Overview

The period between 1857 and 1957 saw a transformation in Anglican sexual understanding when the established church negotiated substantial new normative interpretations of marriage, sexuality, citizenship, and priesthood. Timothy Jones demonstrates how the introduction of female voices into the previously exclusively male spheres of power transformed understandings of gender. He also delineates the impact of the Anglo-Catholic revival on Anglican sexual culture, in particular, the significance of catholic sacramentality on understandings of the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual. Sexual Politics in the Church of England exposes a surprisingly dynamic and dialogical relationship between theology, feminism, and the new sexual sciences that resists the teleologies of secularisation that dominate the histories of sexuality and Christianity in Britain. The story of Anglican sexual politics told in this book firmly rebuts contemporary notions of the Church as an inevitably reactionary institution. On the contrary, it reveals the Church's historic capacity to renegotiate gender and sexual ideologies, and shows how it was often at the forefront of sexual change in British society.

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9780199655106

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Sexual Politics is an ambitious and imaginative study. Its historical sweep allows valuable comparisons between periods and its analytic framework connects domains - intimate life, utopian ideas, party politics, law and policy - often kept apart. It will interest a wide variety of historiansBrooke has enriched the field with his innovative argument about the changing terms of the relationship between sexual reform and class politics. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Journal of British Studies

The historical insights in this volume are essential context for our contemporary debates. They remind us, most of all, of the need always to argue clearly and directly from Scripture, not from the blinkered cultural assumptions of our own generation. Andrew Atherstone, Churchman Sexual Politics is an ambitious and imaginative study. Its historical sweep allows valuable comparisons between periods and its analytic framework connects domains - intimate life, utopian ideas, party politics, law and policy - often kept apart. It will interest a wide variety of historiansBrooke has enriched the field with his innovative argument about the changing terms of the relationship between sexual reform and class politics. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Journal of British Studies This is an important study, of immediate relevance to the Church of England's continuing free and frank discussions on sexuality, for it reveals a background of theological confusion, fluidity and innovation which most disputants have forgotten. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Sexual Politics is an ambitious and imaginative study. Its historical sweep allows valuable comparisons between periods and its analytic framework connects domains - intimate life, utopian ideas, party politics, law and policy - often kept apart. It will interest a wide variety of historiansBrooke has enriched the field with his innovative argument about the changing terms of the relationship between sexual reform and class politics. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Journal of British Studies This is an important study, of immediate relevance to the Church of England's continuing free and frank discussions on sexuality, for it reveals a background of theological confusion, fluidity and innovation which most disputants have forgotten. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Journal of Ecclesiastical History

Author Information

Timothy Jones is lecturer in history and co-director of the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales at the University of Glamorgan. From July 2012 he will also hold an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award at La Trobe University, Melbourne.

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