Christianity

Thomas Cranmer's prayer book was published on January 15th, 1549.

Dominic Janes describes how the early Church reconciled its teaching of holy poverty with the accumulation and display of spectacular wealth.

Russell Chamberlin looks at the renaissance of Bolivia's Jesuit mission

Sexual improprieties and rows between religious orders - not 1990s scandal sheet headlines about the Catholic Church, but a tale from 13th-century Spain, unravelled here by Peter Linehan.

Diarmaid MacCulloch reflects on the 'after-life' of Henry VIII's archbishop, burnt at the stake as a Protestant martyr under Mary. 

How important was the man to the movement? Andrew Pettegree asks what would have happened to the Reformation had the Diet of Worms witnessed its leader’s martyrdom.

David Nash considers a cause celebre that tested tensions between pious tradition and a 'progressive' age.

The way in which the church commemoration of King Charles I's 1649 execution became a potent instrument in the political war of words after the Restoration is examined, and the history of the king's execution and the clergy's promotion of the event are discussed.

Has our image of Henry VIII's elder daughter as 'Bloody Mary', burning Protestants and unhappily married to Philip of Spain, clouded our assessment of how close she came to restoring the old religion? 

Obedience, modesty, taciturnity – all hallmarks of the archetypal 'good woman' in colonial New England, But did suffering in silence invert tradition and give the weaker sex a new moral authority in the community? Martha Saxton investigates, in the first piece from a mini series examining women's social experience in the New World.