The Missionary Era · 1833-1906 · England
The Oxford Movement & Anglo-Catholic Revival
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About This Movement
In July 1833 John Keble preached an Oxford sermon on national apostasy, protesting Parliament's reorganization of the Irish bishoprics, and a group of Oxford dons began issuing Tracts for the Times arguing that the Church of England was not a creature of the state but a branch of the ancient catholic church, with bishops in unbroken succession and a sacramental life to match. The argument split them: John Henry Newman's Tract 90 in 1841 tried to read the Thirty-Nine Articles in a catholic sense, and four years later he left for Rome, while Keble and Edward Pusey stayed and worked. The next generation carried it out of the university and into the parishes — vestments, incense, candles, weekly communion, and slum missions in the worst districts of London and the industrial cities. At the cost of ritual prosecutions in which a few priests went to prison. It also gave England something it had not had since the Reformation: women's religious orders, beginning with the Park Village sisterhood in 1845.
Sources
- Tracts for the Times (1833-41, ending with Newman's Tract 90), with Keble's Assize Sermon 'National Apostasy' (1833) (primary) — These tracts are the movement's manifesto literature, published serially.
- Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864); Keble, The Christian Year (1827); Froude's Remains (1838-39); Pusey's sermons and letters (primary) — Newman's Apologia is a retrospective, defensive account written years after the events. Froude's Remains was published after his death and shaped by its editors. Keble's Christian Year is the movement's own devotional poetry.
- The sisterhoods' archives: Park Village (1845), Sellon's Devonport Society, CSMV Wantage, CSJB Clewer - rules, annals, letters (primary) — These are the first Anglican women's religious orders since the Reformation, documenting themselves in their own rules, annals and letters. Hostile anti-sisterhood pamphlets from the period survive alongside them as the opposing view. Some of these community archives are not easy to access.
- Ritualist parish records (St Alban's Holborn, St Peter's London Docks); the ritual-prosecution record (Public Worship Regulation Act 1874; Bishop King's trial 1888-90) (primary) — Some of this practice is documented through the courts that prosecuted it, a hostile legal filter worth keeping in mind.
- Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context (CUP, 1994), with Brown & Nockles (eds.), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930 (CUP, 2012) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, 'Anglicanism, Presbyterianism and the religious identities of the United Kingdom' (Wolffe); 'Women preachers and the new orders' (Holmes & O'Brien) for the sisterhoods (reference) — Exact chapter numbers for these two chapters could not be confirmed.