Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.
Edward Bouverie Pusey was an English Anglican cleric, for more than fifty years Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford. He was one of the leading figures in the Oxford Movement, with interest in sacramental theology and typology.
David Bogue was a Scottish nonconformist religious leader.
Henry Wace was an English Anglican priest and ecclesiastical historian who served as Principal of King's College, London, from 1883 to 1897 and as Dean of Canterbury from 1903 to 1924. He is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as "an effective administrator, a Protestant churchman of deep scholarship, and a stout champion of the Reformation settlement".
Legh Richmond (1772–1827) was a Church of England clergyman and writer. He is noted for tracts, narratives of conversion that innovated in the relation of stories of the poor and female subjects, and which were subsequently much imitated. He was also known for an influential collection of letters to his children, powerfully stating an evangelical attitude to childhood of the period, and by misprision sometimes taken as models for parental conversation and family life, for example by novelists, against Richmond's practice.
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) is a UK-based Christian charity. Founded in 1698 by Thomas Bray, it has worked for over 300 years to increase awareness of the Christian faith in the UK and worldwide.
Andrew Fuller was an English Particular Baptist minister and theologian. Known as a promoter of missionary work, he also took part in theological controversy.
Joseph Milner (1744–1797), an English evangelical divine, has a reputation particularly for his work on The History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809).
Charlotte Maria Tucker was a prolific English writer and poet for children and adults, who wrote under the pseudonym A.L.O.E.. Late in life she spent a period as a volunteer missionary in India, where she died.
A tract is a literary work and, in current usage, usually religious in nature. The notion of what constitutes a tract has changed over time. By the early part of the 21st century, a tract referred to a brief pamphlet used for religious and political purposes. Tracts are often either left for someone to find or handed out. However, there have been times in history when the term implied tome-like works. A tractate, a derivative of a tract, is equivalent in Hebrew literature to a chapter of the Christian Bible.
The Lutterworth Press, one of the oldest independent British publishing houses, has traded since the late eighteenth century, initially as the Religious Tract Society (RTS). The main areas of publication have been religion and theology, children's books and books for young people, and general adult non-fiction.
William Garrett Lewis (1821–1885) was a Baptist preacher and pastor of Westbourne Grove Church in Bayswater, London for 33 years. He was an apologist author of two books, Westbourne Grove Sermons and The Trades and Industrial Occupations of the Bible, published by the Religious Tract Society.
John Udall was an English clergyman of Puritan views, closely associated with the publication of the Martin Marprelate tracts, and prosecuted for controversial works of a similar polemical nature. He has been called "one of the most fluent and learned of puritan controversialists".
The Tracts for the Times were a series of 90 theological publications, varying in length from a few pages to book-length, produced by members of the English Oxford Movement, an Anglo-Catholic revival group, from 1833 to 1841. There were about a dozen authors, including Oxford Movement leaders John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey, with Newman taking the initiative in the series, and making the largest contribution. With the wide distribution associated with the tract form, and a price in pennies, the Tracts succeeded in drawing attention to the views of the Oxford Movement on points of doctrine, but also to its overall approach, to the extent that Tractarian became a synonym for supporter of the movement.
Charles Maurice Davies (1828–1910) was an Anglican clergyman, writer and spiritualist.
Samuel Walker (1714–1761), called Samuel Walker of Truro, was an English evangelical clergyman of the Church of England.
William Bengo' Collyer (1782–1854) was an English Congregational minister and religious writer,
Ethel Louise Nokes (1883–1976) was a British children's writer who produced 21 novels from the 1930s to the 1950s – several with equestrian themes, plus a trilogy of girls' school stories. Many of her works have evangelical sub-texts.
Sunday at Home was a weekly magazine published in London by the Religious Tract Society beginning in 1854. It was one of the most successful examples of the "Sunday reading" genre of periodicals: inexpensive magazines intended to provide wholesome religious entertainment for families to read on Sundays, especially as a substitute for "pernicious" secular penny weeklies such as The London Journal or The Family Herald.
