Is the era of the reference book coming to an end? Publishers evidently don't think so. Not only have we seen an explosion in the number of handbooks, companions and dictionaries produced by the mainstream academic press in recent years, but even older, well-established ‘brands’ continue to flourish. Here is the fourth edition of Oxford University Press's ‘flagship’ Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC), considerably expanded and revised from the third edition. Yet although libraries continue to buy works such as this, and academic colleagues to use them and refer to them, students often – if my experience is anything to go by – prefer the easier, cheaper, faster route of online sourcing, and particularly Wikipedia. A review of this edition of the ODCC has to reckon, then, not only with evaluating the content of the work itself, but, more sharply than perhaps was necessary before, with the questions of who exactly is likely to use it, and how it stands up in comparison with the competition.

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 essay examines the historical and intellectual significance of the Dutch Doopsgezind-Collegiant poet Gesine Brit. It reconstructs the historical background that led to the writing of a religious-political poem that Brit penned in 1705 to denounce the persecutions suffered by her religious companions in Groningen at the hands of the local religious and civil authorities. It then offers both an examination of its content and its first English translation. It demonstrates that Brit belonged to a tradition of Nonconformist intellectuals who contributed to shaping Dutch Enlightenment culture, thus expanding the canon of political writing to include women and their poetry.

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.

The 1814 memoir of missionary wife Harriet Newell was important for awakening the early nineteenth-century American Evangelical imagination on behalf of the burgeoning missionary cause. As young women ‘read the self’ and patterned their lives according to the literary examples they encountered, Newell's memoir used the language of ‘usefulness’ as a powerful theological plot. This article hopes to address the lacuna of scholarship regarding the theological aspects of Newell's writing and how it was those aspects in particular which subsequent generations venerated in the creation of missionary wife memoirs.

Two contradictory tendencies mark the historiography of Christianity in South Africa. First, the country has been a rich crucible for important scholarship on Christianity. In a country where 80 per cent of the population currently claim Christian affiliation, it is not hard to imagine why this would be the case. The country has a centuries-old Christian presence, spanning the Protestantism of early Dutch settlers in the Cape to the many European and North American missionaries of all persuasions who descended upon South Africa in subsequent centuries (some estimated that the south-eastern region of Natal in the nineteenth century was the most missionised area in the world at that time). An equally great magnet for scholarship was the size and diversity of the independent church movement in South Africa – or those Christians who broke away from missionary oversight to form Black-led congregations, many affiliated with other Black Christian organisations in the Atlantic world. By the mid-century, thousands of churches labelling themselves as Zionist, Apostolic and Ethiopian filled South Africa and attracted a commensurately rich scholarship; many such studies focused on how Christianity was Africanised via the independent church movement. In a darker vein, a further impetus for scholarly interest was the way in which Protestantism was wielded by (some) Afrikaners to justify the apartheid regime. Unsurprisingly, this led to an expansive twentieth-century literature on state power and Christianity, both social scientific as well as theological. Finally, historical studies in general have tended to cluster more densely in South Africa than is the case for many other regions of the African continent – a phenomenon that is due to the country's thriving research scene and its many tertiary education institutions. Viewed from this perspective, the large number of histories of Christianity in South Africa should be seen as a smaller subset of the extensive scholarship on South Africa itself.

Stemming from a canonical commentary of Theodore Balsamon (1130s–1195), this article examines an underexplored Byzantine Christian practice: the consecration of virgins. It focuses on an unusual religious establishment, a parthenon, founded in Thebes by its metropolitan John Kaloktenes (1166–c.1190), which accommodated lay virgins to pursue asceticism without demonstrating monastic commitments. It investigates the practice's origins, development and significance in Byzantine religious heritage, highlighting Kaloktenes's innovative revival of the practice. This study offers a unique case for exploring Byzantine monasticism and ecclesiastical leadership, while also demonstrating the potential for integrating Byzantium into the religious movements of the contemporary Latin West.

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.

This article analyses a selection of archival material written by Paul Tillich, particularly his early parish sermons and sermons from World War I. Although the themes of ‘eternity’ and ‘the soul’ are rare in the early parish sermons and only appear in the context of death or suffering, they play a predominant role in the World War I sermons. This article suggests that this is because, for Tillich, suffering became the interpretative key. Through his sermons amidst the suffering and devastation of war Tillich employed what he called the immanent way of theology.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Thomas Kaufmann's The saved and the damned was first published in Germany in 2017. It was therefore one of many publications that year offered to mark the fifth centennial of Martin Luther nailing up his Ninety-Five Theses (quite possibly a legendary event, as the author notes). Kaufmann's work, now available in English translation, is an unapologetically blunt assertion that ‘In the beginning was Luther’ (p. 6). In this it is much the same as some other English-language scholarship from 2017, such as the monumental Oxford handbook of the Protestant Reformations, which also began with Luther. Although a comparatively recent entry in English-language Reformation scholarship, The saved and the damned has already generated academic discussion and was the focus of a panel at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in 2023.

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.

Bryan Mackey (1770–1847) was for years the unremarkable, unremarked rector of a rural parish in Gloucestershire. He has, however, the distinction of apparently being the first priest with African ancestry to be ordained into the Church of England and who then served his entire career in Britain. His life history raises questions about historical racism within the Church and the wider society.