An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.

Archibald Campbell Tait was enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury in February 1869. It was an inauspicious time to assume the primacy of the Church of England, which was riven by internal conflicts and religious differences. Furthermore, Gladstone had recently swept to power with the support of the Nonconformists. The new prime minister had a mandate to disestablish the Irish church and his political supporters sought to challenge the privileges and status of the Church of England. As primate, Tait attempted to defend the Church of England as the established church and restrict those parties that held particularly narrow and dogmatic beliefs, regardless of whether they were Evangelicals or Ritualists. The archbishop strove to straddle these religious differences and to achieve his aims through a policy of compromise and tolerance, but some of his actions served to cause further divisions within the Anglican church. Tait’s efforts to restrict elaborate ceremonial and services through the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) alienated the Ritualists, for example. Many more clergy were opposed to his concessions to Nonconformists in the Burials Bill (1877), which would have allowed them to be interred in parish churchyards. Amidst the wider religious tensions and political conflicts that marked his primacy, the archbishop also took a close interest in the French Protestant Church at Canterbury, whose history he regarded as reflecting some important attributes of the Church of England, its past, and its current status in the world.

Edwardian Congregationalists regarded 1662 as their annus mirabilis, to be venerated and celebrated in equal measure. For them it was the year when all that they revered, such as the enthronement of conscience, had been thrown into sharp relief by the Great Ejection. This event, which helped to shape the identity of historically minded Congregationalists, had acquired a mythical quality and become part of the denomination’s folk lore. The Ejection involved the removal of ‘some 2,000 ministers … from their livings because they could not swear their “unfeigned assent and consent to … everything contained and prescribed” in the new Prayer Book, or meet some of the other requirements of the new Act of Uniformity’. Many ejected ministers attracted followers, who became the founding members of Dissenting congregations which later evolved into self-governing Congregational churches.

On 21 February 1900 in St Paul’s Cathedral Bishop Mandell Creighton delivered his first, and what proved to be his last, visitation charge to the clergy of the diocese of London. He began by reflecting briefly on the particular challenges of his own position and of London itself, but quickly moved on to focus on current ecclesiastical controversies, especially the nature of holy communion and the practice of confession. Creighton had been a historian long before he became a bishop, and it was therefore natural that his response to contemporary issues should rapidly move into an insightful lecture on Reformation history. His analysis was both specific and general. For example, he pointed out that breakfast was not normally eaten in medieval and early modern societies and so congregations naturally came fasting to a late morning communion service. In changed social circumstances it would be inappropriate ‘to revive this custom as an absolute law’.

The question posed in the title deliberately reverses one that has accompanied me through my academic career: what did the early church do for women? The reversal signals what will prove to be an underlying theme of what follows, namely the role of women in history as objects or as the subjects of action and of discourse. Yet already the question as conventionally phrased highlights different points of stress that reflect where it belongs within reflective historiography, the subject of this volume. Firstly, ‘What did the early church do?’ The coming of early Christianity, it is implied, brought blessings or perhaps curses, evoking a way of writing church history which goes back to Eusebius and which continues both through Edward Gibbon and through those who still portray the social and religious context of the time as one of the inarticulate search for alternative conceptions of the divine or for alternative social values that Christianity would answer. Secondly, ‘for women’: thus, a deliberate rejection of any universalizing interpretation of such effects; a recognition, or at least a suspicion, that any apparently universalizing claim is actually spoken from a ‘normal’ that is already gendered as male; an invitation to ask how women’s experience could be recovered, what the sources would look like, and, indeed, whether it can be recovered from the extant sources.

In 1971 and early 1972, as a final-year Cambridge undergraduate, I turned to the study of the English Reformation, under the able supervision of Felicity Heal, while attending the lectures of a wonderfully rackety and quirkily learned Fellow of Selwyn College, the late and much lamented patron of the Cambridge Footlights, Harry Porter. The course was entitled ‘Thought and Religion in England 1500 to 1650’, and it was fairly cutting-edge by the standards of its day: a genuine effort to reach across the divide then standard between the history and divinity faculties. It also tried to integrate England with mainland Europe – what in those days, we would routinely call with sublime and literal insularity ‘the Continent’.

In 1926 the Revd James Houston Baxter, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of St Andrews, wrote in the Records of the Scottish Church History Society: ‘The attempts of modern Roman Catholics to describe the Roman Church in Scotland have been, with the exception of Bellesheim’s History, disfigured not only by uncritical partisanship, which is perhaps unavoidable, but by a glaring lack of scholarship, which makes them both useless and harmful.’ The same issue of the journal makes it clear that Roman Catholics were not welcome as members of the society. This essay will look at the historiography of the Scottish Reformation to see how the Catholics ‘fought back’ against the aspersions cast on them, and how a partisan Protestant view was dethroned with the help of another society founded ten years before the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Scottish Catholic Historical Association (SCHA).

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

In the words of a modern Quaker historian, ‘Friends are an historical people, and we derive much of our identity from our tradition’. During the past hundred and fifty years the history of Quaker beginnings has several times been reinterpreted, as different Quaker theologies have risen to prominence and been given historical underpinning, and the interpretations themselves then subjected to historiographical reflections by later scholars. Much of this process has been ‘insider’ history, written by Quakers, but in the second half of the twentieth century Quaker beginnings became for a time a preoccupation of mainstream secular history, which has greatly changed the understanding of early Quakerism.

In 1956, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge published a work chronicling a subject billed as ‘an unrecorded chapter of Church history’. The author was an elderly Anglican clergyman, George Balleine. The book was Past Finding Out: The Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and her Successors.

Before Balleine, the early nineteenth-century figure of Joanna Southcott, and her eventually global religious movement, had garnered scant mainstream attention. The most extensive work was Ronald Matthews’s rudimentary analysis of Southcott and five other ‘English Messiahs’ in a 1936 contribution to the psychology of religion. Southcott had not, in fact, claimed to be a messiah herself; rather, she was the prophet of a coming messiah named ‘Shiloh’. Southcott’s followers (variously labelled ‘Southcottians’, ‘Christian Israelites’ ‘Jezreelites’, among other names) believed that she and certain later figures were inspired by God to signal the imminence of the Christian millennium. Claimants to be the actual Shiloh messiah occasionally featured within this particular tradition of biblical interpretation, inspiration and theodicy. The splinter-prone movement spread through Britain, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and retained a few thousand members in the twentieth century.

During twenty years of teaching at a Jesuit university in an ecumenical Ph.D. programme focused on historical theology, I have observed a profound unresolved problem in Roman Catholic theological scholarship. Framed very simply, it is this: since the rise of historical consciousness among Roman Catholics during the nineteenth century, conflicting historiographical assumptions about the Christian past have led to tensions and divisions among Roman Catholic scholars and church authorities. My purpose here is to diagnose this unresolved challenge and propose a mode of analysis for intra-ecclesial dialogue.

Coulton tells the Cambridge youth
That Roman Catholics doctor truth:
While Abbot Aidan Gasquet cries:
Your English History’s packed with lies!

This essay focuses on the polemical historical writing of G. G. Coulton (1858–1947), chiefly his attacks on Francis Aidan Gasquet (1846–1929), whom he believed was the leading member of a mendacious and well-organized Roman Catholic school of history. Apart from the personal animosity which grew up between them as a result of Coulton’s aggressive attitude, this was an ideological and historiographical conflict between the progressive values of an agnostic Anglican priest turned Cambridge academic and the romanticized medievalism of an English Benedictine who was eventually elevated to the rank of cardinal.

The subject of religion and finance is seriously neglected within the historiography of the church during the modern period. This essay explores the pioneering ‘Financing of American Religion’ project and suggests possible fruitful avenues of research into the financing of British religion. By way of a case study, it analyses the size of the religious voluntary sector as a whole and then, within that, the individual finances of a range of Anglican voluntary organizations, all home missionary organizations within the diocese of London. Historians of religion have shown a certain reluctance to grapple with the columns of figures and minutiae of detail contained in cash books, general ledgers and annual reports. This essay serves as a brief taster of the wealth of material contained in such sources.

Tackling issues of church and state is a tall order under any circumstances. Taking the metahistorical view and summarizing the scholarship on church and state makes it positively daunting, especially when the half-century under consideration spans the entire lifetime of the author. This task is made even more challenging when the societies and cultures under investigation are late antiquity and medieval Byzantium, the former (c.300–c.800, encompassing the entire Mediterranean) a paradigmatic period of religious change, the latter (330–1453, focusing on the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire and its subsequent history) emblematic of ‘otherness’ when compared to the Christian tradition in the West that has shaped our worldview to the present day.

‘Church and state’ is a phrase that one rarely meets with in most early modern ecclesiastical history that has been written over the past fifty years. One major exception has been the United States of America, where the phrase even has its own journal. With regard to early modern English history, one rare exception very much proves the rule: Leo Solt’s Church and State in Early Modern England (a synthetic work published in 1990) is the work of an American historian, who admits in his preface that he has chosen to interpret the relationship ‘very broadly’, and that the book ‘might be more accurately entitled “Religion and Politics in Early Modern England”’. The axiomatic status of the separation of church and state in the United States, and its continuing use as a political football, has given the phrase a prominence in public discourse that has naturally been reflected in American historiography, where figures such as Roger Williams invite the application of later terminology to the seventeenth century. Where ‘church and state’ have not been separated (or at least had not been in the early modern period), the term seems to have been less appealing to historians, at least to those working on the period before the assault on established churches in the nineteenth century.

In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The prime minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.