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An Ecclesiastical Descent: Religion and History in the Work of William Stubbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2013

J. E. KIRBY*
Affiliation:
Balliol College, Oxford, OX1 3BJ; E-mail: james.kirby@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Letters of William Stubbs, ed. W. H. Hutton, London 1904, 3.

2 Ibid. 402.

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34 Ibid. 207.

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44 Stubbs, Select charters, 8.

45 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 91–2.

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52 Stubbs, Constitutional history, iii. 323.

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54 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 298–300.

55 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 357–8.

56 Ibid. iii. 667.

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68 B. Young, ‘Gibbon, Newman and the religious accuracy of the historian’, in D. Womersley (ed.), Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays, Oxford 1997, 309–30 at p. 314.

69 Stubbs, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 589–97. The suspicion of German thought is typical of a follower of Pusey, well-known for his criticism of that country's ‘rationalist’ theology.

70 Soffer, R. N., Discipline and power: the university, history, and the making of an English elite, 1870–1930, Stanford 1994Google Scholar, 87.

71 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 32–3.

72 Idem, IV Sermons, Oxford 1896 (privately printed), 9.

73 Letters of William Stubbs, 205, 237 n.

74 W. Gladstone to Stubbs, 2 Feb. 1883, ibid. 231. For contemporary criticism of Stubbs's closeness to Gladstone see Tomlinson, J. T., The ‘legal history’ of Canon Stubbs, London 1884, 6Google Scholar.

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85 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 1. For Tractarians and the apostolic succession see Gloyn, The Church in the social order, 51–2.

86 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 2–3.

87 See especially [J. H. Newman], Thoughts on the ministerial commission, respectfully addressed to the clergy [Tract 1], London 1834, and [W. Palmer and J. H. Newman], On the apostolical succession in the English Church [Tract 15], London 1834.

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94 Idem, Visitation charges, 27.

95 Idem, Hints for teachers of church history, 1.

96 Idem, Visitation charges, 82.

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104 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 26.

105 Slee, Learning and a liberal education, 60.

106 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 27–8. Similar themes recur in his 1894 sermon before the more scientific audience of the British Association: IV sermons, 9.

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117 Ibid.

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129 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 477.

130 Burrow, Liberal descent, 3, 288.

131 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 475.

132 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 663.

133 Ibid. 546–7.

134 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 301.

135 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 194–5.

136 Stubbs to Freeman, 8 Nov. 1857, Letters of William Stubbs, 41–2.

137 Stubbs, preface to Royal letters addressed to Oxford, ed. O. Ogle, Oxford 1892, p. v.

138 Stubbs, Constitutional history, ii. 1–3.

139 Ibid. iii. 668.

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148 Idem, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 627.

149 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 133.