The Oxford Movement transformed the nineteenth-century Church of England with a renewed conception of itself as a spiritual body. Initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, it was a response to threats to the established Church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, Whig and Radical politicians, and the predominant evangelical ethos - what Newman called 'the religion of the day'. The Tractarians believed they were not simply addressing difficulties within their national Church, but recovering universal principles of the Christian faith. To what extent were their beliefs and ideals communicated globally? Was missionary activity the product of the movement's distinctive principles? Did their understanding of the Church promote, or inhibit, closer relations among the churches of the global Anglican Communion? This volume addresses these questions and more with a series of case studies involving Europe and the English-speaking world during the first century of the Movement.

The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement reflects the rich and diverse nature of scholarship on the Oxford Movement and provides pointers to further study and new lines of enquiry. Part I considers the origins and historical context of the Oxford Movement. These chapters include studies of the legacy of the seventeenth-century 'Caroline Divines' and of the nature and influence of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century High Church movement within the Church of England. Part II focuses on the beginnings and early years of the Oxford Movement, paying particular attention to the people, the distinctive Oxford context, and the ecclesiastical controversies that inspired the birth of the Movement and its early intellectual and religious expressions. In Part III the theme shifts from early history of the Oxford Movement to its distinctive theological developments. This section analyses Tractarian views of religious knowledge and the notion of 'ethos'; the distinctive Tractarian views of tradition and development; and Tractarian ecclesiology, including ideas of the via media and the 'branch theory' of the Church. The years of crisis for the Oxford Movement between 1841 and 1845, including John Henry Newman's departure from the Church of England, are covered in Part IV. Part V then proceeds to a consideration of the broader cultural expressions and influences of the Oxford Movement. Part VI focuses on the world outside England and examines the profound impact of the Oxford Movement on Churches beyond the English heartland, as well as on the formation of a world-wide Anglicanism. In Part VII, the contributors show how the Oxford Movement remained a vital force in the twentieth century, finding expression in the Anglo-Catholic Congresses and in the Prayer Book Controversy of the 1920s within the Church of England. The Handbook draws to a close, in Part VIII, with a set of more generalised reflections on the impact of the Oxford Movement, including chapters on the judgement of the converts to Roman Catholicism over the Movement's loss of its original character, on the spiritual life and efforts of those who remained within the Anglican Church to keep Tractarian ideas alive, on the engagement of the Movement with Liberal Protestantism and Liberal Catholicism, and on the often contentious historiography of the Oxford Movement which continued to be a source of church party division as late as the centennial commemorations of the Movement in 1933. An 'Afterword' chapter assesses the continuing influence of the Oxford Movement in the world Anglican Communion today, with special references to some of the conflicts and controversies that have shaken Anglicanism since the 1960s.

This study breaks new ground in setting the Oxford Movement in its historical and theological context. Peter Nockles conducts a rigorous examination of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival in the Church of England, and shows that in many respects this revival had been anticipated by a revival of the Anglican High Church tradition in the preceding seventy years. No other study offers such a comprehensive treatment of the extent of divergence, as well as of continuity, between the Oxford Movement and the older High Churchmanship preceding it.

The Oxford Movement transformed the nineteenth-century Church of England with a renewed conception of itself as a spiritual body. Initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, it was a response to threats to the established Church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, Whig and Radical politicians, and the predominant evangelical ethos - what Newman called 'the religion of the day'. The Tractarians believed they were not simply addressing difficulties within their national Church, but recovering universal principles of the Christian faith. To what extent were their beliefs and ideals communicated globally? Was missionary activity the product of the movement's distinctive principles? Did their understanding of the Church promote, or inhibit, closer relations among the churches of the global Anglican Communion? This volume addresses these questions and more with a series of case studies involving Europe and the English-speaking world during the first century of the Movement.