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GORDON MURSELL. English Spirituality: From the Earliest Times to 1700. Louisville, Kentucky, and London, England: Westminster John Knox Press / SPCK, 2001. Pp. xii + 548, bibliographies, index. $39.95.
GORDON MURSELL. English Spirituality: From 1700 to the Present Day. Louisville, Kentucky, and London, England: Westminster John Knox Press / SPCK, 2001. Pp. χ + 580, bibliographies, index. $39.95.
Gordon Mursell, dean of Birmingham Cathedral, published three substantial books on the history of spirituality in 2001. In addition to the two-volume work under review, he edited The Story of Christian Spirituality (Fortress Press, 2001), for which he wrote the chapter on "The Anglican Spirit." This lavishly illustrated treasury could be mistaken for a pretty coffee table book except that the authors are recognized scholars in the fields of theology, church history, and religious studies. His more weighty two-volume English Spirituality is illustrated not with full-color images but with numerous-often lengthy, but generally lively-quotations from primary sources, ranging from the seventh-century's St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne through significant figures of the twentieth. The subtitles of The Story of Christian Spirituality (Two Thousand Years, from East to West) and English Spirituality (From Earliest Times...to the Present Day) audaciously trumpet Mursell's projection of the big picture. But his mastery of detailincluding scores of brief studies of individuals (exemplars, as they would be called in the tradition) and close readings of devotional texts, hymns, and poems-roots the story in personal religious experience. The scope of this survey of English Spirituality (with a third of its pages endnotes and bibliographies) is encyclopedic, insuring its value as a reference book. In the age of the...