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The Oxford Movement, Marriage and Domestic Life: John Keble, Isaac Williams and Edward King

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

John Boneham
John Boneham*
Affiliation:
Aberystwyth University
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Extract

While a number of studies have highlighted the theological and social importance of the household in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain, the significance of domestic life for the leaders of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement remains almost completely unexplored. In a sense this is unsurprising, since the movement, which began in the 1830s, emphasized the importance of recalling the Church of England to its pre-Reformation heritage and consequently tended to stress the spiritual value of celibacy and asceticism. Whilst B.W. Young has highlighted the importance of celibacy for John Henry Newman, the movement’s main figurehead until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and other works have reflected upon the Tractarian emphasis on celibacy and tried to explain its origins, historians of the Oxford Movement have paid very little attention to the Tractarian attitude towards marriage and domestic life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 366 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

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