Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain ed. by Gareth Atkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain ed. by Gareth Atkins Michael S. Carter (bio) Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Edited by Gareth Atkins. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016. Pages 296. Hardcover: £75.00. ISBN: 978-0-7190-96-0. Sainthood as a cultural category beyond the Medieval and Reformation eras has long been a neglected topic within mainstream historiography of religion, though in recent years renewed attention has been brought to this rich and important subject. The present collection of essays, edited and with a substantial introduction by historian Gareth Adkins, seeks to explore the phenomenon of nineteenth-century British Protestant and Catholic concepts of "sainthood," broadly defined as cultural practice, mostly from the early Victorian through Edwardian periods. It contains fifteen chapters, each by a unique author, and is arranged chronologically according to the lifetime of each historical figure. The subjects included range from biblical and early Christian-era figures venerated within Roman Catholicism and some Protestant traditions, such as St. Paul, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. Patrick, to Reformation-era Catholic figures like Thomas More and the English Catholic martyrs all the way to St. Therese of Lisieux, who was canonized in 1925. The trans-confessional scope of the book is reflected in its inclusion of figures to whom the term "saint" is more loosely applied. This would refer to individuals having belonged to and honored by confessions that do not have a formal category for sainthood, such as prison reform-figures Elizabeth Fry and Sarah Martin, the Scottish Covenanters, and William Wilberforce. The authors explore various themes, among them are saints as they served to solidify Catholic identity amidst external opposition, saints as figures recovered for Protestant identity by Anglicans within the Oxford Movement and outside it, and saints as objects of romantic medieval nostalgia, as well those appropriated for modern liberal Protestant categories of "social reform" saints. Of special interest to scholars of John Henry Newman (who is referenced throughout many essays in the collection) is the chapter on his 1844–1845 Lives of the English Saints. This book most successfully demonstrates that the elevation of historical individuals to the status of saints, at least as figures of emulation (if not necessarily as heavenly intercessors), is not a strictly Catholic phenomenon in post-Reformation [End Page 66] British history. "For despite their qualms about popery," writes the editor, "Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were" (45). Therefore, as he continues, the book uses saints, then, to show that devotional practices and language survived into an age of confessional strife, doubt and secularization … saints were also invoked in broader discussions about gender, morality, and national identity that were not necessarily linked to religious issues at all … (5). The idea that sainthood, as broadly defined within the volume, is not a strictly Catholic phenomenon, is at the heart of this book. It should be noted, as well, that this is not a collection of theological studies; the hermeneutic of analysis throughout the chapters reflects the conventional secular historical approach to regarding saintliness as a cultural or political construction. The volume maintains a high standard of scholarship throughout, and all the chapters are solidly researched and based on primary sources. While the book strives to maintain a sense of chronological flow, and intentionally ties the essays together with transitional material in a manner not often found in such volumes, it omits figures that one would have liked to see in a study aiming to be truly comprehensive. St. George, or the early Christian martyrs aside from just St. Paul, especially given the centrality of enthusiasm for the Gothic and medieval among high church Anglicans of the period studied, would have made for interesting chapters. Outside of an essay on the contested status of the cult and memory of St. Thomas Beckett, there are no other medieval-era saints included. To be fair, the medieval is the best-travelled territory within British sainthood studies, but inclusion of more on that world's vibrant afterlife within the nineteenth-century imagination would have shed light on the persistence, or lack thereof, of Catholic continuity within the complex world of Victorian...