tractarianism

Tractarianism was the name applied to the first stage of the Oxford movement, derived from a series of Tracts for the Times written between 1833 and 1841 by a group of Oxford high churchmen, including Hurrell Froude, Keble, Newman, Pusey, and Isaac Williams. Their context, signalled by Keble's Oxford assize sermon on ‘National Apostasy’ (14 July 1833), was alarm at the onslaught of Roman catholicism, dissent, and ‘liberalism’. The furore provoked by Newman's Tract 90, on the Thirty-Nine Articles, ended the series but their influence set the Anglican pace for the rest of the century.