In his opening address to the Lambeth Conference of 1968 Michael Ramsey publicly attested to the manner in which this scholar-archbishop had, by his elevation to the see of Canterbury, been abruptly precipitated into the cultural conflicts of the 1960s:
Today the earth is being shaken and there can be few or none who do not feel the shaking: the rapid onrush of the age of technology with the new secularity which comes with it, the terrible contrast between the world of affluence and the world of hunger, the explosions of racial conflict, the amassing of destructive weapons, the persistence of war and killing. (p. 206)
With recent new biographies of Rowan Williams, Cosmo Lang and Geoffrey Fisher, archiepiscopal biography has become something of a cottage industry, but Peter Webster's treatment of the one-hundredth archbishop of Canterbury does not disappoint. Rather than a strict biography, Archbishop Ramsey offers an assessment of both the man and the office against the backdrop of an era marked by growing disaffection both from the idea of religious establishment and from organised religion more generally. It is in Ramsey's pronouncements that we see an early Anglican attempt formally to define a post-Christendom model for the atrophied Anglican establishment that he inherited. Such a model, while fully comprehensible to most other churches of the Anglican Communion, came as a shock to those who still thought of the Church of England as a bastion of moral – if not social – order. It earned Ramsey considerable opprobrium from a wide variety of persons both within and outside the Church, even as it proclaimed a fundamentally catholic vision of the Church as the Body of Christ. From the Honest to God controversy and structural reform of the Church of England to Anglican-Methodist unity and ecumenical relationships with the Roman Catholic Church, and from homosexuality and abortion to Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe, Webster opens a window on an eventful primacy, reinforced by thirty-five excerpts from the Ramsey papers and Hansard debates. In a comparatively short volume, more than one-third of which is devoted to Ramsey's own words, it seems churlish to complain of omissions, but the relative lack of space accorded to Ramsey's relationships with his fellow bishops is disappointing. While Ramsey's interactions – particularly with such colourful individuals as Mervyn Stockwood of Southwark – are mentioned, this is mostly en passant (that Archbishop Donald Coggan of York, Ramsey's eventual successor, is mentioned only twice in the text is striking) but perhaps it merely reflects the splendid isolation in which Ramsey actually functioned. This is, however, a minor point and does not detract from the value of Webster's work for scholars of late twentieth-century Anglicanism and of the ecumenical movement more generally.
