Seeing Things Their Way

Intellectual History and the Return of Religion

Edited by Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory

While religious history and intellectual history are both active, dynamic fields of contemporary historical inquiry, historians of ideas and historians of religion have too often paid little attention to one another’s work. The intellectual historian Quentin Skinner urged scholars to attend to the contexts as well as the texts of authors, in order to ‘see things their way.’ Where religion is concerned, however, historians have often failed to heed this good advice; this book helps to remedy that failure. The editors and contributors urge intellectual historians to explore the religious dimensions of ideas and at the same time commend the methods of intellectual history to historians of religion.

The introduction is followed by an essay by Brad Gregory reflecting on issues related to the study of the history of religious ideas. Subsequent essays by John Coffey, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Howard Hotson, Richard A. Muller, and Willem J. van Asselt explore the importance of religion in the intellectual history of Great Britain and Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. James Bradley shifts forward with his essay on religious ideas in Enlightenment England. Mark Noll and Alister Chapman deal respectively with British influence on the writing of religious history in America and with the relationship between intellectual history and religion in modern Britain. David Bebbington provides a concluding reflection on the challenges inherent in restoring the centrality of religion to intellectual history.

ALISTER CHAPMAN is assistant professor of history at Westmont College.

JOHN COFFEY is professor of early modern history at the University of Leicester. He is the author of John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (2006).

BRAD. S. GREGORY is Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999).

CONTRIBUTORS: Anna Sapir Abulafia, Willem J. van Asselt, David W. Bebbington, James E. Bradley, Alister Chapman, John Coffey, Brad S. Gregory, Howard Hotson, Richard A. Muller, and Mark A. Noll.

ADVANCE PRAISE: “Seeing Things Their Way is a unique and important volume that explores and applies in the field of religious thought the methodology of intellectual history pioneered by Quentin Skinner. This rich interdisciplinary collection not only addresses for the first time at book length the strengths, weaknesses, and implications of this approach within the context of the history of religious ideas, but also offers some exemplary exercises in the good practice of that art. It will appeal to historians of political thought and specialists in intellectual history as well as to scholars interested in the place and treatment of religious ideas in social history.” — Richard Rex, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge