On 23 January 295 a young recruit named Maximilian, a Christian by religion and twenty-one years old, appeared in court before Dion, proconsul of Africa, in the town of Theveste in Numidia. He was accused of refusing a summons to serve in the Roman army. Maximilian was accompanied to court by his father, Fabius Victor, described in the record as a temonarius, i.e. ‘an agent who collected the temo, or tax levied for the outfitting of military recruits’; the latter was obliged to present his son for army service if he could not find another suitable recruit. Maximilian, although pressed by the proconsul to submit himself to the formalities leading to induction into the army, stubbornly resisted and was finally sentenced to death. His execution followed immediately.

In any evaluation of the character and accomplishments of the English Reformation, an essential ingredient must be a sympathetic but, so far as possible, objective assessment of the nature – in all its strengths and weaknesses – of the unreformed Church and religion upon which the Reformation was wrought. Among the multifarious operations of the pre-Reformation Church, perhaps the most central to its fundamental purposes was the conduct by its clergy of the worship of God and the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, as effected on the small scale by the parish clergy and on the grand scale by the priests and clerks of the greater collegiate churches and the religious of the monasteries. As acts of worship, commemoration and intercession, the efficacy of these rituals lay in the simple fact of their enactment by those to whom their conduct was committed, irrespective of the grandeur of the setting or the presence or absence of any congregation or other attendance. Nevertheless, credit both terrestrial and celestial was perceived to redound upon those institutions which endeavoured to clothe their acts of devotion and worship with the finest products that the artisans of the day could create, within the grandest achievements of their contemporary architects. In respect of the conduct of the liturgy, it was, in the event, those institutions which had carried these arts to their highest levels that eventually proved to be the principal casualties of the Reformation process; a period of less than fifteen years (1535–49) sufficed to effect the extinction of all the monastic churches, and of all the collegiate churches except for some thirty which enjoyed cathedral status, academic function or extremely close royal connection.

It appeareth (I saye) what an exacte lyfe the trew lyfe of a Christian is: which is a continuall resistance of all sinne, bothe in thought, word and deede, and a performance or exercise of all good woorkes, that possiblie he can deuise to doe.

God requireth at our handes, that we should make his lawes and preceptes our studie and cogitations: that we should think of them continuallie, & meditate vpon them bothe day and night, at home and abrode, early & late, when we go to bedde, and when we rise in the morning: this is his commaudement, & there is no dispensation therin.

At a time when European missionaries were active in the New World to capture the souls of the ‘heathen’ for Catholicism, their confrères were conducting missions throughout Europe itself. For more than two centuries these missions – variously known as internal, parish or popular – were a crucial aspect of religious life, with numerous religious orders and congregations seeking to weave a fabric of evangelisation and catechetical instruction in areas of Europe that were nominally Catholic but were in many ways cut off from orthodox Tridentine Catholicism. This was particularly so in isolated areas on the European periphery. Southern Italy is a case in point. The persistent absence of an efficient parish structure and the dominance of a rather worldly collegiate clergy in the Kingdom of Naples left a large gap in organised religious life in the years following the end of the Council of Trent (1563), a gap that the missions attempted to fill. The mobilisation of preachers, confessors and instructors was vast, concentrated and unceasing. Such is the significance of the missions that they have been identified as the ‘most characteristic and important’ phenomenon of Italian religious history in the seventeenth century. One way to examine their scale and impact would be to map the areas missionised by the various congregations. But this serial approach would tell us very little, other than the fact that all of the towns and villages were visited, most of them repeatedly, over the centuries. Moreover, the varying quality of the surviving records would permit only partial results.