Dr Matthew Grimley
Associate Professor of Modern History
Merton College
01865 (2)76343
My research and teaching focus on the history of twentieth-century Britain. Although my primary area of expertise is religion, my teaching and research both aim to integrate it with other aspects of British history. I teach courses on diverse areas, including British films, British politics and society in the 1970s, and the history of political thought. Other areas of interest include national identity, multiculturalism, and political ideologies in 20th century Britain.
Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England Liberal Anglican Theories of the State Between the Wars (Oxford Historical Monographs, 2004).
This book traces the influence of Anglican writers on the political thought of inter-war Britain, and argues that religion continued to exert a powerful influence on political ideas and allegiances in the 1920s and 1930s. It counters the prevailing assumption of historians that inter-war political thought was primarily secular in content, by showing how Anglicans like Archbishop William Temple made an active contribution to ideas of community and the welfare state (a term which Temple himself invented). Liberal Anglican ideas of citizenship, community and the nation continued to be central to political thought and debate in the first half of the 20th century.
Grimley traces how Temple and his colleagues developed and changed their ideas on community and the state in response to events like the First World War, the General Strike and the Great Depression. For Temple, and political philosophers like A. D. Lindsay and Ernest Barker, the priority was to find a rhetoric of community which could unite the nation against class consciousness, poverty, and the threat of Hitler. Their idea of a Christian national community was central to the articulation of ideas of 'Englishness' in inter-war Britain, but this Anglican contribution has been almost completely overlooked in recent debate on twentieth-century national identity.
Grimley also looks at rival Anglican political theories put forward by conservatives such as Bishop Hensley Henson and Ralph Inge, dean of St Paul's. Drawing extensively on Henson's private diaries, it uncovers the debates which went on within the Church at the time of the General Strike and the 1927-8 Prayer Book crisis.
The book uncovers an important and neglected seam of popular political thought, and offers a new evaluation of the religious, political and cultural identity of Britain before the Second World War.
'The Fall and Rise of Chucrh and State? Religious History, Politics and the State in Britaioin, 1961-2011', in Studies in Church History: The Church on its Past, ed. by Peter Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (Woodridge, 2013), 491-512.
The theme of this volume, The Church on its Past, was chosen to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Under the Presidency of Professor Sarah Foot, this conference brought together leading scholars, among them Diarmaid MacCulloch, David Bebbington, Claudia Rapp and Matthew Grimley, to reflect on developments within the discipline of Church History in the fifty years since the Society's foundation in 1961. In this, the resulting volume, a first group of papers surveys ecclesiastical historiography over the last half-century, considering such key themes in Church History as the Reformation. Another group focuses on scholarship exploring the relationship between Church and State in different periods. A third group investigates the uses that the Christian churches have made of the past, especially in order to justify present agendas, and explores how those churches have constructed their own past. Traditionally much Church History has been written from the 'inside'; particular attention is paid to how the Catholic, non-conformist and evangelical churches have interpreted their own histories. The volume ranges widely over historical writing about the Church, from Eusebius and Socrates Scholasticus in late antiquity through Bede and Cardinal Boso in the Middle Ages to Martin Luther, Polydore Vergil, John Bale and Gilbert Burnet in the early modern period, and beyond. Both Protestant and Catholic approaches to writing the history of the Reformation, and of the pre-Reformation Church, are explored, including such aspects as the papacy and crusading. The influence of other approaches is also considered, notably those attentive to feminism and gender, and how far Church Historians have engaged with these. The richness and breadth of this volume's treatment of such a major subject make it essential reading for all students and teachers of and others interested in Church History.
