On 10 October 1216, eight days before his death, King John sent instructions to Walter de Lacy, sheriff of Hereford, by letters patent:

Know that for the sake of God we have conceded to Margaret de Lacy three carucates of land to be assarted and cultivated in our forest of Aconbury, to build there a certain religious house for the souls of William de Braose her father, Matilda her mother and William her brother. And we instruct you to assign those three carucates of land in the aforesaid forest to the same Margaret.

For the historian of King John, this concession indicates that the king was at last prepared to restore to his favour the Braoses and the Lacys, Welsh Marcher lords and barons of Ireland, who had spectacularly fallen from favour in 1208. Yet for the historian of the military orders and of monastic orders in general, it marks the beginning of a relationship between a patron and a religious house which gives a valuable insight into how that relationship could go badly wrong.

St Simon Stock is an elusive thirteenth-century Carmelite saint of whom it may be said that very little is known but about whom much has been written. The details of his life and even the fact of his existence have aroused considerable controversy over the centuries. In part the lack of firm information could be attributed to the fact that, until recently, the early history of the Carmelites, or Whitefriars, was little known and clouded by legendary claims about the order being founded on Mount Carmel by the prophet Elijah. In addition, church historians have tended to focus on the larger and better documented Franciscan and Dominican orders. The Carmelites, although numerically fewer, were nevertheless a significant presence in medieval England comprising at their peak some thirty-nine communities and a total approaching 1,000 friars. Fortunately, in the past few years, the quantity of published research on Carmelite history has increased significantly.

Early in 1629 one Peter Shaw, an obscure London preacher, appeared before the Court of High Commission. While the records of the court for the relevant period have been lost, it seems clear from a later case that Shaw was both convicted and suspended. For, speaking in 1631, during proceedings against the antinomian, Samuel Pretty, Laud claimed that he

spake the less in this cause (as he intimated) because there had been so much said against these same and the like tenets in the causes of one [Robert] Townes and one Mr Shaw, which Mr Shaw, though the said bishop of London hath in public declared he should never have to do by his consent in this diocese, yet no place, said the bishop, will serve him but he must needs have admittance in London and he came to me for admittance, which I purpose, never, God willing, to grant.

During the period immediately prior to Shaw's prosecution the authorities had launched an investigation into his activities and opinions, one that involved over two dozen witnesses whose testimony appears to have been condensed into a single dossier, which survives in the state papers for March 1628/9. The three documents contained in that dossier – a set of court articles, notes from two of Shaw's sermons and a letter allegedly written by one of his supporters – are reproduced below.

We state as a fact, which we have received, on what we deem undoubted authority, that the Puseyite party have bought up the BRITISH CRITIC, which publication accordingly will from henceforth be dedicated to the promulgation of their principles: The Record, 1 Jan. 1838

This article focuses on the Tractarian takeover and subsequent control of the British Critic, a politically and theologically conservative quarterly periodical, between 1838 and 1843. In doing so it claims several justifications. Firstly, and primarily, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Critic within first-generation Tractarianism and therefore to rehabilitate an extensive periodical journalism as a vital yet neglected source for historians of the movement. Though various Tractarians such as Richard Hurrell Froude, John Henry Newman, John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey had all written for the British Magazine and William Sewell regularly for the Quarterly Review in the early 1830s, it was the Critic which came to serve as the principal medium for the movement's commentary. Historians' neglect of this commentary, it is suggested, has had important consequences in terms of our understanding of Tractarianism, for it has served to marginalise certain aspects of the movement's early thought – in particular the social criticism which was a consistent feature of the Critic's pages.

Every ecclesiastical historian knows, or, dare I say, should know, Lucien Febvre's incisive and polemical article, ‘Une question mal posée’, first published in 1929, in which, beginning with a critique of recent work on the origins of the Reformation, the author ended by calling ecclesiastical history into question. The aim of this article is to place this famous article in context by examining Febvre's main contributions to the history of the Church, or as he preferred to say, the history of religion. Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) was a prolific writer and, although he has not been studied as intensively as his junior colleagues Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, his scholarly work has often been discussed. A bibliography published in 1990 listed 2,143 items either by or about Febvre which had been published up to that time. Since the history of religion was one of Febvre's main interests, it follows that this article will have to be rigorously selective, discussing his major contributions to the field together with a few studies of his achievement.

In order to give some sense of his intellectual development, Febvre's books and articles on religious history will be discussed in chronological order of publication, before any attempt at an assessment of his reception, cool or warm, or the significance of his work. These books and articles appeared in three clusters, published in 1901–11, 1925–30, and 1941–9 respectively.