Hannah More (1745-1833), the daughter of an obscure schoolmaster, began her working life as a teacher at her sisters' school in Bristol. In her thirtieth year she came to London to persuade the actor-manager David Garrick to put on one of her plays. Her subsequent career as playwright, bluestocking, Evangelical reformer, political writer, and novelist turned her into one of the most influential women of her day. Few of either sex could rival the range of her achievements. This book is the first full-length biography of More for fifty years and the first to make extensive use of her unpublished correspondence. The new material shows her to have been a more lively and attractive character than previous stereotypes have suggested. It also reinforces the growing perception that she was a complex and contradictory figure: a conservative who was accused of political and religious subversion, an ostensible antifeminist who opened up new opportunities for female activism. Recent work on the Georgian period indicates that, in spite of their exclusion from formal power, women played a vital role in the ordering of politics and society. The remarkable career of Hannah More adds weight to the argument that women (notwithstanding the repressive rhetoric of the conduct books) were increasingly active outside the allegedly private sphere of the home. More's long life began just before the last Jacobite rising, and ended at the dawn of the railway age. This book argues that she should be viewed as essentially forward-looking. When one of her early biographers dedicated his book to the young Queen Victoria, it was a fitting tribute to More's significance. In her energetic campaigning, her moral fervour, her belief in Britain's providential destiny, Hannah More anticipated many of the characteristics of Victorianism. She was one of the creators of the new age.

There is an immensely rich tradition of writing from the Anglican tradition that has helped to form the spirituality and theology of the contemporary church. This major new work draws together the writings of most of the major writers from the sixteenth century to the present day who have contributed to this development. Each writer is introduced briefly, and then extracts from major works are reproduced, with clear guides to the source texts from which the material has been drawn.

The two Books of Homilies, along with the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, have been basic documents of the Church of England, and are valuable in showing Anglican doctrine during the Reformation, as well as being of considerable historical importance. The first book, published in 1547, early in the reign of Edward VI, was partly though not entirely the work of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and the inspiration appears to have been his. This was intended to raise the standards of preaching by offering model sermons covering particular doctrinal and pastoral themes, either to be read (particularly by unlicensed clergy) or to provide preachers with additional material for their own sermons. The success of the venture led Bishop Edmund Bonner, who had contributed to Cranmer's book, to produce his own Book of Homilies in 1555, during the reign of Queen Mary. The Second Book of Homilies, published in 1563 (and in a revised form in 1571) appears in turn to have been influenced both by Cranmer's and by Bonner's books. The present edition brings together the all three books, edited and introduced by Revd Dr Gerald Bray.

Walton's Lives, which include those of John Donne and George Herbert, helped establish modern biography. A major influence on Boswell and Johnson, Walton's achievement has usually been assessed - and criticized - in relation only to the developed ethic he helped to establish. This book is the first extended study of the process by which Walton transformed the type-dominated conventions he inherited into the particularized individual portrait we take to be central not only to biography but to the novel.

This book is a revised edition of a classic work of scholarship, with new Foreword, Appendix, and updated Index and bibliography. Dr Yates discusses the liturgical arrangement of Anglican churches in the period between the Reformation and the Oxford Movement, challenging many widely held assumptions and prejudices.

Rowan Williams has served as Archbishop of Canterbury through one of the most turbulent periods in the history of global Anglicanism. He has also faced numerous challenges within the Church of England. How has he coped with the huge issues of a divided church and a rapidly changing world? What has he done as archbishop when parts of the church are campaigning for an 'inclusive church' with gay-partnered clergy and women bishops, while others are determined to resist these developments? How has he related to other Christian traditions and those of other faiths? What has he said about the Iraq war, the financial crash, Sharia Law? In this fascinating assessment, Andrew Goddard surveys Archbishop Rowan's time in office. Goddard draws on Williams- speeches and writings, as well as interviews and comments from those who have worked with him. This book shows the pressures faced by an academic scholar who only took on this demanding role because he believed it to be God's call. What sort of leader has he been, and what sort of legacy does he leave for his successor, Justin Welby?

Historians of the Christian Social movement in the Church of England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have paid little attention to its relation to the Liberal Party. But from about 1886 to 1918 there were some socially concerned churchmen who firmly supported the Liberal Party in its new role as an agency of social reform and tried to exercise influence as a group, taking Henry Scott Holland as leader and inspirer. Edward Lee Hicks, who succeeded Edward King as bishop of Lincoln in 1910, was a distinctive churchman associated with this group. He was an outstanding classical scholar who combined a long pastoral experience with active support of movements for temperance reform, improved housing, women's education and enfranchisement, and international peace. This study shows how he developed these social concerns under the influence of such friends as John Ruskin and C. P. Scott, and how he was drawn from his radical liberalism to the support of the incipient Labour Party without becoming a theoretical socialist.

This book is a study of the Anglican Church in the Jacobean period, a time of central importance in English religious and political history. By looking at official words instead of official deeds, the author challenges the recent revisionist position, made by both Anglican apologists and historians, that the reign of James I was an era of religious consensus and political moderation. Analyzing sermons preached and then ordered into print by the king, the book demonstrates that the Jacobean claim to "moderation" and the pursuit of a so-called "via media" were rhetorical strategies aimed at isolating Elizabethan-style Calvinist reformers and alienating their supporters.
Utilizing sources drawn from history, literature, and religion, this interdisciplinary work combines rhetorical and historical analysis in discussing the major religious and political issues of the period: the union with Scotland, the Gunpowder Plot, the Oath of Allegiance controversy, and the forceful elaboration of anti-Puritanism and ceremonialism in the Church of England. Throughout, the author presents evidence for her claim that the discourse of government is the substance of government.

Deals with all aspects of the role and responsibility of being a Churchwarden. The aim of this book is to encourage Churchwardens to approach their role with confidence, and with the knowledge that much can be achieved in their term of office. The C of E has 30,000 churchwardens, of which several thousand are elected for the first time every year. "Churchwardens are the great unsung heroes of the Church of England" says the Rt Rev Michael Ipgrave, Bishop of Lichfield, in his foreword to this book. "The great strength of Matthew Clements' writing is that he sets the sometimes dry duties and responsibilities of wardenship within the warm context of human lives lived joyously and devotedly in the service of Christ and his beloved Church. All will find in this book practical wisdom, shrewd commonsense and indefatigable commitment to a noble cause." The role of the churchwarden in the Anglican Church has not changed much over the years, although perhaps the respectability and authority of the role has diminished. It is a responsible and important role which, if done conscientiously, will augment the efforts of the clergy and encourage the congregation, thus strengthening the Body of the church. This book is for all current churchwardens as well as all those (sometimes reluctant) volunteers who are considering the possibility of becoming churchwardens in the future. Additionally, it will be useful for anyone else in the church who is able to admit to themselves that they don't really know what the churchwarden actually does. Told with gentle humour based on solid experience and pragmatism, Matthew Clements details the extensive boundaries of a churchwarden's responsibilities and gives many examples from his own experience of just what the job can entail. There are many pitfalls that await the unwary, and there are many joys as well.

David Dowland presents one of the few major studies of Anglican theological training during its formative period - the nineteenth century. It describes the innovation of training large numbers of middle-class and lower-middle-class men for the ministry, and considers the conflict between this development and the traditional ideals of the Church of England.

In this comprehensive overview of the Anglican Church, theologian J. I. Packer showcases the hallmarks of "authentic Anglicanism" and its rich history while casting a vision for the future.

F. D. Maurice (1805-72) was one of the most controversial thinkers of mid-nineteenth century Britain. Born a Unitarian, he left Cambridge without a degree rather than compromise his principles. As an Anglican theologian, he uneasily combined Unitarian ideas with the teaching of the Establishment. Sacked from King's College, London, for questioning popular teaching about everlasting punishment, he led a movement to improve working men's education. Yet although Maurice came from a Unitarian family and counted leading Unitarians as his friends, their influence on his work has never been seriously examined. The purpose of this new book is to look at his life and teaching in the light of Unitarianism. Maurice's faith had a distinctly Christological emphasis, but he continued to value his Unitarian heritage. His concern with the Fatherhood of God and the dignity of the human race owes much to his family background. Dr. Young's study opens with a compact history of Unitarianism during the lifetimes of F. D. Maurice and his father, a Unitarian minister. A series of biographical sketches draws on hitherto unpublished material to set Maurice's work in its historic context. Final chapters compare the central themes of his theology with the teaching of his Unitarian contemporaries.

The essays in this book mark the tercentenary of the birth of Bishop Joseph Butler, the leading theologian of the Church of England in the 18th century and also an important moral philosopher. Thirteen distinguished contributors cover the full range of Butler's theological and philosophical writings--from his Christian apologetic against the deists to his discussion of the role of conscience in the moral agent--as well as setting them in their historical context and suggesting their relevance to contemporary religious and philosophical issues. At a time when there is a renewed interest in Butler's thought as well as in the theological positions he was opposing, it is both timely and appropriate that these detailed studies should not be made available. The Bishop of Durham has written a Foreword introducing the volume.

For some thirty years before the First World War, the Church of England maintained a mission of help to the Assyrian Church of the East (popularly known as the Nestorian church) in its then homeland, a corner of eastern Turkey and north-western Persia. The Mission had a controversial history. At home, not everyone could appreciate the rationale of a mission which was to aid an obscure and heretical body and which strictly forbade any conversions from this body to the Anglican church. In the field, the missionaries had to do battle with xenophobic governments, with rival American and French missions, and with the Assyrians themselves, whose confidence proved difficult to gain. In some respects the Mission was unsuccessful, but it had notable accomplishments, especially in scholarship and in ecumenical diplomacy. Besides being the history of a Victorian missionary society, the present study deals in some detail with the history of the Assyrians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - both as the survival of an ancient church with hierarchy, liturgy, and theological formulas, and as an ethnic minority in the Middle East. Illustrations and maps enhance the value of the book as a source for the history of the time and place. This is the first study of the relations between the church of England and the Church of the East, and is based on largely unpublished documents in English and Syriac.

From 1824 to 1843 Newman was an active clergyman of the Church of England; during this time, he entered the pulpit about 1,270 times. Newman published 217 of the sermons which he wrote during these years; a further 246 sermons survive in manuscript in the Archives of the Birmingham Oratory, some only as fragments but the majority as full texts. These sermons will be published in a series of five volumes, the aim being to transcribe them accurately, with sufficient editorial apparatus for the theological development within them to be understood, and their historical situation to be clear. The forty-three sermons contained in Volume I reveal Newman's attitude to his pastoral charge, his theology of liturgy based on the Book of Common Prayer; his gradual acceptance of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as a substitute for his earlier belief in conversion as understood by the Evangelicals; the eventual supremacy of the Eucharist in his own spiritual life; his growing reserve about preaching on the Atonement; his faith in the divinity of Christ the Mediator; and finally, his understanding of the Church as the remedial and mediatorial kingdom of Christ on earth.

This is a study of the rise of English Arminianism and the growing religious division in the Church of England during the decades before the Civil War of the 1640s. The widely accepted view has been that the rise of puritanism was a major cause of the war; Nicholas Tyacke argues that it was Arminianism - suspect not only because it sought the overthrow of Calvinism but also because it was embraced by, and imposed by, an increasingly absolutist Charles I - which heightened the religious and political tensions of the period. Almost all English Protestants were members of the established church. Consequently, what was a theological dispute about rival views of the Christian faith assumed wider significance as a struggle for control of that church. When Arminianism triumphed, Puritan opposition to the established church was rekindled. Politically, Charles and his advisers also feared the consequences of Calvinist predestinarian teaching as being incompatible with `civil government in the commonwealth'. For this paperback edition, Dr Tyacke has written a new Foreword taking into account recent scholarly debate on the subject.

This book looks at how that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church, coped with mass migration from Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book details the great array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the Church with the men and money that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and a common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding 'British world'. It also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. One of the book's key aims is to show how the colonial Church should be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The colonial Church was an institution that played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and State. -- .

Compiled originally as a supplement to the Church Hymnary Third Edition, this work caters for a variety of tastes and styles. Alongside favourite classic hymns and modern choruses, it contains African spirituals and Taize and Iona chants.

Attitudes towards divorce have changed considerably over the past two centuries. As society has moved away from a Biblical definition of marriage as an indissoluble union, to that of an individual and personal relationship, secular laws have evolved as well. Using unpublished sources and previously inaccessible private collections, Holmes explores the significant role the Church of England has played in these changes, as well as the impact this has had on ecclesiastical policies. This timely study will be relevant to ongoing debates about the meaning and nature of marriage, including the theological doctrines and ecclesiastical policies underlying current debates on same-sex marriage.

An important contribution to the history of 19th-century English liberalism and post-reform politics, this book argues that the Whig party was dominated by a new generation of politicians after 1832 who actively sponsored legislation designed to transform the constitution from an exclusively Anglican document to a non-sectarian, yet Christian one. Brent demonstrates that this concern for religious toleration and the preoccupation with ecclesiastical issues were central to Whiggery in this period, and that the questions raised during these years were posed only to dominate Victorian politics for the generation to come.

A scholarly edition of The London Diaries of William Nicolson, Bishop of Carlisle, 1702-18 by Clyve Jones and Geoffrey Holmes. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

John Henry Newman is often described as 'the Father of the Second Vatican Council'. He anticipated most of the Council's major documents, as well as being an inspiration to the theologians who were behind them. His writings offer an illuminating commentary both on the teachings of the Council and the way these have been implemented and interpreted in the post-conciliar period. This book is the first sustained attempt to consider what Newman's reaction to Vatican II would have been. As a theologian who on his own admission fought throughout his life against theological liberalism, yet who pioneered many of the themes of the Council in his own day, Newman is best described as a conservative radical who cannot be classed simply as either a conservative or liberal Catholic. At the time of the First Vatican Council, Newman adumbrated in his private letters a mini-theology of Councils, which casts much light on Vatican II and its aftermath. The leading Newman scholar, Ian Ker, argues that Newman would have greatly welcomed the reforms of the Council, but would have seen them in the light of his theory of doctrinal development, insisting that they must certainly be understood as changes but changes in continuity rather than discontinuity with the Church's tradition and past teachings. He would therefore have endorsed the so-called 'hermeneutic of reform in continuity' in regard to Vatican II, a hermeneutic first formulated by Pope Benedict XVI and subsequently confirmed by his successor, Pope Francis, and rejected both 'progressive' and ultra-conservative interpretations of the Council as a revolutionary event. Newman believed that what Councils fail to speak of is of great importance, and so a final chapter considers the kind of evangelization-a topic notably absent from the documents of Vatican II-Newman thought appropriate in the face of secularization.

Our major sources for the life and death of Thomas Becket are rigorously examined in this major new book. In the wake of his murder in December 1170, an extraordinarily large number of Lives of Thomas Becket were produced.They provide an invaluable witness to the life and death of Thomas and the dramatic events in which he was involved, but they are also works of great literary value, more complex and sophisticated than has been recognised. This book, the first to be devoted to the biographers and their works, consists of an examination the individual Lives,followed by an analysis of the biographers' treatment of the major themes in Thomas's life - conversion, conflict, trial, exile and martyrdom - in the light of contemporary hagiographical, historical and theological writing and canon law. It raises points of major significance for the study of intellectual and literary life in the central middle ages and provides an important reassessment of the Becket conflict and Thomas Becket himself. Dr MICHAEL STAUNTON is Lecturer in Medieval History, School of History and Archives, University College Dublin.

Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the archbishop of Canterbury who guided England through the early Reformation-and Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography of him for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere. Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to annul the royal marriage to Catherine, and how new connections led him to embrace the evangelical faith of the European Reformation and, ultimately, to become archbishop of Canterbury. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer guided the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive versions of the English prayer book. MacCulloch skillfully reconstructs the crises Cranmer negotiated, from his compromising association with three of Henry's divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, and his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as queen to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In jail after Mary's accession, Cranmer nearly repudiated his achievements, but he found the courage to turn the day of his death into a dramatic demonstration of his Protestant faith. From this vivid account Cranmer emerges a more sharply focused figure than before, more conservative early in his career than admirers have allowed, more evangelical than Anglicanism would later find comfortable. A hesitant hero with a tangled life story, his imperishable legacy is his contribution in the prayer book to the shape and structure of English speech and through this to the molding of an international language and the theology it expressed.

Richard Trahair shares an insider's experience of the wide-ranging 'goings on' in a large Church of England diocese in the south of England from the 1980s. As estate manager - Diocesan Property Secretary - for more than thirty years, he reflects on the astonishing range of characters he worked alongside, and the diverse buildings and land for which he was responsible. Richard delves into the nature of a parsonage house, its parish loyalties, and the keen controversy over selling the grand old houses and replacing them with smaller ones so that the impoverished clergy and their families can at least keep warm. Both people and places were a heady mix of the delightful, the worthy, the curious and the downright eccentric. With encounters recounted that range from wacky and hilarious, to thought-provoking and historical, catch a glimpse into the life of a twenty-nine-year-old surveyor in a diocesan office dominated by retired military gentlemen, rattling around in a huge 15th century former city workhouse, as he grows into his role.