This article brings fresh perspective to the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State that sat from 1913 to 1916, emphasising the divisions in the Church that it both reflected and reinforced. The article focuses on the shadow that two competing legacies cast over the committee's appointment and recommendations, and the reception of its report. This is evident in the work of two prominent figures of the early twentieth-century Church: Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947) and J. N. Figgis (1866–1919). While Henson appealed to Hooker's legacy in upholding a national Church, Figgis drew on Tractarianism in defending a narrower, denominational ideal.

The chronicle of Robert the Monk is a well-known source for the First Crusade and the most copied First Crusade narrative in the Middle Ages. Though the number of copies decreased after the twelfth century, it increased in the fifteenth, with most of these later copies either being preserved in German-speaking lands or originating from there. It is possible that a First Crusade narrative was needed in fifteenth-century German-speaking lands because of their proximity to the struggle against the Ottomans, and the chronicle of Robert the Monk was the only one widely available for copying.

Histories of the English Christmas tend to downplay the role of religion in the development of the modern festival. This article examines the place of religion in the popular celebration of Christmas, as well as the provision of worship offered by the Protestant Churches during the festive season. It argues that although some churchmen viewed Christmas pessimistically as part of a broader battle between sacred and secular, the Churches played an important role in the expansion of the urban public culture of Christmas in the late nineteenth century, whilst the doctrine of the incarnation provided a religious framework for the celebration of childhood and domesticity that the festival had come to embody.

This article demonstrates that from the mid- to late fourteenth century the English clergy pursued a sustained campaign to protect episcopal temporalities from royal seizure by asserting the right of bishops to be judged by their peers in parliament. The most important stage of this movement came in the parliament of January 1352 when the clergy made a case for episcopal exceptionalism in English law. The legal identity of bishops in England underwent a seismic shift and it was conceded that in certain cases a bishop should be judged in accordance with his temporalities rather than his spiritual office.

Until comparatively recently the origins of the movement known as the devotio moderna attracted curiously little attention in this country. It was judged too medieval and too orthodox in character to have had much influence upon the course of reform, and the Anglican habit of relating all reforming movements to the Reformation did not allow it its rightful place in the history of the Christian spiritual life; from another angle, the sarcasms of Erasmus in his Compendium Vitae cast doubts about the disinterestedness of its teaching, and raised among humanists suspicions that its aims and methods were ultimately obscurantist. Its reforming activities were mainly associated with the efforts of a single wing of, or group within, the movement that aimed at reforming the religious houses along the lines of the Augustinian convents of Agnetenburg and Windesheim, and small attention was paid to its appeal to the laity and its attempt to combat self-satisfied materialism among the prosperous middle classes in the towns. And the fact that it was, at any rate in its beginning, essentially a local movement, confined in the main to the western part of the ecclesiastical province of Cologne, still further confined its appeal.

Among the archives belonging to the diocese of London and housed in two muniment rooms in St. Paul's Cathedral, is a bundle of papers labelled ‘Certificates as to Papists, 1706’. Curiosity having tempted me to undo and examine its contents, I now give a survey of the documents therein contained, believing that this may prove to be of value in two respects: first, as throwing new light upon members of a proscribed religion at a time which, so far as can be ascertained from books and records in libraries, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is very poorly documented; secondly, as giving yet another insight into the character and outlook of a section of the Anglican clergy at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

This examination of John Wesley's emendation and elaboration of John Foxe's Acts and monuments, shows how Wesley constructed Foxe's text and himself within a tradition of learned English ministry. Offering an expanded vision of the role and function of the popularly styled Book of Martyrs, this article combines readings of Wesley's journals and secondary analyses to permit insights into Wesley's relationship with the established Church of England, his intentions in taking up Foxe's text and his conceptions of hierarchy, pastoral duty and ministry. It contradicts scholarly expectation of anti-Catholic impulses behind Foxeian publications and their effects, and encourages a more nuanced appreciation of the contemporary application of the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘papist’.