Religion in Britain, 1660–1900: Essays in Honour of Peter B. Nockles, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

Abstract

This special edition of the Bulletin is a well-deserved and welcome Festschrift celebrating the work of the historian, librarian, and archivist Peter Nockles. Several of the essays deal with subjects on which Nockles has himself made significant scholarly contributions. His seminal contribution to the study of the Anglican High Church tradition and its transmutation into Tractarianism is particularly well represented: Nigel Aston contributes a luminous essay on the transmission of High Churchmanship through gentry and clerical networks in the case of Thomas Townson, which is followed by Derya Gurses Tarbuck’s analysis of George Horne as an exponent of the Hutchinsonian strand of the tradition. George Westhaver bridges the earlier and later forms of High Churchmanship with a discussion of continuities and discontinuities in the championing of typological readings of scripture by William Jones of Nayland and the Tractarians. Late refractions of the tradition are represented by Kenneth Parker on the theological trajectory of Henry Manning’s conversion to Rome and James Pereiro’s review of Manning’s interest in Jewish affairs, especially his interventions against pogroms in Russia after his conversion to Rome. Similarly, Nockles’s interests in High Church discussions of the relationship between church and state are reflected in Stewart Brown’s insightful account of the public discourse surrounding the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869, which highlights the triumph of voluntaristic arguments against the claims of the sacred mission of the state in the case of Ireland.Appropriately enough for a celebration of a scholar who also made a significant contribution as an archivist, a number of the essays look at both the problems and potential of historical sources, notably William Gibson on the Court sermons of James II and Richard Sharp on the surviving corpus of engraved clerical portraiture from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In her consideration of the production of the biography of the early Methodist leader Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Carol Blessing shows how the priorities of writing for the more settled denomination of the 1820s resulted in the downplaying of Fletcher’s preaching ministry and the radicalism of her apologia for it, as well as an overshadowing of the importance of her team of female assistants. Andrew Crome looks at the way in which British novels about Jewish conversion reveal not only the complex attitudes of nineteenth-century Britons toward Jews but also the complex relationships of Evangelicals inside and outside the island’s established churches with each other. David Bebbington’s analysis of the Leeds Brunswick Wesleyan Methodist Circuit obituary book (an underused category of source for Victorian Methodism) uncovers evidence to support his famous definition of Evangelicalism. However, it also reveals its subjects as preoccupied with a series of other concerns, including the role of the deathbed as revelatory of the nature of individual faith and the importance of assurance of salvation for both subjects and readers. Bebbington also skilfully shows how the obituary book can be used to inform our understanding of gender roles within the church community, the importance of prayer and hymn singing, and the relative lack of stress placed on sacramental worship. He also argues that a discriminating use of the same material reveals much about the dynamics of Methodist class meetings and cultural changes within the Methodist community that led to greater reticence about declarations of religious experience or perhaps a silting up of the channels of Methodist spirituality in the decades before the First World War.Potentially the most fruitful contribution to the volume, however, fits neither of these categories but is more closely related to Peter Nockles’s important contribution as a librarian of Methodism. This is Rachel Cope’s exploration of how the engagement of an early American Methodist, Catherine Livingstone, with reading and writing texts opened spaces in which she could find and express her own voice but also connected her to a rich network of deeply felt spiritual kinship. This allows us to glimpse into her spiritual formation as created relationally, rather than through the categories of the modern liberal individualism.Altogether, this is a volume wide in scope and rich in insights, well deserving of a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the theology, history, and trajectory of both the Anglican and Methodist traditions.