Further Ambiguities in Anglican Support for Episcopacy: The Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

Studies of Anglicanism have devoted comparatively little attention to the century following the Restoration. The tendency has been to regard the eighteenth century as a hiatus between the foundational work of the Caroline Divines and the seemingly more exciting and prolific contributions of the later Oxford Movement. But it would be simplistic to treat this period as a time when the ideas of seventeenthcentury Anglicanism entered some kind of hibernation. The eighteenth century not only continued the ideas of the previous century, but actively defended them.1