The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 By Peter Benedict Nockles

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 449 Turkish policy by its own security interests or by the pursuit ofgoals unrelated to the war itself. Clement VIII never conditioned support for Rudolf on the taking of measures against the Protestants in the Empire, and he saw in his advocacy ofwar against the Turks an opportunity to exercise his role aspadre commune of Christendom in the post-Reformation era. The Papacy's financial contribution Niederkorn calculates at roughly 2.85 million florins, which was outdistanced only by the imperial estates with 20 million and Spain with 3.75 million. Spanish support, which increased significantly under Philip IH after the conclusion ofpeace with France ( 1 598) and England ( 1604), was dictated above all, according to the author, not by religious or dynastic considerations but by the desire to keep the Turks occupied in the east and so uninterested in harassing Spanish territory in the Mediterranean. Venice withheld contributions not because of fear for its commercial interests in the Levant but of retaliatory attacks on its own territories; moreover, an increasing paralysis of the Venetian governmental apparatus hindered the taking of any effective decision at a time when secret aid to the emperor was seriously considered. Niederkorn devotes interesting pages to the machinations and rivalry of the English and French ambassadors in Constantinople, neither of whose states effectively supported the emperor. This bulky volume is impressive in its scope and in the range of its sources both primary and secondary; occasionally it is excessive in its detail and seems to lose focus. A weakness is the lack of a map to locate the many unfamiliar places in southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Robert Bireley, SJ. Loyola University Chicago Late Modern European The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760— 1857¦ By Peter Benedict Nockles. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. xvii, 342. $59.95.) There was a High Church before the Oxford Movement. The torch of orthodox Anglican Churchmanship had been passed through the eighteenth century by Nonjurors and Hutchinsonians to the Hackney Phalanx of the early nineteenth century. Then came the Tractarians in 1833, bringing a fresh spiritual vitality but sharply diverging from the old High Church on crucial points. More importantly, from Peter Nockles' standpoint, the Tractarians and their historians practically obliterated the old High Church from history, portraying their eighteenth century as a period of religious stagnation relieved only by the misleading emphases of the evangelical revival, until the rediscovery of true Anglicanism in 1833. It is Nockles' mission to recover the history ofthe old High Church and to trace the continuities and discontinuities 450 BOOK REVIEWS of the two High Church traditions. Perhaps the title and subtitle should be inverted, for the emphasis is on the context of continuity and not on the Oxford Movement. Nockles, himself Roman Catholic and Assistant Librarian and Methodist Church Archivist at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, first surveyed this ground in a widely cited Oxford dissertation in 1982. Based on a wide range of reading, he has expanded and revised the work over a dozen years. He has also opened himself to new intellectual influences, notably the historical revisionism of J. C. D. Clark; his dependence on Clark may even be too much for that famous spinner of paradoxes. One sign of this is the way in which historical analysis has been transformed into historiographical debate. There is some justification for this in the manner in which the old High Church was written out of existence by Tractarian historians from Newman himself to Tom Mozley and Dean Church, swallowed whole by most twentieth-century historians. But Nockles' demolition of this tradition amounts to overkill and complicates the reader's task of following the development of the old High Church and its interaction with the new. Nockles' chapter structure, after the initial "Historiographical introduction," is topical in the manner of religious studies, pursuing a particular problematic from the beginning to the end of his period, and may thus appear repetitive to chronologically oriented readers. A complete bibliography would have been too exhaustive to publish, but he should have compensated for its absence by giving full citations once in each chapter, which might save one from hunting 300...