The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church is grateful for the service of Bruce Mullin, Historiographer of The Episcopal Church, who retired from this role on June 20, 2022, after serving as Historiographer since 2012. Dr. Mullin’s ten-year term of service included his important historical research in support of The Episcopal Church maintaining its properties during the years of schism that began at the turn of the present century, and due in no small part to his meticulous historical documentation, many parishes were able to keep their church buildings and property after extensive legal proceedings. The three Episcopal historical organizations made a joint statement to General Convention regarding Resolution A-154, which concerns the process for selecting a new Historiographer. The Historical Society welcomes Mr. Lee Little as the Assistant Historiographer of The Episcopal Church.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church gives thanks to God for the work and ministry of Mark Duffy, canonical archivist and director of the Archives of The Episcopal Church, who retired on March 31, 2022, after thirty years of service. As archivist, he and the Archives Board have provided essential leadership in the collection, management, and maintenance of the archival holdings of The Episcopal Church. The Archives of The Episcopal Church contains materials across multiple media formats, from papers and documents - including correspondence, diaries, periodicals, and journals - to personal effects, ephemera, and such objects as photographs, paintings, and film. Under Mark Duffy's direction, the Archives successfully moved to a new location in 2021. We are grateful for his service, and we wish him a happy retirement.

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.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church elected its officers at its annual meeting in July 2022. The president, elected to a first term is Dr. J. Michael Utzinger. Previously he served as Secretary, Vice President and publications committee chair. He succeeds the Rev. Dr. Robyn Neville, president of the Historical Society from 2016 to 2022.

Utzinger is the Elliott Professor of Religion at Hampden-Sydney College and long-standing member of Johns Memorial Episcopal Church in Farmville, VA. He is Scholar in Residence at the Robert Russa Moton Museum, the only civil rights museum in Virginia. His publications include yet Saints Their Watch Are Keeping: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and the Development of Evangelical Ecclesiology (Mercer, 2006). His most recent research looks at the role of religious institutions in the development of Virginia’s massive resistance against Brown v. Board and includes the article, “The Tragedy of Prince Edward,” published in Anglican and Episcopal History. The article was awarded the Nelson Burr Prize in 2013. He was a Lilly Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Valparaiso University, where he earned a B.A. in theology. An M.Div. was earned at Yale University and a doctorate in European and American religious history at the University of Virginia.

Other officers elected to the Board of Directors are: 1^st Vice President - the Rev. John Runkle, Principal of John Runkle Architects, PLLC and Vicar of St. James Episcopal Church, Sewanee, TN; 2^nd vice-President – the Rev. Dr. Robyn Neville, Director and Academic Dean for the Center for Christian Formation and Leadership for Diocese of Southeast Florida; Secretary - Susan Stonesifer, Historiographer of the Diocese of Washington; and Treasurer - George DeFilippi, member of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Annandale, VA.

For over a century the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church has been an association dedicated to preserving and disseminating information about the history of the Episcopal Church and its Anglican heritage. Founded in 1910 as the Church Historical Society, its members include scholars, writers, teachers, ministers (lay and ordained) and others who have an interest in the objectives and activities of the Historical Society.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church is pleased to announce the Rev. Dr. Benjamin King as recipient of the 2022 Nelson R. Burr Prize. King is professor of Christian history, associate dean for academic affairs, and director of advanced degrees at The University of the South, School of Theology. He earned a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University, a Th.M. from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from Durham University.

Dr. King is honored for his article “Church, Cotton, and Confederates: What Bishop Charles Todd Quintard’s Fundraising Trips to Great Britain Reveal About Some Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Catholics,” published in the Summer 2021 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (Volume 90, No. 2).

The Burr prize honors the renowned scholar Nelson R. Burr, whose two-volume A Critical Bibliography of Religion in America (1961) and other works constitute landmarks in the field of religious historiography. A selection committee of the Historical Society determines an author of the most outstanding article in the Society's journal. The award also honors that which best exemplifies excellence and innovative scholarship in the field of Anglican and Episcopal history.

You may read the article here.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church is pleased to announce the awarding of the Robert W. Prichard Prize to Dr. Jannelle Legg, an Assistant Professor in History at Gallaudet University. The Prize recognizes it as the best Ph.D., Th.D., or D.Phil. dissertation which considers the history of the Episcopal Church. It is named to honor the Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard, longtime board member and president of the Society, noted historian and author in the discipline. The prize is awarded every three years. Applications are received and reviewed by a selection committee with a recipients determined by the Board of Directors.

Legg’s dissertation, “With Eloquent Fingers He Preached: The Protestant Episcopal Mission To The Deaf,” was submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History at George Mason University. It explores the emergence of the Church Mission to Deaf Mutes (later the Conference of Church Workers Among the Deaf) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Largely organized by and for deaf people, it formed a network of signing congregations across the United States. The Episcopal Church was the first denomination to offer signed worship services in a church for deaf people.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church announced the awarding of $16,060 in grants to 12 recipients during the Annual Meeting July 27, 2022. The funds are provided to support significant research, publication and projects related to the history of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Over the past decade, the Historical Society has provided over $100,000 in grants to nearly 100 recipients.

Applications are considered by the Grants and Research Committee and determined by the Historical Society’s Board of Directors. Recipients are encouraged to share their research and projects, especially in Anglican and Episcopal History, the peer-reviewed, quarterly journal of the Historical Society. Detail about the granting program may be found at hsec.us/grants.

Grant recipients and their areas of research are:

• Christy Baty – MA candidate at University of Nebraska at Kearney, to research the role of embroidered book bindings in women’s religious lives in early modern England.
• Devin Burns – PhD candidate at Florida State University, to study the Confederate Episcopal Church and its relationship to the making of Lost Cause historiography.
• Mongezi Guma – Canon, Anglican Church in South Africa, to research Sister Alberta Ngudle, a Religious Sister from Tsolo, who founded in 1919 an African female Religious Community of St. John the Baptist (CSJB).
• Laura Hernandez-Ehrisman – Faculty member, Department of History, Austin Community College, to research the place of slavery and race relations in the history of St. David’s Episcopal Church, Austin.
• Stephen Kapinde – Lecturer, Religion and Public Life, Pwani University, to investigate the long standing and ambiguous history of the Anglican Church and ex-slave’s descendants at Frere Town in Kenya.
• Simon Lewis – independent scholar, to study doctrinal debate in the early-eighteenth century Church of Ireland, focusing on the contributions made by the clergyman Edward Nicholson.
• Donn Mitchell – independent scholar, for research on Frances Perkins and the religious dimension of the New Deal by placing it within the context of the Episcopal Church’s role in social mission.
• Daphne Noyes – independent scholar, to continue her research on the life of Adeline Blanchard Tyler (1805-1875), the first deaconess in the Episcopal Church.
• Donna Ray – Senior Lecturer in History and Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, to research the voices of laywomen, especially their “soft power,” in shaping the Episcopal Church in the American Deep South.
• Bart Segu – PhD candidate in systematic theology, St. Paul’s University, Kenya, to study the influence of liberation theology upon John Henry Okullu and his pursuit for social justice in Kenya.
• Diocese of Mississippi –  to digitize five audio cassettes and thirty-three VHS tapes, 1975-2003, which will include sharing the stories online through the diocesan website.
• Diocese of Milwaukee –for the collection and dissemination of oral histories of the Milwaukee Diocese of the Episcopal Church.

Three articles on the history of the Lambeth Conference are featured in the June 2022 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History. The quarterly journal is published by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. The articles are publicly available at hsec.us/Lambeth. This open source access is designed to enhance knowledge of historical perspective to the 15th Lambeth Conference being convened at the end of July 2022 by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“Our three authors provide different perspectives on what the Lambeth Conference was to help inform what it is “ noted AEH Editor, Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook. “The writing is well researched and peer reviewed to meet standards of scholarship. Even so, one doesn’t need to be a scholar to enjoy the perspectives presented.” Kujawa-Holbrook began planning a themed issue over a year ago and intended to “make it available beyond our members. We want anyone who wants to be able to read them to have access. We hope they provide a service to the Church as it grapples with the issues of mission in the world today.”

“‘You Share Our History’: Historiography of the Lambeth Conference” is the lead article by Benjamin Guyer, a history and philosophy lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Martin and contributing editor for the issue. Guyer examines changing interpretations of the Lambeth Conference among historians since 1867.

 “Archbishop Michael Ramsey and the Lambeth Conference,” is by Peter Webster, an independent scholar of contemporary British religious history. Webster considers the relationship between the 1968 Lambeth Conference and Michael Ramsey’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury.

“Anglicanism, the Lambeth Conferences, and International Relations in the Twentieth Century,” is by Andrew Chandler, a professor of modern history at the University of Chichester. He notes that historians have seldom emphasized discussions of international relations at Lambeth Conferences and identifies a number of recurring approaches to global politics.

Anglican and Episcopal History, formerly The Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, is a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to raise the level of discussion, provide a forum for exchange of ideas, and review books of worth and interest to educated Anglicans. It is published quarterly and provided as a benefit to members of the Historical Society and educational institutions. Visit hsec.us/AEH.

For over a century the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church has been an association dedicated to preserving and disseminating information about the history of the Episcopal Church and its Anglican heritage. Founded in 1910 as the Church Historical Society, its members include scholars, writers, teachers, ministers (lay and ordained) and others who have an interest in the objectives and activities of the Historical Society.

Church historians investigate poetry, tables and altars, ritualism, and the development of Spanish-speaking ministries in Central America in the March issue of Anglican and Episcopal History.

In the lead study “Altar of Print, Altars of Stone”, Jarrell D. Wright, a literature instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, examines “The Altar” and other poems in English poet George Herbert’s (1593-1633) collection The Temple.

Wright views Herbert’s legacy as the exemplar English parson as prompting endless debates as to where his writings belong on the continuum of English reformed belief and praxis. Wright offers a new view as to Herbert’s place on that continuum.

The Rev. Warren C. Platt then explores the development of ritualism in “St. Alban’s Church in New York City: the First Avowedly Ritualistic Church in the United States.”

Platt’s work examines the transformation of Church of Intercessor into St. Alban’s in 1865 as it became a beacon of liturgical ritualism in the Diocese of New York including use of liturgical vestments, elaborate processions, and celebrations of High Mass.

In the final study of the March issue, the Rev. John Rawlinson investigates the development of Spanish-language ministries by Episcopalians in Central America.

Rawlinson’s “Literature for the Latino Church: An Episcopal Translation Project” examines the success of a center established in San Jose, Costa Rica, for translation and publication of books and tracts in Spanish established by the 1963 General Convention.

Rawlinson, a bilingual priest who currently serves as archivist for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, describes long-time missionary Carman St. John Wolff (1923-2000) as a driving force for the project. He identifies confusing governance models, financial challenges, and limited staffing as ongoing challenges for the project. Rawlinson concludes, “The national staff of the Episcopal Church began the Centro with good intentions, but without realistic expectations.”

AEH also includes 2 church reviews and 24 book reviews. Among the book reviews, readers will find:

• Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner | reviewed by Benjamin J. King of Sewanee: The University of the South
• Saving Fear in Christian Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell | reviewed by Molly James of the Episcopal Church Center
• The Missionary and the Maharajahs: Cecil Tyndale-Biscoe and the Making of Modern Kashmir by Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe | Reviewed by C. Brad Faught of Tyndale University
• Welfare and Waves: Calvinists and Charismatic in the Church of England by Peter Herriot | Reviewed by Justus D. Doenecke of New College of Florida
• Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church by Michael J. Kruger | reviewed by Valerie Abrahamsen of Brattleboro, Vermont
• The Colonial Records of Kings Chapel 1686-1776, vol. 2 edited by James B Bell and James E. Mooney | reviewed by Joan Gunderson of California State University San Marcos

AEH is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. Active members are able to access each issue digitally. Join here.

The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church invites applications for grants for research and projects which promote the preservation of the particular heritage of the Episcopal Church and its antecedents. Applications must be submitted by May 1st with awards announced in July.

Regular Grants

Applications for a regular grant may be from individuals as well as academic and ecclesiastical groups. Requests may as to support significant research, conferences, and publication relating to the history of the Episcopal Church as well as the Anglican church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. A typical request may include funding for travel to visit an archives or other resource, dissertation research, seed money or support for a larger project. Examples of past awards include support of documentary films, dissertation research, publication of books and articles, and history conference support. Awards are generally $500-$2,000, depending on the number of awards approved and funds available.

Robert W. Prichard Prize

The triennial Robert W. Prichard Prize is offered in 2022. It recognizes the best Ph.D., Th.D., or D.Phil. dissertation which considers the history of the Episcopal Church (including 17th and 18th century British colonies that became the United States) as well as the Anglican church in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The prize is named to honor the Rev. Dr. Robert W. Prichard, a noted historian and author in the discipline who was a longtime member and President of the Historical Society Board.

Applicants may submit a dissertation for consideration successfully defended between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2021. It may be submitted by the author or on their behalf. The dissertation need not focus solely, or even principally, on the history of the Episcopal Church or Anglicanism. The selection committee welcomes dissertations which place that history in conjunction with other strands of church history, or even place it in dialogue with non-ecclesial themes of American history. The Episcopal or Anglican element of the work should be a constitutive, not peripheral, part of the dissertation. Submissions should be a full electronic version of the dissertation, complete with all scholarly apparatus. The recipient will receive a $2,000 prize and be a guest of the Historical Society to receive the award.

For details including application instruction and information, visit hsec.us/grants.