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This chapter uses the response of a prominent Christian reader of Gibbon, John Henry Newman, to explore how 18th-century unbelief was worried over, and occasionally accommodated within the available framework of religious apologetic in 19th-century Britain. The example of the liberal Anglican historian Henry Hart Milman, Oxford's Professor of Poetry when Newman was a young fellow of Oriel, similarly demonstrates that Gibbon's contribution to ecclesiastical history was capable of being accommodated within a variety of liberal Anglican theology strongly influenced by those developments in German historical thought of which Newman remained willfully ignorant.

This chapter examines the study of ecclesiastical history in Great Britain. It explains that the various departments of ecclesiastical history have tended to be under the umbrella of Theology rather than of History and that in Anglican terms the subject has tended to mean Early Church, Reformation and Nineteenth Century. Medieval ecclesiastical history, therefore, has no established position. Some of the most notable British works on medieval ecclesiastical history include Medieval Political Theory in the West by A.J. Carlyle and Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages by Barbara Harvey.

E. A. Freeman’s distaste for Erastianism, his contempt for Whigs, and his equivocal interventions in debates on disestablishment and disendowment are well-attested. Yet the career of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–81) reveals that Whig liberalism remained a historiographical force in Freeman’s time. Although Stanley was dismissed by Freeman as a slapdash historian, as dean of Westminster Abbey (1864–81) Stanley developed a vision of historical scholarship that could support an Erastian defence of established churches. Stanley curated the Abbey to show how the established church had been interwoven with the national past. There and elsewhere in Britain, he sought to pacify Nonconformist advocates of disestablishment by remembering their heroes as national not sectarian figures. This essay surveys Stanley’s energetic involvement in controversies over disestablishment and contrasts it with Freeman’s scholarly detachment, concluding that despite the differences between them, neither historian made much impact on Nonconformist minds.

This chapter examines fifth‐century ecclesiastical historians as evidence for the Christianisation of Roman politicatl ideas. These historians used heresiology as an extension of classical ethnography. For them, heretics, like barbarians, were irrational and divided. These ideas changed the rules for inclusion and exclusion in the empire: now that being orthodox was equated to being Roman; ‘provincial peoples’ could claim civilised virtues, such as self‐control, that had formerly been the preserve ofan educated elite.

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.

The anxieties from which people suffered during the period cannot be attributed to the decline of religious belief. First because it is by no means certain that religious belief did decline; secondly because religion now came to offer new consolations; and thirdly because the Church was itself torn by anxieties of its own. What the ecclesiastical history of this century shows above all is a crisis of communication: churchmen and free-thinkers were so carried away by the bitterness of their disagreements that they became incapable of understanding each other, and hopelessly confused as to what their quarrels were about. The country split into two, but that split concealed a whole plurality of beliefs and temperaments which it cut across in a most misleading way. The dispute about religion was a genuine dispute of fundamental importance but, at the same time as it created new attitudes to life, it also became a major obstacle to self-knowledge and to the perception of the complexities of human motivation.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about twentieth-century British scholarship on the European Middle Ages. This book covers English and European history, scholarship in particular geographical or cultural areas that is neither mainly historical nor exclusively literary, and other disciplines of crucial importance to medieval studies including archaeology, numismatics and science. The specific topics examined include British research and publications on ecclesiastical history, Slavonic studies and Celtic studies.

This chapter considers how the landscape was implicated in Roman Catholicism’s struggle to resist the attempts of the Tudor and Stuart state to eradicate it. It describes how the Counter-Reformation on the Continent was accompanied by a spirited revival of pilgrimage and sacred places and shows how these developments found parallels in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland despite the challenges of persecution and proscription. It also examines how British and Irish Catholics creatively appropriated the landscape as a site for worship and devotion after they were expelled from churches and how they revived holy sites attacked by Protestant iconoclasts and the historical narratives about the Christian past and the lives of the saints with which they were linked. A further theme is the emergence of a new geography of sacred locations associated with priests and laypeople who became martyrs to the Catholic faith.

This chapter examines the efforts made by Irish Catholic writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reconstruct the history of the Irish Christian past. This was undertaken both to counteract the claims of some reformers that early Irish Christianity was proto-Protestant in character and also to construct a workable Irish Catholic identity for the seventeenth century that would incorporate the historical narratives of both Old English and Gaelic Irish communities who now sought common cause against increasing waves of mostly Protestant settlers. In charting their way through a changing political and cultural landscape, Irish Catholic writers, both at home and on the Continent, would attempt to bring to bear on their polemical works the standards of Renaissance humanist scholarship to forge such an identity. In doing so, they also fully participated in the renewal of ecclesiastical history that was a feature of Reformation Europe.

Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) is an attempt to promote national ecclesiastical unity at a time when Wordsworth considered the Anglican Establishment to be threatened by the prospect of Catholic Emancipation. In preparation for this sonnet series, Wordsworth engaged closely with the work of the Anglo-Saxon scholar, St Bede. This chapter explores the importance of Bede’s eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People as both a model for Wordsworth’s sonnets and as a channel through which he became particularly aware of his heritage as a descendent of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria. In this light, the chapter argues for an expanded view of what constitutes Wordsworth’s ‘local’ region, noting that Grasmere was once part of a powerful Kingdom that stretched across the breadth of England. In order to balance his local attachments and appreciation for monasticism with his political opinions, Wordsworth shifts the sonnet form towards the loco-descriptive inscription.

This book explores ecclesiastical history and the history of Western civilization more generally by focusing on the tenth-and early eleventh-century Latin Church, or more precisely the millennial Church. It challenges the narrative linking ecclesiastical revival to the Gregorian Reform and argues that the rise of the West began well before the mid-eleventh century. It presents ecclesiastical reform as a central part of the post-Carolingian, postinvasion revival and suggests that the Church embodied and defined a rising Europe. It shows that the achievements associated with Gregorian Reform in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries rested on earlier ones. The book offers insights into the Christendom that was inherited by the mid-eleventh-century Latin reformers and puts the millennial Church as well as the resurgence of the Latin West in their appropriate contexts.

This chapter provides an account of Thomas Smith’s pioneering account of the archaeology of the ancient Near Eastern church, his Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, first published in Latin in 1672. The book remained a huge influence on travellers to Asia Minor well into the nineteenth century, as clergymen and amateur archaeologists retraced Smith’s steps, with his book as guide. Drawing upon the vast archive of Smith’s letters and manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, the chapter places the book firmly in its original context, unpicking the complex interweaving of patronage, religion, and international scholarship which shaped the work. In the end, Smith’s book looks backwards and forwards: back to the traditions of seventeenth-century English confessionalized scholarship and orientalism, and forwards to later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeological traditions. As such, this study sheds light on a pivotal moment in Western European approaches to the ancient Near East.

This chapter examines how bishop Eusebius of Caesarea influenced Sozomen in writing Ecclesiastical History. It states that Sozomen dedicated this particular work to the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II. The Ecclesiastical History attempted to cover the time of the third consulship of the Caesars Crispus and Constantine up to the seventeenth year of reign of Theodosius II. This chapter argues that Sozomen used methods established by Eusebius, such as his research method of recording conversations with eye-witnesses of events, as well as following Eusebius' practice in making summaries of historical documents.

The trilogy on the models for confessors concludes with an analysis of a treatise of advice dedicated in 1686 to the Spanish royal confessor Tomás Carbonell following his disgrace due to factional struggles. Probably written by the Aragonese Carmelite José Capero, it moves the discussion from prophecy to the lessons to be drawn from ecclesiastical history. An in-depth examination of the treatise reveals the author’s engagement with the revived interest in the sources of ancient and medieval ecclesiastical history and a rejection of scholasticism and probabilism as foundations of truthful counsel. The new focus insists on the essentially antagonistic relationship between secular and spiritual power, profoundly transforming the confessor’s role from a counsellor of conscience to a defender of ecclesiastical liberty, privileging clerical authority over moral theological expertise. The treatise moreover suggests a still enigmatic circulation in Spain of prime examples of contemporary positive theology of French provenance.