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This chapter examines the dispute among the bishops, the lower clergy and the papacy concerning episcopal authority in France during the seventeenth century. It suggests that the dispute represented three competing conceptions of the church, and crystallised opposing views of ecclesiastical government, discipline and hierarchy at local, national and international levels. The chapter also explores how collusion between Rome and the regulars pushed the bishops towards a fiercely protective doctrine of episcopal gallicanism that was finally cemented in the 1682 Gallican Articles.

This chapter examines the episcopal and Catholic renewal traditions in France during the sixteenth century. By the turn of the sixteenth century, French prelates had a variety of sources on which to base their understanding of the episcopal office. Those guides most immediately to hand, the Council of Trent and the examples of contemporary reforming prelates appeared particularly attractive, for they enabled the minority of French bishops who were attempting to introduce reforms in insecure conditions to lay the foundations for permanent ecclesiastical order. The chapter suggests that this French tradition provided strongly articulated views on episcopal jurisdictional rights and authority as well as, secondarily, on episcopal spirituality.

This chapter examines the shaping of Episcopal authority in the Egyptian Church during the Age of Persecution. It focuses on the relationship between the Episcopal leadership and the church's theological school in Alexandria. It investigates the early attempts of Alexandrian bishops, from Demetrius to Peter I, to consolidate their authority and to begin to stake out the boundaries of theological orthodoxy.

Substantial authority was exercised by Father John Baptist Causse as he proved to have fulfilled the frontier priest's key responsibilities. However, he also took advantage of his position for personal gain. Because of indications of rebellion and how he had defied his bishop, the immigrant cleric was able to epitomize a behavioral pattern that would initiate how the early republic's church officials would experience certain problems. Because of the priest shortage, the church's undeveloped structure, and the various expansion problems in the urban East, American congregations attracted ill-advised and aggressive clergy during the period between the 1780s and the 1820s. These priests advocated factions, tested episcopal authority, and initiated public controversies. This chapter looks into the various measures taken in attempting to control these priests and their congregations.

This chapter turns to the late antique bishop, a figure of Christian leadership in whom the holiness of the world-renouncing ascetic saint and the worldly power of the secular magnate met in an uneasy coexistence. It summarizes the creation of two rhetorical opposites, the hagiographic ideal of the bishop-saint and the polemical nightmare of the tyrant-bishop. It then investigates the application of these stereotypes to actual bishops in situations of political or doctrinal conflict. Inappropriate personal violence featured prominently in charges of misconduct brought against bishops. Bishop Rabbula presented himself as a champion for the interests of the poor, and steered the ample material resources of the Edessene church into the provision of charity. The Life of Rabbula offered an idealized way in which charismatic holiness and episcopal authority ought to be combined. Tyrant-bishops resorted to violence, legal or otherwise, in order to satisfy their greed and ambition.

This chapter shows how the reform of the church that was so universally demanded across sixteenth-century Europe depended crucially on the clergy, regardless of the conflicting views that emerged during the Reformation about the exact nature of their orders or ministry. Trent went to great lengths to underline the centrality of clerical action at every level of the church, and its repeated emphasis on dioceses and parishes as the central units in church life was accompanied by corresponding demands on the clergy in charge of them. The council's well-known but belated enthusiasm for Episcopal authority collided sharply with the competing claims of papal power, a clash that nearly paralyzed Trent. The crisis was resolved by simply burying the subject altogether, and the Gallican traditions of France, which themselves exalted Episcopal power to an extent unrivalled elsewhere in Europe, were in no way diminished by this contretemps.

This chapter examines Alexandrian Episcopal authority and biblical interpretation in the early Christian period in the Fayoum Oasis in Egypt. It investigates how allegory was used to reinforce structures of ecclesiastical authority in a specific geographical and cultural context. It attempts to describe local exegetical practices in the region based on evidence from the fifth-century letter by Cyril of Alexandria written to a bishop named Calosirius and On Promises, a third-century treatise against millennarianist belief by Dionysius of Alexandria.

This chapter uses the career of Epiphanius of Cyprus to raise questions about our assumptions regarding episcopal authority. More specifically, it considers how we might utilize Epiphanius's particular form of prominence to reimagine authority in late ancient Christianity in ways distinct from more familiar terms like status, authority, or power. It examines Epiphanius's fame through the lens of modern celebrity studies and asks what cultural work Epiphanius's celebrity accomplished in his lifetime and after his death, particularly in the formation of a Christian culture during Roman times. It argues that Epiphanius was a historically precise icon, whose fame offers important insights into the cultural contours of imperial Christianity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the cultural deployment of Epiphanius's fame—his “celebrity-function”—in several major discourses of the fifth century, along with three major areas of cultural concern in the late fourth and early fifth centuries refracted through the person of Epiphanius: imperium, paideia, and askesis.

This chapter examines the evidence for very early Christianity among British, Gaelic and Pictish societies, and the conversion of Anglo-Saxons. It explores the limited evidence for the beliefs and practices that preceded Christianity – the notion of ‘paganism’ is examined and rejected. Christianity grew in a process of both continuity and change with respect to pre-Christian practices and beliefs. The process of ‘conversion’ (or ‘conversions’) is discussed through the writings of early medieval Christians who sought to ‘save’ the pre-Christian past, or aspects of it. Some aspects of pre-Christian thought shaped early Christianity in ways that distinguished it from Christianity elsewhere. The respective roles of monastic (abbatial) and pastoral (episcopal) authority in the Church are explored, rejecting the idea that there was something unusually monastic about ‘Celtic’ Christianity. Indeed, the idea of a distinctive ‘Celtic church’ or ‘Celtic Christianity’ is also found to be an illusion. Christianity brought about changes in the understanding of space, and time itself was re-imagined, making the dispute over the date of Easter of profound significance – a dispute treated here in new ways.

Samuel Thomas explores the role played by John Cardinal Dearden of Detroit in helping develop a new understanding of the lay apostolate in the Vatican II era. Through Dearden’s pronouncements and actions at Synod 69, in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and at the 1976 lay congress known as Call to Action, Thomas demonstrates how Dearden sought to cultivate a spirit of collegiality among his colleagues and a new understanding of the role of the laity in building up the Church. Thomas lays particular stress on Dearden’s commitment to lay participation in his own archdiocese.

This chapter describes the politico-religious situation when Cardinal Richelieu was chief minister. In 1625, an assembly of the clergy issued a manifesto that defined episcopal authority and controlled relations between the clergy and secular clergy. This alarmed the papacy, and Richelieu's ministry faced criticisms from both inside and outside France that its policies harmed the interests of Catholicism. His policies were also seen as politically motivated, greatly favoring the state. When Richelieu opened up to the Jesuits and Capuchin orders, his detractors became even more vocal with accusations that his dealings with Rome were prejudicial to the state.

This chapter argues for Cyprian’s importance in the history of the Song’s interpretation. It is shown that Song 4:12 and 6:8 were crucial texts in his defense of the practice of rebaptism, and that he presumed his opponents would accept his theological reading of the poem. A development in his interpretation can be mapped from a focus on episcopal authority to theological unity. The Donatists explicitly picked up on Cyprian’s interpretive logic in their theologies of baptism, which can be reconstructed from the writings of Optatus of Milevis and Augustine of Hippo. The ecclesiological mode of interpretation was central for North African writers, who express no qualms about the poem’s sexuality but do not give an individual interpretation of the Song, either.

This chapter reviews the evidence for institutional and spiritual reform in women's communities, and makes three key observations. First, that bishops in particular relied on reform as a way of expressing specific claims to religious and political authority, and of rearranging the lordship and patronage of female monasticism to their own benefit and that of their associates. Second, that the installation of, or the ‘return’ to a Benedictine regime by no means heralded a greater degree of freedom from the interventions of clerical and lay rulers. And finally, that these interventions have rendered obscure a ‘pre-reform’ culture of reflection over the purpose and organization of female communal life, and also a great deal of experimentation. Instead of reversing a situation of terminal decline, the reforms marked the beginning of clerical intolerance towards the ‘ambiguous’ observance of women religious, and the end of a state of relative intellectual and spiritual autonomy.

The concluding chapter sums up the arguments of the book and points towards the long-term significance of the Archpriest Controversy for the later relations between the English Catholics and the English crown, organized around such topics as tolerance and the acceptance de facto or de jure of religious pluralism and the consequences thereof. The chapter takes the account of these points of contact between the Catholic community and the crown down to the later seventeenth century, looking in particular at the petitioning and lobbying that occurred in 1603–4; at the gunpowder conspiracy in 1605; at what happened when the power of episcopal regulation was granted in the 1620s to members of the secular clergy; and also at the strain of so-called Blackloist thought among English Catholics during the Interregnum.