Professor Michael Snape

Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies

Affiliations
Affiliation	Telephone
Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion	+44 (0) 191 33 43966

Biography

Michael Snape is Durham University’s inaugural Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies. He is an ecumenical lay canon of Durham Cathedral, the director of the Michael Ramsey Centre for Anglican Studies, convenor of Durham University’s Anglican Studies research seminar, a vice-president of the Church of England Record Society, a trustee of the Scott Holland Trust, chair of YMCA England’s Archives and Heritage Committee, co-founder of the International Network for the Study of War and Religion in the Modern World, and the official historian of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department. He will serve as vice-president of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 2023-4, and as president in 2024-5.

Snape was awarded a First-Class Honours degree in History and Theology at the University of Birmingham in 1990 and, with the support of a British Academy studentship, was awarded a PhD in Theology in 1994 for his dissertation on Anglicanism in eighteenth-century England, which was supervised at Birmingham by Professor Hugh McLeod. He was Lecturer in Church History at Westhill College of Higher Education from 1994 to 1999; Lecturer in Church History in the School of Education and the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham from 1999 to 2004; and Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham from 2004 to 2010. He became Reader in Religion War and Society at the University of Birmingham in 2010. He was appointed to Durham in 2015.

Snape’s first monograph, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: the Lancashire parish of Whalley in the eighteenth century was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2003. Since then his publications have focused on religion and war in the Anglophone world since 1700, and his books include The Redcoat and Religion: the forgotten history of the British soldier from the age of Marlborough to the eve of the First World War (Routledge, 2005); God and the British soldier: religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars (Routledge, 2005); The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796-1953: clergy under fire (Boydell and Brewer, 2008); God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America’s Armed Forces in World War II (Boydell and Brewer, 2015), and A Church Militant: Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2022).

In 2017, Snape held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute of European History, University of Mainz, and in 2020 gave the Hensley Henson Lectures at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He was a member of the advisory panel for the AHRC-funded project ‘The First World War and Global Religions’, University of Oxford, 2016-2019, and for the AHRC-funded project ‘The Book and the Sword: The Bible in the Experience and Legacy of the Great War’, University of Cambridge, 2014-2017.

Snape has supervised more than a dozen successful doctoral students in modern religious and/or military history and has examined many others. He has made appearances on national television and radio and, since 2009, has co-convened the annual Beckett House Conference on religion and war in the modern world, which is held at the Armed Forces Chaplaincy Centre, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.

Monographs

(Forthcoming) Forgotten Warrior: The Life and Times of Major-General Merton Beckwith-Smith 1890-1942, London: SPCK, 2023. ISBN: 9780281086917.

A Church Militant: Anglicans and the Armed Forces from Queen Victoria to the Vietnam War, Oxford: OUP, 2022, xvi + 492 pp. ISBN: 9780192848321.

God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America’s Armed Forces in World War II, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015, xxiv + 704 pp. ISBN: 9781843838920. Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 by Choice magazine.

The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796-1953: clergy under fire, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008, xviii + 480pp. ISBN: 9781843833468.

God and the British soldier: religion and the British Army in the First and Second World Wars, London: Routledge, 2005, xv + 315 pp. ISBN: 0415334527. Shortlisted for the Templer Medal for Military History, 2005.

The Redcoat and Religion: the forgotten history of the British soldier from the age of Marlborough to the eve of the First World War, London: Routledge, 2005, x + 319 pp. ISBN: 0415377153. Shortlisted for the Templer Medal for Military History, 2005.

The Church of England in Industrialising Society: the Lancashire parish of Whalley in the eighteenth century, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003, xii + 228 pp. ISBN: 1843830140.

Edited books

British Christianity and the Second World War (co-edited with Stuart Bell), Woodbridge: Boydell, 2023. ISBN: 1837650195.

The Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on British Army Chaplaincy in the First World War (co-edited with Edward Madigan), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013, xvi + 211 pp. ISBN: 1409430006.

Secularisation in the Christian World (co-edited with Callum G. Brown), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010, x + 232 pp. ISBN: 9780754661313.

The Back Parts of War: The YMCA memoirs and letters of Barclay Baron, 1915 to 1919, Church of England Record Society, Volume 16, 2009, xiii + 290 pp. ISBN: 9781843835196.

Journal articles

(Co-authored will Eleanor Rance), 'Anglicans and Aviators: The First World War and the Forgotten Origins of Royal Air Force Chaplaincy', Journal of Religious History, 45:2 (2021), 257-79. ISSN: 1467-9809.

‘Anglicanism and Interventionism: Bishop Brent, the United States, and the British Empire in the First World War’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 69:2, 2018, 300-325, ISSN: 0022-0469.

‘The Bible in the Military: The British and American Experience in Two World Wars’, Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, 4:2, 2018, 247-286. ISSN: 2329-4434.

(Co-authored with Victoria Henshaw) ‘From Flanders to Helmand: Chaplaincy, Faith and Religious Change in the British Army, 1914-2014’, Journal of Beliefs and Values, 38:2, 2017, 199-214. ISSN: 1469-9362.

‘The Christian Churches and the Great War: England, Scotland and Wales’, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, Janvier-Juin 2016, Tome 102, no. 248, 121-38, ISSN: 0300-9505.

‘Foxhole Faith and Funk Religion: Anglo-American Perspectives from Two World Wars’, New Blackfriars, 96, 2015. ISSN: 0028-4289.

‘Anglican Army Chaplains in the First World War: Goodbye to Goodbye to All That’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62, 2011, 318-345. ISSN: 00220469.

‘British Military Chaplaincy in Early Victorian India’ in G. Teulié (ed.) ‘Victorian Representations of War’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, 66, 2007, 357-87, ISSN: 02205610.

‘British Catholicism and the British Army in the First World War’, Recusant History, 26, 2002, 314-58. ISSN: 00341932.

'Poverty and the Northern Clergy in the Eighteenth Century: The Parish of Whalley, 1689-1789', Northern History, 26, 2000, 283-97. ISSN: 0078172X.

‘Anti-Methodism in eighteenth-century England: the Pendle Forest Riots of 1748’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 90, 1998, 257-81. ISSN: 00220469.

‘“The Surey Demoniack”: Demonic Possession and Religious Conflict in Seventeenth Century Lancashire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 90, 1994, 93-114. ISSN: 09504699.

Other peer-reviewed publications

Revisiting Religion and the British Soldier in the First World War, London: Dr Williams’s Trust, 2015, 42 pp. ISBN: 978-0-85217-083-0.

‘Civilians, Soldiers and Perceptions of the Afterlife in Britain during the First World War’ in P. Clarke and T. Claydon (eds), ‘The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul’ in Studies in Church History, 45, 2009, 371-403. ISBN: 9780954680954.

‘British Army Chaplains and Capital Courts-Martial in the First World War’ in K. Cooper and J. Gregory (eds), ‘Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation’, Studies in Church History, 40, 2004, 357-68. ISBN: 0952973391.

Chapters in books

‘Catholics, War and Britain’s Armed Forces, c.1900-2020’ in A. Harris (ed.), The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism. Volume V. Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780198844310.

‘“Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?” Reconsidering religion and the British soldier’ in E. Gebarowski-Shafer, A. Null and A. Ryrie (eds), Contesting Orthodoxies in the History of Christianity: Essays in Honour of Diarmaid MacCulloch, Woodbridge; Boydell and Brewer, 2021, 256-80. ISBN: 9781783276271.

‘Catholics, military service, and violence in Great Britain during the First World War’ in Eveline Bouwers (ed.), Glaubenskämpfe: Katholiken und Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. ISBN: 9783525101582.

‘Anglo-American army chaplaincy in the First World War: a centenary perspective’ in T.S. Mallard and N.H. White (eds), A persistent fire : the strategic ethical impact of World War I on the contemporary profession of arms. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780996824910.

‘GI Religion and Post-War Revival in the United States and Great Britain’ in D.H. McLeod and D. Hempton (eds), Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 213-233. ISBN: 9780198798071.

‘War and Peace’ in J. Morris (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume IV: Global Western Anglicanism, 1914–Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 214-242. ISBN: 9780199641406.

‘Twilight of the Padres: the end of British Military Chaplaincy in India’ in T. Brekke and V. Tikhonov (eds), Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism, Delhi: OUP, 2017, 202-227. ISBN: 9780199470747.

‘Front Line I: Armed Forces at War’ in Richard Overy (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 258-92. ISBN: 9780199605828.

‘The First World War and the Chaplains of British India’ in M. Snape and E. Madigan (eds), The Clergy in Khaki: New Perspectives on British Army Chaplains in the First World War, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 143-167. ISBN: 1409430006.

‘Archbishop Davidson’s visit to the Western Front, May 1916’ in M. Barber and S.J.C. Taylor (eds), From the Reformation to the Permissive Society: A Miscellany in Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of Lambeth Palace Library, Church of England Record Society, 2010, pp. 455-520. ISBN: 9781843835585.

‘War, Religion and Revival: The United States, British and Canadian Armies in the Second World War’ in C. Brown and M. Snape (eds), Secularisation in the Christian World, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 135-57. ISBN: 9780754661313.

‘The Great War’ in D.H. McLeod (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities c.1914-c.2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 131-50, ISBN: 13 9780521815000.

‘The Church in a Lancashire Parish: Whalley, 1689-1800’ in J. Gregory and J. Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2002, 243-63. ISBN: 0851158978.

‘Keeping Faith and Coping: Belief, Popular Religiosity and the British People in Two World Wars’ in P. Liddle, T. Whitehead and J. Bourne (eds), The Great World War 1914-45 Vol. 2 The People’s Experience, London: Harper Collins, 2001, 398-420. ISBN: 0007116330.

Other publications

‘The Church at the Front: The Church of England and the British Soldier in the First World War’, Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review, 2014, 86-114.

‘The Bible, the British and the First World War’, The Bible in Transmission, Summer 2014, 17-20.

‘Priests as Combatant Officers in the First World War’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 88, 2010, 98-100.

‘“Holy Grocery”: Reconsidering a forgotten ministry to the Army’, Journal of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 44, 2005, 53-55.

‘Proclamation and the Great War: Reconsidering British military chaplaincy in the two World Wars’, Journal of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 43, 2004, 6-8.