Thomas Fuller

Discovering England's Religious Past

W. B. Patterson

Offers a reassessment of the career and the scholarly achievements of Thomas Fuller, showing that he was a many-sided writer, theologian, and controversialist, as well as a highly significant historian
Describes how Fuller's distinctive ideas and engaging manner of expression emerged in the tumultuous era of civil wars in which he lived
Shows that Fuller was nurtured by a distinctive English tradition of looking at the past, a tradition shaped by a generation of Elizabethan writers and scholars and their later followers
Provides a clear account of the development of European and English historical writing across three centuries

Thomas Fuller

Discovering England's Religious Past

W. B. Patterson

Description

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.

Thomas Fuller

Discovering England's Religious Past

W. B. Patterson

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 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

Thomas Fuller

Discovering England's Religious Past

W. B. Patterson

Author Information

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.

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