The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721. By Andrew Starkie. Studies in Modern British Religious History 14. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2007. vii + 261 pp. $85.00 cloth.

摘要

This exhaustive yet pointed study examines what J. C. D. Clark has called “thenmost bitter domestic ideological conflict of the [eighteenth] century” (1) andnwhat might be read as an Enlightenment anticipation of the North Americann“culture wars” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and theninternecine quarrels of world Anglicanism. The author, Andrew Starkie, isnboth a meticulous scholar and an engaged parish priest in the Church ofnEngland. His book began life as a Cambridge dissertation, supervised bynMark Goldie, and he has read and digested the hundreds of politically andntheologically charged newspaper columns, pamphlets, books, and publishednsermons in which the controversy played itself out. Though Starkie does notnmake an explicit connection in his monograph, one can easily imagine thenearly eighteenth-century equivalent of the twenty-four-hour electronic newsncycle, the blogosphere, and YouTube videos. Of course, the Bangorianncontroversy produced a more sustained (and more substantial) print medianblitz in which all sorts and conditions weighed in: Whigs and Tories,npartisans of both high and low church, Latitudinarians and the fiercelynorthodox, Dissenters and Non-jurors and even Huguenots and a sometimenFrench Catholic. Kudos to Starkie for delving into the morass, unravelingnthe various combatants in their respective contexts, and coming up with ancomplex and compelling analysis.