In his reinterpretation of ‘Henry vm and the praemunire manoeuvres of 1530-31’ Dr J. A. Guy asserts that the principal aim of the king in his dealings with the Church in these years was to secure a large sum of money. The purpose of the prosecution of churchmen for offences against the statute of praemunire was ‘to reinforce the demand for a clerical subsidy’. ‘Some serious praemunire offence had to be constructed in order to encourage the clergy to settle quickly for a general pardon’ for which they would pay a hefty fine. ‘The king had already decided by mid-1530 to seek a repeat performance of the clerical subsidy of 1523, and … he acted to outfoot those who had identified themselves as stalwarts in Wolsey's day [i.e. those who had opposed the subsidy in 1523] by accusing them of praemunire.’ Dr Guy cannot ignore Henry was desire for an annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon altogether. The king's true objectives were ‘supply and the divorce’. But the latter was subsidiary. ‘Henry VIII wished to raise a clerical subsidy as substantial as that achieved by Wolsey in 1523. Second, he aimed to subdue the opponents of the divorce in convocation’.

This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and Northern Rus' as processes separated by established confessional and institutional boundaries. Surviving narrative sources mention a number of clerical peregrinators crossing confessional borders in northern Europe in the post-conversion period, and some contemporaneous baptismal rites from Scandinavia and northern Rus' testify to their ability to influence the basic Christian rituals in both regions. These phenomena suggest that differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were in no way preventing contacts across the early Christian north in the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth century.

No one can read Richard Baxter without perceiving that he was an intensely bookish man, widely read and living close to his books. In most of his writings he turns aside to comment or to animadvert on others' books. His unpublished correspondence shows similar characteristics: one correspondent, writing in 1652, mentions five of the latest books; to another, who writes, ‘Though I have the use of a library at Westminster, yet there is in it neither Du Plessis, Grotius or Camero,’ Baxter replies, ‘I ans:[wer] they are comon bookes as most in ye shops’.

Forty years ago the story of the Church in late medieval England was a simple one and not very different from the version which had prevailed half a century before that. The interpretation presented by W. Capes in 1900 had been slightly modified but largely underlined by 1950, and the Church and its development which was commonly depicted in that year would not have been strikingly unfamiliar to him. The current version was that, after the reforming efforts of the thirteenth century, which failed to achieve their end, and the advent of the friars, who even by the middle of that century were departing from their earlier zeal and purity, the Church in the following hundred years was exploited by the pope when it was not saved or oppressed by the Crown. The resulting corruption of the clergy contributed to its negligence and provoked an eruption of heresy which in due course was savagely suppressed and virtually expunged; rid of this threat, the fifteenth-century clergy were so notorious for their laxity, greed and mediocrity that a few devout members of the laity, perhaps inspired by the mystical writings, took refuge in private devotions which anticipated the individualism of the Protestant. The Reformation was viewed as the inescapable result of these circumstances.

Much work that is absolutely essential for the continuance and progress of an ordered society has a severely limited attraction for those who perform it. How, nevertheless, men and women were persuaded to work regularly or at all in the Middle Ages has provided one of the central themes in the study of the period, for this is what we study in the institutions of slavery, serfdom and villeinage—all three were ways and means of persuading reluctant workers to work. But these were also means of escape from toil, and it is with one of these, the custom of abstaining from many habitual forms of work on church festivals, that this essay is concerned.

In an article in the last number of this JOURNAL, Caroline Walker Bynum drew attention to the way in which historians during the past few decades have written of the twelfth century in terms which would once have been thought more appropriate to the fifteenth. We have become used to hearing about the twelfth-century renaissance, about the classical revival and the growth of humanism and about the discovery of the individual. The period has been credited with a rapidly growing awareness of the regularity of the natural order and with an increased confidence in the power of reason. The idea has now been widely accepted that the twelfth century saw the emergence of institutions and sensitivities which were to become characteristic of western civilisation, but which previously did not exist or played only a subordinate cultural role. It is then, as R. R. Bolgar has expressed it, that we can discern for the first time the lineaments of modern man. This is obviously not to say that the attitudes displayed were the same as those in subsequent centuries; it would be absurd to look for the humanism of the fifteenth century, the rationalism of the eighteenth, or the individualism of the nineteenth, in the writings of Cistercians or magitri. Some phrases will strike us by their modernity, but the context of thinking is usually different in important ways from our own. The question is not whether there is a cultural identity between the twelfth century and the modern world, for there obviously is not, but whether in the twelfth century we can discern elements of respect for humanity, reason and individuality which were largely lacking during the preceding five hundred years, and which were to have a lasting impact on the growth of.western culture.

Bede's historical interests frequently manifested themselves in his exegetical writings. In the case to be studied here, his references to Acts ii. 42–7 and iv. 32–7 and related passages, verses which describe the first Christian community at Jerusalem immediately after Pentecost, Bede broke new ground in trying to picture for himself the life of the first Christians, while accepting the traditional monastic reading of these passages almost without question. Alongside, and conflicting with the well-established view of the first Christian community as one distinguished by perfect love and monastic abandonment of the world, there was in Bede's mind a second, more historically minded, tendency to see the primitive Church as having passed through stages of development, and to try to imagine the historical circumstances in which the ideals of Acts ii. 42–7 and iv. 32–7 had been expressed.

Henry VIII's appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps his finest hour. In what has been called a ‘pioneer royal Christmas broadcast’, the king delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech lamenting the religious divisions that afflicted his kingdom, and urging his subjects towards unity and charity.The phrase is Diarmaid MacCulloch's: Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven–London 1996, 348. According to William Petre, the king himself wept as he recounted how ‘charity between man and man is so refrigerate’, and few of his audience could restrain themselves from doing likewise.PRO, SP 1/212, fos 110v–11r (Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, London 1862–1910 [hereinafter cited as LP], xx/2, 1030). Another eye-witness, the chronicler Edward Hall, wrote down the speech ‘worde for worde, as near as I was able to report it’. This account gives details of how Henry illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: ‘the one calleth the other Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Yypocrite and Pharisey’; rival preachers inveighed against each other ‘without charity or discrecion’. To the king's mind, the blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and, to reinforce the point, Henry brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse: ‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be to busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’.E. Hall, Hall's Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis, London 1809, 864–5. The charge of religious name-calling was hardly new in 1545. In an earlier exhortation to unity and charity, Thomas Starkey had lamented the fact that ‘eche one in hart iugeth other to be eyther pharisee or heretyke, papist or schismatike’: An exhortation to the people instructynge them to unitie and obedience, London ?1536, fo. 27v.

Recent historians of the reign have understandably devoted considerable attention to his speech, arguably the most famous of all Henry VIII's public pronouncements, and most have quoted the mumpsimus–sumpsimus idiom, with varying degrees of wry amusement.J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, London 1968, 470–1; S. E. Lehmberg, The later parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547, Cambridge 1977, 229–31; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation, Oxford 1989, 378; G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd edn, London 1991, 200; C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 164; R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1993, 172; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 348; G. W. Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the search for the middle way’, Historical Journal xli (1998), 348. Yet there has been little attempt to explain why the king should use precisely these words to epitomise the polarisation of religious positions in the early 1540s.The exception here is Lehmberg, Later parliaments, 231, which notes that the phrase was derived from a 1517 treatise by Richard Pace. As I shall show, this does not give the complete picture. It is not always apparent from modern accounts that the terms ‘mumpsimus’ and ‘sumpsimus’ did not represent the king's own assay at faux-bucolic neologism, but were an established (though not long-established) literary trope. In the following short discussion, I hope to demonstrate how an investigation of the derivation and precedents of the phraseology employed by Henry in his Christmas speech can throw some revealing light on the processes by which religious typologies were constructed and utilised in the course of the Henrician Reformation, as well as providing some points of orientation in that most formidable of terrae incognitae, the mind of Henry VIII himself.For two recent stimulating, though contrasting, attempts to locate Henry's religious centre of gravity see Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy’; D. MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the reform of the Church’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, Basingstoke 1995, 159–80.

It is often claimed that the story of the Abitinian martyrs provides evidence relevant to the outbreak of the Donatist schism. However, this interpretation of the text rests upon a number of false assumptions regarding its manuscript tradition and the celebrity of the martyrs it commemorates. Rather than being written in the early fourth century, the text in its extant form was probably written after the Council of Carthage in 411, and perhaps in response to it. It thus does not cast light upon the outbreak of the schism, but rather on the way in which the events of the early fourth century were polemically reinterpreted at a much later date.

This article recreates the everyday experiences of rural Catholics in Mexico during the Church–State crisis of the 1920s and the cristero revolt (1926–9) against Mexico's post-revolutionary regime. Focusing on the archdiocese of Michoacán in western Mexico, the article contends that the 1920s should be viewed not only as a period of political tension between Church and State, but as a period of attempted cultural revolution when the very beliefs of Mexican Catholics were under attack. It is then argued that the behaviour of many Catholics during the cristero revolt is best described not as overt counter-revolutionism, but as defensive cultural and spiritual resistance designed to thwart the state's secularising aims by reaffirming and reproducing proscribed Catholic rituals and practices in collaboration with the parish clergy. The article then examines Catholic strategies of resistance during the cristero revolt and their consequences, above all the parochialisation and laicisation of the Church.

The five days of municipal insurrection in Toulouse from 13 to 17 May 1562 were critical ones for the city's Protestants. The Huguenots attempted to seize control of the city in a coup which failed on a grand scale. Two hundred Protestants may have died in the street fighting alone; over two hundred were executed after the rising had been suppressed and at least as many again were hanged in effigy. In all, over a thousand suspects were investigated by the authorities, determined to ensure that the city would remain safe from Protestant contagion in the future.

The Blagdon controversy is the name given to the dispute between Hannah More, the conduct-book writer and prominent Evangelical, and Thomas Bere, the curate of Blagdon, a village in the Mendip hills in Somerset, where she had set up a Sunday school in 1795. It began quietly as a purely local affair in 1799, blazed into national notoriety in 1801, and petered out in the summer of 1802. It was the most problematic episode in More's career, seriously jeopardising her reputation as a loyalist. According to M. G. Jones, her most substantial biographer, the controversy centred on two issues: ‘ whether the lower orders should be educated, and if so, by whom?’, and ‘Was Miss More a Methodist? Were her schools Methodist schools? Had she established them with or without the consent of the clergy in whose parishes the schools were set up?’ To Ford K. Brown the controversy ‘was at first simply a dispute between a country parson and Mrs Hannah More over the alleged “Methodism” of the teacher of one of her schools”. However, ‘taken up by the London journals, it roused national interest when the Orthodox party saw it correctly as a symbol of Evangelical aggression’. Brown's analysis is part of his controversial thesis in which the Evangelicals are portrayed as an almost Leninist vanguard movement, intent on a fundamental revolution in Church and Nation. More recently, however, attention has focused on the gender issues behind the controversy. Viewed from this perspective, More has been seen as the embodiment of a revisionist female ideology, replacing the accommodating female ideal with an activist model: hence the virulent chauvinism of her opponents' attacks. Though the gender aspect of the controversy will be briefly mentioned, and its importance acknowledged, this article focuses on the theological and ecclesiological factors which, with the partial exception of Brown's tendentious account, have been neglected in previous studies. These are the light thrown on the inadequacies of diocesan structures; the particular problems of the Mendip parishes; the issues dividing Evangelicals and High Churchmen; the tensions between the Church and Methodism; the rival, but overlapping, agendas of Evangelical Sunday school pioneers and itinerant Methodist preachers; and ultra-loyalist fears of a cultural attack waged by William Wilberforce and his associates, interpreted as a front for ‘Jacobinism’. Three questions are posed about the controversy, all of which centre around Evangelical–High Church relationships. What aspects of More's work in the Mendips particularly disturbed some High Churchmen? Why, given these facts, did other High Church clergy rally to her defence? Why did her opponents retreat in the spring and early summer of 1802?

Apostolic delegate in Turkey and Greece and archbishop of Messambria from January 1935 to December 1944, Angelo Roncalli was confronted from 1939 to 1944 with extraordinary situations of human suffering. His response to some of the challenges has received little attention. Yet both public and private archives contain materials sufficient to throw considerable light on Roncalli's activities during those years.

On 8 December 1527 two scholars, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur, carried penitential faggots at St Paul's Cross as a token of abjuration of heresy. With this act both men formally cleansed their souls and brought about their reconciliation with the Church. Far from being the end of a story, however, this ceremony proved to be the beginning of a controversy which has survived until the present day. For Thomas Bilney subsequently renounced his abjuration and became a significant figure in the early Reformation in England, eventually dying at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1531. And yet, despite the importance attributed to him as a reformer, Bilney is now, as he was then, an ambiguous figure whose relationship with the Catholic Church and precise beliefs have never been conclusively determined. Many writers have claimed Bilney as a champion of their particular causes or have sought to identify his place in the wider movements of the Reformation. For the Protestant John Foxe he was a martyr, albeit a flawed one, for the reformed faith, who refused to the last to be intimidated into a second abjuration. For Sir Thomas More, in somewhat mischievous mood, he was a Catholic saint brought to realise the error of his ways at the stake and reconciled to the Church with almost his last breath.

The first Register of the Faculty Office, in Lambeth Palace Library, is a document which throws much light upon those who left religion before 1538. These ex-religious were, in the main, unpensioned. Although the late E. H. W. Dunkin made an almost complete transcript of the register in 1890, these early records of the Court of the Faculties were at one time thought to be lost. So much has been written about the treatment of the ex-religious, their pensions and benefices, that only the appearance, or more correctly the re-appearance, of fresh evidence justifies further consideration of this subject. Views as to whether the ex-religious were well treated or ill treated have been widely expressed, and of those who applied for capacities in 1536, Professor Knowles has recently written ‘whatever the numbers concerned, they were certainly not very large, and as they were the first religious to appear in the market in search of employment they were probably absorbed without great difficulty’. Any material which increases our knowledge of the unpensioned religious should be brought before scholars for, as the late Geoffrey Baskerville wrote in 1937, ‘the after-careers of the religious who were dispersed in 1536 are more difficult to trace than those of their companions whose sense of vocation led them to accept transference to the larger monasteries, and who were eventually able to claim a pension.’

The First Crusade was such an important event with such amazing consequences that it is hardly surprising that an enormous amount of ink has been spent on discovering the reasons why enthusiasm for it was so widespread. Much effort has been spent on examining factors which preconditioned the men of the eleventh century to welcome Urban's appeal in 1095–6. Broadly speaking it has been supposed that the wars against Islam in Spain accustomed men to the notion of Holy War, while the growing authority of the Church in the age of reform predisposed them to obey their spiritual directors – early evidence of this was the Peace and Truce of God first proclaimed by the bishops and clergy of France. Papal initiative in supporting the reconquest of Islamic Sicily and ‘corrupt’ England, and the influence of papal ideas about the militia Christi refined and developed by Anselm of Lucca reinforced the point. The Church threw its authority behind pilgrimage, the great manifestation of the popular piety of the age which was intimately allied to devotion to relics of saints and the cult of their sacred places. The most sacred of all places, and therefore the greatest of pilgrimages, was that to Jerusalem. It was the spiritual reward for this journey to Jerusalem which Urban 11 offered for those going on the expedition of 1095. These factors have always been the substance of discussion and were systematically analysed by Erdmann in a book which remains the basis of scholarly discussion to this day.

When Augustine and his monks landed at Thanet in 597, they were confronted with a situation rare even in the Völkerivanderung. What was to become the church of the English people had to be built up from scratch. In his despatches to Pope Gregory during the first years of his mission, Augustine gives no hint of an existing native Christian population, survivors of Roman Britain under Jutish rule, who might form the nucleus of a Church. There was Ethelbert's Frankish Queen Bertha and her retainers for whose use a church dedicated to St Martin outside the royal city of Canterbury, had been restored, and Bede mentions that this had been ‘built of old while the Romans yet inhabited Britain’. But despite Canterbury providing evidence for Christianity in the late fourth century and being relatively near sites such as Lullingstone, Richborough and Faversham, where there had been Christian worship in Roman times, Augustine's problems were concerned entirely with how to deal with Germanic paganism. What had happened? How was it that the ecclesia Britannorum failed to provide foundations for the ecclesia Anglicana even in Kent?

This article explores the reception of the European Protestant Reformation in the British Atlantic using the early Bermudan Church as a case study. It offers an alternative model for Puritan colonisation which was driven by a reformed vision for godly globalisation and evangelisation rather than flight from persecution in England. By shedding light on ecclesiastical ties between the reformed Churches on the continent and the British Atlantic, it extends the ideological foundations for the establishment of British America beyond the theories of empire and economic opportunism usually addressed by historians.

Hobbes's eschatology in Leviathan is one of the most striking aspects of this classic work and has received considerable scholarly attention. Nevertheless, its scriptural interpretation has rarely been examined. This article closely analyses Hobbes's scriptural case for two aspects of eschatology: the doctrine of mortalism and the terrestrial kingdom of God. It shows that, to a large extent, Hobbes's biblical exegesis for these two eschatological issues was preceded by that of his contemporaries, including Richard Overton and John Archer. It is likely, in particular, that the scriptural interpretation for Hobbes's mortalism was directly indebted to Overton's Mans mortalitie.

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution.