Henry Melvill Gwatkin (1844-1916), theologian and church historian, spent the whole of his working life at Cambridge. Appointed lecturer at St. John's College in 1874, he succeeded Mandrel Creighton as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1891. He was Gifford lecturer in 1903. Gwatkin was a man of wide and deep learning, with an exceptional knowledge of original sources and a singularly keen eye for vital facts and tendencies in difficult and perplexing periods. As a teacher, despite bad sight and a poor delivery, he was outstanding. He was a clear, witty, and stimulating lecturer, but in the opinion of some of his pupils he was at his best in the Greek Testament readings he conducted in succession to F. J. A. Hort. Gwatkin easily stood at the head of the Cambridge lecturers whom I regularly heard wrote T. R. Glover, one of his former pupils. His subject was Church History and he knew it in and out, back and forth, root and branch - the original authorities and secondary.

Excerpt from Studies of Arianism: Chiefly Referring to the Character and Chronology of the Reaction Which Followed the Council of Nicaea The Second Edition is in the main a reprint of the first, with a few passages inserted (by the courtesy of Messrs Longmans) from my Arian Controversy, a few corrections and amendments, and some account taken of more recent work on the subject. I have not however been in a position to give it the thorough revision I could have wished, so that some things are left unaltered which do not now fully satisfy me. The whole question of Antony in particular urgently needs a com prehensive revision from the Coptic side, which few of us are competent to give. Dom Butler has made a good be ginning, though he rightly points out that others may differ greatly from him in their estimate of some conspicuous parts of the evidence. Without entering on particular criticism, it may safely be said that the investigation needs to be much more closely connected with the whole development of Roman Egypt. What for example was the exact relation of Christian asceticism to the old pagan asceticism? I may add that I cannot follow another of my critics in setting down Athanasius as a genuine ascetic. If indeed all self-denial be called asceticism, there must be a good deal of asceticism in every character that is not contemptible: but if the word be limited as it ought to be to self-denial resting on an idea that the pleasures of sense are of the nature of sin, there are comparatively few traces of it in Athanasius. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

This is the first volume to attempt a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the 'Arian' churches in the Roman world of Late Antiquity and their political importance in the late Roman kingdoms of the 5th-6th centuries, ruled by barbarian warrior elites. Bringing together researchers from the disciplines of theology, history and archaeology, and providing an extensive bibliography, it constitutes a breakthrough in a field largely neglected in historical studies. A polemical term coined by the Orthodox Church (the side that prevailed in the Trinitarian disputes of the 4th century C.E.) for its opponents in theology as well as in ecclesiastical politics, Arianism has often been seen as too complicated to understand outside the group of theological specialists dealing with it and has therefore sometimes been ignored in historical studies. The studies here offer an introduction to the subject, grounded in the historical context, then examine the adoption of Arian Christianity among the Gothic contingents of the Roman army, and its subsequent diffusion in the barbarian kingdoms of the late Roman world.

This is the first volume to attempt a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the 'Arian' churches in the Roman world of Late Antiquity and their political importance in the late Roman kingdoms of the 5th-6th centuries, ruled by barbarian warrior elites. Bringing together researchers from the disciplines of theology, history and archaeology, and providing an extensive bibliography, it constitutes a breakthrough in a field largely neglected in historical studies. A polemical term coined by the Orthodox Church (the side that prevailed in the Trinitarian disputes of the 4th century C.E.) for its opponents in theology as well as in ecclesiastical politics, Arianism has often been seen as too complicated to understand outside the group of theological specialists dealing with it and has therefore sometimes been ignored in historical studies. The studies here offer an introduction to the subject, grounded in the historical context, then examine the adoption of Arian Christianity among the Gothic contingents of the Roman army, and its subsequent diffusion in the barbarian kingdoms of the late Roman world.