List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2017: List of Publications

This article calls for a reassessment of the Battle of the Books by arguing that the dispute did not simply oppose imitators of the ancients and supporters of modern critical scholarship, but that ...

Traditions of learning around the English Battle of the Books

In seventeenth-century France, secular law favoured parents’ authority in children's choices of marriage, religion or the clerical state, despite Catholic theology and canon law favouring individual freedom. Negotiating this tension led many clerical writers – in advice on choosing a state of life found in devotional treatises, sermons and catechisms – to reconcile parental involvement with vocational liberty. Believing that the right choice of a state was virtually necessary for salvation, they urged parents and children to cooperate in discerning and accepting God's call. Amid conflicts with French law and culture, pastoral persuasion helped to forge an enduringly influential strain in modern Catholicism.

Vocational Freedom, Parental Authority and Pastoral Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century France

Lactantius’s treatise De mortibus persecutorum , which celebrates the end of the persecutions of Christians in the Roman empire, was lost for six centuries Its discovery in 1678 was a European event which set the sophisticated machinery of information exchange in the republic of letters in motion Scholars joined forces in expounding the historical significance of the patristic text However, this collective enterprise was also bound up with theological-political interests Editors and commentators were all affected by affairs of state and ecclesiastical policy, which conditioned their engagement with the treatise This article reviews the editorial history of De mortibus persecutorum , during the three decades in which it attracted scholarly attention, and it highlights the specific interests of the scholars involved The focus will be on Gijsbert Cuper (1644–1716), often depicted as an exemplary member of the republic of letters His paper legacy allows us to recover the theological-political concerns which informed his investigations

Patristic Scholarship and Religious Contention, 1678–1716

The Restoration was the heyday of patristic studies in England, particularly at Oxford under the guidance of John Fell. Fell was not only a good scholar in his own right; he used his patronage to organize collective undertakings and he refounded a learned press. He was able, moreover, to take advantage of the collections of patristic manuscripts, especially Greek, which had been acquired by the Bodleian Library since the 1620s. As a result, an unprecedented number of scholarly works were brought out by the new Oxford press. The ante-Nicene Fathers were clearly privileged, as is shown by most of Fell’s so-called New Year Books, the 1682 edition of Cyprian (his masterpiece), and some aborted projects by Fell’s proteges such as Henry Dodwell and John Mill. This was no accident, but rather the expression of a powerful doctrine of tradition. Indeed, Oxford patristics had an explicit, even aggressive, confessional agenda. It was meant to express and to promote a distinctive confessional identity. Already in Fell’s lifetime, however, the exploration of Christian antiquity began to threaten the orthodoxy it had been meant to buttress.

Jean-Louis Quantin

Papers

Erudition and Orthodoxy: John Fell and Patristic Scholarship in Restoration Oxford

Catholic Moral Theology, 1550–1800