Stephen Prickett's book is part of a recent trend in intellectual history of which Schneewind's The invention of autonomy (1998) and Dixon's The invention of altruism (2008) are also representative. Prickett claims that ‘the history of words is often a window into the history of thought’. The choice of word and of historical period in the book under review could hardly be more felicitous: tradition, after a long eclipse from the intellectual horizon, loomed large in the thought of the long nineteenth century. Cartesio-Kantian rationalism had brought about an epistemological fracture between reason and extramental reality, blocking deeply felt desires of direct access to nature and the transcendental. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in contrast with the Enlightenment image of tradition as one of progressive deterioration (the pure spring water muddied in the course of the river), tradition tends now to be viewed as the record of a progressive clarification of man's obscure and confused early universe of myth and fable by the light of knowledge (accessed also by means of sentiment and the imagination) and by divine revelation. The first chapters of the book offer some general considerations about the character of tradition, viewed as an appropriation of the past intended to authenticate the present and to help understand it, while serving as guide to the future by providing the key to recognising the direction of history. Prickett wonders, however, to what extent the past, when explored in depth, tends to sustain or undermine the original expectations of early tradition's framers. In the second and larger section of the book, Prickett explores the concept of tradition in different intellectual contexts, surveying several authors' understanding of it: Herder, Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Keble, Newman, Arnold and Eliot in particular. Herder's influence on Romanticism and on the creation of national identities makes him central to any study of tradition in this period. He regarded it as the memory and inherited wisdom of a national race, conceived as an organic being with distinct personality, expressing itself in a proper culture, language and institutions, the result of the interplay between the ‘genius’ of the race and the accidents of its history. On this side of the Channel, although Coleridge contributed to spreading Herder's ideas, it is not easy to gauge the depth of their influence. Coleridge's own vision of tradition included his concept of clerisy: the existence of a network of clergy, teachers and cultural leaders whose function would be to preserve the treasures of past ages and to disseminate them among the whole community. Within that context, ‘poetic imagination’ would serve to identify the true outlines of tradition and also guide its development. In later chapters, Prickett goes on to show how Coleridge's ideas influenced such diverse thinkers as Arnold and Eliot. Coleridge's influence on the Oxford Movement is, however, a more contentious subject. It might perhaps have been desirable at this point to have treated the peculiar characteristics of Christian tradition (and the different approaches to it) at greater length. Within Tractarianism, Keble conceived religious tradition as a complete and accurate deposit, requiring nothing but fidelity in the transmitter. Newman, however, would gradually move towards a developmental concept of tradition. On the way, he encountered a difficulty barring his progress: how to distinguish between true and false developments? Prickett considers that he solved this conundrum by having recourse to the Coleridgian concept of the imagination. There is much to be said in this respect. Recent research, however, suggests that Keble and Newman had early rejected the idea that poetic imagination, with independence from the poet's moral ethos, might offer privileged access to the divine; moral rectitude, they thought, was the sole guarantee of present and future doctrinal orthodoxy. In the end, Newman would reach the conclusion that even those developments effected under the guidance of the right moral ethos needed the hallmark of a divinely instituted doctrinal authority certifying them as true developments.

Stephen Prickett ranges across a wide intellectual landscape. He covers it at times with broad brush-strokes; at other occasions, with a fine eye for detail. His book is an important contribution to the intellectual history of the long nineteenth century and invites further research into the topic.