Hellenism, Hebraism, and Heathenism in Nineteenth-Century England: Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, and the religions of antiquity
January 2021
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Chapter
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The Bible and Antiquity
Addison and the Victorians
January 2019
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Chapter
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Addison: Tercentenary Essays
The Counter-Enlightenments of Thomas Carlyle
May 2018
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Chapter
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Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence
'Reading at Intervals': Britten's Romantic Poetry
May 2018
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Chapter
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Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works
A.G. MacDonell's 'England, their England'
January 2018
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Chapter
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Literature and Union Scottish Texts, British Contexts
This volume introduces the insights of the new British history into mainstream Scottish literary scholarship.
Gibbon and Catholicism
January 2018
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon
J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion
January 2018
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Journal article
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Erudition and the Republic of Letters
4705 Literary Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields
Theology in the Church of England
September 2017
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Chapter
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The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume II Establishment and Empire, 1662 -1829
The series forms an invaluable reference for both scholars and interested non-specialists. Volume one of The Oxford History of Anglicanism examines a period when the nature of 'Anglicanism' was still heavily contested.
Religion
History
March 2017
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Chapter
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Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain
This book studies the rise and nature of historicist approaches to life, race, character, language, political economy, and empire.
History
Richard Busby
June 2016
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Chapter
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Loyal Dissent Brief Lives from Westminster School
Trevor-Roper and Thomas Carlyle: History and Sensibility
January 2016
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Chapter
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HUGH TREVOR-ROPER: THE HISTORIAN
A Companion to Intellectual History
December 2015
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Edited book
A Companion to Intellectual History provides an in-depth survey of the practice of intellectual history as a discipline.
History
Intellectual History and Historismus in Post War England
December 2015
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Chapter
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A Companion to Intellectual History
A Companion to Intellectual History provides an in-depth survey of the practice of intellectual history as a discipline.
History
Introduction
December 2015
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Chapter
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A Companion to Intellectual History
A Companion to Intellectual History provides an in-depth survey of the practice of intellectual history as a discipline.
History
John Jortin, Ecclesiastical History, and the Christian Republic of Letters
December 2012
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Journal article
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Historical Journal
‘Reading at Intervals’: Benjamin Britten’sRomantic Poetry
April 2012
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Journal article
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Essays in Criticism
This is the first of a series of essays discussing the diversity of relationships between literature and the other arts that the editors of Essays in Criticism hope to publish over the next few years.
Preludes and Postludes to Gibbon:Variations on an impromptu by J.G.A. Pocock
March 2012
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Chapter
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The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, 1600-1750
The study of historiography is undergoing a revolution akin to that which took place in the history of political thought in the 1960s, and the work of J.G.A. Pocock is central to both. Pocock’s continuing exploration, in Barbarism and Religion (1991-), of the intellectual contexts of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is central to this enterprise, and this essay situates the origins of his own work within a pre-‘Cambridge School’ Cambridge and its experience of what might be called the Butterfieldian moment. That was marked by a desire to treat religion seriously as a driving force in history; and the same concern is applied here to further understanding an eighteenth-century controversy in which history and religion were dramatically involved, and which profoundly affected Gibbon’s own historical and religious views. The work of Conyers Middleton and John Jortin is critically examined from this perspective. These preludes to Gibbon lead to a series of postludes examining the particular contexts in which Victorian and twentieth-century historians and writers, from Henry Hart Milman to Evelyn Waugh, variously appreciated and interpreted Gibbon. The whole is to be seen as a reflexive engagement with Pocock’s vitally illuminating studies in eighteenth-century historiography.
Conyers Middleton: the historical consequences of heterodoxy
January 2012
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Chapter
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The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy
J.W. Burrow: A personal history
March 2011
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Journal article
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HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS
The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary
enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex
School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article
places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the
vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come.
The Sussex School, The Cambridge School, Intellectual History, A second identity, Historicism, Friedrich Meinecke, A.D. Nuttall, Virtue, Sensibility
Enlightenment Political Thought and the Cambridge School
March 2009
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Journal article
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Historical Journal
As the 1960s saw the publication of the major methodological statements of the
Cambridge School of intellectual history, so the 1970s saw the publication of the
major substantive studies that those statements had made possible.1 Important
works were produced by John Dunn, in The political thought of John Locke (1969) ; by
the still comparatively neglected and idiosyncratic elder statesman of the field,
Duncan Forbes, in Hume’s philosophical politics (1975) ; by J. G. A. Pocock, in The
Machiavellian moment (1975) ; and by Quentin Skinner, in The foundations of modern
political thought (1978). Consideration of some of the most recent work in the field
of modern political thought reveals indebtedness to this pioneering work; the
Cambridge School has thus become an intergenerational enterprise, complete
with many of the refining complications that necessarily follow.
The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History
October 2007
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Book
The Victorians were preoccupied by the 18th century. It was central to many 19th-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers - Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M. R. James - to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the 20th century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the 18th century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularizing influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of 18th-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the 18th century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of 18th-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the 19th-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the 18th century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant 18th-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M. R. James.
A history of variations: the identity of the eighteenth-century Church of England
August 2007
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Chapter
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Protestantism and National Identity Britain and Ireland, C.1650-c.1850
In the profession of Christianity, the variety of national characters may be clearly distinguished.
Gibbon, The decline and fall of the Roman empire
In 1753, in a typically audacious act of intellectual precocity, the sixteen-year-old Edward Gibbon, who came to possess one of the most cosmopolitan of English intellects, converted to Catholicism. Though Edward Gibbon senior had been tutored by the notably pious nonjuror William Law, he was a casualty of his own half-hearted worldliness, and quickly set about rescuing his wayward son from the clutches of continental ‘superstition’: an error to which he himself was so allergic as to condone the attempted inculcation in his child of the scepticism of David Mallet, Bolingbroke's publisher. When this remarkable venture failed, it was to Switzerland that the son was dispatched in order to be reclaimed for the greater protestant fold. After the apparent success of his Swiss cure, Gibbon continued to develop in his un-English manner. Scottish scepticism seeped into his soul from readings of Hume, and the infidelities of the philosopher continued both to attract and to repel his scholarly sensibility through his subsequent intellectual life.
A number of lessons can be learned from Gibbon's early experience and subsequent career, some of which are more typical of his contemporaries than the actual details of his conversion, reconversion and ultimate, if tacit, apostasy. For example, his father's hearty detestation of most things catholic was a principal leitmotif of English self-identity in the eighteenth century, whether acquired in contradistinction to the French, the Irish or any number of continental nations.
History
Intellectual History in Britain
May 2006
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Chapter
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Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History
Intellectual history has often seemed rather a foreign activity in British historical circles; some of its major practitioners in the twentieth century were themselves refugees from cultures in which the history of ideas was altogether more widespread a scholarly activity than it has ever proved to be in Britain. The first half of this chapter will explore the immediate post-Second World War renaissance in the practice of intellectual history in Britain, and the second half will examine how it has changed as an activity since the days when such grandees as Isaiah Berlin and Arnaldo Momigliano dominated the subject. There is a useful symbolic break in this chronology, originally appearing as recently as 1997, when the views of an unusually dominant refugee scholar, the late Sir Geoffrey Elton, who was a strikingly assiduous opponent of intellectual history from the perspective of an ultra-empirical political historian, were subjected to a searching refutation by Quentin Skinner, the most recent of his successors as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.2 How was it that intellectual history moved from being the subject of professorial denunciation in Cambridge to a primary subject of later professorial practice there? What does this correction of prejudice reveal about the wider standing of intellectual history in British academic and cultural life as a whole?
Science
Newtonianism and the enthusiasm of Enlightenment
September 2004
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Journal article
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A
The career of John Jackson (1686–1763), Arian theologian and controversialist, provides a key to unlocking the early reception and quick collapse of a Newtonian natural apologetic originally developed by Samuel Clarke. The importance of friendship and discipleship in eighteenth-century intellectual enquiry is emphasised, and the links between Newton and his followers are traced alongside those of a group of Cambridge Lockeans, led by Jackson’s direct contemporary Daniel Waterland, who proved instrumental in the initial dismantling of Clarke’s brand of Newtonian apologetic. The controversial context of this engagement is shown to have been largely provided by the religiously compromising rise of freethinking, and Tindal’s Christianity as old as the creation (1731) signalled the dangers to proponents of natural religion as an adjunct of Christian apologetic in such a heated atmosphere. Religious division of the sort that resulted paradoxically played into the hands of the freethinkers in the anticlerical atmosphere of the 1730s, and accusations were exchanged between Newtonians and Lockeans accordingly. The dynamic of England’s Enlightenment experience is, then, a complicated one, and, as the career and writings of Jackson and William Whiston demonstrate, it was one which absorbed as well as repudiated ‘enthusiasm’.
Theological Books from the Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith
May 2003
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Chapter
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Books and Their Readers in 18th Century England Volume 2: New Essays
This collection of eight new essays investigates ways in which significant kinds of 18th-century writings were designed and received by different audiences. Rivers explores the answers to certain crucial questions about the contemporary use of books. This new edition contains the results of important new research by well known specialists in the field of book and publishing history over the last two decades.
The Performance of Pastoral Politics: Britten's Albert Herring
March 2003
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Journal article
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History Workshop Journal
Opera has a radical history of political and social engagement, and this essay is a contribution to that history. It takes as its point of departure a relatively minor opera by Benjamin Britten, Albert Herring (1947), which it places in context, revealing that what is usually taken to be a slight, nostalgic comedy is a staging of generational revolt, which subverts the conventional conservatism of the pastoral, turning it towards a socialist vision at one with the direction of the interventionist Labour government then newly elected to office. Britten's own role as a socialist cultural broker between the worlds of rural working people and comfortably off opera‐goers is emphasized, as is the consistency of his left‐wing political commitment, from the 1930s to the end of his working life in the early 1970s, when he composed a pacifist opera for the BBC, Owen Wingrave , and his last work for the stage, Death in Venice . The movement of Britten's operatic career, post Albert Herring , from the private‐finance initiative of John Christie's Glyndebourne to the publicly‐funded Arts Council masterminded by John Maynard Keynes, is symptomatic of the socialist politics of the composer and the operas that he created in post Second World War England.
The Tyranny of the Definite Article: Some Thoughts on the Art of Intellectual History
January 2002
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Journal article
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History of European Ideas
This essay argues, following an insight of Burckhardt, that the philosophy of history is a ‘centaur’, and that it has a tendency to hinder rather than to encourage the practice of history. It challenges many of the presuppositions of Bevir's study, demonstrating that The Logic of the History of Ideas is not, in any meaningful sense, an historically minded work. The ‘logic’ of the essay looks to the arts, especially literature and music, as providing genuinely illuminating parallels to the discipline involved in the practice of intellectual history. History cannot be understood as a process of philosophical abstraction; pertinent examples are of its essence, and plurality is therefore central to its richly textured nature. It still has much to learn from the reflexive procedures of anthropology. By examining the idea of ‘tradition’ the essay demonstrates that ‘the past’ is never dead, and that the relationship between texts is a living process: the intellectual historian is him/herself an artist, and his/her task is no less demanding than that of the creative artist, and it is always humblingly provisional.
Religious history and the eighteenth-century historian
September 2000
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Journal article
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Historical Journal
The relationship between intellectual secularization and the writing of academic history has long been one of the major neglected themes in British historiography, and its unexamined presuppositions are explored here in relation to the religious history of the eighteenth century. A great deal of the history of eighteenth-century religion has been written from a confessional standpoint, and this has served further to marginalize discussion of the subject in a period of history concerning which secular interpretations continue to prevail. A reunion of the religious and the secular is a major desideratum in the writing of eighteenth-century history, and this applies not only to historians of religion but also, a fortiori, to political, social, and cultural historians. The perspectives offered by such historians are critically examined, and the need for them to take seriously the integral part of religious history in the broader history of the period is emphasized accordingly.
Economy, Polity, and Society British Intellectual History 1750-1950
May 2000
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Book
Economy, Polity and Society and its companion volume History, Religion and Culture aim to bring together new essays by many of the leading intellectual historians of the period. The essays in Economy, Polity and Society begin by addressing aspects of the eighteenth-century attempt, particularly in the work of Adam Smith, to come to grips with the nature of "commercial society" and its distinctive notions of the self, of political liberty, and of economic progress. They then explore the adaptations of and responses to the Enlightenment legacy in the work of such early nineteenth-century figures as Jeremy Bentham, Tom Paine, Maria Edgeworth and Richard Whately. Finally, in discussions that range up to the middle of the twentieth century, they explore particularly telling examples of the conflict between economic thinking and moral values.
History
History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750-1800
May 2000
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Book
Modern British intellectual history has been a particularly flourishing field of enquiry in recent years, and these two tightly integrated volumes contain major new essays by almost all of its leading proponents. The contributors examine the history of British ideas over the past two centuries from a number of perspectives that together constitute a major new overview of the subject. History, Religion, and Culture begins with eighteenth-century historiography, especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It takes up different aspects of the place of religion in nineteenth-century cultural and political life, such as attitudes towards the native religions of India, the Victorian perception of Oliver Cromwell, and the religious sensibility of John Ruskin. Finally, in discussions which range up to the middle of the twentieth century, the volume explores relations between scientific ideas about change or development and assumptions about the nature and growth of the national community.
Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke
April 1998
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Book
The author describes and analyses the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England, particularly in relation to those developments traditionally described as constituting the Enlightenment. It challenges conventional perceptions of an intellectually moribund institution by contextualising the polemical and scholarly debates in which churchmen engaged. In particular, it delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and the legacy of Locke. By emphasising the variety of its intellectual life, the book challenges those notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period. Thus, eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, notably those who contributed to a burgeoning interest in mysticism, are equally integral to this study.
Religion
"Scepticism in excess": Gibbon and eighteenth-century Christianity
March 1998
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Journal article
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Historical Journal
Since the appearance of volume I of The decline and fall of the Roman empire in 1776, the religion of Edward Gibbon has been subject to intense debate. He has been variously identified as an atheist, a deist, even as a somewhat detached Christian. Examination of his relations, both personal and scholarly, with the varieties of religion and irreligion current in eighteenth-century Britain leads to the conclusion that he remained resolutely critical of all such positions. He did not share the convictions of dogmatic freethinkers, still less those of determined atheists. The product of a nonjuring family, Gibbon benefited from the scholarly legacy of several high church writers, while maintaining a critical attitude towards the claims of Anglican orthodoxy. It was through the deliberate and ironical adoption of the idiom of via media Anglicanism, represented by such theologians as the clerical historian John Jortin, that Gibbon developed a woundingly sceptical appraisal of the history of the early church. This stance made it as difficult for his contemporaries to identify Gibbon's religion as it has since proved to be for modern historians. Gibbon appreciated the central role of religion in shaping history, but he remained decidedly sceptical as to Christianity's ultimate status as revealed and unassailable truth.
Cornelius Bayley
Internet publication
Bayley, Cornelius (1751-1812), Church of England clergyman, was born at Ashe, near Whitchurch, Shropshire, and baptized on 27 November 1751 at the Presbyterian chapel at Dodington by Whitchurch. His father, Thomas Bayley, reportedly a Methodist, was a leather-breeches maker in Manchester who claimed to have been deprived of an estate ...
Reference Entry. 568 words.
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Religion and Politics, in Amy Concannon (ed.), In Focus: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows exhibited 1831 by John Constable