"The Catalogue ... has been prepared with a view to accomplish two objects. One, to offer an inventory of all the books on the shelves of the Reference Department of the Manchester Free Library: the other, to supply ... a ready Key both to the subjects of the books, and to the names of the authors." - v. 1, the compiler to the reader.

The thirty papers which comprise this volume are selected from those delivered at the summer and winter conferences of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 1971 and 1972. The volume opens with three important, wide ranging surveys of the nature and types of religious orthodoxy and dissent in the early Christian centuries. A further group of papers considers the emergence and treatment of earlier medieval heresies, while a number of contributions concerned with Lollardy have their focus in M. J. Wilks' examination of relations between Wyclif and Hus. For developments in more modern times K.T. Ware supplies a wider perspective to a rich and varied series of papers on more familiar matters in British, Continental and American history. In this volume, considerable attention is paid to the relationship of movements of protest and dissent to their social, intellectual, cultural and political backgrounds: in this many of the authors reflect the interest in 'religious sociology' which characterises much contemporary Continental work in the field of ecclesiastical history.

W.R. Ward was one of the most influential historians of modern religion to be found at work in Britain during the twentieth century. Across fifty years his writings provoked a major reconsideration by historians of the significance of religion in society and its importance in the contexts of political, cultural and intellectual life. Ward was, above all, an international scholar who did much to repudiate any settled understanding that religious history existed in merely national categories. In particular, he showed how much British and American religion owed to the insights of Continental European thought and experience. This book presents many of Ward’s most important articles and gives a picture of the character, and extraordinary breadth, of his work. Embracing studies of John Wesley and the development of Methodism at large, the ambitions of Evangelicals in an age of international mission, the place of mysticism in evolution of Protestantism and the relations of churches and secular powers in the twentieth century, Andrew Chandler concludes that it was in such scholarship that Ward 'quietly recast the picture that we have of the past and drew our attention towards a far greater, more difficult and more interesting, landscape.'