Abstract: This article proposes an alternative way to think about the violence that swept the Roman Empire in the wake of Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Traditionally seen as the inevitable result of Christian intolerance, recent experience suggests that this violence can be better understood by casting a broader net and including political as well as theological issues. The result shows this violence to be the by-product of a struggle between emperors and bishops to control access to the divine. In an age of widespread belief in the active intervention of deity in human affairs, this "religious" prerogative was fraught with profound "secular" implications that make our distinction between "Church" and "State" meaningless. Martyrs play an important role in this process, but it is a symbolic one. Bishops use martyrs to control emperors. But, as a famous confrontation between Ambrose of Milan and the emperor Theodosius shows, bishops also relied on their new role as patrons of a large and volatile constituency. Their efforts were abetted by significant rethinking of the meaning of martyrdom and persecution that followed Julian the Apostate's ill-starred efforts to rein in Christianity without producing martyrs.

Abstract: This book is the first cultural history of papal authority in late antiquity. While most traditional histories posit a 'rise of the papacy' and examine popes as politicians, theologians and civic leaders, Kristina Sessa focuses on the late Roman household and its critical role in the development of the Roman church from c.350–600. She argues that Rome's bishops adopted the ancient elite household as a model of good government for leading the church. Central to this phenomenon was the classical and biblical figure of the steward, the householder's appointed agent who oversaw his property and people. As stewards of God, Roman bishops endeavored to exercise moral and material influence within both the pope's own administration and the households of Italy's clergy and lay elites. This original and nuanced study charts their manifold interactions with late Roman households and shows how bishops used domestic knowledge as the basis for establishing their authority as Italy's singular religious leaders.

Abstract: The present volume contributes to a reassessment of the phenomenon of episcopal elections from the broadest possible perspective, examining the varied combination of factors, personalities, rules and habits that played a role in the process that eventually resulted in one specific candidate becoming the new bishop, and not another. The importance of episcopal elections hardly needs stating: With the bishop emerging as one of the key figures of late antique society, his election was a defining moment for the local community, and an occasion when local, ecclesiastical, and secular tensions were played out. Building on the state of the art regarding late antique bishops and episcopal election, this volume of collected studies by leading scholars offers fresh perspectives by focussing on specific case-studies and opening up new approaches. Covering much of the Later Roman Empire between 250-600 AD, the contributions will be of interest to scholars interested in Late Antique Christianity across disciplines as diverse as patristics, ancient history, canon law and oriental studies.

Abstract: This article examines the problems and possibilities that captivity, remarriage, and the return of kidnapped spouses presented to Roman bishops during the fifth century, a period of social instability and religious change in the Italian peninsula. Through close readings of letters penned by Innocent I (401-417 C.E. ) and Leo I (441-461 C.E. ), it explores how these bishops attempted to resolve a novel quandary for households: the impasse between emergent Christian ethics that insisted upon the indissolubility of first marriages and the Roman legal position that captivity severed all unions. Rather than pronouncing the sanctity of the former and the venality of the latter, Innocent and Leo offered complementary solutions that established their expertise in solving new conundrums of domestic life.

Abstract: This article seeks to reevaluate existing scholarship on the late Roman “bishop’s hearing” or “bishop’s court” via a reexamination of the nature of the extant legal evidence. Paying particular attention to the original contexts in which the relevant fourth- and early fifth-century imperial constitutions were issued, it argues that, prior to the publication of the Theodosian Code in 438, these constitutions should be understood as specific responses to circumstances thrown up by courtroom practice. Having reassessed the nature of the legal evidence both before and after the promulgation of the Theodosian Code, the article attempts to re-contextualize the episcopalis audientia within a broader late Roman socio-legal landscape, hence challenging the traditional framing of the debate on the episcopalis audientia as a question of “church” and “state.”

Abstract: A remarkable series of Anglo-Saxon wills have survived, spanning the period from the beginning of the ninth century to the years immediately following the Norman Conquest. Written in Old English, they reflect the significance of the vernacular, not only in royal administration during this period, but in the recording of a range of individual transactions. They show wealthy laymen and women, and clerics, from kings and bishops to those of thegnly status, disposing of land and chattels, and recognising ties of kinship, friendship, lordship and service through their bequests; and whilst land is of prime importance, the mention in some wills of such valuable items as tableware, furnishings, clothing, jewellery and weapons provides an insight into lifestyle at the time. Despite their importance, no study has hitherto been specifically devoted to Anglo-Saxon wills in their social and historical context, a gap which this book aims to fill. While the wills themselves can be vague and allusive, by establishing patterns of bequeathing, and by drawing on other resources, the author sheds light on the factors which influenced men and women in making appropriate provision for their property. Linda Tollerton gained her PhD from the University of York.

Abstract: In medieval Europe, the death of a king could not only cause a dispute about the succession, but also a severe crisis. In times of a vacant throne particular responsibility fell to the bishops - whose general importance for the time around the first milennium has been revealed by recent scholarship - as royal counsellors and policy makers. This volume therefore concentrates on the bishops' room for manoeuvre and the patterns of episcopal power, focusing on the Eastern Frankish Reich and Anglo-Saxon England in a comparative approach which is not least based upon the research of a renowned medievalist, Timothy Reuter. His article about "A Europe of Bishops" ("Ein Europa der Bischofe") is presented in English translation for the first time.

Abstract: Michael Edward Moore is assistant professor of medieval and European history at the University of Iowa.

Abstract: During the mid-1960s a few Catholic journals and individuals advised that a more active role should be taken in defeating abortion reform. In 1967 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops selected James Thomas McHugh, administrator of the United States Catholic Conference’s Family Life Bureau, to guide its National Right to Life Committee (NRLC). Several pro-life organizations, including Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, emerged and affiliated with the NRLC national office. To appeal to a more broad-based, nonsectarian movement, key Minnesota leaders proposed an organizational model that would separate the NRLC from its founder. In early 1973 McHugh and his executive assistant, Michael Taylor, proposed a different plan, facilitating the NRLC’s move to independence.

Abstract: Introduction: the Restoration, the Reformation, and the royal supremacy 1. Foundations and legacies: the Reformation and the royal supremacies, 1530-1660 2. The Crown and the Cavalier Anglicans: prerogative, Parliament, and ecclesiastical law 3. Spiritual authority and royal jurisdiction: the question of bishops 4. Dissenters and the supremacy: the question of toleration 5. Anticlericals and 'Erastians': the spectre of Hobbes 6. Catholics and Anglicans: James II and Catholic supremacy Conclusion.

Abstract: In the sixth century, emperors, kings, and bishops discovered the monastery as a tool of government. In particular, this century saw the transition of confinement in a monastery from a voluntary form of penance to a legal penalty. Recent scholarship has very much concentrated on the role of civic rulers in this development. This article investigates a bishop’s view on and practice of monastic confinement. Some of the most detailed evidence for the employment of both clerical and lay monastic confinement in the sixth century comes from the letters of Gregory the Great (590–604). They provide a unique case study of episcopal engagement with Roman criminal law at a time when bishops in general, and the Roman bishop in particular, increasingly assumed a role in civil judicial administration. They also show that Gregory’s interest in the monastery lay mostly in its ability to provide a (sometimes temporary) space for the correction of everyone—clergy, ascetics, and lay people alike. The article demonstrates that Gregory employed the sentence of monastic confinement as an extraordinary form of structured penitential routine for stubborn offenders within his larger program of pastoral flexibility. Michel Foucault’s 1975 study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison famously opens by juxtaposing the 1757 public execution of Robert-Francois Damiens with a nineteenth-century prison timetable, arguing that in the interim a new vision of society had emerged, requiring

Abstract: This study offers an examination of the position and public role of bishops within their local urban communities in the late third century CE. Two case studies, of the bishops Gregory Thaumaturgus and Paul of Samosata, explore how individual bishops searched for a way to publicly present themselves that was acceptable not only to their own congregation but especially to the general population of the city where their congregation was situated. Whereas Gregory was received with great respect and admiration in Neocaesarea, Paul’s public behavior caused negative reactions from within the Christian community of Antioch. Nevertheless, both cases reflect the struggle by which the Christian church tried to obtain a firm position within Roman society. Furthermore, this study aims to demonstrate that bishops and the Christian communities that they represented enjoyed imperial recognition several decades prior to the conversion of Constantine.

Abstract: This thesis investigates cultural expressions of episcopal power in Anglo-Norman England. Bishops were powerful men who operated within a complex power structure. It addresses three key cultural themes: language, the body and space. Using a variety of source material this study offers a wide-ranging vision of episcopal power. It draws on a number of theoretical positions and confronts some of the most damaging historiographical narratives which have overshadowed the bishop. The central aim of this thesis is to investigate the performance of power. By studying how bishops used documents and rhetoric it is possible to understand episcopal power as a pragmatic force. In particular the symbols or representations of power are in fact acts of power which need to be interpreted within the broader historical context of post-Conquest England. Overall this thesis seeks to reposition bishops back in their cathedrals and in this way provide a comparative study of episcopal power.

Abstract: The Ottonian kings of Germany (919–1024) inherited from their Carolingian predecessors a tripartite system of pastoral care for the army. At the most basic level, the Ottonian kings provided chaplains to their soldiers to hear their confessions before battle. At the army-wide level, priests and bishops serving with the army celebrated intercessory masses to gain divine favour for the army, preached to the soldiers in order to encourage bravery in the face of battle and carried sacred relics onto the field. Finally, priests and bishops also helped to mobilise the ‘home front’ on behalf of the army, by leading the population as a whole in intercessory prayers, as well as in fasts and other acts of penitence that were intended to gain God's favour for their fighting men.

Abstract: Between the beginning of the fifth century and the end of the seventh, the Christian dead became ever more prominent participants in the society of Iran. The early Sasanian state's cultivation of fear within, and attempt to assert control of, an increasingly organized religious community through the public execution of its leaders, both secular and religious, had provided the Christians of the empire with countless martyrs. Martyrs' shrines provide an alternative, local perspective on the development of Christian institutions, one that foregrounds the role of local elites who could both contest and complement the communal leadership of bishops and their clerical hierarchies. The emergence of martyrs' cults aroused minimal interest, let alone intervention, on the part of the Zoroastrian religious professionals of the empire. Martyrs' shrines and their feasts gathered the dispersed populations of particular localities to commemorate the patronage and dominance of Christian elites as well as their saints. Keywords: Christianity; Iran; Martyrs' shrines; Sasanian martyrologies; Zoroastrianism

Abstract: 'Forever Pruning? the ECUSA Path To Ordained Women's Full Participation?' - Dr Adair Lummis (Hartford Institute of Religious Research, USA) 'We see them and hear thembut has it made any difference?': The Ordination of Women in Africa' - Dr Esther Mombo (St Paul's United Theological Seminary, Limuru, Kenya) 'The process in the Church of Sweden towards ordination of Women Priests and Consecration of Women Bishops' - Bishop Christina Odenberg (Bishop of Lund, Church of Sweden) 'Hermeneutical questions: the ordination of women in the light of biblical and patristic typology' - Revd Professor Frances Young (University of Birmingham, UK) 'Women's Ordination in the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht - Developments and Experiences' - Prof Dr Angela Berlis (University of Utrecht, Holland) 'The Almost Fully Ordained Meat Pie: The General Synod Doctrine Commission and the Doctrine of Reception' - Revd Kay Goldsworthy (Anglican Diocese of Perth, Australia) 'Walking with Women Called and the Ministry of Irritation' - Evelyn Hunt, Diana Wear and Regina Bannan (Women's Ordination Conference, USA) 'Women's ordination in the Roman Catholic Church: Forcing an Open Door' - Bishop Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger (an 'irregularly' consecrated Roman Catholic woman bishop from Austria): 'The Ordination of Women in Anglican and Quaker Perspective' - Revd Paul Oestreicher

Abstract: Historians of the late medieval English parish have debated the level and quality of parishioner involvement. Some see the parish as dominated by the local elite, others argue for broader participation. These debates are hampered by the disconnect between the expectations of medieval clerics charged with regulating parish life and the surviving sources. Historians tend to equate participation and interest with financial support, because the sources that most frequently survive document these practices. Medieval bishops, on the other hand, looked to attendance and reception of the sacraments as signs of Christian commitment carried out in the context of the parish. This article looks at the parish of St. Margaret’s, Westminster and argues that broad participation was key to the parish’s successful financing of their new church, built between 1487 and 1523. The unusually detailed parish records allow us to see that the urban gentry, married and unmarried women, non-elite men, and possibly even the poor all contributed time, money, and interest to the parish’s construction project. While St. Margaret’s cannot stand in for all parishes, the experience of this parish calls into question assumptions about the limited involvement of parishioners in the late Middle Ages.

Abstract: In this article, Rosemary Ruether details the development of the Roman Catholic Women’s ordination movement in the US and the emergence of the Women-church Movement as a critique of the drive to ordain women and recreate the clerical caste system. She then outlines the emergence of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests Movement which decided to find bishops and proceed with women’s ordination. She explores the disagreements between these two movements and a way to resolve this by accepting different contexts for the two movements.

Abstract: St. Amand could count among his many feats the extraordinary achievement of social equilibrium. “The way he was in the midst of the rich and the poor,” his hagiographer marveled, “the poor saw him as a poor man, and the rich treated him as their better.” On a resume of miracles performed and peoples converted, this accomplishment was no less impressive. Bishops in the post-Roman kingdoms of Gaul/Francia maintained an ongoing balancing act between seeking social and political distinction, on the one hand, and fulfilling their obligation to defend the poor, on the other. Their authority increasingly depended upon both, even as it engendered a tension between elitism and inclusivity. To study bishops' choice of company is therefore to highlight the difficulty inherent in an ambitious pastoral and political positioning. Linked to the subject of the episcopal entourage, and to the issue of episcopal authority and its representation more generally, was a change in the culture of Merovingian government, for bish...

Abstract: Innocent I (402-417) addressed Epistula 38 to two Bruttian bishops, Maximus and Severus, in response to a complaint from Maximilianus, an agens in rebus, that these southern Italian bishops had failed to take action against presbyters who fathered children contrary to the requirements of celibacy after ordination and claimed to be ignorant of any policy on this matter. Innocent reminded the two bishops that they needed to attend to their duties. This letter is among the earliest evidence for how the Roman bishop operated in practice as metropolitan of Suburbicarian (and possibly Annonarian) Italy and so this article examines the growth of Rome's metropolitan authority and concludes from an examination of both context and content of the letter that Innocent did not refer to any formal authority, which grew over time but seems to have been limited to presiding over synods, approving the election and ordination of new bishops, and hearing appeals from deposed bishops outside his province, but was exercising a practical authority as the leading bishop of the area, which he expressed in surprised tones, to direct them to do their duty.

Abstract: ON 25 September 1659, the funeral of Thomas Morton, the nonagenarian bishop of Durham, took place at St Peter's Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire. The preacher praised Morton's faithful service ‘as a bishop till the very last gasp’ and cited ‘his late ordinations of priests and deacons here among you, whereof some here present received the benefit, and many more can give the testimony’.1 It is well-known that between 1646 and 1660, several bishops, including Morton, conferred holy orders in defiance of the Long Parliament's ordinance of 9 October 1646 abolishing the office and jurisdiction of bishops,2 but hitherto no one has calculated the exact numbers of ordaining bishops and ordinands or placed this activity within the context of contemporary debates over the validity of ministerial orders, so the incidence and significance of these illegal ceremonies remain unclear. Now, with the powerful assistance of the Clergy of the Church of England Database, it is possible to produce reliable figures of ordainers and ordinands, and to demonstrate a high demand for ordination which was met by bishops willing to perform the ceremony. This evidence throws important new light on the organisation, practice and popularity of episcopalianism in the late 1640s and 1650s. We shall challenge the prevalent view that the episcopate abandoned its pastoral responsibilities in the Interregnum, and suggest that the rising demand for episcopal ordination in the 1650s reveals the enduring appeal of traditional episcopalian orders in a period of proscription and intermittent persecution, at a time when the episcopate itself looked unlikely to survive for much longer.3 That ordinands were able to make contact with a diminishing number of bishops points to the effective operation of a series of semi-clandestine networks of episcopalian loyalists. Many ordinands were already serving in the state church, or else upon ordination entered the parochial ministry. This allows us to revise our understanding of the character of the clerical profession during the Interregnum. What follows falls into three sections: first, we present the evidence for ordinations in the 1640s and 1650s and analyse those bishops who were, and who were not, active ordainers; secondly, we explore the connections which allowed ordinands to be in touch with ordaining bishops; and thirdly, we investigate the motivation and careers of the ordinands themselves.

Abstract: This article investigates the concept of professionalization in terms of the bishops' role in the 19th-century Church of Sweden. Previous research has generally claimed that from the late 18th century until the mid-19th century, before the abolition of the Diet of Estates, the Swedish bishops amounted to secularized, conservative state officials who lacked the ability to effect religious reform. In this article, however, it will be argued that in the early 19th century, several decades earlier than previously assumed, the Swedish episcopate had begun to undergo a slow transformation that is best described as professionalization. It is posited that the bishops, inspired by Evangelical revival and Romanticism, became increasingly specialized in religion and theology in their education, thinking and practice. The episcopal profile also changed as the middle classes gained more influence from the early 19th century onwards, and this, in turn, prompted a higher standard of role performance.

Abstract: The events surrounding Origen’s relocation are more complex than has been previously held. In the wake of the Severan Persecutions, as Demetrius attempted to reorganize the Alexandrian house-churches into a more centralized body, he naturally brought Origen’s school within this new model. This shift placed Origen more directly under the authority of the bishop, who monitored Origen’s activities. When Origen was asked to act as a representative of the Caesarean church in settling a dispute in Athens and subsequently was ordained presbyter, this raised the question of the limits of bishops’ powers: could they ordain candidates from outside their own churches? Though his theology may have been questioned, the synods following Origen’s ordination focused on issues surrounding the boundaries of ecclesiastical authority.

Abstract: This chapter aims to demonstrate how power accumulated in Ambrose's hands. It observes that the Catholic community under the leadership of Ambrose accrued power. After the events of 386, both bishop and community wanted to show their phenomenal victory in public. Ambrose, therefore, acted against the law by enacting a procession. He could never have claimed for himself a ritual restricted to the emperor; it was, however, easy to claim it for the relics of his saints. With the spread of relics, the form of this ritual also dispersed across the western Roman Empire. Some generations later, the same ritual had become the common way for bishops to represent the 'Christian dominance in society'. So much did it become ingrained in the episcopate that by the sixth century it was even used without relics, and the imperial adventus no longer played the crucial role that it had played. Keywords: Ambrose; Christianity; Cult of Saints; Roman Empire; saints

Abstract: A fascinating, lively account of the making of the King James Bible. James VI of Scotland - now James I of England - came into his new kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created: the King James Bible. 47 scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London translated the Bible, drawing from many previous versions, and created what many believe to be the greatest prose work ever written in English - the product of a culture in a peculiarly conflicted era. This was the England of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Bacon; but also of extremist Puritans, the Gunpowder plot, the Plague, of slum dwellings and crushing religious confines. Quite how this astonishing translation emerges is the central question of this book. Far more than Shakespeare, this Bible helped to create and shape the language. It is the origin of many of our most familiar phrases, and the foundations of the English-speaking world. It was a generous and deliberate decision to make the Bible available to the common man: not an immediate commercial success, but which later became a bestseller, and has remained one ever since. Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the early years of the first Stewart ruler, and the scholars who laboured for seven years to create the world's greatest book; immersing us in a world of ingratiating bishops, a fascinating monarch and London at a time unlike any other.

Abstract: This article examines Ambrosiaster's exegesis of Psalm 1 in his quaestio 110, focusing on his strikingly lengthy explanation of the cathedra pestilentiae of Ps 1.1. It locates his interpretation of the cathedra pestilentiae in a particular tradition of Latin anti-heretical scriptural allusion: Cyprian's polemic against rigorists and Optatus of Milevis's denunciation of Donatist antibishops. This illuminates the likely target of this passage as the Donatist antibishop of Rome in the late 370s, Claudian. However, the connections between q. 110 and other quaestiones suggest that Ambrosiaster may also have had the Novatianists in his sights.

Abstract: In medieval Europe, the death of a king could not only cause a dispute about the succession, but also a severe crisis. In times of a vacant throne particular responsibility fell to the bishops - whose general importance for the time around the first milennium has been revealed by recent scholarship - as royal counsellors and policy makers. This volume therefore concentrates on the bishops' room for manoeuvre and the patterns of episcopal power, focusing on the Eastern Frankish Reich and Anglo-Saxon England in a comparative approach which is not least based upon the research of a renowned medievalist, Timothy Reuter. His article about "A Europe of Bishops" ("Ein Europa der Bischofe") is presented in English translation for the first time.