St Francis of Assisi, mystic, stigmatic and founder of the Franciscans, has come to seem uncontroversial, a saint for ecologists, socialists and animal lovers as well as Christians of all denominations. Until his rediscovery by the Victorians, Francis was firmly associated with Roman Catholic doctrine, obedience to the papacy, participation in crusades and distinctively Catholic mystical phenomena. This article argues that Faber’s, Oliphant’s and Sabatier’s nineteenth-century Lives of St Francis opened the way for his appropriation by the general British public. The resulting denominational competition over the saint stimulated a boom in St Francis’ popularity but also led to his piecemeal secularisation.

This article explores how communities of female religious within the English sphere of influence in Ireland negotiated their survival, firstly in the aftermath of the Henrician dissolution campaigns of the late 1530s and 1540s and thereafter down to the early 1640s. It begins by examining the strategies devised by women religious in order to circumvent the state’s proscription of vocational living in the aftermath of the Henrician suppression campaigns. These ranged from clandestine continuation of conventual life to the maintenance of informal religious vows within domestic settings. It then moves on to consider the modes of migration and destinations of Irish women who, from the late sixteenth century onwards, travelled to the Continent in pursuit of religious vocations, an experience they shared with their English counterparts. Finally, it considers how the return to Ireland from Europe of Irish Poor Clare nuns in 1629 signalled the revival of monastic life for women religious on the island. The article traces the importance of familial and clerical patronage networks to the ongoing survival of Irish female religious communities and highlights their role in sustaining Catholic devotional practices, which were to prove vital to the success of the Counter-Reformation mission in seventeenth-century Ireland.

This essay provides the first edition and discussion of the ballad When all that is to Was ys brought, copied sometime between 1561 and 1585 into a draft account book relating to the will of Dr William Bill, dean of Westminster (Durham Cathedral Add. MS 243, fol. 93r-v). Its last line, ‘Amen Quoth Iohn heywood’, indicates that its author was the court entertainer John Heywood (b. 1496/7–d. in or after 1578) and internal evidence suggests that it was written shortly before he went into exile on account of his Catholic faith in 1564. The ballad includes references to Heywood’s family and allusions to several works of Thomas More, especially A Dialogue of Comfort, suggesting that it is Heywood’s personal reflection on his spiritual life under four English monarchs. Its subject matter makes it likely that it is also the poem described as ‘a rythme declaringe his own life and nature’, which Heywood sent to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Queen Elizabeth via John Wilson in 1574 to support his petition to be allowed to remain in the Spanish Netherlands.

Theology, the study of God, consists of a network of subdisciplines: biblical theology, moral theology, ecumenical theology, and so on. Each branch of theology has its own distinctive object of study, methods, and purposes. For example, pneumatology studies the Holy Spirit, practical theology uses the pastoral cycle, and liberation theology seeks to transform unjust societal structures that oppress the marginalized. Each branch of theology has its own distinctive community of scholars. It is a common view (though perhaps a contested one, as between the different church traditions) that the main purpose of Christian theology is to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. The branches of theology, in turn, are vehicles for each of this core purpose. Legal theology could become a branch of theology with its own distinctive objects of study, methods, and purposes. What follows explores these themes, how the subdiscipline of legal theology might be defined and developed in the context of the study of the systems of law, order, and polity, of churches across the Christian traditions that deal with, for example, forms of regulation, ministry (lay or ordained), governance (institutions and functions), discipline, doctrine, worship, rites, property, and external relations. It does so as to the following. (1) The object of study: legal theology should at its core be about the relationship between theology and church law—more particularly, the relationship between church law and each of the other branches of theology. (2) The method of study: legal theology may involve the theological study of church law and/or the legal study of theology using standard juristic methods (such as text and context, critical, historical, analytical) as well as methods used in the other branches of theology (3) The purpose of study: the development of a community of scholars collaborating with a view to its impact on ecclesial practice. Theology is indispensable to a full understanding of the place of law in the life of the church; and law provides evidence to test the propositions of theology in the practical life of the church as this is translated through norms to action.

The Roman province of Germania Inferior is characterized geographically by the river Rhine—the border of the Empire—and the forts along it. From the north-west to the south-east, there are significant differences in landscape and type of rural habitation. Whether these differences are also noticeable in animal husbandry forms the subject of this article. Are there any differences in species proportions and slaughter ages between the western and eastern parts of the province, and between urban, military, and rural sites? What does this say about farming and food supply? After presenting an overview of the zooarchaeological data from Germania Inferior, I shall discuss in detail one civitas—the civitas Batavorum, with the best known zooarchaeological dataset within the province. What changes in species proportions and cattle size can be detected over time from this civitas? Is there evidence for inter- and intra-site variability and changes in butchery methods? This article's further aim is to demonstrate what kind of questions a synthetic overview of zooarchaeological datasets can address.

From 1884 until the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, international and national exhibitions had a fad for including reconstructed historic urban streets in their attractions. This article investigates the meaning of such forms of urban heritage in the light of modernizing cities. It shows that ideas about historical authenticity were complex, and traces this to the ways in which staff and employees, and also the big crowds at the displays, co-produced this meaning. It suggests that visitors particularly constructed meaning through haptic and emotional encounters with the past, providing evidence of the development of new memory practices for modernity.