‘Because of the obedience by which I am bound to the Apostolic See…filially and obediently, I do not obey, I oppose, I rebel.’ The more we learn of Robert Grosseteste's achievements as theologian and scientist the less likely does it seem that he will be remembered in the future—as he used to be in the past—principally for this letter of defiance concerning papal provisions in the diocese of Lincoln. Yet the letter itself remains something of an enigma in spite of all the attention it has received from a long line of scholars. It may seem an unprofitable task to go gleaning in a field where workers like Maitland and Sir Maurice Powicke have helped with the harvest, but we would suggest that Grosseteste's direct refusal to obey an unambiguous papal command has never been adequately analysed from one obvious point of view—as an extreme instance of a classical problem of political theory, the right to resist an unjust command of a divinely ordained power.

Volume 241 in the Vatican Archive series of ‘Collectorie’ is described in de Loye's printed catalogue of the cameral materials as ‘Collectorie Patrimonii b. Petri’. This inadequate description may be responsible for the failure of historians to exploit the earliest surviving complete account-book for a province of the Papal States and probably the best source for the condition of the States at the opening of the Avignon period. This volume, which consists of sixty-six folios, is the account-book noting the revenue and expenditure of the papal province of the Tuscan Patrimony from August 1304 (a month after the death of Benedict XI) till April 1306 (ten months after the election of Clement V). It was kept by Lapo di Marzo, the Treasurer of the province, and his socius Bartolo ‘de Cepparello’. There are no other full accounts for a papal province before those of the same province covering the years 1312–4.

It is not generally known that solemn exequies were performed for Edward I at Poitiers in the presence of the pope, Clement V; that these exequies were the first exequies held in the curia for a king; that they supplied the model for the corresponding ceremonial in the office for the dead laid down in Ordo Romanus XIV which was composed by cardinal James Gaetano Stefaneschi; and that, furthermore, the liturgical details of a canonisation ceremony shown in the same Ordo Romanus (OR.) were modelled on the ceremonial actually observed at the canonisation of St. Thomas Cantelupe of Hereford in 1320. Lastly, attention must be directed to the apparently also unknown exequies solemnly performed for Edward III at Anagni on 3 September 1377, again in the presence of the pope, Gregory XI.

Edmund Lacy, a doctor of divinity in the University of Oxford, was translated by papal provision on 5 July 1420 from the see of Hereford to that of Exeter, vacant by the death of John Catrick at Florence at the Holy See. He was then aged about fifty, and he continued for thirty-five years as bishop of Exeter until his death at Chudleigh on 18 September 1455. Previously he had been a fellow of University College, Oxford, its bursar in 1396–7 and master in 1398–9. He appears to have kept a room in the college at an annual rent of one mark until 1406–7, and he maintained a fruitful association with the society until his death. His service of the king, both at home and abroad, was rewarded first with the bishopric of Hereford, to which he was consecrated at Windsor on 18 April 1417, in the presence of king Henry V, and then with the richer see of Exeter. He entered his diocese on 17 March 1422, not long before king Henry died. From then until his own death his absences were of the briefest.

History has not yet taken its full measure of Martin Butzer who must be adjudged as standing within the sphere of Reformed rather than Lutheran theology, not only because of his masterful influence on Calvin or Calvin's considerable influence on him, but because his pioneer work in Biblical hermeneutics and patristic study helped to shape the whole Reformed Church. If Luther's theology is to be interpreted over against the development of Western thought particularly in its medieval form, that of Butzer is to be understood in terms of the Catholic Church and patristic theology of the first six centuries, for here we have a great attempt to get behind medievalism and, as Calvin put it, writing from Strasburg, to restore the face of the ancient Catholic Church. In further contrast to the Lutheran position Butzer's theology is more broadly based on the teaching of Scripture. Ephesians, Galatians and the Johannine writings, for example, are interpreted together, and so the Biblical ideas of election and adoption into the Body of Christ are placed alongside the doctrines of rebirth and justification by faith, and they are thought into each other, while the ministry of the Gospel, as well as the Gospel itself, becomes a de fide matter. It was in line with this that, while Luther laid all the stress upon the Word of God, Butzer (to be followed by Calvin) invariably stressed the Word and Spirit in their inseparable conjunction.

In the Cosin Library at Durham there is preserved a MS. catalogue of its contents, written in bishop Cosin's lifetime (probably in 1669–70) and under his direction, which contains this entry:

‘Common Prayer Booke with my MS. Notes in the Margent made for Variations in the last new Liturgy, fol.’

Richard Baxter could never write for long without inserting some autobiographical reminiscence, some reference to his own experiences. The argument of his most serious works is relieved by such an illustration as ‘When I was young, I was wont to go up the Wrekin-Hill with great pleasure (being near my dwelling) and to look down on the country below me’; or ‘I cannot forget that in my youth…sometimes the morrice-dancers would come into the church in all their linen and scarfs, and antic-dresses, with morrice-bells jingling at their legs’; or ‘the case, as I remember, when I was a boy, our school was in, when we had barred out our master’; or ‘the raining of that grain about ten years ago in England…I tasted it, and kept some of it long, which fell on the leads of the church, and of the minister's house in Bridgnorth’; or ‘I never awaked since I had the use of memory, but I found myself coming out of a dream’. This autobiographic tendency Baxter himself might piously rationalise: ‘All these I mention as obliged to record the Mercies of my great Preserver to his Praise and Glory’; and ‘I find it convenient to remember what is past, and to insert the transcript of my own experiences, that I may fully try whether I have gone rationally and faithfully to work or not’. In fact, however, it is clear that he was fascinated by experience, and its strangeness, for its own sake; by life itself. In this, as in much else, he was a man of his age, which abounds in diaries, memoirs and autobiographies.

Nothing could be more fitting than to begin a Liturgical Review with a notice of Dr. Oscar Cullmann's Early Christian Worship (Studies in Biblical Theology No. 10. Pp. 124. London: S.C.M. Press, 1953. 8s.). The English book is in two parts: the first entitled ‘Basic Characteristics of the Early Christian Service of Worship’, being a translation of Urchristentum und Gottesdienst (Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1950); and the second, entitled ‘The Gospel according to St John and Early Christian Worship’, being a translation of Les Sacrements dans l'Evangile Johannique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1951). Part 1 occupies only thirty-six pages. Whatever it may have lost in argument through conciseness, it has gained in definiteness and clarity of statement. Dr. Cullmann summarily rejects the distinction commonly drawn between two types of early meeting for worship, one for ‘proclamation of the Word’, the other for the Eucharist. ‘In the service described by Justin, therefore, we are not dealing with a later development, for here the Eucharist and the other elements of worship, above all the proclamation of the Word, are bound up together. That was certainly the case from the beginning’ (30). Yet, if we take, in its plain and grammatical sense, Justin's account of a Baptism and of the Eucharist which follows it, it is not easy to find a reference to, or a place for, a proclamation of the Word of the kind described as forming part of the normal Sunday worship.