Interpretations of the Continental Reformation in Great Britain during the nineteenth century

The following inquiry seeks to identify and explore a number of more or less well defined traditions of Reformation interpretation, many of which had their rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which were current in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. Thus it explores, for example, the liberal idea of the Reformation, the Protestant evangelical idea, the Roman Catholic idea, and so on. It is concerned also with showing how, behind these various interpretations, lies a remarkable common attitude to the very problem of interpretation-an attitude which may be described, following Butterfield,as the which approach to history; that is,considering the past from the standpoint of the present rather than in its own right. Also, the inquiry seeks to show something of the progress of thorough Reformation scholarship in Great Britain,especially in the last quarter of the century, and to that end examines the writings of a number of historians who were pioneers in Great Britain of a Reformation history which would eventually become emancipated from confessional bias; although these pioneers were themselves rarely free of a predetermined view of the Reformation, into which their critical findings were fitted, not always with complete success. The emphasis of the study is not so much upon the Reformation interpretations for their own sakes, but as the products of a variety of political and religious presuppositions as these sought to explain the meaning and significance of a key event in the making of modern times.