Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920 by James Kirby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920by James Kirby Martin Wellings Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870-1920. By James Kirby. [ Oxford Historical Monographs.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xi, 257. $100.00; £60.00. ISBN 978-0-19-876815-9.) The central argument of James Kirby's elegant monograph on British historical scholarship between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of World War I is that many of the most influential and widely-read historians of the period were committed members of the Church of England, some lay and many ordained. [End Page 600]Kirby begins by establishing the importance and prestige of history in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, noting that a popular work like J. R. Green's Short History of the English People(1874) vastly outsold the novels of George Eliot and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He explores the formation of the "Anglican historians"—E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, J. S. Brewer, Nicholas Pocock, J. E. Thorold Rogers, J. R. Green, R. W. Dixon, Mandell Creighton—noting the influence of the worldview of the Oxford Movement, with its emphasis on the historical continuity of the Church. The opportunities for scholarship are then examined by investigating "the learned Church," with its well-endowed parishes, its tradition of intellectual activity among the cathedral clergy, and its near-monopoly of tenured posts at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Having set the scene, Kirby then investigates four themes in British history, showing how they were addressed by his Anglican scholars. He considers the Nation (and the role of the national Church), the Constitution (and the vexed question of the English Civil War), social and economic history from the Middle Ages to the industrial revolution, and the particularly neuralgic issue of the Reformation Settlement. Kirby's scholars were not necessarily in agreement on all of these topics. Dixon, Freeman, and Stubbs, for example, emphasised the continuity of the English Church across the Reformation, praising the Elizabethan Settlement as a triumph of authentic English (and Anglican) Catholicism. Brewer and Pocock, on the other hand, espoused a more thorough-going Anglo-Catholic view, owing something to the polemics of Hurrell Froude, and vigorously repudiating the English Reformers and all their works. As Freeman wrote to Green in May, 1869: "once a month (as some men get drunk), [Pocock] roasts a Reformer in the Sat. [urday] Rev. [iew]" (p.181). In his final chapter, Kirby turns to providence and teleology, showing that these historians eschewed the Positivist theories of H. T. Buckle ("an ignorant windbag," in Freeman's opinion—p. 191), and espoused a subtle and flexible teleology which allowed for an ultimately mysterious Providence drawing good out of the contingent choices of flawed but free human beings. Kirby persuasively connects this with a theological focus on the Incarnation, and with an ecclesiological emphasis on the Church as an extension of the Incarnation. An epilogue reflects on the gradual decline of the Anglican school of English historiography, blaming agricultural depression, the equalization of stipends and the expansion of other career opportunities for bright graduates for the demise of the "learned Church." James Kirby has written a well-researched and erudite study. One reservation: Kirby's heroes are almost all High Churchmen or Anglo-Catholics, with an occasional reference to Broad Churchmen. The Evangelicals are discounted, as are Nonconformists of all shades—the dismissive reference to the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, in which J. N. Figgis was raised, as "a Methodist sect" (p. 102) speaks volumes. Evangelical Anglicans and Nonconformists wrote and read history in this period, and more might be made of this constituency. And although it is gratifying for a reviewer to find his own work cited, it is disappointing when his name is consistently misprinted in the footnotes and the bibliography. [End Page 601] Martin Wellings Oxford Methodist Circuit Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press