This article contends that the importance of post-biblical Jewish legal sources for the development of the case for infant baptism in England has been significantly underestimated. Focusing on the Westminster Assembly debates on baptism, it demonstrates how John Lightfoot’s interventions shaped contemporary understandings of that rite’s historicity. Lightfoot’s later work is shown to have further entrenched a conception of infant baptism as a development upon the proselyte baptism of the Jews. The study of Jewish texts thus emerges as having been an essential means of buttressing doctrine in mid- to late seventeenth-century England.

Little attention has been paid to how canon law interpreted religious poverty, an influential ideal in twelfth and thirteenth-century Christian Europe. Given that many involved in the apostolic poverty movement were educated in canon law, this omission needs to be addressed. Gratian held a reformist view, advocating for a secular clergy largely without private property, but subsequent canonists abandoned this ideal as impractical, confining poverty to monks and canons regular. This weakening of the ideal continued as Decretalists gradually allowed popes to relax vows of poverty. This canonistic trend is vital context for later doctrinal conflicts around apostolic poverty.

Faith in war. Religion and the military in Germany, 1500–1650. Nikolas M. Funke. (Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association, 31.) Pp. viii + 238. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2024. £99. 978 1 80539 617 8 - Volume 77 Issue 1

Symbolic reproduction in early medieval England. Secular and monastic households. By Katharine Sykes. (The Past and Present Book Series.) Pp. x + 229. Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. £76. 978 0 19 284475 0 - Volume 77 Issue 1

A ‘phoenix of women’. Puritan spirituality in the letters of Brilliana Harley. Edited and introduced by Michael A. G. Azad Haykin. (Heritage Classics.) Pp. xvi + 153 incl. frontispiece and 27 ills. Cambridge, ON: Heritage Seminary Press, 2024. $19.99 (paper). 978 1 77484 152 5 - Volume 77 Issue 1

Makarios – Ein östlicher Kirchenvater im Spiegel des deutschen Protestantismus. By Martin Illert. (Eastern Church Identities, 14.) Pp. xvi + 203. Leiden: Brill/Schōningh, 2023. €107.87. 978 3 506 79138 2 - Volume 77 Issue 1

The Christian Holy Land is defined by and through representation. Images of Christ’s life, death and resurrection draw on scriptural details to set sacred events in a Palestinian landscape. A desire to witness locations marked by divine presence propels Christian travellers towards monuments built to enshrine the terrestrial traces of the faith’s central mysteries. Shortly after the fourth-century construction of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea declared that the sight of Christ’s empty tomb in the structure testified to the truth of the Gospels ‘by facts louder than any voice’. 1 Textual descriptions, visual depictions and monumental designs soon began to reference the church’s characteristic architectural features. This intentional layering of structure and Scripture enabled readers, viewers and users to activate these associations from afar.

In 1408, as the Great Western Schism entered its fourth decade, the Parisian community of Celestine monks asked Pierre d’Ailly to write a life of their founder, Pietro Morrone, who served as Pope Celestine V in 1294. D’Ailly found in him an example that suited his times: a pope could resign without damage to the Church at large. With cardinals from both obediences ready to withdraw support from Avignon’s Benedict XIII and Rome’s Gregory XII, both of whom resisted resignation, d’Ailly made his case for papal resignation via his life of Celestine V.

The Old Testament, Calvin and the Reformed tradition. Edited by Yudha Thianto. (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 208.) Pp. xvi + 287 incl. 2 colour ills. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2024. €99. 978 90 04 41524 9; 1573 5664 - Volume 76 Issue 4