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Has Ecclesiastical History Lost the Plot?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Foot*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford

Extract

The Ecclesiastical History Society’s fiftieth anniversary conference provides an opportunity both to celebrate the achievements of the society and to reflect on the current state of the discipline. In asking whether church historians have lost the plot, I do not mean to question colleagues’ reason and sanity, but to wonder whether those of us who work in this field might have forgotten some of the objectives and principles that once distinguished our endeavour. Has ecclesiastical history lost its sense of purpose, its place at the heart of historical enterprise, to the extent that it has become not just marginalized and peripheral, but essentially irrelevant both to academic study and wider society?

Type
Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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Footnotes

*

I gave an earlier version of this essay as my inaugural lecture in Oxford on 18 May 2011: ‘Thinking with Christians: Doing Ecclesiastical History in a Secular Age’.

References

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11 Ibid. 2–3.

12 Ibid. 15.

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23 The first volume of SCH included an essay by Christopher Brooke reflecting on the problems of the church historian, covering many of the same issues raised by this paper: see n. 5 above.

24 Brakke, David, ‘The Early Church in North America: Late Antiquity, Theory and the History of Christianity’, ChH 71 (2002), 47391 Google Scholar, at 475. That has been one of the guiding principles underpinning the Society’s annual publication, Studies in Church History, whose volumes survey particular themes across the two millennia of ecclesiastical history.

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40 Fletcher, A Very Agreeable Society, 34.

41 Ibid. 103.

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43 Ladurie, E. Le Roy, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (London, 1978), 352 Google Scholar; quoted in Biller, Peter, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Seeing Medieval Heresy’, in Linehan, Peter and Nelson, Janet L., eds, The Medieval World (London, 2001), 30826 Google Scholar, at 320.

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55 The further particulars for the chair when it was advertised in 2010 situated the post within the expansion of ecclesiastical history in recent years ‘to include the broader history of the Christian religion, which may include its relations with or comparisons to other major world religions’.

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72 Knowles, David, ‘Foreword’ to Mirgeler, Albert, Mutations of Western Christianity (Mainz, 1961; English edn London, 1964).Google Scholar