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.

In The Excommunication of Elizabeth I, Aislinn Muller examines the excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth I of England by the Roman Catholic Church, and its political afterlife during her reign. Muller shows that Elizabeth's excommunication was a crucial turning point for both Catholics and Protestants, one that irrevocably changed attitudes towards the queen, widened political participation and resistance, and posed a destabilising threat to her regime. The Excommunication of Elizabeth I demonstrates how this event exacerbated religious tensions in England's foreign and domestic politics, and how Elizabeth's conflict with the papacy shaped the development of anti-Catholicism in post-Reformation England.

Unique account of the affairs of the Church of England during a period of colossal change and controversy. This is the first comprehensive historical picture to be published of the life and work of the Church of England in the second half of the twentieth century. It traces the evolution of the Church in a period of immense upheaval, giving not only a detailed portrait of the work of its archbishops and bishops, but also exploring the Church's relationship with the State, the changes within its central institutions, and the response of the wider community to those changes. Placing the Church of England in its social context, Andrew Chandler examines the parochial reforms which arose in response to the realities of domestic and international migration, multi-culturalism and secularization. Other themes explored are the administration of property (particularly bishops' houses and the work of the cathedrals), 'ethical investment', and the recent crises which are still the subject of argument. Included among theseare the financial speculations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, from which flowed controversies about the reform of the Church of England itself and the nature of its relationship with the state. ANDREW CHANDLER is Director of the George Bell Institute, Birmingham, and Honorary Lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

This study examines the major themes and personalities which influenced the outbreak of a number of Evangelical secessions from the Church of England and Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the number of secessions was relatively small their influence was considerable, especially in highlighting in embarrassing fashion the tensions between the evangelical conversionist imperative and the principles of a national religious establishment.

"This book will make a profound difference for the church in this moment in history." - The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry Sometimes it takes disruption and loss to break us open and call us home to God. It's not surprising that a global pandemic and once-in-a-generation reckoning with white supremacy-on top of decades of systemic decline-have spurred Christians everywhere to ask who we are, why God placed us here and what difference that makes to the world. In this critical yet loving book, the author explores the American story and the Episcopal story in order to find out how communities steeped in racism, establishment, and privilege can at last fall in love with Jesus, walk humbly with the most vulnerable and embody beloved community in our own broken but beautiful way. The Church Cracked Open invites us to surrender privilege and redefine church, not just for the sake of others, but for our own salvation and liberation.

Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's six published novels against the background of a 'long 18th century' that stretched from the Restoration to the Regency. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. Giffin's focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation, and reflection on experience.

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.

Originally published in 1943, the aim of this concise book was 'to consider generally the theological principles involved in the relation of the Anglican Communion to non-episcopal churches, making clear the relevance of these principles to the issues raised in South India'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Anglican Communion and India.

Originally published in 1921 as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume contains two sermons by John Donne, delivered in 1621 and 1625, on the theme of death and resurrection. A short editorial introduction is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Donne and his religious writings.

Originally published in 1932 as part of the Cambridge Plain Texts series, this volume contains the substance of two Easter sermons by Anglican bishop and scholar Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626). The texts display the characteristic intelligence and clarity of Andrewes's sermons, qualities which have made them an abiding influence in both non-secular and secular contexts. An editorial introduction is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Andrewes and his works.

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.

The sermons of John Donne are seen to embody the tensions and pressure on public religious discourse 1621 - 25. This book considers the professional contribution of John Donne to an emerging homiletic public sphere in the last years of the Jacobean English Church (1621-25), arguing that his sermons embody the conflicts, tensions, and pressures on public religious discourse in this period; while they are in no way "typical" of any particular preaching agenda or style, they articulate these crises in their most complex forms and expose fault lines in the late JacobeanChurch. The study is framed by Donne's two most pointed contributions to the public sphere: his sermon defending James I's Directions to Preachers and his first sermon preached before Charles I in 1625. These two sermons emerge from the crises of controversy, censorship, and identity that converged in the late Jacobean period, and mark Donne's clearest professional interventions in the public debate about the nature and direction of the Church of England. In them, Donne interrogates the boundaries of the public sphere and of his conformity to the institutions, authorities, and traditions governing public debate in that sphere, modelling for his audience an actively engagedconformist identity. Professor JEANNE SHAMI teaches in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

The first general study of different attitudes to conformity and the political and cultural significance of the resulting consensus on what came to be regarded as orthodox. The different ways in which people expressed `conformity' or `nonconformity' to the 1559 settlement of religion in the English church have generally been treated separately by historians: Catholic recusancy and occasional conformity; Protestant ministerial subscription to the canons and articles of the Church of England; the innovations made by avant-garde conformist clerics to the early Stuart Church; and conformist support for the prayer book in the 1640s. This is the first book to look across the board at what was politically important about conformity, aiming to assess how different attitudes to conformity affected what was regarded as orthodox or true religion in the English Church: that is, the political and cultural significance of the ways in which one could obey or disobey the law governing the Church. The introduction places the articles in the context of the recent historiography of the late Tudor and early Stuart Church. PETER LAKE is Professor of History, Princeton University; MICHAEL QUESTIER is Senior Research Fellow, St Mary's Strawberry Hill. Contributors: ALEXANDRA WALSHAM, MICHAEL QUESTIER, PAULINE CROFT, KENNETH FINCHAM, THOMAS FREEMAN, PETER LAKE, ANDREW FOSTER, NICHOLAS TYACKE, DAVID COMO, JUDITH MALTBY.

This book challenges the domination of the institutional church as the overriding concern of nineteenth-century religious history by taking as its starting point the nature and expression of religious ideas outside the immediate sphere of the church within the wider arena of popular culture. It considers in detail how these beliefs formed part of a richly textured language of personal, familial, and popular identity in the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants of the London Borough of Southwark between c.1880 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The study highlights the persistence of patterns dismissed as alien to the industrial and urban environment. The interaction of folk idioms with institutional religious language and practice is also considered and urban popular religion is identified as a distinctive system of belief in its own right. This study also pioneers a methodology for exploring belief and interpreting it as a popular cultural phenomenon. A wide range of source materials are drawn on including oral history. Centrality is given to understanding the ways in which individuals expressed and communicated their religious ideas.

First full-length exploration of the role of the Anglican church in the development of colonial Australia. Anglican clergymen in Britain's Australian colonies in their earliest years faced very particular challenges. Lacking relevant training, experience or pastoral theology, these pioneer religious professionals not only ministered toa convict population unique in the empire, but had also to engage with indigenous peoples and a free-settler population struggling with an often inhospitable environment. This was in the context of a settler empire that was beingreshaped by mass migration, rapid expansion and a widespread decline in the political authority of religion and the confessional state, especially after the American Revolution. Previous accounts have caricatured such clerics as lackeys of the imperial authorities: "moral policemen", "flogging parsons". Yet, while the clergy did make important contributions to colonial and imperial projects, this book offers a more wide-ranging picture. It reveals them at times vigorously asserting their independence in relation both to their religious duties and to humanitarian concern, and shows them playing an important part in the new colonies' social and economic development, making a vital contribution to the emergence of civil society and intellectual and cultural institutions and traditions within Australia. It is only possible to understand the distinctive role that the clergy played in the light of their social origins, intellectual formation and professional networks in an expanding British World, a subject explored systematically here for the first time. Michael Gladwin is Lecturer in History at St Mark's National Theological Centre, Charles Sturt University, Canberra.

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.

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.

Described by Pope Pius XII as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas, the Swiss pastor and theologian, Karl Barth, continues to be a major influence on students, scholars and preachers today. Barth's theology found its expression mainly through his closely reasoned fourteen-part magnum opus, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Having taken over 30 years to write, the Church Dogmatics is regarded as one of the most important theological works of all time, and represents the pinnacle of Barth's achievement as a theologian.

Henry Venn (1796 1873) was an Anglican clergyman who, like his father and grandfather before him, was influential in the evangelical movement and campaigned for social reform, eradication of the slave trade, and better education and economic progress in the British colonies so as to enable them to become responsible for their own affairs. Venn was Secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1873, and alongside practical training and appointment of missionaries and ministers he spent time developing a theology of mission and principles for its practice. This book, published in its second edition in 1881, was edited by William Knight who had access to Venn's private journals and correspondence (from which he used substantial quotations), and met Venn's niece, who provided the portrait of her uncle used as the frontispiece of the book. The appendix contains some of Venn's own accounts of his early missionary work.

In Anglicanism Reimagined Andrew Shanks challenges all who are tempted to erect boundaries around their faith. Far more important than dogma and metaphysics, he argues, is the need to be open to all, and to engage with people who hold views at odds with our own. He shows how a commitment to this ideal can create fresh energy and new ways forward for the Church.

John Henry Newman (1801-90) was at the height of his position in the Church of England in 1839, when he first began to feel doubts concerning the claims of the Anglican Church. His editorship of the British Critic took up a great deal of time, but he was greatly encouraged by its increasing sales. Uncomfortable with his position as Vicar of St Mary's, Oxford Newman was considering giving up the position at the end of 1840. This volume covers a significant period in Newman's life, with a background of social ferment and political tension: the Corn Laws, Chartism, an inexperienced monarch, weak government, and foreign problems. Contemporary writers such as Carlyle attracted Newman's attention, and university reform was a live issue.

This book evaluates William Temple's theology and his pursuit of church unity. It exposes a number of paradoxes and conflicts that have generally gone under-appreciated in assessments of Temple. William Temple was one of the most outstanding leaders of the early ecumenical movement. In many ways his ecumenical efforts provided a paradigm others have looked to and followed. Through detailed analysis of primary sources, this study sheds light on several behind-the-scenes conflicts Temple experienced as he worked toward church unity. Edward Loane explores the foundation of Temple's work by analyzing the philosophy and theology that underpinned and fueled it. The book also exposes the tensions between Temple's denominational allegiance and his ecumenical convictions-a tension that, in some ways, undermined his work for reunion. This book reveals issues that contemporary Christians need to grapple with as they seek to further church unity.

Child Protection in the Church investigates whether, amidst publicised promises of change from church institutions and the introduction of "safe church" policies and procedures, reform is actually occurring within Christian churches towards safeguarding, using a case study of the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania, Australia. Through the use of interviews and document analysis, the book provides an insight into the attitudes and practices of "ordinary clergypersons" towards child sexual abuse and safeguarding to understand how safe ministry is understood and executed in everyday life in the Church, and to what extent it aligns with policy requirements and criminological best practice. It adopts organisational culture theory, the perspective used to explain how clerical culture enabled and concealed child sexual abuse in the Church to the present, in order to understand how clerical attitudes (cognition) and practice (conduct) today is being shaped by some of the same negative cultures. Underlying these cultures is misunderstandings of abuse causation, which are shown here to negatively shape clerical practice and, at times, compromise policy and procedural requirements. Providing an insight into the lived reality of safeguarding within churches, and highlighting the ongoing complexities of safe ministry, the book is a useful companion to students, academics, and practitioners of child protection and organisational studies, alongside clergy, church leaders, and those training for the ministry.

From 1824 to 1843 Newman was an active clergyman of the Chruch of England; during these years 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. Volume I was published in 1991; the series will consist of five volumes in all. This volume presents 58 previously unpublished sermons of John Henry Newman. Those preached in his early days as Vicar of St Mary's Oxford include a series of sermons devoted to Biblical history and contain some searching moral portraits of patriarchs and kings. Another series of sermons on the Epistle to the Romans with subsequent extensive revisions reveals the development of Newman's views on Justification and Faith leading up to the Lectures on Justification published in 1838. Of the sermons surviving from St Clement's, 1824-1826, when Newman held Evangelical views, the present volume contatins a number of practical sermons dealing with details of Christian living. These are followed by sermons devoted to Biblical theology in which Newman among other issues explores various aspects of the Jewish religion as presented in the Old Testament. As many of these sermons were revised and subsequently preached again, they are important for an undrestanding of the growth of Newman's spiritual theology.