In the brave new world of digital publication, collections of previously published articles may seem redundant. However, essays which appear in books rather than journals can all too easily still sink into unmerited obscurity, while an astutely chosen collection affords a valuable opportunity to reflect on the range and character of a scholar's interests. Andrew Chandler's selection from the voluminous back catalogue of the late W. R. ‘Reg’ Ward (very helpfully documented in the bibliography appended to the book) is very welcome on both counts. The anthology embraces all the key areas of Ward's ecclesiastical historical interests (though it is important to remember that Reg cut his teeth in large-scale studies of the land tax and the Hanoverian and Victorian University of Oxford). Chandler divides his collection into three subsections: ‘The Realm of the Imagination’, including essays on Gerhard Tersteegen, Johann Sebastian Bach (as biblical expositor) and ‘The making of the Evangelical mind’ in German Protestant circles in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; ‘Piety and Practice: Establishments, Denominations and Movements’, which offers – alongside Ward's classic essay of 1971 on early nineteenth-century English religion, ‘The religion of the people and the problem of control’, in which he memorably declared its context ‘the most important single generation in the modern history not only of English religion but of the whole Christian world’ – pieces on Swedenborgianism, revivals in early eighteenth-century Europe and a characteristically robust take on Church-State relations in the DDR and Switzerland; and ‘Inheritances and Accommodations’, starting with reflections on the Evangelical genesis of the missionary movement and the history of the pastoral office in British and American Methodism, then heading back to twentieth-century German Protestantism (Barth and Bonhoeffer) via the seventeenth-century Lutheran Gottfried Arnold before a peroration discussing ‘British Methodism between clericalisation and secularisation 1932–99’. The variety of periods and characters under discussion is none the less given genuine unity by the enduring concerns that fuelled much of Ward's scholarship: a breadth of international vision combined with a forensic focus on the particular; concentration on the Protestant tradition of Protestantism and its intellectual trajectories within a thorough grounding in social historical context; and a sceptical approach to establishments (in all senses) which helped to make ecclesiastical history for him the ‘dismal science’.
Chandler's lively and affectionate memoir and assessment of Ward prefaces the essays, and together with Jay Brown's outstanding obituary for the British Academy will provide readers not fortunate enough to have encountered Reg in real life with valuable and in places necessary context for properly understanding his scholarly output. Those, like the present author, who did know Ward and his work will experience familiar reactions in the re-reading that the volume provokes. The depth and range of reference and knowledge are breathtaking (if humiliating in the expectations the author has of his readers’ ability to keep up); there is also the rather curious combination of knotty and difficult prose with memorable one-line put-downs of both fellow historians (‘the holy water sprinkled by the late Dean Sykes and his pupils’) and historical subjects (‘[Thomas] Coke's weakness was not ambition, but the thickest vein of personal silliness ever disclosed by a Methodist leader of the first rank’) and themes (‘Ecumenicism has degenerated in the minds of too many churchmen into a kneejerk substitute for thought’). Ward's often unsparing approach to scholarly engagement both on paper and in the seminar makes it all the more important that Chandler's memoir also captures the genuine human warmth and lack of pretention that made Ward not only most intellectually stimulating but good and supportive company for several generations of historians of religion.
