The role of indulgences in pre-Reformation English religion remains incompletely studied. Centred on material contained in the Lincoln episcopal registers dating from c. 1290 to c. 1340, granting indulgences for prayers for the souls of named people and often specifying their burial locations, this article argues that their place in medieval spirituality and charitable activity has been under- appreciated. Examining the mechanisms and implications of the Lincoln records, it suggests that under-recording of actions considered normal and routine, rather than lack of popularity, lies behind the failure to give indulgences their due place in assessment of English medieval religious life.

This article deals with the practice and theory of penances imposed on heretics by inquisitors in southern France before 1250. At first inquisitors offered a simple choice between penance as proof of conversion or death by burning. Lay resistance forced a subtler approach whereby penitents were removed from the local community in order to be gradually reintegrated into the wider Catholic one. The construction of prisons and the imposition of crosses helped turn inquisitors into an institution. From being a means to the destruction of organised heresy, they became a permanent police force of doctrinal orthodoxy.

In order to tackle the problem of ecclesiastical heresy, late medieval theologians elaborated on the idea of fraternal correction. Alexander of Hales laid the foundation of the standard theological discourse, which was developed by Thomas Aquinas. In applying this concept to the problem of papal heresy, William of Ockham questioned and reversed the hierarchical assumptions and premises in the traditional discourse. Drawing on his ethical theory of invincible ignorance, he also provided a moral basis for an inferior's dissent from ecclesiastical authority. Ockham's emphasis on the inalienable obligation of conscience in defence of ecclesiastical disobedience shows a striking similarity to some of John Locke's ideas on religious toleration.

Innocent III regularised ecclesiastical usage of several penalties which punished the innocent along with the guilty, notably the interdict. His actions need to be understood in their intellectual as well as political context. It has long been thought that Peter the Chanter taught the future pope when he studied theology at Paris. This article presents evidence of the Chanter's radical influence on Innocent's attitude to collective guilt and punishment and compares their views with canonistic doctrine.

Westminster Abbey has been surprisingly neglected by early modern historians. This article attempts to recreate a full sense of the institution and its character during this period, in order to build it into our picture of the post-Reformation religious landscape. The abbey, it is argued, continued to be an important religious institution, while its high-profile ceremonialism, coupled with strong secular and religious jurisdiction over the surrounding locality, may have served as an inspiration for the emerging Laudian movement. Nevertheless, the abbey and its school were never exclusively proto-Laudian in their religious character.

With particular attention paid to the experience of the Marian exiles, this paper analyses the sixteenth-century Protestant debate about the rectitude of flight from persecution. It suggests that, although this debate must be located in a centuries-old Christian discussion about flight, contemporary understandings of the nature of God's will and providence were equally important. The paper contends that the Marian exiles largely succeeded in justifying their flight to their brethren, and that this success had a significant impact on the subsequent historical accounts of the period.

The Vestiarian Controversy of 1564–6, during which Archbishop Matthew Parker pressed for full conformity to the provisions of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, is generally taken to mark a watershed in the fortunes of the English Protestant tradition. This study seeks to show that the realities of Elizabethan churchmanship in the 1560s and 1570s were rather more complex. By reference to the career of Thomas Cole, former ‘freewiller’ and returned Marian exile, who was appointed archdeacon of Essex by Edmund Grindal and was Parker's own commissary in Essex and Suffolk as dean of Bocking, it hopes to demonstrate that Parker's efforts at a national campaign for uniformity were inevitably doomed to failure because of pressures both political and jurisdictional. Cole and his allies did not consider the battle lost in 1566; it was the Presbyterian campaign of the 1570s and 1580s, which Parker's efforts helped to provoke, that marked the real turning point in the government's relations with senior churchmen who wished to see the Elizabethan Settlement advanced by means of further parliamentary legislation.

This article explores the printed and oral communications through which the sixteenth-century holy woman Elizabeth Barton publicised her political prophecies against the Henrician Reformation. Authorship of the primary printed account of Barton's early career has been misattributed, leading scholars to underestimate the number of accounts of Barton's miracles which circulated in her lifetime. This observation leads to an analysis of the media apparatus used by Barton and her adherents, which was an expansion into the political realm of the textual and oral networks through which saints' lives and miracles were publicised in late medieval England.

This paper highlights striking commonalities between the pre-Reformation Church in England and that in the Pale around Dublin, and argues that the eventual failure of the Tudor reformations in the Pale was not inevitable. It shows that while the Henrician Reformation encountered very considerable opposition at first, the Pale's secular and ecclesiastical elites subsequently endorsed a moderated religious settlement wherein papal authority was abrogated. They acquiesced in the first Book of Common Prayer. However, the crown's deputies were loth to enforce religious change and Protestantism won very few adherents as late as 1553.

This case study of the Alsatian community of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines argues that although negotiating religious differences at the local level was essential to defining community, the political context was essential in setting the framework. Straddling the Lorraine/Alsace border, Sainte-Marie was divided among Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians and Anabaptists as well as between French- and German-speakers. After the Thirty Years' War, the changing demographic balance among the confessional groups, especially the immigration of Catholics necessitated a re-evaluation of Catholic/Protestant coexistence. The Peace of Westphalia established a legal framework in the imperial territories based on cuius regio eius religio. France's 1648 annexation of most of Alsace, meant that French centralising authority collided with this seigneurial territorial system. The French crown could not, however, govern without the co-operation of the local authorities: religious groups at Sainte-Marie exploited the resulting ambiguities. In uneasy coexistence Catholics enjoyed royal favour and Protestants had the protection of the local seigneurs. This local outcome mirrored the imperfect process by which the French monarchy imposed itself on the imperial system of Alsace.

The ideological valence or resonance of Hooker's Ecclesiastical polity has proved to be a controversial subject. This article attempts to bring to bear on the problem the immediate response to Hooker's book of a number of contemporaries – moderate Puritans, avant-garde conformists and Catholics. It concludes that none of these groups saw the Polity as a mere restatement of English reformed orthodoxy, the continuation of English conformist business as usual, and suggests that modern commentators should take these contemporary evaluations into serious account in their own analyses of Hooker.

In 1660 the Quaker movement was confronted with a new political situation. In response, the leadership constructed a centralised system of bureaucracy designed to maintain solidarity in the face of persecution. Not all Friends, however, reacted positively to the changes, especially the new arrangements for women's meetings and the conduct of weddings. By the 1670s the movement was split by the Wilkinson–Story controversy, an internal dispute reflected in Quaker meetings throughout the country. This article examines the friction between Friends in Hertford and the claims made by some members of the meeting that George Fox was stifling individual spiritual freedom, the touchstone of Quaker doctrine.

In the mid-1940s a Catholic lay organisation, Maria Duce, emerged in Ireland which vigorously promulgated the idiosyncratic writings of Revd Denis Fahey, a Holy Ghost priest. Amongst other activities, Maria Duce campaigned in the late 1940s for an amendment of the Irish constitution of 1937 by which the Roman Catholic Church would be recognised as the ‘one true Church’ rather than the ‘special position’ enshrined in article 44 of the constitution. The origins and development of Maria Duce are charted in some detail and particular attention is paid to Fahey's role in the group. The campaign to amend article 44, which ultimately led to the demise of the organisation in 1954, is examined, as is the lack of widespread support for the activities of Maria Duce in post-war Ireland.

Calvin Colton (1789–1857) was an important publicist for both evangelical revivalism and the Whig party in antebellum America. Contrary to the standard historical interpretations, however, Colton did not move smoothly from the one to the other but took up political advocacy only after denouncing Yankee revivalism and its attendant social advocacy as threats to Church and State alike. At the same time his turn to episcopacy went together with a pronounced anglophobia. An analysis of Colton's rhetoric and career path reveals a consistent pattern beneath his unexpected changes and some under-explored dimensions of American religion before the Civil War.

David Hume's attacks on religion posed particular problems of method and approach for those who undertook to reply to them. This article is concerned with the responses of two main groups from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth: a number of Anglicans and Episcopalians, and a smaller group of rational Dissenters. The responses of some of these are well known, but those of others have not hitherto been investigated. The essay charts a definite shift from wit and ridicule to reasoned and mannerly response as the appropriate way to deal with infidelity. Most respondents assumed that Hume could be adequately refuted by rehearsing old arguments; however, a small but significant number maintained that his infidelity was of positive value for the future of Christianity.

Josephine Butler waged an unremitting campaign against the ‘state regulation of prostitution’, both in Britain and on the continent, from 1869 until her death. She was a convinced feminist, appalled by the double standard inherent in state regulation, and also, as this article demonstrates, a devout Anglican Evangelical whose spiritual experiences inspired her work. She argued for the right of ‘inspired’ Christian women to preach and teach and developed a radical feminist theology, claming that Christ had treated women as of equal importance to men and had ‘liberated’ them. Her belief in her individual mission enabled her to assume the leadership of a notoriously contentious and emotionally draining campaign.

This article examines conflict between spiritual and temporal power in nineteenth-century West Africa – the uneasy relationship between the Church Missionary Society in Yorubaland and the official British presence in the nearby port of Lagos. Having encouraged Britain to intervene in Lagos in order to extirpate the slave trade, the mission soon found itself disagreeing with the policies of the colonial government concerning both the expansion of the Lagos colony and relations with the largely Christian Egba tribe. The dispute developed into a concerted attack on the colonial governors both from missionaries in the field and from the CMS headquarters in London.

Henry VIII's appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps his finest hour. In what has been called a ‘pioneer royal Christmas broadcast’, the king delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech lamenting the religious divisions that afflicted his kingdom, and urging his subjects towards unity and charity.The phrase is Diarmaid MacCulloch's: Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven–London 1996, 348. According to William Petre, the king himself wept as he recounted how ‘charity between man and man is so refrigerate’, and few of his audience could restrain themselves from doing likewise.PRO, SP 1/212, fos 110v–11r (Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, London 1862–1910 [hereinafter cited as LP], xx/2, 1030). Another eye-witness, the chronicler Edward Hall, wrote down the speech ‘worde for worde, as near as I was able to report it’. This account gives details of how Henry illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: ‘the one calleth the other Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Yypocrite and Pharisey’; rival preachers inveighed against each other ‘without charity or discrecion’. To the king's mind, the blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and, to reinforce the point, Henry brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse: ‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be to busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’.E. Hall, Hall's Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis, London 1809, 864–5. The charge of religious name-calling was hardly new in 1545. In an earlier exhortation to unity and charity, Thomas Starkey had lamented the fact that ‘eche one in hart iugeth other to be eyther pharisee or heretyke, papist or schismatike’: An exhortation to the people instructynge them to unitie and obedience, London ?1536, fo. 27v.

Recent historians of the reign have understandably devoted considerable attention to his speech, arguably the most famous of all Henry VIII's public pronouncements, and most have quoted the mumpsimus–sumpsimus idiom, with varying degrees of wry amusement.J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, London 1968, 470–1; S. E. Lehmberg, The later parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547, Cambridge 1977, 229–31; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation, Oxford 1989, 378; G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd edn, London 1991, 200; C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 164; R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1993, 172; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 348; G. W. Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the search for the middle way’, Historical Journal xli (1998), 348. Yet there has been little attempt to explain why the king should use precisely these words to epitomise the polarisation of religious positions in the early 1540s.The exception here is Lehmberg, Later parliaments, 231, which notes that the phrase was derived from a 1517 treatise by Richard Pace. As I shall show, this does not give the complete picture. It is not always apparent from modern accounts that the terms ‘mumpsimus’ and ‘sumpsimus’ did not represent the king's own assay at faux-bucolic neologism, but were an established (though not long-established) literary trope. In the following short discussion, I hope to demonstrate how an investigation of the derivation and precedents of the phraseology employed by Henry in his Christmas speech can throw some revealing light on the processes by which religious typologies were constructed and utilised in the course of the Henrician Reformation, as well as providing some points of orientation in that most formidable of terrae incognitae, the mind of Henry VIII himself.For two recent stimulating, though contrasting, attempts to locate Henry's religious centre of gravity see Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy’; D. MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the reform of the Church’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, Basingstoke 1995, 159–80.

As in every other branch of learning, the study of the early history of Christianity has undergone massive changes during the last century. This has been due not only to the vast accumulation of knowledge through new discoveries, but to new approaches to the subject, together with the rise of archaeology as a principal factor in providing fresh information. The study of the early Church has as a result moved steadily from dogma to history, from attempts to interpret divine revelation through the development of doctrinal orthodoxy down the ages, to research into the historical development of an earthly institution of great complexity and of great significance in the history of mankind over the past two thousand years.