Dr Simon Skinner

This book which is devided into seven parts reflects the rich and diverse nature of scholarship on the Oxford Movement and provides pointers to further study and new lines of enquiry.

This is the first history of Oriel College, Oxford for over a hundred years. It is an account of a distinctive society, the college of Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Gilbert White, Thomas Arnold, John Henry Newman and Cecil Rhodes, written by a group of specialist scholars whose aim it is to place the body of Orielenses in the context not only of Oxford but of British and international history. It is therefore more than a domestic history of the college; it explores the ideas which have animated, and often divided, the members of the college in every generation since 1326, especially during the brilliant Noetic era of the early nineteenth century and the Oxford movement which succeeded it; and it considers the impact of Oriel on national life, including sport and the government of the British Empire. Though designed to conform to the highest standards of historical scholarship, the chapters are accessible to the general reader, and are fully illustrated throughout. Maps and plans are provided to make the physical development of the college easy to follow.

At the close of his epistolary protest at Ian Ker's contemptuous review of John Henry Newman in the Times Literary Supplement in 2002, Frank Turner remarked: ‘Ker's review raises the larger issue of whether modern British and European religious history will continue as an arena for professional research and critical analysis or succumb to the parochial constraints and contentions of denominational and intra-denominational discourse. Ian Ker has made his choice in the matter, and I have made mine.’ My article in this Journal in October 2010, ‘History versus hagiography: the reception of Turner's Newman’, sought to demonstrate that professional research and critical analysis were altogether suffocated by the contentions of denominational discourse after that book's publication in 2002. The article was careful not in any simple way to legitimise Turner's conclusions – indeed, it set out schematically and at length the interpretative retorts which they invited – but rather his purpose and method. I concluded: What is at stake … in the fuss over Turner's Newman, is not the plausibility or otherwise of his interpretation. It far transcends that. What is at stake is the legitimacy and remit of historical inquiry itself, when confronted with a vocal interest group whose principles and prejudices are seldom acknowledged. The difference between the book and the great majority of its critics, therefore, is not between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor even religion and secularism, but between history itself and hagiography – a difference not of prejudice, but of methodology. A great – though mortal – man once wrote, in the Tracts for the Times, no. 1, ‘Choose your side’. In his response to my article on ‘History versus hagiography’, it is at once enlightening and dispiriting to see Eamon Duffy choosing his.