Gregory the Great in the context of "Donatist"

Asser (/ˈæsər/; Welsh: [ˈasɛr]; died c. 909) was a Welsh monk from St David's, Dyfed, who became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. About 885 he was asked by Alfred the Great to leave St David's and join the circle of learned men whom Alfred was recruiting for his court. After spending a year at Caerwent because of illness, Asser accepted.

In 893, Asser wrote a biography of Alfred, called the Life of King Alfred. The manuscript survived to modern times in only one copy, which was part of the Cotton library. That copy was destroyed in a fire in 1731, but transcriptions that had been made earlier, together with material from Asser's work which was included by other early writers, have made it possible to reconstruct the work. The biography is the main source of information about Alfred's life and provides far more information about Alfred than is known about any other early English ruler. Asser assisted Alfred in his translation of Gregory the Great's Pastoral Care, and possibly with other works.

The archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and a principal leader of the Church of England, the ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the bishop of the diocese of Canterbury and metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury. By virtue of their office the archbishop is also a Lord Spiritual, one of the 26 Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The office has been vacant since 7 January 2025 following the resignation of Justin Welby, the 105th archbishop. Dame Sarah Mullally, currently the bishop of London, will become archbishop on 28 January 2026; she will be the first woman to hold the office.

The first archbishop was Augustine of Canterbury, the "Apostle to the English", who was sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great and arrived in 597. From Augustine until William Warham the archbishops of Canterbury were in full communion with the Catholic Church. During the English Reformation, King Henry VIII broke communion with Rome and proclaimed himself the head of the Church of England. Thomas Cranmer, appointed in 1533, became the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury and would become one of the most important figures in the development of Anglicanism.

In Christianity, the Devil, also known as Satan, is a malevolent entity that deceives and tempts humans. Frequently viewed as the personification of evil, he is traditionally held to have rebelled against God in an attempt to become equal to God himself. He is said to be a fallen angel, who was expelled from Heaven at the beginning of time, before God created the material world, and is in constant opposition to God. The Devil is identified with several other figures in the Bible including Lucifer, Satan, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the tempter of the Gospels, Leviathan, Beelzebub, and the dragon in the Book of Revelation.

Early scholars discussed the role of the Devil. Scholars influenced by neoplatonic cosmology, like Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius, portrayed the Devil as representing deficiency and emptiness, the entity most remote from the divine. According to Augustine of Hippo, the realm of the Devil is not nothingness, but an inferior realm standing in opposition to God. The standard medieval depiction of the Devil goes back to Gregory the Great. He integrated the Devil, as the first creation of God, into the Christian angelic hierarchy as the highest of the angels (either a cherub or a seraph) who fell far, into the depths of hell, and became the leader of demons.

The Nursing Madonna, Virgo Lactans, or Madonna Lactans, is an iconographic type of the Madonna and Child in which the Virgin Mary is shown breastfeeding the Child Jesus. In Italian, it is called the Madonna del Latte ("Madonna of Milk"). It was common in paintings until the change in atmosphere after the Council of Trent, when it was rather discouraged by the Catholic Church, at least in public contexts, on grounds of propriety.

The depiction is mentioned by Pope Gregory the Great, and a mosaic depiction probably of the 12th century is on the façade of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, though few other examples date to before the Late Middle Ages. It survived in Eastern Orthodox icons (as Galaktotrophousa in Greek; Mlekopitatelnitsa in Russian), especially in Russia.

Ambrosian chant (also known as Milanese chant) is the liturgical plainchant repertory of the Ambrosian rite of the Roman Catholic Church, distinct from the more widely known Gregorian chant. It is primarily associated with the Archdiocese of Milan, and named after St. Ambrose much as Gregorian chant is named after Gregory the Great. It is the only surviving plainchant tradition besides the Gregorian to maintain the official sanction of the Roman Catholic Church.