Alexander Forbes, Bishop of Brechin from 1847 to 1875, was the first adherent of the Oxford Movement to become a bishop. A leading example to many Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and in the Church of England, he also became well known to various Roman Catholics in Europe for his work for Catholic reunion in the 1860s. As bishop, and also incumbent of the Scottish Episcopalian congregation in the newly industrialized Dundee, Forbes developed a Tractarian slum ministry unique among Anglican bishops in Britain. It was the influence of the Oxford Movement during the early 1840s that shaped Forbes's social commitment towards the labouring poor, coupled with his inherited Tory paternalism. The Movement also imparted to Forbes a strong belief in the importance of dogmatic theology, as a remedy for the Church against the religious doubt and secularism of the mid-Victorian period. In 1857, the Tractarian dogmatics of his teaching initiated the Eucharistic controversy within the Episcopal Church and seriously divided Episcopalian High Churchmen and the Tractarians led by Forbes. In 1860 he was tried for heresy. Although censured, he continued to work for the defence of Scottish traditions in his Church, and for Anglican-Roman Catholic reunion. By the time of his untimely death in 1875, Forbes's place as a leader and example to many sympathizers of the Oxford Movement in Scotland and England was cemented.

This collection of essays seeks to redress the negative and marginalizing historiography of Pusey, and to increase current understanding of both Pusey and his culture. The essays take Pusey's contributions to the Oxford Movement and its theological thinking seriously; most significantly, they endeavour to understand Pusey on his own terms, rather than by comparison with Newman or Keble.

Scottish Episcopalianism has been neglected by historians. This new work looks at the various groups of Episcopalians in the nineteenth century, showing how their beliefs and attitudes responded to the new industrial and urban society. Never before have these groups been subject to historical examination. They include Highland Gaels; North-East crofters, farmers, and fisherfolk; urban Episcopalians; Episcopalian aristocrats; Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians. Rowan Strong examines also the place of Episcopalians in Scottish identity in the nineteenth century, an issue which is topical today.

Between 1700 and 1850 the Church of England was the among the most powerful and influential religious, social, and political forces in Britain. This was also a momentous time for the British Empire, during which it developed and then lost the North American colonies, extended into India, and settled the colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Public understanding of this expanding empire was influentially created and promulgated by the Church of England as a consequence of its missionary engagement with these colonies, and its role in providing churches for British settlers. Rowan Strong examines how that Anglican Christian understanding of the British Empire shaped the identities both of the people living in British colonies in North America, Bengal, Australia, and New Zealand during this period - including colonists, indigenous peoples, and Negro slaves - and of the English in Britain.

Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840 - c.1914 considers the religious component of the nineteenth-century British and Irish emigration experience. It examines the varieties of Christianity adhered to by most British and Irish emigrants in the nineteenth century, and consequently taken to their new homes in British settler colonies. Rowan Strong explores a dimension of this emigration history that has been overlooked by scholars-the development of an international emigrants' chaplaincy by the Church of England that ministered to Anglicans, Nonconformists, as well as others, including Scandinavians, Germans, Jews, and freethinkers. Using the sources of this emigrants' chaplaincy, Strong also makes extensive use of the shipboard diaries kept by emigrants themselves to give them a voice in this history. Using these sources to look at the British and Irish emigrant voyages to new homes, this study provides an analysis of the Christianity of these emigrants as they travelled by ship to British colonies. Their ships were floating villages that necessitated and facilitated religious encounters across denominational and even religious boundaries. It argues that the Church of England provided an emigrants' ministry that had the greatest longevity, breadth, and international structure of any Church in the nineteenth century. The book also examines the principal varieties of Christianity espoused by most British emigrants, and argues this religion was more central to their identity and, consequently, more significant in settler colonies than many historians have often hitherto accepted. In this way, the Church of England's emigrant chaplaincy made a major contribution to the development of a British world in settler colonies of the empire.