This study relates to literature in the four main areas of ecclesiastical, intellectual, political and social history.

The classic works on the Church of England in the eighteenth century remain those of Norman Sykes which, rightly, did much to rehabilitate the Hanoverian church after the criticisms of earlier writers such as C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton. But Sykes's sympathy with the latitudinarian and Erastian strains in the church led him to concentrate, intellectually, upon men like Hoadley and Watson, and on Warburton's theory of the alliance of church and state. Like many ecclesiastical historians, his interests were more constitutional, ecclesiological and pastoral than metaphysical and theoretical. This is true even of a man of the breadth of vision and understanding of G. F. A. Best, who has provided the definitive account of church-state relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and much else along the way. Sykes paid only limited attention to the last decade of the century; unfortunately, the best study of the Church of England in the 1790s, by Nancy Murray, remains unpublished. Murray also neglects theoretical arguments, but analyses the various parties in the church and the ideological and theological differences between them. She examines the high-church Hackney Phalanx, the orthodox bishops, the liberal Latitudinarians, and the Evangelicals. All these groups in the Church of England have had their historians, but the Evangelical movement has grabbed the lion's share of attention. A host of monographs, theses and articles examines the evangelical phenomenon from almost every angle.