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Church and State in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Anthony Milton*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield

Extract

‘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.

Type
Part III: Church and State in History
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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References

1 Solt, Leo F., Church and State in Early Modern England 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1990), viiviii Google Scholar. The Journal of Church and State has carried articles on early modern England and Europe, but these tend not to be written by prominent historians in the field, and the journal itself is clearly focused more on nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates on secularism, public education and the First Amendment.

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17 This sentiment can even infect discussions by non-English scholars. Thus at the Augsburg conference on ‘Catholic confessionalization’ in September 1993 the question was raised in discussion ‘ob der Anglikanismus als Konfession gelten könne, oder vielmehr als eine nicht-konfessionalisierte Nationalkirche zu betrachten sei’: Schilling, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche’, 47.

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30 Frijhoff, W., Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002), 37 Google Scholar. The appropriate term for such coexistence remains a matter of dispute. Frijhoff’s use of ‘omgangsoekumene’ has been followed by a number of historians. Kaplan has warned that this could be confused with modern-day ecumenism, although his preferred term of ‘toleration’ carries similar problematic modern associations: see Kaplan, B., Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (London, 2007), 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Religiously Mixed Marriage in Dutch Society’ in idem et al, eds, Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570–1720 (Manchester, 2009), 48–66, at 50.

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32 See n. 30 above, and also the important comparative discussion in Walsham, A., Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), ch. 6.Google Scholar

33 Here the impulse to oppose the ‘secularization’ model arguably leads Kaplan at times to overstate the religious credentials of other moderating social forces. For instance: ‘Honor, loyalty, friendship, affection, kinship, civic duty, devotion to the common weal – these bonds have a sacred character that might reinforce or complicate an individual’s confessional allegiance’: Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 9.

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49 e.g. Gibson, W., The Achievement of the Anglican Church, 1689–1800: The Confessional State in Eighteenth-Century England (Lampeter, 1995).Google Scholar

50 Ibid. 26–7; Taylor, S., ‘Un état confessional? L’Église d’Angleterre, la constitution et la vie politique au XVIIIe siècle’, in Joblin, A. and Sys, J., eds, L’Identité anglicane (Arras, 2004), 14154.Google Scholar

51 Whilst the revised version of Clark’s book includes a short section entitled ‘the confessional state’ (English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the ancien régime [Cambridge, 2000], 26–34), it still offers no definition of the term and makes no allusion to European debates. Clark does claim, however, that a confessional state does not require ‘denominational uniformity’, but only ‘the dominance … of certain ideas of what society’s problems were and how they should be addressed’: ibid. 34.

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56 Clark, J. C. D., ‘Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a “Grand Narrative”’, HistJ 55 (2012), 16194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57 For a critique of Skinner’s approach to religion, see John Coffey, ‘Quentin Skinner and the Religious Dimension of Early Modern Political Thought’, in Chapman, Alister, Coffey, John and Brad Gregory, S., eds, Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), 4774.Google Scholar