The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830–1930 is a collection of essays by a group of international scholars examining the impact of the catholic revival within Anglicanism. Its origin was an Oxford conference in September of 2008. In a way the volume is a successor to the 1933 volume Northern Catholicism edited by N. P. Williams. But whereas the earlier volume had many foci (theology, aesthetics, the moral life, spirituality, and so forth) this volume is rigorously historical, and much more international in scope.

The essays are divided into three sections: “Prelude,” “Beyond England: The Oxford Movement in Britain, the Empire, and the United States,” and “The Oxford Movement and Continental Europe.” The prelude is a fine essay by Peter B. Nockles exploring the culture of Oxford's Oriel College, where the movement had its birth. A number of the essays in section 2 attempt to cast new light on their subjects by picking them up by a new handle. Thus Stewart J. Brown suggests that the Catholic revival had some of its greatest influences not on the Scottish Episcopal Church but on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The “Scoto-Catholic Movement” led to liturgical and devotional changes and to an emphasis on the catholic nature of that church. In Rowan Strong's essay on the Jerusalem bishopric controversy (in which it was proposed that the English church and the Prussian church sponsor a bishop in Jerusalem), he does not focus on John Henry Newman's well known criticism of the project but on Henry Edward Manning, who was much more positive, seeing it as a way of extending Anglicanism into the world. Nockles attempts the same change of handles in treating the Oxford Movement in America. Rather than focusing on American Episcopal sources he taps English observations of American events, and the correspondence of James McMaster, one of the country's Roman Catholic converts. He provides some fresh insights, particularly from the correspondence of John Henry Newman. Unfortunately this approach leads to some factual errors (Isaac Hecker was never a student at the General Theological Seminary), glaring omissions (such as the pro-Tractarian bishop of New York, Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk), and questionable claims such as that the American Episcopal Church never had a strong evangelical component. It also leads him to fail to identify John Murray Forbes, one of the most interesting figures in the story of the Oxford movement in America. This middle section is rounded out by two essays considering Australia; one focusing on its early bishops, and the other treating later Anglo-Catholicism. In the last section Geoffrey Rowell offers a broad overview, and there are specific essays on the relationship between E. B. Pusey and August Tholuck and the reception of the movement in Germany, the reactions of Belgian and French Catholics to the events in England, and the later Anglo-Catholic response to the Old Catholic movement.

As a whole these essays are carefully researched and clearly argued, but the reader comes away wondering what makes it a book. The problem begins with the subtitle “Europe and the Wider World, 1830-1930.” There is no explanation why 1930 is taken as a cutoff date. It is further puzzling that only two of the fourteen essays even make it out of the nineteenth century, and one of those only on its last page. Finally it seems peculiar that the one essay that truly touches on the twentieth century (David Hilliard's study of Anglo-Catholicism in Australia) uses as its end point 1960. And although the essays are uniformly interesting, there is a silo quality about them. They do not hang together. For example, both Rowan Strong and Mark Chapman discuss the issue of the Jerusalem bishopric. And each essay is very good. But there is no interplay between them although they are arguing slightly different things. To a lesser degree the same could be said of Angela Berlis's and Nigel Yates's essays on the Old Catholics. More synthesis would have been helpful.

But at the end the book's readers will come away having learned a great deal, and will be impressed by the remarkable impact the Oxford Movement has had. In that sense The Oxford Movement has accomplished its goal.