A History of ‘Religious History’

As a category denoting the analysis of religious actors across history disinterestedly and on their own terms, “religious history” is a relatively recent coinage. This article offers a brief contextualisation of the emergence of the field in the twentieth century. It distinguishes “religious history” from an older, “confessional” mode of ecclesiastical history on the one hand; and an anticlerical or secular‐minded “anthropological” style of writing the history of religion on the other. The essay particularly emphasises the value of Jane Garnett's work on the history of Christianity as a model for how historians might pursue a type of religious history which integrates the history of religion with the history of broader movements in intellectual culture.