The December 2022 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (AEH) considers Tudor legacies in Anglicanism with studies of Peter Martyr Vermigli, Elizabeth I, and Henry VIII. These three research essays are complemented by 2 church reviews and 20 book reviews. Readers will also enjoy reports from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church’s 2022 annual meeting.

In the lead study, Daniel F. Graves explores connections between Florentine reformer Vermigli (c. 1500-1562) and the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556). Vermigli was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in England. Graves argues the Preface to the Oxford Treatise is “a kind of apologia for the 1549 Communion rite” with specific focus on the theological concept of "mutual indwelling" during the Eucharist.

The study is titled “Heavenly Ascent: The Relation of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Preface to the Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist to the Introduction of the Edwardian Prayer Books.” Its author is theologian in residence at Trinity Church, Aurora, in the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of Toronto.

Heidi Olson Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate at Baylor University in Texas, then considers the evolution of Queen Elizabeth I’s legacy.

Campbell draws on sermons, plays, literature, and art to investigate ironic ways “…men presented women, not men, as the key players in fixing society and religion” while attempting to uphold the patriarchal system. Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was reimagined as the “exemplar of the ideal monarch” to critique the failing of her male successors.

The final study examines the historical legacy of King Henry VIII’s will. Competing historical interpretations of Henry VIII’s (1509-1547) will took on significance as to whether the parliament ultimately controlled the royal line of succession. Christopher Petrakos reminds readers that, “Historical discourse was riven by the legal consequences of the Anglican Church’s establishment and its political and institutional consequences.”

Petrakos is a historian of early modern and modern British history at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Church reviews then take readers to a Lenten service for Laetare Sunday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Montclair, in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark and a Palm Sunday service at the Church of England’s University Church in Oxford.

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

• Making Italy Anglican: Why the Book of Common Prayer was Translated into Italian by Stefano Villani | Reviewed by Gianluigi Gugliermetto of Christ Church, Ontario, California
• Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life by Troy R. Saxby | Reviewed by Valerie Bailey
• The Church of the Transfiguration in the City of New York by Warren C. Platt | Reviewed by R. William Franklin of Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary
• Becoming Human Again, an Oral History of the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi by Donald E. Miller et al. | Reviewed by John Rawlinson
• The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition edited by Samuel Bray and Drew Keane | Reviewed by Tanner J. Moore of Purdue University
• The Hong Kong Protests and Political Theology edited by Kwok Pui-lan and Francis Ching-Wah Yip | Reviewed by Carla E. Roland Guzmán of General Theological Seminary