High Church Revival Research Articles

The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities, written by Jeremy Morris

The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities, written by Jeremy Morris

The High Church revival in the Church of England. Arguments and identities. By Jeremy Morris. (Anglican and Episcopal Theology and History, 2.) Pp. xii + 288. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016. €55 (paper). 978 90 04 32679 8; 2405 7576

The High Church revival in the Church of England. Arguments and identities. By Jeremy Morris. (Anglican and Episcopal Theology and History, 2.) Pp. xii + 288. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2016. €55 (paper). 978 90 04 32679 8; 2405 7576 - Volume 69 Issue 2

The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities by Jeremy Morris

Reviewed by: The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities by Jeremy Morris Robert Tobin The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities BY JEREMY MORRIS Anglican-Episcopal Theology and History. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2016. x + 288 pages. Paper: $66. ISBN 978-90-04-32679-8. The Church of England's High Church Revival is among the most scrutinized topics in the religious history of modern Britain. What more, then, is there to be said about it? Quite a lot, it turns out, as Jeremy Morris ably demonstrates in this collection of essays, which is a compilation of his writings on the subject from the past twenty years. Alongside scholars such as Peter Nockles and Rowan Strong, Morris has sought to broaden the historiographical terms in which the Revival is discussed, extending its chronology and geography and framing it against wider social and religious currents. In doing so, it was first necessary to deconstruct the received narrative, a version of events which routinely identifies the years 1833–45 in Oxford as of paramount importance. This narrative originated with the Tractarians themselves and has been assiduously maintained by their champions in subsequent generations. (Having welcomed hundreds of John Henry Newman devotees to Oriel College Oxford during my recent tenure there as chaplain, I can attest to the imaginative hold this "founding myth" continues to exercise over both Roman and Anglican Catholics even now.) What this dominant narrative has discouraged, however, is due consideration of alternative forms of High Church Anglicanism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the ways Tractarian ideas were taken in multiple directions thereafter. By the same token, it also emphasized, in Morris's words, that which "is unique and striking rather than what is mundane and pervasive," ironically ensuring that the Revival is presented in isolation from the very society it set out to transform (25). As a corrective to these limitations, Morris seeks not just to fill gaps in the historical record but to take a more varied approach to the study of the Revival in its fullness. In two essays paired under the heading "Growth, Renewal, and Society," he insists on the importance of scrutinizing popular sentiment and local factors when gauging the relative success Anglo-Catholics had in embedding their principles at the parochial level. He illustrates the point by looking closely at the conditions under which Tractarian clergy pursued their cause away from the common rooms of Oxford, in such burgeoning urban centers as Leeds and Croydon. In a second pair of essays under the title "Continental Perspectives," he then shifts his focus from the local to the international. Here [End Page 91] again he identifies a dimension of the Revival too often overlooked. Morris attributes such an omission to a wider tendency among British historians to regard religious developments in England as segregated from those in Europe. Yet in reviewing the travel writings produced by high churchmen during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, he identifies among them a considerable self-consciousness about the ways their own ideas and activities intersected with the realities of continental Catholicism. To some degree, the opposite was also the case, as Morris examines the rhetorical uses that rival parties within French Catholicism made of the Oxford Movement when promoting competing visions for their own Church. Having sought to escape the long shadow of Newman, Pusey, and Keble in his study of the High Church Revival, Morris returns to them in the book's final section. He does this, however, by first attending to one of their more neglected legacies, that of preaching. Commenting that "it is often forgotten that the Oxford Movement was not so much written as preached," Morris documents the importance its leading figures attached to parochial sermons as central to their cause (174). He also notes the impact of the Evangelical phase through which many of them had passed. This was evident in their use of expository techniques and the earnestness with which they promoted devotional practices from the pulpit. This willingness to explore influence and overlap in the thinking of Victorian High Churchmen enables Morris to trace intellectual legacies that...

Jeremy Morris, The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities

Jeremy Morris, <i>The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities</i>

British High Churchmen, Continental Church Tourism and the Roman Connection in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines accounts of continental church life to be found in the travel journals, letters and books of leading High Church Anglicans in the nineteenth century. It argues that these constitute a neglected source of evidence for understanding the interaction between continental church developments and the High Church revival in Anglicanism. It focuses particularly on accounts of travel in Catholic countries, and concludes that there are good reasons for assuming that experience of Catholic worship on the continent influenced High Church attitudes towards liturgical and ritual reform in Anglicanism.

From Private Counsellor to Public Church Politician – Three Female Expressions of Conservative, Urban Lutheranism in Western Sweden, 1810–1910

During the nineteenth century, the High Church revival tradition initiated by Henric Schartau (1757-1825) was widely spread and accepted in western Sweden. According to Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury, Schartau ‘had something of the character of Dr. Pusey in his relation to those who consulted him, but, in his position at Lund, and his general influence, he was perhaps more like his English contemporary, Charles Simeon (1759-1836), at Cambridge’. Wordsworth found great merit in his teaching, being ‘strong and spiritual, and without the defects of Moravian or Pietistic sentimentality’. During his Scandinavian journey in 1889, Randall Davidson characterized the followers of Schartau as a High Church party in their emphasis on private confession and their strict rules of conduct. On the other hand he found them to be zealous about the Sabbath, and preaching conversion in a quasi-Methodist way. Here, we shall study this movement through the examples of three women of urban culture. The Schartau tradition has been studied mainly with emphasis on its doctrines and clergy, and as a rural tradition connected to the unchanging values and structures of the old rural society. Through these examples of urban women, the general impact of the tradition is widened, and the emphasis is put on the changes in reception of the tradition among lay people in a changing society.

:Ronsard: Etude historique et litteraire. Vol. 5: Un Brasier sous la cendre

Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2005, pp. xii + 207, hb. £45.00, ISBN: 1843832089This book has to be judged at two levels. For the general and non-expert reader it is a fair, well-written and attractively-illustrated introduction to the topic, though some of us might quibble about the atrocious pun in the sub-title and question the extent to which the high church movement of the early seventeenth century really was a 'counter-Reformation'. For the more expert scholar it is a sad disappointment and this is a pity, since there is a good deal more to be researched and published about the grassroots response to the episcopal initiatives of the 1620s and 1630s. Graham Parry looks at church building and furnishing (five chapters), contemporary devotional literature (two chapters), church music and the role of antiquaries in promoting romantic visions of a pre-Reformation heritage (one chapter each). The last four chapters are undoubtedly the best since they cover those areas where Graham Parry, Professor of English at York University, has the greatest expertise. Whilst he tries to weld these elements together with the architectural and liturgical ones to provide a 'seamless robe' of high church belief and practice there is little doubt that the robustness of his thesis is challenged by the defects of the first five chapters. These suffer from no really new source material being used, some major omissions in the secondary works consulted, and a serious lack of contextualisation.Parry treats the seventeenth-century high church movement as if it was a purely English phenomenon led largely by a few bishops. There is no mention of Ireland, Scotland and Wales yet the movement (if it was one in the classic sense) cannot be understood without being seen in a British context. Whilst there is no doubt that there was much opposition to the ceremonial initiatives, though the vociferousness of the opposition probably exaggerated its true extent, it is at least arguable that without the attempt (by Scottish bishops) to impose the Laudian agenda on Scotland the religious fall-out of the 1640s might have been more modest, and the campaign for a limited episcopacy successful. Parry also sees this high church revival as something that was confined to the period between about 1615 and 1645. There is, however, growing evidence that, at the grassroots, opposition to Puritanism, and its attack on the Book of Common Prayer, was beginning to drive people, with or without an episcopal lead, into a greater appreciation of ceremonial. Where Parry is at his most misleading is in giving the impression that, with the execution of Laud and the abolition of episcopacy, the high church revival was a spent force after 1645. In fact, of course, as we now know from the work of John Spurr (not cited) and others, there was far more residual Anglican liturgical practice during the interregnum than had been realised and, although the 1662 religious settlement tried to be as comprehensive as possible, its failure to reconcile all the Puritans was to lead to a high church triumph by the 1670s. …