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In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.

This chapter explains how Colley Cibber became a crucial figure in the preservation of Restoration cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century, through both his fop performances and his influential Apology. As a prominent Whig who was cozy with the Walpole administration, he repudiated Restoration absolutist ambitions. While rejecting Tory politics, he nevertheless embraced Stuart glamor and particularly Stuart theatrical innovations. In ways that would have been clear to contemporary readers but now demand excavation, Cibber set up his Apology as an alternative to Gilbert Burnet's ubiquitous History of His Own Times, which dwells on the brutality of Stuart rule. Cibber shared Burnet's rejection of absolutist politics, but nevertheless recovered the glamor and theatrical innovation of the Restoration by impersonating and exaggerating its fops in repeated gestures of deliberate anachronism that promoted the pleasures of the foppish spirit of national and gendered fungibility.

Chapter three considers the chronological effects of placing the 1688–9 revolution in ‘Reformation’ time: that is interpreting it as a salvation for a Protestant movement that had started in the early sixteenth century. The chapter shows that Protestant readings of time produced some chronological dynamism—seeing major turning points in history that divided the past into periods, reading spiritual truth as revealed through evolving narrative and perhaps promising an imminent apocalyptic denouement. However it also shows Protestant understanding of 1688–9 was affected by the inherently static nature of Christian time: the typological structure of scripture encouraging a view of time that was frozen, symmetrical (it could be read as easily backwards as forwards), and fractal (the content of time looked the same whatever period or length of period was examined).

In his appraisal of England's political, religious, and cultural scene following the Restoration, Gilbert Burnet singled out the esteemed state of learning at Oxford University, and ‘chiefly the study of the oriental tongues’. More than a century later, this perception still lingered. When the young Edward Gibbon arrived at Oxford, his ambition was to master oriental learning. Although this was not to be, many years later Gibbon recalled that what had tired his youthful enthusiasm was the fact that ‘since the days of Pocock and Hyde, oriental learning has always been the pride of Oxford’. These two acute observers did not exaggerate. The 17th century was, indeed, the heyday of oriental studies at Oxford. During this period, the university became a truly major centre for Hebrew and Arabic, drawing from all over Europe students and visitors eager to study with local scholars or use the rich resources of the Bodleian Library. The principal incentive for the study of Hebrew and Arabic was their application to scripture and their contribution towards the bolstering of Christianity.

Fuller’s books about England’s religious past helped to stimulate an outpouring of historical writing. Peter Heylyn wrote about some of the same subjects as Fuller, and so did Gilbert Burnet, Edward Stillingfleet, John Strype, and Jeremy Collier. Burnet, who looked for models for his history of the English Reformation, was sarcastic about Fuller, partly because of the latter’s “odd way of writing.” Fuller’s work was not highly regarded in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge deeply admired him for his insights and praised him for his writing. Several nineteenth-century historians defended his work. His reputation has remained uncertain, despite fresh assessments in recent years. Coleridge was remarkably apt in his viewpoint. Fuller saw the broader significance of the events he described and was one of the most sensible scholars and writers of his time.