Thomas Fuller (1608–61) was an English clergyman who enjoyed success both as a popular preacher and as a successful writer. Whilst Fuller produced a steady output of published sermons, his most significant contributions were as a historian. Patterson's important monograph reflects this emphasis, narrating Fuller's life and work as preacher, writer and clergyman, but with greater attention and analysis given to his historical work.
Fuller undertook his ambitious writing projects during the tumultuous period of the civil war and interregnum, conditions highly unconducive to scholarship. Whilst he eventually supported the royalist side, he was a man of moderate temperament who knew his own mind and was not afraid to make his opinions known. He held nuanced convictions in a time of picking sides, and his promotion of compromise for the sake of peace earned him the suspicion of both sides. Patterson presents Fuller as a thoroughly likeable character: a man of wit with a love of peaceful moderation, as well as a prodigious scholar of exceptional memory, ability and industry.
Chapter i sets the stage, laying out Fuller's early life and education at Queens’ College, Cambridge, with a particular focus on how his education shaped his Reformed (Calvinist) theological convictions, and prepared him for his future historical work. Notably, Fuller's uncles and godfathers were theologians Robert Townson and John Davenant, whilst his father knew William Whitaker, Richard Greenham and John Overall. Patterson sets Fuller's historical work in the context of the late sixteenth-century Antiquities movement. Works such as William Camden's Brittania (1586) and Francis Bacon's The advancement of learning (1605) were foundational to Fuller's historical scholarship.
Chapter ii centres on The history of the holy warre (1639), Fuller's first major historical work and the first history of the Crusades to be written in English. One of the most valuable aspects of Patterson's monograph is the way in which he provides a digest of each of Fuller's main works, along with a sober assessment of merits and shortcomings, and its overall historiographical significance. Already in his first major work Fuller demonstrated his ability to produce critical, source-based history that cut through the rhetoric of his sources. Though he did not intend it for this purpose, Fuller's account of a religiously motivated war was read with practical interest during the civil war which soon erupted in England.
Chapter iii considers The holy state (1642), a collection of short, practical pieces on virtuous living in service to God. Fuller focuses on the effective fulfilment of one's office, offering both ideal descriptions and short accounts of actual persons as examples. Patterson argues that Fuller's pithy portraits made a significant contribution to the development of the genre that we call ‘biography’ (p. 82).
Chapter iv highlights Fuller's life and the various works that he produced through the civil war and early interregnum period. However, the most important work that he produced during this period was his Church-history of Britain (1655). This massive work of approximately 1,300 folio pages was the first English Protestant account of the Church in Britain from earliest times to the present. As such it dealt not only with England's past, but also with recent events of the civil war. These aspects of the work are handled respectively in chapters vi and vii, with chapter v first contextualising Fuller's work in the rise of humanist historiography and antiquarian interest. Patterson shows how Fuller used new scholarly tools to pioneer an approach to ecclesiastical history that is more properly historical than ideological or theological.
Fuller died shortly after the Restoration, and his History of the worthies of England was published posthumously, in 1662. With this final work Fuller pioneered the Dictionary of National Biography. In it he laid out the notable persons and characteristics of each county, major town and city of England with wit and insight. This remarkable achievement was, in Patterson's estimation, comparable to Samuel Johnson's compilation of his English dictionary in the next century (p. 316).
Patterson shows that Fuller's work has often been unjustly criticised, beginning with the bitter critique of Church-history by his contemporary, Peter Heylyn, and repeatedly in the centuries that followed. However, whilst Patterson demonstrates that Fuller's work is flawed in some ways, upon close examination his historical works stand up admirably for their solid and critical employment of primary sources and their original analysis. Patterson demonstrates that Fuller's significance to ecclesiastical history is not to be underestimated and that his works continue to deserve to be read today.
One quibble that this reviewer had was with Patterson's characterisation of Fuller's theology as ‘Calvinist’, meaning that he ‘followed the main lines of Calvin's theology’ (p. 39). It is more accurate to describe this theological movement as ‘Reformed’, given both its origin among multiple sixteenth-century theologians of whom Calvin was but one, and the theological variations within it on issues relating to predestination and perseverance. In short, Patterson's analysis of Fuller's theological position could be sharpened and enriched by using more precise analytical categories. This would better reveal where Fuller's theological convictions lay in relation to some of the important theological figures in his life (such as John Davenant and Samuel Ward) as well as the range of theological options present in seventeenth-century England.
However, this (somewhat marginal) point does nothing to devalue Patterson's important study. It is thoroughly researched, convincingly argued, and clearly written. Students of the history of the English Church simply cannot afford to ignore it.
