Church is not the first place we should think of looking for ‘the historian of the Roman Empire’. He is more usually thought of as the opponent of organised Christianity and of the established church whether under Constantine or the Hanoverians. Yet we know that he dutifully sat in the family pew at Buriton, occasionally attended services elsewhere and was indeed something of a connoisseur of sermons. Our aim is to seek him out during times of worship and, by an imaginative interpretation of certain known facts, to enter as far as possible into his mind. Such informed reading between the lines, using the documents which reveal to complement those which leave things unsaid, is hardly going beyond what the historian does when he deduces probable causes or demonstrable effects from a set of well-documented facts.

This paper traces the history of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, one of the most successful of the eccentric and idiosyncratic private ecumenical initiatives of the mid-nineteenth century. The principal motivation behind the venture was a Romantic medievalism inspired by the lay Roman Catholic Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle and the Anglican ritualist priest, Frederick George Lee. While initially attracting widespread support, the leaders failed to recognise the power of vested interests in both Churches. After a vigorous denunciation by Henry Manning, the hopes of reunion proved to be little more than a dream.

The abbey of St Augustine was named for Augustine ‘Apostle of the English’, as was its associated parish church, but was governed from its foundation by canons of the rule of St Augustine of Hippo. The two Augustines in the equation were a source of confusion. A reconstruction of the abbey's lost liturgical calendar suggests that the chapter sought to exploit this uncertainty in the matter of the foundation history of their abbey, with the aim of displacing, in the popular mind, the humble ‘English’ saint of the dedication in favour of the ‘Latin’ founder of the canons' rule.

Under the leadership of James the Lord's brother the Christian Church at Jerusalem was probably the most influential of all existing Christian communities. It could boast a system of internal organisation under authoritative resident leaders; it was an important missionary centre, despatching apostles and recalling them, or sending advisors to them when they were in difficulties. Neither the prestige nor the destiny of the Jerusalem Church were the immediate concern of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and it is Hegesippus who keeps us informed of its progress. The stability of that Church was apparently shattered shortly after the death of James, when the Jews revolted against the Romans and ‘immediately Vespasian attacked them’. We hear no more about the Jerusalem Church directly from Hegesippus until he tells of a meeting convened to elect a successor to James, and Eusebius tells us that this meeting took place after Jerusalem had been taken in A.D. 70.

The consistory court of the bishops of Ely by the fourteenth century regularly held its sessions in Cambridge, the largest and most prosperous city of the diocese. Ely itself was small, little more than a hamlet, and physically isolated. Recurrent flooding in the fens often cut off the roads leading into the Isle of Ely, and even at the best of times Ely tended to be rather out of the way. Although Cambridge was flat and lowlying, it rose just far enough above the level of the fenlands to be secure from all but the worst flooding, while the River Cam gave the city ready access to the commercial networks of eastern and southern England.

Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation.

Tudor governments were characterised by their concern that Tudor power and policies should be advertised in pomp and pageantry and in the printed and spoken word. A great deal of work has been done by modern historians on this subject. One of the most exhaustively researched aspects of Elizabeth's reign has been the pomp and pageantry surrounding the queen herself; the products of the Elizabethan printing presses and pulpits have also been dealt with, although not as systematically. There has been little attempt to follow up Conyers Read's introductory article on William Cecil as one of the government members responsible for propaganda. The present study proposes to consider from this perspective the career ofan eminent Elizabethan ecclesiastic and statesman, Elizabeth's first archbishop of Canterbury.

Manuscript Douce 103 in the Bodleian Library is one. of three manuscripts compiled in the late fifteenth century by a priest of Hereford diocese, the others being MSS Douce 60 and Douce 108. The manuscripts contain elementary grammatical texts such as an English version of Donatus's Ars minor, with rearrangements and expositions of hymns, psalms, canticles and sequences (often using material peculiar to the Hereford Use in this country, and showing a particular interest in St Anne and the Virgin), and copies of John Mirk's Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests. A note in the hand of this compiler on fo. 228v of MS 60 may give some clue as to his identity;

The problem of ascertaining by what means and what authority true teachings may be distinguished from false is fundamental to any ecclesiology, since the ecclesiastical community is based, above all, on commonly accepted doctrine. It is a community whose limits are defined — and the parameters within which it operates set — by the body of teachings which is accepted within it as true. Thus, the fundamental practical question which any ecclesiology must address becomes, in effect, who has authority to determine what is taught and what is not; and the answer reveals the main thrust ofthat ecclesiology. In broad terms, two principal, and often conflicting, emphases may be noted: on the community of Christian pilgrims (whom any structure exists to serve), and on the formal ecclesiastical structure (within which the faithful may find security). Pastorally, these emphases are associated to some degree with two different assumptions: either that the believer gains confidence in the institution because of the truth that is taught in it, or that a teaching will be received with confidence by believers ior he reason that it is taught within the institution. In the second case, the pursuit of truth may be subordinated to the support of the expedient.

John of Damascus (c. 655–745) is a striking figure in church history as a defender of icon veneration and as a Church Father who maintained Byzantine Orthodoxy despite living under Muslim rule. His life amongst Muslims and his association with the Umayyad Melkite Christian community, the Christian Church which attempted to maintain an adherence to Byzantine Orthodoxy after the Arab conquest, is often associated with his defence of icons. However, most scholarship claims that his Three treatises on the divine images were written solely against Byzantine iconoclasm. This article provides a close reading of his Treatises focusing on themes which overlap with contemporary Jewish and Muslim debates on figurative images, arguing that John wrote his Treatises in an attempt to create a seminal Melkite theology on icons for both Byzantine and Umayyad Christians faced with iconoclastic arguments from all three Abrahamic faiths.

After his appointment as chief justice of King's Bench in 1495, John Fyneux pressured the ecclesiastical hierarchy through indictments for escapes which explored which officials had responsibility for the prisons and how they were managed, and thereby successfully asserted the royal right of oversight. By the end of Henry VII's reign his bishops, faced with ruinous fines like other lords, had largely accepted their role as gaolers under royal authority, and thus contributed to the bureaucratisation of the hierarchy which Henry VIII would exploit to such good effect.