Staff Profile:Professor Stephen Taylor

Responsibilities:

Research
My research interests are in the political and religious history of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At present I am completing a study of 'The Whigs and the Church 1714–60', and I am working, with Kenneth Fincham, on episcopalianism and conformity during the English Revolution. In addition, I am involved in two major collaborative research projects funded by the AHRC: The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 and British State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings, 1540s to 1940s. In the longer term I plan to continue my research into the life of Caroline of Ansbach, the wife of George II, with the intention of writing a biography.

Postgraduate Supervision
I have a lively group of postgraduate students and am glad to supervise any research student with an interest in the political and religious history (broadly defined) of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. Topics studied by recent and current PhD students include: the Cromwellian church; propert, church and society in the late eighteenth century; low churchmanship 1689–1717; anti-Catholicism and anti-popery c.1680–1720; Catholicism in the Thames Valley 1660–1800; sermon culture 1700–1750; reactions to Jacobitism in north-east England; the Hampshire gentry in the eighteenth century.

Areas of Interest:

Stephen Taylor is Academic Editor of the Royal Historical Society, with responsibility for the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH). He was an Associate Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is also General Editor of the Church of England Record Society, and on the editorial board of two monograph series, Studies in Modern British Religious History and Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History.

Research groups / Centres:

Publications:

Editions of texts

Tory and whig. The parliamentary papers of Edward Harley, 3rd earl of Oxford, and of William Hay, M.P. for Seaford, 1716–1753, edited with Clyve Jones (Parliamentary History Record Series, 1, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 1998)
The Entring Book of Roger Morrice. Volume 4: 1687–1689 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007)

Major articles

'Sir Robert Walpole, the Church of England and the Quakers Tithe Bill of 1736', Historical Journal, XXVIII (1985), 51–77.
'The bishops at Westminster in the mid-eighteenth century', in A pillar of the constitution: the House of Lords in British politics 1640–1784, ed. C. Jones (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), pp. 137–63.
'William Warburton and the alliance of church and state', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLIII (1992), 271–86.
'"The fac totum in ecclesiastic affairs"? The duke of Newcastle and the crown's ecclesiastical patronage', Albion, XXIV (1992), 409–33.
'Archbishop Potter and the dissenters', Yale University Library Gazette, LXVII, 3–4 (1993), 118–26.
'Whigs, bishops and America: the politics of church reform in mid-eighteenth-century England', Historical Journal, XXXVI (1993), 331–56.
'The Church and Anglicanism in the "long" eighteenth century', with John Walsh, in The Church of England c. 1689 – c. 1833. From Toleration to Tractarianism, ed. John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–64.
'"Dr Codex" and the whig "pope": Edmund Gibson, bishop of Lincoln and London, 1716–48', in Lords of Parliament: studies 1714–1914, ed. R.W. Davis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 9–28, 183–91.
'Whigs, tories and anticlericalism: ecclesiastical courts legislation in 1733', Parliamentary History, 19, 3 (2000), 329–55.
'The historical public and academic archival research: the experience of the Clergy of the Church of England Database', with Arthur Burns and Kenneth Fincham, Archives, 27 (2002), 110–19.
'Un Etat confessionel? L'Eglise d'Angleterre, la constitution et la vie politique au XVIIIe siècle', L'identité anglicane, ed. Alain Joblin and Jacques Sys (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2004), pp. 141–54.
'Sir Robert Walpole', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), LVII, 67–92
'Benjamin Hoadly (bishop of Winchester)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), XXVII, 340–8
'Edmund Gibson (bishop of London)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), XXII, 68–75
'William Wake (archbishop of Canterbury)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), LVI, 721–8
'Queen Caroline (of Ansbach)', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), X, 202–7
'Reconstructing clerical careers: the experience of the Clergy of the Church of England Database', with Arthur Burns and Kenneth Fincham, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, LV (2004), 726–37
'The clergy at the courts of George I and George II', in Monarchy and religion. The transformation of royal culture in eighteenth-century Europe, ed. Michael Schaich (Oxford: Oxford University Press and German Historical Institute London, 2007), pp. 129–51

 

Edited works

The Church of England c.1689 - c.1833. From Toleration to Tractarianism, edited with John Walsh and Colin Haydon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; paperback 2002)
Hanoverian Britain and Empire. Essays in memory of Philip Lawson, ed. with Richard Connors and Clyve Jones (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998)
Cranmer to Davidson. A Church of England miscellany(Church of England Record Society, 7, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999)
Parliament and the Church, 1529-1960, edited with J. P. Parry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
Evangelicalism in the Church of England c.1790-c.1890. A Miscellany, ed. with Mark Smith (Church of England Record Society, 12, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004)
Parliament and Dissent, 1689-1914, ed. with David Wykes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005)

 

Online resources

The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 (First release 2005; 2nd Edition)

 

Forthcoming and in preparation
The diary of Mary, Countess Cowper 1714–1720 (Hertfordshire Record Society)