Religious Identities in Britain, 1660-1832 (review)

This is in many ways a bold endeavour, exploring the currently-fashionable concept of identity, particularly in the long eighteenth century, but in the rather less fashionable context of ecclesiastical and theological history. The chosen modus operandi is, it should be said, an especially rewarding one. Where others have pronounced relatively vacuously about broad outlook and affiliation, speculating about the construction of national, ethnic and class identities, the authors of the essays in this volume have instead tackled the religious characteristics of a series of individuals, thereby allowing in each case a coherent and revealing picture to emerge of their distinctive experiences, attitudes and ideas.

Accordingly, the main body of the text is given over to attempts to investigate in intellectual-biographical terms a series of first-rank ecclesiastics—Charles Leslie, Benjamin Hoadly, John Wesley, Richard Price, William Warburton—alongside a battery of less famous but nevertheless significant figures—for example, William Davies Shipley (Dean of St Asaph), George Smalridge (Dean of Christ Church), Sir George Pretyman-Tomline (Bishop of Lincoln and Dean of St Paul's) and Charles Daubeny (Archdeacon of Sarum). Attention is given to the careers and institutional affiliations of each subject, and the contributors are particularly alive to the controversies in which their chosen figures were embroiled: thus Hoadly on the Lord's Supper, Leslie on political theology and Price on revolution provide strong centres of interest.

The main common theme to emerge is that confessional historiographies and enduring popular misconceptions have often led to the survival of unrealistic or unreasonable appraisals of many of these individuals and their true positions in matters of church government and theology. Hoadly, for example, is rehabilitated as a less heterodox theologian than has often been supposed; Smalridge's reputed altitudinarianism is reassessed and shown to consist in a great degree of flexibility towards low church interests; Wesley and his Methodist movement emerge as evidence not of Anglican failure but of Anglican vitality; and Warburton is interpreted as an enlightened Newtonian thinker rather than as a violently polemical divine.

Conventional ecclesiastical categories are also subjected to pressure and important ones collapse under the resulting strain. Above all, several contributions, but especially Guglielmo Sanna on Hoadly and William Gibson on Smalridge, successfully argue that high and low church affiliations, rather than being definitive in explaining the affairs of the Anglican church, were actually flexible classifications. Low church figures were not necessarily tied to anti-Trinitarian theology or to erastianism; for their part, high church Tories might incline sympathetically towards latitudinarian policies where the unity of the church was at stake.

Readers of the Scottish Historical Review, however, will be only too familiar with the obvious criticism that can be levelled at volumes of this kind, especially where the claim is made in the title that what will emerge is a British perspective. For apart from James Caudle's interesting reflection on James Boswell's shifting religious affiliations, no essay makes any substantial contribution to an understanding of Scottish religious history in this period. Indeed, the avowedly biographical slant of the volume militates even more disappointingly against a properly integrated account of British developments in the round. The result is less a coherent view of British experiences (Irish historians, for example, would find virtually nothing of immediate interest here) than the predictable study of England's religious history with single Scottish-and Welsh-focused essays tacked on. The book, in short, is interesting. But the title is seriously misleading.