History, religion, and culture

About this book

The essays in History, Religion and Culture begin with discussions of eighteenth-century historiography, especially Gibbon's Decline and Fall; they then take up different aspects of the place of religion in nineteenth-century cultural and political life, such as attitudes toward the native religions of India, the Victorian perception of Oliver Cromwell, the role of the Quarterly Review and the religious sensibility of John Ruskin; and finally, in discussions that range up to the middle of the twentieth century, they explore relations between scientific ideas about change or development and assumptions about the nature and growth of the national community.