Simon Sudbury is one of the more obscure archbishops of Canterbury.He should be better known, if only because he was archbishop during a particularly confused but important period of English history—the period of Edward III's dotage and Richard II's minority. Anything which casts a little light upon the politics and personalities of that period should be welcome to historians.

During the war, many learned books published on the continent missed notice in England, among them one which advanced the study of the Responsiones supposedly sent by pope Gregory I in answer to the queries of St. Augustine: Responsiones included by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica (i. xxvii). This unnoticed book, entitled Die Quellen zur Angelsachsenmission Gregors des Grossen: eine historiographische Studie, by Suso Brechter, Münster, 1941 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des altem Mönchtums und des Benediktinerordens, Heft 22), was not reviewed in the English Historical Review nor (so far as the present writers know) in other periodicals. There is no copy of it in the British Museum nor the Cambridge University Library, and, though the Bodleian has a copy, it was, up till August 1956, uncut.

The Appendices to the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, published in the great reforming era of the eighteen-thirties, provide rich fields for the exploration of fossil-hunters. There, enrolled and briefly described, are the Church courts of the country. Their practice had, by that time, shrunk considerably; but few, or none, of the old courts had disappeared entirely.

The absence of any adequate modern biography of Mabillon has long left a deplorable gap in the history of French scholarship. Almost immediately after his death his intimate disciple, Dom Thierry Ruinart, wrote a short life which must always remain essential for any estimate of its subject's character, and a more formal notice found its place in Dom Tassin's history of the Maurists. After that, no work of any originality or insight appeared until 1879, when a well-documented study of Mabillon's early life and some of his work was published in a most inaccessible fashion by H. Jadart, who continued his patient investigations for another thirty years. Then, in 1888, Emmanuel de Broglie produced his classical picture of the society of St. Germain-des-Prés and the journeys of Mabillon which, though a work of genuine scholarship and high literary charm, was extremely selective and made no attempt to cover the whole of Mabillon's life and work. De Broglie's volumes, however, soon followed by a similar work on Montfaucon, by their very excellence deterred would-be biographers until in the early years of the present century Dom P. Denis began to make preparatory soundings among the mass of Maurist documents with a view to writing a formal history, which must have contained a long account of Mabillon. His labours issued in a number of valuable articles in the Revue Mabillon, but he died with his main task unaccomplished. Meanwhile Dom Henri Leclercq contributed to the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie an article, as long as a short book, on Mabillon, as well as numerous other articles on topics connected with his works, but it was not generally known that during the last years of his life, in what time that indefatigable worker could steal from compiling single-handed the last volumes of his great Dictionnaire, he had written what was at least the first draft of a full-scale biography. He succeeded, as is well known, in finishing his encyclopedia a few months before his death, and he also despatched the manuscript on Mabillon to his Paris publisher, but, for an unexplained reason, publication was long delayed and it was only a year ago that the second volume appeared. It is nowhere stated what editorial changes have been made, though it is implied that there has been some abbreviation.

‘The Church History of Joseph Milner is one of those books which may perish with some revolution of the moral and religious character of the English race, but hardly otherwise.’ Sir James Stephen's prophecy reads alarmingly to-day when the book has vanished even from the dustiest and highest shelf of the rectory library. But it was of Milner's History that Cowper also wrote enthusiastically ‘the facts are incontestible, the grand observations upon them are all irrefragible, and the style, in my judgment, incomparably better than that of Robertson or Gibbon’. Translated into German, Swedish and Spanish, relayed to Grundtwigian pietist circles through the histories of Rasmus Sørensen, Milner was read as far north as Greenland and as far east as the Volga. His book was instrumental in converting half a dozen Members of Parliament. It was long considered—as Milner intended it to be—as the replacement of Mosheim's famous History, and as such it was prescribed reading in the educated Evangelical home and beyond. In 1847 Julius Hare regarded it as still ‘the main, if not the sole, source from which a large portion of our Church derive their notions of ecclesiastical history’. Ironically, it was from Milner's soundly Evangelical pages that young Newman got his first love of the Fathers. The History of the Church of Christ must thus be reckoned as a book of first importance in the religious history of early nineteenth-century England. Yet, save for a few pages in Abbey and Overton (still the most reliable survey of Evangelicalism, after eighty years) Milner's book is now unknown.

As in other spheres of historical activity, the modern ecclesiastical historian has tended to examine traditional interpretations of the state of the Elizabethan Church in the light of detailed studies of clerical conditions within limited areas. The local approach has cast into the melting pot many well-established historical assumptions. No longer is it reasonable to condemn the intellectual attainments of the Elizabethan clergy in the terms employed by W. P. M. Kennedy as recently as 1914. The wide fluctuations in standards between dioceses—and even between different archdeaconries within the same diocese—have shown the decisive factors to be essentially local: the distribution of patronage, the proportion of impropriated livings, proximity to London or to a university. A definitive picture of clerical standards and qualifications will not be forthcoming until a representative number of dioceses have undergone this type of analysis.

On 22 April 1646 the House of Commons formally questioned the jure divino claims put forward by the ministers in the Westminster Assembly. Ostensibly this action represents the climax to one of the most puzzling developments in the Civil War: the triumphant assertion of Erastianism by men who had acquiesced in the passing of theocratic measures in the early part of the Civil War. W. A. Shaw's reading of the situation typifies the general attitude of historians of the period: the resolution of the problem by denying that it is one. His main thesis is that English Puritanism in the period 1641–6 was never really divorced from its historic Erastian associations.

For well over a hundred years, the convocation of Canterbury presented one of those curiosities which give England so much of her charm. It was summoned to transact business, and, as soon as it met, it was prorogued before it could transact any business at all, apart from the pure formality of agreeing to an address to the sovereign. It remained prorogued until the sovereign dissolved parliament. This state of affairs originated in 1717, when an immediate prorogation precluded the lower house of convocation from censuring the latitudinarian sermons of Hoadly.

This bibliography is part of the preparation of an edition of Eriugena's Periphyseon (De diuisione naturae) for the series, Scriptores latini Hiberniae, published by the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. It supplements the shorter one contained in J. F. Kenney's Sources for the Early History of Ireland, i: Ecclesiastical (New York 1929), and, except in the lists of MSS., does not repeat what is contained there. The letter K against a MS. indicates that it is mentioned by Kenney. Dom Maïeul Cappuyns's study, published in 1933, would have afforded a broader and sounder foundation to build upon, but its bibliographical material, though ample, is not systematically arranged. Kenney supplies the form, Cappuyns the greater part of the matter, the rest of which derives from researches carried out since he wrote.