During the pontificate of Benedict xvi, Anglicans and Roman Catholics with consciousness of their shared nineteenth-century past observed with consternation the way in which broken ‘threads' from the 1800s were taken up again, in an effort to weave a bond of unity between those ecclesial communities. Mark Chapman's well-researched and clearly argued monograph provides essential historical background for understanding why these recent efforts have proven as unproductive as their nineteenth-century predecessors. Yet the 2011 establishment of the ‘Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham’ in England, and similar developments in other parts of the Anglican Communion, are not the overt subject of this book. Covering the period from 1833 (which marked the start of the Oxford Movement) to 1882 (when hopeful dialogue between certain Anglicans and Old Catholics faded), Chapman sets out to explain why this ‘pre-history’ of ecumenism struggled from the beginning. He singles out differing understandings of ‘catholicity’ and divergent forms of ‘historical imagination’ as the stony ground on which these nineteenth-century seeds of ecumenism sprouted, withered and died.

I am convinced by the case that Chapman marshals for ‘catholicity’ and ‘historical imagination’ as core challenges to the success of these early ecumenical endeavours. He demonstrates effectively the ways in which Pusey and the (Catholic) Newman spoke past one another when exchanging letters, private and public, on the subject of catholicity and in critiquing truth claims based on appeals to the Christian past. He explains how these efforts became further complicated by Pope Pius ix's ex cathedra definition of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility (1870). These Roman Catholic ‘developments' of dogmatic teaching created insuperable barriers to arguments for ‘catholicity’ grounded in appeals to the ancient Church or patristic authority. Chapman concludes with an examination of post-conciliar efforts to build bonds between the Churches of the Anglican Communion, Orthodox Christians and ‘Old Catholics' who rejected papal infallibility, and analyses why these efforts faded, as politics and the interests of their religious leaders dissipated the energy for ecumenical initiatives. This narrative should become essential reading for anyone seeking to understand early efforts at ecumenical dialogue.

However, a key reason for my enthusiasm for this book does not rest on its explicit arguments. It is the implicit evidence of the central importance of the legacy of the Oxford Movement – both for Anglicans and Roman Catholics – that has me coming back again and again to this text. Chapman's account helps to explain why these early ecumenical efforts by Anglicans gained momentum, and the way in which their progress was blocked or thwarted by key Oxford Movement converts to Roman Catholicism. Indeed, most of this book could be recast as a narrative tracing the ongoing struggles between former brothers in a common cause – to restore the Catholic character of the Anglican tradition.

This is not a complaint, or an argument that Chapman should have written a different book. Instead it alerts scholars to the work that is yet to be done concerning the influence of the Oxford Movement and its chief protagonists long after 1845 (or 1851), and suggests that the debates of the Oxford Movement era are a theological legacy that binds the Anglican and the Roman Catholic communions together.

In some respects the beatification of John Henry Newman in 2010 re-energised enthusiasm in Rome – and among certain Anglicans and Roman Catholics – for the failed strategies of that nineteenth-century legacy. The divergent forms of ‘historical imagination’ that Chapman explores in his book continue to challenge both communions. The fact that the ‘development of doctrine’ remains closely identified with John Henry Newman – whose conversion rested on that reimagining of the Christian past – should have long ago drawn historians and theologians into a closer examination of the historiographical metanarratives employed in this period, how they aided individuals and communions in their quest to understand the faith, and why their use divided and alienated as well.

As Chapman has so ably demonstrated, the polemical use of these divergent ways of understanding the Christian past, and the differing conceptualisations of ‘catholicity’ that resulted, took on a curious – and innovated – intensity during the initial period of the Oxford Movement. The defection of so many of the movement's key members to the Church of Rome did not end the struggle, but shifted the battle to a larger context. Archbishop Henry Manning of Westminster and the papal chamberlain George Talbot pressed a neo-ultramontane agenda in the late 1860s; Edward Pusey, Alexander Forbes and Henry Liddon sought to make common cause with continental Gallicans; and Newman's quest for a middle way made him a lightning rod for controversy. Chapman's work reminds us that we should labour more diligently to understand why this ‘pre-history’ of ecumenism failed to bear fruit; it suggests that this Oxford Movement legacy is a cautionary tale, rather than an example to model in our own times.