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The History of the Reformation of the Church of England: A New Edition Carefully Revised, and the Records Collated with the Originals
edited Nicholas Pocock. 7 vols.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1679
7 people want to read
About the author
Gilbert Burnet
952 books1 followerGilbert Burnet was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and Bishop of Salisbury. He was fluent in Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Burnet was highly respected as a cleric, a preacher, an academic, a writer and a historian. He was always closely associated with the Whig party, and was one of the few close friends in whom King William III confided.
Burnet was the son of Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond, a Royalist and Episcopalian lawyer, who became a judge of the Court of Session, and of his second wife Rachel Johnston, daughter of James Johnston, and sister of Archibald Johnston of Warristoun, a leader of the Covenanters. His father was his first tutor until he began his studies at the University of Aberdeen, where he earned a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the age of thirteen. He studied law briefly before changing to theology. He did not enter into the ministry at that time, but travelled for several years. He visited Oxford, Cambridge, London, the United Provinces and France. He studied Hebrew under a Rabbi in Amsterdam. By 1665 he returned to Scotland and was ordained in the Church of Scotland by the bishop of Edinburgh. In 1664 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He began his ministry in the rural church at East Saltoun, East Lothian. In 1669 he was named to the vacant chair of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. At first he declined, since his congregation unanimously asked him to remain at East Saltoun; but, when the Bishop of Edinburgh, Leighton, urged him, he accepted the post. He was later offered, but declined, a Scottish bishopric.
In 1674 he left the University and moved to London where he took an active part in the controversies of the time, endeavouring to bring about a reconciliation between Episcopacy and Presbytery. At Court, where his brother Thomas was a royal physician, he gained the favour of Charles II, from whom he received various preferments.
In the mid-1670s, a French translation of Nicholas Sanders' De origine et progressu schismatio Anglicani libri tres (1585) appeared. Sanders attacked the English Reformation as a political act carried on by a corrupt king. Several of Burnet's friends wished him to publish a rebuttal of the work, so in 1679 his first volume of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England was published. This covered the reign of Henry VIII; the second volume (1681) covered the reign of Elizabeth and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement; the third volume (1715) consisted of corrections and additional material. His literary reputation was greatly enhanced by this publication. The Parliament of England voted thanks for Burnet after the publication of the first volume, and in 1680 the University of Oxford awarded Burnet the degree of Doctor of Divinity on the advice of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury. For over a century this was the standard reference work in the field.
Upon the succession of the Roman Catholic King James II in 1685, Burnet requested permission to go abroad, which James consented to. He left on 11 May and reached Paris at the end of that month. He travelled through Switzerland to Italy. After more months of travelling across France, Switzerland and Germany he arrived at Utrecht, Netherlands in May 1686. He was sent letters from the court of William, Prince of Orange and his wife Princess Mary inviting him to take up residence at The Hague. This courting of Burnet infuriated James and under his pressure he was formally dismissed from court, but still kept in contact with William and Mary. It was Burnet who pointed out that William's marriage to Mary did not in itself entitle him to reign jointly with her if she became Queen, and that further steps would be necessary to ensure his right to the throne.
Burnet was the son of Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond, a Royalist and Episcopalian lawyer, who became a judge of the Court of Session, and of his second wife Rachel Johnston, daughter of James Johnston, and sister of Archibald Johnston of Warristoun, a leader of the Covenanters. His father was his first tutor until he began his studies at the University of Aberdeen, where he earned a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the age of thirteen. He studied law briefly before changing to theology. He did not enter into the ministry at that time, but travelled for several years. He visited Oxford, Cambridge, London, the United Provinces and France. He studied Hebrew under a Rabbi in Amsterdam. By 1665 he returned to Scotland and was ordained in the Church of Scotland by the bishop of Edinburgh. In 1664 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He began his ministry in the rural church at East Saltoun, East Lothian. In 1669 he was named to the vacant chair of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. At first he declined, since his congregation unanimously asked him to remain at East Saltoun; but, when the Bishop of Edinburgh, Leighton, urged him, he accepted the post. He was later offered, but declined, a Scottish bishopric.
In 1674 he left the University and moved to London where he took an active part in the controversies of the time, endeavouring to bring about a reconciliation between Episcopacy and Presbytery. At Court, where his brother Thomas was a royal physician, he gained the favour of Charles II, from whom he received various preferments.
In the mid-1670s, a French translation of Nicholas Sanders' De origine et progressu schismatio Anglicani libri tres (1585) appeared. Sanders attacked the English Reformation as a political act carried on by a corrupt king. Several of Burnet's friends wished him to publish a rebuttal of the work, so in 1679 his first volume of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England was published. This covered the reign of Henry VIII; the second volume (1681) covered the reign of Elizabeth and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement; the third volume (1715) consisted of corrections and additional material. His literary reputation was greatly enhanced by this publication. The Parliament of England voted thanks for Burnet after the publication of the first volume, and in 1680 the University of Oxford awarded Burnet the degree of Doctor of Divinity on the advice of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury. For over a century this was the standard reference work in the field.
Upon the succession of the Roman Catholic King James II in 1685, Burnet requested permission to go abroad, which James consented to. He left on 11 May and reached Paris at the end of that month. He travelled through Switzerland to Italy. After more months of travelling across France, Switzerland and Germany he arrived at Utrecht, Netherlands in May 1686. He was sent letters from the court of William, Prince of Orange and his wife Princess Mary inviting him to take up residence at The Hague. This courting of Burnet infuriated James and under his pressure he was formally dismissed from court, but still kept in contact with William and Mary. It was Burnet who pointed out that William's marriage to Mary did not in itself entitle him to reign jointly with her if she became Queen, and that further steps would be necessary to ensure his right to the throne.
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May 4, 2015
Well this is quite a book. Published originally in two volumes in 1679 and 1681, it must rank amongst the first works of history-writing that deserves to be called a work of scholarship.
The book in its time
The book was published at a time of change and transition: the monarchy had been restored 20 years before, after a decade of republican interregnum, but fears of a return to the quasi-Catholic rule of Charles I kept flaring up with regularity. In the world of learning, a slow revolution was beginning to free the mind from the shackles of scholasticism. The foundation of the Royal Society in 1680 gave the pursuit of "natural philosophy", an ancestor of modern science, an institutional footing.
Into this "volatile gas" of constitutional fears and philosophical ideas Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, published a work of history aimed to portray the period of the Reformation. The Reformation! Let us just remember that this is the time of Henry VIII, the time of rift with the Roman Catholic Church.
And do we think Gilbert did a good job? Would he have been able to be objective? On the one hand, he needed to defend the Anglican Church against Catholic attack in his present. But on the other hand, nascent scientific and scholarly thought demanded the objective treatment of his sources. On the one hand, Gilbert saw himself "in the front of those who opposed Popery" ("Burnet's Autobiography", in History of My Own Time, ed. Foxcroft, 1902, pp485-6) but on the other hand he felt dutybound to remain impartial in his analysis: "... the duty of an historian leads him to write as one that is of neither party, and I have endeavoured to follow it as carefully as I could..." (History of the Reformation [HR] II, 5).
So did he live up to this duty? Well... first we need to know a bit about the author himself, I am afraid.
Gilbert Burnet
Bishop Burnet was a man of the most extensive knowledge I ever met with; had read and seen a great deal, with a prodigious memory, and a very indifferent judgment: he was extremely partial, and readily took every thing for granted that he heard to the prejudice of those he did not like: which made him pass for a man of less truth than he really was. I do not think he designedly published any thing he believed to be false... His vast knowledge occasioned his frequent rambling from the point he was speaking to, which ran him into discourses of so universal a nature, that there was no end to be expected but from a failure of his strength and spirits.... [History of His Own Time, I, 5].
This evaluation is from one of Gilbert's contemporaries, Georg Legge, Count of Dartmouth. What emerges from this short account is a vivacious, good-humoured, vastly-read and enthusiastic man, a man who may have been full of bluster at times, but who was honest with good intentions at heart.
Gilbert Burnet was born on 18 September 1643 in Edinburgh as the 11th child of the locally well-regarded lawyer Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond, and his second wife Rachel Burnet. After his father tutored him at home, Gilbert graduated at 14 years of age as Master of Arts from Marischal College, Aberdeen. Even at the time, this was extremely young and speaks to the extraordinary intellectual power of the young scholar. He topped this up with a study of theology, and entered the services of the Church as a broad-minded, measured, and essentially tolerant latitudinarian cleric (this word is quite a mouthful, but essentially only means "broad church").
In questions of clerical constitution, he was indebted to the ideas of Richard Hooker, who in his treatise Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Politie" established the key political and theological maxims of the day: The church is administered by the clerics, but these ultimately answer to the monarch, who in turn is justified and anointed by God. In learning, Hooker thought that human reason was the instrument that would open up the world around us and make it permeable to intellect; the Bible he saw as a reservoir of complementary metaphysical truths. These ideas strongly echo voices sounded by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620) and were to establish Gilbert's life-long moderation in theological doctrine, and his acceptance of the views of others. In 1663, we find Gilbert in Amsterdam, and he remembers his time there:
One thing I drank in at Amsterdam... which is never to form a prejudice in my mind against any man because he is of this or that persuasion; for I saw so many men of all persuasions that were, as far as I could perceive, so truly religious that I never think the worse of a man for his opinions [The Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald. London 1677, p 93].
Admittedly, this was a very short sketch of Gilbert's life, but I think we have what we need. He should live out his life as one of the more prominent clergymen of his day. He died on 18th March 1715, having been appointed Bishop of Salisbury by William of Orange in 1689. What remains is the legacy of a well-meaning, honest cleric, dedicated to the Anglican Church, diligent and serious in his scholarly pursuits, and undogmatic in his religious beliefs.
The History of the Reformation as a scholarly work of history
But was he impartial in his role as a historian? And did he further the development of historiography as a "science"?
Well, let's see. I'll give you two examples of how Gilbert worked with his sources.
Example 1. The Book of Martyrs. (Trial of Anna Askew)
Well, this is actually not the official title of this famous 16th Century theological work. It was published by John Foxe in 1563 as "Actes and Monuments" and is basically a pro-Anglican, biased account of how the Catholic church persecuted protestants in Europe, and especially in England. Soon better known as the "Book of Martyrs" [BoM], the work received near-canonic acclaim in Elisabethan England, so much so that a copy of the work was typically chained to the pulpit, next to the Bible, and passages recited from it as part of the homily.
Gilbert used the BoM extensively as a source, and pledged to examine Foxe's own sources critically before accepting the narrative as accurate (HR I, 578). And indeed, Gilbert did as he said. When giving an account of a trial against Anna Askew from Lincolnshire, a woman who refused to accept the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he shows himself critical of a detail in Foxe's account. Foxe claims that Thomas Wriothesly of Titchfield, the Lord Chancellor at the time, personally tortured Anne to make her accept the Catholic interpretation. Gilbert examined this claim against the independent source of the prison register, and discards Foxe's claim as unhistorical. However, Gilbert still betrays pro-Anglican sentiment in the way he conducts this analysis:
That she was racked is very certain; for I find it in an original journal of the transactions in the Tower... But Fox adds a passage that seems scarce credible... it is, that ... the lord chancellor...drew the rack so severely, that he almost tore her body asunder.... Fox does not vouch any warrant for this, so that though I have set it down, yet I give no entire credit to it. If it was true, it shews the strange influence of that religion [Catholic], and that it corrupts the noblest natures. (HR I, 537)
Well. Although Gilbert does not give credence to Foxe in this detail, he still mentions the passage, and even goes on to speculate with a pro-Anglican bias what might have driven the action if it had been true.
Example 2. The Book of Martyrs (trial of John Philpot)
The details of the trial against John are not relevant in the context of this review, all we need to know is that both John and the prosecutor Hugh Weston were clergymen, John of an Anglican hue, and Hugh Catholic. The trial is typical for the time, and represents a tedious religious dispute that carried on for hours over several days. It was recorded by Foxe in all its minutiae. Gilbert used Foxe as a source for pages on end, and finishes his account by recording a detail embarrassing for the Catholic prosecutor.
And yet - that detail is not given by Foxe! After dozens of pages of similarity with the BoM, Gilbert inserted a detail from another source! And the detail does not appear either in any of the accounts Foxe himself used for his narrative. Where did it come from?
It is from the account of Peter Heylin, Affairs of Church and State in England, During the Life and Reign of Queen Mary (1670). The passages correspond nearly word-for-word, and Gilbert owned an edition of the Ecclesia Restaurata, with which the book was bound up (see the sales catalogue of his library, Bibliotheca Burnetiana, nr. 55).
"So what", you might say. "What's so important about that?" It is the fact that Gilbert hated Heylin. He did not think he was a good historian and had a particular issue with the fact that Peter never quoted the sources he used.
In summary therefore, I might be tempted to make a flippant remark. When Gilbert doubted the authenticity of a pro-Anglican event, he said so but still mentioned it, and when he found pro-Anglican events omitted, he added them even though he might have taken issue with their authenticity.
But this interpretation would indeed be flippant, and it would also be wrong.
What is important is not that Gilbert checked his evidence against independent sources with a pro-Anglican bias, what mattered is that he did it at all! This in itself represents progress compared with other humanistic historians, who would simply copy out large passages of literary sources (other works of history) without adding any interpretation and certainly without checking them against non-literary sources (prison registers, letters, official writs etc).
Gilbert also published transcripts of non-literary documents in extensive appendices in order to accomplish objectivity in his research. Indeed, in this he was the first English historian to do so.
Verdict - did he do a good job?
Actually - yes. I think he did. In the final analysis, he was not genuinely objective in his use of non-literary documents, but showed notably higher detachment when dealing with literary sources. The fact that he remained pro-Anglican in his evaluation cannot weigh in as a severe point of criticism - after all, he was an Anglican clergyman and the whole point of the work was to defend the Anglican Church against Catholic attack perceived in his present.
But the real value of the History of the Reformation as a work of history lies in the way in which he analysed and presented historical dynamics. Gilbert presented his material thematically, and would analyse a particular dynamic coherently, before moving on to the next. This technique overcame the confines of historical annals, which would simply narrate events that happened in consecutive years, without striving to understand cause and effect between the specific events recorded.
Also, he would typically analyse an event as the consequence of several events that caused it, and trace its roots back to a number of human authors. This is an achievement in the context of contemporary history-writing, which would typically attribute events to the dominant influence of one historical figure, or one political, economic, or religious event.
Finally, but by no means least importantly, Gilbert did not present historical dynamics as the result of divine providence. As a devout believer, he did not doubt that divine providence pervaded all of human history, but he crucially did not identify this quality as the driver of historical dynamics. Indeed, hardly do we find any evidence of moral philosophical or theological interpretations anywhere in the HR.
Gilbert successfully rejected humanistic traditions in historiography still alive in the 17th Century. The History of the Reformation is a coherent work, it is written in clear rhetoric style, analysed with sharp intellectual acuity, and presented with a compendium of historical sources. Events are presented as driven by many causes, not one dominant force. Dynamics are narrated as themes, not confined to the annals of disjointed calendar years. Divine providence does not play any role in the analysis.
In this, Gilbert's work foreshadows the historiography of later centuries. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England represents Gilbert Burnet's legacy like none of his other works. It is, without a doubt in my mind, a milestone along the road towards modern scholarship.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
The book in its time
The book was published at a time of change and transition: the monarchy had been restored 20 years before, after a decade of republican interregnum, but fears of a return to the quasi-Catholic rule of Charles I kept flaring up with regularity. In the world of learning, a slow revolution was beginning to free the mind from the shackles of scholasticism. The foundation of the Royal Society in 1680 gave the pursuit of "natural philosophy", an ancestor of modern science, an institutional footing.
Into this "volatile gas" of constitutional fears and philosophical ideas Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, published a work of history aimed to portray the period of the Reformation. The Reformation! Let us just remember that this is the time of Henry VIII, the time of rift with the Roman Catholic Church.
And do we think Gilbert did a good job? Would he have been able to be objective? On the one hand, he needed to defend the Anglican Church against Catholic attack in his present. But on the other hand, nascent scientific and scholarly thought demanded the objective treatment of his sources. On the one hand, Gilbert saw himself "in the front of those who opposed Popery" ("Burnet's Autobiography", in History of My Own Time, ed. Foxcroft, 1902, pp485-6) but on the other hand he felt dutybound to remain impartial in his analysis: "... the duty of an historian leads him to write as one that is of neither party, and I have endeavoured to follow it as carefully as I could..." (History of the Reformation [HR] II, 5).
So did he live up to this duty? Well... first we need to know a bit about the author himself, I am afraid.
Gilbert Burnet
Bishop Burnet was a man of the most extensive knowledge I ever met with; had read and seen a great deal, with a prodigious memory, and a very indifferent judgment: he was extremely partial, and readily took every thing for granted that he heard to the prejudice of those he did not like: which made him pass for a man of less truth than he really was. I do not think he designedly published any thing he believed to be false... His vast knowledge occasioned his frequent rambling from the point he was speaking to, which ran him into discourses of so universal a nature, that there was no end to be expected but from a failure of his strength and spirits.... [History of His Own Time, I, 5].
This evaluation is from one of Gilbert's contemporaries, Georg Legge, Count of Dartmouth. What emerges from this short account is a vivacious, good-humoured, vastly-read and enthusiastic man, a man who may have been full of bluster at times, but who was honest with good intentions at heart.
Gilbert Burnet was born on 18 September 1643 in Edinburgh as the 11th child of the locally well-regarded lawyer Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond, and his second wife Rachel Burnet. After his father tutored him at home, Gilbert graduated at 14 years of age as Master of Arts from Marischal College, Aberdeen. Even at the time, this was extremely young and speaks to the extraordinary intellectual power of the young scholar. He topped this up with a study of theology, and entered the services of the Church as a broad-minded, measured, and essentially tolerant latitudinarian cleric (this word is quite a mouthful, but essentially only means "broad church").
In questions of clerical constitution, he was indebted to the ideas of Richard Hooker, who in his treatise Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Politie" established the key political and theological maxims of the day: The church is administered by the clerics, but these ultimately answer to the monarch, who in turn is justified and anointed by God. In learning, Hooker thought that human reason was the instrument that would open up the world around us and make it permeable to intellect; the Bible he saw as a reservoir of complementary metaphysical truths. These ideas strongly echo voices sounded by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620) and were to establish Gilbert's life-long moderation in theological doctrine, and his acceptance of the views of others. In 1663, we find Gilbert in Amsterdam, and he remembers his time there:
One thing I drank in at Amsterdam... which is never to form a prejudice in my mind against any man because he is of this or that persuasion; for I saw so many men of all persuasions that were, as far as I could perceive, so truly religious that I never think the worse of a man for his opinions [The Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald. London 1677, p 93].
Admittedly, this was a very short sketch of Gilbert's life, but I think we have what we need. He should live out his life as one of the more prominent clergymen of his day. He died on 18th March 1715, having been appointed Bishop of Salisbury by William of Orange in 1689. What remains is the legacy of a well-meaning, honest cleric, dedicated to the Anglican Church, diligent and serious in his scholarly pursuits, and undogmatic in his religious beliefs.
The History of the Reformation as a scholarly work of history
But was he impartial in his role as a historian? And did he further the development of historiography as a "science"?
Well, let's see. I'll give you two examples of how Gilbert worked with his sources.
Example 1. The Book of Martyrs. (Trial of Anna Askew)
Well, this is actually not the official title of this famous 16th Century theological work. It was published by John Foxe in 1563 as "Actes and Monuments" and is basically a pro-Anglican, biased account of how the Catholic church persecuted protestants in Europe, and especially in England. Soon better known as the "Book of Martyrs" [BoM], the work received near-canonic acclaim in Elisabethan England, so much so that a copy of the work was typically chained to the pulpit, next to the Bible, and passages recited from it as part of the homily.
Gilbert used the BoM extensively as a source, and pledged to examine Foxe's own sources critically before accepting the narrative as accurate (HR I, 578). And indeed, Gilbert did as he said. When giving an account of a trial against Anna Askew from Lincolnshire, a woman who refused to accept the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he shows himself critical of a detail in Foxe's account. Foxe claims that Thomas Wriothesly of Titchfield, the Lord Chancellor at the time, personally tortured Anne to make her accept the Catholic interpretation. Gilbert examined this claim against the independent source of the prison register, and discards Foxe's claim as unhistorical. However, Gilbert still betrays pro-Anglican sentiment in the way he conducts this analysis:
That she was racked is very certain; for I find it in an original journal of the transactions in the Tower... But Fox adds a passage that seems scarce credible... it is, that ... the lord chancellor...drew the rack so severely, that he almost tore her body asunder.... Fox does not vouch any warrant for this, so that though I have set it down, yet I give no entire credit to it. If it was true, it shews the strange influence of that religion [Catholic], and that it corrupts the noblest natures. (HR I, 537)
Well. Although Gilbert does not give credence to Foxe in this detail, he still mentions the passage, and even goes on to speculate with a pro-Anglican bias what might have driven the action if it had been true.
Example 2. The Book of Martyrs (trial of John Philpot)
The details of the trial against John are not relevant in the context of this review, all we need to know is that both John and the prosecutor Hugh Weston were clergymen, John of an Anglican hue, and Hugh Catholic. The trial is typical for the time, and represents a tedious religious dispute that carried on for hours over several days. It was recorded by Foxe in all its minutiae. Gilbert used Foxe as a source for pages on end, and finishes his account by recording a detail embarrassing for the Catholic prosecutor.
And yet - that detail is not given by Foxe! After dozens of pages of similarity with the BoM, Gilbert inserted a detail from another source! And the detail does not appear either in any of the accounts Foxe himself used for his narrative. Where did it come from?
It is from the account of Peter Heylin, Affairs of Church and State in England, During the Life and Reign of Queen Mary (1670). The passages correspond nearly word-for-word, and Gilbert owned an edition of the Ecclesia Restaurata, with which the book was bound up (see the sales catalogue of his library, Bibliotheca Burnetiana, nr. 55).
"So what", you might say. "What's so important about that?" It is the fact that Gilbert hated Heylin. He did not think he was a good historian and had a particular issue with the fact that Peter never quoted the sources he used.
In summary therefore, I might be tempted to make a flippant remark. When Gilbert doubted the authenticity of a pro-Anglican event, he said so but still mentioned it, and when he found pro-Anglican events omitted, he added them even though he might have taken issue with their authenticity.
But this interpretation would indeed be flippant, and it would also be wrong.
What is important is not that Gilbert checked his evidence against independent sources with a pro-Anglican bias, what mattered is that he did it at all! This in itself represents progress compared with other humanistic historians, who would simply copy out large passages of literary sources (other works of history) without adding any interpretation and certainly without checking them against non-literary sources (prison registers, letters, official writs etc).
Gilbert also published transcripts of non-literary documents in extensive appendices in order to accomplish objectivity in his research. Indeed, in this he was the first English historian to do so.
Verdict - did he do a good job?
Actually - yes. I think he did. In the final analysis, he was not genuinely objective in his use of non-literary documents, but showed notably higher detachment when dealing with literary sources. The fact that he remained pro-Anglican in his evaluation cannot weigh in as a severe point of criticism - after all, he was an Anglican clergyman and the whole point of the work was to defend the Anglican Church against Catholic attack perceived in his present.
But the real value of the History of the Reformation as a work of history lies in the way in which he analysed and presented historical dynamics. Gilbert presented his material thematically, and would analyse a particular dynamic coherently, before moving on to the next. This technique overcame the confines of historical annals, which would simply narrate events that happened in consecutive years, without striving to understand cause and effect between the specific events recorded.
Also, he would typically analyse an event as the consequence of several events that caused it, and trace its roots back to a number of human authors. This is an achievement in the context of contemporary history-writing, which would typically attribute events to the dominant influence of one historical figure, or one political, economic, or religious event.
Finally, but by no means least importantly, Gilbert did not present historical dynamics as the result of divine providence. As a devout believer, he did not doubt that divine providence pervaded all of human history, but he crucially did not identify this quality as the driver of historical dynamics. Indeed, hardly do we find any evidence of moral philosophical or theological interpretations anywhere in the HR.
Gilbert successfully rejected humanistic traditions in historiography still alive in the 17th Century. The History of the Reformation is a coherent work, it is written in clear rhetoric style, analysed with sharp intellectual acuity, and presented with a compendium of historical sources. Events are presented as driven by many causes, not one dominant force. Dynamics are narrated as themes, not confined to the annals of disjointed calendar years. Divine providence does not play any role in the analysis.
In this, Gilbert's work foreshadows the historiography of later centuries. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England represents Gilbert Burnet's legacy like none of his other works. It is, without a doubt in my mind, a milestone along the road towards modern scholarship.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
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