Perhaps no historian has proved so influential in recovering the history of Georgian High Church Anglicanism as Peter Benedict Nockles. John Rylands Library celebrates his career in this festschrift edition of the Bulletin. Nockles's most influential work has been The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), which dispelled the Tractarian narrative that High Churchmanship perished following the death of the nonjurors. Additionally, significant continuities and discontinuities existed between eighteenth-century High Churchmanship and Tractarianism. Of course, Nockles wrote on many topics, and the editors included essays “broadly representative of Peter's scholarship and scholarly networks” (4). The collection's strongest essays most directly build off Nockles's work or take his interests into new methodological directions. These include essays by Nigel Aston, Derya Gurses Tarbuck, and George Westhaver. Additionally, Carol Blessing contributes to ongoing scholarly debate about the impact of patriarchal structures on the visibility of women in history.
Aston examines Thomas Townson, a humble priest who enjoyed both popularity and influence within his High Church Tory social and intellectual circles. Although relatively unknown today, contemporaries thought highly enough of Townson's spiritual and intellectual prowess. Despite Townson's influence among High Churchmen in his own lifetime, his affection for the establishment and Protestant convictions prevented admiration among Tractarians. Townson represented a significant strand of eighteenth-century, non-Hutchinsonian High Churchmanship that failed to exert much influence after his passing. Aston argues that churchmen like Townson illustrate Nockles's contention that Tractarianism represented a break with vital earlier traditions. Moreover, Townson sheds light on another significant Georgian High Church tradition in need of further study.
Tarbuck also contributes an essay on eighteenth-century High Churchmanship. In this case, she focuses on the Hutchinsonian George Horne. As noted by Nockles and Tarbuck, Horne and other High Churchmen embraced Hutchinsonianism to uphold Trinitarian orthodoxy. Tarbuck situates Horne as a key figure linking the early Oxford Hutchinsonians with later devotees (74). She argues that Hutchinsonianism was a system fluid enough that Horne was able to drop its anti-Newtonianism and instead emphasize aspects that best upheld Anglican orthodoxy (80). William Stevens was the most influential lay Hutchinsonian and close friend of Horne. Despite mentioning him on page 73, Tarbuck does not interact with Robert Andrews's, Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732–1807 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Tarbuck also notes that “Hutchinsonian mistrust of the Jewish Talmudic tradition has not yet been investigated” (72). While there is more work to do, Andrew and David Katz (“The Hutchinsonians and Hebraic Fundamentalism in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews [Leiden: Brill, 1990]) have already done work in this area.
Scholarly interest in the role of women as preachers has recently spilled from the academy to the mass media as a result of works such as William Witt's Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women's Ordination (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021) and Beth Allison Barr's historical approach in The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Ada, MI: Brazos, 2021). Blessing's work confirms Barr's contention that the contribution of women has been systematically erased from history as a result of systemic patriarchy. For example, Mary Fletcher was a well-known Methodist preacher and author (97). We primarily know about Fletcher today from The Life of Mary Fletcher. As a result of editing by Henry Moore, Fletcher's Life exists in an ambiguous space between autobiography and biography. Blessing argues that Moore's “omissions and commentary neutralised her more radical proto-feminist ideas” (97). By reading the correspondence of Fletcher's secretary, Mary Tooth, Blessing discovered Tooth's efforts to preserve Fletcher's image as a Methodist preacher (101). Moore, however, erased Tooth's portrayal of Fletcher to present a more “respectable” image of Methodism.
Westhaver builds on Nockles by examining continuities between High Church figurative exegesis and Tractarian sacramental exegesis (161–162). Tractarians recognized the influence of High Church exegetes, such as William Jones. However, Pusey's emphasis on the Incarnation led to a sacramental exegesis more extreme than Jones's figurative approach (163). Yet Westhaver argues that this may not fully explain Pusey's tendency—highlighted by Nockles—to ignore similarities between his work and Jones's. He puts forward an admittedly “speculative” suggestion that the shared reserve of both Jones and Pusey prevented Pusey from acknowledging Jones. The association of typological mysteries with Jones, whose Hutchinsonianism was then out of favor, might have led Pusey to downplay his reliance on Jones. Despite being a speculative argument, Westhaver hopes to encourage further research of High Churchmanship and Tractarianism “in the path suggested by Nockles” (173).
As the collection's editors write, “This volume is an expression of thanks for the scholarly generosity and friendship extended by Peter for over three decades to researchers at the John Rylands Library and in his many professional and personal connections with scholars of early modern and modern religious history” (4). Naturally, not all essays are equally strong. For example, David Bebbington unsurprisingly concludes that Victorian Wesleyans were expected to embody the famous Bebbington Quadrilateral and some Methodist distinctives (see Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s [Allen and Unwin, 1989]). Even in this essay, however, Bebbington's use of obituaries as source material may prove a fruitful avenue for future endeavors. In all, the editors provide a well-rounded collection that achieves their goal of celebrating Peter Nockles.
