The autumn issue of Anglican and Episcopal History considers 3 vastly different influences in the Anglican tradition: the Black freedom struggle, French Huguenots, and King Charles II’s Royal Society.

“The Episcopal Church was born in a racialized context visible to the Black population of the early republic,” writes D.A. Dunkley. He invites readers to recontextualize celebrated priest Absalom Jones within the Black freedom struggle and culture of Black enslaved people to understand better the influences on Jones’ leadership and ministry shaping the Episcopal Church and becoming its first Black American priest in 1802.

The study is titled, “Black Radicalism in the Episcopal Church: Absalom Jones and Slave Resistance, 1746-1818.” Dunkley is associate professor of history and chair of Black Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Lonnie H. Lee’s “Huguenot-Anglicans in Seventeenth Century Virginia” then draws on county court records to show ways the “Anglican Church played a more pivotal role in the Huguenot migration to America than historians have previously understood.” Lee, a retired Presbyterian minister, discovers a hidden Rappahannock Refuge for Huguenot Christians.

In the final essay, William Brown Patterson examines the Royal Society formed under King Charles II. “Religionists of a broad range of backgrounds were attracted to and welcomed by the membership in the years that followed [its founding in 1663]” and that “Faith and reason were thus joined in a cultural revolution in the early years of the [monarchy’s] Restoration.”

The essay is titled, “Religion and the Royal Society in Early Restoration England.” Patterson is professor of history emeritus at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Readers are also treated to 3 church reviews.

Church review editor J. Barrington Bates highlights a rare service presided over by 3 women bishops at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, part of the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of New Westminster.

Other church reviews include Ash Wednesday at St. Edward the Confessor in Lugano, Switzerland, and the Easter Triduum at St. Margaret’s Anglican-Episcopal Church in Budapest, Hungary. Both churches are part of the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe.

As always, AEH boasts numerous book reviews related to recent church history and Anglican scholarship. Among them:

• Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750–1776 by Gary L. Steward | reviewed by Suzanne Geissler of William Paterson University
• The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History by James G. Clark | Reviewed by Norman Jones of Utah State University
• Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb by James H. Thrall | Reviewed by Molly James of the Episcopal Church Center
• Reclaiming the Lives of Britain’s First Mission to West Africa: Three Lives Lost and Found by Fiona Leach | Reviewed by Kyle Welty of University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
• Faith and Foreign Policy in the American Century by Mark Thomas Edwards | Reviewed by Justus D. Doenecke of New College of Florida

About Anglican and Episcopal History

Anglican and Episcopal History (ISSN 0896-8039), formerly The Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, seeks to raise the level of discussion, provide a forum for exchange of ideas, and review books of real worth and of interest to educated Anglicans. It is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December. Full text articles are available through JSTOR.org and for members of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church at https://hsec.us/AEH.