Church and State in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Historiography

Abstract

‘Church and state’ is a phrase that one rarely meets with in most early modern ecclesiastical history that has been written over the past fifty years. One major exception has been the United States of America, where the phrase even has its own journal. With regard to early modern English history, one rare exception very much proves the rule: Leo Solt’sChurch and State in Early Modern England(a synthetic work published in 1990) is the work of an American historian, who admits in his preface that he has chosen to interpret the relationship ‘very broadly’, and that the book ‘might be more accurately entitled “Religion and Politics in Early Modern England”’. The axiomatic status of the separation of church and state in the United States, and its continuing use as a political football, has given the phrase a prominence in public discourse that has naturally been reflected in American historiography, where figures such as Roger Williams invite the application of later terminology to the seventeenth century. Where ‘church and state’ have not been separated (or at least had not been in the early modern period), the term seems to have been less appealing to historians, at least to those working on the period before the assault on established churches in the nineteenth century.