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"I'm an Anglican," says Jonathan Clark. "But I didn't come to ecclesiastical history because of my Anglicanism."

His first history book, The Dynamics of Change (1982), was a study of a high-politics crisis in 1750s England.

But his major opus, English Society 1688-1832 (1985), reintegrated religion into a traditionally secular historical vision of the long 18th century, and here Professor Clark does draw at least one intellectual link. "Being an Anglican made me aware that there was a body of controversy surrounding the role of Anglicanism which showed how church and state were put together. For all their differences, Anglican defenders of the old order - before 1832 - and those who opposed them agreed on one thing: what the old order was."

Jonathan Clark is Hall distinguished professor at Kansas University.