The past decade and a half has brought a blossoming of studies on the Shepherd of Hermas, an influential Christian apocalyptic text from the second century ce. Most have been produced by specialists in Western Europe and North America publishing in German, French, Italian and English, but others writing in historically overlooked locales and languages are also contributing. Both groups reflect an increasing diversity of perspectives and approaches, which stands in tension with the sort of scholarship on the Shepherd that has typically appeared in the modern period. Despite the resurgence, precious few book-length projects have tackled research questions beyond those bounded by historical-criticism until Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas (Berlin 2022) was edited by Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier, who rank among the most path-breaking scholars presently exploring this text. Their edited volume is a wide-ranging, invigorating contribution to knowledge that should fuel innovative work on the Shepherd and, by extension, early Christian literature in the future.

The charismatic renewal in the early 1960s was a significant development in global Christianity, creating theological and pastoral debates and disagreements with both local and international dimensions. This article sets the controversy between the leading Anglicans John Stott and Michael Harper within the wider cultural context that impacted the initial rise of the charismatic movement, and its subsequent growing global acceptance. The Stott-Harper debates contributed notably to the long-term domestication of the charismatic movement within an established Church, keeping most charismatic Anglicans within the Evangelical tradition. Conservative Evangelicals were enabled to adjust constructively to the growing ‘charismatisation’ of global Evangelicalism.

Scholars of late antique liturgy usually find the origins of baptismal imagery in the Bible and the daily life of early Christians. This article reveals that some metaphors, such as the ‘furnace’ image, may also come from pre-Christian literature. In ancient Greek and Mesopotamian sources, the female uterus is compared to a furnace. This article argues that, based on its use in pre-Christian literature, the furnace image might also be considered feminine. This image describes a broader range of activities in baptism than that ascribed to female agency until now and seems more empowering for today's women.

This article argues that we must look beyond Paolo Sarpi's infamous history of the Council of Trent to understand the culture of reading about the council in early modern Italy. We unearth prohibited works that garnered more attention from Rome than Sarpi's, and we show that these were widely read in multiple formats across Italy from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century. By recovering this history, we can see Sarpi's magnum opus in a new light: as one of many works that sought to make sense of the council, working within and around serious constraints.

Preserved within the corpus of the East Roman polemicist Peter the Sicilian, several unassuming statements subtly contradict the historical consensus that the Paulicians espoused absolute dualism. According to their own testimony, rather than literally upholding two gods, as their Roman adversaries alleged, the Paulicians worshipped the heavenly Father but contended that the devil was merely a false god to whom the Romans were subject. This article therefore contributes to a broader critique of several received truths: that the Paulicians were absolute dualists, or dualists more generally, and that their thought informed that of later dualist groups.

In 1120 Notre Dame of Paris received a fragment of the True Cross from a former canon, Ansel, who had joined the First Crusade and become cantor of the Holy Sepulchre. The history of the relic was sought out, documented, inserted into the liturgy and in time revised according to political and cultural developments. This article reconstructs the story of the relic's arrival in Paris, and the way in which, through the successive narratives attached to it, it slowly gained and grew in meaning, giving definition to the Church of Paris and ultimately to the kingdom of France.

Mark Goldie is a towering figure in the historiography of early modern England, with a wide body of work concerning the origins and formations of political and religious institutions, including nascent party groups. His essays and edited collections inform most other accounts of the period, and his cohort of influential supervisees is legion within academia.

The Codex Angus (Add. MS 40 in the University of Sydney Library's Rare Books and Special Collections) is a Byzantine Gospel lectionary meant for liturgical use. The findings presented here corroborate this catalogue description. There is ample evidence of its heavy use, which indicates a public not a private setting. After a brief description of the manuscript, particularities of its content and appearance are discussed, all of which point to a small rural community, in Northern Greece, as its original owner and user. Together with introducing the codex, this article casts light on the Christian community that might have used it.

This article examines the context for the establishment of the non-denominational Port of London Society, and the dissenting Bethel Union, which came together to form the British and Foreign Sailor Society in 1833. Making forensic use of the surviving archives as well as contemporary reports in regional and national newspapers, it challenges the traditional historiography which focuses on the charismatic, but disruptive, figure of George Charles (‘Boatswain’) Smith (1782–1863). It suggests that the cult of the founder is misplaced for Smith, and that marine religious charities flourished despite, rather than because of, his contribution.

This paper explores the crisis of 596 which interrupted Augustine of Canterbury's mission to the Anglo-Saxons, necessitating his return to Rome. Bede's interpretation of this as a moment of psychological failure is discounted. Political changes in Merovingian Gaul associated with the death of Childebert are reconsidered. A new economic explanation is advanced based on the wording of Gregory the Great's letter of encouragement to Augustine and his fellow missionaries, consideration of the management of the papal estates in Gaul and the behaviour of Virgilius, metropolitan of Arles.

This article uses letters from BL, ms Lansdowne 99 to explore how a diverse group of individuals experiencing mental and emotional distress utilised religious ideas as a primary means of interpreting their experience and expressing themselves to those in authority in Elizabethan England. It shifts emphasis away from the causes and towards the construction and experience of distress. It argues that such letters shed important light on the character and progress of the English Reformation by the closing decades of the sixteenth century, as well as on the operation of the process of Reformation itself.