The object of this article is to describe the social and theological setting of primitive Montanism within second-century Asia in order to account for its appearance and its subsequent condemnation. According to an anonymous source employed by Eusebius the prophecy appeared in the middle of the second century under the leadership of a recent convert called Montanus, and the faithful of Asia gathered and condemned the movement at its outset. Clearly this is a propagandist account but we may accept its broad outlines none the less, in that there was a prophetic movement in which Montanus was a prime mover, and which failed to receive acceptance in the wider Asian Church.

It should be made clear that this article restricts itself to the earliest period of the prophecy and therefore to primary sources which are directly germane to that period. These sources are both preserved by Eusebius, and consist of an unnamed writer known as the anonymous, and an otherwise unknown Apollonius. A further possibly ancient source is employed by Epiphanius, but we shall observe below that its understanding of prophecy is hardly consistent with a second-century Asian origin, whereas both the anonymous and Apollonius reveal their Asian provenance in their extant writings. Although there is a degree of bias in the presentation of the charges, we should none the less accept that there is a factual basis behind the assertions of the opponents, and that their opposition was motivated by a genuine belief that the prophecy did not conform with the tradition and the succession of the Church.

According to the Byzantine scholar Andronicus Callistus, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks on 29 May 1453 was a cataclysm of such magnitude that it was mourned not only by the Greeks, but by people of every nation. This may sound like the type of rhetorical flourish with which Byzantine authors were fond of adorning their works, yet recent scholarship has tended, if anything, to corroborate Callistus' assertion. Over the past few years, historians of the crusades have been largely successful in showing that the fifteenth century, far from witnessing the decline of the crusading ideal, was a period when it remained as potent as ever, even in a country as far removed from the main theatres of action as England. Consequently, the fall of such an important Christian city was greeted with shock and anger throughout western Europe, and for the rest of the century the burning question for crusading strategists was how the disaster could be reversed.

It is of course true that no large-scale expedition was ever launched against the Turks after 1453, the efforts of successive popes ultimately failing to organise a united Christian response. Yet this does not detract from the overwhelming evidence that all sections of western society took the threat posed to Christendom very seriously, and continued to believe that to take up arms against the infidel was one of the highest acts of piety.

Jean Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian religion, wrote that ‘there is a twofold government of man; one aspect is spiritual…the second is political…. There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority’. He emphasised this further by stating that ‘we must keep in mind that distinction which we previously laid down so that we do not (as commonly happens) unwisely mingle these two, which have a completely different nature’. The idea of the separation of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions was, of course, no post-Reformation innovation but had been a theme over centuries of conflict between popes and secular princes throughout Europe. With the fragmentation of western Christendom in the sixteenth century, the issue came to prominence within individual states, not least Scotland. As early as 1559, during the civil war which led to the Reformation, a letter to the regent, Mary of Guise, from ‘the professouris of Christis ewangell’ mentioned two ‘kingdomes’. It asserted that there was ‘ane kingdome temporall’ and ‘Christis kingdome’, the Kirk, and that the former ought to be ruled by ‘mortell men’ and the latter by Christ alone. The regent was described as ‘ane servand and na quein havand na preheminence nor authoritie above the kyrk’.

Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous, woman of her age. For much of the 1870s and 1880s she promoted the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She became a vice- president of the National Secular Society, the members of which thought almost as highly of her as they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president. In 1889, however, she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became president of the Theosophical Society, the members of which again revered her almost as much as they did its prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from the materialist atheism of the secularists to the New Age thought of the theosophists. All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable to recover any coherence in her activities within the secularist, Fabian and theosophical movements. Indeed, they have spoken of her many lives, as though she wandered aimlessly, if enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no guiding theme whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life, they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she did, but rather to her hidden needs, such as to follow a dominant man or to exercise her powers. They turn to her emotional make-up to explain her final flight from reason, and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope to represent Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with her secularism, Fabianism and theosophy, was very much of her time, for whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped by a religious movement to make Britain a truly Christian nation and a political movement to make Britain a democratic nation, the later part of her reign took its shape from the need to find both a faith capable of surviving the rationalist onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended franchise had failed to solve.

Spain in the sixteenth century was not exempt from the movements of reform sweeping over Europe. Its enthusiastic but short-lived reception of Erasmian humanism in the 1520s is well-documented. So is its even more enthusiastic suppression of native ‘Lutheran’ conventicles in the 1550s and the extinction of hope for a Protestant Church in the kingdom of the Spanish Habsburgs. These events have relegated Hispanic Protestantism to little more than a footnote in most histories.

The story, though, is not limited to the Iberian peninsula. A dedicated cadre of Spaniards did battle in the realm of ideas from places of exile in Naples, France, England, Geneva and Germany. In so doing, they contributed significantly to a core literature of evangelical humanism in Spanish. This corpus consists, in part, of translations of Reformers' works, such as Melanchthon's Antithesis and Luther's treatise on Christian liberty, by Francisco de Enzinas (1540); Calvin's catechism, by Juan Pérez (Geneva 1556); and Calvin's Institutes, by Cipriano de Valera (London 1597). Translations of classics also figure prominently in the work of Francisco de Enzinas, for example Plutarch's Lives and the Decades of Livy.

The Oxford Movement in context. Anglican High Churchmanship, 1700–1857. By Peter Benedict Nockles. Pp. xvii+342. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. £40 (cloth), £15.95 (paper). 0 521 38162 2; 0 521 58719 0

This book, together with subsequent articles on Scotland and Ireland, contains the fruits of researches which first became available in Dr Nockles's Oxford DPhil. of 1982, probably the most widely consulted dissertation on religious developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain since John Walsh's Cambridge PhD of 1956. The outlines of the argument have been adumbrated elsewhere, but God (in Nockles's case) resides also in the details, and historians will turn to this book for its rich scholarship and its staggering mastery of published and unpublished sources. Indeed the appearance of this definitive study is doubly welcome because, so long as it was known to be in the offing, there was a danger that other historians would be deterred from starting research on the subject of Anglican High Churchmanship, but now that it is out it will inevitably act as a guide and stimulus to further inquiry. Already scholars such as Stewart Brown, Arthur Burns, Frances Knight, Simon Skinner and Brian Young are beginning to till the ground. A field which had once seemed high and dry has been refreshed and made fertile.