ways to honour commitments to it.

The Lutheran minority in Warsaw celebrated the 100th anniversary of its magnificent classicist church in 1881, under Russian rule, when the parish was predominantly culturally German; and the 150th anniversary in 1931/2, during the Second Polish Republic, when the clergy were to a large extent Polish-speaking. This article compares these two jubilees to show acts of commemoration as a tool, steering religious bonds and social identification, whether or not consciously. It highlights the social, ‘terrestrial’ aspects of the functioning of confessional minorities, showing how the community was constantly reinvented through common memory.