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The declining hold of the Church and its doctrines on European society represents a major shift in Western life and thought. Owen Chadwick's acclaimed lectures on the secularisation of the European mind trace this movement in the nineteenth century, identifying and exploring both the social and the intellectual aspects of this momentous change. The rise of technology, the growth of big cities and a cheap press take their place alongside evolutionary science and Marxism in this fascinating analysis of the erosion of the Church's power. Woven into its brilliant discussion are brief but very illuminating studies of familiar major thinkers, including Marx, Darwin, Mill and Comte.
The book studies the use made by the British government of its envoy, immured inside the Vatican from 1940 to 1944, and what the envoy made of such opportunities during the Second World War to help the Allied cause. We see the Vatican, the Fascist Italy, from 'inside', and so gain a new and rare perspective into the predicament of the papacy. Owen Chadwick gives insight into the workings of the Vatican, including such questions as the struggle to keep Italy out of the war, the relations between the Vatican and the Fascist government, the use which the British sought to make of Vatican radio, the question of condemning atrocities, the bombing of Rome, the fall of Fascism, the armistice between the Allies and Italy, the German occupation of Rome, and the escape line for British prisoners of war. The author has used several groups of hitherto unexplored archives, and makes a fresh contribution both to the history of the Second World War and to the modern history of the papacy.
The coming of modern historical research had religious consequences, especially in the more traditional churches to which history was very important and which themselves helped to create the historical sense. In this classic work, long unobtainable but now revised with a new introduction, Owen Chadwick traces the development of the notion that change in Christian doctrine was both possible and legitimate. Bossuet in the seventeenth century represented the opinion that Christian doctrine never or hardly changed: Newman in the second half of the nineteenth century saw that its expression necessarily changed in a changing society. This book shows how one opinion changed into the other, and explains the difficulties and tensions behind Newman's attempt to persuade an inherently conservative institution to face reality. In so doing it thus illuminates one vital aspect of the arrival into European thought of a distinct historical sensibility.
Continual and sometimes heated interest is shown in the control by governments over documents in their possession, and in the time during which access to them is denied - and not only on the part of the historians to whom the documents are of prime concern. Professor Chadwick summarises the gradual establishment of the papal records down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they were carried off to Paris on the orders of Napolean. Their return (for the most part) to Rome and the subsequent history of the relationship between their guardians and would-be users provide a lively narrative of human as well as historical interest. The author shows how an argument developed within the Vatican itself between the statesmen who wished rigourously to restrict what was released to the public and the historians who wanted free access. This important study of how new attitudes and techniques of history affected the Church is based upon the author's Herbert Hensley Henson Lectures in Oxford 1976, and will interest documentalists and general readers as well as ecclesiastical and general historians.
This is an edited collection of Owen Chadwick's principal writings on Lord Acton, the distinguished Victorian historian and founder of The Cambridge Modern History. Some of the pieces are no longer readily available, while one has never before appeared in English. All have been revised, sometimes extensively. Acton (1834–1902) was born in Naples, the grandson of the Neapolitan prime minister Sir John Acton. Educated at Munich University, he sat as a Liberal MP 1859–64, was created a baron in 1869, and in 1895 was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. This book explains the important aspects of Acton's complex mind and his great contribution to historical studies. Professor Chadwick, himself a former holder of Acton's Regius Chair, is the leading senior authority both on Acton and on matters of church and state in the nineteenth century.