The paths to sainthood of the cults of Isidore Agricola and Ferdinand III exhibit a unique phenomenon of collaboration across the Spanish empire for the canonisation of multiple Counter-Reformation saints. An analysis of their financial records may reveal a network of alliances that could account for the overwhelming number of Iberian saints canonised in the seventeenth century. The role of Spanish America in the construction of a renewed imperial identity is also examined, demonstrating that it capitalised on the urgency of these devotions to advance its own cults while arguing for the centrality of their territories to the expansion of Catholicism.

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.

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.

A distinction is often made between magisterial and radical reformers in the early modern period, Luther and Thomas Müntzer being frequently taken as representatives of two quite different reformations, especially in regard to the understanding of Scripture and of the political realm. It can, however, be argued that the Reformation as a whole was radical, and that it is misleading to characterise one aspect of it as mainstream, another peripheral. The comparison between Müntzer and the Scottish reformer, John Knox, appears to support the contention that the chasm between the two camps is not unbridgeable.

The nineteenth century witnessed a transition from the ancien régime to the ‘age of mobilisation’, says Charles Taylor, from an organically and hierarchically connected society to a fragmented society based on mass participation, charismatic leaders and organisational tactics. Amid this upheaval the Netherlands Reformed Church faced an unprecedented crisis as it lost its taken-for-granted social status. This essay examines the new legitimation that Abraham Kuyper offered the Church through his Free Church theology, and how various other aspects of his theology, including his baptismal and public theology, developed in conjunction with his ecclesiology. Kuyper's ecclesiology thus offers a case study of problems that ecclesiology in general faced due to the social and cultural shifts of the nineteenth century.

To Englishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few institutions inspired such horrified fascination as the Bedlam hospital, the principal London mad-house. Yet Bedlam, or to give it its proper title, the hospital of St Mary of New Bethlehem, had been in existence for several centuries before its principal charge became the care, or perhaps more correctly the confinement, of the insane. The origins of Bedlam lie in the 1240s, in the reign of King Henry III. To date, the circumstances which gave rise to the hospital's foundation have failed to attract the understanding and attention which they deserve. Bedlam's founders would no doubt have been surprised to learn of the subsequent fate of their institution, intended in origin not as a mad-house but as a link between England and the Holy Land, part of a wider movement in which the cathedral church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and its bishops sought land, alms and hospitality in western Europe. The purpose of this present essay is to investigate the links between England and the church of Bethlehem which gave rise to the foundation of Bedlam. In the process, it is hoped that new light will be shed upon English attitudes to the crusades, upon the reorganisation of the finances and administration of the bishops of Bethlehem exiled from the Holy Land after 1187, and in particular upon the career of one bishop, Goffredo de Prefetti. It was Goffredo who was to be personally responsible for the introduction of the Bethlehemites to England, and so it is with his career that we should commence.

If we affirm against recent criticism the authenticity of the Middle Recension of the Ignatian letters, we are nevertheless left with the enigma of Ignatius' relations with Polycarp. This paper explains that enigma in terms of two distinct cultural worlds of early second-century Christianity that come together in the meeting of these two church leaders. Ignatius was the first great missionary bishop who reinterpreted church order, the eucharist and martyrdom against the backcloth of the Second Sophistic in Asia Minor, with its pagan processions, cult and embassies that celebrated the social order of the Greek city state in relation to imperial power. Much of Ignatius' iconography was alien to Polycarp, though the latter was finally to canonise both him and his writings by focusing on his impressively enacted refutation of Docetism through his portrayal of his forthcoming martyrdom.

The 1559 Book of Common Prayer printed by Richard Grafton has been dismissed by bibliographers, who have suggested that Grafton printed it as ‘agent for Jugge and Cawood’ (the Queen’s Printers) and ‘improperly put his name in the imprint’. Relying on evidence from a 1559 Grafton prayer book in the collection of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which contains the signatures of members of Elizabeth i’s Privy Council that can be dated prior to the opening of Elizabeth’s Reformation Parliament, this article argues not only that Grafton’s Book of Common Prayer was legitimate (indeed ‘authorised’), but also that it may have been printed in a limited edition, perhaps to be circulated in association with the Bill for Uniformity.

‘Into theology Cyprian scarcely ever entered’, wrote W. D. Niven, yet d'Alès's book La Théologie de S. Cyprien covers more than 400 pages without appearing to be dealing with a non-existent subject. The prima facie conflict is not difficult to resolve. A religious leader can no more help talking theology, whether consciously intending to do so or not, than Molière's M. Jourdain could help talking prose. An unconscious theology, indeed, can be every bit as important and as influential as a fully selfconscious one; in fact, its influence is very liable to be the greater, because succeeding generations are less likely to be aware of it and so less likely to submit it to critical scrutiny and review. In no case is this largely-unconscious influence more significant than in the case of Cyprian. All the other outstanding writers of the third-century western Church ended their days in schism. Tertullian, Hippolytus and Novatian were all far greater theologians than Cyprian, but all three broke from the catholic Church in support of the rigorist cause. In spite of this fact, their importance for later theology remains considerable. But that importance is a fully conscious theological one. Where their ideas were accepted and developed, it was because they carried conscious conviction as theological ideas; the fact of who it was who was the father of the ideas did little to commend them.

Bancroft's celebrated sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Cross on 9 February 1588/9. Two editions appeared in England during the summer. The protests from English Puritans—Dr Reynolds of Oxford University, Sir Francis Knollys—soon died away. Bancroft was denouncing the puritan movement more forcibly than it had been denounced, but so far as England was concerned he was saying nothing which had not already been said by Anglican controversialists like John Whitgift, John Bridges, Thomas Cooper. The novelty of the sermon lay in its attitude to foreign churches. The presbyterian movement in England claimed the support of the protestant churches in Scotland, Holland, the Rhineland, Switzerland. Bancroft was not afraid to transform the denunciation of presbyterianism in England into a denunciation of Presbyterianism in general.

Fourteenth-century records give a depressing picture of the finances of the Cistercian Order. In 1338, for instance, the Chapter General stated that the Order was heavily in debt at the papal curia and in the fairs of Champagne, and that its income was not sufficient to meet all its obligations. Its immunity from papal and royal taxation had been largely eroded in the thirteenth century. During the Avignon period the popes levied frequent property taxes from the Church in France, and by an arrangement with the French monarchy, the lion's share of the profits went to the king. In this way Philip VI obtained money from the Church during the Hundred Years’ War. The premier abbeys of the Cistercian Order, and its other houses within the kingdom, were not exempt from these exactions, and no doubt shared the distress of the French clergy. In 1362 Urban V refused to levy another property tax from the Church in France, on the grounds that it had paid more than enough.