Coronations, grand royal entrances and the ceremonies of royal burials were public manifestations of the ‘sacra maiestas regia’. The Polish ceremonies had close parallels in other European monarchies, and also their own special features. The rites formed a symbolic drama with social and political overtones; they were needed to preserve order in the human community. Recent studies in this region have brought interesting results, especially when seen in a long perspective of time and with due contemplation of the mentality and attitudes behind the outward show.

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the so-called renaissance in Morean studies in recent years has been to provide the historiography with a new focus, namely the phase of More's career that begins in the aftermath of Utopia (1516) and concludes with his imprisonment in 1534. Hitherto, interest in that period was confined largely to the domestic scene celebrated in Holbein's famous portrait and drawings, the household at Chelsea as a centre of humanist culture, Christian piety and cosy family virtue. Yet this was the period of More's public career in which he served as a councillor to Henry vm and in a number of major administrative posts before his elevation to succeed Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529. It was also the period in which he assumed a leading role in the campaign against the Reformation in England, partly as a prosecutor of heresy on behalf of the Crown, but more spectacularly as a polemicist, specifically commissioned by the Church to defend orthodox doctrine against the challenge of the reformers – a task on which he expended some million words in the period between his tract against Luther in 1523 and the changed circumstances which induced a more devotional literary mode in the much acclaimed Tower Works.

Hatred of popery was hardly a puritan monopoly in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century England. The conviction that the pope was Antichrist was something of a commonplace amongst Protestant Englishmen. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the terms in which the identification was established and asserted. The supposed link between such concerns and a ‘millenarian’ radicalism has quite rightly been challenged, most notably by Dr Bauckham. It remains true, of course, that sensitivity towards the extent and nature of the popish threat was a hallmark of puritanism. The consequences of this, however, were ambiguous. The conviction of the reality and pervasiveness of the popish threat undoubtedly prompted much of the puritan critique of the established Church. Certainly, the rhetoric of Antichrist played a crucial role in puritan denunciations of the corruptions of the English Church. But such denunciations drew much of their polemical force from the fact that the premise on which they were based – the antichristian nature of popery – was generally accepted by English Protestants. For the whole strength of the puritans’ case rested on their ability to present their position as but the logical extension to the area of church polity and ceremony of positions readily accepted in the realm of doctrine. Even the most committed Presbyterians accepted that the doctrine of the established Church was unequivocally Protestant. For the immediate polemical purposes of Presbyterians this provided a powerful argument for a parallel and equally thorough reformation of church polity and discipline. Taking a longer perspective and in the face of the threat from Rome, such considerations served to underline the ties of common interest and identity that bound puritans to the national Church.

For English Catholics the eighteenth century has justifiably been termed ‘the age of Challoner’, because Richard Challoner, vicar apostolic of the London District between 1758 and 1781, left a distinctive mark on the character of the English Catholic Church through his long period in office at a formative period and through his many popular spiritual books and pamphlets. Challoner's pre-eminence has tended to diminish the stature of all other bishops appointed as vicars apostolic to the four districts in England and Wales during the course of the century. The only other vicar apostolic who came close to Challoner was the Benedictine monk, Charles Walmesley, a near-contemporary and coadjutor in the Western District from 1756 to 1764, when he became vicar apostolic of that district until his death in 1797. Although Walmesley's published works were far fewer than Challoner's, they demonstrated a wider range of interests and a more original mind. For, while Challoner has often been taken as the representative eighteenth-century English Catholic clergyman, the main feature of his mind, a dread of innovation, prevented him from tuning his theology to the new world of eighteenthcentury scientific and philosophical enquiry.

Was non-residence in benefices necessarily an abuse? It was an old problem, usually linked with pluralities, and even if the Councils of Constance and Basel had done nothing about it, non-residence had been denounced by Gerson, by Panormitanus and by Denys the Carthusian; it remained a live issue in the later fifteenth century. An interesting discussion of the subject emerges from the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83) with his father and brother, successive rulers of Mantua. It raises points of wider importance than the particular matters at stake and throws some light upon relations between the Italian powers and the papacy over Church appointments; in Italy there was no Pragmatic Sanction, and appointments would often depend upon official request and more or less informal ways and means of accommodation with the Roman court. It is, however, not only about appointment to, and absenteeism from, major benefices, but also minor ones. In the absence of any general treatment in depth of the subject, these documents contribute some specific and important evidence about practical problems and attitudes in Italian ecclesiastical life. Resentment in the small Lombard principality of Mantua towards non-resident ‘foreigners’ and papal reservations, professions of concern about pastoral standards and the social standing of the local clergy are among other themes which emerge; not least remarkable is that the cardinal's viewpoint as revealed in the correspondence was sometimes distinctly different from that of the lay rulers, in spite of his being their close relative and top-level agent in the papal court.