Thomas Fuller
Discovering England's Religious Past
W. B. Patterson
Reviews and Awards
"Spanning the scope of Fuller's life, Brown Patterson has written an intellectual biography that also offers considerable insight into how a highly educated clergyman negotiated the rapidly shifting political terrain of Caroline England....With Thomas FullerPatterson has drawn the map for future Fuller studies while making a crucial contribution to the study of seventeenth-century English historiography." -- Benjamin M. Guyer, Anglican and Episcopal History
"Thomas Fuller accessible to today's historians. I highly recommend this book as a text which the non-specialist in early modern theology can use to quickly navigate around Fuller's writings so as to find his viewpoint on a wide range of social and historical issues that were pertinent to his day whilst, for the student of the history of theology, this book is simply indispensable... by being a historian who largely suppressed his theological bias in his historical works, Fuller can be seen as a morning star of the Rankean historical method which two centuries later would see history fully separate from theology as an academic discipline. In this way, Patterson has aptly defended his book's main thesis that Thomas Fuller was a pioneer historian." -- Lawrence Rabone, University of Manchester, Reviews in History
"Thomas Fuller's ... is a life badly in need of a thorough and generous assessment. He is fortunate in his biographer. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past is impressively detailed, unabashedly admiring and (given British and ecclesiastical history's current absorption in memory studies, as well as its ongoing interest in the history of historiography) very timely." -- Lori Anne Ferrell , The American Historical Review
"[The book] is thoroughly researched, convincingly argued, and clearly written. Students of the history of the English Church simply cannot afford to ignore it." -- Matthew Payne , Journal Of Ecclesiastical History
"Patterson effectively sketches Fuller's gregarious, yet deeply introspective, personality, which personalizes both his work as a historian and the unsettled times in which he lived. Patterson's work is a convincing reassessment of one of the major early modern English historians and a nuanced account of the social, theological, and political unrest of 17th-century England." --Jonathan Badley, Reading Religion
"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." -- Seventeenth-Century News