In 2012, a group of scholars, headed up by Murdoch University’s Rowan Strong, undertook to ‘make an extensive, analytical investigation into the history of Anglicanism’ in the recognition that, at last, there was sufficient academic interest in the topic, as well as enough extant scholarship, to make it both an internationally and intellectually feasible project (pp. xxv-xxvi). In appropriate expression of the global reach and complexity of contemporary Anglicanism – surely, far beyond what Henry VIII could possibly have envisaged way back in 1534 – the 5-volume series was officially launched last July by the Anglican Communion’s Director for Unity, Faith and Order, the Revd Canon Dr John Gibaut. Equally representative of the Communion’s worldwide impact is that Strong himself, the series editor and its chief architect, lives in Perth, Western Australia – the world’s most isolated capital city. Perhaps, in fact, nothing speaks louder than this – a Canadian ecumenist (Gibaut) launching the series, and a New Zealand-born Australian historian (Strong) initiating and overseeing it – of the Anglican Church’s globality. Yet precisely because it has this transnational character as a worldwide communion of federated Churches, each living within and thus being contextualized by and against their own respective cultures, ‘Anglicanism’ as such has been the subject of competing narratives and contested identities from its very inception.

This new series, and its first volume in particular, highlights how central these contests have always been. As Strong notes in the Series Introduction, to ask the question ‘What is Anglicanism?’ is to ask something to which there has never been an unambiguous answer around which genuine consensus has been possible (p. xviii). Whether one considers the non-jurors of 1689 – who, in protest against William and Mary established an un-established episcopal church in Scotland and in so doing birthed the idea of an Anglican Communion – the erratic pendula of religious policy under Henry and his three successors, or the protagonists in the ‘Vestarian Controversy’ of the 1560s, the hallmark of embryonic Anglicanism was diversity and discord (p. 61), hidden only scantily by external expressions of allegiance.

In the first volume of the series, skilfully edited by Anthony Milton, this theme of contested identities takes centre-stage. Two of the chapters explore the Church of England’s identity-formation in the context of its sixteenth-century dialogues and disputes with the various Continental churches. Another chapter by Michael Winship considers the conspicuously congregationalist form of ecclesial polity that came to dominate the New England colonies, despite the claim that they had not separated from the Church of England (p. 270). John McCafferty’s chapter also describes the various other forms of British Protestantism that were tried in the ‘laboratories’ of Scotland and Ireland, and which therefore ‘provided models (or warnings…) of alternative English reforms…’ (p. 22). These chapters aside, however, the volume concentrates its focus on the various forms of Anglicanism that took shape and fought for prominence within England itself. What becomes abundantly clear, though, even through this predominantly English prism, is that the particular enterprise that was the Church of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was decidedly quixotic, if not in fact schizophrenic (pp. 3, 26).

The various contributing authors each speak, in their own ways, to this ecclesial variegation. Andrew Foster shows how unsettling it was, to both clergy and the wider populace, to have such contradictory attitudes towards the episcopacy as existed under Elizabeth – who didn’t much care for bishops and left many of the important sees vacant (pp. 92, 94) – and James I – for whom bishops were critically important members of his court (p. 98).

Felicity Heal explores a quite different form of ambiguity, in her consideration of the inconsistency of rules and sentiment about images and statuary. Elizabeth’s own affection for the ‘crucifix and candlesticks’ was in stark contrast to her official campaign ‘Against the Peril of Idolatry’ (1563). Even the replacement of images with scriptural texts was not an entirely austere exercise, given Elizabeth’s injunction in 1561 that such texts be given ‘some comely ornament’ (p. 191).

In his chapter on ‘Confessional Identity’, Stephen Hampton argues, against those who would claim that ‘true’ Anglicanism resides more in its distinctive worship than in any doctrinal framework, that the Thirty-Nine Articles were and are ‘the authoritative statement of the Church of England’s faith’ (p. 226). Moreover, he contends that the intentionally Reformed nature of the Articles undercuts any suggestion that the genius of incipient Anglicanism was that it was merely ‘a kind of Protestant tertium quid, neither Reformed nor Lutheran…’ (p. 210). The difficulty, however, as Hampton well shows, is that being ‘Reformed’ was itself fraught with ambiguity. The puritan-minded could, for example, cite the French, Belgic, and Second Helvetic Confessions in their opposition to clerical hierarchy, while the episcopal conformists could equally cite other Reformed authorities in support of episcopal polity (pp. 220–21). Again, only when the tolerable diversity among the Reformed Churches is acknowledged – when, that is, that Geneva is not unequivocally assumed to be ‘the benchmark of Reformed identity’ (p. 211) – can the twists and turns of Anglicanism be properly understood as experiments within the breadth of the Reformed tradition.

Given such variety in every aspect of Anglicanism – from its use of authorized liturgies (which one?), and its somewhat ambivalent polity, to its polarized attitudes towards ceremony and ritual – it is hardly surprising that the historical narratives of Anglicanism have had an unnatural uniformity imposed upon them. As David Green (Monash University) has said, because our world is complex, we seek simple solutions to hide or ignore the complexity we cannot handle. And so, differing historiographical imperatives have sought to ‘flatten out’ the complexities of Anglicanism by prioritizing competing definitions of what constitutes the ‘orthodox Anglican’. For the nineteenth-century Tractarians, the chaos of the sixteenth-century reforms was disowned in favour of regarding the seventeenth-century Laudian movement as the true beginning of Anglicanism. Conversely, the intentions of the Parker Society and, more recently scholars such as Patrick Collinson, have claimed a more ‘Puritan’ vision of the English Church, from which any form of old or new Laudianism is a ‘strange and disastrous aberration’ (p. 5). Divergent historiographies, along with their attendant but often unstated ecclesial motivations, have thus sought to impose a confected normativity, thereby making ‘the Other’ more readily marginalized.

The great strength of this volume is that each of the contributors takes Anglican diversity, in both its genial and pugilistic forms, as part of the inherent richness of the tradition. Neither a single form of governance, liturgy, private piety, nor a single theology of sacrament or predestination, is privileged as ‘truly Anglican’ or solely ‘authentic’. And, while the book itself is concerned with only the first 140 years of the Church of England, the need to be similarly circumspect in rendering normative any variety of global Anglicanism is arguably just as urgent now as it ever has been.