Liberal Anglican Historiography

The Liberal Anglican historians were a small group of friends and colleagues that shared an approach to the past and history which attempted to combine a Germano-Coleridgean (to use Mill's phrase) historicist sensibility with the imperatives of a post-Enlightenment belief in progress necessitated by their liberal politics. They were Thomas Arnold, Julius Charles Hare, Henry Hart Milman, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Connop Thirlwall and Richard Whateley. Duncan Forbes, in The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (1952), has set out an understanding of their work and theory that has allowed for the appreciation of their importance in the development of historical studies in Britain: as Forbes pointed out, while Coleridge and the Romantics ha