The development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin has a long history. This article deals with a small but important segment of this development, by providing some account of what was at stake and of the main stages by which the contest was fought out, principally within the Dominican Order, between 1515 and 1551.

The development here considered is really sandwiched between two Councils, the Fifth Lateran on the one hand, and Trent on the other, at which the thought of settling a very contentious issue was first entertained and then dismissed. The need for a settlement became apparent in the fifteenth century when the increasing popularity of the doctrine exacerbated the longstanding rivalry between the Franciscans, its principal devotees, and the Dominicans, its traditional opponents. Pope Sixtus IV went some way towards satisfying the Immaculists by the constitution Cum praeexcelsa of 1476, but the constitution Grave nimis of 1483 gave some satisfaction to their opponents, because it explicitly stated that, in the case of this doctrine, the Church had not yet made up its mind.

Popular and elite are imprecise terms, but it may be possible to give them a closer definition by relating them to categories in the work of John Henry Newman. In 1877, Newman was growing old. He was republishing his Anglican writings, both to preserve what they contained of value and to draw what poison remained. A particular difficulty attached to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published forty years before, in 1837, which classically defined the peculiar merit of the Church of England as occupying a middle way or via media between Romanism and popular Protestantism. The work contained some sharp attacks on Rome, which Newman had retracted even before his Roman conversion. There remained, however, a particular matter which had long been an obstacle to his submission to Rome, his conviction that the honours which Roman Catholics paid to the Virgin and saints derogated from the unique worship due to Christ, which Newman combined with a fastidious distaste for the more ‘unmanly’ and sentimental or sugary aspects of modern Catholic devotion.

When Anglican missionaries helped to constitute the Chinese Anglican Church (Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui) in 1912, they had a particular expectation of how the church would one day become self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating. The first constitution crafted by missionary bishops presupposed an infant church that would require the step-by-step guidance of its parent association. However, the intended trajectory was superseded by the zeal of Chinese Christians and drastic changes in the national government of China. The constitutional basis of the Chinese Anglican Church had to be restructured fundamentally again and again due to political upheaval in republican China, the Japanese occupation and the Communist revolution. This article explores the difficulties of crafting and implementing church constitutions in China in the first half of the turbulent twentieth century. Focusing on the South China diocese, wider questions are posed about the formation of canon law in an age of extremes.