Anglican Attitudes: Some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War

Abstract

It remains a commonplace that what historians write bears some relation to their own time and particular angle of vision. Less often remarked, however, is the tendency for historical interpretations to acquire lives of their own, at least partly independent of the original circumstances that produced them, and to enter as it were the intellectual bloodstream of subsequent generations. A good illustration of this latter proposition is afforded by the history of the English Church. For, since at least the seventeenth century, the very radicalism of the Reformation has proved a continuing source of embarrassment to a section of Church of England opinion; rather than frankly admit their own dissent from the views of many of the Tudor founding fathers, they have regularly sought to rewrite the past in the light of the present. This conservative vision has come to be expressed in terms of a so-called via media, which is deemed to have characterized the English or “Anglican” way of religious reform.Until quite recently, the historiography was heavily influenced by these same Anglican insiders, other historians being prepared largely to take on trust their claims—especially as regards theological change. Moreover, willingness to follow what is in effect a party line has now received powerful reinforcement from certain revisionist historians, who discern a congruence between the alleged moderation of Anglicanism and their own commitment to a consensual model of English politics in the decades before the Civil War. The old idea of the English Church as epitomizing a mean between the extremes of protestantism and catholicism is once more being pressed into service.