It is not clear that ‘Anglicanism’ can operate successfully as a coherent international expression any more than it has ever quite worked satisfactorily as a national one. This need not worry a historian as much as it appears to worry theologians or ecclesiologists. Yet one may still wonder if the word itself serves as a successful basis for the writing of history. Might it be better to write regional histories which combine ecumenical breadth with a more profound weighing of contexts? At all events, with this fourth volume in the Oxford History of Anglicanism Jeremy Morris introduces a new ensemble of scholars to weigh up the twentieth-century experiences of the Anglican Churches of the English-speaking Western world, in Britain, North America and Australasia. The geographical distinctions which maintain the enterprise are, as Morris himself acknowledges, awkward. But alternatives clearly present still greater difficulties. In short, to William Sachs belongs the task of a fifth volume in the series, Global Anglicanism.

In his carefully judged introduction, Morris confronts a variety of difficulties, not least conceptual and interpretative questions about terminology, chronology, theme and treatment. Indeed, the whole venture owes a very great deal to him and much of the coherence achieved by an inevitably fractured survey is due to his exertions at the beginning and the end. The book is divided into three sections and their titles give rather little away: ‘Themes and Wider Engagements’, ‘Institutional Development’ and ‘Regional Survey’. The contributors represent a range of backgrounds and approaches to their subjects and some are practitioners too. All of them settle down, almost comfortably, within the borders of their established expertise or experience. Mark Chapman is characteristically authoritative on the ‘evolution’ of Anglican theology. He finds Anglo-Catholicism ‘triumphant’ for a while before the ebullient fragmentations of the 1960s. The future, he concludes, will surely owe more to a rhetorical pluralism than any steady evolution of an acknowledged, or even distinctive, foundation. Louis Weil writes of liturgical developments, in which twentieth-century Anglicans invested so abundantly, finding them all essentially complementary rather than adversarial. Again, the end comes in diversity. Cordelia Moyse presents a ‘gender perspective’, on women in the Church. This looks firmly, and almost unwaveringly, towards ordination and on those terms is wholly admirable. In an intense chapter on sexuality by William Sachs it is the debate about homosexuality which is really the focus and although there are some backward glances the chronology tilts almost entirely towards the controversies of the last twenty years. In his essay on Anglican views of the state and of national identity Matthew Grimley is very much the historian of people alive and at work in various shifting contexts and he extends the range of his earlier work into the second half of the century. Martyn Percy exercises freely and fruitfully the perspectives of the sociologist in his analysis of the Anglican clergy in its class, ethnic and educational dimensions. Sarah Stockwell looks to the assorted contributions of the Anglican Churches in Britain and across the empire in the tumbling contexts of decolonisation, finding attitudes and perspectives altered by it all, at least in some degree. Paul Avis surveys the place of Anglicanism in the narratives of Christian unity, observing that if ecumenism had grown quieter, and had arguably declined, by the end of the age much of it had been incorporated into the ‘bloodstream’ of individual traditions. Michael Snape examines the themes of war and peace, noting the growth of Anglican pacifism, the development of military chaplaincies, the contributions of various bishops, the patriotic mentalité at large and the impact of the wars of the world on patterns of church life at home. Malcolm Brown looks at the Church's attitudes to questions of global poverty and justice; this becomes a brief study in adaptation, from the idealism of Edinburgh to the painstaking and costly realism of a later age which had lost much of the old high ground. Colin Podmore examines church governance as perhaps only he can, fixing purposefully upon something which historians tend to view too lightly or ignore altogether. How to reconcile episcopacy with more ‘consultative’ models proves an inevitable anxiety; authority here proves to be something of a moving, not to say wandering, target. Ephraim Radner explores debates about the very idea of an Anglican communion and finds a good deal that was not happily agreed but energetically contested – but then, he assures us, what went for the Anglican communion went for a disorderly world altogether. Ian Breward contributes a thorough survey of Anglicanism in Australasia, observing the phenomenon of ‘Sydney exceptionalism’ along the way, while Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook achieves a comparable effect in exploring the fissures of North American Anglicanism over the last half-century. Here is a brief section on Canada and a note on the Church in Mexico.

Near the end of his long life, most of it spent as an Anglican priest, Canon Adrian Carey remarked to a friend that he had always regarded going to church simply as a duty. It is something that Anglicanism, however one understands it, has often relied on rather heavily. There is something about this book, too, which possesses at least a hint of dutiful churchgoing. The ensemble which Jeremy Morris has chosen so wisely is surely irreproachable. The surveys are all thorough in their way, and authoritative. It worries a little that the historiographies often lack inventive curiosity and that almost nothing seems to have mined from archives. It is also perplexing that the work of Owen Chadwick, which has been fundamental in so many ways, turns up in the references to only one article (four altogether, drawn from the same book) and is featured in none of the select bibliographies. But there are other doubts. In too many chapters the chronological gravity falls heavily on the later decades and this leaves far too much of significance behind. For the most part Anglicanism across the first half of the twentieth century was a good deal richer, more expressive and productive, than it was in the second. It is also striking, perhaps, that in what is expressly a thematic odyssey no chapter confronts the awkward, and arguably receding, place of the laity. I looked for Kathleen Bliss but did not find her and the absence is suggestive. Then there is rather little sense that the Anglicans actually did very much for the world at large. The social thought, and activism, of men and women of all kinds seems very largely to have gone missing. Most of the great questions of the age apparently end up dismally as internalised debates about the Anglicanism itself. Not even ecumenism escapes such a fate. Bishop George Bell turns up periodically, not least as the biographer of Archbishop Davidson, but the coherence of his intellectual and humanitarian contribution to international politics is quite lost. If the Church of England never quite knew where to put him one begins to wonder if the same might be said of its historians. Yet all academic juggernauts are vulnerable to such criticisms, and not least from advocates of particular causes. The question, however, hovers: will such a book as this convince the historians of the modern world at large that the Anglican Churches deserve the attentions of a visitor at all? Or will Anglicanism remain merely a place of continuing fascination for those who, in one way or another, live there already?