On Monday 23 May 550 a directive was issued by the Emperor Justinian to John, metropolitan bishop of Anazarbus in Cilicia Secunda. Another directive, cast in corresponding terms, was sent to Cosmas, bishop of Mopsuestia (the present day Misis, seventeen miles east of Adana in southern Turkey) in the same province. ‘We indicate to your holiness”, he writes to John, ‘that you are to convene all the most-religious bishops of your synod; you are to repair to the town of Mopsuestia and make a detailed examination, with the senior men (whether clerics or laity), there established, foregathering, and learn from them whether they know the date when Theodore's name was removed from the diptychs.” If the senior persons in question do not know the answer, the fact is to be expressly recorded and the diptychs themselves are to be duly checked. Into the events leading up to this directive I will not now enter. It must suffice to recall that the setting was the so-called Three Chapters Controversy: what to do about Nestorius' precursors Theodore and Diodore, about Theodoret's writings against Cyril of Alexandria's twelve Anathematisms and the Letter of Ibas to Maris. On these matters the Council of Chalcedon had been indecisive. A hundred years after that council, it looked to many people, the emperor included, as if a few modest addenda to the council's decisions, amounting, perhaps, to nothing more than explications of its mind on Nestorius and his school, would put an end to the painful disunity of eastern Christendom.

At Rouen on a certain day, the people who had undertaken to go on that expedition [that is, the First Crusade] under the badge of the cross began to complain to one another, ‘After traversing great distances, we desire to attack the enemies of God in the East, although the Jews, of all races the worst foes of God, are before our eyes. That's doing our work backward.’ Saying this and seizing their weapons, they herded the Jews into a certain place of worship, rounding them up by either force or guile, and without distinction of sex or age put them to the sword. Those who accepted Christianity, however, escaped the impending slaughter.

In 1979, in a study of the ‘inquisitors of heretical depravity” and their work against heresy in medieval Germany, I urged rethinking of the term ‘the Inquisition” and the concept behind it. There is no clear evidence, I argued, that people in medieval Europe used either inquisitio or officium inquisitionis with reference to an agency or institution. The former term was used for specific trials following inquisitorial procedure, while the latter was essentially parallel to officium predicationis, and referred to the office or function of an individual inquisitor, not to an institutional structure. Furthermore, I argued that there is no reason to suppose there actually was an institution in medieval Europe to which the term ‘the Inquisition” might meaningfully be assigned. Heresy inquisitors during the Middle Ages were not held together by a structure of inquisitorial authority, which could ensure vigorous action, procedural regularity, or interaction of members. ‘In these circumstances”, I tentatively concluded, ‘it would perhaps be advisable to avoid speaking of even papal inquisitors as if they formed a suprapersonal agency, or an Inquisition.”

When Jean Lemaire de Belges composed his Traité de la différence des schismes et des conciles de l'eglise in 1511, the purpose of the text was to support Louis XII in his struggle with Pope Julius II, to promote the conciliar ideology which the French king was exploiting, and in general to set Christian kings and emperors in favourable contrast with the popes of Rome. Read beside vernacular texts by other authors – Jean Bouchet, Pierre Gringore, Jean Marot, Jean d'Auton – who were writing during France's war with Julius II, it appears more effective propaganda and in some ways bolder and more far-reaching. However, the contrast is not sufficient to mark its author out as heterodox in comparison with the rest, two of whom, Bouchet and Gringore, were later to attack Lutheranism with some vigour. Lemaire's text established itself as an acceptable Gallican–monarchical view of history. It sold well and was printed twice in both 1511 and 1512. It continued to be printed after the crisis which produced it had abated. Increasingly it was included in the collections of Lemaire's works which remained popular long after the author himself dropped out of public view in about 1515. As the Lutheran Reformation developed readers brought new perceptions to the text, and we may deduce a sharpened sense of its relevance from a new edition which appeared in Lyons in 1532. Romain Morin published the text in a new small format, and with a new title, Le Promptuaire des conciles de l'eglise catholique, avec les scismes et la difference d'iceulx. The text itself was very little modified. Morin himself reissued the Promptuaire in 1533 and ten years later Paris printers took it up, showing that the text continued popular in France into the 1550s, when it was finally placed on the Sorbonne's list of forbidden books.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a major rift within the ranks of English Catholicism. Following the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850, the Ultramontanes began to consolidate their hold on the channels of ecclesiastical authority. Led by the flamboyant Nicholas Wiseman, they began to dominate the newly established English Catholic hierarchy, supported in their efforts by a tide of Irish immigrants, a reservoir of talented and dedicated priests trained at the English College in Rome and a wave of Oxford converts who, in the wake of the Gorham case, thirsted for a fount of unswerving ecclesiastical authority. The domination of the Ultramontanes, both in England and on the continent, meant that Liberal Catholicism was decidedly on the defensive, seeking to combat a rising tide of intellectual and scientific. intolerance. The period from mid-century until the promulgation of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 was a crucial one in this struggle for intellectual autonomy. It was marked by several events which placed the emerging concepts and theories of scientific inquiry in direct conflict with the authority of the Church as is most sharply demonstrated in the convoluted and intense debate which came to be focused upon an ancient Christian artifact, the ampolle di sangue or the phials of blood.

The church of Exeter, although geographically remote from the centres of royal and ecclesiastical power in England, was in the twelfth century in no way isolated. The rule of the important royal clerk and ambassador, William de Warelwast (1107–37), destroyed its provincialism and much of its archaism; and in the second half of the century a connection with the church of Salisbury led to the influx of some interesting men. It may be that the intimate relationship with Canterbury, inaugurated by the election of Bartholomew, Archbishop Theobald'sformer clerk, to Exeter in 1161, and repaid by the final location of the Exeter clerk Baldwin on the primatial throne in 1184, was the more rewarding for both. But the seemingly largely one-way contribution of Salisbury to Exeter is just as interesting.