Mobilizing Historiography: The English High Church Historians, 1888--1906

In this dissertation I will explore the contribution of High Church writers within the Church of England to the development of academic historical teaching and writing for about two decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It will be argued that historians with a High Church ecclesiastical background achieved a sophisticated historiographical methodology and held a virtual monopoly on historical discourse concerning the Church of England.;Throughout this dissertation I examine the interplay between historians, publishers and ecclesiastical authorities. It will be shown that historians writing on the history of England or the Church of England were often obligated to write to the needs of publishers seeking to profit and to the needs of ecclesiastical authorities who did not wish to upset members of the Church of England who were not professional historians. I have tried to read all historical texts concerning the history of the Church of England from the l850s up through the 1920s whether these are small pamphlets or large general histories. I have used a sample of newspapers and periodicals primarily from the 1890s through to the 19l0s and consulted a number of archives containing the papers of the High Church historians.;I focus on two historiographical issues which interested High Church historians. First, I argue that after a period of disagreement about the place of the Tractarians within the Church of England, historians by the mid-1890s saturated the publishing market with general histories on the Church of England in which nearly all agreed that the Tractarians were at the front of a great revival in the nineteenth century. Second, High Church historians focused on the continuity of the Church of England from the Middle Ages up to their own present. I argue that this issue became crucial to High Church historians writing in a highly charged polemical environment as self-ascribed Protestants called for greater state intervention in the government of the Church of England while Catholic polemicists challenged the apostolicity of the Church of England by declaring that the Church of England was a creature created by the state and hence no true Church.