This is probably the most important book on the history of the Oxford Movement to be published in the past decade. James Pereiro has explored the concept of “ethos” as a foundational theological motif of the Tractarians, arguing that it expresses a theory of religious knowledge that was fundamental to their theological position.

The definition of this seminal idea is not an easy one, for, while the word was used by early Tractarian writers, the idea behind it was variously expressed. Pereiro comes at the concept through the early writing of Samuel Wood, an early Tractarian convert and London lawyer who wrote an unpublished paper titled “Revival of Primitive Doctrine” in 1840, making it the earliest account of the movement. Using Wood's paper and the writings of John Keble, Hurrell Froude, and John Henry Newman, Pereiro presents Tractarian “ethos” as “a moral temper involving openness to God's action in the soul” (109). Holiness of life gave the sanctified a divinely inspired insight into religious truth. Truth and holiness were interconnected. Ethos, thus conceived, was not merely a personal quality of holiness, it was also a communal one, principally found in the centuries of the early church. For the Tractarians this made the early church an absolute paradigm for the recovery of a Catholic ethos for the Church of England because it was in those centuries that theologians exhibited the necessary moral holiness requisite for the discovery of divine truth. Appalled at the less-than-exemplary lives of the English Reformers, and their abuse toward Catholic doctrine and piety, the Tractarians, under the influence of James Anthony Froude, recoiled from the Reformation as a guide to a Catholic ethos and the divine truth it contained. Pereiro then explores, largely through the medium of Newman and the concept of the development of doctrine, how Newman came to believe that the recovery of a catholic ethos could not be a return of the Church of England to Antiquity, statically conceived. Newman, reluctantly and gradually influenced by the insights of Woods and Froude, came to accept that an idea, an ethos, could and should develop within the church.

Finally, the book has a chapter on how ethos, as a primary concept of Tractarianism, came to drive a wedge between the High Church and the Tractarians as the early church came to be paramount over the Reformation for the latter. Against some contemporary interpretations, Pereiro maintains that no such wedge was necessary with regard to the Evangelicals as Tractarians and High Church were already, theologically, at odds with the Evangelical party from the commencement of the Oxford Movement. Tractarians, however, did often admire the serious piety of Evangelicals.

There is an interesting section in the book that looks at the revisionist histories of the Oxford Movement over the past two decades which have stressed its continuities with High Church teaching and maintained that late Georgian High Churchmanship was not as moribund as earlier scholarship had maintained. Pereiro raises some important questions about this largely accepted viewpoint on the basis that High Church reform was both patchy and had largely run its course by the 1830s. He also believes that the revisionist scholars also rather obscure the revivalist energy and innovation of the Oxford Movement, as well as glossing over many contemporary expressions of concern at the state of the Church of England in the 1820s and 1830s. Personally, this reviewer believes that Pereiro rather downplays the vitality of High Churchmen in the 1830s. Walter Hook, George Selwyn, and Henry Manning, for example, though undoubtedly later inspired by Tractarianism, began their clerical work as energetic young High Churchmen. Notwithstanding such cavils, it seems that with this book Oxford Movement historiography is set for another substantive debate.

Pereiro's work recovers the Oxford Movement as a movement of theological substance. Scholars from Owen Chadwick to John Reed have tended to focus on the devotionalism and ritualism of the Tractarians and their Anglo-Catholic progeny. Pereiro has produced a salutary reminder that the Oxford Movement was, in its own eyes, first and foremost a substantive theological and intellectual challenge to the status quo in the Church of England in the 1830s and 1840s. By focusing on Samuel Wood, Pereiro provides an important focus on what he calls “the supporting cast of secondary figures” among the Tractarians.

However, as the book develops, the work of Newman yet again reasserts itself as the principle focus of the Oxford Movement, as had been the case with many, if not most, scholarly works of the past decades. The very long chapter 4, “Ethos and Development,” mostly follows the theological unfolding of Newman's thought about ethos, leading him to convert to Rome in 1845. However, if Tractarian “ethos” was as fundamental as Pereiro convincingly argues it was for the Tractarians, then perhaps more weight could have been given to those Tractarian thinkers for whom “ethos” did not necessitate a path to Rome, but who remained in the Church of England. Yet Pereiro's highlighting of Froude as a seminal figure behind the more elaborated thought of Newman is a further step toward recovering the Oxford Movement as something wider than its undeniably greatest theologian.

The Tractarian paradigm of the early church as the exemplar of the catholic ethos inevitably raised the question of how to decide between the variants and contradictions of theological truth in that period. Holiness of life was the Tractarian answer; but this, they came to realize, was insufficient when deciding between the lives and works of obviously holy writers. In the end the Roman converts opted for the papacy as the adjudicating authority. Any continuing use of the Early Church within Anglicanism's rule of faith certainly still raises the question of an adjudicating authority, if the Christian past is to be in any sense authoritative for the present-day Church and not merely a matter of the “private judgement” that the Tractarians so abhorred.