{"id":13,"date":"2020-05-03T10:33:34","date_gmt":"2020-05-03T10:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/?page_id=13"},"modified":"2020-05-03T10:33:34","modified_gmt":"2020-05-03T10:33:34","slug":"recommended-books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/?page_id=13","title":{"rendered":"Recommended Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thomas Cromwell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A complex man with a complex career, Thomas Cromwell tends to defy the efforts of his biographers. David Loades brings a lifetime’s expertise to this new study, which is fresh, fair, lucid and a pleasure to read.
Hilary Mantel<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fluent, learned and perceptive
Paul Cavill, Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, described Cromwell as one who had, he professed shown such\u00a0wisdom, diligence, faithfulness and experience as no prince in this realm ever had<\/em>. He had been so vigilant to protect the king from all treasons that he found it incredible that he should have fallen into that way himself. He had he professed, loved Cromwell as a friend.

The biography of the blacksmith’s son who rose to be Henry VIII’s right-hand man.<\/em>

Thomas Cromwell was a self-made lawyer who served first Cardinal Wolsey and then Henry VIII. His time with Wolsey was an apprenticeship which served him well in his work for the king after the Cardinal’s fall from power in 1529. Cromwell’s time in office from 1530 until his execution in 1540 was one of the most crucial periods in English History.

This biography explores how he tried to manage his relationship with Henry VIII and why he failed. It also shows how he manipulated the politics of the Court that eventually destroyed him. The rise and fall of the Boleyns, the dominance of the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher all play their part in Cromwell’s life. Eventually he overreached himself in his patronage of evangelical preachers and in arranging Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, which played a crucial part in his fall and death in July 1540.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carlyle’s The French Revolution<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The historians under discussion belonged to the Romantic age. As the French Revolution did more than any other political event to foster that new atmosphere, it is appropriate first to consider Ruth Scurr\u2019s edition of its foremost nineteenth-century Anglophone historian, Thomas Carlyle. Like her fellow editors, Scurr proceeds by choosing narrative sections which best exemplify the author\u2019s style and philosophy. Helped by the comparatively short chronological range of Carlyle\u2019s\u00a0The French Revolution<\/em>, Scurr impressively sustains a sense of unbroken progression from the convening of the Estates General in 1789 to the death of Robespierre in 1794, even though her extracts range across three volumes. At the opening, we see Carlyle assuming his vantage-point at the procession opening the Estates General, fixing his prophetic eye on a succession of figures whom Time will call forward as major actors in the World-Phoenix of Revolution, one of whom, Robespierre, will preside over the intensification of the purgative madness during the Terror and perish by the guillotine to which he devotes himself. Between these two points Scurr presents Carlyle\u2019s dramatic rendering of a series of connecting events richly amenable to such depictions: the storming of the Bastille, King Louis\u2019 flight to Varennes, the annihilation of the Swiss guards outside the Tuileries in August 1792. Even if posterity cannot view them as world-historical in the sense Carlyle believed them to be, there is something about the Revolution\u2019s violent repudiation of a society of orders, its attempted reconstitution of human political sociability, its paving the way for the transformations of the Napoleonic era, which make Carlyle\u2019s metaphors \u2013 biblical, volcanic, epic – permanently resonant.

The strangeness of Carlyle\u2019s prose and historical judgements demand an editor\u2019s introduction which will explain something of their intellectual origins to the non-specialist audience at whom the volume is aimed. Scurr describes the fraught process of composition and summarises the events Carlyle goes on to evoke; she also explains his desire to recreate action rather than indulge in complacently detached analysis, and his related contempt for Rousseau.\u00a0\u00a0But the reader stands in need of further illumination. How are we to understand Carlyle\u2019s belief that the principles underlying \u2018battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi\u2019 are still two centuries from burning out (p. 28); that \u2018in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation\u2019\u00a0\u00a0(p. 61); that religion has died, and yet the revolutionary wars generate the first show of faith since the last of the Cameronians, Renwick, was shot in Edinburgh (pp.65,141)? Scurr\u2019s introduction leaves some of the roots of these and related claims unexposed. John Burrow has connected Carlyle\u2019s cyclical metaphors, and his relish for fire and volcanism as agents of renewal, to the Huttonian geology he encountered at Edinburgh University. His biblical allusions and sermonising vehemence are remnants of his upbringing in the valleys of fundamentalist Dumfriesshire: although the unquestioning Calvinism of his parents drained away from him, sapped especially by Gibbon, Carlyle (with the aid of an idiosyncratic reading of German transcendentalism) retained a keen faith in a divine reality that convulsively destroyed the unreal worldly semblances and forms which periodically overgrew it. He came to look beyond the Scriptures, to the course of modern and contemporary history, as a prophetic manuscript containing evidence of ongoing divine operation: hence, in part, his use of the present tense in\u00a0The French Revolution<\/em>, and his invocation of parallels with modern Britain.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps limited by available space, Scurr does not make these contexts explicit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The historians under discussion belonged to the Romantic age. As the French Revolution did more than any other political event to foster that new atmosphere, it is appropriate first to consider Ruth Scurr\u2019s edition of its foremost nineteenth-century Anglophone historian, Thomas Carlyle. Like her fellow editors, Scurr proceeds by choosing narrative sections which best exemplify the author\u2019s style and philosophy. Helped by the comparatively short chronological range of Carlyle\u2019s\u00a0The French Revolution<\/em>, Scurr impressively sustains a sense of unbroken progression from the convening of the Estates General in 1789 to the death of Robespierre in 1794, even though her extracts range across three volumes. At the opening, we see Carlyle assuming his vantage-point at the procession opening the Estates General, fixing his prophetic eye on a succession of figures whom Time will call forward as major actors in the World-Phoenix of Revolution, one of whom, Robespierre, will preside over the intensification of the purgative madness during the Terror and perish by the guillotine to which he devotes himself. Between these two points Scurr presents Carlyle\u2019s dramatic rendering of a series of connecting events richly amenable to such depictions: the storming of the Bastille, King Louis\u2019 flight to Varennes, the annihilation of the Swiss guards outside the Tuileries in August 1792. Even if posterity cannot view them as world-historical in the sense Carlyle believed them to be, there is something about the Revolution\u2019s violent repudiation of a society of orders, its attempted reconstitution of human political sociability, its paving the way for the transformations of the Napoleonic era, which make Carlyle\u2019s metaphors \u2013 biblical, volcanic, epic – permanently resonant.

The strangeness of Carlyle\u2019s prose and historical judgements demand an editor\u2019s introduction which will explain something of their intellectual origins to the non-specialist audience at whom the volume is aimed. Scurr describes the fraught process of composition and summarises the events Carlyle goes on to evoke; she also explains his desire to recreate action rather than indulge in complacently detached analysis, and his related contempt for Rousseau.\u00a0\u00a0But the reader stands in need of further illumination. How are we to understand Carlyle\u2019s belief that the principles underlying \u2018battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi\u2019 are still two centuries from burning out (p. 28); that \u2018in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation\u2019\u00a0\u00a0(p. 61); that religion has died, and yet the revolutionary wars generate the first show of faith since the last of the Cameronians, Renwick, was shot in Edinburgh (pp.65,141)? Scurr\u2019s introduction leaves some of the roots of these and related claims unexposed. John Burrow has connected Carlyle\u2019s cyclical metaphors, and his relish for fire and volcanism as agents of renewal, to the Huttonian geology he encountered at Edinburgh University. His biblical allusions and sermonising vehemence are remnants of his upbringing in the valleys of fundamentalist Dumfriesshire: although the unquestioning Calvinism of his parents drained away from him, sapped especially by Gibbon, Carlyle (with the aid of an idiosyncratic reading of German transcendentalism) retained a keen faith in a divine reality that convulsively destroyed the unreal worldly semblances and forms which periodically overgrew it. He came to look beyond the Scriptures, to the course of modern and contemporary history, as a prophetic manuscript containing evidence of ongoing divine operation: hence, in part, his use of the present tense in\u00a0The French Revolution<\/em>, and his invocation of parallels with modern Britain.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps limited by available space, Scurr does not make these contexts explicit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J. A. Froude’s The Reign of Mary Tudor<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Religious crisis also shaped the historical vision of James Anthony Froude, a great admirer of Carlyle and, eventually, his biographer. As Duffy observes in his excellent introduction to his selections from Froude\u2019s\u00a0History of England\u00a0<\/em>, Carlylean dispositions \u2013 suspicion of the masses, racialism, and others – surface in Froude\u2019s understanding of the sixteenth century. And, like Carlyle, Froude suffered from that very nineteenth-century affliction, an agonised loss of simple childhood faith. Froude arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate in the shadow of his bullying and by-then consumptive elder brother, Hurrell, and like him fell under the spell of Newman and the Oxford Movement. The giddiness did not last: after his election as a fellow of Exeter College he read, on the one hand, Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Neander; on the other, fabulous source materials for a\u00a0Life of St Neot\u00a0<\/em>requested by Newman. His religious doubts grew, encouraged \u2013 as had Carlyle\u2019s \u2013 by historical reading. Repulsed by Tractarianism, and soon forced out of Exeter, Froude settled into a theistic low-churchism uninterested in dogma but firmly committed to practical, Protestant religion, contemptuous of sacerdotal presumption and the constraints it imposed on human intellectual freedom. As Duffy remarks, Froude accordingly wrote his\u00a0History of England\u00a0<\/em>as a distinctive and somewhat truculent defence of the Reformation against its recent assailants, most notably John Lingard. Duffy satisfyingly brings Froude\u2019s personal dispositions into focus, without revealing his own very different religious assumptions. He also recognises Froude\u2019s great scholarship: his extensive use of manuscript sources, in five languages, in an age before calendars and catalogues, point to the enormous industry which helped to make his work so enduring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duffy faces an unenviable task in selecting extracts from Froude\u2019s \u2018loose and baggy monster\u2019 (p.10), which fills twelve substantial volumes. Covering English history from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Armada, its chronological range is too large for Duffy to attempt something like a \u2018summary\u2019 in the way Scurr accomplishes for Carlyle. Froude\u2019s conception of history, as Burrow once observed, is moreover \u2018essentially spasmodic\u2019 (A Liberal Descent<\/em>, p.251), without the continuous, unifying protagonist of Parliament and constitution found in Macaulay and other Whigs. Duffy is therefore right to prioritise an individual episode: Froude\u2019s account of Mary Tudor, Duffy\u2019s co-religionist and subject of his acclaimed and decidedly un-Froudian recent study,\u00a0Fires of Faith<\/em>. Duffy thankfully minimises Froude\u2019s less-than-captivating accounts of Mary\u2019s parliaments, in favour of showcasing his facility for characterisation and the dramatic incident. In these pages, Froude ranges from the death of Edward VI to an indignant concluding apostrophe on Marian tyranny. We see Froude\u2019s disgust at the rapacity of the Edwardian protectorate, which, he says, succeeded Henry\u2019s deliverance of the English from bondage in Egypt only for its grandees to steal their manna in the wilderness. The great hopes which greeted Mary\u2019s accession were to be disappointed, first by her marriage to a Spaniard, then by her allegedly savage enforcement by fire of the return to Romanist superstition. Mary herself appears pitiably and, in the end, dangerously deluded rather than actively evil, unsuccessful in marriage and her attempts at motherhood, seeking comfort in \u2018the false roof of her creed painted to imitate and shut out the sky\u2019 (p.87) and angling for divine favour by destroying Protestants, those latter-day Amalekites whom Saul had unwisely spared. Greater guilt seems to lie with the architect of her policy, Cardinal Pole, who played on Mary\u2019s fantasies to intensify the drive to bring heretics to the stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duffy includes a number of Froude\u2019s vivid descriptions of these burnings, including the martyrdoms of Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer in Oxford, where Froude had himself once been persecuted, albeit less fatally, for his own religious opinions. Froude\u2019s heavy reliance on the recent Cattley and Townsend edition of John Foxe\u2019s\u00a0Acts and Monuments\u00a0<\/em>for these descriptions is noted only incidentally in Duffy\u2019s introduction, while the original footnotes revealing this are removed. Foxe\u2019s great composition, and its reception in later ages, has recently attracted significant historical interest in the work of Patrick Collinson and others; and one of the aims of Continuum\u2019s series is to introduce today\u2019s readers to the significance of how one age engages with another. Froude\u2019s use of Foxe surely merits greater emphasis than Duffy accords it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lord Macauley’s History of England<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Froude\u2019s relative unconcern for constitutional details, and anxious preoccupation with religion, set him apart from that great, unspiritual panegyrist of Parliament and suburban ease, Thomas Babington Macaulay. As Hugh Trevor-Roper argued, Macaulay\u2019s place today as the quintessential \u2018Whig\u2019 historian obscures the novelty his\u00a0History<\/em>\u00a0once represented. He departed from the older Whig historiographical tradition, overthrown by Hume, of a static, \u2018free\u2019 constitution, inherited from the barbarian conquerors of Rome and encroached upon by the Stuarts, whom the Whig patriots finally repulsed. Accepting that history is essentially the history of progress, the lesson of eighteenth-century Scottish sociology, Macaulay fastened this forwards advance to the Whig party as its guarantor down the ages to the present day; a party whose victory in 1688, much more than any medieval event, finally secured England\u2019s political freedoms and economic advance. John Burrow\u2019s edition accordingly presents the undoubted\u00a0Schwerpunkt<\/em>\u00a0of Macaulay\u2019s extraordinarily popular\u00a0History of England<\/em>: the overthrow of the tyrannical James II and his replacement, by the Convention, with William and Mary of Orange. Burrow successfully condenses a substantial section of Macaulay\u2019s narrative into almost-continuous prose. James\u2019 Declaration of Indulgence, leading to the sensational prosecution and acquittal of several Anglican bishops who refused to publicise it, encourages a group of conspirators to seek the nation\u2019s deliverance by William of Orange; his arrival causes James II to flee, and William is installed to popular acclaim. This occasions Macaulay\u2019s famous aside on the \u2018peculiar character of the English Revolution\u2019, coloured by his own triumph in 1832 and the disturbing spectacle of political instability across Europe in 1848.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Burrow\u2019s introduction is a marvel of brevity. It raises most of the biographical and contextual points necessary for an informed understanding of the text that follows; though he could have said more of Macaulay\u2019s contact with Romanticism, especially the novels of Sir Walter Scott.\u00a0\u00a0He rightly observes that Whiggism was more important to Macaulay as a label for a perennial force in English political life than as a narrow party label. Macaulay dims his partisanship at points where he wishes to celebrate moments where Tories and Whigs come together to oppose arbitrariness: \u2018not a few of William\u2019s followers,\u2019 Macaulay reports, \u2018were zealous Tories\u2019 (p.105). Macaulay\u2019s political career, oratorical prowess and training as a barrister shape the historical judgements he delivers and reveal themselves in the kind of event he delights most in describing. He enjoys the dynamics of high politics and takes sides at set-piece parliamentary occasions, interposing his own strident views to demolish the opposing side and thoroughly remove its foundation-stones; the public are there somewhat passively, to admire and applaud. Macaulay directly connected the triumph of constitutional politics to the material wealth of nineteenth-century Britain, pausing in his description of William\u2019s landing at Torbay to imagine the contrast between the scrawny Stuart settlement and modern Torbay, decked out in \u2018crowded marts\u2019, \u2018luxurious pavilions\u2019 and \u2018gay villas\u2019 (pp.89-90). This is the clearest instance in the edition of Macaulay\u2019s recurrent interest in processes of material sophistication, revealing the obligations to the Scottish Enlightenment most obviously on show in the third chapter of his\u00a0History<\/em>. Macaulay was very much the modern Whig here; but his formation owed just as much to the classics. His third chapter, as Burrow suggests, has the character of a Herodotean digression; his reports of speeches recall Thucydides, and his occasional roll-calls of participants and spectators, Homer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Epic qualities, and the afterlife of eighteenth-century philosophic history, may also be discerned in the work least likely to be familiar to British readers, William H. Prescott\u2019s\u00a0History of the Conquest of Mexico<\/em>. Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s is the hero of the work and his exploits give it a dramatic unity. Sir John Elliott accordingly presents to us his the first, ill-starred expedition to Tenochtitlan in 1519-20: surely among the most mesmerising subject matter ever available to a historian. Although full of western condescension towards the Aztecs, the weak spirit of Montezuma acting as a kind of extended metaphor for the inferiority of the society he ruled, Prescott emerges an even-handed judge by nineteenth-century standards. His treatment of the Catholic Spaniards is not vitiated by what John Burrow has called the Protestant \u2018provincialism\u2019 displayed by the slightly younger Boston historian, John Lothrop Motley, author of\u00a0The Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic<\/em>. And Prescott, speaking for Cort\u00e9s, grants to the Aztecs a measure of the \u2018intellectual progress, mechanical skill, and enlarged resources of an old and opulent community\u2019 (p.44).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind Prescott\u2019s history lies a fascinating intellectual biography, which Elliott\u2019s introduction brings out well with the aid of the author\u2019s unusually full\u00a0Literary Memoranda<\/em>. He came from the same Bostonian milieu that sustained the other great American historians of his time, Motley and Parkman. Prescott\u2019s prose is shaped by the epic poetry in which he read deeply, and by Romantic-era interest in the heroic and colourful depiction. In this he bears a similarity to Macaulay, still more noticeable in their shared debts to Enlightenment sociological categories: in Macaulay\u2019s essay on Milton (1825), and Prescott\u2019s on \u2018Scottish song\u2019 (1826), both advanced remarkably similar theories of poetry which connected its most natural expression to primitive stages of society. This Enlightenment heritage, to which Elliott draws attention, deeply colours Prescott\u2019s\u00a0History<\/em>. It is perhaps most visible in Book I, absent from this edition, where\u00a0\u00a0Prescott surveys the state of Aztec civilisation; but it also surfaces in the extracts Elliott has selected chiefly for their literary merit rather than \u2018philosophical\u2019 character. We read of the \u2018slavish forms of Oriental adulation\u2019 paid by the Aztecs to Montezuma (p.31), and the \u2018superstition\u2019 allegedly inherent in \u2018savage\u2019 man (p.134). After noting the historical context for these views, Elliott explains how the scholarship of recent decades has dispensed with them. No longer do historians gloss over the brutality of Cort\u00e9s and imperial Spain; they also aim to evaluate Mexican society on its own terms, and to reconstruct how natives came to terms with the rapid shattering of an assumedly permanent world.

Continuum\u2019s series will hopefully broaden public interest in the great historical literature of the past. The editors introduce the works judiciously. Handling the texts themselves, the editors successfully trim back the authors\u2019 elaboration of detail which, though necessary, even enjoyable in works of the original size and scope, may have appeared cumbersome in these slimmer, deliberately fast-paced volumes. Sometimes this topiary is undertaken rather too vigorously. It seems a pity that Elliott should have removed a paragraph where Prescott meditates on the dauntless spirit of Cort\u00e9s, after his withdrawal from Tenochtitlan (p.150). Burrow\u2019s sharp curtailment of one of Macaulay\u2019s cherished lists \u2013 this time of notables publicly siding with William of Orange after his landing \u2013 makes the cumulative collapse of James II\u2019s support seem rather less crushing than Macaulay had intended it to appear (p.104). Despite these occasional problems, the literary merits of these works remain plainly in view. But should the historian, rather than just the lover of literature, still take them seriously? The editors, all with special interests in the writers or the periods they describe, appear to think as much. The historical explanations offered by Carlyle, Froude, Macaulay and Prescott have variously lost their force. Their texts stand, however, as fascinating documents of the ages in which they were written. More than this, they supply what the growing complication and fragmentation of academic history has tended to diminish; an idea of history, as Sir Steven Runciman expressed it, as attempting \u2018to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.\u2019 It is, one hopes, an ideal that will never completely lose its attractions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J.M.R.Bennett
<\/strong>Christ Church, Oxford<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The History House is a resources site. It provides information, including links to websites, on a range of historical matters – books, people, places to visit, conferences to attend, societies to join, anniversaries to celebrate and invites visitors to the site to send in information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W. J Mander, British Idealism. A History<\/em><\/strong> (Oxford, 2011)
ISBN 978-0-19955- 929-9<\/strong>
Reviewed by J. M. R. Bennett<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Mander\u2019s fine book crowns twenty years of his scholarship on the Idealist movement.\u00a0\u00a0His study seeks to follow the development of Idealism in Britain from its curiously late emergence in the 1860s until its surprisingly recent disappearance in the second half of the twentieth century: G. R. G. Mure, the last Oxford Hegelian, died in 1979, a few months after the publication of his elegiac\u00a0Idealist Epilogue<\/em>. Mander\u2019s aim is to help to restore British Idealist thought to the knowledge, and even the respect, of philosophers within an Anglo-American tradition who are today traditionally inattentive to developments in British philosophy from Mill to Russell and Moore.\u00a0\u00a0Idealists held to a range of common intellectual dispositions, despite their considerable diversity, which were in marked distinction to the hues of twentieth-century British thought. They saw an underlying unity in the world of knowledge, which it was within the power of philosophy to unlock. Just as early modern philosophers were preoccupied by epistemology, and twentieth-century philosophy was often rooted in the philosophy of language, Idealists affirmed the centrality of metaphysics. They were also optimists, who saw in philosophy a means of both understanding and advancing the progress they saw around them in religion, politics and society.

Mander begins the book with a discussion of the forerunners to and influences on Idealism, as it gathered pace from the mid-1860s onwards. Although he accepts that the \u2018location of its historical origins uncovers vital clues to understanding the character of the movement\u2019, he thinks that an excessively contextual discussion \u2018risks losing the reader\u2019s patience and interest before he ever (sic) begins his main task\u2019 (13). The question of the movement\u2019s historical beginnings is accordingly treated in too cursory a manner for historians (such as the present reviewer) to be left feeling wholly content; philosophers, with different intellectual priorities, may reach a different conclusion. Mander argues that the two main schools of British philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century \u2013 the \u2018common sense\u2019 tradition in Scotland, and the psychologistic tradition in England \u2013 were \u2018largely moribund\u2019 and \u2018becoming increasingly sterile\u2019; this state, he contends, is a major part of the explanation for the rise of a newer mode of thinking (13-15). There is certainly something in this, but the argument is not developed at length and appears rather unhistorical. Would the adherents of the older traditions, who presumably – like the Idealists \u2013 did not simply disappear once a new fashion took hold, have seen themselves as boring and outdated? It seems strange that Mander, who rightly complains about easy dismissals of Idealist thought by later analytic philosophers, should mete out such treatment to the predecessors of Idealism. He writes more satisfyingly once he moves on to the formative sources of Idealism proper. He stresses its eclecticism. Kant and Hegel were crucial, the latter making a later entrance than the former, but the Idealists tended not to refer to themselves as \u2018Hegelians\u2019 and believed that they were advancing beyond what was offered by their German stimulants. They moreover turned to a number of other sources of inspiration, including Herman Lotze (an important critic of Hegelian absolute idealism) and Thomas Carlyle, whom Mander oddly understands to have \u2018championed the natural equality of all\u2019 (26).

The Idealists were themselves deeply concerned to elaborate a narrative of their own intellectual heritage, as Mander shows in his admirable chapter on their understanding of the history of philosophy. For them, as for Hegel, the history of philosophy was not a chronicle of discrete intellectual systems, but a progressive evolution, in which successively higher philosophies lifted up and preserved the insights of their predecessors whilst disposing of their errors. According to the Idealists, just as Kant\u2019s failings had led to Hegel, so the inadequacies of classical empiricism had led to Kant. Spinoza was to them a great Idealist, albeit once whose monism could seem too abstract. They esteemed Aristotle as well as Plato; Mander emphasises that the Idealists\u2019 reverence for these philosophers, however inflected it may have been by Hegel, substantially stemmed from the strength of classical education in British universities. This cautions against the view that Idealism was straightforwardly a German import.

Subsequent chapters engage in a detailed and properly demanding way with Idealist metaphysics, their philosophy of religion, ethics, political and social philosophy, logic and aesthetics. His aim here is primarily to rescue Idealist thought from obscurity and caricature and to show how it should rightfully continue to be a part of an ongoing philosophical dialogue in the present day; he therefore points to the strengths of Idealist philosophy as well as its problems. Mander notices the close affinity which the Idealists identified between philosophy and poetry: they were united in a search for \u2018the most hidden, most profound and most universal principles and work behind both thought and reality\u2019 (340); the disappearance of this sense of relationship is one that the author evidently regrets. Against L.T. Hobhouse\u2019s alleged misrepresentations of Bernard Bosanquet\u2019s social philosophy, Mander argues that Bosanquet\u2019s conception of the general will amounts not to an abstraction but, more concretely, to the shared leading ideas of a society, without which no social organism can function.

This highly valuable study cannot be evaluated except in the light of the author\u2019s starting principles. As has been indicated, Mander frames his study as a history of philosophy aimed primarily at philosophers, as distinct from a completely historical study. He sees the importance of placing past thinkers in historical context, if what they were actually saying at the time is to be made intelligible, but the main focus is on the exposition and assessment of their ideas, rather than the delineation of intellectual networks and religious, social, political and institutional contexts. It would not be right to criticise this decision by dogmatically asserting the superiority of the historical approach to the philosophical. Clearly, the latter has its own agenda\u00a0sui generis\u00a0<\/em>and its own merits. Had a historian written this book, it is unlikely (unless he had picked up a logical training along the way) that it would have contained Mander\u2019s fascinating chapters on the origin and development of a distinctively Idealist conception of logic (cc. 8, 12); nor would a historian have set about evaluating the truth or otherwise of Idealist notions understood on their own terms, which, though it is not a historical procedure, certainly holds interest for the philosophically engaged. But from a historian\u2019s point of view, his approach inevitably leads to omissions. \u2018Too much context\u2019 may, as he says, lead \u2018to an uncritical descriptivism\u2019 (11), but too little context can leave historians \u2013 interested in institutions, networks, reception \u2013 concluding that they been insufficiently acquainted with Idealism as it developed\u00a0in time<\/em>.

Mander\u2019s approach to his subject means that he leaves unanswered, because unasked, a number of significant historical questions. At times his primary interest in delineating and judging ideas leaves the historical location of his subjects looking rather bare. This is not true in all cases. He handles the significance of Darwinism well. The cultures of formative institutions also feature in his explanations. The young men who studied at Oxford and Glasgow were acquainted with Plato and Aristotle long before the future Idealists among them met Hegel. The Scottish Common Sense school gave the Glaswegians John and Edward Caird something to react against. However, religion is more of a weak point when Mander seeks to proceed contextually. The significance of Anglicanism for T.H. Green, and Presbyterianism for the Cairds, is not discussed in the chapter in which Mander discusses the \u2018Idealist Philosophy of Religion\u2019 (c. 5). Edward Caird\u2019s\u00a0The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers\u00a0<\/em>(1904) is examined in terms of Caird\u2019s wider interest in the history of philosophy; but what might be seen to be distinctively theological rather than philosophical in the two-volume work is passed over or subordinated to the latter. For instance, Caird conceived the work at least partly as a critical response to Harnack\u2019s attack on the Hellenisation of Christianity by the early church: and his interest in Harnack is also recorded in his letters. Mander makes no mention of the German theologian. He might also have been more historically sensitive to what, exactly, Idealists were trying to achieve by their engagement with religious subjects. He says that \u2018by the late nineteenth century, religion in many people\u2019s eyes had failed\u2019 and suggests that in Green and the Caird brothers we see an attempt \u2018to replace theology by philosophy\u2019 (342-343). Would it be closer to the truth to argue that (at least in the case of the Cairds) they were using philosophy to understand theology in its true light, finally to grasp the truths at which theology had been aspiring for so long, rather than to dispense with it?

Mander\u2019s dominant interest in providing a technical exposition and evaluation of Idealist thought as philosophy leaves open a number of other questions to which future historians could profitably pay attention. We hear rather little of intellectual networks; Mander pays attention to teacher-pupil relationships, but not to any correspondence between figures or intellectual engagement across borders (he deals with Kant, Hegel and Lotze only in translation, and could have made more of Idealist contacts with North America or India). He is certainly aware that opponents of Idealism existed before Moore and Russell, but he does not provide especially detailed discussion of their opposition to Idealism or how Idealist works were received by commentators in other books and in the periodical press. One of this work\u2019s great strengths is its presentation of how the Idealists themselves read the history of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, but it is less strong in treating the Idealists\u2019 historical thought insofar as it lay outsider what can reasonably be called the history of philosophy: it is either missed out (as with Green\u2019s\u00a0Lectures\u00a0<\/em>on the English Revolution) or treated cursorily (as with Caird\u2019s\u00a0Evolution of Religion<\/em>) (160-166).

Such problems as there are with\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0British Idealism: a History<\/em>\u00a0are problems of omission and simplification, rather than any more fundamental difficulties with its conception and range. No work can ever be exhaustive, especially when viewed from the point of view of a different discipline. This study raises, as good books do, many issues which other scholars may wish to explore further or clarify. But as a full study of the movement, it will surely have no rival for years to come.

Joshua M.R.Bennett

Christ Church, Oxford<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Cromwell A complex man with a complex career, Thomas Cromwell tends to defy the efforts of his biographers. David Loades brings a lifetime’s expertise to this new study, which is fresh, fair, lucid and a pleasure to read.Hilary Mantel Fluent, learned and perceptivePaul Cavill, Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/historyhouseofoxford.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}