The Oxford Handbooks are nothing if not solid, door-stopping tomes: this one comprises no less than forty-two articles by almost as many authors and reading requires heavy lifting. It is natural to approach enterprises like this with some caution: such collections are almost invariably curate's eggs and rather often established authors rest on their laurels a little too contentedly while others can cling too firmly to the narrow perspectives of their own research and dissipate any hopes of overall coherence. They can tend to draw out laziness in readers too: it is not difficult to imagine such a Handbook turning up on university reading lists (it is clearly meant for institutional libraries), marking out one chapter or another and dispensing with the rest altogether.

The Oxford Movement was not simply a world wrapped up in itself. It sought, and touched, a wider world in many ways. It even proved influential in altering its atmosphere. It was vividly alive with a concentrated intellectual force and its long-term history owed at least as much to this as it did to ritual, vestments or new piety. This book not only makes comprehensive claims in terms of its subject but also presents a valuable picture of the current state of scholarship in an area of church history which has long attracted serious, even devout, attention. Its roots lie with a former Principal of Pusey House whose involvement in the project was extinguished altogether by a translation to a bishopric. His successor proves to be another contributor. If there is a whiff of incense in the air now and then that is surely no bad thing. But with one exception (the admirable Geoffrey Rowell, who died in 2017) the remaining participants have been safely preserved from episcopacy and they present an impressive ensemble. Many of the names that one might look for turn out to be here. Most are historians of various kinds, or scholars of historical theology, while three are scholars of English literature. There is a strong transatlantic character, and an Australian and a German presence, but the weight falls on this side of the ocean (with one or two crossings). The various colleges of Oxford turn out to be the academic homes, in one form or another, of a good many.

This, it is acknowledged, is more of a ‘portrait’ than an introduction. As a whole it has a convincing shape, partly because the editors have done their job well and framed the whole enterprise handsomely; also because the Oxford Movement itself insisted on systematic order and coherence and left strong traces for later interpreters; also because the book draws from a quite small, coherent body of scholarship where people clearly know each other's work well. Some of the best writing here is deep and demanding while new perspectives are acknowledged and even ventured, if briefly. In sum, we are left with a sure sense of what has been accomplished over the years but also a glimpse of where the scholarly future may come to fall.

The structure falls into eight parts. The first explores origins and contexts (comprising intricate writing on the Caroline divines; High Churchmen in England in the first half of the eighteenth century; the Evangelical background; High Church ‘presence’ under George iii; Tractarianism and the Lake poets; Pre-Tractarian Oriel and the Noetics). The second examines the ‘spring and summer’ of the movement, examining individuals, not all of them obvious, controversies in Oxford, the Tracts for the Times, the view of history and then Protestant reactions. Part iii examines the theology of the movement with discussions of theories of religious knowledge, tradition and development, ecclesiology, the place of Scripture and biblical interpretation, justification and sanctification, mysticism and sacramentalism, and then theology expressed in verse and sermon. The fourth part examines the great turning, or ‘crisis’, of 1841–5 before part v explores more widely ‘cultural expressions, transmissions and influences’: here may be found social and political ‘commentary’, a picture of life and worship in the parishes, architecture, music and hymnody, the emergence of sisterhoods, liturgy and devotion, further poetry and fiction (not only Charlotte Yonge) and then Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites. The sixth part looks ‘beyond England’ to Ireland, Wales and Scotland, to connections with Europe at large, then to North America and the expanding world of the missions before a discussion of ecumenical ambivalence. The seventh part turns to the twentieth century, offering discussions of the heights of the Congress Movement of 1920–33, the depths of the 1927–8 Prayer Book crisis and a twentieth-century literary ‘tradition’ which included figures as diverse as W. H. Auden, Rose Macaulay and Barbara Pym. The final section, ‘Reflections, Receptions and Retrospectives’, yields some freedom in raising specific questions and debates (‘Did the Oxford Movement die in 1851?’), an exploration of Catholic (and Protestant) Liberalism which emphasises the presence of Charles Gore, and a sage overview of historiographical campaigns before a concluding, and not unhopeful, collecting of contemporary strains. Each chapter offers a full bibliography.

Throughout the figure of Newman dominates, but Pusey, Richard Hurrell Froude and Keble are never far away and Isaac Williams is more than honourably mentioned. Perhaps Liddon might have received more attention? At all events the editors are determined not to be over-awed by the principal players, pronouncing firmly that the Oxford Movement was something greater than Newman and that in the lives and ambitions of men (and sometimes women) of like mind there remained much life and endeavour. Indeed, the book goes some way to showing how rich and diverse the fruits were. It is briefly acknowledged that once the movement outgrew Oxford as a place a wider history of ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ (the term itself does not occur in the index) began, but arid discussions of terminology are avoided, or left to hover in the air. We are left with a general sense of a Catholic movement at work within the Church of England. More room might have been given to the extraordinary emergence and spread of religious orders (though Carol Engelhardt Herringer accomplishes much in ten brief pages on the new sisterhoods) and also to organisations. There is new work to be done on parish realities, lay patronage, lay piety and congregational sociology. The fabled slum priests of the movement are not much, if at all, in evidence here and they may be missed. But a great deal of value is achieved altogether. Indeed, this is a fine book which offers much writing of commitment, substance, warmth and insight. One may still be left wondering what a ‘handbook’ is, but the many virtues on show here are palpable.