‘“True churchmen”? Anglican Evangelicals and history, c. 1770-1850’, Theology (Sep-Oct 2012), 339-49 (original) (raw)
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coal-face research by other scholars, and he seems to have read everything: aficionados of a well-crafted citation will explore the endnotes with admiration and profit. He has an eye for arresting possibilities, such as the report by the veteran courtier and Catholic recusant Sir Francis Englefield that he had been employed by Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole to exhume and cremate the corpse of King Henry VIII (p. ). He enjoys the observation which in its incongruity invites reflection: as in the fact that the Dutch Sea Beggars-Protestant pirates in the North Sea who might be labelled terrorists todaygloried in an Islamic crescent badge and the motto 'Rather Turkish than popish' (p. ). He also displays a proper historical agnosticism. Having described at p. the typical profile of a convert to evangelical religion in the early Reformationwell-educated, Erasmian humanist, critical of Church abuses, advocate of a vernacular Biblehe points out that this is the profile of Sir Thomas More. This is an utterly reliable history of the English Reformation, but it is also its imaginative biography, treating the story as a single narrative, watching its birth, its growth, its growing complexity, ending with the prospect that finally, as one hopes in a human life, a rueful wisdom may follow. Marshall is an historian's historian, probing the close-up warp and weft of the period with admirable curiosity and archival expertise, but he also enjoys an enviably light touch for the general reader. DIARMAID MACCULLOCH ST CROSS COLLEGE, OXFORD The Oxford history of Anglicanism, I: Reformation and identity, c. -. By Anthony Milton. Pp. xxvi + incl. ills. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, . £. JEH () ; doi:./S As the first volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism, this collection of twenty-five essays by leading scholars takes the brave, if awkward, decision to renounce the label 'Anglican' on the grounds that, prior to , the Church of England lacked a stable theological identity; it was an institution, not an 'ism'. As one essay wittily notes, whereas on the Continent the different Churches, each with a distinctive theological platform, competed for Christian souls, in England, Christians espousing very different theological platforms, competed for the soul of the English Church (p. ). Hence, whereas prior studies of the fledgling Church of England championed one or another churchmanship as the true 'spirit of Anglicanism'whether Hooker's ceremonious and rationalist traditionalism favoured by Tractarians, the post- Calvinist consensus model, or the mid twentieth-century big-tent non-confessional via mediathe current volume portrays the period between about and as a 'struggle between competing claims' to be 'the authentic and representative voice of the Church of England' (p. ). Yet, although the essays do on the whole avoid privileging any one churchmanship as the orthodox mainstream, most do betray the shaping hand of the past four decades of front-line scholarship, and if they do not fully embrace the Calvinist consensus model, see the Tudor-Stuart Church as unequivocally Reformed in doctrine and self-understanding.
Bunyan Studies: The Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture, Issue 26, pp. 110-116., 2022
In recent years there has been a reinvigorated impetus amongst academics to explore the histories and legacies of pre-modern religious Dissent. The first, and ironically the most recent, of the now complete five volumes of The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions is a significant stride in this important scholarly intervention. Though such a subject can seem 'bewildering in its complexity' (2), Coffey's finely structured introduction guides readers through the heady maze of denominational 'starting point[s]' and 'turning points' (2). Coffey is to be commended for the clarity, and sensitivity, with which he depicts the roots and branches of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Dissent in Britain and beyond. In doing so, Coffey elucidates how Dissenters were not at the margins of society, but much 'closer to the centre of the action', whereby their history belongs, and rightly so, 'to the mainstream' of early modern religious historiography (16). Divided into four parts, the twenty-one essays emphasise, to varying degrees, the diffusion and migration of ideas that came to define or defy religious Nonconformity in the pre-modern transatlantic and continental Anglophone world. Part I examines the denominational 'Traditions within England'. Polly Ha discusses Presbyterianism, 'rigorously principled as it was practical', as it developed from the Elizabethan to the early Stuart period (44). Ha's research sheds light beyond the well-trodden narrative of Presbyterians wishing simply to 'complete Protestant reform in England' (41), revealing instead how the origins of that reform were 'neither Presbyterian nor even Puritan-specific' (42). Ha signals the intersectional 'overlap and movement' between early Puritanism and Presbyterianism, whilst being careful not to draw a 'fixed line' between
The scholarly writings of Thomas Burgess (1756-1837), bishop of St David's and then Salisbury, supported a polemical and present-day centred reading of the earlier history of the British church and primitive Christianity, designed to rebut rival and competing threats from a resurgent contemporary Roman Catholicism on the one hand and from rational Protestant Dissent, notably Unitarianism, on the other. Burgess used the high church trope of apostolical continuity to reconstruct an explicitly Protestant identity for the historic English Church, its lineage rooted in a non-Roman ancient British church. While the early Tractarians gave signs of appearing to follow in this tradition of apologetic, it was clear from as early as Newman's number 7 of the Tracts for the Times was rather predicated on the unhistorical and modern origin of Protestantism and rested its claim to Antiquity on a different basis. By the time of Newman's Tract 90 (1841) at least one strand of Tractarian apologetic was more in tune with Bishop Burgess's contemporary high church opponent, Samuel Wix, applying that same apostolical emphasis in such a way as to distance the Church of England as far as possible from 'Ultra Protestantism' while attempting to build bridges with the Church of Rome.