Joseph Milner's ‘History of the Church of Christ’ (1794–1809) was the most popular English-language church history for half a century, yet it remains misunderstood by many historians. This paper argues that Milner's Evangelical interpretation of church history subverted Protestant historiographical norms. By prioritising conversion over doctrinal precision, and celebrating the piety of select medieval Catholics, Milner undermined the historical narratives that undergirded Protestant exceptionalism. As national religious identities became increasingly contested in the 1820s and 1830s, this subversive edge was blunted by publishers who edited the ‘History’ to be less favourable toward pre-Reformation Christianity.

During the first half of the fourteenth century titles granted by English religious houses replaced patrimonial titles and titles granted by laymen and women as the predominant titles for unbeneficed secular clergy in most dioceses. This probably reflects the greater security an undying corporation provided for the ordaining bishop; but none of the various kinds of title as described in episcopal registers can necessarily be taken at face value and in practice ordinands were not expected to depend on the grantors of their titles for their future careers or for long-term financial support.

John Wesley required detailed records to be compiled of Methodist society members. One extant list is that of the Keighley circuit for 1763–5. This article, breaking new ground in Wesley studies, argues that symbols in this and other catalogues recorded members’ spiritual condition. These symbols are used to analyse recruitment, losses and spiritual change on a quarterly basis. They reveal that although recruitment in the circuit was high during a revival at the start of a new preaching regime, it fell quickly, many members departed and there was little overall improvement in spiritual condition. Recruitment and changes were not uniform across the circuit, pointing to local rather than regional or national influences.

The Holy See's involvement in interwar multilateralism is rarely acknowledged, largely due to its exclusion from the Versailles settlement and resulting institutions. Using new archival findings, this article reevaluates the Vatican's role in the contestation and construction of this new order, focusing on the League's International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Unofficially acting as Vatican intermediaries, a number of League officials quietly promoted Catholic visions of internationalism from within this body. The activities of these individuals provided an alternative method for promoting the Holy See's interests within the emergent international order, in conscious competition with more dominant secular conceptions of internationalism.

Most of Archbishop Williams's manuscript remains were destroyed in a fire in 1695. However, the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, contains a volume of manuscript sermons and sermon notes that have not been significantly studied. On closer examination, the sermons can all be dated to the 1640s, and several were delivered on significant occasions. They show that Williams was a far more committed preacher than has generally been acknowledged, and demonstrate his explicit and consistent adherence to Reformed theology. They therefore help in explaining his close links with godly communities and so his significance during the Long Parliament.

This article investigates the financial arrangements put in place by Pope Urban V to pay for his household on his journey from Avignon to Rome in 1367. It shows that the curia's move had a disruptive effect, since its normal routine of paying expenses at the end of each month could not be continued while the court was in transit. In order to deal with these exceptional circumstances, household officials were given a special advance payment in anticipation of the costs that would be incurred on the journey, which in effect set a budget for the pope's domestic expenditure.

The experience of Jean-Pierre Camus, a reforming bishop in seventeenth-century France, highlights the problematic ambivalences present within French Catholic reform after the Council of Trent: the persistent tensions between bishops, the papacy and lower clergy over the most effective means of achieving renewal and the most appropriate forms of ecclesiastical government, as well as the growing emphasis upon episcopal perfection within an episcopate that was, paradoxically, closely linked to politics and secular society. His publications on episcopacy provide an insight into the motivations and beliefs of a prominent episcopal reformer and into the ecclesiastical culture of seventeenth-century France. This article seeks to demonstrate that Camus' episcopal ideal was a coherent adaptation of traditional and contemporary views produced in response to post-Trent circumstances and that the bishop's published views had a significant impact upon his fellow prelates and their relationship with the papacy.

On 4 May 1897 more than a hundred Parisians – mostly women of high society – perished in the Charity Bazaar fire. The records of this terrible accident reveal much about the charitable practices of the nobility in France of the Third Republic. This article explores the place of religion in upper-class charity within the context of republican anticlericalism. It focuses especially on issues of inter-faith collaboration and the role of aristocratic women in supporting the work of the Catholic Church.

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.

Robert Barnes is a name well known to historians of the English Reformation. He receives brief mention in most historical surveys, being variously discussed as Coverdale's prior, Luther's friend, Cromwell's protégé, or Henry VIII's martyr. Among scholars whose interests lie primarily with the theology of the Reformation, Barnes has at times received further, more focused attention, his written works being examined in some detail and he himself being painted as a rare English Lutheran. Those interested in the politics of the Henrician Reformation have also found reason to assign Barnes a place of some importance, giving particular attention to his later role as royal ambassador to the princes and theologians of the German Protestant League of Schmalkalden. In contrast to these portraits of Barnes as a theologian and diplomat, and in spite of the fact that Barnes regularly mounted the pulpit while in England, there has been no comparable emphasis on Robert Barnes the preacher. The reason for this lacuna is quite simply that, despite the amount of contemporary commentary on his preaching, none of Barnes's actual sermons has been preserved. This is a fact all the more lamentable since, as those friends and foes who did comment upon his preaching make clear, he was known by contemporaries to be an extraordinarily zealous and effective preacher.

The adoption of socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was for many an experience akin to religious conversion. Katherine St John Conway's path to enlightenment provides a stark example. While sitting in her fashionable Bristol church ‘praying for a fuller consciousness of the Presence’, she was confronted by a group of workers adopting the socialist tactic of the ‘church parade’, the invasion of churches during Sunday services to highlight labour disputes and the plight of the unemployed:

[I]n they came, lassies out on strike against starvation wages and for the right to combine … there they stood, sister-women, … ill-clad, wet through with the driving rain, hungry … ‘They stand between me and the Christ.’ So the thought smote me; so I see it still … . For the first time in my life I heard and began to understand.