Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (The Wiles Lectures)

What came before 'postmodernism' in historical studies? By thinking through the assumptions, methods and cast of mind of English historians writing between about 1870 and 1970, this book reveals the intellectual world of the modernists and offers a full analysis of English historiography in this crucial period. Modernist historiography set itself the objective of going beyond the colourful narratives of 'whigs' and 'popularizers' in order to establish history as the queen of the humanities and as a rival to the sciences as a vehicle of knowledge. Professor Bentley does not follow those who deride modernism as 'positivist' or 'empiricist' but instead shows how it set in train brilliant new styles of investigation that transformed how historians understood the English past. But he shows how these strengths were eventually outweighed by inherent confusions and misapprehensions that threatened to kill the very subject that the modernists had intended to sustain. What came before 'postmodernism' in historical studies? By thinking through the assumptions, methods and cast of mind of English historians writing between about 1870 and 1970, Michael Bentley reveals the intellectual world of the modernists and offers the first full analysis of English historiography in this crucial period. Modernist historiography set itself the objective of going beyond the colourful narratives of 'whigs' and 'popularizers' in order to establish history as the queen of the humanities and as a rival to the sciences as a vehicle of knowledge. Professor Bentley does not follow those who deride modernism as 'positivist' or 'empiricist' but instead shows how it set in train brilliant new styles of investigation that transformed how historians understood the English past. But he shows how these strengths were eventually outweighed by inherent confusions and misapprehensions that threatened to kill the very subject that the modernists had intended to sustain. Frontmatter Acknowledgements (page vi) Note on the text (page viii) Introduction (page 1) Prelude: after the whigs (page 5) PART I The whig legacy 1 Constitution and nation (page 19) 2 Church and state (page 45) 3 Empire and war (page 70) 4 Ghosts and intimations (page 92) Part II Modernist investments 5 New historians, new histories (page 119) 6 The new eighteenth century (page 144) 7 Ideological environments (page 169) 8 Modernist method (page 194) Code: after the modernists (page 219) Bibliographical note (page 233) Index (page 237) Any reader of history born after about 1955 is likely to have comparatively little knowledge of the constitutional history of England. Michael Bentley. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.