The First Crusade was such an important event with such amazing consequences that it is hardly surprising that an enormous amount of ink has been spent on discovering the reasons why enthusiasm for it was so widespread. Much effort has been spent on examining factors which preconditioned the men of the eleventh century to welcome Urban's appeal in 1095–6. Broadly speaking it has been supposed that the wars against Islam in Spain accustomed men to the notion of Holy War, while the growing authority of the Church in the age of reform predisposed them to obey their spiritual directors – early evidence of this was the Peace and Truce of God first proclaimed by the bishops and clergy of France. Papal initiative in supporting the reconquest of Islamic Sicily and ‘corrupt’ England, and the influence of papal ideas about the militia Christi refined and developed by Anselm of Lucca reinforced the point. The Church threw its authority behind pilgrimage, the great manifestation of the popular piety of the age which was intimately allied to devotion to relics of saints and the cult of their sacred places. The most sacred of all places, and therefore the greatest of pilgrimages, was that to Jerusalem. It was the spiritual reward for this journey to Jerusalem which Urban 11 offered for those going on the expedition of 1095. These factors have always been the substance of discussion and were systematically analysed by Erdmann in a book which remains the basis of scholarly discussion to this day.

Simon Langham, archbishop of Canterbury and former abbot of Westminster, was made cardinal priest of St Sixtus by Urban v on 22 September 1368. Resigning Canterbury, he joined the pope in Italy, formally entering on his duties at Montefiascone on 24 May 1369. He returned with the pope to Avignon in late 1370. In early 1371 he was employed by Pope Gregory XI as a legate in France, England and the Low Countries but by April 1373 was rejoining the curia. After that he lived continuously in Avignon until his death on 22 July 1376, though little is known about his activities. At the curia like all cardinals he maintained a household. The aim of this study is to discuss who were its members, to consider their recruitment and careers and to ask a few questions about Langham's patronage.

One of the most problematic tasks which the historian must address is the assessment of people's opinions and the motives for their actions. There is violent disagreement about the opinions of individuals for whom there exist extensive archives of correspondence, whose ideas are recorded in numerous printed works and whose political associations and circles of friends help to disclose their views. How much more difficult then to assess the motives of a man for whom such sources are very slight, whose ideas are set out in the shortest of polemical tracts, and whose opinions, when assembled, seem to represent a mass of contradictions? Such a man was Benjamin Carier whose change of religious opinions and notorious conversion to Rome are the subject of this article. He was a chaplain to James i but his beliefs were not fully attuned to those of the Jacobean clerical establishment and he decided towards the end of his life to embrace Roman Catholicism. He was apparently just a minor churchman whose early promise was never fulfilled and who changed horses out of pique at his enemies' dominance in the Church of England. His conversion in 1613 caused a brief stir but in less than a year he was dead. His influence in the established Church is uncertain; his real doctrinal beliefs appear to be lost or polemicised beyond the point where they can be used to analyse his transfer of religious allegiance.

St Radegund, a sixth-century royal ascetic who relinquished her position as the wife of a Frankish king and established a convent in Poitiers, is today a rather obscure French local saint. Yet in the nineteenth century, as a result of the tireless promotion of her cult by Édouard Pie, bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880, St Radegund was widely invoked in France as ‘la sainte reine de la France’ and ‘la mère de la patrie’. Her wonder-working tomb, a popular devotional site in the Middle Ages, offered cures and Pie saw to it that the pilgrim trains to Lourdes made an obligatory prayer-stop at Poitiers. This article analyses devotion to St Radegund during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and explores some of the religious and political connotations of the cult of this royal saint. The development of the cult is particularly significant for it allows us to see, reflected on the local level, something of the larger struggle for national self-definition that was taking place in nineteenth-century French society as royalists contended with Bonapartists and republicans, clericals waged war against secularists and the ultramontanes sought to rouse their fellow countrymen in support of Pius IX.

This winning and much-quoted declamation, made in Oxford in 1908 by G. H. Frodsham, the Anglican bishop of North Queens-land, enshrines the aura of romance which has ever since surrounded the Australian bush brotherhoods. The attraction of this form of community life, especially to younger English clergy, lay in its spirit of adventure and in the once magnetic appeal to empire loyalty: duty and sacrifice, for a limited term, in a not too foreign land.