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Long considered a highly distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) has not been treated as the significant historian he was. Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first comprehensive history of Christianity from antiquity to the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the tumultuous events of the English civil wars. His numerous publications outside the genre of history--sermons, meditations, pamphlets on current thought and events--reflected and helped to shape public opinion during the revolutionary era in which he lived. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. W. B. Patterson provides both a biography of Thomas Fuller's life and career in the midst of the most wrenching changes his country had ever experienced and a critical account of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history in England, a process to which he made a significant and original contribution.
The volume begins with a substantial introduction dealing with memory, uses of the past, and the new history of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fuller was moved by the changes in Church and state that came during the civil wars that led to the trial and execution of King Charles I and to the Interregnum that followed. He sought to revive the memory of the English past, recalling the successes and failures of both distant and recent events. The book illuminates Fuller's focus on history as a means of understanding the present as well as the past, and on religion and its important place in English culture and society.
List of contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Memory, Uses of the Past, and the New History
- 1: Education: The Study of History and Theology
- 2: Apprenticeship: The Holy Warre and Impending Conflict
- 3: Ordeal: The Holy State, Peacemaking, and Revolution
- 4: Scholar and Controversialist: Seeking Order amidst Radical Change
- 5: Writing History: The European and English Contexts
- 6: Church Historian: The Church-History of Britain
- 7: Contemporary Historian: The Church-History of Britain
- 8: The Final Challenges: Restoration and Reaction
- 9: Social Historian: The History of the Worthies of England
- Conclusion: Reputation and Significance
- Bibliography
About the author
W. B. Patterson, Professor of History (Emeritus) at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, has written widely on British and European history and religion. His publications include King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge University Press, 1997), which won the Albert C. Outler Prize in ecumenical church history from the American Society of Church History. He is an active member of the Ecclesiastical History Society of Great Britain and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Summary
This works shows that Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) was a major contributor to historical writing in early modern England by analysing his life and career.
Additional text
In Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past, W. B. Patterson has written a thoughtful, insightful, and generally interesting account of Thomas Fuller, who had a unique position in the seventeenth century to view the chaotic political changes that accompanied his age. Patterson's ability to weave this intellectual biography between a micro and macro-historical study speaks to his ability as a writer and researcher ... I would recommend Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past to any individual interested in the seventeenth century or in British history generally. It would also make a great addition to a graduate-level reading seminar or even as a reading for an advanced undergraduate course in the Tudor-Stuart era.
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Patterson puts Fuller's achievements on a par with the great Dr Samuel Johnson and his eighteenth-century dictionary; given this detailed, scholarly biography, few would argue with that Andrew Foster, Ecclesiology Today
