J oshua B ennett . God and Progress

Ever since Duncan Forbes’s influential The Liberal Anglican Idea of History appeared in 1952, a central theme of Victorian historiography has been how that era’s national histories were imagined within the framework of a larger developmental providentialism. It therefore followed that providing evidence for the moral and spiritual unfolding of the English nation was the primary goal of this tradition that connected the national histories of Thomas Arnold in the early Victorian era to those of William Stubbs and Edward Freeman in a later period. What has been less well understood, however, is how this framing related to what was perhaps a more centrally relevant historical subject at the time: the history of the church. Indeed, as Joshua Bennett shows in his nuanced and carefully argued God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845–1914, a similar historicism came to inform histories of Christianity, and not just...

Aesthetics · Art · Christianity · Economic history · Framing (construction) · Historicism · Historiography · History of Christianity · Intellectual history · Literature · Period (music) · Sociology · Theme (computing) · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies