This volume has its roots in a 2008 conference on the Oxford Movement in its world context, organized by Peter Nockles and the late Nigel Yates. Global in its scope of topics, the collection also assembles an international array of scholars. The book's fourteen essays seek to explore the influence of the Oxford Movement outside of England, tracing how the movement's ideals were exported and adapted in other national contexts and how its distinctive principles shaped missionary and ecumenical efforts. Placing the Oxford Movement into the narrative of Christianity's global spread in the nineteenth century usefully advances the study of Tractarianism beyond its traditional Anglo-centric focus on Oxford and John Henry Newman.

An introduction by the editors provides a succinct orientation to the Oxford Movement (also called Tractarianism, after Newman's series of ninety “Tracts for the Times”) and some of its key personalities. In keeping with the book's attention to place, Nockles's first chapter establishes Oxford's Oriel College as the “nerve-centre” (12) of Tractarianism and the source of a global religious movement. Subsequent chapters quickly take the reader beyond Oxford's cozy confines. Some of these essays portray ideas spreading from this “nerve-centre” and influencing the periphery while fewer discuss how influence flowed in the other direction. Yet this volume reveals that Tractarianism was always adapted and changed by its movement beyond England's borders.

In the book's first half, a series of chapters on the Oxford Movement in Britain, the empire, and the United States demonstrate how local conditions shaped the reception of Tractarianism. John Boneham's essay shows that a more conservative version of the Oxford Movement took root in Wales in order to earn acceptance from Welsh parishioners, who were hostile to both Protestant Dissent and Roman Catholicism. Stewart Brown argues that the Oxford Movement not only helped to revitalize the Scottish Episcopal Church but also enjoyed its most lasting legacy through the liturgical reform movement, which introduced more elaborate worship, decorations, and architecture into the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Rowan Strong describes the development of an “imperial Anglicanism” (79) among Tractarian sympathizers. In Australia, as Austin Cooper and David Hilliard show, Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism provided an important element of Anglican identity and supported a powerful role for the region's newly appointed bishops as well as the “muscular” “bush brotherhoods” (122).

All of these essays taken together establish that the Oxford Movement's history cannot be told solely from the vantage point of Oxford or Newman. Indeed, in most of these contexts it was moderate Tractarianism and an emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Church of England, not Newman and “his ultra-Roman supporters” (98), which found the most purchase outside of England. Anti-Roman Catholicism was a persistent feature in many of these contexts. Though, as Peter Nockles makes evident in the case of the United States, even Catholicity could be a stumbling block, contributing to the growing divergence between the more independent and republican American Episcopal Church and the Church of England.

The second half of the volume turns to continental Europe. This section begins with a perceptive overview of the European context by Goeffrey Rowell, bishop of Gibraltar. Rowell elucidates the “important continental parallels to and influences on the Oxford movement” (166), especially through the strands of Romanticism and reactions to German theological developments. The latter theme is continued by Albrecht Geck, who examines the German interest in, though not embrace of, Tractarianism. Jan de Mayer's and Karel Strobbe's analyses of the Belgian Catholic response to the Oxford Movement and Jeremy Morris's exploration of the same theme among French Catholics reveal that continental interest in the movement could be “enthusiastic and intense” (185). In both cases, Catholics eagerly followed developments in England, hoping that Tractarianism would lead to mass conversions to Roman Catholicism as part of a post-Napoleonic Roman Catholic resurgence.

The final chapters consider the intersection between the Oxford Movement and nineteenth-century European ecumenicalism. Mark Chapman finds the roots of Tractarian attraction to communion with Greek Orthodoxy in the Eastern question and in the political instability of the Ottoman Empire. The contentious establishment of a Jerusalem bishopric helped to turn Tractarian attention to the possibilities of Orthodoxy. Here as elsewhere, the Oxford Movement's embrace of the branch theory that the Church of England, like the Roman and Orthodox Churches, was one branch of the true Catholic Church, both inspired and complicated ecumenical efforts. Angela Berlis examines the correspondence between Roman Catholic historian Ignaz von Döllinger and Tractarian leader Edward Pusey, an important reminder that a variety of dissident Catholic groups were also involved in ecumenical efforts. Nigel Yates concludes the volume with a further consideration of Anglo-Catholic efforts to unify with European Old Catholics and Reformed Catholics. As Yates argues, these discussions helped to strengthen Anglican commitments to many principles championed by Tractarians and shared with Old Catholics, such as the historic episcopate and “a broadly Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist” (264). In the long run, the Oxford Movement advanced Anglican ecumenical engagement across Europe.

This volume achieves its goal in providing a fresh approach to Tractarianism and demonstrates that it was hardly an insular movement. There seems to be much promise for considering this volume's observations alongside other recent work on imperialism and missionaries. Thus, the contribution by Rowan Strong stands out for clearly placing the Oxford Movement into its imperial context. Though Tractarian sympathizers linked a unified, Catholic Church of England with the success of a unified, Christian empire, they were not “fastened to the ideology of imperial state power nor . . . unmindful of the less powerful in the imperial-colonial-indigenous interface” (97). The Oxford Movement's wariness of state power and imperial ambitions, also noticed by Mark Chapman (233), deserves further comparison with other missionary endeavors. This book will be of great interest to religious and intellectual historians and offers many suggestive observations for imperial historians and scholars of Britain's interactions with the European continent. Its breadth and insight are a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Nigel Yates.