Pusey is often characterised as obscurantist and conservative in his rejection of the higher literary criticism of the Bible in the later part of the nineteenth century. Much of the criticism of Pusey has focused on a limited assessment of Pusey as a scriptural scholar and on unfair psychological analysis. This article examines Pusey's epistemology more deeply and concludes that he had a breadth of vision which commends itself to the modern world as a critique of reason rather than a rejection of reason. Pusey's role as a biblical scholar is reassessed within the broad context of the Oxford Movement.

This article seeks to explore the thinking of Edward Bouverie Pusey on the doctrine of transubstantiation. It begins by looking at the conflicted way Pusey is considered and goes on to examine Pusey's writings on transubstantiation. The article points out that Pusey's early writing on transubstantiation wrongly believed that the doctrine implied a carnal view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, but that in his mature thinking this caricature was abandoned and he came to understand that transubstantiation is a form of moderate realism. Some detailed examination of Pusey's mature thinking is undertaken, including a very important set of correspondence between Edward Pusey and John Newman in 1867 which addressed the doctrine of transubstantiation. Pusey's thinking reveals that he is prepared to accept the word transubstantiation as long as it does not imply a change in the substance of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The article concludes with discussion on the term transubstantiation itself and controversially cites evidence from both Anglican and Roman Catholic sources which suggest that the dependence on a particular scholastic philosophical analysis which attempts to explain the ‘how’ of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist may be less useful than an approach of ‘what’. Pusey's mature thinking on transubstantiation is seen as useful for ecumenical dialogue between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.

This article examines some of the links between the nineteenth century Tractarian leader Edward Pusey and the Romantic poets, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in relation to eucharistic theology, especially Pusey's 1836 ‘Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament’. Pusey's sacramental theology was affected by the Romantic poets in the expression of moderate realism which also played an important part in the Oxford Movement. Like the Romantic poets, Pusey saw nature as pointing to and conveying the presence of God and this had clear connections for Pusey to a moderate realist sacramental theology where the presence of the divine was known through the material: things like bread and wine and water.