Our History

The Anglo-Catholic History Society emerged from conversations in the late 1990s between two lifelong Anglo-Catholics, Michael Farrer and Brent Skelly. Both were aware that there was increasing interest by historians in the field, but that few publication outlets were available. They wondered whether there might be a way of making some of the fruits of research available to the wider public, and of stimulating additional interest among both scholars and serious-minded laypeople. They came to the view that a society might provide such a function.

The idea was floated with Bishop Geoffrey Rowell, formerly Chaplain and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and the author of The Vision Glorious (1983) – a wide-ranging study of the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism. He was supportive of the idea and became our first President. He also enlisted the Revd Dr Perry Butler, author of Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism (1982) and editor of Pusey Rediscovered (1983), as Chairman.

By June 2000 the Society was ready to be launched. The inaugural lecture was delivered by Dr Rowell at St Mary’s, Bourne Street. Membership increased rapidly, largely by word of mouth. By the tenth anniversary of the Society, some thirty lectures had been given and eleven substantial monographs produced.

Michael Farrer, the society’s co-founder, died in 2010. His last contribution to Anglo-Catholic history had been the occasional paper One Part of London: Aspects of Anglo-Catholicism in Camden (2009).

Our first President, Bishop Geoffrey Rowell, died in 2017. He was succeeded by Bishop Rowan Williams, who gave his inaugural lecture in January 2020.

The society celebrated its twentieth year with a book of essays, Twenty Priests for Twenty Years (2020) and its silver jubilee with An Anglo-Catholic Anniversary Compendium (2025).

Details of the society’s lectures and publications are available here.