In reviewing the historiography of the Catholic reform in seventeenthcentury France, one cannot but be struck by the scant attention devoted to the old monastic orders. At a superficial level, this may well be because there are few genuine successes to record or because the numerous failures of attempted reforms make up a particularly depressing and unedifying tale. It is obvious that the more recently founded congregations, both male and female, proved to be more sensitive to the needs of the age and better equipped to deal with them; it was they who succeeded in attracting most of the religious elite who sought entry into the religious life out of a sense of vocation. The rapid growth of the Jesuits, Capucins, Oratorians, Lazarists and Eduists among the male societies, and of the Ursulines, Carmelites and Visitandines among the female are proof enough of that. But this of itself does not demonstrate that the older, monastic orders were not suited to the spiritual or pastoral needs of the age. Indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that, if reformed, they could act as centres for religious revival and attract outstanding individuals. The earliest stirrings of the Catholic reform in the 1590s and 1600s were closely connected to houses of old orders like the Benedictines and the Carmelites; many of the forty new religious houses founded in Paris between 1600 and 1640 belonged to the old orders. As for the inability of the old orders to attract recruits of a high quality, one need but point to the Maurists, Port Royal and the Cistercian strict observance.

Walter Stapledon, bishop of Exeter 1308-26, treasurer of England and victim of the downfall of Edward 11, was a notable benefactor of the Church. As well as giving generously to the rebuilding of Exeter Cathedral (where he was buried in a splendid tomb beside the high altar), he founded or planned three institutions for the clergy of his diocese: a school foundation for a tutor and twelve pupils in the hospital of St John at Exeter; a college for a chaplain and twelve scholars at Oxford (now Exeter College); and a hospital for two chaplains and twelve infirm priests at Clyst Gabriel in Bishop's Clyst, four miles east of Exeter. Unlike the college, the hospital has long since disappeared, but its records survive in unusual profusion for such a small foundation. Not only do they reveal the constitutional and financial history of the house, they also preserve the names of many of its inmates, the dates of their entry and of their deaths or departures. Clyst Gabriel possesses, in effect, one of the oldest registers of patients in an English hospital, commencing as early as 1312.

This essay, which stems from a broader project on religion in the nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, seeks to recreate the experiences of the thousands of Protestants who struggled tenaciously to retain or hide their faith in colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico before the declaration of religious tolerance in 1869 and before the establishment of the region's first Protestant churches, the Anglican congregation of Ponce, organised in 1869, the Episcopal mission of Havana, started in 1871, and the Anglican congregation of Vieques, an island located eight miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, founded in 1880.

The arrival of Robert Morrison in Macau on 4 September 1807 marked the beginning of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary movement in China. The most familiar and important legacy of Morrison is his translation of the Bible into Chinese and the compilation of A dictionary of the Chinese language. When Morrison concluded his work in 1832, only ten Chinese had been baptised. However, the true measure of his accomplishment is not to be sought in the harvest of souls, but in the foundations that laid for future work. As a pioneer missionary in the nineteenth century, Morrison lived in an alien ‘heathen’ world for twenty-five years. How did he hold on to his evangelistic vision and passion in such an adverse and unfavourable environment? This essay aims to sketch Robert Morrison's views on mission, focusing on the way in which he responded to traditional Chinese culture and religion and the huge political obstacles in early nineteenth-century China.

This first publication of the newly-found letter to Gandhi from Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a window into his thinking in the early 1930s, a time of personal formation and of resistance to National Socialism. Western Christianity needed ‘a Christian peace movement’, and Bonhoeffer wanted to learn from Gandhi's movement ‘the meaning of Christian life, of real community life, of truth and love in reality’. The letter includes Bonhoeffer's critique of Western culture and the Church in Europe and America, his hopes for a Church regenerated by the Sermon on the Mount, and his appreciation and critique of Karl Barth

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

Faced with the problem of ministering to the pastoral needs of a rapidly expanding Catholic population, the restored English hierarchy naturally turned its attention to the training of candidates for the priesthood. The immediate problem after 1850 was to devise a constitution for the three existing colleges or seminaries, and it is to this issue that historians have given most attention. Of greater importance, however, were the ideals and standards which the bishops laid down to guide those who were running the colleges, for here they were setting a pattern of training which determined what was to happen for almost a century. In general terms, they advocated a training which isolated the seminarians from contemporary developments in secular education and which was marked by a deep suspicion of the world; it reflected a very narrow view of theology, and was partly responsible for the failure to develop a commitment to continuing study after ordination in many of the clergy. The present article investigates some of these issues by examining the decrees of the provincial synods of Westminster and the situation in the new diocese of Liverpool under its energetic second bishop, Alexander Goss.

When it first appeared in Germany, Gottfried Arnold's History of heretics (1699) was a publishing sensation, immediately causing a stir due to its radical reinterpretation of the Christian past. Numerous scholars wrote against it, but the most determined was the Orthodox Lutheran Ernst Salomon Cyprian, who considered the central thesis of the work – that the history of the Christian Church was a history of decline – a deliberate attack on the principles of Lutheran belief. In Cyprian's view, Arnold's reading of the past was shaped by a cast of personal faith which not only rewrote the Protestant narrative of Christian history, but threatened the very fabric of Lutheran belief.

In the summer of 1337, representatives of the English King Edward III and the German Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria concluded negotiations leading to the formation of an Anglo-imperial alliance. Edward, who was in the midst of preparations to pursue by force his dynastic claim to the French crown, received from Ludwig the title of imperial vicar-general per Alemanniam et Galliam, an act which conferred upon him sovereign rights over subjects and lands west of the Rhine. In return, Edward provided the emperor with the substantial financial remuneration which he required to stabilise his own position within Germany. This Anglo-imperial treaty, the greatest achievement of Edward's early diplomatic programme, was solemnised in a ceremonial meeting between the two rulers during September of the following year. One figure who was no doubt in attendance throughout these events was William of Ockham, the Franciscan philosopher and theologian exiled from his native England as the result of a dispute with Pope John XXIL. Ludwig, while never an entirely reliable protector, had sheltered Ockham and numerous other intellectuals who had run afoul of the papal court at Avignon.

It has long been recognised that one of the most valuable documents about pluralism is the lengthy return of pluralists made in 1366 in accordance with a constitution of pope Urban V. In this return detailed information was sent in to archbishop Simon Langham by the various diocesans, containing the names of pluralists residing at the time in their dioceses, the value of their emoluments, their benefices and academic titles. It has an obvious value as a clergy-list, containing the names not only of several distinguished clerks who held office in the government service, but also of humbler men, as well as of that interesting class of university graduates to whom the acquisition of ecclesiastical benefices became a financial necessity.

Uber dem Berg gibst auch Leute. This ultramontane remark made in 1742 by Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, professor of theology and chancellor of Tübingen University between 1720 and 1756, was intended to shake students out of their cosy, provincial and exclusive Lutheran theology. It was time, so Pfaff argued, they opened windows, put aside their arrogant hair-splitting about correct Lutheran doctrine, and looked at the wider Protestant world beyond Württemberg. Knowledge of the sources of the Christian Church, and of the customs and legal shape of Protestantism in Germany as it had developed since the Reformation, provided the only sure defence of the Protestant Church in an age when autocratic behaviour was fashionable with princes, and the temporal authority of Popes Clement xi and Clement XII was still an inescapable fact.