We seem to be taking what some scholars in the humanities have called a “religious turn,” intended to put religion and ecclesiology back into explanations of historical, philosophical, and literary texts; and this study of fin de siècle churchmen can certainly find some alignment with that development. It brooks no denial that British, and especially English, historical thought and writing burgeoned in its weight and significance after 1870. What James Kirby wishes to disclose in Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920, however, is the degree to which Anglican clergy, particularly in the higher reaches of the Church of England, not only contributed to that richness but in many ways created it. He seeks to show that the generations of William Stubbs and E. A. Freeman, Thorold Rogers and William Cunningham, Mandell Creighton, and J. R. Seeley, J. R. Green, and F. D. Maurice, brought to their histories their churchmanship, not as an accompanying but as a defining characteristic of their intellectual work. The church, once an intellectual joke, had become a “learned church,” whose lights could comfortably see their illumination tested against the best minds of their day. After the turn of the century, the bench of bishops could look like the British academy at prayer. How, more importantly why, did this reorientation come about? And why, a more painful question, did it end, as it assuredly did? Contrast our own day. At the time of writing, not a single bishop in the Church of England has ever held a university position.

In his able monograph Kirby aims at these questions and envisages the period through two lenses. He spends some time on the origins of a learned church and leads the reader through a few of its most potent personalities. Then he turns to what they wrote. He analyzes the historical output of his proponents into three categories: the idea of the nation, the place of the constitution and constitutional history, and the particular contribution made to the study of social and economic history. In explaining the shift after 1870, he identifies the Oxford Movement as a central ingredient with its commitment to things medieval and the arrival of the assumption that the church was a historical church whose past could be venerated even when personal religion no longer fired enthusiasm, as in Seeley's case. Evangelicalism made less impact since it stressed the Word more than ecclesiology, though its earnestness certainly permeated a generation absorbed in work. If one critic risked disappointment in saying that any cleric who did not read for six hours a day besmirched his cloth, he nevertheless caught the mood of intense scholarship that characterized this Anglican cohort. Their own writing sought to show through the past what Ranke called “God's moving finger.” The nation could be painted as on a historical trajectory rooted in Saxon identity that in itself proved the existence of divine cherishing. Its constitution, lovingly depicted by Stubbs, showed how the church had guided the fortunes of the realm in difficult moments. The papacy, lovingly rubbished by Creighton, appeared as a foil to the wonders of the Reformation, which the Oxford Movement had silhouetted in new light as the carrier of the apostolic flame. Meanwhile, concern with the history of society and its poor moved Green in his Social History. An acknowledgment that economic history could supply spiritual insight also prompted the impressive contributions of William Cunningham, later archdeacon of Ely.

On the second question, relating to the termination of this learned-church ascendancy, Kirby supplies a few pages of epilogue but does not have space for the extended discussion that the subject demands. Interested readers will need to go to Simon Green's Passing of Protestant England (2011), which concurs with Kirby's conclusion that 1920 supplies the caesura.

There are moments, indeed, when one wishes Kirby could widen the perspective of his monograph and step farther back from his close focus. But the book is drawn from his doctoral dissertation, with all the constraints of that form, and Kirby's room is too small to negotiate with elephants. He does his best with two of them. In order to project his thesis of Anglican intellectual ascendancy, Kirby needs to undermine two certainties frequent in the literature: that English historiography was undergoing a process of “professionalization” after 1870 and that the process ran in tandem with “secularization.” It has to be said that Kirby is not without youthful certainties of his own; he is able to maintain his resistance only by gliding over or ignoring some counterarguments. He is undoubtedly right that scholars have too easily turned to professionalization as a “process” that explains the development of the university system and its place in intellectual life. A glance at what was happening in Germany, France, and the United States leaves one equally convinced, however, that a major movement was afoot in Western countries and that England felt its arrival, albeit in weaker forms and belatedly. He is on firmer ground in attacking secularization. How things have changed since Owen Chadwick's Secularization of the European Mind (1975). Kirby demonstrates persuasively that the thesis found there does not work at all in the British case. Again, we can quibble. Not nearly enough appears in these pages about the people who opposed Anglican historiography and did so from an anticlerical, agnostic, or atheist sensibility. If the High Church presence was important after 1870, so was Darwinist critique. Yet Kirby bypasses most of that mood by claiming that he is writing about one cohort and not another and that temperaments different from theirs nevertheless recognized the importance of the historical work analyzed here. His arguments about this and throughout this well-written and assured study will repay attention.