Believing that the historiography of the Oxford Movement has “lacked a modern, brief, synthetic, and accessible account” (xi), C. Brad Faught offers just that in this tautly written book that serves as an excellent thematic overview of this important episode in nineteenth-century religious history. The author attributes his approach to the influence of Linda Colley's treatment of eighteenth-century Britain in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Faught largely succeeds because while the themes—politics, religion and theology, friendship, society, and missions—are examined in clearly defined, separate chapters, he still manages to unveil enough of the narrative history of the Oxford Movement across the chapters to provide the essential context that such an approach often struggles to achieve.

As one might expect in a book on the Tractarians, the figure of John Henry Newman looms large as the intellectual and emotional center of a group that included fellow Oxford dons John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Yet one still finds ample biographical coverage of the other three, as Faught ensures that the reader understands this movement was not a one-man show, but rather a convergence of like-minded abhorrence of the state's increasing Erastianism and liberalism. Each man, however, brought something unique to the movement. Newman was the moody and eloquent agitator whose obsessive pursuit of religious truth ultimately led him to his controversial conversion to Roman Catholicism. Keble emerged as the reserved father figure who turned his back on the intellectual turbulence of Oriel College for the tranquility of a rural living. Froude, the youngest of the four men, wrote, spoke, and acted with impetuosity and occasional vitriol. His early death in 1836 left his friends devastated. And Pusey, last to join the Tractarians and Oxford's Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, not only brought prestige to the fledgling movement, but also an intense belief in the social obligations of the church of England.

The first chapter's examination of politics offers a concise explanation of the successive legislative changes from the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1827 to the Irish Church Temporalities Bill in 1833. Faught follows the Tractarians’ initial anger at the Irish bill represented in Keble's famous sermon on national apostasy to the publication of the Tracts for The Times as religious and political polemic. He ends by appraising both William Ewart Gladstone's and Benjamin Disraeli's experiences with the movement. As he does in the later chapters, Faught extends his gaze beyond Newman's conversion in 1845—typically accepted as the end date of the Oxford Movement—to the movement's replacement by its heir Anglo-Catholicism and its subsequent wrangling with the state over baptismal regeneration and ritualism later in the century. In the end, Faught concludes that politics to the Tractarians meant simply maintaining the proper balance between church and state. Since they perceived the state to be growing increasingly “invasive and onerous” (31), they set their course in opposition to the prevailing wind blowing from Westminster.

The chapters on “Religion and Theology” and “Friendship” are Faught's strongest. The first initially explores the appeal of the early church and its patristic theology to the Tractarians. While this attraction kept the Tractarians in the good graces of the High Church party for a time, it soon became apparent that Newman and company were using the early church as an unchangeable model for their emerging views, while the High Church saw that ancient heritage as more flexible in light of the English Reformation and the changes it wrought. Nonetheless, Faught rightly acknowledges the High Church debt the Tractarians owed in developing their theological positions on church government, the apostolic succession, dissent, and ritual and ceremony in worship. This chapter also includes a closer examination of the central body of writing from the Oxford Movement—the Tracts for the Times, published between 1833 and 1841—the purpose of which, in Faught's vivid words, was to “pierc[e] the flesh of a moribund clergy and rous[e] a complacent establishment” (61). The valuable chapter on the Tractarians’ friendships fleshes out these historical figures into human beings. Here we read of Newman's and Froude's travels on the Continent, including their seminal trip to Rome, Keble's and Newman's commitment to honor their beloved Froude's memory by publishing his contentious journals, and Pusey's slow warming to the Tractarians and their ideas until he suddenly found himself alone as the movement's Oxford leader. Faught uses this chapter to draw out much of the later narrative of the Oxford Movement leading up to Newman's agonizing decision to leave the Anglican Church for Rome. This sorrowful but not unexpected decision evoked elegiac words from his friends, words that reflected the strong personal bonds formed in the heady days of the movement.

Changing course, Faught uses the chapter on “Society” to investigate the Oxford Movement's wider influence in Victorian Britain by exploring its social conscience. He begins with the Tractarian axiom that the church, rather than the state, was the “repository of all that was necessary for the health of the nation” (101). Thus, the movement harshly criticized the state's social amelioration plans in the age of reform. Perhaps because the Tractarians, notably Newman, were famously short on words for the Condition-of-England question, this chapter evolves into a comparison of Gladstone's Tractarian-influenced liberalism and Disraeli's conservative Erastianism, as well as an interesting but somewhat tangential consideration of Tractarianism in the Gothic revival. Likewise, while the chapter on “Missions” fits the movement within the context of empire from Canada to Australia to South Africa, it also reaches further into the subsequent history of Anglo-Catholicism in the post-Tractarian era. Thus, these final two chapters emphasize the later influence of the Oxford Movement after its demise, rather than the actual movement itself.

As a readable, informative work of synthesis, The Oxford Movement satisfies. It will be valuable for undergraduates just becoming acquainted with the subject, as well as for graduate students who will benefit from Faught's deft handling of the movement's historiography. The author's thematic approach, though inevitably suffering from some occasional repetition, does afford the reader an efficient view of this movement that rattled and then transformed the nineteenth-century Anglican Church.