Dispute about the authenticity of the Dialogues attributed to St Gregory the Great is not new. As long ago as 1551, when the New Learning had given birth to the critical study of texts, the Protestant humanist scholar Huldreich Coccius first challenged the traditional ascription of that work to Gregory, on the grounds that it differed from all the other works of the great pope and doctor, ‘in character, style of expression, seriousness and purpose’. There followed more than two centuries of controversy on this subject, coloured by confessional antagonism, with strong opinions expressed on both sides. The Benedictine scholars, Van Haeften, Mabillon, Ceillier and others, were particularly affronted by the challenge to the patristic authority of the Dialogues, which seemed also to be a challenge to their monastic loyalties. All that is known of the person and life of St Benedict, patriarch of Western monasticism, comes from the vivid biography presented in that book, and the book is generally acknowledged to have been a principal factor in the triumph of the Regula Benedicti as the general rule of monastic observance in medieval Europe.

On 20 November 1210, before a large crowd of spectators which had flocked to the market-place of Les Champeaux outside the Saint-Honoré Gate in Paris, the heretical Amalricians were burnt at the stake. Fire that day consumed ten men, of whom nine were certainly laicised priests, deacons and sub-deacons. Six days earlier, at the nearby church of St Honorius, they had been stripped of their clerical status and handed over for execution to the royal officials of the rex chrislianissimus, Philip Augustus. Indeed, from the time some three months beforehand that Master Ralph of Namur, discoverer of their existence and pseudo-convert to their beliefs, was instructed by his clerical superiors to infiltrate the sect – an act of ecclesiastical espionage which eventually delivered the Amalricians to the flames – a highly placed royal counsellor, the Hospitaller Brother Guerin, had been consulted immediately. For this was a matter of urgency, and not just to the Church.

Historians accept that the personality of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, was of central importance in determining the nature and objectives of his regime from 1547 to 1549. Unfortunately, they disagree about many aspects of that elusive character; it is therefore important to eradicate misapprehensions about Somerset's views from historical discussion. Vain, insensitive and lacking judgement in personal and political relationships, he yet retains the reputation of a politician concerned for the commonweal, whether from the motives of political calculation suggested by Michael Bush or the influence of Christian humanism detected by Brendan Bradshaw. Charlatan or Christian, the reputation of ‘the good duke’ shows astonishing resilience despite the quantities of cold water poured upon it by Sir Geoffrey Elton. To complicate matters, a misleading interpretation of Somerset's views on higher education, a central concern of the ‘commonwealth’ programme, appears to have become the accepted orthodoxy, making it even more difficult to discover Somerset's true character. This paper examines the origins, development and significance of that error and traces it to its source in a preoccupation typical of Tudor Protestantism.

The Counter-Reformation initiated a long period of growth in the numbers of the secular and religious clergy of Catholic Europe. Mario Rosa has observed that in Italy the clerical population reached its peak in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu described the peninsula as a ‘monk's paradise’, and that it declined thereafter as reformist governments attempted to curb the religious orders and restrict new ordinations to the priesthood. According to Rosa, in the early eighteenth century the Italian Church had a ‘plethora’ of poorly trained priests who lived on the meagre sums provided by their patrimony and sought to improve their lot by obtaining benefices and endowments. In spite of the efforts of the hierarchy to improve clerical education, Rosa continues, Italian seminaries lacked adequate resources to train the great numbers of clerics.Rosa's observations about the expanding ecclesiastical population before the mid-eighteenth century are borne out by statistical evidence to be found in the archive of the northern diocese of Novara, where numbers of secular or diocesan priests tripled between the early seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the composition of the Novarese priests and to test the applicability of Rosa's observations about the economic status and education of the Italian clergy to the diocese of Novara.