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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

Uncertainty regarding the circumstances in which devotion to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was established is almost as old as the devotion itself. The earliest surviving version of the legend, which recounts the adventures of the celebrated statue from the time of Gregory the Great to its discovery in the Montes de Toledo by the pastor Gil Cordero - an account dating from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century - places its reappearance in the reign of the son of Fernando iii of Castile, ‘su fijo Don Alfonso el qual gano las Algesiras e murio sobre Gibraltar’, thus conflating Alfonso x, Fernando iii's son, who died in 1284, with Alfonso x's great-grandson Alfonso xi (1312–50). Attempts to unscramble or to disguise this confusion have a long history too, the earliest being that of the corrector of Ms AHN 48B, who expunged words and phrases and supplied marginal additions to bridge the gap between the reigns of the two Alfonsos.