Historians and the Church of England

James Kirby’s Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920 is a beautifully written work of immense scholarly commitment. It is not, as the title might suggest, a study of fin-de-siècle debates about the history of the Church of England—or at least, that is only part of the picture. Rather, the book deals with the works and influences of the leading historians of this period who belonged to the Anglican Church. It is based on profound immersion in contemporary historical literature, with attention paid to German and French writing as well as to English, and on close critical engagement with the current authorities on nineteenth-century intellectual life. Its ambitions are carefully defined, and it succeeds handsomely in presenting an elegant, compelling and significant set of reinterpretations. The purpose of the book is to establish the existence of a more or less coherent ‘school’ of Anglican historians operating between c. 1870 and 1920, and to show that this represented the dominant force in English historical scholarship in these decades. Methodologically, the book seeks to distance itself from purely text-based approaches to the study of historiography, paying attention to the social contexts within which its protagonists were writing as well as to the content of their works. It begins by explaining why Anglican High Churchmen were more interested in history than their Broad Church and Evangelical brethren, and how this tendency was encouraged by the Oxford Movement. Next comes an analysis of the institutional bases of the ‘learned church’—that is, of the Church of England as a sponsor of branches of higher learning beyond theology and ecclesiastical history—including the roles played by the universities, and by parish and episcopal work. Though it briefly discusses the broader diffusion of Anglican historical argument, particularly into school and university curricula, the book is avowedly a study of prominent historians. Its protagonists are E. A. Freeman and the scholar-bishops William Stubbs and Mandell Creighton, with J. R. Green also playing a substantial role, while the principal supporting cast includes John Seeley, William Cunningham, R. W. Dixon, J. N. Figgis, and R. H. Tawney

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