Unitarians and the Construction of History and Biography, 1740-1820

Abstract

In his biographies of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Leo X, the Liverpool Unitarian William Roscoe (1753-183) explored a mutually-dependent relationship between individuals and the political structure within which they lived. Roscoe recorded that history and biography were regarded as distinct genres, but he saw the roots of change in history as grounded both in the political structure and in the human mind and thus integrated the two, investigating change in history through a physiological understanding of the human mind and the nature of personal identity. The Unitarian concept of the soul as a part of the divine spirit, as having no sex, affected their attitude to gender relations: all individuals had both male and female attributes in varying degrees, on a single continuum. Thomas Reid saw a possibility of philosophical integration between matter and spirit, and mind and body were being brought together in physiological terms as Descartes dualism was discarded. In this context we can set the Liverpool concept of the need for balance in the individual and in society. Unitarianism also contributed to a sense of alienation, privileging balance and integration. There is a synergy between Rousseau's description of the inevitability of democratic forms declining into slavery and Roscoe's description of the subversion of Lorenzo's democratic Florence into Leo's oligarchic city. So too with Liverpool: despite a wide franchise in the 17th century, by the mid 18th century control was in the hands of a small group of High Anglican Tories, albeit constantly disputed. This political and religious position, exposed through the biographies, mapped out a route for change led by the presence of liberty and the reasoned control of the passions.