History, Religion, and Culture. British Intellectual History, 1750-1950

Abstract

STEFAN COLLINI, RICHARD WHATMORE, AND BRIAN YOUNG, EDS. History, Religion, and Culture. British Intellectual History, 1750-1950. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 289, index. $64.95. Intellectual historians are given to claiming that last twenty years or so have been marked by widespread rediscovery of religion by historians not formerly marked off as ecclesiastical, and religion's acceptance into an intellectual agenda once dominated by positivist issues. Readers ?ι Anglican and Episcopal History may approach this volume to see how far, and in what ways, that is case. The expectation would be not wholly misplaced: this volume is one of two (the other entitled Economy, Polity and Society) organized as festschriften for two highly distinguished historians of ideas, John Burrow and Donald Winch. Such volumes attempt to be more than disparate collections; they generally offer an overview of development of subject to which person honored has contributed, and so it is here. Yet Stefan Collini's general introduction, printed in both volumes, does not explore religion as an influence either on developing discipline of history of ideas or on scholarly formation of Burrow and Winch themselves. Collini identifies contents of this volume as the relations between historiography, religion, and conceptions of natural and social change (19), but it is not clear how far theme of religion takes its rise from any preoccupations of this school at University of Sussex, especially in school's most formative years, late 1960s and early 1970s. The volume opens with a wholly secular essay on method by Mark Salber Phillips of British Columbia which seems unindebted to Burrow or Winch. The first two substantive chapters are by J. G. A. Pocock and David Womersley, not members of Sussex school, and from a different intellectual tradition; they examine in detail greater role of religion in Gibbon's writings than an earlier identification of him as the English Voltaire allowed, but what it was in developing discipline of history of ideas that led Pocock and Womersley to this theme is not made explicit. In both cases it may have been study of historiography, a concern evident from Pocock's first book in 1957 and traceable to interests at Cambridge of Sir Herbert Butterfield: if so, this is not an intellectual genealogy that closely involves others of contributors. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.