A full scholarly edition of Dowsing's record of his and his deputies' activities in Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, 1643-4. During the Civil War, in late 1643 and 1644, the Suffolk puritan William Dowsing visited some hundred parish churches in Cambridgeshire, and about a hundred and fifty in Suffolk, smashing stained glass and other 'superstitious' imagery, ripping up monumental brass inscriptions, destroying altar rails and steps, and pulling down crucifixes and crosses. He dealt equally vigorously with the chapels of the Cambridge colleges, still fresh from their Laudian re-ordering. This modern edition of Dowsing's journal brings together, with commentary, the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk sections of his record of what he destroyed, never previously published together. Dowsing and his character and beliefs are set in context, with coverage of Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm; the work of Dowsing and his deputies in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk; Dowsing and Cambridge University, and the arguments at PembrokeCollege; evidence of destruction in the other counties of the Eastern Association; the text and history of the journal. Contributors: JOHN BLATCHLY, TREVOR COOPER, JOHN MORRILL, S. SADLER, ROBERT WALKER.

Complete in two volumes, the records of the Manx convocation cover the period from the 13th century to the present day. Largely unpublished hitherto, the materials contained in The Records of Convocation have been drawn from a variety of sources. They make available, for the first time, the fullest possible account of the convocations which stood at the very heart of the nation's life throughout most of the medieval and early modern period. The Records of Convocation contain the minutes of clergy synods, the legislation passed by them tax assessments imposed by the king onthe clergy, and accounts of the great debates about religious reformation and reform. The two volumes of records of the Manx convocation cover the period from 1229 to the present day, but they are of particular interest forthe eighteenth century, where they provide a remarkably full and detailed account of a vigorous period of ecclesiastical reform.

This book considers the work of Charles Taylor from a theological perspective, specifically relating to the topic of ecclesiology. It argues that Taylor and related thinkers such as John Milbank and Rowan Williams point towards an "Aesthetic Ecclesiology," an ecclesiology that values highly and utilizes the aesthetic in its self-understanding and practice. Jamie Franklin argues that Taylor's work provides an account of the breakdown in Modernity of the conceptual relationship of the immanent and the transcendent, and that the work of John Milbank and radical orthodoxy give a complementary account of the secular from a more metaphysical angle. Franklin also incorporates the work of Rowan Williams, which provides us a way of thinking about the Church that is rooted in a material and historical legacy. The central argument is that the reconnection of the transcendent and the immanent coheres with an understanding of the Church that incorporates the material reality of the sacraments, the importance of artistic beauty and craftsmanship, and the Church's status as historical, global, and eschatological. Secondly, the aesthetic provides the Church with a powerful apologetic: beauty cannot be reduced to the presuppositions of secular materialism, and so must be accounted for by recourse to transcendent categories.

What defines the Church of England? Are the Thirty-nine Articles of any relevance today? Anglicanism, according to Jim Packer, possesses "the truest, wisest and potentially richest heritage in all Christendom" with the Thirty-nine Articles at its heart. They catch the substance and spirit of biblical Christianity superbly well, and also provide and excellent model of how to confess the faith in a divided Christendom. In this Latimer Study, Packer aims to show how the sixteenth century Articles should be viewed in the twenty-first century, and how they can enrich the faith of Anglicans in general and of Anglican evangelicals in particular. He demonstrates why the Articles must once again be given a voice within the church, not merely as an historical curiosity but an authoritative doctrinal statement. A thought-provoking appendix by Roger Beckwith offers seventeen Supplementary Articles, addressing theological issues which have come into prominence since the original Articles were composed. This booklet, first published more than twenty years ago, remains much in demand and as timely as ever. It has proved on of the most popular and enduring Latimer Studies, and is now issued in a second edition. Jim Packer is Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College, Vancouver. Amongst his many best-selling books are 'Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God' (1961), 'Knowing God' (1973), 'Keep in Step with the Spirit' (1984), and 'Among God's Giants' (1991). Roger Beckwith was librarian and warden of Latimer House, Oxford, for more than thirty years. His recent books include 'Elders in Every City' (2003) and 'Calendar, Chronology and Worship' (2005).

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.

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.

In the year 1581, after four days of debating six leading Anglican divines at the Tower of London, Jesuit Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was put to death because he would not deny his faith. In 1970, the martyred Campion was canonized a saint. A Jesuit Challenge is a book-length edition of previously unpublished Catholic manuscript accounts of those debates.. "As corrective historical documents, these Catholic manuscripts reveal a quite different picture of Campion and his opponents from that represented in the government's published version, and thus offer us a fuller and more balanced understanding of what actually took place. In addition to their historical value, the Catholic manuscripts also include lively exchanges between Campion and his opponents, and provide humanizing details about them. As personalized documents they capture the dramatic flavor of a series of spirited debates dealing with the major theological issues separating Protestant England from Catholic Rome in Elizabeth's reign.. "Together with a transcription of the Catholic manuscript accounts, Holleran supplies a general historical introduction to the debates, a detailed description of the manuscripts, brief supplementary commentaries about the debates, and a full set of explanatory notes.

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.

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.

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most influential books in history. First published in the reign of Edward VI, in 1549, it was a product of the English Reformation following the break with Rome. For nearly five centuries, it has formed the order of worship for established Christianity in England. More listeners have heard these prayers, it is said, than the soliloquies of Shakespeare. As British imperial ambitions spread, the Book of Common Prayer became the primary instrument (at least as much as the King James Bible) of English culture, firstly in Ireland in 1551. When the Puritans fled to America in 1620 it was to escape the discipline imposed by of the Book of Common Prayer, yet the book came to embody official religion in America before and after Independence, and is still in use. Today it is a global book: it was the first book printed in many languages, from north America to southern Africa, to the Indian sub-continent. In this Very Short Introduction Brian Cummings tells the fascinating history of the Book of Common Prayer, and explains why it is easily misunderstood. Designed in the 1540s as a radical Protestant answer to Catholic "superstition", within a century (during the English Civil Wars) radical Christians regarded the Book of Common Prayer as itself "superstitious" and even (paradoxically) "Papist". Changing in meaning and context over time, the Book of Common Prayer has acted as a cultural symbol, affecting the everyday conduct of life as much as the spiritual, and dividing conformity from non-conformity, in social terms as well as religious, from birth to marriage to death. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This volume brings together a diverse group of Reformation scholars to examine the life, work, and enduring significance of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury from 1560 to 1571. A theologian and scholar who worked with early reformers in England such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, and Thomas Cranmer, Jewel had a long-lasting influence over religious culture and identity. The essays included in this book shed light on often-neglected aspects of Jewel's work, as well as his standing in Elizabethan culture not only as a priest but as a leader whose work as a polemicist and apologist played an important role in establishing the authority and legitimacy of the Elizabethan Church of England. The contributors also place Jewel in the wider context of gender studies, material culture, and social history. With its inclusion of a short biography of Jewel's early life and a complete list of his works published between 1560 and 1640, Defending the Faith is a fresh and robust look at an important Reformation figure who was recognized as a champion of the English Church, both by his enemies and by his fellow reformers. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Andrew Atherstone, Ian Atherton, Paul Dominiak, Alice Ferron, Paul A. Hartog, Torrance Kirby, W. Bradford Littlejohn, Aislinn Muller, Joshua Rodda, and Lucy Wooding.

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.

First full-length study of the life and career of John Henry Williams, one of the most fascinating figures of the eighteenth-century church. John Henry Williams was the vicar of Wellesbourne in south Warwickshire from 1778 until his death some fifty years later. A dedicated pastor, displaying an `enlightened and liberal' outlook, his career illuminates the Church of England's condition in the period, and also a clergyman's place in local society. However, he was not merely a country parson. A `political clergyman', Williams engaged fervently in both provincial and national political debate, denouncing the war with revolutionary France between 1793 and 1802, and published a series of forceful sermons condemning the struggle on Christian principles. To opponents, he appeared insidious and blinkered, but to admirers he was 'a sound divine, and not a less sound politician'. This book, the first to examine Williams' career in full, is a detailed, vivid, and sometimes moving, study of a man who occupies an honorable and significant position in the Church of England's history and in the history of British peace campaigning. Dr COLIN HAYDON teaches in the Department of History at the University of Winchester.

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. -- .

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.

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.