Francesca Norman’s Henry Longueville Mansel is volume 9 in the Anglican-Episcopal Theology and History Series of Brill publications. The volume was initially Francesca Norman’s doctoral thesis for Canterbury, Christ Church University, in 2015. Henry Mansel (1820–1871) was an academic and churchman, and a key ecclesiastical/political figure in mid-Victorian Britain whose significance has long been overlooked since his death at the age of fifty. Norman provides us with a rich appendix which summarizes all previous treatments of aspects of Mansel’s life, but she also provides us with a complete overview of the significant biographical details of each phase of his career and his character. Mansel came from a family of old-fashioned High Church country gentry steeped in the ways of pre-industrial England: squires, rectors, army and naval officers. He attended Merchant Taylor’s School in London as a boy and then St. John’s College, Oxford, which, at that time, represented the old High Church party. He became one of the most prominent philosophical theologians of his era, one of the best Oxford preachers of the nineteenth century, and a vigorous intellectual who consecrated his career ‘to the service of God’. All the while, he remained something of a quaint donnish eccentric, who had the reputation as a common room wit and full of fun. In 1850, he published a famous satire on the Oxford University Reform Commission of 1850, which launched his career in Oxford politics. Norman skillfully displays Mansel’s character in revealing the story that his sister Katherine rejected the hand of the philosopher Herbert Spencer; Spencer retaliated by making vicious attacks on Henry Mansel over the course of his life, labelling him an Anglican agnostic, and worse. To preserve his sister’s honour, Mansel never responded to Spencer.

In 1845, Mansel was ordained a priest of the Church of England, and he was appointed to a fellowship, again at St. John’s, Oxford. Norman stresses that until the 1860s, his primary duty was teaching undergraduates. When he was thirty-five, he was appointed Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. In 1866, Lord Derby, then the Tory Prime Minister, nominated him as Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and, at the end of 1868, the Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli appointed him Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a key post in the Church of England. Despite the fact that Norman’s ground-breaking focus in the book is Mansel’s engagement in British secular politics, she pays the necessary attention to Mansel’s role as one of the most prominent philosophical theologians of his time, above all by the attention she pays to the publication of his Bampton lectures of 1858. Norman rightly includes a quote from Owen Chadwick, the leading historian of the Victorian Church, arguing that Mansel’s The Limits of Religious Thought ‘was the most important and clear-headed volume written by an English philosopher of religion of the period’, from this time of the publication of The Origin of the Species and Essays and Reviews. His Bampton lectures were a defence of the idea that the key message of the Bible is the doctrine of Divine Personality: that God is a person, that human beings can have a personal relationship with God, and that prayer is one of the chief means of that relationship. Mansel has been seen as a precursor of Karl Barth in his emphasis on personalism. Yet the key to Norman’s achievement is not the exploration of Mansel’s personalism, but a focus on his social and political context. Norman breaks new ground in relating Mansel’s philosophical theology to the role of theology in a Christian nation. This is an extremely important focus at this moment with the rise of religious and Christian nationalism in contemporary politics around the globe.

This book is by no means the first investigation of Mansel. Until now, however, the political context of Mansel and the political motivations that guided his many critics in their severe opposition have been ignored. Beginning in 1851, Mansel developed a skill in academic politics when he was elected to become a representative of the Oxford college ‘heads of houses’ to the Hebdomadal Council of the Oxford. There he remained for many years in the post as a Conservative (a Tory), in never-failing opposition to university reform. His vibrant personality connected him to the Tory leaders, and Norman considers him to have been ‘the brain’ of the Oxford Tories. Mansel’s career depended on the networks of Tories who were resistant to change. He was spokesman for a socially engaged Toryism rooted in the old country-based traditions of family, opposition to slavery in the Tory tradition of William Wilberforce, hostile to the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, with a strong sense of the Church of England as the conscience of the nation.

Norman makes it clear that Mansel’s eminence as a philosophical theologian was ‘obscured by a great deal of political mudslinging’. For example, F. D. Maurice’s attack on Mansel’s Bampton lecturers coincided with William Gladstone’s election to represent the Liberal Party as Oxford’s representative to Parliament. In like manner the 1865 British General Election was the context for an equally bitter controversy between Mansel and the Liberal spokesman John Stuart Mill. In 1865, Mansel led the Tory counter-attack on Mill and other Gladstonian Liberals. His successful counter-attack landed Mansel his appointment in 1868 as the Dean of St. Paul’s, by the Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. This appointment did nothing to deflect the onslaught of Liberal misrepresentation: Mansel was a Kantian, Mansel was an agnostic, and Mansel was an Anglican atheist.

The book is not perfect. The author could have defined in more detail the differences between the Disraelian Tories and the Gladstonian Liberals, particularly for readers in other parts of the Anglican Communion who are less familiar with this terrain. While including references to the role of the Broad Church and Tractarian parties with respect to politics, alongside the expected High Church coverage, Norman makes scant reference to the role of the Evangelical Party. Yet the gifts of the book are immense. The detailed bibliography and the index will guide the next generation of scholars. Above all, we should be grateful for the timing of the publication at a moment of a sharp confluence of religion and politics. His name is now largely forgotten, for he was dead at fifty. He was, after all, the recognized founder of no school. This book, however, means that today Mansel, in our current environment, can become a valuable resource for Anglican Studies. Notably, it could be useful for the Anglican evaluation of the proper place of study, and of the dangers of the interaction of religion and politics in what appears to be an uncharted moment of movements seeking to harness political motivations to the cause of faith, with potentially negative consequences.