Jeremy Gregory

Refashioning Puritan New England: The church of England in British North America, c. 1680-c. 1770

The position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Churchs growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

Gender and the Clerical Profession in England, 1660–1850

The relationship between the two co-ordinates of this essay, ‘gender’ and ‘the clerical profession’, might be interpreted in a number of ways. It could, for instance, be taken to mean the manner in which clergy articulated and encouraged differences in gender roles. For it is certainly true that the most commonly quoted conduct books of the period – and especially those which prescribed roles for women – were written by the clergy. Clerics like James Fordyce, a Presbyterian minister in London, in his popular Sermons to Young Women (1765) advised his presumed audience:

Standards for admission to the ministry of the Church of England in the eighteenth century

ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s of failing to have any standards for admission to the ministry: if one thing united the stereo typical younger son of the aristocracy and the impoverished curate who entered the clerical profession, so the Churchs critics argued, it was that both were woefully unqualified and unprepared for their role.1 It was often alleged that the Churchs hierarchy did very lit tle to remedy the situation, being more concerned with politics and their own personal advancement than with the professional standards of the clergy under their charge.2 Historians of the clerical profes sion have in the twentieth century largely concurred with these views. While the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the one hand, and the nineteenth century on the other, have been held up as periods when the Church successfully tightened up its entry require ments as a prerequisite to improving the clerical profession, the period between 1660 and 1830 is usually seen as one where few, if any, professional requirements were required.3 It is the contention of this

Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660-1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and Their Diocese

This wide-ranging and original book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Church of England in the long eighteenth century. It explores the nature of the Restoration ecclesiastical regime, the character of the clerical profession, the quality of the clergys pastoral work, and the question of Church reform through a detailed study of the diocese of the archbishops of Canterbury. In so doing the book covers the political, social, economic, cultural, intellectual and pastoral functions of the Church and, by adopting a broad chronological span, it allows the problems and difficulties often ascribed to the eighteenth-century Church to be viewed as emerging from the seventeenth century and as continuing well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, the author argues that some of the traditional periodizations and characterisations of conventional religious history need modification. Much of the evidence presented here indicates that clergy in the one hundred and seventy years after 1660 were preoccupied with difficulties which had concerned their forebears and would concern their successors. In many ways, clergy in the diocese of Canterbury between 1660 and 1828 continued the work of seventeenth-century clergy, particularly in following through, and in some instances instigating, the pastoral and professional aims of the Reformation, as well as participating in processes relating to Church reform, and further anticipating some of the deals of the Evangelical and Oxford Movements. Reluctance to recognise this has led historians to neglect the strengths of the Church between the Restoration and the 1830s, which, it is argued, should not be judged primarily for its failure to attain the ideals of these other movements, but as an institution possessing its own coherent and positive rationale.

Review: Pierre Corneille. Poetics and Political Drama under Louis XIII, Politeness and its Discontents. Problems in French Classical CultureClarkeDavid, Pierre Corneille. Poetics and Political Drama under Louis XIII, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. xii + 316, £42.50;FrancePeter, Politeness and its Discontents. Problems in French Classical Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. xi + 245, £32.50.

conservative, and of which Milton was aware, IS Intriguing. Dr von Maltzahn gives close attention to these matters, attempting to justify his sub-title, but does not seem in the end to get far towards the inwardness of the problem. Why, since Milton was deeply concerned with a present during which the times were like to go up in flames, did he not, apart from that surely rather odd Digression, bring together past and present, drawing explicit historical lessons? Beginning his study Dr von Maltzahn remarks that The History, reticent as it is, has been somewhat marginal. I rather think it is still both in the Miltonic canon and in republican historiography.

Review: The Sociable Humanist. The Life and Works of James Harris 1709–1780. Provincial and Metropolitan Culture in Eighteenth-Century EnglandProbynClive T., The Sociable Humanist. The Life and Works of James Harris 1709–1780. Provincial and Metropolitan Culture in Eighteenth-century England, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. xv + 371, £40.

education for more of this heady stuff, which convincingly beds Austen, however briefly, beside Byron and Thomas Love Peacock as commentators on the same contemporary scene. This book bears several indications that it is a labour of love and so it seems ungenerous to comment on the predictability of the illustrations, the absence of a full bibliography (which would have been telling in its omissions) and the failure to acknowledge the existence of a substantial body of illuminating feminist criticism on the Austen oeuvre. But there is room for the contribution of the gentleman-scholar, too, and the insight of the historian can extend and alter the private and public implications of the text.

‘A Just and Sufficient Maintenance’: Some Defences of the Clerical Establishment in the Eighteenth Century

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.