Gregorian scholars have been unable to reconcile widely differing views on Gregory the Great's ‘political thought’. The trend has been to view him as either ambivalent towards secular authority or completely indifferent to it. This article aims to demonstrate that Gregory the Great's conception of an ordered and hierarchic universe not only encompassed both secular and ecclesiastical spheres but also allowed each a positive role in the work of salvation. His ideas, influenced by neo-Platonic thought, differed substantially from those of St Augustine and were vital to the development of an early medieval partnership between secular and ecclesiastical authority.

Female religious, especially holders of benefices, made significant contributions to aristocratic family strategy and fortune in early modern France. This study of members of the wider Montmorency family in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries demonstrates the financial and political benefits derived from female benefice holding. Abbey stewards and surintendants of aristocratic households collaborated in the administration of religious revenues. Montmorency control of Sainte Trinité, the Abbaye aux Dames, Caen, for over a century was associated with attempts to assert political influence in Normandy. Conflict ostensibly over religious reform could have a political dimension. Yet reform could be pursued vigorously by those originally cloistered for mercenary or political reasons.

Photius (patriarch of Constantinople 858–67, 877–86) was born c. 813. His father Sergius, a wealthy official, was exiled along with Photius for opposing Iconoclasm, evidently in 833. During this exile, which lasted until 842, Photius read voraciously. Later, probably in 845, he catalogued his reading in his Bibliotheca. Yet Photius composed neither the Bibliotheca nor his other pre-858 work as formal scholarly literature, for which the contemporary audience was exiguous. Indeed he found no satisfactory use for his talents as the leading scholar of his time until he was rewarded for his learning with the patriarchate.

Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

In the twelfth or thirteenth century the monks of Evesham Abbey, an ancient Benedictine foundation in Worcester diocese, seem to have altered their domestic chronicle so as to conceal the decisive role of Oswald, bishop of Worcester, in the tenth-century reform of their house; after c. 1100 the abbey was anxious to suppress evidence of Evesham's early dependence on the church of Worcester lest the post-Conquest bishops should use it in the papal courts to refute Evesham's current case for exemption. Privately, however, the monks continued to honour St Oswald and their relic of his arm; he had become a political embarrassment, but in heaven he remained their spiritual friend.

After their trial, Templars in England were in 1311 dispatched singly to religious houses, where they were to observe their vows and do penance. Although there was some opposition from both Templars and monasteries, the payment of pensions assigned to Templars caused longer-lasting problems: the crown and later the Hospitallers frequently defaulted in making payment from former Templar revenues. In 1318 John XXII instructed that Templars should enter a religious house of their choice, either as brothers or lodgers. His decree was occasioned by the situation in other countries, but was implemented in England, and some Templars transferred to other religious houses, although opposition was again expressed by monasteries. There were, however, some Templars in England who were never apprehended and lived out their lives in freedom.

The thirteenth century in Scotland witnessed a determined effort on the part of the crown and its ecclesiastical officials to initiate a series of reforms comparable to those that had so deeply altered the social and religious life of England and continental Europe. An important aspect of the transformation that occurred in Scotland was the consolidation of a network of parish churches throughout the kingdom. Scottish authorities, however, encountered several obstacles in their attempts to create parishes, and especially to assign sufficient revenues to them. In the lordships controlled by old Celtic families in particular the Church's designs sometimes clashed with the interests of great native land-holders and their kinsmen. In many of these lordships the process of parish formation was ultimately the result of negotiation and litigation which saw the Church forced to accommodate the claims of Celtic landowners. This article examines, in the context of the native lordship of Strathearn, the struggles that marked the creation and consolidation of some parishes in thirteenth-century Scotland.

The distinction between a Puritan ‘plain’ and a Laudian ‘metaphysical’ preaching style rests on secular rhetorical theories of persuasion that are relatively unimportant to early Stuart homiletics but are central to later Latitudinarian polemics on preaching. Instead, the ‘English Reformed’ theory and method of sermon composition rests on the didactic function of preaching and the need for the Holy Spirit and hearers to co-operate with the preacher. Although Andrewes and some avant-garde conformists questioned this theory, they developed no alternative method of composition. Arguments made in the 1650s for direct inspiration by the Spirit contributed to the decline of both theory and method.

If St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, was a fairly typical London parish in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its archive is unusually good. A reasonable number of its parishioners have surviving wills, which is true for the City's parishes generally; but St Andrew Hubbard is extraordinary in preserving churchwardens' accounts in a virtually unbroken run from c. 1450. It thus proves possible to gain a more than usually clear impression of parishioners' beliefs and conduct both for the period preceding the Reformation and then during subsequent upheavals. Scrutiny of testamentary practice either side of c. 1540 indicates a profound and rapid shift in the way in which individuals conceived of and exploited their parish. While, by comparison, churchwardens' accounts suggest institutional continuities, analysis of two mid sixteenth-century initiatives to keep property which had been devised to the parish sheds further welcome light on the reflexes that a community developed to safeguard its interests in this critical period.

This article discusses the relationship between Church and society in Aberdeen and Glasgow, c. 1800–c. 2000, with specific reference to levels of church attendance and membership, alongside the social and gender composition of church membership. Despite contrasts in economic development, both cities experienced a sharp decline in levels of church attendance. However, this decline was partly offset by an expanding membership in suburban areas such as Bearsden and Cults. The article confirms previous analyses of religion and social class, but further reinforces more recent research which highlights the important role of women in the Church.

Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.

This article employs evidence relating to church seating between 1560 and 1640 in order to argue that English people experienced the interior of their parish church as a setting of profound significance. It seeks to augment the rather secular interpretative framework within which social and economic historians have tended to consider the importance of church seating. Such seating mattered to people not only because of their preoccupation with social precedence during a period of economic strain, but because of its stirring and symbolic location. Church seating also deserves to be interpreted as evidence of popular attachment to the church, rather than almost exclusively as an instrument of social control deployed by parochial leaders. Much of the surviving documentation relates to the misdemeanours of a conspicuous minority, but it is also possible to examine the sources for what they reveal of the arguably more positive attitudes of the ever elusive majority.

The decline of anti-Catholic sentiment in twentieth-century England stood in stark contrast to attitudes in Wales, where a distinct and persistent anti-Catholic polemic was common as recently as the 1960s. While research into British anti-Catholicism has ignored the situation in twentieth-century Wales, many of the reasons suggested for the fervent nineteenth-century English hostility seem not only to explain the absence of Welsh animosity in the same era, but also to illuminate the predicament in Wales a century later. What we have is a striking example of historical synchronicity: two eras where the majority Christian denomination, already facing an internal crisis, reacts to a Church that is seen to threaten its existence and status, as well as the national way of life it upholds.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, liberal Protestants, not fundamentalists, attempted to preserve Princeton University's traditional religious mission during the rapid intellectual and social change reshaping American higher education in the early twentieth century. In fact, when fundamentalists in the university community demanded the secularisation of the undergraduate programme, liberal Protestants spurned their efforts. Although American liberal Protestantism gradually dissolved into the surrounding secular culture over the course of the twentieth century, the conflict between the rival pieties of liberal and conservative Protestants reveals how and why liberal Protestantism was able to maintain hegemony over one key institution of American culture – the university – well into the mid-twentieth century.

This article investigates the development of the use of texts and images in commemorating the regicide of Charles I , from private commemoration among Royalists during the Republic, to its official institution after the Restoration. The article will argue that the Office gave official sanction to an image of the virtuous suffering king which had been in existence even before his execution. The Office also presented a particular view of the king's moral character, the causes of the Civil War and the Restoration which was to become the accepted account expounded in commemorative sermons for the next 150 years. Drawing on Old Testament themes, the Office also aimed to point a political moral used by successive governments, namely that attacks on the established order incurred divine punishment.

A Lutheran settlement was the natural outcome for a politically imposed Reformation such as that of Henry VIII. Some aspects of his settlement pointed in that direction, and English evangelicalism during his reign leaned more towards Lutheranism than has been hitherto appreciated. Reformed views only came to dominate the movement at the very end of the reign. This shift reflects the waning influence of German Lutheranism in England, and arguably also the influence of Lollard sacramentarianism. Henry VIII's radical attitude towards images also brought some quasi-Reformed ideas into his settlement. Most important, from 1543 onwards the regime drove Lutheran-leaning evangelicals into open opposition, forcing them towards more confrontational Reformed doctrines.

Victorian Cambridge diehards dismissed Harvard as Socinian. William Everett (1837–1910), establishment Bostonian and future Unitarian minister, graduated from Harvard in 1859, and matriculated at Cambridge, which had no doctrinal entry requirements, and since 1856 had allowed men not ‘bona fide members of the Church of England’ to graduate. He found college rules, especially compulsory chapel, restrictive, but was regular at chapel, and was encouraged to take communion. He deplored college ‘monasticism’, restriction of fellowships to Anglicans, inadequate clerical training and Puseyism. Back in Boston, he praised Cambridge's ‘spirit of liberality’, in lectures published as On the Cam, and Cambridge contacts continued, although with sometimes modified enthusiasm.

In 1994 the archive of Liddon House, London, was moved to Pusey House in Oxford. The journals of Henry Parry Liddon, kept more or less daily from 1858 to 1890 (the year of Liddon's death), thus came to be housed alongside the enormous correspondence of Edward Bouverie Pusey which Liddon himself spent much effort in collecting. Liddon's journal entries from 1863 onwards contain a number of references to the young Gerard Manley Hopkins, then an undergraduate at Balliol. A number of Hopkins scholars have made use of the journals in their research but none, to my knowledge, has examined them since their move to Oxford. Recently, a number of other documents have come to light which relate to Hopkins's time in Oxford, and in particular to his conversion. One of these documents strongly suggests that the only extant letter from Edward Pusey to Hopkins has been misdated since its publication in 1935, and hence that the accepted chronology of the days leading up to Hopkins's reception into the Roman Catholic Church needs slightly to be revised.

Parish priests in late eighteenth-century Malta often grumbled about their poverty, but their excuses were generally self-serving and related to the financial demands of their bishop; like incumbents in mainland Europe, they were not in a bad financial situation. Their relative affluence was a result of revenues such as tithes, mass legacies and surplice fees. In small communities this income may have been tiny, but parish priests were not entirely dependent on parochial revenues, since they were generally drawn from middle-rank families and might possess personal wealth in addition.