ELIZABETH A. CLARK. Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. Pp. x, 561. $69.95

Abstract

In this book, one of America's foremost historians of the early church goes back to her roots. In the first sentence, Elizabeth A. Clark asks “How [did] the study of early Christian history and theology become instantiated as a discipline in four nineteenth-century Protestant seminaries?” (p. 1). Her answer takes readers on a brilliantly imagined, carefully organized journey through the minds and lives of six American professors, spanning two continents and a century of scholarship. The founding of the disciplinary study of the church fathers, she finds, emerged only slowly, in a manner contingent upon international trends and national politics, but also the availability of books, the demands of teaching, and the idiosyncratic agendas of individuals—with on-the-ground factors weighing as much as the evolution of theology and historical inquiry. This is not your grandfather's intellectual history. Methodologically, Clark's book continues the trajectory of her scholarship on history and historiography, incorporating elements of literary criticism and networking theory as well as elements of curriculum history and microhistory. Clark examines church history not only in the conception but in the enactment. Her subjects include Samuel Miller (1769–1850) at Princeton Theological Seminary; Henry B. Smith (1815–1877), Roswell D. Hitchcock (1817–1887), and Philip Schaff (1819–1893) at Union Theological Seminary; George Park Fisher (1827–1909) at Yale Divinity School; and Ephraim Emerton (1851–1935) of Harvard Divinity School. For each man, Clark reconstructs a rich and complex intellectual landscape, critically analyzing published and unpublished writings, class notes, personal and institutional libraries, textbooks, institutional trends, and biographical information. While six men do not a discipline make, Clark situates each within a broader context and ingeniously interlocks them in a chronological arc.