This is a study of the sixty-six bishops who held office during the reign of James I. Kenneth Fincham surveys their range of activities and functions, including their part in central politics, their role in local society, their work as diocesan governors enforcing moral and spiritual discipline, and their supervision of the parish clergy. Dr Fincham argues that the accession of James I marked the restoration of episcopal fortunes at court and in the localities, seen most clearly in the revival of the court prelate. This detailed analysis of the early seventeenth-century episcopate, intensively grounded in contemporary sources, reveals much about the church of James I, the doctrinal divisions of the period, and the origins of Laudian government in the 1630s. Prelate as Pastor offers a new perspective on the controversies of early Stuart religious history.

This is the extraordinary story of an audacious fight for souls on famine ravaged Achill Island in the nineteenth century. Religious ferment swept Ireland in the early 1800s and evangelical Protestant clergyman Edward Nangle set out to lift the destitute people of Achill out of degradation and idolatry through his Achill Mission Colony. The fury of the island elements, the devastation of famine, and Nangle’s own volatile temperament all threatened the project’s survival. In the years of the Great Famine the ugly charge of ‘souperism’, offering food and material benefits in return for religious conversion, tainted the Achill Mission’s work. John MacHale, powerful Archbishop of Tuam, spearheaded the Catholic Church’s fightback against Nangle’s Protestant colony, with the two clergymen unleashing fierce passions while spewing vitriol and polemic from pen and pulpit. Did Edward Nangle and the Achill Mission Colony save hundreds from certain death, or did they shamefully exploit a vulnerable people for religious conversion? This dramatic tale of the Achill Mission Colony exposes the fault-lines of religion, society and politics in nineteenth century Ireland, and continues to excite controversy and division to this day.

With kind and humble intent thou reprovest me, dearest brother, for having wished by hiding myself to fly from the burdens of pastoral care; as to which, lest to some they should appear light, I express with my pen in the book before you all my own estimate of their heaviness, in order both that he who is free from them may not unwarily seek them, and that he who has so sought them may tremble for having got them. This book is divided into four separate heads of argument, that it may approach the reader’s mind by allegations arranged in order—by certain steps, as it were. For, as the necessity of things requires, we must especially consider after what manner every one should come to supreme rule; and, duly arriving at it, after what manner he should live; and, living well, after what manner he should teach; and, teaching aright, with how great consideration every day he should become aware of his own infirmity; lest either humility fly from the approach, or life be at variance with the arrival, or teaching be wanting to the life, or presumption unduly exalt the teaching.

The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors writing for print, it uses a case study of prolific pastor-author Richard Bernard to offer a new lens through which to view religious change in this pivotal period. By bringing together questions of print, genre, religio-politics and theology, the book will interest scholars and postgraduate students in history, literature and theological studies, and its readability will appeal to undergraduates and non-specialists.

Pastoral Care, or The Book of the Pastoral Rule, is a treatise on the responsibilities of the clergy written by Pope Gregory I in which he contrasted the role of bishops as pastors of their flock with their position as nobles of the church: the definitive statement of the nature of the episcopal office. Gregory enjoined parish priests to possess strict personal, intellectual and moral standards which were considered, in certain quarters, to be unrealistic and beyond ordinary capacities. The influence of the book, however, was vast and became one of the most influential works on the topic ever written. It was translated and distributed to every bishop within the Byzantine Empire.