Archbishop William Sancroft's 1685 mandate that the bishops of his province ordain no man “who hath not taken some degree of school in one of the universities of this realm” embodied the ideal of a graduate clergy that would long transfix the Church of England. Despite its largely nugatory effect, Sancroft's directive helped enshrine for the ensuing “long eighteenth century” the normativity of a university-educated clergy in the established Church. And accordingly, ecclesiastical historians have tended to view the early modern dream of a graduate clergy as an ideal moving inexorably toward fulfilment, acknowledging the substantial persistence of the “literate,” or nongraduate, clergy in many parts of England as exceptional. Dr. Sara Slinn's worthy monograph The Education of the Anglican Clergy 1780–1839 invites readers to reconsider this framework. The objective here is not to dispute the overall tendency towards a university-educated clergy throughout the period, but rather to decenter, as it were, the Oxbridge degree as the typical route to a benefice. In doing so, Slinn reveals an extraordinary panoply of educational institutions, professional arrangements and episcopal policies which mediated the path to ordination.

The Education of the Anglican Clergy is divided into two parts. The first part, almost wholly quantitative, provides a statistical portrait of the roughly 22,000 men ordained to the Anglican diaconate in England and Wales during the six decades under consideration—broken down by both diocese and decade. Using information gleaned from the Clergy of the Church of England database project and the extensive collections of ordination application records in diocesan archives, Slinn displays the remarkable variation between dioceses in the percentage of graduate-educated clergy throughout the period—from an average of merely 18% in Carlisle to upwards of 97%, perhaps not surprisingly, in Oxford. Those readers allergic to relentless quantification will more than welcome the author's thoughtful consideration of how distinct clerical cultures and ad hoc episcopal policies within these dioceses contributed to these extraordinary variations.

The second part of the study examines the disparate educational routes to ordination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whether institutional or informal. At the heart of this section is a significant irony: that the ecclesiastical governors of the Church of England in this period overwhelmingly preferred, and increasingly required, graduate degrees of the clergy, despite the manifest inadequacy of the university curriculum for clerical education. As Slinn points out, the theological content of university education was scant, and beyond language training and divinity lectures, nearly all the professional and pastoral skills relevant to a clerical career had to be acquired supplementarily in extracurricular settings. This was particularly true of Cambridge, where mathematics loomed especially large in the degree requirements. While not really preparing students for a clerical vocation, Slinn points out, the universities were indispensable in making men into gentlemen—and facilitating the assimilation of future ordinands into the local elite society in which Anglican clergy were expected to move. Nevertheless, these pedagogical deficiencies threw candidates for ordination—not unlike their nonuniversity counterparts—onto a number of alternative and supplementary educational arrangements to complete their training. Slinn compellingly examines autodidacticism, tutors (for hire or appointed by the diocesan), and private clerical seminaries to which men turned to study for their ordination examination. She also sheds considerable light on the networks of private grammar schools that comprised the main nonuniversity route to ordination and their eventual supersession by the clerical colleges founded at St. Bees, Cumberland in 1818, and St. David's, Lampeter in 1827. The episcopal policies and new professional institutions which made the prospect of a direct path from grammar school to the church ever more unlikely further accelerated the decline of the classical education that was once the hallmark of grammar school education in England.

The Education of the Anglican Clergy largely shies away from the ecclesiastical politics that so marked this era of English church history. This is unfortunate, as Slinn offers just enough tantalizing evidence to implicate distinct modes of churchmanship in the various educational arrangements under consideration. For instance, the pedagogical inadequacies of clerical education at Cambridge created a vacuum that would be filled by Charles Simeon's “conversation parties” in which generations of evangelical clergy learned their divinity. Indeed, the entire array of informal and irregularly supervised educational environments were often criticized as vectors of evangelicalism. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the wave of theological colleges that emerged in the mid-Victorian period, many of them attached to cathedrals, were often hotbeds of Tractarian theology and advanced ritualism. Hopefully, future scholars will use Slinn's outstanding work to illuminate the contributions of clerical education to ecclesiastical polarization in this period and beyond. As it stands, this is a deeply researched and judiciously argued work that successfully displaces the graduate clergyman from the center of our understanding of the Georgian Church of England. Given that so much of our encounter with nineteenth century theological and ecclesiastical history runs through Oxbridge, this expanded landscape of educational settings can only enrich the field.