Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Progress – History – 18th century »

Religion and history became closely related in new ways in the Victorian imagination. This thesis asks why this was so, by focusing on arguments within British Protestant culture over progress and development in the history of Christianity. In an intellectual movement approximately beginning with the 1845 publication of John Henry Newman's 'Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine', and powerfully spreading and developing until the earlier years of the twentieth century, British intellectuals came to treat the history of religion - both as a past and present process, and as a didactic genre - as a vital element of broader attempts to stabilise or reconstruct religious belief and social order. Religious revivalists, determined to use church history as a raw material for the inculcation of exclusive confessional identities and dogmatic theology, were highly successful in pressing it on the attention of early Victorian audiences. But they proved unable to control its meaning. Historians rose to prominence who instead interpreted the history of Christianity as a guide to how religious culture, which many treated as indistinguishable from society as a whole, might eventually supersede denominational and dogmatic divisions. Humanity's spiritual development in time, which numerous British critics assessed with the aid of German Idealist thought, also became an attractive apologetic resource as the epistemological basis of Christian belief came under unprecedented public challenge. A major part of that danger was perceived to come from rival, avowedly secularising interpretations of human social progress. Such accounts - the ancestors of twentieth-century secularisation theory - were vigorously opposed by historians who understood modernity as involving not the decline, but the purification of Christianity. By exploring the ways in which Victorian critics - clerical and lay, religious and secular - approached religious history as a resource for solving the problems of their own age, this thesis offers a new way of understanding the importance of history, claims to knowledge, and the nature and ends of 'liberalism' in the long nineteenth century.

Defence date: 21 September 2007<br>Examining Board: Prof. Dr. Peter Becker, University of Linz (EUI) ; Prof. em. Dr. Dietmar Rothermund, (University of Heidelberg) ; Prof. Dr. Martin van Gelderen, (EUI) ; Prof. Pius Malekandathil (University of Sanskrit, Delhi)<br>PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses<br>no abstract available

This study explores the moral characteristics of late eighteenth-century Scottish culture in order to ascertain both its specific nature and its contribution to modern consciousness. It argues that, while the language of moral discourse in that socio-economic environment remained in large part traditional, containing aspects from both neo-Stoicism and classical humanism, it also incorporated and helped to develop an explicitly modern conceptual network. The language of sensibility as discussed by Adam Smith and adapted by practical Scottish moralists, played a key role in the Scottish assessment of appropriate ethical behaviour In a complex society. The contribution of enlightened Scottish moralists to the language and literature of sensibility has been virtually overlooked, with a corresponding impoverishment of our understanding of some of the most important eighteenth-century social and cultural developments. Both literary scholars and social historians have made the mistake of equating eighteenth century sensibility with the growth of individualism and romanticism. The Scottish contribution to sensibility cannot be appreciated in such terms, but needs to be examined in relation to the stress that its practitioners placed upon man's social nature and the integrity of the moral community. Scottish moralists believed that their traditional ethical community was threatened by the increased selfishness, disparateness, and mobility of an imperial and commercial British society. They turned to the cultivation of the moral sentiments as a primary mechanism for moral preservation and regeneration in a cold and indifferent modern world. What is more their discussion of this cultivation related in significant ways to the development of new perspectives on adolescence, private and domestic life, the concept of the feminine and the literary form of the novel. Scottish moralists made a contribution to sentimental discourse which has been almost completely overlooked. Henry Mackenzie, Hugh Blair and James Fordyce were among the most popular authors of the century and their discussion of the family, the community, education, the young and the conjugal relationship was not only influential per se but also reflected a particularly Scottish moral discourse which stressed the concept of sociability and evidenced concern about the survival of the moral community in a modern society. To the extent that literary scholars and historians have ignored or misread their works, they have obscured rather than enlightened eighteenth-century culture and its relationship with the social base.<br>Arts, Faculty of<br>History, Department of<br>Graduate