Collaboration between European merchants and Franciscan friars in Mongol-Yuan China is often discussed without sufficient attention to local contexts. Drawing on Latin and Chinese sources, this study shows how friars and merchants pragmatically adapted European practices to East Asia. It examines their co-location of churches and trading houses in Khanbaliq and Zayton, as well as their joint involvement in diplomatic missions to the Great Khan. The analysis situates these interactions within the local culture of religious-commercial symbiosis, the broader framework of tributary diplomacy and the ortoq merchant system under Mongol rule.

Charismatic renewal and radical Christianity were movements of the ‘long’ 1960s. They both saw themselves as ‘new Reformations’ but have seldom been examined together. This article claims that ‘renewed’ and ‘religionless’ Christianity were more related than usually assumed. Both responded to a profound sense of religion-in-crisis. They were deeply eschatological and in different ways emphasised the Spirit. Despite some obvious dissimilarities, they were opposite sides of the same coin. Furthermore, they were entangled in unexpected ways. This points towards deeper undercurrents of religious thought and experience at work during the period and invites a wider appreciation of the significance of both eschatology and pneumatology in the Churches during the Sixties.

This article considers Hensley Henson’s advocacy of disestablishment following the Prayer Book defeat of 1927–8 as more than a rash reaction to events, one that he continued to work out well into the 1930s in response to domestic and international challenges to the Church, in addition to initiatives within the Church itself. Using his extensive journal and correspondence, as well as his published writings, it seeks an enhanced understanding not only of his views regarding ‘spiritual independence’ but of the wider debate in the Church – both among clergy and laity – and Free Churches, of which they were an integral part.

This article examines the impact of the Thirty Years War on Lutheran religious life. Drawing on evidence from Electoral Saxony, one of Germany’s most important Protestant territories, it argues that faith played an important role in individual and communal resilience. It uses eyewitness accounts to explore the disruption of everyday religious life, strategies of spiritual survival and the post-war restoration of religious space and ritual. The article emphasises the importance of traditional beliefs and practices and argues that rather than being a crucible in which disinterest in faith was forged, war reinforced religion’s role at the heart of pre-modern society.

A newly discovered unpublished declaration of Charles II on ‘ecclesiastical affairs’ of November 1661 allows us to reassess the making of the religious settlement of 1660–3. The declaration contains a review of developments since his return to England and demonstrates the king’s unwavering commitment to honour his promise at Breda of a ‘liberty to tender consciences’ to accompany the return of episcopal government and worship with the Prayer Book. It also indicates his consistent pursuit of these objectives and, more broadly, his critical role in religious politics from 1660 to 1663.

During the winter of 1929–30, Russian persecution of religious believers aroused considerable public indignation in Britain. This article considers why the Labour government refused to make formal complaints to the Soviet government, and why protests against the persecution soon subsided. A Christian Protest Movement failed to gain support from many church leaders, because of its right-wing political associations. English church leaders arranged their own protests and a day of special intercessions, causing some friction with the government; but in what might be termed ‘Christian realism’, they accepted that there were principled and practical limits to government actions.

Starting from the accounts by the first Jesuit missionaries to arrive in Japan, this article documents their culture shock at witnessing the sexual habits of the country’s upper classes, in particular the clergy and warrior class. It shows how these sexual customs were part and parcel of the samurai construction of virility and of organising their hierarchy. Therefore the missionaries came to face an impossible choice: either accept these customs or fight them on the ground. The result was an instance of ideological warfare that resulted in the departure of the missionaries or their persecution and eventual execution.

This article investigates the construction of the past in Carolingian Europe by focusing on the ‘Martinelli’, a family of manuscripts that contain texts related to the cult of Martin of Tours (d. 397). The article focuses particularly on the presentation of the writings of Gregory of Tours (d. 594) within these manuscripts. Two codices are used as case studies: Berlin, ms Phillipps 1877 and Paris, BnF, ms Lat. 10848. This analysis sheds new light on when the earliest Martinellus was compiled, the reception of Gregory of Tours and the agency of scribes in shaping conceptions of the past in the Carolingian period.

Six volumes, 5,000 (double-columned) pages, 650 authors, 1,350 lemmata:1 how is such a behemoth to be reviewed? The first decision is to confine what follows to the hardcopy edition, which, while decidedly not portable, does permit random and intentional sampling, as well as reflection on the materiality of such an enterprise. Many users will probably access the digital version online, driven by its potential (not tested here) search facilities as well in pursuit of the internal cross-references, and perhaps by the promise of additional entries and regular updates; for the first of these desiderata, print-readers must turn to the table of contents which lists all the entries (vol. i, pp. v–xxxiii) and to the index (vol. vi. 578–823), on which more below.

This article contributes to ongoing attempts to move historical understanding of Christian attitudes to Jews beyond a dichotomy between philo- and antisemitism. Employing the history of emotions, it examines how ‘love’ was understood in the specific religious, social and historical contexts in which it was advocated. Focusing on the Church of Scotland’s 1839 ‘Mission of Enquiry to the Jews’, it shows how the Church advocated a system of shared feeling towards Jews among believers. This ‘love’ engaged a variety of different emotional states linked to contemporary internal tensions within the Church of Scotland, and prophetic hopes for their resolution.

No man has seen God (1943) was the masterpiece of the Chinese Protestant theologian Wu Yaozong (1893–1979). This article retraces Wu’s leftward intellectual turn in the preceding years, which culminated in the book’s attempt to reconcile Christianity and Communism. Originally a follower of American liberal Christianity, Wu embraced Stalinism after the mid-1930s. His case testifies to an alternative afterlife of American liberal Christianity, the Socialist character of which had become moribund in America, but found new vitality in China through Wu’s Stalinist reappropriation. Today, Wu’s development of the American liberal tradition lives on in different Chinese Christian communities worldwide.

In 1747, Johann Conrad Arbogast Gauch, a parish priest in the diocese of Constance, was executed for serial child abuse – a unique outcome among known clerical cases in the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire. Drawing on extensive inquisition records, this article examines how Church and State authorities negotiated jurisdiction, reputation and punishment when clerical crime threatened moral and social order, exposing tensions between justice, discipline and institutional self-preservation.

Both Ranters and Fifth Monarchists emerged as sectarian groups during the English Revolution, believing in an imminent apocalypse and the need for a total spiritual and social overhaul in England. Yet, their unique eschatologies resulted in dramatically different plans to overhaul the political and spiritual authorities in England. This article seeks to reassert the importance of scriptural citations in historical studies by arguing that the basis for these groups’ differences can be identified in the hermeneutical underpinnings of their millenarianism, and how their reading practices in turn informed their understanding of the apocalypse and their own political participation during the end times.

This article contends that the importance of post-biblical Jewish legal sources for the development of the case for infant baptism in England has been significantly underestimated. Focusing on the Westminster Assembly debates on baptism, it demonstrates how John Lightfoot’s interventions shaped contemporary understandings of that rite’s historicity. Lightfoot’s later work is shown to have further entrenched a conception of infant baptism as a development upon the proselyte baptism of the Jews. The study of Jewish texts thus emerges as having been an essential means of buttressing doctrine in mid- to late seventeenth-century England.

On an Adventide Sunday in 1523, a visitor to Milan’s Duomo witnessed something unexpected. Lay congregants halted high mass by yelling at the priests, demanding that attention remain fixed on their favoured preacher. This and similar episodes are recounted in the Cronica Milanese by the shopkeeper Giovan Marco Burigozzo. Using Burigozzo’s accounts alongside overlooked evidence from the Duomo’s archives, this article traces moments when customary rituals broke down under lay intervention. Such episodes reveal how ordinary congregants experienced, contested and redirected the cathedral’s functions, reshaping the church’s sonic and liturgical space in ways that diverged from its intended purposes.

The Christian Holy Land is defined by and through representation. Images of Christ’s life, death and resurrection draw on scriptural details to set sacred events in a Palestinian landscape. A desire to witness locations marked by divine presence propels Christian travellers towards monuments built to enshrine the terrestrial traces of the faith’s central mysteries. Shortly after the fourth-century construction of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea declared that the sight of Christ’s empty tomb in the structure testified to the truth of the Gospels ‘by facts louder than any voice’.1 Textual descriptions, visual depictions and monumental designs soon began to reference the church’s characteristic architectural features. This intentional layering of structure and Scripture enabled readers, viewers and users to activate these associations from afar.

Around the turn of the twelfth century, Bishop Ivo of Chartres (c. 1040-1115) wrote the sermon-tract Quare deus natus et passus sit in which he outlined the process of human redemption. Although widely circulated in the twelfth century, this important text has been little studied. Here it is situated within the context of high-medieval penance. It is argued that Ivo was specifically concerned to impress the importance of contrition in Quare deus natus et passus sit by providing an outline of the redemptive process that emphasised God’s ‘medicinal mercy’ whilst delineating human knowledge of that process for priestly audiences.

This article examines the fear of death in fourteenth-century Italy by analysing miracle testimonies through the methodological frameworks of terror management theory (TMT) and lived religion. It argues that devotion to saints served as a key coping mechanism for existential anxiety. Examples from the canonisation processes of Clare of Montefalco and Nicholas of Tolentino reveal how individuals turned to saints for protection, seeking to prolong life rather than accept death. This study provides both empirical and methodological insights into the medieval fear of death, illustrating its parallels with contemporary experiences of death anxiety.