Of the literary bequest from the Middle Ages, homilies provide one of the more useful tools in helping us to understand the medieval mind, at least from the perspective of the Church. Homilies provide us with insight on a number of levels, extending well beyond the personal viewpoint of those who wrote and preached them. They also clearly reflect the values, aspirations, and concerns of an era. Homilies are particularly valuable, especially if one has them in large numbers, because they are generally addressed to people of both genders, of all ages, and from every stratum of society. This is especially true of the large corpus of homilies attributed to Bishop Caesarius of Arles who directed his attention to both laity and clergy of all ranks with the aim of encouraging reading in order to promote literacy and divine wisdom. The Caesarian homiliary that survives from the early Middle Ages, is an enviable collection of documents.: one need only consider the scarcity of this type of source for contemporary Visigothic Spain. Homilies did exist in that period in Spain, but the ravages of time and man have caused so much to disappear.

The Virgin Mary was a powerful and evocative figure around whom the competing religious parties of Victorian Britain arrayed their forces. She was at the forefront of controversy whenever Scottish and English Protestants clashed with Irish Catholics, and whenever evangelicals attempted to purge the Church of England of ritualism. Roman Catholic leaders placed the cult of the Virgin at the centre of their campaign to evangelise Britain after 1840. This article analyses the development of Marian Catholicism in Victorian Britain, and considers Anglo-Catholic and Protestant responses to the growth of the Marian cult.

The creation in North America of the first overseas diocese of the Church of England was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable and unlikely of the changes in British colonial policy which resulted from the American Revolution. Before the war, the Anglican campaign for the appointment of colonial bishops had been a major reason for the colonial fear of British tyranny; many Americans, particularly Nonconformists, vigorously protested against a scheme which they saw as a bid to recreate a Laudian ecclesiastical tyranny. But the post-war colonial policy envisaged the colonial bishop as a focus of political stability and loyalty. The new prestige and political responsibility accorded by the government to the Church was equally remarkable in view of the government's Erastian suppression of Convocation since 1715 and its politic responsiveness to Dissenting sensibilities. Despite occasional outbreaks of clerical frustration at the Church's inability to act independently, the Church of England had been unable to escape this political domination. This paper will attempt to explain why, given the government's prior hostility to the design, ministries in the 1780s should have decided to extend the church hierarchy to the colonies.