Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 by James Kirby (review)

Writing a monograph on Anglican historiography that is also an engaging read cannot be an easy task, yet James Kirby succeeds in his Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920. Derived from a doctoral dissertation of the same title, Kirby's book makes a case for the centrality of Anglican beliefs and ideas to English history writing in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Historians' theological investments drove them to particular interpretations of particular subjects: the medieval Church, the Glorious Revolution, and the English Reformation, but also the rise of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the uses of history in finding solutions to political and social problems. The core of the book is close analysis of the texts produced by what Kirby refers to as "scholarly" Anglican historians (not all, but many, held university positions), including Edward Augustus Freeman, John Richard Green, John Robert Seeley, William Stubbs, Richard Henry Tawney, and other, less familiar names (4). Kirby also addresses the material and institutional contexts in which his historians did their work, as well as their receptions in the world beyond the Church and universities, from Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Max Weber to textbooks that reached generations of British schoolchildren.

After a historiographical and methodological introduction, the book proceeds with two chapters identifying the group of historians under discussion, their intellectual and theological backgrounds, and the institutional contexts in which they did their work, mostly either as clerics or as laymen in the universities (all of Kirby's key historians are men). Five chapters then provide detailed accounts of major themes that the Anglican historians took up in their writing: the English nation and Constitution, ideas of empire, the rise of capitalism, ideas of progress, and, most importantly, the English Reformation.

Three key historiographical interventions set Kirby's work apart. First, he follows other recent intellectual historians in reemphasizing the centrality of religion and theology to modern British intellectual and cultural life. Nineteenth-century historical scholarship has previously been portrayed as conforming to a secularizing, scientizing teleology, but Kirby shows that theological impulses for history writing held sway until well into the twentieth century, declining for historically specific reasons in the interwar period. Second, he has produced a kind of writing that sits "between intellectual history and the social or institutional history of scholarship": unapologetic in its focus on texts and ideas, but acknowledging the "total historical world" in which those texts and ideas were produced (8). Though this approach has long been pursued by early modernists, it is refreshing in a work of modern history, and helps to elucidate intellectual history's role in working alongside other forms of history to arrive at a more comprehensive vision of the past.

Finally and more specifically, Kirby seeks to nuance the category of Protestant as applied to the post-Reformation English Church and English national/imperial identity more broadly. Not only did the nineteenth-century Church of England consist of multiple factions—Tractarian/High Church, liberal-Anglican/Broad Church, and Evangelical—Anglican historians actually preferred "a Catholic, albeit anti-papal, idea of Englishness," which emphasized continuity across the Reformation (11). This was in large part due to the influence of the Oxford Movement, which suffused the mid-nineteenth-century university environment in which Kirby's historians were educated. Kirby differs, perhaps, from other intellectual historians in focusing on the contributions of this strand of Anglicanism to non-theological scholarship, in contrast to historians of philosophy or classics who have focused on the Broad Church Anglicanism of Benjamin Jowett, T. H. Green, and the Oxford Greats curriculum.

The greatest strength of Historians and the Church of England is the clarity and force of Kirby's writing. Though readers might occasionally have to look up a piece of theological jargon or the name of an early-modern bishop, they will not...