After Newman had preached the ninth of the Oxford University sermons, the year before the Oxford Movement began, there was a gap of seven years before he again preached a university sermon. The following sermons, preached between 1839 and 1843, are his most seminal writings. The first four, which explore the relation between faith and reason, look forward to his philosophical magnum opus, An essay in aid of a grammar of assent (1870). The ‘philosophical’ mind considered in the next sermon, ‘Wisdom, as contrasted with faith and with bigotry’, bears on education and may be seen as the genesis of The idea of a university (1873). The ideas of the last and greatest of the sermons, ‘The theory of developments in religious doctrine’, were to be developed two years later in An essay on the development of Christian doctrine. This critical edition of one of Newman's most important books, which the introduction curiously calls ‘a work of moral theology’ (on the analogue of the old-fashioned term ‘moral science’ to mean philosophy?), has been long awaited. The most interesting and original part of the lengthy introduction is the first section which argues that the sermons ‘have all the immediacy of a journal’ and indeed are ‘a conversion autobiography’, and points out that this ‘fascinating autobiographical dimension … has generally gone unnoticed by critics and historians’. But in the case of the last great sermon on development, the editors argue less convincingly that it was written to try and dissuade Newman's brother Francis from virtual Unitarianism. It is true that Newman touched on the development of doctrine in a lengthy letter to Francis a year before the sermon was preached, but the truth is that Newman had been thinking about doctrinal development ever since his first book and the matter had now become urgent as he drew nearer and nearer to Rome and sought to test his growing conviction that the Church of England was in schism. The early sermons are far less significant than these six seminal sermons, but they ‘reveal the larger foundation on which Newman's analysis of faith and reason is built’ and ‘show Newman distancing himself from Evangelical influences, deeply at first under the influence of the Noetics’ (although even the first sermon indicates ‘suspicion of Whatelyan optimism’). By the third sermon both these influences had been largely discarded. Lengthy summaries of the sermons are provided, but apart from a perfunctory reference to a modern philosopher there is no account of the ways in which the Sermons have attracted serious philosophical attention during the last three or four decades for the first time since their publication. The editors tell us that at the time the University sermons ‘seem to have attracted very little public notice in England or elsewhere’, but fail to make clear whether or not there were any reviews at all, although they mention a favourable review of a French translation published in 1850. Worried about the unfavourable reaction in Rome to the publication of his Essay on the development of doctrine, published in the same year (1845) as his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, Newman had written in 1847 a ‘Rough draft of matter for preface’, which he later translated into Latin, but in the end decided not to use fearing adverse publicity for the book. This rough draft (the English version) is printed as an appendix, although the editors do not make it clear that it was never in the end used. There is also an appendix listing textual variants between the first edition of 1843 and the revised 1872 edition which is the text reprinted here. The editors' notes are comprehensive and detailed.