The Architectural Impact of the Oxford Movement

Author(s):  
Peter Doll

In this chapter the author argues that church buildings and their architecture influenced by the Oxford Movement cannot be understood apart from their essential grounding in the worship and self-understanding of the Church. This study sets the consideration of such church buildings in the wider context of the history of the Church of England both before and after the Reformation. The churches of the Church of England preceding and following the Oxford Movement articulate an Anglican sense of belonging to the Church universal and are thus a valuable contribution to the faith and witness of the Church far beyond the Anglican Communion.

Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone

Protestantism was a major rallying cry during the Tractarian controversies. It was anathematized by some Oxford Movement radicals as a ‘heresy’, and held tenaciously by evangelical campaigners as ‘the pure Gospel of Christ’. Protestant polemicists decried Tractarianism as a revival of Roman Catholicism in an Anglican disguise and called their brothers-in-arms to fight the theological battles of the Reformation over again. Focusing on the events in Oxford itself between 1838 and 1846, this chapter surveys the rhetoric which surrounded three overlapping themes—Protestant Reformers, Protestant Formularies, and Protestant Truth. It shows how these loomed large in the speeches and writings of those who wanted to defend the Protestant hegemony of the Church of England and the University of Oxford.


1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Collinson

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.


Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin

In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.


Author(s):  
Grayson Carter

Did Evangelicalism influence the beginnings—and nature—of the Oxford Movement? There were, in fact, a number of close associations between the two movements, and several of the leading personalities of the Oxford Movement were raised in Evangelicalism, but eventually came to reject the more extreme ‘gospel religion’ found in Oxford during the 1820s and 1830s. As this chapter illustrates, there were powerful political, spiritual, and social forces and counter-forces at work in England at the time, propelling young men and women in different ecclesial directions. The Evangelical background to the Oxford Movement is an important, but often overlooked, feature of the history of the Church of England during the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Matthew Bradley

Anglo-Catholicism, the nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that sought to reassert many of the forms and rituals of Roman Catholicism, exerted a significant shaping influence upon the religious aesthetics of English decadent writing. While the space that Anglo-Catholicism offered for a decadent performance of sexual difference has been examined before, this article offers a complementary argument, emphasizing a strand within decadence arising from the role of personality in reconceptualizing, and possibly distorting, religious orthodoxy. The first part provides a history of the discourse of degeneracy around the early Oxford Movement and the mediation of Anglo-Catholic ideas into English decadence through the writings of Walter Pater. It then discusses the ways in which decadent writing in England explored a distorting excess of personality through the aesthetics of religious ritual and asceticism.


Author(s):  
PATRICK COLLINSON

This chapter surveys the perceptions of the Tudor Church since the sixteenth century. It argues that the history of the Tudor Church has been punctuated, bisected, fractured, and forever complicated by the Reformation, which meant different things to different people. One of the visions of the Tudor Church seen through very dark if rose-tinted glass was that enjoyed by Anglicans in the century or so following the recatholicising Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. In this perspective, what happened to the Tudors was sensible and non-revolutionary. The Anglo‐Catholic version of the Tudor Church was a reaction against the story of British Christianity which had been told between the 1560s and 1580s by John Foxe in Acts and Monuments of the Church, or its more familiar title, ‘The Book of Martyrs’.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 268-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.


1974 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Philip Barrett

An important feature of the ecclesiastical history of the Church of England since the Reformation has been the unique and precious tradition of a choir of men and boys singing daily choral services in the cathedrals of this country. There have been several studies of this tradition and the music written for cathedral services, but there has not yet been a full account of cathedral choirs in the last century. There have been useful brief surveys by Owen Chadwick and Bernarr Rainbow, but these have been only parts of larger works whose main emphasis is elsewhere. Plenty of material exists, however, and the contemporary conditions which led S. S. Wesley to write his polemical pamphlet A Few Words on Cathedral Music in 1849 demand detailed investigation.


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