Hymns Ancient and Modern is a hymnal in common use within the Church of England and resulted out of the efforts of the Oxford Movement. Over the years it has grown into a large family of hymnals. As such, the Hymns Ancient and Modern set the standard for the current hymnal in the Church of England.

Origin

Hymn singing

Using hymns in official services started in dissenting churches. In the Church of England, however, hymn singing was not an integral part of the official Service Orders up until the early years of the nineneenth century, but it was – as opposed to metrical psalms – not officially sanctioned. From about 1800 parish churches started to use various hymns collections in informal services like the Lock Hospital Collection (1769) by Martin Madan, the Olney hymns (1779) by John Newton and William Cowper and A Collection of Hymns for the Use of The People Called Methodists (1779) by John Wesley and Charles Wesley. Around 1830 the regular singing of hymns in the dissenting churches (outside the Church of England) had become widely accepted thanks to the efforts of hymn writers like Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and others.

The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (French: querelle des Anciens et des Modernes) began overtly as a literary and artistic debate that heated up in the early 1690s and shook the Académie française.

Origins of the debate

It was an essential feature of the European Renaissance to praise recent discoveries and achievements as a means to assert the independence of modern culture from the institutions and wisdom inherited from Classical (Greek and Roman) authorities. From the first years of the sixteenth century, one of the major reasonings used to this end by the most eminent humanists (François Rabelais, Girolamo Cardano, Jean Bodin, Louis LeRoy, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, etc.) was that of the "Three Greatest Inventions of Modern Times" — the printing press, firearms, and the nautical compass — which together allowed the Moderns to communicate, exert power, and travel at distances never imagined by the Ancients. When the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns later arose in France, the "Three Greatest Inventions of Modern Times" would almost invariably be adduced as evidence of the Moderns' superiority.