‘There is still a lot of work to do on Pusey where the archive is so plentiful.’ So wrote Owen Chadwick in 1990 in his collection of Tractarian essays, The spirit of the Oxford Movement. Yet over twenty years later little has appeared. This volume of essays is therefore welcome. It consists of seven papers given at a conference held, suitably, at Ascot Priory in Berkshire from 14–16 September 2009 organised by two of the priest librarians of Pusey House, Oxford, and one of the editors of this volume. It is hoped that three other papers given at the conference will be published elsewhere. In the introduction the two editors (one Australian and one from the US), provide a brief outline of Pusey's life and the recent historiography of the Oxford Movement highlighting recent essays by Timothy Larsen and David Brown, which have done something to fill the void as well as making the case for a revaluation of Pusey's theology and a more sympathetic portrayal of his personality. This revaluation is developed further in the first two papers where Ian McCormack surveys ‘The history of the history of Pusey’, challenging the usual view of Pusey as a ‘life-denying joyless man whose austere piety bordered upon the pathological’ (to quote this reviewer who edited Pusey rediscovered, a collection of earlier essays on Pusey published to mark the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Movement, in 1983). Noting the pervasive view of Pusey's personality deriving from David Forrester's study of ‘Young Doctor Pusey’, McCormack develops further the insights of Donald Allchin's study of Pusey's sermons showing that beneath the supposed gloom was a spirituality that was mystical and joyful, fed by a profound doctrine of the Holy Spirit. In the second K. E. Macnab writes of his discovery of the manuscript of Liddon's Life of Pusey showing how those who edited the volume after Liddon's death ‘doctored’ it to present a more coherently ‘catholic’ Pusey playing down or excluding anything that marred the image of Pusey as a heroic Anglo-Catholic champion. Albrecht Geck, the editor of Pusey's correspondence with the German theologian Friedrich Tholuck, writes persuasively on Pusey's early and continuing interest in continental Protestantism from his knowledge of German Lutheran and Reformed thought, breaking new ground and offering a counterweight to Colin Matthew's mischievous 1981 article ‘Edward Bouverie Pusey: from scholar to Tractarian’. R. Barry Lewis sets Pusey's ecclesiology in the context of eighteenth-century High Church antecedents and one of the editors, Carol Engelhardt Herringer, surveys Pusey's eucharistic doctrine, offering some intriguing, if speculative, motives for his ideas. The two final essays bring the importance of Pusey's friendship with Alexander Forbes, bishop of Brechin, into clearer focus. Mark Chapman sheds light on the neglected 1860s in a fine essay about Pusey, Forbes and the First Vatican Council, while Rowan Strong (another of the editors) uses his unrivalled knowledge of nineteenth-century Scottish Episcopalianism in an essay charting Pusey's relationship with the Scottish Episcopal Church with Forbes playing a central part. Welcome though these essays are, they do illustrate Owen Chadwick's point. The archive material available is massive and so to gain a full and rounded picture of Pusey requires an appreciation of him as Hebrew scholar, participant in the Tractarian Movement, later Anglo-Catholic leader, Oxford academic, ecumenist, patristic scholar and more. Pusey studies seem therefore doomed to proceed in a scholarly but piecemeal fashion since the task of writing the substantive and critical biography of him (on the scale of Ian Ker's life of Newman for example) is such a daunting task. Lacking popular appeal in comparison with other Victorian religious leaders our ability to appreciate Pusey's true importance remains clouded and sadly the cost of this relatively short volume means that it is destined for only a few academic libraries.