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Edward Bouverie Pusey and the oxford Movement, edited by rowan strong and Carol Engelhardt Herr inger; pp. x + 164. London and new York: A nthem press, 2012, £60.00, £25.0 0 paper, $99.00, $40.00 paper.
In 1865, three of the leaders of t he Oxford Movement met for t he first time in over twenty years. A mong them was Edward Bouverie pusey, regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, canon of Christ Church Cathedral, and the embodiment of Anglo - Catholicism as then practiced w ithin the Church of England. A long with him on t hat nosta lgic afternoon were John Keble-just a year prior to his death-and John Henr y newman, by then England's most (in)famous roman C atholic convert who would later be elevated to rome's College of C ardinals. T he atmosphere of t he meeting, which took place in Keble's parsonage at Hursley in Hampshire, w as both somewhat tense and necessarily elegiac. Victorian custom demanded that even highly intimate fr iends- such a s t he Tractarian tr iumvirate had been in the 1830 s when t he Movement was at its height-must separate socially in the st arkest of ways if no longer in theological or relig ious har mony. Famously, at newman's semi-monast ic retreat of Littlemore near Oxford, such a separation or estr angement had t aken place in 1843: the "parting of friends," a s it came to be called. such was the power of Victorian religious convent ion that twenty-t wo years would elapse before t he Oxford band of brothers would meet again, if only briefly, in (strained) frater nal comit y.
At t his meeting, and in the years both before and after it, pusey is understood to have been a dour and severe churchman. Humorless and eccentr...