In his article on the critical reception of the late Frank Turner's John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion, Simon Skinner contends that Turner's study is ‘empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous’, and he cites with approval Andrew Wilson's judgement that it ‘revolutionizes Newman studies’.1 But this historical masterpiece, he thinks, has been unjustly howled down by a benighted posse of Roman Catholic reviewers, ‘almost none of [whom] are … tenured in a university history department’. Turner's Catholic reviewers, ‘which is to say nearly all reviewers’, are therefore ‘amateurs’, who ‘literally could not comprehend’ what Turner was up to.2 But history is not an arcane discipline, and Skinner's complaint about the ‘lack of disciplinary equipment’ of these hostile reviewers seems hardly to the point in relation to a book offered by a major publisher to a general readership. The ordinary rules of historical evidence are intelligible to anybody, and a de haut en bas restriction of the right to an opinion on Turner's book to the gild of professional historians runs the risk of seeming both arbitrary and condescending.
