Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority.