Social historians tell us that religious movements often spring up as reactions to social change. J.C.D. Clark (in English Society 1660–1832, Cambridge University Press, 1985) saw the first Tractarians as a radical attempt to reconstruct the Church–State establishment as the old order collapsed around their ears in 1828–32. J.S. Reed (in The Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, Vanderbilt University Press, 1996) saw the phase of Tractarianism that introduced Catholic religious orders and Catholic ceremonial as a counter-cultural movement appearing as something timeless to young women and men surrounded by social change in Victorian Britain.

Now comes Jeremy Morris’s book of social and theological history to turn such consensus on its head: ‘the High Church revival is better read, not so much as a counter-cultural phenomenon, but as a distinct development within the panorama of European religious vitality in this period, one which shared much of its ecclesial character with parallel movements in both Britain and abroad’ (p. 33). Morris shows the nineteenth century to be a time of religious revival across Europe, and the High Church/Tractarian/Ritualist movement (he intentionally blunts the distinctions) to be part of the culture and not a counter-culture. Moreover, contrary to Reed’s claims, although the young women and men involved in the movement may have thought they were radical, they were largely from the professional middle classes, and their timeless identity in fact ‘resulted from competing religious loyalties within the overarching framework of establishment’ (p. 29).

So argues the introduction, which is followed by seven already-published essays adapted here to make compelling evidence for his case. His conclusion then provides an invaluable understanding of the High Church movement in England to the present. The organization of the volume is, as it were, architectural: chapters present findings as laying modest foundations for ‘richer seams … to be studied’ further (p. 134), but on which he builds three impressive wings (Part 1, Growth, Renewal and Society; Part 2, Continental Perspectives; Part 3, Theological Identity and Difference) of a grand historical edifice.

Chapter 2 looks at aspects of the High Church revival in specific places. Of particular interest is Morris’s response to George Herring’s revisionist history of the movement, recently made available in The Oxford Movement in Practice (Oxford University Press, 2016). Morris questions the very methodology that led Herring to produce a list of 958 Tractarian clergy, and observes that he has found 11 priests-in-charge and 5 curates in the Croydon area before 1870 that Herring has missed (in ch. 3, Morris is similarly critical of Nigel Yates’s underestimate of the number of Ritualist churches). While I heed Morris’s point that the distinction between Ritualists and Tractarians may be overdrawn in Herring’s work, there is nevertheless value in constructing a list of names of people whose biographies and social networks can be analysed. There is, moreover, an important similarity between Morris and Herring in their attempts to shift the focus of Tractarian scholarship away from Oxford to the parishes, from Newman and Pusey to vicars and people and their pastoral relationships. Thus ch. 3 provides ‘close study of the eucharist as a social practice’ (p. 77) with evidence from parishes in Taunton and Cambridge, from the Guild of St Alban and the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament.

The essays in chs. 4 and 5 have been expanded since they appeared elsewhere. Placed together and at the heart of the book, they conclusively prove that the High Church revival was not insular in either a literal or metaphorical sense. There was constant interaction with Catholic (and Protestant) churches on the continent, particularly in France. Moreover, ch. 4 shows that it was not simply future converts to Roman Catholicism who were impressed by what they saw of continental church architecture and devotion: conservative High Churchmen and liberal Broad Churchmen commented positively too. All found fault, of course – but so did the French Catholics whose views of the High Church revival in England are elucidated in ch. 5. Although observers crossed the English Channel in both directions, they viewed their respective churches with Chunnel vision!

Chapter 6 on Tractarian preaching reveals the uncharacteristic nature of John Keble’s ‘National Apostasy’ sermon. Most Tractarian sermons ‘did not so much seek to assert long-lost doctrinal truths or to comment pointedly on particular questions of ecclesiastical governance and identity, as simply to build up the Christian character of their hearers’ (p. 179). Little distinguished these sermons from others in the culture. But in ch. 7 Morris recognizes that some distinctions do need to be drawn, and he does so by showing similarities and differences in the theology and ecclesiology of Newman and F.D. Maurice. Irreconcilable differences between these two meant, ultimately, that Charles Gore and other ‘Liberal Catholics’ into the twentieth century were destined to fail in uniting their thought. Gore tried to square Maurice’s attentiveness to the church’s historical reality with Newman’s ‘fixed framework of doctrine and practice’ in the first four Christian centuries, a framework that was ‘itself synthesised from what we now know to have been a remarkably diverse history’ (p. 217).

The last two chapters bring the High Church story up to the present. Chapter 8 sees continuity between Pusey in the nineteenth century and Austin Farrer in the twentieth in their theology of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Both used the ‘double test’ of Scripture and tradition to evaluate a doctrine’s claim to be de fide. Farrer held to this position (Morris thinks rightly) when many Anglo-Catholic theologians gave up their heritage and embraced Roman Catholic teaching instead. Chapter 9 (the conclusion) argues that the High Church movement was imploding long before the battles over women’s ordination. For Morris, the interwar years, far from being the glory days of the Anglo-Catholic Congresses as many commentators argue, represented the defeat of the Catholic vision of Anglicanism. That vision (shown in ch. 3) saw the parish, the diocese, the national church as a eucharistic community, membership of which depended on the regular reception of Holy Communion. Once the previously united Charles Gore and Edward Talbot found themselves arguing on different sides over whether the franchise to elect members of representative church bodies (from parish councils to the house of laity) should rest with communicants or with all the baptized, then the vision’s days were numbered. When in 1919 High Churchman ‘conceded a reorganisation of the church’s institutional governance which marginalised their distinctive perspective on church membership’, the ‘defeat of Prayer Book revision by Parliament in 1927–8 merely confirmed’ their minority status (p. 251).

One omission in the book is the global Anglican perspective. Apart from an intriguing aside on the antebellum American South (p. 146), for instance, Morris fails to mention vibrant High Church movement in the United States. But, as his title explains, he is looking at arguments and identities in the Church of England, and the book’s contributions here are so great as to make it required reading of all scholars or students or practitioners of the High Church revival.