A study of religious revival in its broad historical and historiographical context. David Bebbington provides detailed case-studies of religious awakenings that took place between 1841 and 1880 in Britain, North America and Australia, looking at pre-conditions, causes, and trends for the phenomenon.

"This book is a discussion of the part played by religious revivalism, and by the American professional religious revivalist, in the religious world of nineteenth-century England. It was during the Victorian period that popular Protestantism began to lose its grip on English society. This was true despite the strength of the denominations. It is therefore against a background of slowly changing popular religion that the role of the professional revivalist has to be studied." --From the First Chapter

In The High Church Revival in the Church of England, new insights are opened up into one of the most significant movements of devotional and liturgical revival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Attending closely to the social history of the movement, as well as to its continental connections and its theological complexity, this research re-evaluates its historiographical legacy in the light of recent research and controversy. Traditional interpretations of High Churchmanship have presented it either as a heroic rediscovery of the real essence of Anglicanism, or as an eccentric distortion of it. This volume asserts instead its theological creativity and its popular roots as a permanent enrichment of the Anglican tradition, whilst also analysing and describing the nature and limits of its growth.

Joseph Tracy (1793-1874) was an American Congregationalist minister. His careful research draws together all the available contemporary sources to give a fascinating insight into the events surrounding the awakening that took place throughout New England in the eighteenth century. The immense roles played by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield are inevitably prominent, but all the other characters and the parts they played are also featured. It is estimated that between twenty-five and fifty thousand were converted during this period, from the local revivals in the 1730’s through the more extensive and widespread blessing of the early 1740’s and beyond. Tracy does not shirk the need to examine the aberrations and excesses that marked the revival in some parts, nor the controversies that raged between the friends and foes of the revival. From these, important lessons may be learned even now by all those looking for significant blessing on their ministries.