| --(8) EVANGELICAL RELIGION
provides to Frank Turner's academic peers, people educated as
was he, men and women who mainly read and speak to one another, first
a fresh look at and then an honest, trained, meticulous re-reading of old
and wrongly neglected
sources. The book then makes to professional historians the case for a broader-gauged, this-worldly method of writing history which can be emulated by other researchers handling subjects other than Newman. Many in the professor's intended audience are assumed, I think, to be much like Charles Kingsley: full of high animal spirits, latitudinarian or sceptical and personally unempathetic with Newman's preference for celibacy, monasticism and self-mortification. If that be so, then must there not be for the least conservative, the most imaginative of Turner's academic peers ways (let those ways be speculative so long as materialistic) to reduce the age's religion to conditioned social behavior? We cannot expect the new breed to write like Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Belloc or Eamon Duffy. Young secular historians may rightfully ask: might not Newman and his younger Tractarian acolytes have behaved as they did because they were simply superstitious or prone to magic? Is the key to unlocking Newman and his followers the fact that they were or were not homosexual or had eating disorders? Were their evangelical foes the kind of people easily hypnotized? A non-academic reader may enlarge his knowledge of the Victorian Age in England by dipping into specialized research about deviant behaviors and illnesses (even if Turner has not demonstrated such information to bear directly on Newman).Turner's speculations have their clearly indicated scholarly points of departure. |