The Anglican Tradition (2024)

For three hundred years after the dissolution of the monasteries, there were no vowed religious, monasteries, or convents in the Church of England. Then, ignited by the Oxford Movement (1833–1845), monastic life revived. Between 1840 and 1900 more than ninety women’s communities were founded, and thousands of women had taken their first steps as novices. During the same period, some twenty-nine men’s communities were established.

By 1900, there were some sixty surviving women’s and men’s communities, with a total membership, including novices, of between 3,000 and 4,000, and Anglican religious life had spread to most of the English-speaking world (Mumm 1999: 3). Since then many more communities following traditional monastic forms have arisen around the Anglican world, as well as numerous non-traditional communities. It is now a recognized feature of the Anglican Church’s life.

Anglican Monasticism: History and Themes

Since the Reformation, the Church of England had regarded monastic life with profound suspicion. There were, however, some early stirrings of interest, notably in the family community of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding (1626–1657). Refugees from the revolution in France exposed many to the practical, charitable work of Sisters of Mercy and of Charity, as did the German Lutheran deaconess movement, which had begun in 1836 at Kaiserswerth. Admiration grew for women who devoted themselves to education, caring for the sick, and aiding the disadvantaged. In 1829 the poet laureate Robert Southey called for the establishment of Anglican Sisters of Charity to meet the growing needs of both the industrialized and the rural poor (Allchin 1958: 15–51; Anson 1964: 1–28).

Anglican religious life was closely tied to the Anglo-Catholic movement. Its first foundations in the Tractarian and Ritualist eras (1833–1890) were followed by Anglican missionary expansion, liberal theological, and Anglo-Papalist movements (1890–1920), and a long period of mature Anglo-Catholicism (1920–1963). The influence of modern theology, history, sociology, and psychology culminated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), marking the acceptance of Anglo-Catholicism’s liturgical goals and its decline. The past sixty years have seen growth in Anglican religious life in Africa and Melanesia and loss in numbers in many other areas.

Controversy dominated the early years of Anglican religious life. Fear of Roman Catholic influence was widespread. Early objections were raised to life-long vows, to the alienation of family property, and to the contemplative life, which was regarded as socially useless. While these particular objections have faded, Anglican monastic and religious life has remained peripheral to the main concerns of the Anglican Church.

The first generations of Anglican monasticism were outward looking. Women’s communities ignited an explosion of educational, medical, social, and charitable institutions and ministries, while men’s communities challenged established patterns of parish and institutional life and often advocated social justice. As time has passed, Anglican monasticism has concentrated more on inner spiritual life, with a particular emphasis on recovering traditional historical forms of monastic life, theology, and practice.

Tractarians and Ritualists: 1833–1890

The beginnings of Anglican monastic life may be dated to 6 June 1841, when Marian Rebecca Hughes vowed her life to God in the presence of Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a leader of the Tractarian movement. For family reasons she pursued her vocation alone until 1847. In America Anne Ayres followed a similar path when, inspired by a sermon of Rev. William Augustus Muhlenberg, a prominent proponent of the social gospel, she dedicated herself on All Saints Day, 1845, and pursued her vocation alone until 1852.

The first enduring Anglican communities were established for women in the 1840s. By 1860, some eighteen communities had been founded in England, and another thirty-three by 1890, as well as sixteen in the United States and Canada, three in Africa, and two in Australia. They shared three characteristics. Each embraced charitable work at its core; almost all were founded as cooperative efforts of clergy, interested laity, and the founding women themselves; and all adapted the post-Reformation Roman Catholic forms of charitable sisterhoods rather than the earlier, more traditional forms of the monastic life. Men’s communities began later, were fewer in number, and remained much smaller.

The work of the early sisterhoods included nursing, home visiting, rehabilitation of women in prostitution, and education, particularly of poor children. Nursing was in its infancy as a profession, and nursing sisters were in the vanguard of a profession made famous by Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War (1853–1856). The selfless work of Anglican sisters among the sick and dying, and among the poor in desperate industrial slums and isolated rural areas, earned the sisterhoods the respect of many who were otherwise prejudiced against the religious life.

The ways by which the first religious communities were founded were recognizably Anglican. Over the years a typical pattern emerged: a clergyman concerned for the welfare of a distressed area conceived the need for help. He would then assemble clergy and leading laity, who would identify suitable buildings, initiate a funding plan, and invite interested women to form the community, of which he would be temporal guardian and spiritual advisor. Bishops might or might not be consulted, but most gave consent and blessing once the undertaking was on a firm footing. This pattern of founder-committee-leader-church approval is, in fact, how most Anglican organizations and works are usually formed. So, although it was not well noted at the time, the religious life began and flourished in characteristically Anglican patterns from the beginning. Before 1860 only the energetic and authoritarian Priscilla Lydia Sellon acted independently when she founded her ‘Devonport Sisterhood’ in the slum areas of Plymouth. But even she acted in response to a public plea for help by the bishop of Exeter, and received his personal encouragement (Williams 1965).

The first attempt to organize religious life for women in the Church of England was Pusey’s Sisterhood of the Holy Cross (SHC), in 1845 (Williams and Campbell 1965). It was followed in quick succession in 1848 by Sellon’s Society of the Most Holy Trinity at Devonport, by William John Butler’s Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV), and by the nursing Sisters of St John the Divine. Another fifteen communities were founded by 1860, among them the All Saints Sisters in 1851, the Community of St John the Baptist (CSJB) in 1852, founded by Thomas Thelusson Carter with Harriet Monsell, and John Mason Neale’s Society of St Margaret (SSM) in 1855.

The wider context of early Anglican efforts to establish monastic life was strongly conditioned by anti-Roman Catholic anxieties. From 1829 to 1867, a number of public acts upset the old religious order in England: the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829); the Irish Temporalities Bill (1833); controversy over government endowment of Maynooth, an Irish Roman Catholic seminary (1845); John Henry Newman’s conversion (1845); the Gorham judgement, reinstating an Anglican clergyman who taught conditional baptismal regeneration (1850); the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England (1850); an attack by the Prime Minister, Lord Russell, on Tractarians as papists (1850); and criminal prosecutions of ritualist clergy (1867). The suspicion that the new religious communities were crypto-Roman Catholic often led to controversy and in some cases to public and disorderly protest.

Three elements of traditional monastic life were missing in these early foundations: the rule and structures of the religious life, vows, and practical, lived experience. Experience would accumulate as the years passed, but rules and forms of vows had to be sought elsewhere, or constructed anew.

The first rule written for an Anglican religious community was by Pusey for the SHC. It was based on the rule of the Visitation Sisters, founded by Francis de Sales in 1610. Pusey’s rule incorporated sections on visiting the sick and the poor drawn from the rule of the widely admired Sisters of Mercy of Dublin, founded by Catherine McAuley in 1831. Butler’s rule for CSMV was likewise based on the rule of the Visitation Sisters, with additions gleaned from his wide researches and travels. Charitable sisterhoods provided a pattern for many other Anglican communities well into the twentieth century. Early Anglican rules mandated both the full monastic office and full-time work. This combination became normative for Anglican religious life, lending a Benedictine quality even to non-Benedictine foundations. In their independence, Anglican communities have freely modified their early rules and developed their own customs and traditions over the years, and so are not easily classified into types.

Non-dispensable lifelong religious vows were for centuries at the core of Protestant criticism of the religious life, encompassing both high-minded scriptural and theological questions and a rich and inventive literature of scandal. The fear was that the young, impressionable, and enthusiastic would be manipulated by unscrupulous or fanatical leaders into making ill-advised commitments under vows, depriving them of freedom, family, and property. The public commitments of the earliest sisters were therefore made in general and time-limited terms, although many women made the traditional vows for life in private. Public profession of the vows for life was still controversial in the 1880s. The greatest early episcopal supporter of the religious life, Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford from 1845 to 1870, made his position clear: vows were valid only as long as the person making them chose to continue (Anson 1964: 300–304).

In spite of these obstacles, religious communities flourished and multiplied. In the first twenty-five years, from 1845 to 1870, some 230 women made final vows. Greater growth and influence followed: by one calculation another 1,530 British women finished their novitiate training and made vows between 1870 and 1900 (Mumm 1999: 220). For Anglican women in Britain the religious life was by 1900 a sizeable and established fact.

The first non-British communities arose in New York City: Anne Ayres’ Sisterhood of the Holy Communion in 1852, and the Community of St Mary (CSM) in 1865. CSM’s distinguished history includes not only extensive growth and ministries, but also perhaps the first Anglican monastic martyrs. In 1878 CSM sisters remained in Memphis to nurse the sick during a yellow fever epidemic, knowing that their lives would likely be given in that service. Four died, with others inspired by their example (Mary Hilary 1965: 97–109). SSM established a house in Boston in 1873, and CSJB a house in New York City in 1874. Another American women’s community, the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity, began in 1882.

Foundations soon began throughout the British Empire. In 1874 Alan Becher Webb, the bishop of Bloemfontein, founded the Community of St Mary and All Angels (CSM&AA), one of whose sisters, Henrietta Stockdale, is revered as the founder of modern nursing in South Africa. Ten years later Bishop Webb and Cecile Isherwood initiated the Community of the Resurrection of our Lord in Grahamstown, to pursue educational, pastoral, and social work. And in 1887 the Society of St John the Divine was established in Natal.

In 1884 Hannah Coome began the Sisterhood of St John the Divine in Toronto, whose members earned respect from the sceptical by their nursing work during the 1885 North-West Rebellion. In Melbourne, Emma Caroline Silco*ck founded the Australian Community of the Holy Name in 1888, and the foundation of the Society of the Sacred Advent followed in 1892.

As for Anglican men’s communities, the first were John Henry Newman’s community at Littlemore, near Oxford, and Nashotah House, a missionary community in Wisconsin, both founded in 1842. Littlemore did not long survive Newman’s departure to Rome in 1845. Nashotah became a semi-monastic seminary. Richard Meux Benson initiated the first enduring Anglican men’s religious community. Benson, since 1850 the vicar of Cowley, adjacent to Oxford, was attracted to both the study and practice of the ascetic life. Scholarly and self-denying, he was also a natural and effective parish priest. A friend of Butler and Carter, he knew the CSMV and CSJB communities near Oxford well. He was a student of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, and Ignatian spirituality would be prominent in the community he founded. In 1865 he and two friends joined to form the Society of St John the Evangelist (SSJE). They based themselves at Cowley, and on 27 December 1866 they made lifelong vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. They made their vows, not before Bishop Wilberforce, whose convictions they respected, but before each other. SSJE began work in America in 1870, in India in 1874, and in South Africa in 1883.

The second lasting men’s community was American, begun in 1881 by James Huntington, a young social activist priest, and two friends. Influenced and sponsored by CSJB, the first work of the Order of the Holy Cross (OHC) was with German-speaking immigrants in the Lower East Side of New York City. OHC combined the work with the poor that was characteristic of the early sisterhoods with the preaching, mission, and spiritual direction characteristic of SSJE. OHC added Benedict’s Rule to Huntington’s rule in 1984, and these dual energies have remained at the core of its identity.

In 1863 Joseph Leycester Lyne, charismatic, romantic, persuasive, and possibly a bit mad, began the first substantial Anglican Benedictine community. Guided by Sellon and Pusey, he served briefly as deacon to Charles Lowder, the famous slum priest of St Peter’s, London Docks, who disapproved of his monastic habit. Calling himself Fr Ignatius, Lyne issued a pamphlet in 1862 calling for the restoration of monasticism in the Church of England, and then entered on a career of itinerant preaching to attract followers. His community found a home in 1869 near Llanthony in the Black Mountains of Wales. In time, he drifted into an attempted revival of the ‘ancient British church’, neo-druidism and the beginnings of Wicca, British Israelitism, and flat earth beliefs, as well as more serious efforts to restore the Welsh language. Ordained priest by the episcopus vagans Joseph René Villatte in 1898, Lyne remained loyal to his own sense of vocation, died in 1908, and is buried at Llanthony.

Liberals and Papalists: 1890–1945

The publication in 1889 of Lux Mundi, edited by Charles Gore, himself soon to be a monastic founder, proclaimed a new Anglo-Catholic era. It was a revolutionary attempt to reconcile biblical studies and liberal thinking with Christian theology through the Incarnation. A new generation, influenced by visions of wider social inclusion, as well as by the colonialist expansion of European power, sought to embody these values in new religious communities.

Some twelve communities for men came into being in this period, notably the Community of the Resurrection (CR) in 1892, founded by Gore and other Christian Socialist clergy, while in 1893 Herbert Kelly founded the Society of the Sacred Mission (SSM) for the training of middle- and working-class men for the ministry. The Society of the Holy Cross, an association of celibate Anglo-Catholic clergy, had been founded by Charles Lowder in 1855. The Oratory of the Good Shepherd, founded in 1913, organized community life for dispersed celibate clergy. In the United States, Eva Lee Matthews founded the Community of the Transfiguration (1898), and American SSJE inspired the Order of St Anne (1910).

A generation after Fr Ignatius’ efforts, Benedictine life was established on a firmer basis by Aelred Carlyle at Caldey Island (1896). He and most of his community became Roman Catholic in 1913. But his work bore lasting Anglican fruit when, in 1914, a former member, Denys Prideaux, helped found Pershore, later Nashdom, Abbey. The Society of St Paul, now Alton Abbey, founded in 1889 to aid distressed sailors, began to follow the Rule of Benedict in 1893. Under Carlyle’s influence, the first women’s Benedictine community, founded by Jessie Park Moncrieff, adopted the Rule of Benedict and the Latin office. Those who remained Anglican founded Malling Abbey in Kent in 1916. Many communities founded under Anglican rules have since adopted the Rule of Benedict. Today some two dozen communities identify themselves as Benedictine.

Roman Catholic influence on Anglo-Catholics took a new direction with the 1896 publication of the bull Apostolicae curae by Leo XIII, in which he declared Anglican orders ‘absolutely null and utterly void’. Anglicans who had hoped for reunion with Rome on the basis of mutual recognition formed a new party, loosely called Anglo-Papalism. It intended to fashion Anglican worship and forms as closely as possible to Roman models, so that the Church would be ready for reunion if the 1896 teaching were ever to be superseded. Anglo-Papalism flourished in England until the Second Vatican Council. Religious communities played an important role in the Anglo-Papalist movement, in their symbolic role exemplifying Anglican catholicity, but more, as communities giving daily reality to its spiritual values. The Nashdom Benedictines were strong adherents from the beginning, and several women’s communities came under their influence, including Malling Abbey and the Society of the Precious Blood, founded in 1905. Beginning in the 1930s CR became engaged in the movement as well. Individual adherents were found in many communities.

Franciscan community life first emerged with the Society of the Divine Compassion (1894). The women’s Community of St Francis was formed in 1905; the American Order of Poor Brethren of St Francis in 1919; and the English Brotherhood of St Francis of Assisi in 1921. Anglican Franciscan life eventually amalgamated into the Society of St Francis (SSF), with additional communities now also in Brazil, Korea, and Melanesia.

One of the most remarkable forms of monastic life for men began in Australia in 1897, when the first of some twenty Bush Brotherhoods was formed. Founded to provide ministry to isolated communities in the Outback, many of their members were young, enthusiastic Anglo-Catholic clergy looking for the adventure of mission. They vowed celibacy, poverty, and obedience, usually for five years, and attended a general community reunion several times a year. In 1972 the assets of the last three Brotherhoods were merged into the Brotherhood of the Good Shepherd, now a social service agency for rural life. The Bush Brotherhoods are an important part of the self-image of Australian Anglicanism.

Anglican religious life entered perhaps its most influential period after the First World War. This was the era of the great Anglo-Catholic Congresses of the 1920s and 1930s, which brought together tens of thousands for mass celebrations, speeches, and meetings, prominently featuring members of Anglican religious orders. During the early part of this period many communities reached the height of their membership, some having hundreds of members and dozens of houses. Nursing and education, social welfare work, and scholarship were thriving. Confidence in the principles of Anglican Catholic life as it was then understood was never higher.

In 1925 Ini Kopuria, a former policeman and devout Anglican from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, founded the Melanesian Brotherhood. Devoted to overcoming ethnic conflict in Melanesia, the Brotherhood has played a significant role in ethnic reconciliation. Seven brothers suffered martyrdom for this cause in 2003 (Carter 2006). The Melanesian Brotherhood is the largest Anglican religious community in the world, at its height numbering many hundreds and now counting some 282 brothers under vows and more than 170 novices (Dunstan 2017: 88). In 2004 it received the Pacific Human Rights Award for its peace work. In the late 1950s SSF began work in Papua New Guinea, and it now numbers some sixty-one friars there and in the Solomon Islands. Melanesia now claims the largest number of Anglican religious.

Asian men’s communities began in India as early as 1877 with the Brotherhood of the Ascended Christ, and with the Brotherhood of the Epiphany in 1880. They were followed by the Sisterhood of the Epiphany in 1902, the Sisterhood of St Mary, and the St Andrew’s Brotherhood, both in 1911, and then the Christa Prema Seva Sangha in 1934. In 1929 the Bangladeshi Sisterhood of the Epiphany was founded, and in 1948 the Order of Women of the Church of South India. In Korea the Society of the Holy Cross was founded by the English Community of St Peter (1925). Their Sr Mary Clara, killed in North Korea in 1950, is considered a martyr.

In Africa the Community of the Sacred Passion (CSP), founded in 1910 by Bishop Frank Weston, soon began work throughout Tanzania. In 1924 the South African CSM&AA established the Community of St Mary at the Cross (CSMC) in Leribe, Lesotho. Eleven years after its UK foundation at Whitby in 1915, the Order of the Holy Paraclete (OHP) began work in Ghana, now at Jachie, near Kumasi and Sunyani. And in 1936 the CR fathers helped found what became the Holy Name Community (CZR) in Zimbabwe.

Mid-Century to Millennium: 1945 to the Present

Trends that would be validated by the Second Vatican Council had been on the horizon for a decade or more, including new biblical, liturgical, and theological studies, as well as new ideas of psychology, community, and authority. Some Anglican monastic orders ignored these changes, but the council made further resistance almost impossible. Anglo-Papalists seemed stranded, and some, like Nashdom, struggled. Its American daughter, St Gregory’s Abbey, continues. Most communities successfully adapted to the new environment. Anglican liturgical reforms came to embody many Anglo-Catholic goals, but in that process Anglo-Catholicism lost much of its cohesiveness as a distinct movement. Most Anglican communities have since entered into the mainstream of Anglican life.

Many first-world communities founded in this period have remained small, though some have prospered, such as the Order of St Helena in the United States. Women’s communities have generally declined in numbers, partly because careers are now widely available to women, and partly because requirements for education, health, and social work have become too complex for many communities to manage. Women’s ordination has brought greater sacramental autonomy, reducing the need for outside clergy. Many gender-specific characteristics of women’s communities have disappeared. Women’s and men’s community growth dynamics have become more and more similar. Institutional independence and smaller community size, traditionally characteristic of Anglican men’s communities, are now shared by both men and women.

As the millennium drew near, Anglican growth shifted to Africa and the developing world. In 1970 the Sisters of the Church, founded in 1870, began work in the Solomon Islands, and now number some fifty sisters. Ten years later the Community of Sisters of Melanesia began, complementing the Brotherhood, with some fifty members as well.

The other burst of growth is in Africa. A notable African connection was begun by the English Community of the Holy Name (CHN), founded in 1865. CHN began work in 1931 with OHC in Bolahun, Liberia. In 1959 they absorbed the indigenous CSMC in Lesotho. CHN was subsequently established in Zululand (1969), Mozambique (1980), Zimbabwe (1982), and South Africa (1993). CHN communities now number some ninety sisters. A second connection grew from the Holy Name Community (CZR) founded by the CR fathers in Penhalonga, Zimbabwe in 1935, which engendered two other communities in Zimbabwe, at Bonda and Harare. CSP founded the Chama cha Mariamu Mtakatifu (CMM) in 1946, now with eighty-five sisters in twelve houses in Tanzania and Malawi.

Contemporary interest in monastic life and spirituality has led to new forms of religious life, including communities in which both men and women live together under traditional vows. A hermit movement has emerged, with solitaries generally making vows to their diocesan bishops. New companies of celibates living and ministering apart have sprung up. Professing vows reinterpreted for members living and supporting themselves, some celibate and some not, an almost kaleidoscopic variety of communities, began to emerge in the 1960s. New Monasticism, whose members are largely evangelical from both within and beyond Anglicanism, is the most recent of these dynamic movements.

Areas for Further Research

Anglican monasticism is an underdeveloped field of study. In narrative history, biographies and histories of communities predominate, but many communities remain undocumented or chronicled only by brief internal histories. Archival resources and access vary widely. The close connection of Anglican monasticism to Anglo-Catholicism has been recently explored by Pickering (1989), Reed (1996), Yelton (2005), Gunstone (2010), and Kollar (2011). No general narrative history of Anglican monasticism has appeared since Anson’s Call of the Cloister (1964).

Analytic history has been slow to develop. This is due partly to the relatively small size of Anglican communities, and partly because Anglican polity does not give a central place to monasticism. Consequently the study of Anglican monasticism is rich in scholarly opportunity.

Academic historians have begun to bring sociology and other analytic tools to focus on Anglican religious life, including interest in legitimation (Hill 1973) and in women’s history (Mumm 1999). Anglican monastic communal organization and psycho-social development are undeveloped fields.

Because of early sensitivity to Roman influence, Anglican monastic rules at first did not follow classic models. Influenced by the widely admired Visitation and Daughters of Charity movements, early rules were generally revised over time by community process, which presents challenges to anyone who wishes to edit them. Vaggione’s work (1996) on OHC’s rule is exemplary, though for the most part distinctively Anglican rules await research. Explicitly Benedictine and Franciscan communities were founded beginning in the late 1800s, and the impact of Anglicanism on these traditions likewise awaits study.

Early Anglican monastic theology was largely authored by non-monastic founders and tended to be theoretical, rhetorical, occasional, and polemic. A later stage consisted largely of devotional works, especially retreat addresses. More systematic theological works were slower to appear, and were often based on traditional Roman Catholic models, epitomised by S. C. Hughson’s The Fundamentals of the Religious State (1915). After the 1960s, contemporary psychology and forms of thought replaced older methods, as in Andrew Marr’s commentary on Benedict, Tools for Peace (Marr 2007). A sympathetic treatment of earlier theologies, identifying distinctively Anglican elements, remains to be done.

Ecclesiological research is in its infancy. As the Anglican Communion comprises thirty-eight autonomous provinces with no central magisterium, governance of monastic communities is subject to the canons and customs of each province. In the Church of England official discussions of religious communities frequently took place in Convocation beginning in 1861, and at the Lambeth Conference of 1897, but no formal legislation ensued (Allchin 1958: 157–180). The American Episcopal Church enacted a canon on the religious life in 1914, but most communities, regarding it as too restrictive, continued without ecclesial recognition. In lieu of official canons, in 1935 the Church of England created a representative Advisory Council, which issued a handbook of guidelines in 1943, now in its fifth edition (Advisory Council 2004). Most Anglican provinces follow this model. In the United States an improved canon on the religious life was enacted in 1976, augmented in 1985 with a section for non-traditional communities. For internal governance, most Anglican communities adopt a rule and constitution and make policy through regular legislative meetings, which elect the superior. They also choose a bishop visitor, who safeguards the community’s governing processes.

In liturgical practice, Morning and Evening Prayer from The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) have always been normative for devout Anglicans. So the revival of the monastic office for Anglicans was a matter more of elaboration than of innovation. As monastic communities evolved, each developed its own specific adaptations, and over time several liturgical books became standard (Williams 1950). Several communities have recently produced their own breviaries. Revisions of the BCP often enshrine monastic practice in four-fold Daily Office form. Communal monastic eucharistic practice has been influential as well. Anglican monastics have always given parish missions, retreats, confession, and spiritual direction, and more recently they have been influential in the promotion of contemplative and meditative practices.

Major writers from Anglican monastic communities include R. M. Benson, Charles Gore, Father Andrew, Walter Frere, Shirley Carter Hughson, Gregory Dix, A. G. Hebert, Bonnell Spencer, Barnabas Lindars, H. A. Williams, Benedicta Ward, Andrew Marr, and many others. The growing interest in Benedictine spirituality seen among laypeople has roots in Anglican monasticism, particularly in Esther de Waal’s Seeking God (1984), which initiated the now important genre of lay Benedictine spirituality.

Suggested Reading

After more than fifty years Allchin (1958) and Anson (1964) are still fundamental. The best brief guide to contemporary communities is the biennial handbook Anglican Religious Life, edited by Petà Dunstan (2017). A new generation of community histories which place their subjects in wider contexts has arisen. They include works on OHC (McCoy 1987), Australian CHN (Strahan 1988), CR (Wilkinson 1992), SSM (Mason 1993), Aelred Carlyle (Kollar 1995), SSF (Dunstan 1997), Nashdom (Dunstan 2009), CSJB (Bonham 2012), and SSJE (James 2019). Allchin (1958) has short introductions to the founders Carter, Butler, Neale, and Benson. There are fuller introductions to Benson in Smith (1983), to Pusey in Butler (1983), to Neale by Chandler (1995), to Fr Ignatius in Allen (2016), and to Gore by Waddell (2014). Benedicta Ward and Barnabas Lindars wrote on monastic theology for the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Movement (Rowell 1986: 199–225). John Henry Newman’s widely accepted narrative framework for the Anglo-Catholic movement from his Apologia pro Vita Sua has begun to be re-evaluated, notably by Nockles (1994), Faught (2003), and Brown and Nockles (2012). For general background on Anglicanism, see the chapters in Strong’s Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017–2018).

Bibliography