This is the second volume in a new series, Anglican and Episcopal Theology and History. The author is a member of the distinguished international editorial board whose editor-in-chief is Paul Avis. Jeremy Morris has written extensively on modern church history, especially that of the Church of England, and so is well qualified to write an up-to-date scholarly narrative tracing the different phases of Anglican High Churchmanship which would have filled an undoubted gap. Sadly, despite the title, this is not his aim here, though a further volume integrating Anglo-Catholicism into a study of the relationship of religion, society and the state is promised in the future. Rather this volume is a collection of seven, somewhat disparate, previously published articles. It is topped and tailed by a helpful critical bibliographical essay analysing the historiography of the revival with a shorter conclusion discussing its progress and decline in the twentieth century. The term ‘High Church Revival’ is deliberately chosen as Morris's aim is to move beyond the well-trodden paths of the Oxford Movement and Ritualism. Morris's strength is that, while sympathetic to his subject, he is keen to place the Revival in a broader social and religious context than so much of the older, often partisan, literature. Thus he explores links and influences and sets it in the wider context of Catholic renewal in continental Europe as a whole. The book is organised in three sections, the first being the most useful to the general historian of Victorian religious history. Chapter ii, ‘Movements and regions: dynamics of local religious change’, emphasises the importance of regional and local factors in the spread and success of the High Church movement, drawing on the work of the late Nigel Yates and the author's own study of Croydon. Since the revival was above all sacramental, the next chapter in this section, ‘Sacramental renewal and popular religion’, explores High Church eucharistic teaching and how it was translated into parochial practice both liturgically and devotionally. This was often done by establishing parochial communicant guilds and confraternities which sought to deepen regular eucharistic practice among the devout; a subject previously overlooked. However Morris points out that clerical success in increasing the percentage of communicants in the congregation inevitably came into conflict with the un-sacramental nature of English popular religion, creating a sort of High Church version of the ‘godly’ and the ‘multitude’. Ultimately this model of the parish as a ‘eucharistic community’ fitted awkwardly with the broader understanding of the scope of a national Church and had ‘sectarian’ implications for the future.

Because the revival was a European phenomenon, the second part of the book explores the continental perspective. Chapter iv considers the effect that church tourism had on a number of High Church clergy; an intriguing mixture of repulsion and attraction. The next discusses the response of three contrasting French Catholic groups to the English revival: Montalembert and the Liberal Catholics; the Ultramontanes; and the Gallicans. This continental dimension offers an interesting area for future research. French Catholicism itself had a significant but seldom appreciated attraction for Anglo-Catholics in matters like parish missions, the development of priestly confraternities and the adoption of the catechetical method of St Sulpice. Peter Davie traced this in a lecture given to the Anglo-Catholic History Society in 2012. The debt of the High Church movement within the Church of Sweden to English High Churchmen would be another fruitful topic to explore. The third section is more theological. Chapter vi considers the role of preaching in the Oxford Movement, drawing on the preaching of Newman and Liddon but also the many collections of sermons given by ordinary parochial clergy seeking to instil sound High Church doctrine and revitalise personal devotion amongst their flocks, often blending evangelical ‘heart religion’ with the liturgical rhythm of the Christian year. Chapter vii, ‘Ecclesiology and contested identities: The parting of the ways’, discusses the contrasting ecclesiologies of Newman and F. D. Maurice and debates whether the ideas of Charles Gore contributed to a possible synthesis. The final chapter in this section, ‘Scripture and history: Mary and the nature of doctrine’ analyses the shifting arguments used by Anglo-Catholics in relation to the Marian dogmas and the influence that ecumenical dialogue had on these changes.

In these essays Morris has undoubtedly succeeded in integrating the High Church Revival into the broader context of both English and European religious history. Moreover he has pointed to fresh avenues for research. He acknowledges that the present work is by no means comprehensive. This is hardly his fault. While some aspects of Anglo-Catholicism have been intensively studied, our knowledge of so much of it, especially from the 1880s, is pretty patchy.

Despite the seminal work of Peter Nockles and Simon Skinner on the early period, some studies of the revival of the religious life, Nigel Yates's studies of ritualism and, more recently, George Herring's study of parochial practice to 1870, there remain huge gaps. How significant was the growth of Anglo-Catholicism between 1880 and 1918? How did the bishops respond? While the Congress Movement between the wars has attracted interest, this has detracted from other strands of Anglo-Catholicism in this period. The political and socially progressive Anglo-Catholicism of Fr Roberts of Bloomsbury, friend of Maude Royden, for example, or the advanced socialism of Fr ‘Bill’ Iredall marching against the Mosleyites in Barnsbury, who died a Quaker, merit study. So too do the right-wing Anglo-Catholic supporters of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The literary dimension of Anglo-Catholicism has also been neglected, with novelists like Sheila Kaye-Smith who converted to Rome or Ernest Raymond, author of the extraordinary best-seller Tell England, who lost his faith and resigned his orders. As the author says, to see Anglo-Catholic history as an irrelevance is ‘a tempting, but I think ultimately implausible position’. However, taking a longer perspective, was Anglo-Catholicism a failure?

In his conclusion Morris acknowledges the obvious truth that it never captured the Church of England completely and its heyday was probably between the wars. Its success was inevitably partial since the deeply-rooted Protestant religious culture proved resistant to its particular brand of sacramental and liturgical religion. But, unlike some, he sees many areas of achievement: in theology, worship, ministerial and lay formation, missionary endeavour and ecumenical engagement, in both the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. Interestingly he sees its most significant and lasting achievement as creating a space for a ‘reformed Catholicism’ within a Church that had for centuries identified as Protestant. How far is that really true I wonder? W. S. F. Pickering subtitled his influential sociological study of Anglo-Catholicism (2nd edn 2008) ‘A study in ambiguity’. The theological problem was surely that Anglo-Catholics have always differed in where they believed the ultimate standard of ‘catholicity’ was to be found. Many looked to contemporary Roman Catholicism, others to a medieval English past, some to Christian antiquity or the ‘undivided Church’, some to a kind of an undifferentiated sacramental and liturgical ‘Catholicism’ shared with other Episcopal and liturgical Churches. A few even looked to Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet a specifically Anglican understanding of ‘reformed Catholicism’ has proved elusive and this became painfully apparent when the Roman Catholic Church reformed itself at the Second Vatican Council. Much Anglo-Catholic history certainly remains to be explored. We must be grateful that in these essays Morris has given us food for thought, with the promise of more to come. My concern is that this expensive paperback and probably the series as a whole may not gain the attention that it deserves.