It is fitting that this Festschrift, which celebrates Peter B. Nockles's distinguished career as ‘one of the increasingly rare breed of scholar-librarians’ (p. 3), appears in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. Chronologically arranged and thematically diverse, the twelve wide-ranging essays accord due weight to both Nockles's historiographical contributions and his library work at the Rylands.
As an historian, Nockles's most seminal work has been The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge 1994), which absolves the vitality of Georgian High Churchmanship from the taint of stagnation and lethargy left by nineteenth-century Tractarian historiographers. In the process, the hitherto overlooked (or intentionally downplayed) continuities between ‘old High Churchmen’ and the Oxford Movement, as well as their discontinuities, have been firmly established. The variations within the Tractarians’ predecessors identified by Nockles were convincingly complex, and Derya Gurses Tarbuck's and George Westhaver's essays in this volume focus on the Hutchinsonian strand, offering detailed support and nuanced qualifications to Nockles's thesis. By positioning George Horne as a transitional figure between earlier and later generations of Hutchinsonians, Tarbuck pays perhaps more attention than Nockles to the fluidity and evolution of Hutchinsonianism. In order to defend ‘Trinitarian Protestant Christianity’ (p. 74), Tarbuck argues, Horne toned down his anti-Newtonianism, which became but an optional component of Hutchinsonian ideas, to achieve closer affinity with Anglican orthodoxy.
Tarbuck's essay is complemented by Westhaver's exposition on the (dis)continuities between the typological exegesis of Horne's friend and biographer, William Jones of Nayland, and that of the Tractarian E. B. Pusey. As Nockles has noted, Jones's figurative biblical readings prefigured Pusey's sacramental principle. Building upon this, Westhaver shows that, although Pusey went further than Jones in the direction of the Incarnation, both emphasised revelation in place of reason and thereby differed from the evidentialist approach of other High Churchmen such as William Van Mildert and Herbert Marsh. These similarities, however, beg the question of why the Tractarians credited the Fathers, but not the Hutchinsonians, with their theological debt. A plausible answer, Westhaver proposes, lies in Nockles's concept of the ‘doctrine of reserve’: just as Jones trimmed off some of his publications’ figurative edges to suit his audience's dispositions, so Pusey ‘reserved’ any mention of Jones's influence because association with Hutchinsonianism risked reducing the appeal of his exegesis to ‘a generation fed on evidence writing’ (p. 173). Interestingly, in this reader's view, this hypothesis of ‘reserve’ provides a further clue as to why, paradoxically, Horne and Jones needed to drop Hutchison's name publicly, but not privately, to gain wider recognition for his central tenets. (Tarbuck's essay hints at this, but one does wonder if editorial interventions could have brought the interactions between these two essays more to the fore.)
With the Hutchinsonians well represented in this collection and elsewhere, Nigel Aston shifts the attention from his previous expertise in Hutchinsonianism to ‘other, more mainstream manifestations’ of Georgian High Churchmanship (p. 63). If one of the many achievements of Nockles's monograph has been to rescue lesser-known figures such as William Palmer of Worcester from the overshowing presence of J. H. Newman, Aston, in like manner, retraces the life of a neglected cleric, Thomas Townson, to illuminate broader religio-political issues. According to Aston, Townson represented a group of non-Hutchinsonian High Churchmen who were influential among their eighteenth-century contemporaries but failed to leave a mark on the Oxford Movement. Aston's essay then serves to bring the continuities between High Churchmanship and Tractarianism into balance with the latter's innovation and break from the former. Equally refreshingly, Kenneth Parker takes the historiographical spotlight off Newman and narrates Henry Manning's journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism instead.
Other essays honour Nockles's role as a librarian and the custodian of the Methodist Church Archives, which no doubt shaped his later interests in Methodism. Therefore, Rachel Cope contributes an essay on the ways in which the Methodist convert Catherine Livingston's reading habits helped her to foster a corporate, rather than individual, Evangelical spirituality. Carol Blessing more directly draws upon the collection of the Rylands and showcases its usefulness to literary and gender studies. Her careful reading of Mary Fletcher's manuscript journals exposes how, when editing the (auto)biography of Fletcher, Henry Moore de-radicalised her ‘proto-feminist’ advocacy of women's preaching (p. 97) and sidelined Mary Tooth, the keeper of Fletcher's papers. Again, consideration of audience loomed large, as Blessing suggests that Moore's curtailing of Fletcher's radicalism was done ‘with good intent’ to avoid reducing the (auto)biography's readership when female preaching was censured among the wider Methodist movement (pp. 105–6). Gender roles are also considered in David Bebbington's case study of the Victorian Wesleyan congregation of Brunswick Chapel, Leeds. Although the essay largely conforms to Bebbington's previously established model – the four qualities of Evangelical religion: conversionism, biblicism, activism and crucicentrism – it nevertheless digests obituaries as a new source material to telling effect. New primary sources, textual and visual, are also brought to light by William Gibson and Richard Sharp, whose contributions (on Catholic court sermons at James ii's Chapel Royal and clerical portraits respectively) testify to the impressive chronological reach of Nockles's scholarship.
There is, however, some unevenness regarding the title, Religion in Britain. While Andrew Crome's fascinating study of ‘Jewish conversion’ novels and James Pereiro's of Cardinal Manning's involvement in Jewish issues extend the ‘religion’ in the title beyond Christianity, Stewart J. Brown's survey of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 sits somewhat uncomfortably with the volume's declared scope of ‘Britain’, with Scotland only mentioned in passing. More, then, could have been made of the Oxford Movement's Scottish connections, a topic which Nockles and Brown have examined elsewhere (Peter B. Nockles, ‘“Our brethren of the north”: the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, this Journal xlvii [1996], 655–82; Stewart J. Brown, ‘Scotland and the Oxford Movement’, in Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the wider world, 1830–1930 [Cambridge, 2012], 56–77). These qualms aside, this is a fine and stimulating collection that achieves its goal of paying tribute to Peter Nockles.
