The victory of Christianity in the last years of Constantine's was graphically described by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Life of Constantine. Clearly in Phoenicia, where he had excellent sources of reign information, the heart had gone out of the old religion. Every class in the community was prepared to accept Christianity and even to deride the deities that once they had held in awe. The victory there and ultimately over nearly the whole empire was so decisive that one is inclined to forget the tremendous struggle for the hearts and allegiances of the provincials that preceded it. Though in retrospect one might agree with von Harnack's view that even without Constantine's conversion Christianity would have triumphed, this was not how it appeared to most contemporaries. Down to the time of his victory over Licinius (September 324), Constantine seems to have aimed only at securing for Christianity the legal equality with the traditional cults, as envisaged by the Edict of Milan. The Council of Nicaea, however, summoned by the emperor in 325, proved to be decisive both for the establishment of orthodoxy and the victory of Christianity itself. Thenceforth, the history of the empire would also be the history of the Church.

The letting of pews was virtually a universal practice in the churches of nineteenth-century Britain. Although letting and private ownership of seats were well known before the 1700s and have continued in the present century, the renting of fixed seats for use during divine service reached its height in the Victorian period. Worshippers paid anything from one shilling to thirty shillings or more to reserve a seat for one person for a year. It thus became a considerable expense to accommodate a large family. By its ubiquity it is clear that the practice was accepted by church-goers as a facet of ecclesiastical life and was accepted by church authorities as a necessary feature of congregational management. But the fact that the system was generally introduced and operated at the discretion of individual congregations or their owners and patrons, with little or no interference from denominational authorities, has meant that comparatively meagre attention has been paid to how it worked in practice and to what its effects were on congregational life.

In English and American Studies in German, summaries of theses and monographs, a supplement to Anglia, 1983, there is a notice of Hans Sauer's edition of the Middle English poem the Owl and the Nightingale with a German translation. Sauer stresses ‘that no completely satisfactory interpretation of this fascinating poem has been suggested so far. At best, only some of the aspects of O & N are covered by the various allegorical explanations or by reading it as a burlesque-satirical poem - these interpretations by no means explain its significance as a whole.’ The present paper suggests that a knowledge of the papacy's changing attitude t o marriage in the twelfth century, as expressed in the development of canon law, as well as in the deliberations of English provincial synods, goes far to illuminating the scope and purpose of this Middle English satire/burlesque.

‘Almost everything in him has its roots in Augustine and yet almost nothing is genuinely Augustinian.’ The words are those of Reinhold Seeberg and the subject of the appraisal Gregory the Great (540–90). It is an observation that has a particular validity when applied to Gregory's adaptation of Augustine's material in his doctrine of Purgatory, which is the subject of this article. In his thought about life after death, Gregory adopted Augustine's theological framework at almost every point. Dogmatic questions such as: ‘At or after death, do the redeemed people of God, other than martyrs, need purification to make them fit for the love and presence of their holy Creator and Judge?’; ‘Does prayer for the dead relate to this growth?’; or ‘Is the life-to-come static?’; and ‘How should St Paul's more obscure statements in his First Letter to the Corinthians concerning salvation “yet so as by fire” be interpreted?’ were questions that Augustine had himself inherited and explored with diligence and real coherence. In large measure, Gregory was content to adopt Augustine's solutions. But in matters of detail Gregory departed from his great forebear, and then, significantly, it was to ‘firm-up’ some of Augustine's more cautious pronouncements particularly about the possibility of purgative suffering in the afterlife. In the celebrated phrase of B. J. Kidd, Gregory ‘erected speculation into a certainty’.

Ecclesiastical rogues, misfits and outcasts often possess some magnetic or magical quality. The lives and activities of these men and women may provide comic relief for scholars bored by research into spirituality, administrative reform or questions involving the relationship of Church and State. On the other hand, they may exemplify some novelty or pioneering effort; as a consequence, their insights might have been blackened by more cautious contemporaries who resorted to mockery or accusations of heresy. Some of these people may be prophets who had the courage to point the boney finger at scandal or abuse, whom officialdom was quick to brand as deviants. Finally, they may be people caught in the ecclesiastical maelstrom of change. Unable to adapt, they lash out against the structure. These streams converge in the life of the Revd Richard O'Halloran (i 856-1925). During his stormy career, he publicly attacked the alleged misuse of power by archbishops and bishops. Always proclaiming his loyalty to Rome, O'Halloran threatened schism several times. He also believed that the religious orders throughout England were involved in a grand conspiracy to destroy the rights of the secular clergy. Fr O'Halloran's experiences with the Benedictine monks in the London suburb of Ealing confirmed his suspicions.

It is notoriously difficult for biographers of late-medieval people to recapture the personalities of their subjects, and consequently motives often have to be deduced from actions. This fundamental difficulty prompted the great Professor Jacob Burckhardt to date the emergence of the individual from the Renaissance and to assert that, rulers apart, there were few developed personalities in the Middle Ages. Medieval people saw their world through a sort of ‘religious mist’, perceiving things distorted rather than as they really were. In spite of some recent support, Burckhardt's theory is not really tenable, but historians still find the prevalent religious aura difficult to penetrate. We may know the official doctrine and moral teaching of the Church, but we cannot safely assume that they were understood by the laity, when both contemporary sermons and literature proclaim the contrary. Even were the Church's teaching understood, historians would still not know in what ways and to what extent religion influenced other fields of individual activity – economic, social or political. Burckhardt's problem remains of more than purely religious importance.

In the middle years of the sixteenth century Antwerp reached the zenith of its economic power. With ninety thousand inhabitants it was far from being the largest city in Europe, but its pre-eminence as a centre for European trade was now universally acknowledged. As a money market, commodity market and, above all, as a centre of the cloth trade Antwerp had by 1550 eclipsed its rivals in Flanders and Brabant and made itself indispensable to merchants from all over the continent. Germans made up the largest contingent among Antwerp's foreign merchant community, but there were substantial numbers of both Portuguese, still dominant in the international spice trade, and Italians, who had first introduced the sophisticated financial and accounting techniques which were now developed to a new peak of refinement in Antwerp. The concentration of capital in the city was an inducement to every major banking house to maintain a permanent representation there, as did their most regular clients, the princely houses of Europe. The real foundation of Antwerp's greatness, however, was the trade in English broadcloths, established there since the turn of the century and carried on by an English merchant community that numbered three or four hundred by 1560. All this frenetic economic activity was presided over with studied negligence by the city elders, whose tradition of minimum controls was calculated to avoid alarming an extremely heterogeneous trading community.

Early in 1652 the leading Independent divine John Owen, with a group of other ministers, published a plan for the reform of the Church entitled The Humble Proposals. The scheme aroused antagonism and opposition. The existence of petitions against it, one of them published by Roger Williams under the title The Fourth Paper (1652), was noted by David Masson in his Life of Milton. The protest was more intense, and went on longer, than Masson suggests. Petitions were soon followed by a number of tracts, some of them anonymous, others raising the issues in an introductory epistle or an appendix to material with a wider reference. Taken together, they clearly indicate a well-organised campaign behind the scenes.

Even the darkest accounts of the eighteenth-century Church of England have generally singled out the religious societies of (various sorts as a bright spark in the gathering Latitudinarian gloom. They included: private devotional groups (‘the religious societies’); the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (referred to here as ‘the SRMs’); the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG); and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which also supported charity schools. Taken together, these activities seem to add up to a considerable movement of religious renewal. The devotional religious societies are of particular interest because of their problematical relationship to the origins of the evangelical revival and of Methodism in particular. The present paper is mainly concerned with this question.

Some may wonder why Acton is a suitable subject for a Butterfield Lecture. People who knew Butterfield's writing will not wonder. He was fascinated by Acton's mind. He did not quite like Acton's mind. Yet something in Acton was so powerful to Butterfield that it needed arguing with all the time. In some ways you can say that Butterfield spent a lot of his historical life arguing with Acton, even though he was born only just before Acton died. Sir Geoffrey Elton said in his first Butterfield Memorial Lecture that he, Elton, much regretted Butterfield's obsession with Acton. He said that Acton was an ‘unproductive monument’ who really deserves ‘honourable oblivion'. ‘I could wish’, he told you here two years ago, ‘that after 1931 Butterfield had forgotten about Acton. He wasted much time, effort and subtlety, in that doomed enterprise to make something of a bogus enigma.’

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.

The sermon which John Fisher preached at the month's mind of Lady Margaret Beaufort, on 29 July 1509, compared her with Martha, traditionally the woman of action and counterpart of Mary, the woman of contemplation. The virtues he stressed, in addition to nobility of character and lineage, were those of good order: the disciplining of Lady Margaret's body and manner of life through prayer and abstinence, her hospitality and charitable dealings with her neigh-bours. The bishop saw discipline also as the mark of her household: statutes for its government were read four times a year, her servants well cared for, her almsfolk regularly supported. Whenever factions arose among her servants she applied herself with great skill to keeping the peace and finding a solution to controversy. Fisher's account has recently been compared by Retha Warnicke with other memories of her household recorded by Henry Parker, Lord Morley. The same elements are found in both descriptions, but Morley complements Fisher's portrait of charity and able household management with a spectacle of splendid conviviality worthy of the great ladies of the past, Queen Elfleda and Matilda, wife of Henry 1. Morley's memories of the household he entered in the early 1490s are not all contemporary with Fisher's who did not become Lady Margaret's confessor until 1498 or later, and the bishop allocates more of her day to religious observance. But whether her piety grew more exacting and intense in her last decade, or was simply more closely observed by her confessor, she remained until her death the centre of a network of patronage and influence in which she took an active part. Her household was a society with many facets, defined not merely by the austere and charitable practices of its head, but by her importance as a tenant-in-chief of the Crown and mother of the king. It was the combination of all these elements that placed her so high in contemporary estimation. This article explores the life of her household not only as the home of works of charity and a pattern of worship whose special feature was devotion to the Name of Jesus, but also as a centre of justice and regional influence and as a source of support for the activities of the Crown.

Nonconformity was one of the major formative influences on Victorian society in Britain. The census of 1851 revealed that of seven million worshippers attending service on census day roughly half were counted in a nonconformist chapel. Even the Victorian who failed to attend service regularly found it difficult to evade the influence of nonconformity — and the Evangelicalism with which it was most closely —identified — in a society whose very customs, attitudes and even political life were so largely moulded by it. The main physical manifestation of this pervasive influence was the ubiquitious chapel, its most obvious human expression the professional minister. Of the leading nonconformist denominations the Congregationals were served by some 1,400 full-time men in 1847 while the Wesleyan, Primitive, New Connexion and Association Methodists had respectively 1,125, 518, 83 and 91 ministers in 1851.

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, issued by the leaders of the German Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) churches in October 1945, was a unique document in the recent history of the Christian Churches. This public acknowledgement of responsibility and guilt for their inadequate response to the criminal actions of the nation's political leaders was, and remains, unprecedented. The solemn proclamation included the by-now well-known sentences:

With great pain do we say: through us endless sufferings have been brought to many peoples and nations. What we have often borne witness to before our congregations, we now declare in the name of the whole church. We have for many years struggled in the name of Jesus Christ against the spirit which found its terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of tyranny, but we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously and for not loving more ardently.

The earliest extant Canterbury register is an artifact of the scribes and notaries, clerici and magistri working within the household of Archbishop John Pecham (1279-92). Of the numerous members of Pecham's familia, John of Bologna, trained in the Italian notarial arts and the cursus, was of great influence in this regard. He accompanied the new scholar-archbishop who left Rome in June 1279 to take up the most important and exacting ecclesiastical office in England. After Pecham's day, as C. R. Cheney has amply demonstrated, the use of notaries public in English episcopal chanceries was commonplace: the example of the archbishop's employment of notaries, no doubt encouraged and guided by John of Bologna, must be seen as a prime cause of this. Appropriately, John's Summa Notarie, a manual for fledgling notaries in England — ‘where they are unacquainted with the notarial art’ — was dedicated to Pecham. The conceptualisation, composition and even custody of Pecham's register must be seen within this framework. The subsequent rationalisation and retention of Canterbury records of all kinds including registers, though not exclusively attributable to John of Bologna and Pecham's notaries, was probably strongly influenced by them. For this reason, all that can be learned about Pecham's register and record-keeping among his staff is of significance — certainly to historians of what Robert Brentano has called ‘the written Church’.

The Spanish Church of the Golden Age has been much discussed but little studied. Certainly, its professional structure and internal administration are much less well understood than those of secular government. This paper seeks to correct some of the imbalance by applying to the 540 members of the Castilian episcopacy who served under Habsburg leadership the prosopographical techniques which in recent years have advanced our understanding of the State. But before doing so it might be useful to describe the structure of the episcopacy and the principles and procedures which governed appointments to it.

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.

The year 1808 does not feature with any greater prominence in the history of Catholic relief legislation than it does generally in Irish history. It was an uneventful year for Anglo-Irish relations, and for the Irish Catholic community in particular it was – on the surface at least – a period of embarrassment, division and failure. The veto controversy, which dominated Catholic politics in 1808, was productive of mutual misunderstanding and was to cast a shadow over the later proceedings of Catholic interest groups. But the significance of the dispute, hidden even to the protagonists, lay in the very breadth and depth of the misunderstanding. With the veto controversy began the gradual loss of confidence in the traditional champions of Catholic relief, the equally gradual transfer of the initiative to new champions and, all unseen, the first faint crack in the union of Britain and Ireland. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the causes and course of an incident which was fraught with such long-term serious consequences.