Hidden Development: Mary’s Evolution in John Henry Newman’s Anglican Sermons

Following the example of Scripture, we had better only think of her [Mary] with and for her Son, never separating her from Him, but, using her name as a memorial of His great condescension in stooping from heaven, and “not abhorring the Virgin’s womb.” And this is the rule of our own Church, which has set apart only such Festivals in honour of the Blessed Mary, as may also be Festivals in honour of our Lord; the Purification commemorating His presentation in the Temple, and the Annunciation commemorating His Incarnation. And, with this caution, the thought of her may be made profitable to our faith; for, nothing is so calculated to impress on our minds that Christ is really partaker of our nature, and in all respects man, save sin only, as to associate Him with the thought of her, by whose ministration He became our brother.1

The above quote is from a sermon Newman first published in 1835 entitled “The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary: The Reverence Due to Her” (a sermon, as the title implies, for the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March).2 The sermon and the quote contains a Marian interpretation—or iteration—of the Tractarian via media, an ecclesiological position advanced by Newman and other High Churchmen in the mid-1830s that sought to be faithful to both Protestantism and the primitive church. As this article highlights, Newman, as an Anglican, had a high Mariology (for an Anglican, a surprisingly high Mariology),3 yet he also combined his reverence for Mary with some kind of caution or warning that such notions could lead to doctrines and practices that were not sanctioned by the Church of England.4 In reality, that caution (or warning) was both a message by Newman to his congregation and a message to himself—to a conscience that was beginning to doubt the veracity of his own ideas.

In discussing Newman’s Anglican Marian thought we are, of course, remembering that this influential modern Catholic thinker was not only a convert but spent almost half of his long life as a member of the Church of England. Recent scholarship is paying more attention to this early period of Newman’s life,5 which includes Newman’s earlier “conversions”: one from nominal belief to Evangelicalism, the next to a flirtation with liberal Anglicanism, then from liberal Anglicanism to High Churchmanship, and then from High Churchmanship to a more radical Tractarian version of it. It is easy to forget these previous contexts—contexts in which Newman was, at least at the time, by no means necessarily destined for conversion. It is easy—for Catholics especially—to fall into a view of Newman’s early life that is teleological in the sense of being merely preparatory to conversion. This is understandable, but conflicts with at least one of the tasks of a historian, which is to understand the past as it was—as though it were a moment in what was formerly the present, subject to surprise, possibility, and the unexpected. The Anglican Marian sermons examined in this article come out of a period in Newman’s life when Catholicism was seen by Newman as being, at best, only partially true. Eventually, Newman did come to shed such a view, but that took time.

That period of “shedding” began roughly in the middle of the 1830s, by which time two contexts had emerged that changed not only Newman’s life, but that of the Church of England as a whole. The first was the Oxford Movement (which ran from 1833 to 1845), the second was Newman’s pulpit ministry from St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford (which ran from 1828 to 1843).

The Oxford Movement—otherwise known as Tractarianism, owing to the influence of its chief publications, the Tracts for the Times (1833 to 1841), of which Newman wrote a third, in addition to editing the entire series—was a High Church response to politico-religious events that affected British society from 1828 to 1833, notably—from 1830—the Whig desire to enact liberal reforms that would affect the Church of England and the Church of Ireland.

Reform, for Newman and his fellow High Church allies—notably, John Keble (1792–1866), Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836), Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), Hugh James Rose (1795–1838), and William Palmer of Worcester College (1803–1885)—meant little more than a slippery slope to liberal disestablishment at best, and wholesale revolution at worst. Combined with a High Church—or catholic (small C)—revival that began to defer more to the church fathers than to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the place of Mary within the Church of England became, in a low-key way, more prominent. As Roger Greenacre has rightly observed, “prudence and reserve,” not to mention “a quite robust opposition to the excesses (or what were considered to be such) of contemporary Roman Catholic Mariology,” meant that the Oxford Movement tended to keep Mary somewhat hidden.6 However, there is no question that Mary’s place within what became Anglo-Catholicism in the mid- to late-nineteenth century was made possible by the High Church revival begun by the Oxford Movement.7 The presence of statues of Mary in some Anglican or Episcopal Churches (usually Our Lady of Walsingham) is a legacy of this.

For Newman, Mary was prominent, but in keeping with Tractarian reserve, she was also kept at a cautious distance—in a sense, hidden, or “out of sight,” as John Keble put it in an 1845 poem about Mary that his friend, the judge Sir John Taylor Coleridge (1790–1876),8 and a few other friends, encouraged him to suppress, rather than publish.9

Yet, despite the hidden nature of Newman’s Mariology—despite the fact that, for Newman, as for most Tractarians and High Churchmen, Marian invocation and veneration were considered some of the chief alleged errors of Rome—he nonetheless developed a high, deep, and reflective Mariology. Indeed, he was vicar of a prominent Oxford church that was not only named in honour of Mary, but (unusually for an Anglican Church) it possessed a prominent statue of the virgo coronata above its entrance. Indeed, as we shall see, Newman’s pulpit ministry from the University Church named in honour of Mary produced some notable Marian reflections.

In speaking about Newman’s pulpit ministry, we are talking about a ministry that produced not only sermons delivered in churches, but sermons that were later published, and, as this essay highlights, sometimes slightly revised. Such revisions were not always explained but are likely the result of Newman’s convictions shifting and developing during the late 1830s and the 1840s. How extensive these were in Newman’s sermons as a whole is a question that requires further research, but they can easily be overlooked when one picks up an edition of a sermon that is, in actual fact, neither the original version preached, nor the original version published. This is certainly the case with Newman’s aforementioned sermon, “The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary: The Reverence Due to Her,” which was first published in 1835, though he preached a different version of it on 25 March 1831, and again in 1832 (and on a few other subsequent occasions).10 Most readers of Newman’s sermons will likely read this sermon in the edition contained within the Parochial and Plain Sermons (edited by William Copeland in 1868).11 The edition found in this widely-read set of sermons (which is the version most people read), contains a republication of the 1840 edition of the sermon, not that of 1835. Moreover, as this article will outline, though the differences between the 1835 and 1840 editions of this sermon are small, the 1840 edition nonetheless contains a few small but significant revisions.

Whatever the edition, there is a reason why Newman’s Anglican sermons continue to be amongst the most enduring of his writings. For though they are Anglican sermons, they contain a theology that is not only insightful, but, with a handful of notable exceptions, mostly Catholic in terms of doctrine (indeed, Catholics probably comprise the largest group of readers of these sermons). Part of a broader pulpit ministry that arguably ranks as one of the most religiously affective of the nineteenth century, Newman’s Anglican Marian sermons—though few in number—are nonetheless striking. Take, for example, Newman’s remarkable statement regarding the holiness of Mary in the sermon under discussion. From the 1835 edition:

Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ? If to him that hath, more is given, and holiness and divine favour go together, (and this we are expressly told,) what must have been the angelic purity of her, whom the Creator Spirit condescended to overshadow with His miraculous presence? What must have been her gifts, who was chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God, the only one whom He was bound by nature to revere and look up to; the one appointed to train and educate Him, to instruct Him day by day, as He grew in wisdom and in stature? This contemplation runs to a higher subject, did we dare follow it; for what, think you, was the sanctity and grace of that human nature, of which God formed His sinless Son; knowing, as we do, “that what is born of the flesh, is flesh;” and that “none can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?”12

The equivalent passage from the 1840 edition:

Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ? If to him that hath, more is given, and holiness and divine favour go together, (and this we are expressly told,) what must have been the transcendent purity of her, whom the Creator Spirit condescended to overshadow with His miraculous presence? What must have been her gifts, who was chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God, the only one whom He was bound by nature to revere and look up to; the one appointed to train and educate Him, to instruct Him day by day, as He grew in wisdom and in stature? This contemplation runs to a higher subject, did we dare follow it; for what, think you, was the sanctified state of that human nature, of which God formed his sinless Son; knowing, as we do, “that what is born of the flesh, is flesh;” and that “none can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?”13

Not only are both editions expressive of a high view of Mary’s holiness, the differences, though subtle, seem to signify development on Newman’s part in an increasingly Catholic direction—which we know was happening to Newman and the Oxford Movement during the period from around 1835 onward.14 They are as follows: (1) Newman changed “the angelic purity” of Mary (1835) to “the transcendent purity” (1840), and (2) he changed “the sanctity and grace of that human nature” (1835) to “the sanctified state of that human nature” (1840).

The textual differences are, of course, small—though by no means negligible. Indeed, a case can be made that the changes strengthen and heighten Newman’s view of Mary’s sinlessness—that they strengthen particularly the notion of Mary possessing her own, unique, nature in which sanctity is a divine gift. This becomes more convincing when we note, further on, a change to the sermon that cannot conceivably be anything other than doctrinal.

Returning to the passages, however, it is noteworthy to observe that the statement, “this contemplation runs to a higher subject, did we dare follow it,” is typical of the kind of caution present in Tractarian thought when its protagonists advocated theological ideas that were controversial for most Anglicans. In fact, one often sees in Tractarian writings some kind of qualifying remark whenever a statement goes beyond—or seems to go beyond—the Protestant boundaries of the Church of England. This was a necessary tactic. It took very little for most Anglicans, and even less for evangelicals and Dissenters, to see within Tractarian theology statements that were deemed to be “Papist” and evidence of a latent “Romanism.”15

On the other hand, the caution also came from within the preacher’s conscience, or, in this case, from Newman as the editor of the published sermon. For the sermon is also evidence of, in Newman, a mixture of reticence and reserve based on a genuine tension—a tension that by the mid-1830s increasingly struggled to contain, qualify, and explain growing and persistent Catholic sympathies. One sees this more explicitly in another section of this sermon, where Newman engages in an illuminating discussion regarding the question of why the New Testament says so little about Mary in comparison to her son.

Newman answers this question in two ways. First, he observes that scripture was written primarily to display God’s purpose for humanity, that “God’s great and marvellous providence” may be made known.16 Scripture, Newman claims, was not written to give glory to any one particular saint. Such figures appear only when they are seen to be “instruments of His purposes, as either introducing or preaching His Son.”17 For example, the Gospels tell their readers that Jesus loved John (see John 13:23), yet we know little of John when compared to the life and mission of the apostle Paul, whose mission to the Gentiles dominates the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles. Had Mary’s life been known in more detail, Newman claims that “the Giver would have been somewhat less contemplated,” and thus Christ’s mother, rather than Christ himself, would have become the focus.18 It was impossible, Newman contends, that while Christ lived on earth his mother would, or could, become the focus of the Gospels, for that—according to Newman—is not the purpose of the Gospels. Moreover, for Newman, Mary’s hiddenness in the writings of the four evangelists reveals the greatness of her blessing in bearing the Son of God. “The higher their gifts,” Newman puts it, “the less fitted they are for being seen.”19

It is within Newman’s second answer, however, that despite being advanced, Newman’s Anglican Mariology had its limits, which were set by both his church and his shifting thought. Thus, Newman states that “the more we consider who the Virgin was, the more dangerous will such knowledge of her appear to be.”20 Newman seems torn here between the rationale of the Christological basis to Marian veneration and a caution that Mary, the Mother of God, be not adored over and above Christ. For Newman, the hiddenness of Mary was, therefore, by design. No human being in history has ever had the kind of intimate relationship with God that Mary had with her divine son—the son who took her flesh for his human nature. Therefore, the sanctified state of the woman who gave birth to Christ naturally leads to a desire to exalt that holy woman in ascriptions that, for the Anglican Newman, go beyond the appropriate veneration of a creature. Though he would eventually see that Catholics did not worship Mary, but rather venerated her, there was for Newman during the mid-1830s and early-1840s wisdom in the Church of England’s approach to Mary’s place in its faith and devotion. The following quote illustrates that, despite Newman’s high Anglican Mariology, he was in 1835 (certainly more than he was in 1840) still a Protestant, though the connection was beginning to weaken:

Other Saints are but influenced or inspired by Christ, and made partakers of Him spiritually. But, as to the Virgin, Christ derived His soul and body from her, and so had an especial unity of nature with her; and this wondrous relationship between God and man, it is perhaps impossible for us to dwell much upon without some perversion of feeling. For, truly, she is raised above the condition of sinful beings, though she was a sinner; she is brought near to God, yet is but a creature; and, seems to lack her fitting place in our limited understandings, neither too high nor too low. We cannot combine in our thought of her, all we should ascribe with all we should withhold. Hence, following the example of Scripture, we had better only think of her with and for her Son, never separating her from Him, but, using her name as a memorial of His great condescension in stooping from heaven, and “not abhorring the Virgin’s womb.” And this is the rule of our own Church, which has set apart only such Festivals in honour of the Blessed Mary, as may also be Festivals in honour of our Lord; the Purification commemorating His presentation in the Temple, and the Annunciation commemorating His incarnation. And, with this caution, the thought of her may be made profitable to our faith; for, nothing is so calculated to impress on our minds that Christ is really partaker of our nature, and in all respects man, save sin only, as to associate Him with the thought of her, by whose ministration He became our brother.21

The phrase, “though she was a sinner,” shows that in 1835, despite his high view of Mary’s holiness, Newman remained cautious about going beyond the broad Protestant consensus that was hesitant about speaking of Mary’s holiness, given its “Romanist” connotations. The precise context, of course, explains Newman’s meaning, which is that Mary is paradoxically, on the one hand, “raised above the condition of sinful beings,” while also simultaneously, for Newman, on the other hand, “a sinner”—Mary is “brought near to God, yet is but a creature.” Mary, therefore, lacks “her fitting place in our limited understandings, neither too high nor too low.”22

What, then, does Newman do to the 1840 edition? Not surprisingly, there is a small change. In 1840, Newman amended his description of Mary from, “though she was a sinner,” to “though by nature a sinner.”23

What had happened? The statement “though by nature a sinner” indicates that Newman had probably come to view a state of advanced—perhaps even, unique—holiness as being an inherent aspect of Mary’s nature, even if he still placed Mary within the fallen lineage of Adam. To describe Mary as “by nature a sinner” is to seemingly declare that Mary is sinful only in the sense of sharing in the punishment of Adam. When some Eastern Orthodox object to the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception, they will often contend that Mary, though very much without sin (even immaculate), she nonetheless shares in the punishment of original sin, which is death, rather than inherited guilt.24

Of course, one does need to be careful in drawing firm inferences regarding Newman’s development here—especially from what seem to be only minor changes. For example, elsewhere in volume five of the Parochial Sermons (1835), Newman, when preaching on the Incarnation during Christmas Day 1834,25 writes that Mary “was a sinner as others, and born of sinners,” though he immediately explains that “she was set apart,” remarkably comparing Mary to the bride in the Song of Songs (4:12)—“‘a garden inclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed,’ to yield a created nature to Him who was her Creator.”26 The use of the Song of Songs 4:12 as having a Marian interpretation goes back to a number of patristic writers, though it flourished with the extravagant biblical typology of the Middle Ages.27 It is a notable scriptural application by Newman, notwithstanding his own advanced High Church views, and it certainly strengthens the notion that he was an early adherent of Mary’s sinlessness. However, he stopped short of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception—even if he felt able to make carefully defined statements that simultaneously asserted Mary’s sinlessness and, rightly understood, her sinfulness. Yet, for whatever reason, Newman did not later edit his sermon for the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord, as he did for the sermon on the Annunciation under discussion in this article. Most likely this is because of Newman’s qualification expressed by his application of the Song of Songs 4:12 to Mary—an application that essentially expresses her simultaneous sinfulness and sinlessness within the same breath.

Despite appropriate cautions, however, when one sets the textual changes to the sermon on the Annunciation within the broader history of Newman’s life during the mid-1830s to early-1840s, it makes sense that Newman felt the need to edit the sermon. By 1840, Newman and the Oxford Movement had changed. In 1835, the Oxford Movement remained within the boundaries of High Church acceptability. By 1840, the Oxford Movement was well outside such acceptability and, indeed, was about to become even more controversial with the publication of Tract 90 (written by Newman) in 1841. The Oxford Movement had changed because Newman had changed. By 1840, Newman was more patristic in orientation, had become more critical of the Reformation, and was on the cusp of admitting privately, for the first time, that Rome may in fact be proved right in the end.28 Feeling out of place, yet not quite ready to go over to Rome, Newman began to explore the theological and historical questions that most perplexed him. Mary, though still largely hidden, was becoming part of this journey.

In one of Newman’s last major sermons within the Church of England, Mary featured in a manner that placed her at the center of one of Newman’s most important theological ideas: the idea of doctrinal development. On 2 February 1843, Newman preached “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” the last of seventeen University Sermons he preached at St. Mary’s. The University Sermons were not Newman’s usual Sunday discourses. They were by no means “parochial,” nor were they in any sense “plain.” They were, in fact, part of the University of Oxford’s academic and spiritual life, wherein Masters of Arts in holy orders were called to preach.29 They could be long, they could be dry, but in Newman’s case they often held a “captivated audience.”30 This was certainly the case by early 1843, when the question of Newman’s future within the Church of England was the subject of intense speculation.

The sermon, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” reportedly went for an hour and a half. We know this because of the recollections of one who was present, J. C. Shairp, later to become a Scottish literary critic.31 According to Shairp, who speaks movingly of the beauty and influence of Newman’s preaching, the sermon was preached during “the crisis of the movement,” when the “fear of change” on Newman’s part possibly meant an almost unspeakable act: conversion to Rome.32 Shairp speaks of the church being “crowded to the door,” and even speculates that had Newman then immediately resigned from the Church of England for Rome, he “might … have taken almost all the flower of young Oxford with him.”33

Newman’s sermon was preached on the Feast of the Purification (otherwise known as Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation), when Mary and Joseph presented Our Lord in the Temple in fulfilment of their Jewish obligation. Newman did not so much elaborate on the assigned Gospel reading from the Book of Common Prayer (Luke 2:22–40) as relate the event in Christ’s life that it describes to the internal life of Mary, when, just after the birth of Christ and the visit of the shepherds, she inwardly reflected on the immense meaning of her life (“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”). Again, Newman noted the providential hiddenness of Mary in scripture—that “little is told us in Scripture concerning the Blessed Virgin.” Yet in keeping with the broader message of the theory that Newman was expounding in the sermon, he had seemingly come to realize that the church, over the centuries, had rightfully drawn meaning out of what the Mother of God means for the church’s doctrine and devotion. “St. Mary” had become, for Newman, “our pattern of Faith.” Newman explains how:

St. Mary is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.34

Though Newman has probably overextended the analogy (Mary, for example, “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart,” rather than openly proclaim her status as divinely favored), Newman’s thinking is nonetheless persuasive for those of us who believe that Providence directed not only the writing of scripture but its gradual unfolding by the great minds of the church over the centuries. If Mary’s place in the Gospels signifies nothing special beyond the direct and literal meaning of the handful of sentences assigned to her, then the church also has no right to draw out (to ponder, as Mary had done, and even, if need be, to speak out and clarify) the Christological implications of the nativity—implications that, for instance, mean a lot if we are to rightly regard the babe in the manger as being “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father.

More broadly, the sermon is an exposition of the theory that the creeds and doctrines of the church represent the legitimate outworking of ideas that had once been present only in the hearts and minds of Mary and the apostles—as Newman memorably puts it, the whole history of creeds and councils becomes “the expansion of a few words, uttered, as if casually, by the fishermen of Galilee.”35

Given Newman’s objections to Marian devotion within Catholicism, Mary (and what Catholics believe about her) became an important test case for Newman as he expanded his ideas regarding development into what became An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). There, Newman argues that ideas are living; that they have life and are thus the source of further development. No idea is more vital for the church than the idea of the Incarnation (which Mary carried, quite literally, within her being). Indeed, this idea was still alive within the church of the 1840s.36

But which church? On 11 July 1845, Newman wrote to a friend that he had come to believe that history, especially early Christian history, shows that “the Church of Rome [is] in every respect the continuation of the early Church. I think she is the early Church in these times, and the early Church is she in these times. They differ in doctrine and discipline as child and grown man differ, not otherwise.”37 Of Mariology, the same applies to its doctrinal expressions and its devotions, for Newman saw in early Christianity “an atmosphere … charged” with “Catholic doctrines and practices” that have been present “from the first.” The church simply “delivered itself of them from time to time, in this way or that, in various places and persons, as occasion elicited them, testifying the presence of a vast body of thought within it, which one day would take shape and position.”38

Many years later, in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), Newman made a number of remarks about the place of Mary in Catholic doctrine and devotion—remarks that indicate that the issue of Mariology as a stumbling block to conversion was less of an intellectual or theoretical objection as it was psychological and cultural.39 Specifically, Newman did not feel that he could ever come to be at ease with the public and effusive nature of Marian devotion that he had personally experienced in southern Europe.40 In 1841, Newman had written to the priest and professor at Maynooth, Charles William Russell, admonishing him that his Catholic Church “would reform” its “worship,” and “disown the extreme honors paid to St Mary and other Saints … It would do your highest and most religious interests as much benefit in our eyes, as it would tend to rid your religious system of those peculiarities which distinguish it from primitive Christianity.”41 Nevertheless, subsequently, with the assistance of Russell, Newman was able to bring himself to accept such “peculiarities”—indeed, by 1845, to regard such “peculiarities” as legitimate practices born out of an apostolic and patristic deposit—even when those practices, embraced by various cultures, sometimes lead to devotional excesses (a theme Newman, as a Catholic, expanded upon, explained, criticized, and defended).42

There are other aspects of Newman’s Mariology that feature in his Anglican sermons. One is the way in which the church fathers quietly informed many of his insights. Of particular influence was the way in which Newman drew out the implications of the Mary-Eve analogical relationship that he derived from the “three-fold cord” (as he put it)43 of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. This patristic foundation stayed with him all his life. As he publicly wrote to his old friend and former Tractarian ally, Edward Pusey, in 1866:

For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their times is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain the value and authority of the “Schola,” as one of the loci theologici;[44] still I sympathize with Petavius[45] in preferring to its “contentious and subtle theology,” that “more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity.” The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them. And, in particular, as regards our teaching concerning the Blessed Virgin, with the Fathers I am content.46

By then Newman had become one of those voices of theological authority within the church that, like the schoolmen, was engaging in that same process of explanation and completion—a process that had begun during Newman’s time as an Anglican priest, and that received its own explanation and completion in the decades following Newman’s conversion. In a small way, in emulation of Mary, Newman had himself become a “pattern of faith.” Mary, hidden initially behind Protestant caution, became for Newman a model of faith and development.

The editors of the Newman Review are grateful for the opportunity to republish this article, which appeared under the same title in The Australasian Catholic Record 102, no. 1 (January 2025): 3–16.

1.John Henry Newman, PS ii, (London: J.G. and F. Rivington, 1835), 149–50.

2.Newman, PS ii, 140–53.

3.See Philip Boyce, ed., Mary: The Virgin Mary in the Life and Writings of John Henry Newman (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001); Nicholas L. Gregoris, ‘The Daughter of Eve Unfallen’: Mary in the Theology and Spirituality of John Henry Newman (Mt Pocono, PA: Newman House, 2003); Robert M. Andrews, Apologia Pro Beata Maria Virgine: John Henry Newman’s Defence of the Virgin Mary in Catholic Doctrine and Piety (London: Academica, 2017).

4.Andrews, Apologia, 24–27.

5.See Geertjan Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift: The Making of John Henry Newman’s Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022).

6.Roger Greenacre, Maiden, Mother and Queen: Mary in the Anglican Tradition (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2013), 98.

7.Greenacre, Maiden, Mother and Queen, 98–99.

8.His son, Henry James Coleridge (1822–1893), became a Roman Catholic in 1852 (later a Jesuit priest).

9.John Taylor Coleridge, A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M.A., 3rd ed. (Oxford: James Parker, 1880), 290–99, 315–19. I found this source via Carol Engelhardt-Herringer’s noteworthy study, Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830–85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

10.See John Henry Newman, Sermons 1824–1843, ed. Francis J. McGrath and Placid Murray (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 3:116–21.

11.Newman, PS ii, (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1868), 127–38.

12.Newman, PS ii, (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1835), 145–46.

13.Newman, PS ii, (London: J.G. F. and J. Rivington, 1840), 147–48.

14.See James Pereiro, “The Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, ed. Stewart J. Brown, Peter B. Nockles and James Pereiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 187–211.

15.This is exactly what happened with the sermon in question. See, e.g., The Eclectic Review 16 (July 1836): 45–46, and [Anonymous], Specimens of the Theological Teaching of Certain Members of the Corpus Committee at Oxford (London: B. Fellowes, 1836), 31.

16.Newman, PS ii, (1835), 147.

17.Newman, PS ii (1835), 147.

18.Newman, PS ii (1835), 148.

19.Newman, PS ii (1835), 148.

20.Newman, PS ii (1835), 149.

21.Newman, PS ii (1835), 149–50.

22.Newman, PS ii (1835), 149–50.

23.Newman, PS ii (1840), 151.

24.See Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 2015), 252.

25.Newman, PS ii (1840), 27-43. Preached on 25 December 1834.

26.The quote from the Song of Songs is from the Authorised Version of the Bible, and Newman has slightly contracted the original verse, which reads: “A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” Newman, PS ii (1835), 33.

27.Michael O’Carroll, Theotokos: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983), 327–28.

28.See Newman’s letter to Robert Isaac Wilberforce (26 January 1842), LD viii, ed. Gerard Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 440–42.

29.James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey, “Editors’ Introduction,” in John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between A.D. 1826 and 1843, ed. James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xxii–xxiii.

30.Earnest and Tracey, xvii.

31.J. C. Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868), 279.

32.Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, 279, 281.

33.Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, 279, 285.

34.John Henry Newman, Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief (London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1843), 312–13.

35.Newman, Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, 317.

36.See Andrews, Apologia, 33-60.

37.Newman to Richard Westmacott (11 July 1845), LD x, 729.

38.Newman, Dev (London: James Toovey, 1845), 369.

39.Newman, Apo, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 176-77.

40.See Andrews, Apologia, 53-58.

41.Newman to Charles William Russell (13 April 1841), LD viii, 174.

42.See Andrews, Apologia, 75-108.

43.John Henry Newman, A Letter to the Rev. E.B. Pusey, D.D., On His Recent Eirenicon, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 39.

44.Loci theologici are theological places or sources from which principles are derived.

45.Dionysius Petavius (Denis Pétau) (1583–1652) was a French Jesuit theologian.

46.Newman, Letter to Pusey, 26.