The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830–1930. Edited by Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii + 273 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830-1930 . Edited by Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012. xii + 273 pp. $99.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThe Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830-1930 is a collection of essays by a group of international scholars examining the impact of the catholic revival within Anglicanism. Its origin was an Oxford conference in September of 2008. In a way the volume is a successor to the 1933 volume Northern Catholicism edited by N. P. Williams. But whereas the earlier volume had many foci (theology, aesthetics, the moral life, spirituality, and so forth) this volume is rigorously historical, and much more international in scope.The essays are divided into three sections: Prelude, Beyond England: Oxford in Britain, the Empire, and the United States, and The Oxford and Continental Europe. prelude is a fine essay by Peter B. Nockles exploring the culture of Oxford's Oriel College, where the movement had its birth. A number of the essays in section 2 attempt to cast new light on their subjects by picking them up by a new handle. Thus Stewart J. Brown suggests that the Catholic revival had some of its greatest influences not on the Scottish Episcopal Church but on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Scoto-Catholic Movement led to liturgical and devotional changes and to an emphasis on the catholic nature of that church. In Rowan Strong's essay on the Jerusalem bishopric controversy (in which it was proposed that the English church and the Prussian church sponsor a bishop in Jerusalem), he does not focus on John Henry Newman's well known criticism of the project but on Henry Edward Manning, who was much more positive, seeing it as a way of extending Anglicanism into the world. Nockles attempts the same change of handles in treating the Oxford in America. Rather than focusing on American Episcopal sources he taps English observations of American events, and the correspondence of James McMaster, one of the country's Roman Catholic converts. He provides some fresh insights, particularly from the correspondence of John Henry Newman. Unfortunately this approach leads to some factual errors (Isaac Hecker was never a student at the General Theological Seminary), glaring omissions (such as the pro-Tractarian bishop of New York, Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk), and questionable claims such as that the American Episcopal Church never had a strong evangelical component. …