All Souls College in Oxford is a unique academic institution and has had a unique history. But its history has been little known and its fortunes in the period 1600-1850 have been viewed, if at all, through the eyes of the Victorian university "reformers." This volume explores for the first time the "ancien regime" in All Souls on its own terms. It brings together sixteen substantial studies of some of the college's most significant figures, among them the architect and polymath Christopher Wren and the great eighteenth-century lawyer William Blackstone. Its chapters trace the involvement of...

The seemingly inexorable decline of religion in twentieth-century Britain has for long fascinated historians, sociologists and churchmen. In this cogent and original study, S.J.D. Green concentrates scholarly attention for the first time on the "social history of the chapel" in a characteristic industrial-urban setting. He demonstrates just why so many churches were built in these years, who built them, who went to them, and why, and he offers a fresh interpretation of the extent and the implications of the decline of religion in Britain.

This innovative book provides an essential historical perspective on the boundaries of the state in modern Britain. At a time of intense debate about the state, the collection of interdisciplinary studies gathered here emphasizes the sheer variety of public involvement in British life, the ebb and flow of that involvement and its dynamics, and the wider implications this has for civil society and intellectual life. These new essays contribute to current debates not only by providing a historical analysis but also by looking to future developments.

In The Passing of Protestant England, S. J. D. Green offers an important new account of the causes, courses and consequences of the secularisation of English society. He argues that the critical cultural transformation of modern English society was forged in the agonised abandonment of a long-domesticated Protestant, Christian tradition between 1920 and 1960. Its effects were felt across the nation and amongst all classes. Yet their significance in the evolution of contemporary indigenous identities remains curiously neglected in most mainstream accounts of post-Victorian Britain. Dr Green...