The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England c. 1800-1870 [Hardcover]

This book provides the first account of an important but neglected aspect of the history of the nineteenth-century Church of England: the reform of its diocesan structure. It illustrates how one of the most important institutions of Victorian England responded at a regional level to the pastoral challenge of a rapidly changing society.

In this comprehensively, if narrowly, researched study, Arthur Burns goes far to demonstrate that the classic institutional focus of 'church history' is by no means dead. --American Historical Review

Arthur Burns's masterly account of one of the main aspects of nineteenth-century Church reform has got to be among the best half-dozen books to appear on the history of the modern Church of England in the last two decades. Not since Geoffrey Best's monumental 1964 book on the Ecclesiastical Commissioners,Temporal Pillars, has a historian come to grips so well with the institutional and administrative history of the modern Church. The breadth and depth of material covered here is simply breathtaking....As with Best's book, it is simply inconceivable that historians of the modern Church of England will be able to work in the future without a cpy of Burns's text to hand. If the execution is thorough and immense, the analysis presented in the book is remarkably simple. --Anglican Theological Review

Burns triumphantly demonstrates the merits of the patient, sensitive study of Church institutions....Through Burns's work...we can begin to see how different the practice of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglianism really was from the historical mythologies that have fed the ecclesial identities of the different 'parties' within Anglicanism. --Anglican Theological Review

The Diocesan Revival in the Church of Englandis an extensively researched and closely reasoned work that successfully argues that the diocesan revival was as important as the OxfolcÀ