The justification for this book is the professed need for a single-volume introduction to the Oxford Movement, the immense literature on which has certainly been far longer on biography and monograph than on the sort of synopsis which Herring has set out to furnish. This short textbook and selection of documents, however, eschews the narrative form routinely adopted in the standard accounts, generationally R.W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years (1891), S.L. Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement (1915), and M.R. O'Connell, The Oxford Conspirators: A History of the Oxford Movement 1833â45 (1969). Herring's aim is not merely to synthesise, but occasionally to âbreak new ground in a number of areasââchronological and geographicalâsuch as the consequences for the movement of Newman's conversion, and âthe impact of Tractarianism within the parochial settingâ. The introduction has a short section on the historiographyâtoo short, and a little crude, given the book's avowed purpose in summarising the new and debunking the old (and some of the new)âthough the point that far too much of the literature is biographically or prosopographically framed is well made in justification of the author's fourfold-thematic approach to âContextsâ, âIdeasâ, âEventsâ, and âParishesâ. The first of these nicely situates the movement in religious, political, and cultural terms. The religious contextualisationâas any such history mustâowes much to Peter Nockles's recovery of the Tractarians' debt to the earlier high-church tradition, though Herring remains disposed to emphasise the novelty and innovations of the movement, which, he doughtily insists, ârepresents one of the most fundamental discontinuities in the history of Anglicanismâ. Politically, he demonstrates that the common âconservative or radical?â teaser is anachronistic when posed of the 1830s and 1840s, much of whose radical-paternalist discourse defies those binary categories, a point which is pursued in the context of Tractarianism's obvious romantic affinities. The chapter on âIdeasâ frames Tractarian religious thought in terms of the visible church, of the via media, and of sacraments and ascetics, though the intelligibility with which this is done is at odds with the needlessly defeatist air of Herring's ensuing conclusion that since Tractarianism was a âdynamic rather than a static phenomenonâ it remains âslippery as the proverbial bar of soapâ. A merit of this chapter, however, is its attention not just to Tractarian thought, but to the means of its âdisseminationâ, in a short section which reminds us of the role played not only by the Tracts but by the mass of published sermons, by the periodical journalism of the British Critic, and by the movement's early fictional forays. The (third) chapter on âEventsâ is perhaps the most conventional of the four, and might profitably have preceded the others: it confronts terminology, traces the disparate personal routes to Tractarianism, and recovers the âOxford battlesâ around which theological partisanship became entrenched. It is here that the author delivers on his promise to question the impact of Newman's conversion with an assortment of very useful data on the numbers of Anglican conversions to Rome, and of Tractarian ordinations and incumbencies. The statistical dimension is sustained in a final chapter which, since it draws on numerical and geographical data from the author's still-indispensable doctoral work on Tractarianism in the parishes, is inevitably the most original. If this lacks the choice exemplification which might have imparted some colour to the panorama, it succeeds well both in recovering the Tractarian ideal of âan ever-expanding Eucharistic communityâ, and in demonstrating the relative paucity of our understanding of the movement's parochial rather than polemical character. Finally, the book contains an Epilogue which âoffers some thoughts on the contemporary problems faced by Anglo-Catholics, including the controversy over the ordination of womenâ. This strikes a discordant note in a textbook and slightly compromises the foregoing deprecation of the parochialism and partisanship of Tractarian historiography. The reappearance shortly after this book of Brad Faught's The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and their Times (Pennsylvania, 2003), which broadly shares the purpose and approach of Herring's, only at greater length, was perhaps unfortunate. But Herring's vigour, his very brevityâthe commentary itself weighs in at under a hundred pagesâand the thoughtful and eclectic selection of forty documents in accompaniment, should ensure him the grateful student audience which is his target.