The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796-1953
Title Details

480 Pages

23.4 x 15.6 cm

34 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in Modern British Religious History

Series Vol. Number: 18

Imprint: Boydell Press

The Royal Army Chaplains' Department, 1796-1953

Clergy under Fire

by Michael Snape

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A survey and reassessment of the role of the army chaplain in its first 150 years.

Few military or ecclesiastical figures are as controversial as the military chaplain, routinely attacked by pacifist and anticlerical commentators and too readily dismissed by religious and military historians. This highly revisionist study represents a complete reappraisal of the role of the British army chaplain and of the Royal Army Chaplains' Department in the first century and a half of its existence. Challenging old caricatures and stereotypes and drawing on a wealth of new archival material, it surveys the political, denominational and organisational development of the R.A.Ch.D., analyses the changing role and experience of the British army chaplain across the nineteenth century and the two World Wars, and addresses the wider significance of British army chaplaincy for Britain's military, religious and cultural history over the period c.1800-1950.

MICHAEL SNAPE is Senior Lecturer in ModernHistory at the University of Birmingham. The volume has a Foreword by Richard Holmes.
Introduction
The Origins and Early Years of the Army Chaplains' Department
The Army Chaplains' Department from Waterloo to the Crimea
The Army Chaplains' Department from the Crimea to South Africa
The Army Chaplains' Department and the First World War
The Royal Army Chaplains' Department and the Second World War
Epilogue
Retrospect
Bibliography
Index

MICHAEL SNAPE is Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University.

"[The author's] wide range of knowledge has made him the ideal historian of this particular department and enabled him to place it firmly in context." JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
"This authoritative history.is an impressively documented account of the Department from its foundation in 1769 up to the Korean War. CHURCH TIMES [An] admirable book.[...] Full of rigorous and incisive analysis based on deep research in the archives.[...]Gives a wealth of detail about the RAChD, individual chaplains, and their role in the wider army, and this book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the wider history of the British army." THE BRITISH ARMY REVIEW
"A fine study [and] a work of huge scholarship and wide range." BAPTIST QUARTERLY

Hardcover

9781843833468

November 2007

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Title Details

480 Pages

2.34 x 1.56 cm

34 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in Modern British Religious History

Series Vol. Number: 18

Imprint: Boydell Press