Dr. G. A. Michell has argued that the kind of Eucharistic Prayer presupposed in the letter of Firmilian to Cyprian, about a prophetess who arrogated to herself the functions of the ordained ministry, was an invocation, or naming, of the Trinity, ending with the Sanctus; that this was, therefore, the kind of Eucharistic Prayer which was used at Caesarea in Firmilian's time; and that it survives in the first part of the Anaphora of the Liturgy of St. Basil, ending with the Sanctus. If this is true, it follows that all the rest of the prayer has been added, after the original ending. The question arises, whether it is an original composition, or whether it is borrowed from another church. This essay will try to answer that question, in the light of an attempt to recover the original structure of this part of the prayer.

The eucharistic doctrine of Apollinaris is of more than passing interest as illustrating the kind of piety of which his whole system is the fruit. However, we do not possess any systematic treatise on the Eucharist from his pen, still less any liturgy described as ‘Apollinarian’. In fact, in dealing with this subject, attention must be concentrated entirely on two fragments, where the eucharistic reference is unmistakable. To discuss the significance of these fragments, and to try to give some indication of their relation to the rest of the fourth century liturgical tradition as we know it, is the aim of this paper.

John Bale acquired the MS. of Fasciculi Zizaniorum sometime after he left the Carmelite Order and before 1540 when he went into exile in Germany taking it with him. He was already familiar with Fasciculi Zizaniorum long before he left his Order. Bodley MS. 73 is an autograph MS. of Bale's and is one of his earliest notebooks. The bulk of it was written before 1524, though there are several later additions, the latest of which is 1526. This notebook was compiled, therefore, whilst Bale was a zealous Carmelite student, and before he went abroad to Toulouse and Louvain. It is a mine of miscellaneous information about the Carmelite Order: a list of all the Carmelite houses in England with their dates of foundation; the names of all the Priors Provincial of the Order; descriptions of the antiquities of many Carmelite houses, of the friars buried in different convents, often with their epitaphs; a lengthy selection of the letters of Thomas Netter. Of special concern here are Bale's notes on Carmelite writers. The ascription of the authorship of Fasciculi Zizaniorum to Thomas Netter of Walden first appears in this notebook in Bale's notes on Walden, where he says that Netter wrote the Doctrinale Ecclesie and Fasciculus Zizaniorum. The incipit to the latter work he gives as ‘Colligite Zizania’, which appears on the second folio of our MS. Later there follow four folios of ‘Extracta quedam ex fasciculo doctoris fratris Thome Walden’. There can be no doubt that all these extracts are taken from our MS., which was well known to Bale. He summarises its contents as far as the condemnation of Wyclif at the Council of Constance. His summary is interesting.

Among the legislators of the medieval English Church John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury, 1279–92, is remembered chiefly on account of canons published in two councils early in his pontificate, at Reading in July-August 1279 and at Lambeth in October 1281. His successor, Robert Winchelsey (1294–1313), less celebrated for his laws, none-the-less is assigned by Lyndwood, the fifteenth-century canonist, nine chapters of the Provinciale. The ‘Winchelsey’ documents and some others described in medieval manuscripts as ‘Statuta’ or ‘Constitutiones’ or ‘Decreta’ of one or other of the two archbishops cannot be immediately or surely connected with any known provincial council. They include texts on questions of almost daily occurrence to medieval archdeacons and parochial clergy: about the calculation of tithe, the duties of stipendiary priests, the obligations of the laity for church repairs. Lyndwood glossed many of them. Modern students of history and canon law commonly cite them. It is, therefore, of some importance to establish the degree of credit which may be allowed to the ascriptions. This study will consider the evidence of the manuscripts and will aim at sorting the genuine statutes from the spurious and the dubious. Some of each kind will be found. The enquiry may not only help to determine the nature of these particular documents, but also may reflect light on other doubtful legislation and illustrate the ways in which laws were framed and customs established in the English Church in the later Middle Ages.

Fasciculi Zizaniorum. has become the bible of ‘Wycliffite’ and early protestant studies. The best known collection of materials relating to John Wyclif and his heresies, and roughly contemporary with what is described, it is the most important single source for the history of John Wyclif. The full title—Fasciculi Zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wycliff cum Tritico—is derived from the description which precedes the opening narrative in the MS. A great deal more is included in the MS. than this title would at first sight suggest. The collection also contains much about the heresies of the Oxford followers of Wyclif, about his leading opponents and the cases of many early Lollards. It also includes the Latin text of the two statutes against Lollards, De Haeretico Comburendo of 1401 and the Leicester Statute of 1414. To these Lollard materials are added the proceedings of the Council of Constance against Wyclif, John Hus and Jerome of Prague, and summaries of condemnation of heresies made by the Church before Wyclif's day, beginning with those condemned at Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth century. The other works are mostly concerned with the age-long controversies over Apostolic Poverty and the Mendicant Orders: a selection from the writings of archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh; the proceedings against the Irish Cistercian, Henry Crump, in 1392; the Protectorium Pauperis of the Carmelite, Richard Maidstone; the Defence of the Carmelite Order written in 1374 by Richard Hornby. The last two works in the MS., a sermon by John Hornby and the well known treatise against Wyclif's Trialogus by the Franciscan, William Woodford, are incomplete.

In June 1432 Gerardo Landriani, the bishop of Lodi, visited England as an ambassador of the Council of Basel to address the king and parliament. The assembly in Basel, despite a late start, poor attendance and the threat of war in its immediate neighbourhood, had rebelled against Eugenius IV at the beginning of the year by continuing to meet in defiance of the papal bulls of dissolution. It persisted in its negotiations with the excommunicated Hussites and showed determination to achieve its other declared aims, the reform of the Church and the pacification of Christendom. Landriani found that a papal envoy bearing copies of the bulls of dissolution was also in London; he, nevertheless, succeeded in obtaining promises of English support and a delegation composed partly of Henry VI's ambassadors, partly of delegates of the English clergy, set out for Basel before the close of the year.

The history of the Oratory for which Bremond hoped has not yet been written and much of it remains doubtful. André George has recently repeated his own lament that this should be so, especially as a full study ‘éclairerait singulièrement les obscurités dont sʼentourent les origines du XVIIIe siècle…’. An examination of some of the difficulties which overpowered Sainte-Marthe, the fifth Superior General of the Congregation, may enlighten these dark places and perhaps serve both as a modest contribution to the unwritten history and as a detailed illustration of the magisterial thesis of Paul Hazard. A comprehensive history of the intellectual achievements of the Oratory—which would, in these years, include a study of such giants as Quesnel, Simon, Lamy, Male-branche and Thomassin—is plainly impossible within the limits of an article, and attention will therefore be concentrated on the attempts of Sainte-Marthe himself to direct the turbulent life of the Congregation.

There are two anonymous treatises concerning the General Council that are left to us from the reign of Henry VIII: the one is Hatfield MS. No. 46, which has never been put into print, the other is A Treatise concernynge generall councilles, the Byshoppes of Rome and the Clergy, published by Berthelet in 1538, which was a development of Hatfield MS. No. 47. Though their existence has been known for some time, they have failed to receive the attention they deserve; the first treatise has been summarised by historians of the English Reformation, the second hardly ever mentioned, although its MS. draft was cursorily used by F. van le Baumer. Neither treatise has, thus, ever been studied in its entirety. The purpose of this paper is to give a fuller account of what these treatises are, to elucidate the circumstance of their composition, and to place them in the context of the general history of contemporary Tudor literature on the General Council.

The year 1961 witnesses the centenary of the Deaconess Community of St. Andrew, the only Religious Community in the Anglican Church whose full members are both professed Religious and ordained Deaconesses. In 1861, Elizabeth Catherine Ferard, with two like-minded ladies, began to live together under a common rule of life, dedicated to worship and to works of mercy. In July of the following year, the bishop of London ‘set apart’ Miss Ferard as the first deaconess of the English Church. Thus began the Community of Deaconesses, expanding and developing during the ensuing hundred years, but from the beginning maintaining its characteristic two-fold vocation to the Religious Life and to the Order of Deaconesses.

Late at night on 18 May 1688 the bishops, granted an audience by James II, handed him their petition. ‘When he looked upon it he said he knew whose handwriting it was, as well he might, for it was the Archbishop's.’ It certainly was the archbishop's hand, but it was not wholly his work, nor that of the other six bishops who had signed it with him and who now presented it to their king. How this document came into being is the subject of this paper.

In the course of an article on these Responsiones in this Journal (x. (1559) 1–49), it was suggested that a text of these replies, long known to canonists as the ‘capitular’ text, was older than that in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede; and, also, that the fifth Responsio in the Bedan text, which contains the long controverted permission to marry within the third and fourth generation, was an interpolation made, possibly, if not probably, by the priest Nothelm. Nothelm had corresponded with Bede over many years, and he later became archbishop of Canterbury. The writers of the article did not know at the time that Dom Paul Meyvaert had in preparation an edition of the Responsiones based on the text as found in canonical collections. The publication of this edition is much to be desired; but, meanwhile, it seems permissible to point out that the ‘capitular’ text is found in the oldest MSS. and that the Bedan text is never found in any MS. earlier than Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written in 731. If it had been, the question of priority could not, of course, have arisen.

The return to office of Peel and the Conservatives in 1841 was reassuring to the Church. On the whole, Melbourne had been less objectionable than the bishops had expected. But the Whigs had by no means lived down the suspicion with which Churchmen naturally regarded a party so strongly supported by Dissenters; and, although there were men unfriendly to the bishops in the Tory ranks, Peel was a far more skilful disciplinarian than Melbourne, if only because he took more pains.