Abstract
So dominant is the secularization narrative, even after some two or three decades of steady critical challenge, that certain myths about the marginalization of religion from British intellectual and cultural life persist despite the absence of much supporting evidence. James Kirby’s highly original monograph on the historical ‘profession’ (he is sceptical about the relevance of the term) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries draws our attention to one very striking instance of this. That is the tenacity of the idea that, in the late nineteenth century, British historical scholarship escaped the iron cage of religious or confessional commitment, embracing the new-found freedom of a scientific, evidence-based methodology and the apparent, concomitant liberation from confessional commitments that supposed ‘professionalization’ brought with it. As Kirby shows most eloquently, in fact historical writing in Britain arguably was dominated in this period by a group of writers who combined a commitment to the highest standards of historical scholarship with, in most cases, open and unashamed Anglican belief.
Kirby opens up a fascinating insight into a world of which most British historians today are but dimly aware. In a wide-ranging study of British historiography, he draws on a host of names – some of them very familiar, some probably unfamiliar, almost certainly nearly all however unread today – to construct a persuasive (to this reviewer) argument about the impact of Anglicanism on the development of historical scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. William Stubbs, Mandell Creighton, E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, J. S. Brewer, William Cunningham, R. W. Dixon, R. H. Tawney and other names are probably vaguely familiar to anyone interested in Victorian and Edwardian historiography. But who actually reads their works today? Nonetheless, as Kirby shows, each of them made substantial contributions to historical writing about British history, and especially the history of the English Church. Kirby makes a strong case for saying that it was High Church opinion in particular, sharpened by Tractarianism, that helped to mould a closer, more scholarly and in that (very loose) sense ‘professional’ approach to the study of sources and to shape influential interpretations of English history across a wide range of subjects. These included the connection of religion with English national identity, the origins and history of constitutionalism, the nature of the Middle Ages, the nature and legacy of the English Reformation, the consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries, the Civil War and the impact of the industrial revolution.
Kirby’s reading of these historians is necessarily summative and sometimes sketchy: a short monograph can hardly do justice to the achievement of historians such as Stubbs and Creighton, to mention just two. But in a sense he only has to assert their importance, and discuss in outline the range of their work, to demonstrate the solidity of his argument. As he shows, Anglicanism remained a decisive influence on British historiography well into the twentieth century. Arguably he actually underestimates its lasting effects: at least in the area of patristic study, as well as modern ecclesiastical history, Anglican historians have continued to exercise a decisive influence almost up to the present. Specialists as well as beginners, theologians as well as historians, will find Kirby’s book a brilliant opening-up of a forgotten but not-so-distant world. He is perhaps more sure-footed in historical than in theological analysis: if there is one weak chapter, it is that which deals with the theme of providence, in which (as it seems to me) he seems to underestimate the extent to which Anglican historians reverted to an essentially pre-Enlightenment, Augustinian apprehension of the hiddenness of God’s action in history, a more persuasive framework than the somewhat over-schematized transition from atonement to incarnation Kirby uses here, following some other scholars. But that is a mere quibble. This is an outstanding contribution to British intellectual history, which puts religion squarely back into the picture as a motivating force in one vital area at least of British intellectual life.