It has been claimed the origins of the movement emanate from the teachings of the 16th-century Cambridge University professor and intellectual Desiderius Erasmus.
However, the more readily understood beliefs of the movement began in 1833 with a sermon made by the Reverend John Keble which was hostile toward a plan by the British Government to diminish the official power of the Anglican Church in the predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland.
[citation needed] However, it was concerned with the aesthetics and liturgy pertaining to the more powerful and spiritual medieval church.
This resulted in a great wave of Gothic revival church architecture with its "remote but splendid high altars, vestments, and the full panoply of medieval ceremonial.
While the movement was strongly in favour of high church ritual, conversion to Catholicism in the anti-Popish climate of the day was a step too far for the British establishment to which many of its members belonged.