Research

July 30, 2018 at 5:13 pm

Ingram Authors Book on Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England

Dr. Robert G. Ingram, portrait

Dr. Robert G. Ingram

Dr. Robert Ingram’s latest book publication is Reformation without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018).

Ingram, Professor of History, is also director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and History.

Book cover for "Reformation without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England"In Reformation without End, Ingram offers a radical reinterpretation of the English Reformation, writing, “no one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment.’ Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century.”

They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody 17th-century political and religious revolutions. Thus, Ingram’s book is about the ways that the 18th-century English debated the causes and consequences of those 17th-century revolutions and the thing which they thought had caused them, the Reformation. His first book is Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Boydell, 2007).

In the History Department, Ingram offers an array of courses on European history in general and intellectual history in particular. These include:

  • HIST 2300 — Capitalism and its Critics: An Intellectual History
  • HIST 3860 — Shakespeare’s England
  • T3 4104 — God & Science in the Western World

Ingram is now beginning to research his next book project, the provisional title of which is “Hobbes’s Century: England, Ireland and Religious Establishment, 1689–1742.” Therein, he argues that the 18th-century British “talked like Lockeans but acted like Hobbesians.” The book project seeks to explore that tension.

Ingram also is working on an edited volume with Dr. Jason Peacey (University College London) and Dr. Alex Barber (Durham University) titled The Freedom of Speech, 1550–1850, which emerged from a George Washington Forum conference last spring.

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