The history of ecclesiastical structures? The link between denominations and social change? The history of Christian doctrine? The study of formal beliefs? What people believed? Eight historians answer the question...
Christopher Brooke
A wider and a deeper interest in other faiths and in comparative religion is one of the happiest developments of modern scholarship, but my own studies have their centre in the Christian Church. A Christian who meditates deeply on his faith must be concerned with history in some sense and some degree; for Christianity is an historical religion, inescapably tied to the events of Jesus' life – not to particular interpretations of particular moments in it, nor to a particular theological interpretation of the Incarnation or the Atonement – but, as I once heard a schoolmaster put it to his class, when speaking of the events of Christmas, reverently, hut firmly, 'no baby, no Church'. This means that the Christian faith is a constant inspiration to an historian; but it does not mean that believing Christians have any necessary advantage in the study of religious history, nor of Christian origins. They are more likely perhaps to be interested; but it is fundamental to the modern study of religious history that it has been fruitfully pursued by folk of every faith and none.
There are no watertight compartments in the study of the past. Religious history is not an entity, utterly distinct from secular or social or political or economic or intellectual history. The religious historian will do an inferior job if he has not at least an inkling of many other specialisms. As historians, we live in a large and ample room – in which we meet people of every race and colour and religious and political creed. It seems to me quite natural, for example, that the study of the history of the Church was one of the most creative sciences in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century another approach to history, equally ideological though in a very different way, made the writings of Karl Marx immensely fruitful and influential in stimulating new historical currents. Serious advance in historical science in the seventeenth century involved the application of scepticism – commonly by deeply religious, fervent Christians – to current credulity and superstition. But this was not incompatible with a dogmatic faith, though dogma and historical enquiry can be as easily enemies as friends, as many found in the era of Darwin and the biblical critics of the nineteenth century. Yet the same nineteenth century saw a new system, fully as dogmatic as the old, rise out of the historical speculations of Marx – and those of us who are not wedded to the dogma are liable to think his system often in conflict with the historical enquiries which (like the seventeenth-century Church) Marxism has so enormously stimulated.
This illustrates the fundamental point. If the historian of religion tries to divorce himself or herself wholly from his belief, he deceives himself and his hearers, and is liable to be convicted of cynicism or blindness. Yet if he is wholly possessed by his beliefs, and cannot talk the same language as those who believe them not – if he cannot work in the same room with the people who used to be called heretics and unbelievers – he is not engaged in a serious, academic or scientific enquiry at all. This is one of the greatest challenges a modern academic has to face – and most of us face it most of the time so successfully that our students think us cynics, and judge our disciplines to be irrelevant.
I am myself a medievalist and have spent much time in recent years studying the history of marriage. Here is an institution which goes right to the heart of the problem of religious history. It was and is a Christian sacrament; it is the centre of all that is fashionable in social history today; much of the political history of the Middle Ages turned on dynastic schemes and marriages. Some of its problems, as one meets them in the Middle Ages, seem strangely remote. 'Till death us do part' in the Middle Ages meant – for most people – about ten years, or twenty if they were lucky, or, as it might be, very unlucky. Divorce in the modern sense was forbidden by the Church's laws. There were all sorts of escape routes; yet many people for much of the time did not think of following them.
It has been fashionable among some modern social historians to claim that modern attitudes to married love and domestic intimacy were invented in some later century – they differ as to which. This is not so. There are great difficulties in penetrating to the heart of marriage, and of its status in the face of other human relationships. But it is quite clear that every variety of attitude and approach was possible in the Middle Ages. Men and women married for money and aggrandisement and security and comfort, and out of gratitude and love. We can even catch some glimpses of the way in which these very different attitudes were brought together in the liturgy and theology of the sacrament. One central piece of evidence lies in the letters which the distinguished Abbess Heloise wrote to Abelard, now for long years a monk, about their former life of love and marriage. For here we see two of the most acute theological minds of the twelfth century searching for a reconciliation between the deepest of human experiences, carnal and spiritual, in a sacrament which is performed by the partners. The range of problems they faced illustrates how relevant – how desperately relevant – such studies can be to the predicaments of the modern world, fascinated by the lofty claims of marriage, yet contemplating its unequal struggle against many other relationships; and how the religious historian must be something of a virtuoso, now in the most abstract realms of spiritual experience and theological speculation, and the next minute among the most earthly and earthy of human events and experiences.
Edward Norman
THE VERY WORDS 'ecclesiastical history' now sound rather antique, and it is true that the subject they describe has been broadened and transformed enormously in recent decades. As traditionally practiced, from Bede to the denominational chronicles still being written, church history was moralistic and didactic: it was intended to demonstrate religious truth by disclosing the divine guidance supposedly evident in the development of the institutions of Christianity. Thus Southey, in his Book of the Church (1824), declared that his intention was to dispel 'heathenish delusions' and 'the errors and crimes of the Romish Church', and to illustrate 'the day-break of the Reformation'. Church history also tended to be rather narrowly national, and even F.D. Maurice, who had real insights into the fallibility of human institutions, felt able to assert, in 1838, that 'England has been the centre of all religious movements that have occurred'.
Yet even more than most other branches of history, the historical study of religion has been reconstructed with materials provided by the social sciences; for some of the most seminal sociological theory, like that of Weber and Troeltsch, derived from studies of religious phenomena. Just as in the nineteenth century it was historical relativism rather than scientific discovery that induced intellectual doubts about religious claims (it was the realisation that the evidences and structures of Christianity and its Jewish foundations were very like other religious systems found in widely varying societies), so in the twentieth century it has been the analysis of the non-religious reasons for which people hold to religious practice and belief that has dissolved away the priority of 'ecclesiastical' over 'religious' history. The major advances in the subject are now those which relate the history of the churches to 'secular' developments.
Denominational histories are still being produced – and they are still of great value. But contemporary emphasis is upon the ways in which each individual denomination responds to external influences: to the social changes of the times, to economic conditions, to the impact of intellectual orthodoxies, and so forth. The other great emphasis is upon the life of the grass-roots. This, too, is hugely necessary; but there is a risk of exclusivity in those whose enthusiasm to learn about the practices of the ordinary church member in the provincial chapel produces impatience with the study of church leaders and theologians. A balance is needed, and the application of the same canons in religious history as obtain in other areas of history. There is a legitimate – even necessary – division of labour: few would expect a study of, for example, the fiscal policies of Sir Robert Peel to dwell extensively upon the economic perceptions of the electorate of, say, Newcastle. It is for others, specialists in social and economic history, to write of Newcastle opinion. Similarly, in religious history, there has to be comparable sophistication. Not every study of 'the Church' in a given period has to embrace – as 'secular' histories in general do not embrace – both central and local phenomena. It is a careful and balanced recognition of the inter-relationship of the two which will make for authentic professionalism, and for the most valuable advances in the subject. But specialisation has to persist.
In view of the modern emphasis on the secular influences in the development of religious institutions it is surprising that 'secular' historians do not take religious history more seriously. For it has to be observed that the contemporary secular intellectual, unable to experience the importance of religion for himself, is unable to appreciate its importance for others. This can often lead to a serious distortion of the motives and preoccupations of the men and women of the past. Anyone concerned with the teaching of history, in schools and universities, will know how difficult it is to persuade pupils that religious belief was a crucial and often determining consideration in the formation of past culture. The absence of a contemporary secular alternative in the place traditionally filled by religious observance – and the consequent intellectual disorientation – means that there is not even a modern substitute from whose dimensions and sacral qualities modern pupils can grasp the shape of the past. Historians of religions have only themselves to blame if they cannot write with those graphic qualities required to give an impression of the importance of their subject. 'Profane historians', Acton said in 1859, 'have yet a lesson to learn from the method of ecclesiastical history'.
Patrick Collinson
'Religious history' was not, until recently, an expression much used, and it has not been as fully institutionalised, academically and pedagogically, as 'Ecclesiastical History', which for generations was an examinable subject for ordinands and other students of Theology. A subject known as 'The History of Religions' turns out, upon examination, to resemble what used to be called 'Comparative Religion', not particularly historical at all. So we may begin by defining Ecclesiastical History. This is clearly the parent discipline. The editor of a recent volume of essays called Religion and the People 800 – 1 700 (James Obelkevich) was making, as it were, an adolescent and generational protest when he announced: 'the authors have broken with the related discipline of ecclesiastical history and have abandoned its confines and conventions'.
Eusebius of Caesarea wrote a book called Ecclesiastical History in the fourth century AD. This work both observed and entrenched certain conventions but by the historiographical standards of antiquity it was not at all confining. Eusebius was almost the first historian in the classical tradition to expand the scope of his enquiry to embrace the experience of ordinary folk, the laos or people of God, many of them martyrs for the faith. Eusebius also respected documents and made ample use of them. Similarly, sixteenth-century ecclesiastical historians writing in the age of the Reformation in the Eusebian tradition, like the English martyrologist John Foxe, were progressive (if we are allowed to write in such Whiggish terms) in the breadth of their social sympathy and their fidelity to the documentary record.
Yet it would be absurd to pretend that the confessional and institutional commitments of most ecclesiastical historians were anything but a liability. In the centuries of bitterly divided loyalties, rival confessions gave birth to distorted, false histories. And devotion to ecclesiastical bodies and institutions expressed by clerical historians led to an excessively institutional history, full of nothing but hierarchies, liturgies and other forms and structures. In the nineteenth century Carlyle complained of an ecclesiastical history which turned upon 'the outward mechanism, the mere hulks and superficial accidents of the object,... as if the Church lay in Bishops' Chapter Houses and Ecumenical Council Halls and Cardinals' Conclaves and not far more in the hearts of believing men'. A full hundred years later, a teacher of the subject in a Nottingham seminary confessed: 'The very name of Church History is often associated with sheer boredom'.
Nevertheless, bishops and councils deserve to be studied and, in this country, both the Ecclesiastical History Society and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History are strongly supported institutions. There are university history departments which contain more ecclesiastical specialists than students of secular politics, if only for the arbitrary reason that ecclesiastical archives, until recently little known or exploited, have yielded attractive and rewarding research topics. But many and perhaps most of these specialists now declare an interest in 'popular religion'. With Christopher Hill, they want to know not what 'most people' were supposed to believe but what they in fact believed, and what is more, what their belief meant to them; its function. The range of belief now acknowledged to have mattered in people's lives has been greatly extended in the historian's perception, as, for example, in Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic. Obscure and Byzantine though 'cardinals's conclaves' no doubt are, this is a much more demanding study than traditional ecclesiastical history, It moves beyond observing one's fellow passengers in a railway carriage to trying to converse with them and even to read their inmost thoughts.
But what is religion? It is a question which. historians have scarcely bothered to ask, although anthropologists have debated it inconclusively for a hundred years. Is it belief in divine beings and all that accompanies such a belief, or a kind of ultimate concern, the groundwork of social existence? And if the latter, where do we draw the line? Is all human experience and therefore all history religious? There is some danger that the coming generations of historians, having little direct experience of religion in the conventional sense, will be too ready to collapse it into something else: most probably social protest or its converse, 'social control'. Others, reacting, may fall into the errors parodied by the poet Browning in Bishop Blougram's Apology':
You'll say, once all believed, man, woman, child,
In that dear middle-age these noodles praise.
But what did they believe?
Peter Lake
The definitions game is always more fun for the spectator than the participants. I am no more capable of defining religion than I am of defining history. What follows will be more than a set of circumlocutionary exercises designed to explain the sort of assumptions and aspirations with which one 'working historian' of one section of the Christian tradition approaches his material, laced, I fear, with some baldly prescriptive statements about what 'religious history' should be like. The subject matter of the religious historian I take to be any set of actions or beliefs which either their author or other contemporaries subjected to a religious interpretation. By a religious interpretation I mean any reading which involved either the honour and worship of God or the attainment of salvation by men.
In playing definitions it is usual to go on about how one's subject really is part of a seamless web and in fact contains virtually every other sort of history imaginable. Such an option is certainly open to the historian of early modern Christianity. A whole series of attempts have been made to 'read off' contemporary social and political attitudes from ostensibly religious statements and actions, on the assumption that once religion is regarded as the idiom through which contemporaries conducted their arguments about such subjects, the process whereby the historian can decide what they 'really' meant provides no difficulty. It is not necessary to go to the opposite extreme and claim, with Professor Bossy, that since contemporaries viewed society in religious terms and were unable t conceive of the dichotomy between 'religion' and 'society' all such projects represent fundamental lapse from historical propriety. I would argue, however, that religious history can only retain a certain coherence and integrity if its practitioners insist that their range of interest is limited t< those areas of experience and action which contemporaries subjected to religious interpretation. That said, it remains the case that the resulting area of legitimate interest is large enough to satisfy the appetites of the greediest historiographical imperialist. Since many contemporaries invested the course of international politics with eschatological significance the religious historian can well claim a legitimate interest if not in Elizabethan foreign policy tout court, then, at least, in the ideological coordinates within which much of that policy was formulated.
More important than a licence to steal other historians' subjects, however, such a view means that religious history must, in the broadest sense, be regarded as a branch of intellectual history – or rather of the history of human consciousness. It must relate to the meanings and interpretations with which historical agents invested their own actions and lives. This is to accept the now well known dichotomy between religious and ecclesiastical history. Of course, very often the religious historian uses the formal records of the church and is, therefore, duty bound to analyse the structure of the institutions which produced those records. However, the study of those institutions remains a branch of administrative rather than of religious history and the tendency whereby religious history is transmuted into the study of the institutions of the church needs to be resisted. Religious history is not the history of the church, defined as a bureaucratic structure of jurisdictional unit, rather it is the history of the religious sentiments or values to which the church's employees (the clergy) and its clients (the laity) subscribed.
In describing religious history as to do with meaning, it is important not to accept what might be called a 'Protestant' fallacy which tends to identify the study of meaning with the study of formal belief. It is important to remember that if religious history should not be collapsed into ecclesiastical history, on the one hand, it should not be collapsed into the history of Christian doctrine, on the other. A knowledge of and interest in formal doctrine is a sine qua non for any religious historian but his or her concerns should encompass the search for implicit meanings in religious practice and observance as well as for formal meanings explicit in theological argument. In that search caution needs to be exercised lest too incoherent and inchoate an animism be imputed to the inarticulate masses of early modern Europe. Too rigid and mechanical a functionalism in the analysis of 'magical' or 'superstitious' beliefs has marred some pioneering attempts to explicate the religious component in early modern 'popular culture,' although given the very difficult nature of the sources it is far easier to carp about such failures in theory than to avoid them in practice.
If religious history is a part of the history of human consciousness, is it in fact a part, even a major part, of the history of false consciousness? When ecclesiastical history was the preserve of the ordained and the pious such questions hardly arose. Now that secularisation has caught up with the history of the Christian tradition itself it occurs with rather greater force. How far are people located outside that tradition able to comment sympathetically on its history? It is certainly true that a theological training of the sort to which few non-Christians can aspire is a great help to the religious historian. Conversely, it could be argued that an indifference to contemporary theological issues enables the historian to approach the religious values and disputes of the past with some sort of open mind. In practice it seems to me that a practical agnosticism represents an acceptable (if not the best) response to these difficulties. Certainly, religious history must retain religion as the centre of its concern; too radical an atheism, too stringent a drive to 'read' religious impulses and experiences as really something else – the product of political, social or sexual divisions, conflicts or solidarities, not only destroys the integrity of the subject, it fundamentally subverts the authenticity of that reconstruction of the experience, choices and cognitive structures of particular groups or individuals, which I take it to be the religious historians' job to produce.
Rosemary O'Day
Religious history is a compendium of many games. Ecclesiastical history; the history of theology; the social history of religion; the history of the church as an institution, the comparative history of religion; the history of the clergy as a profession. It is tempting, given the nature of academic training, to learn to play and to specialise in just one of these games. But it is much more fun to learn to play all of them. And the ability to play one game is much improved by the knowledge of another. Historians have tended to take the adage, 'Jack of all trades and master of none', a mite too seriously. For it is as easy to argue that mastery of one game is nigh on impossible without at least a nodding acquaintance with several other games in the box.
The religious historian is one who studies the spiritual life of man in the past but he or she will approach this study from one or more of many differing perspectives. Equally valid and equally important will be the emphasis on the history of the various churches and the interest in the material bases of religious life. There is an unfortunate tendency to assume that there is a proper perspective for the religious historian to adopt – this means that practitioners of ecclesiastical history may pour scorn upon those heavily involved in the social history of religion. In the past this has been accentuated by the dominance of religious historians who received no training in general history. Now that religious history has been drawn into the mainstream of the history discipline its practitioners are more aware of the need to place religious history in its context.
Initially I became fascinated by the web of interests which linked the material and the spiritual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It may seem very simplistic to assert that people who adopt particular beliefs or work for a church are also individuals who breathe, sleep, eat, love, conspire and worry. Yet religious historians in the past have avoided facing up to this. It was left to historians like R.H. Tawney and Christopher Hill to force us up against the fact of the humanity of religious practitioners.
I certainly would not want to argue that all religious belief is a reflection of material concerns. This would involve consideration of evidence which historians are not equipped to handle. My counsel is: stick religiously to our own compendium of games and don't seek to trespass into the bag of tricks owned by the theologian. What the religious historian can properly do is to trace and reflect upon the social and economic roots of religious life. For example, it seems entirely feasible to discuss the attitude taken towards clerical dress, ceremonial and liturgy within the context of contemporary preoccupations, both ecclesiastical and secular, while desisting from passing any opinion in a judgemental way regarding the correctness of the views expressed or the spiritual sincerity of the participants.
I wanted to study the clergy of the post-Reformation Church of England as a profession. But in order to do this effectively it was necessary to learn the rules of several games. The development of the clergy as a profession is inextricably intertwined with the development of state and hierarchical and clerical views about church government, with contemporary thought concerning profession and vocation, with the changing provision for education and the control which the church had over it, with the mechanisms for the training, recruitment and support of the clergy and with the relations between clergy and laity. It is an enormous subject. Clerical professionalisation was part of a wider movement towards professionalisation – was there a common impetus?
In The English Clergy (Leicester University Press, 1979) I concentrated upon the lower clergy and their organisation. I was particularly concerned to show the obstacles in the way of effective organisation by the hierarchy – the heritage of lay patronage, of poor financial provision, of the knotted relationship between church and state put the goals of the hierarchy out of reach. Yet, for a variety of other reasons, the lower clergy developed a certain esprit de corps and a common intellectual baggage which encouraged professional development. Any such study must involve a good knowledge of the institutional apparatus of the church, of the relations between clergy and laity, of the social origins of the clergy, of church law, of the workings of church patronage and training and recruitment of ministers, of the factors which militated for and against effective professional organisation. I have since (Education and Society in Britain, 1500 – 1800, Longman, 1982) explored clerical control of education and training. But still the subject is far from exhausted. The relationship between clerical professionalisation and the rise of other professions is yet to be defined. Moreover the extent to which the clergy were a self-governing profession has to be determined. There were opposing interest groups within the clergy. Which faction won and why? What were the professional implications?
In short, the more one contemplates a problem in religious history, the more one realises its complexity and the crying need for a variety of different perspectives upon it.
Claire Cross
For early modern historians it would be very difficult to look upon religious history as a distinct discipline or even as a discrete area of study. Certainly in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries political, economic and social needs very obviously affected religious developments just as, I would maintain, religion permeated all aspects of national life. It is especially upon the interaction of social and religious history that I have recently been concentrating in the hope of gaining a little more understanding of what religious change meant to the inhabitants of one particular region in the north of England at the time of the Reformation.
About two thousand wills dating from between 1520 and 1650 survive for the citizens of Hull and Leeds, and from these it has proved possible to make some deductions concerning the impact of the Reformation on the population at large there. From the professions of faith contained in the often very conventional preambles and much more from the bequests in the main body of the will, some fairly clear trends emerge. In neither Hull nor Leeds, where testators were commissioning masses for their souls well into the 1550s and beyond, does there seem to have been any disillusionment with the practices of the late medieval church. In their readiness to accept Protestantism, however, the two towns did differ quite considerably and a convinced Protestant governing elite assumed power in Hull on Elizabeth's accession, a full generation earlier than this came about in Leeds. If religious allegiance can be assessed from gifts to religious and charitable uses, the endowment of sermons, relief of the clergy and the like, the majority of testators in both towns appear to have been markedly apathetic in the Elizabethan period, though the pace of charitable giving quickened in the reigns of James I and his son. This might suggest that the mass of the population reacted to the religious revolution in a peculiarly passive way.
The wills of a hundred and thirty clergy who ministered in the city of York in the sixteenth century to some extent support this conclusion. A sharp division has to be drawn between the Minster dignitaries and the lower clergy in the Minster, the chantry priests and vicars choral, and the beneficed and unbeneficed clergy in the city parishes. While the Minster prebendaries had invariably proceeded to university degrees, the lower clergy in the Minster and city had attended. a grammar school at most and were almost always local men. The former were greatly influenced by the theological controversies of the time: at the accession of Elizabeth almost half the prebendaries refused the oath of supremacy and so lost their offices, but virtually none of the lower clergy made this stand and, as late as 1580, there were incumbents in city livings who had begun their careers as chantry priests in the Minster. Men such as these regarded service in the church more as a means to a livelihood than as a vocation.
Yet this rather crude form of economic determinism can only be taken so far. While probably the majority of York clergy depended upon their exiguous benefices for the necessities of life, at the top of the hierarchy there were men who cared passionately about religious orthodoxy. At his death in 1528 the Catholic Chancellor Melton left a remarkable library of over a hundred Renaissance books which included John Fisher's latest polemics against Luther. Thirty years on the Chapter embraced equally committed Protestants like Anthony Blake and Thomas Atkinson who died in. 1570 and 1571 respectively: both in their wills declared their confidence in their election to salvation, while among his many Protestant books Atkinson possessed a copy of Calvin's Institutes.
Some royal officials in York in the Elizabethan period strove consciously to bridge this gulf between the highly sophisticated Minster clergy and the mass of the citizenry among whom the 3rd Earl of Huntingdon deserves pride of place. A very moving account of his death, written by Nathaniel Gilby, one of the earliest fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, has just come to light. It provides an unique insight into Calvinist pastoral practice and attitudes towards death among convinced Protestants in the north at the turn of the century.
Theological ideas, the evolution of both Catholicism and Protestantism must clearly remain at the heart of any study of religious history at this time, but I should like to think that the opinions of the clergy and laity of one locality might have more general relevance, if only at the periphery.
David Hempton
In the past twenty years religious history has widened its scope to take into account the full range of social, economic, cultural and political life within which religion must be located. Since history is not a separate compartment in the intellectual mansion, and since religion has impinged on all aspects of human life in one form or another, the religious historian needs to be familiar with a wide range c f disciplines from theology to sociology. Indeed, any light from whatever source is valuable, so long as it is genuinely illuminating and not, as has sometimes been the case, merely dazzling. Much illumination has come recently from those concerned more with the religion of the people than with ecclesiastical or theological elites. The great acreage of ignorance about religion at a popular level has now been reduced, though there is still much to be done. Moreover, this is difficult land to cultivate despite the new implements of statistical analysis, anthropological techniques, and the more skilful investigation of popular culture. More knowledge, especially of local history, has inevitably resulted in greater complexity.
Recent work on the history of Methodism, for example, has drawn attention to its remarkable expansion in the British Isles in the decades after 1790. The range of explanations offered by historians illustrate new dimensions to the social history of religion. Methodist growth has been interpreted as both a component of the psychic process of counterrevolution and as a religious expression of popular radicalism. Its success has been attributed to weaknesses in Anglican parochial machinery and to its creative interaction with English popular culture through shared superstitions. Its growth has been related to specific kinds of community, to certain occupational groups, and to the booms and slumps of the economy. Some argue that Methodist revivalism had an internal dynamic of its own, and was based more on religious zeal than on social determinants. More traditional Methodist historians still like to emphasise Methodism's Arminian theology, pragmatic organisation, standards of pastoral care, innovations in worship and community solidarity. Still others have tried to shed light on Methodist expansion by comparing it with similar developments in continental Europe and America.
Such explanations are not, of course, mutually exclusive and there is some material to support all of them; but establishing priorities with limited evidence is not easy. Even when the 'why' question is satisfactorily answered, other problems remain. Within Methodism what were the respective roles of clergy and laity, rich and poor, men and women, and parents and children? How did Methodists relate to other denominations and to their surrounding culture? How did religion affect their ethical standards, their social and economic relationships, and their political consciousness? To what extent, and in what form, do complex theological ideas filter down into popular perceptions? In short, how religious are supposedly religious people and how irreligious is the rest of the population? Such questions ought to make it clear that the social historian of religion is operating in rather different territory from historical theologians and denominational reconstructionists; but the links between them must be preserved to save religious history from an undue concentration on theologians and denominations, and from those who would see religion as a mere product of social forces. Ultimately, the best religious history is written by those who combine a deep insight into the nature of religious forms and experiences with a proper understanding of their social setting.
Another problem for religious historians is that they are often part of, or writing about, living religious traditions. Thus, it is by no means easy, or even necessarily desirable, to divorce their work from their beliefs. This is, of course, as big a problem for the atheist or agnostic as it is for the believer, since it is just as difficult to write creatively about people for whom one has no sympathy whatsoever as it is to apply scholarly detachment to those whom one admires. In addition, the current preoccupations of churches – ecumenism, social justice and the role of women – to a certain extent, determine the agenda for the study of the past. This is not altogether a bad thing, especially as far as women are concerned, because predominantly male historians have often written religious history with half the population left out. It is well to be reminded, however, that historical imbalances are not always put right by further imbalances. Unfortunately the past can be mythologised with the best of intentions.
Finally, the question 'What is religious history?' poses not only methodological problems for the historian, but philosophical ones for everyone. After all what is religion itself, since one man's belief is another man's superstition? How that central question is answered, whether in behavioural, organisational, theological or purely social terms, in large measure determines the kind of history that is written. That is why the discipline must remain open to all kinds of practitioners. History, especially religious history, must not become the preserve of a quasi-priestly caste, of whatever persuasion.
Edward Royle
'When I mean religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.' (Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749.) This has invariably been the starting point for the religious historian of modern Britain. Indeed, Ecclesiastical History or Church History has been the preferred term. Just as the British Constitution used to serve for Political History, so the history of the Church by Law Established (in the southern part of our islands) has served for religious history. And religion, even in this narrowed form, has ceased to interest the mainstream historian after about 1700. A.J.P. Taylor's English History, 1914 – 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1965) managed two references to religion (and only four on the Church of England itself). Even more surprisingly a general social history, J. Ryder and H. Silver, Modern Social History (Methuen, 1970), devoted only two pages to a broad survey of religion. Religious history has been, until recently, ecclesiastical history – an in-house production of the various religious denominations, chiefly for domestic consumption. The result has been a widespread ignorance amongst students of even the basic vocabulary and no grasp at all of what religion meant to our recent forebears. A religious history which is about religious institutions has no meaning for a generation which does not frequent such places and prefers to leave the study of them to those that do.
This is not to deny that denominational, institutional history can be a proper pursuit for the religious historian. The legacy of our institutional religious history is too obvious to ignore, even at the level of explaining why chapels still appear to compete like shoe shops in the High Street. Good denominational institutional history is still written in both the classic style (Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers, Dent, 1977), and exploiting the modern dedication to tables of statistics and graphs (Alan Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England. Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740 – 1914, Longman, 1976). Both these examples extend and help redefine their subject, the former by conjuring up the ethos of Nonconformity and giving institutional religion a meaning, the latter by seeking to relate the institutions to each other and to the wider society of which they were a part.
The recovery of religious history as a legitimate, mainstream topic in social history owes much to sociology and anthropology. The influences which produced Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld, 1971) in the early-modern period have stimulated interest in popular culture, popular religion and popular attitudes towards religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Alan Smith, The Established Church and Popular Religion, 1750 – 1850, Longman, 1971; J. Walsh, 'Methodisrn and the Mob', Studies in Church History vol. 8, 1972; A. Rattenbury ‘Methodism. and the Tatterdemalions', in Popular Culture and Class Conflict, ed. S. and E. Yeo, Harvester Press, 1981; J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979; J. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society, Oxford University Press, 1976). Sociologists, who have long seen religion as a central concern, have given religious historians new and sharper tools of analysis (Bryan Wilson, ed., Patterns of Sectarianism, Heinemann, 1967), and their questioning of earlier assumptions about secularisation has stimulated careful historical work on more recent times (Alan Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain, Longman, 1980). Elie Halevy's attempt in 1906 to apply Weberian sociology about the relationship between ideas and social forms, prompted him to examine Evangelical religion and the absence of revolution in England. Filtered through Edward Thompson's notorious treatment of Evangelical revivalism in The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1963), this controversy now makes an understanding of religious history central to any discussion about British society in the early nineteenth century.
Far from being a marginal subject of interest only to specialists, religious history has now rightly entered the mainstream of social history, and is a focus for interdisciplinary study. The attempt to understand the past involves not merely the recovery of information about institutions but also the recreating of human experience. Religion has throughout past ages been central to that experience, so religious history must go beyond ecclesiastical structures to the heart of human rela.tionships, beliefs and motivations – the very stuff of history.
Fonte: History Today
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