At the time when encyclopaedic works on the military orders began to be produced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was widely held that the military order was an institution which had existed for most of the Christian era. Many of the orders catalogued in these volumes were reported to have been founded well before the period of the crusades, although there were often conflicting opinions about the precise antiquity of a particular foundation. Various dates were, for example, given for the establishment of the military order which the knights of the Holy Sepulchre were thought to constitute: although some held that it had been founded shortly after the first crusade, its creation was attributed by others to St James the Less in the first century A.D., while its origins were also placed in the time of Constantine and in that of Charlemagne. The foundation of the order of Santiago, which in fact occurred in 1170, was often traced back to the ninth century; yet while some linked it with the supposed discovery of the body of St James during the reign of Alfonso 11, others associated it with the legendary victory of Clavijo, which was placed in the time of Ramiro i. The accumulation of myth and tradition recorded in these encyclopaedias has exercised a prolonged influence on historians of the military orders: disproof has not always been sufficient to silence a persistent tradition. It is, nevertheless, clear that the Christian military order, in the sense of an institution whose members combined a military with a religious way of life, in fact originated during the earlier part of the twelfth century in the Holy Land.

Coronations, grand royal entrances and the ceremonies of royal burials were public manifestations of the ‘sacra maiestas regia’. The Polish ceremonies had close parallels in other European monarchies, and also their own special features. The rites formed a symbolic drama with social and political overtones; they were needed to preserve order in the human community. Recent studies in this region have brought interesting results, especially when seen in a long perspective of time and with due contemplation of the mentality and attitudes behind the outward show.

Medieval historians confronted with the Latin word papa may be tempted to translate it unthinkingly as ‘pope’. Certainly the word has been restricted to the bishop of Rome for much of the history of the Church, and its application to this bishop is of long standing. It occurs in an inscription from pre-Constantinian Rome, in a letter despatched to Rome by the fathers of the Council of Aries in 314, which is addressed ‘dilectissimo papae Silvestro’ and goes on to style Silvester ‘gloribsissime papa’, and in the acts of the first Council of Toledo which met in 400, where language is used which implies that the bishop of Rome, and he alone, was papa. But in the early Church it generally seems to have been felt that the word could be applied to other bishops as well. A striking indication of this is furnished by a letter sent to Cyprian of Carthage by the priests and deacons of the Roman Church itself, which refers to him as papa. Sidonius Apollinaris, who became bishop of Clermont in 469, felt free to address his confrères among the Gallic episcopate by the same title, apparently indiscriminately, and was himself so addressed.

According to a beloved and now generally disbelieved story, the Cross upon which Jesus suffered was discovered some three hundred years after the event by the saintly Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, Rome's first Christian emperor. For centuries, this story enjoyed the greatest vogue, blossoming into a full-blown Legend of the Cross which traced its genealogy all the way back to the Garden of Eden. With the waning of the Middle Ages, however, came new criteria for evidence, and with them a scholarly predisposition to dismiss the discovery, as well as the legend, as pure bunkum. Put together all the pieces of the True Cross, it became common to say, and one could float a fine freighter.

In recent years some of the most interesting statements about medieval Christianity have come not from medieval but early modern historians, Jean Delumeau, Keith Thomas, John Bossy and others, in the broad descriptive accounts which form the backcloth to discussions of reformation or counter-reformation developments in ‘religion’ – provocative statements which have not, however, evoked a large response from the English world of medieval scholarship. The latest of such statements is contained in an article by John Bossy. In part of this Bossy puts forward contentions and arguments which are of considerable importance for the study of medieval Christianity. If his arguments and the evidence he advances in their support were to be accepted the historian of medieval Christianity would be pressed to reconsider the words and concepts he deploys in his definition, descriptions and explanations of his subject. Even if modified or rejected they are acute and fruitful points, and their examination may sharpen understanding of medieval thought about religion. Bossy's arguments also point to a gap in modern scholarship: a general account of one area (assuming it was an area) of thought – the development of medieval description, classification and explanation of ‘religious’ phenomena.

In an important article published in this Journal in 1979, Professor Nicholas Canny attacked the notion that the Protestant Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that the entire question was misformulated, in part because no such decisive event occurred until the nineteenth century. It is the argument of the present article that Professor Canny did not disprove the relevance or usefulness of the question, and that ‘why the Reformation failed in Ireland’ remains a central problem of early modern Irish history.

In the period of time between the Islamic conquest and the coming of the crusaders to Palestine in 1099, Christian pilgrims from East and West continued to visit the Holy Land, and particularly Jerusalem, by the licence of the Islamic government. Among the western visitors during this period at least half a dozen of them published accounts of their journeys. However, these accounts tell one virtually nothing about the life of the local Church, beyond the occasional list of shrines, churches, monasteries and the number of personnel assigned to them. As one modern scholar has remarked, ‘In the Patriarchate of Jerusalem the indigenous element is always half-hidden behind the crowds of pilgrims of every nationality…In the Holy City the resident aliens often outnumbered the Christian natives of Jerusalem, but in Palestine taken as a whole, the Syrians must always have been a majority.’

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the so-called renaissance in Morean studies in recent years has been to provide the historiography with a new focus, namely the phase of More's career that begins in the aftermath of Utopia (1516) and concludes with his imprisonment in 1534. Hitherto, interest in that period was confined largely to the domestic scene celebrated in Holbein's famous portrait and drawings, the household at Chelsea as a centre of humanist culture, Christian piety and cosy family virtue. Yet this was the period of More's public career in which he served as a councillor to Henry vm and in a number of major administrative posts before his elevation to succeed Cardinal Wolsey as lord chancellor in 1529. It was also the period in which he assumed a leading role in the campaign against the Reformation in England, partly as a prosecutor of heresy on behalf of the Crown, but more spectacularly as a polemicist, specifically commissioned by the Church to defend orthodox doctrine against the challenge of the reformers – a task on which he expended some million words in the period between his tract against Luther in 1523 and the changed circumstances which induced a more devotional literary mode in the much acclaimed Tower Works.

While it is incontrovertible that the Catholic faith exercised a profound influence on the lives of the common people of fifteenth-century England, it is equally apparent that many aspects of contemporary belief and practice will never be wholly clear. This is not simply for want of evidence but more the result of the limitations of the sources. It may, for instance, be assumed that contemporaries' religious priorities would be illuminated by close examination of their wills since these documents almost invariably deal with pious provisions intended to benefit testators' souls. But tolerably represented by surviving wills as the wealthy and town-dwelling classes of late medieval England are, analysis of these documents is treacherous. Just as the scribes who registered them certainly standardised the presentation of different testators' wishes, so probate procedures militated against even faintly unorthodox expression. Moreover, the proportion of a testator's movable or immovable estate represented in any given will is impossible to gauge, as a result of which no measure may be taken of any testator's devotion by comparison of his religious bequests with those made for other purposes. It must also be remembered that wills reveal nothing of the pious provision that testators undoubtedly made during their lifetimes for their own benefit. Neither do they convey any impression of what family or friends may have agreed to discharge for the benefit of a testator's soul. Late medieval wills are undeniably disappointing and frequently misleading.

We finding (right dread and soveraigne Lord), in the sacred records of God that the most worthy kings set over his people sanctifyed the entrance of their raigne with clensing the house of God from all idolatry and superstition and reforming the ministers thereof, according to the order appointed by God; the safest and surest way to establish the thrones of kings to themselves and their posterity. And we acknowledging with all thankfulnes to God that he hath touched your royall hart with a true love unto his sanctuarie and raysed you up as another Josiah even to pull down all the high places and to breake in peeces all the strange altars that remaine yet in Israell (for we must acknowledg as the truth that many of us and of the people have not yet prepared our harts to the God of our fathers) ar moved in those respects (most noble king) as remembrancers of the Lord to crie with our hart and voice for the effecting herof.

Hatred of popery was hardly a puritan monopoly in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century England. The conviction that the pope was Antichrist was something of a commonplace amongst Protestant Englishmen. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the terms in which the identification was established and asserted. The supposed link between such concerns and a ‘millenarian’ radicalism has quite rightly been challenged, most notably by Dr Bauckham. It remains true, of course, that sensitivity towards the extent and nature of the popish threat was a hallmark of puritanism. The consequences of this, however, were ambiguous. The conviction of the reality and pervasiveness of the popish threat undoubtedly prompted much of the puritan critique of the established Church. Certainly, the rhetoric of Antichrist played a crucial role in puritan denunciations of the corruptions of the English Church. But such denunciations drew much of their polemical force from the fact that the premise on which they were based – the antichristian nature of popery – was generally accepted by English Protestants. For the whole strength of the puritans’ case rested on their ability to present their position as but the logical extension to the area of church polity and ceremony of positions readily accepted in the realm of doctrine. Even the most committed Presbyterians accepted that the doctrine of the established Church was unequivocally Protestant. For the immediate polemical purposes of Presbyterians this provided a powerful argument for a parallel and equally thorough reformation of church polity and discipline. Taking a longer perspective and in the face of the threat from Rome, such considerations served to underline the ties of common interest and identity that bound puritans to the national Church.

There are currently two approaches to the perennial problem of characterising Elizabethan puritanism. Successive attempts to establish a general taxonomy have failed to describe the historical diversity of puritan thinking. Recently the variable contemporary meanings of the epithet ‘puritan’ have been emphasised.1 Neither approach advances our understanding of reforming ideas within the Elizabethan Church, because the first tries to make individuals conform to type and the second limits the usefulness of the term ‘puritan’ in historical discussion. Both approaches ignore important facets of the intellectual environment of puritanism, particularly the contemporary historical vision. The present study offers an alternative approach to the problem through an analysis of the religious mentality revealed in the writings of William Harrison. It argues that Harrison's works reveal some of the underlying assumptions of puritan thinking. By comparing Harrison's thought with that of some radical and conformist contemporaries, it attempts to show that a distinctive historical interpretation, and the application of that interpretation to contemporary conditions, provide a consistent index to puritanism. Analysis of Harrison's thought suggests that, for radicals, divinely inspired faith and knowledge were transmitted through the past, providing a universally normative truth whose criteria could be used to evaluate contemporary circumstances. This truth, which directed every facet of life, establishing the limits of the individual's interests, of his knowledge and of its application, was centred in Israel. To depart from its criteria was to lapse into Gentilism.

There are several questions yet to be answered in the period of Italian religious history leading up to the Council of Trent. One particularly intriguing question is the part played by the Benedictine Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua, generally known as the Cassinese Congregation. Historians have often observed some of these monks flitting like shadows around the fires of controversy, but what they were actually doing has remained obscure. They had connections with Contarini, Pole, Sadoleto and other spirituali; they gave hospitality to Pier Paolo Vergerio, bishop of Capodistria, before he fled into the Protestant camp; amongst them were many humanist educated biblical scholars, some of whom publicly expounded St Paul; the Congregation's chief spokesman at the Council of Trent was shouted down for what were taken to be his Lutheran sentiments; another monk was the prime author of the tract Il Beneficio di Cristo, later revised by Marcantonio Flaminio and published in 1543 with lengthy extracts from the 1539 edition of Calvin's Institutes woven into its text. It is not surprising that several historians, in common with a number of contemporary observers, have suggested that some of these Benedictines were strongly influenced by Reformation thought.

As founder of ‘the first continuing Congregational church on English soil’ in the London suburb of Southwark in 1616, Henry Jacob has figured prominently in denominational hagiography. His place in the wider circle of puritan scholarship has also been secured by virtue of this radically new ecclesiological experiment in puritan Congregationalism which, by most historical accounts, signalled a drastic departure from the prevailing presbyterianism of the Cartwright generation of left-wing puritanism. While his shift into a more progressive, democratic ecclesiological mode has appeared self-evident to many historians, those scholars intrigued by Jacob's churchmanship have often puzzled over the source of his new polity. Among an earlier generation of historians, the obvious solution seemed to be that Jacob had at some point borrowed from the Separatists, adopting their ecclesiology while declining their practice of separatism. This conclusion arose primarily from the assumption (which persists today) that before Jacob's Southwark church formed, Congregationalism was alone the preserve of late Tudor and early Stuart separatism. Daniel Neal became one of the first to suggest this, explaining that Jacob probably derived his Congregationalism from the Separatists by way of John Robinson at Leyden, where the two had met in 1610.

For English Catholics the eighteenth century has justifiably been termed ‘the age of Challoner’, because Richard Challoner, vicar apostolic of the London District between 1758 and 1781, left a distinctive mark on the character of the English Catholic Church through his long period in office at a formative period and through his many popular spiritual books and pamphlets. Challoner's pre-eminence has tended to diminish the stature of all other bishops appointed as vicars apostolic to the four districts in England and Wales during the course of the century. The only other vicar apostolic who came close to Challoner was the Benedictine monk, Charles Walmesley, a near-contemporary and coadjutor in the Western District from 1756 to 1764, when he became vicar apostolic of that district until his death in 1797. Although Walmesley's published works were far fewer than Challoner's, they demonstrated a wider range of interests and a more original mind. For, while Challoner has often been taken as the representative eighteenth-century English Catholic clergyman, the main feature of his mind, a dread of innovation, prevented him from tuning his theology to the new world of eighteenthcentury scientific and philosophical enquiry.

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.

Was non-residence in benefices necessarily an abuse? It was an old problem, usually linked with pluralities, and even if the Councils of Constance and Basel had done nothing about it, non-residence had been denounced by Gerson, by Panormitanus and by Denys the Carthusian; it remained a live issue in the later fifteenth century. An interesting discussion of the subject emerges from the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83) with his father and brother, successive rulers of Mantua. It raises points of wider importance than the particular matters at stake and throws some light upon relations between the Italian powers and the papacy over Church appointments; in Italy there was no Pragmatic Sanction, and appointments would often depend upon official request and more or less informal ways and means of accommodation with the Roman court. It is, however, not only about appointment to, and absenteeism from, major benefices, but also minor ones. In the absence of any general treatment in depth of the subject, these documents contribute some specific and important evidence about practical problems and attitudes in Italian ecclesiastical life. Resentment in the small Lombard principality of Mantua towards non-resident ‘foreigners’ and papal reservations, professions of concern about pastoral standards and the social standing of the local clergy are among other themes which emerge; not least remarkable is that the cardinal's viewpoint as revealed in the correspondence was sometimes distinctly different from that of the lay rulers, in spite of his being their close relative and top-level agent in the papal court.

Current evaluation of the Church of England under the first four Georges follows in the main the assessment made by Norman Sykes in his monumental Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1934. According to that view the Church, which was lastingly cleared of the universal slackness previously imputed to it, exhibited a pervasive Latitudinarianism sympathetically portrayed by Sykes as ‘practical Christianity’, an emphasis on cdnduct and good works to the neglect of ‘organised churchmanship’ and the ‘mystical element’ in religion. R. W. Greaves detected similar features in the concept of ‘moderation’: suspicion of popery and friendship towards dissenters, a cult of plainness in theological explanation and a very general contempt of whatever was medieval. Historians have been willing to acknowledge as exceptions to this ‘mild’ quality of Anglican churchmanship the early Methodists and ‘small Evangelical and High Church minorities’, but only the two former have been taken seriously. Piety of a more traditional kind - rubrical, sacramental, Catholic - has been identified, only to be discounted. The Establishment has been seen in the light of the judgement recently summarised by Dr Anthony Russell: ‘Certainly the temper of the eighteenth century which favoured reason above all else, and was deeply suspicious of mysticism and the emotions, was against any form of sacramentalism.’

The history of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in the modern imperial period (1700–1917), has been a woefully neglected field of scholarly research. That neglect antedates the collapse of the ancien regime in 1917, for pre-revolutionary historiography on the Church was neither abundant nor sophisticated; rarely did it produce more than myopic diocesan histories, fatuous accounts of the local seminary, or hagiographic paeans devoted to some prominent clergyman. The reasons for this neglect of so fundamental an institution in ‘Holy Rus’ are many – restricted access to ecclesiastical archives, difficulties in publication because of vigilant censors, but above all the intelligentsia's indifference to an apparently moribund and state-controlled institution. Paradoxically enough, Catholic polemicists, Orthodox Slavophiles, anticlerical intellectuals and reform-minded clergy all concurred – from different motives, for different reasons – in believing that the Church had become a mere instrument of the secular state, and that this change derived from ‘revolutionary’ and ‘Westernizing’ reforms in the Church imposed by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century.

When the redoubtable Presbyterian Richard Baxter came to write his engagingly biased autobiography he distinguished three broad categories of conformists to the Restoration Church Settlement of 1662. There were those who had been forced to conform out of need, or had casuistically placed their own meaning on the words of the Subscription; next there were the Latitudinarians, who were ‘mostly Cambridge-men’ and of ‘Universal Principles and free’; and then there were those of the ‘high and swaying Party’ who were ‘desirous to extirpate or destroy the Nonconformists’.