This book investigates one aspect of the story of how our religiously-oriented culture became a secular one. It concentrates on the conflicts enveloping the attitude to the past from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The background argument is that the way the process of secularization occurred in one particular religious context, the Roman Catholic one, was determinative for the possibility of something such as secular culture, and hence for both the modem secular attitude to the past and the modem religious one. In recent years a spate of scholarship has suggested that...