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The English Parish Church through the Centuries is an interesting example of how digital media can be used to improve and enhance our understanding of the past.

Marie-Hélène Rousseau has written this book on the perpetual chantries of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral based on the rich archive in the Guildhall Library, London, in conjunction with other sources. The author has provided a concise and clear introduction to the subject of chantries alongside a very detailed and comprehensive account of this feature of the life of the cathedral.

While the term ‘radical’ is an effective hook for his readers, its use in Andrew Bradstock’s Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England is in some ways problematic. In the introduction the author sets out his awareness of this fact, and the pressing need to identify criteria by which ‘radical’ may be determined, but sidesteps precisely defining the term himself.

Chocolate, writes Emma Robertson in the introduction to her monograph, ‘has been invested with specific cultural meanings which are in part connected to … conditions of production’ (p. 3). At the heart of this study is a challenge to existing histories:

Ever since R. I. Moore published his The Formation of a Persecuting Society in 1987, we have increasingly come to understand medieval society in terms of its treatment of its ‘others’: Jews, lepers, heretics and so forth.(1) New bureaucratic structures starting in the 11th century established themselves by persecuting these minorities.

This splendid study is part of the admirable Oxford-Warburg Studies series dedicated to the history of scholarship, under the general editorship of Charles Hope and Ian Maclean. It is to be hoped, however, that it receives a far wider readership than that location might suggest, as Quantin’s study has important contributions to make in a number of disparate fields.

‘There is no salvation without preaching’ declared Thomas Cartwright, at the height of the Admonition controversy (p. 32). Nehemiah Wallington agreed – and he couldn’t get enough of it. One week he managed to squeeze in 19 sermons, a remarkable achievement, though his average of 30 a month may not have been so unusual.

Midst the foe, and the stranger she seeks not renown

She courts not their smiles, and she heeds not their frowns

Could she only impart unto childhood and youth

The science of God, of religion, and truth... (p. 110)

There was a time, not so long ago, when the history of the Jewish communities of 12th- and 13th-century England was a neglected subject in English historical studies. No longer.

Early modern English Presbyterianism found its expression in two bursts of activity: during the Elizabethan period as a movement to perfect the Reformation from the Elizabethan compromise and during the mid 17th-century Civil War and Republic as a contender for the Parliamentarian settlement of the Church of England.