Popular Piety Research Articles

A conversation overheard: reflecting on the Trinitarian grammar of intimacy and substance

In response to Stephen Holmes, this paper reviews the Trinitarian contributions of the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine with the goal, following Robert Jenson and Colin Gunton in particular, of reasserting the key distinctions between them and some aspects of the heritage of these distinctions in Western theology and popular piety. The paper also acknowledges some of their commonalities, including the common inadequacies in their expressions of the doctrine of the Spirit.

Votive panels and popular piety in early modern Italy

Votive panels and popular piety in early modern Italy

The Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the Pre-Augustinian Sources by Pier Franco Beatrice (review)

Reviewed by: The Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the Pre-Augustinian Sources by Pier Franco Beatrice Allan Fitzgerald O.S.A. The Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the Pre-Augustinian Sources. By Pier Franco Beatrice. Translated by Adam Kamesar. [AAR Religions in Translation.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 299. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-975141-9.). This book is a translation of Tradux Peccati: Alle fonti della dottrina agostiniana del peccato originale (Milan, 1978). The author collaborated significantly in the translation, making minor revisions and a few bibliographical additions to the English edition. Since the reception of the Italian edition was quite mixed, it would have been helpful to have a new state of the question from the author, who says that he remains convinced of the main theses but does not provide an explanation for that conviction. The book is divided into three sections, seeking to discover the source of St. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. Pier Franco Beatrice agrees that Augustine was defending a widely-held doctrine, but he locates the Augustinian expression of that doctrine in relation to the popular piety of North Africa, which retained elements of Encratism. Thus the first section of the book describes Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, and the second section discusses the biblical and patristic texts on which, it is said, that doctrine is based. In the third section, the author explores the thesis that the real basis for Augustine’s doctrine can be traced back to Judeo-Christian Encratism—as if it could be seen as a definable movement in the West. The question of the transmission of original sin is certainly circumscribed by the polemical atmosphere within which it developed. That means that some effort is needed to see beyond the terms of the debate between Julian of Eclanum and Augustine on marriage and concupiscence. In fact, the sharp distinctions that are drawn in this book may be the clearest signs of how it was necessary to simplify the issues. Augustine, for example, was never able to decide on a theory for the origin of the soul, a fact that has to be part of any understanding of the transmission of original sin. Hence, the fact that this book does not deal with what Augustine says that he does not know makes its thesis less helpful than it might first appear. There is also a methodological issue that needs to be noted. The author defines Augustine’s understanding of the doctrine of original sin at the beginning and then asks whether St. Paul’s writings did, in fact, affirm that doctrine. That way of proceeding seems to make the answer a foregone conclusion. [End Page 105] Also, an extended discussion of Romans 5:12—the text that was used to typify his thinking by other authorities after his death—seems to pay more attention to how Augustine’s doctrine was received than it does with the fullness of his thought on this matter. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, in fact, was based more on chapters 7 and 9 of the letter to the Romans and on 1 Corinthians 15 than on Romans 5:12. A 1963 study by Stanislas Lyonnet—cited in the bibliography—makes that very point; it should have been more fully represented in the discussion of Paul’s thought. In that context, it may not be all that surprising that the scriptures are not given the primary role in the formation of Augustine’s idea of transmission of original sin (chapter 6). When first published, this book stimulated the conversation about the transmission of original sin in a good way. But it would have been very helpful to see how the conversation about the transmission of original sin and infant baptism has developed in the thirty-five intervening years—a task to which this book has unfortunately not contributed. Allan Fitzgerald O.S.A. The Augustinian Institute Villanova University Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Lisa Pon. Review of "Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy" by Fredrika Jacobs.

Lisa Pon. Review of "Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy" by Fredrika Jacobs.

The Portable Madrasa: Print, publics, and the authority of the Deobandi `ulama

AbstractIn the first decades of the twentieth century, classically trained Muslim scholars (`ulama) of the influential Deobandi school of North India issued a number of immensely popular, mass-printed ‘primers’ on Islamic belief and ritual practice. Now ubiquitous in the Islamic bookshops in South Asia and elsewhere, these primers sought to summarize the rudiments of an Islamic education for a nascent lay Muslim reading public. Focusing on three Deobandi`ulama—Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), Mufti Muhammad Kifayatullah (d. 1952), and Muhammad Manzur Nu`mani (d. 1997)—this paper explores how their primers advanced the Deobandi school's well-known critique of popular piety even as they claimed to address Muslims generally, and how their authors negotiated the subtle dynamics of print. Understanding the potentially subversive power of print to open a space for readers to form their own interpretations of minute doctrinal matters and the threat of mass-printed religious texts to their own authority, these`ulamaimplored readers to refrain from forming their own opinions of the primers’ content and to consult the`ulamathroughout the reading process. Thus, even as they took advantage of print's possibilities, they remained deeply suspect of its ramifications.

Parables as indicators of popular wisdom: The making of piety culture in Turkish television dramas

This article attempts to evaluate the articulation of folk cultural symbols in the context of TV drama to discuss the process whereby the act of storytelling becomes a tool for mediated and moralised teaching. Investigating the relatively new sphere of popular piety offers a suitable avenue for evaluating the nature of popular wisdom; the process by which popular TV dramas borrow from folk culture and popular religion has become a new area of investigation because new mediatised forms of folk culture are now a common feature of many television genres. Tracing the emergent patterns of storytelling, this article analyses narratives extracted from two well-known TV serials, Kurtlar Vadisi ( Valley of Wolves) and Deli Yürek ( Crazy Heart) in Turkey. It is argued that in both serials the meditative role of the mentor, which involves narrating parables for the hero’s benefit, constitutes one of the significant rhetorical strategies for reconstructing a piety culture.

Tragedy against Tyranny

Aristotle’s Poetics continues the project of The Politics and The Nicomachean Ethics by encouraging interrogation of the regimes and the habits they instill. Leading citizens to examine their own habits, tragedy can impede the slide of extreme democracies into tyranny. Aristotle held that tragedies such as Oedipus the Tyrant and Iphigenia among the Taurians encouraged such inquiry. Those plays spoke to the popular piety of their day. Tensions among contradictory elements of that piety posed thought-provoking puzzles to their audiences. The Poetics was directed at encouraging playwrights to actualize the interrogative potential of tragedy. The content of popular piety in today’s Western democracies, the limited aspirations of today’s nonteleological social sciences, and the dependence of mass communication on pressures of the marketplace require us to find different strategies for a civic education that bridges the gap between enculturation in necessary habits and interrogation of the regimes that instill them.

A provocation to mission: Constance Padwick's study of Muslim devotion

This article offers an examination of the work of Constance Padwick (1886–1968), who served as a ‘literature missionary’ with the Church Missionary Society and the International Missionary Council in Egypt and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Through a study of Padwick's life-long engagement with popular Muslim devotional prayers, the article demonstrates how she was inspired to use language, devotion and liturgy to call for a richer, bolder and deeper Christian presence in the Muslim world. Formed by the prevailing Evangelical tradition of the epoch, Padwick was drawn to Islam's mystical tradition. Her commitment to teasing out underlying similarities between the two traditions influenced the theology of mission that she developed, as her study of Muslim devotions led her to encourage a greater emphasis on the contribution that Arabic Christian devotional literature could make to Protestant missions in the Muslim world. In addition to shaping a specific missiological approach, the experience of Islamic popular piety led her to exhort her colleagues to cooperate more closely with the Eastern churches in order to build up and strengthen the ancient Christian presence in the Arab world.

The ‘urs of the patron saint of Lahore: national popular festival and sacred union between the Pakistani State and society?

Sufi shrines in Pakistan are the communal loci of popular piety. Through their symbolic meaning and capacity for mobilization, they have become pivotal power stakes in Pakistani politics. Since the late 1950s, the State has attempted to nationalize them and make them tools for the construction of its identity and authority, in a modernist perspective embodied in the Ministry of Religious Endowments ( awqaf ministry). In Pakistan, the veneration of saints takes a spectacularly festive turn during the ‘ urs (meaning ‘marriage’ in Arabic, symbolizing the union of the saint with God). As the anniversaries of the death of saints, the ‘urs have become the focus of yearly pilgrimages. In nationalized shrines, these popular festivals are managed by the awqaf ministry. Among the most notable is the ‘urs of the patron saint of Lahore, Hadhrat Syed Ali Bin Uthman al-Hujweri (1010–1072). His shrine is one of the biggest in Pakistan and his ‘urs constitutes one of the largest religious gatherings in the Pakistani calendar. Massively loaded with nationalist and political symbols, the religious ritual is legitimized as a key element of national identity and, conversely, serves to legitimize the government and its administrative machinery. Hence, the State exploits the pilgrimage as a political platform in order to communicate with the population, through emotional and symbolic means. Thus, the celebration of the union of the saint with God somehow becomes the yearly opportunity for the sacred union between the Pakistani State and society.

Some Reflections on Theology and Popular Piety: A Fruitful or Fraught Relationship?

It hardly needs reminding but scholarship over the past twenty years or so has moved quickly to close what was once perceived to be a chasm between so-called ‘popular’ belief and its ‘elite’ counterpart. Indeed in recent years historians can be said to have come to a consensus at least on the porous nature of what were once viewed as quite distinct categories. As early as 1978[2] Peter Burke argued that while the ‘great’ culture of elites remained largely foreign territory to the majority of the population, both the ‘little’ and the ‘great’ cultures could be accessed by the higher orders, allowing the nobleman to be pious in a ‘popular’ sort of way and, indeed, opening up new avenues that permitted traffic to cross categories at least in one direction. Later work by scholars such as Martin Ingram would speak of a ‘cultural consensus’ uniting all levels and, perhaps most notably, in 1992 Eamon Duffy argued for a degree of religious homogeneity across the social divide by coining the term ‘traditional religion’.[3] In the years since Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, many scholars, while critiquing his approach, have, nevertheless chosen to join the increasingly long wagon train of academics who like to congratulate themselves on not being associated with their less ‘enlightened’ predecessors who only viewed the world in black and white – popular or elite religion, non-official or official religion, unlearned or learned religion, heretical or orthodox religion, superstition or sound doctrine. However, while everyone seems now to be an expert on what was wrong with the old system, few are confident about what should replace it. If there are to be categories such as ‘popular piety’ at all, the challenge now seems to be how they should be defined.

Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory Michael Yonan Christiane Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011). Pp. 270. $99.95. Ignaz Günther is a sculptor well known in his native Germany, but entirely unfamiliar outside of it. His elegant rococo compositions grace the interiors of several important Bavarian ecclesiastical spaces, and a few have found their way to American and British museums. In general, though, his name remains little known; therefore, Christiane Hertel’s book is a most welcome addition to the critical literature on eighteenth-century art. Incredibly, this is the first English-language study on Bavarian rococo art of any kind since Karsten Harries’s The Bavarian Rococo Church, published nearly three decades ago. Hertel’s book is no introductory monograph, however. It is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and intricately argued investigation of Günther’s work which posits commonalities between religious art and the widespread retheorization of sculpture that took place in late eighteenth-century philosophy. As such, it is a novel and surprising text quite without parallel in the critical literature. Hertel’s intent is less historical or biographical than it is theoretical, and her book contributes as much to the study of eighteenth-century art theory as it does to that of art itself. She employs a comparative method that alternates works by Günther with lengthy explorations of diverse texts, including works by such prominent thinkers as Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder, as well as more obscure personages like the historian Lorenz Westenrieder (1748–1829). Hertel is particularly interested in passages concerned with self-reflective perception and sensory experience, since she sees in Günther’s sculptures a visual and material examination of these processes. Her overarching point is that Günther theorized self-reflectivity, interiority, and sensation in his art, making sculptures that fulfilled devotional expectations while also silently critiquing or confusing those expectations. Commentators have long characterized Günther’s sculptures as psychologically expressive, but according to Hertel that expressiveness is the result of a palpable self-awareness on Günther’s part. She relates this self-awareness to the Protestant critique of idolatry, to sculpture’s ritual functions in Catholic religious culture, and to the spiritual meaning accorded to sculpture in eighteenth-century German aesthetics. After a brief biographical overview, Hertel introduces the Pygmalion theme in order to examine an unusual etching on the subject by Günther. This image, [End Page 457] Hertel claims, complicates notions of high and low art through its odd iconography, and she sees the Pygmalion story as both a model for sculptural practice generally and a theorization of religious sculpture especially—a fascinating suggestion. Then comes a chapter on Günther’s relationship to late eighteenth-century Bavarian religious culture. Here Hertel interprets Günther through wide-ranging comparanda, including the baroque devotional machina, the theatrical tableau vivant, and Andrea Pozzo’s writings on perspective, connections that Hertel forges associatively and nonlinearly. Hertel uses this moment to build on and partially rethink Harries’s observations on the rococo church as theatrum sacrum. Chapter three examines Günther’s angels, their locations in churches, and the effects they have on viewers and worshippers. Hertel concentrates on the multiple commissions Günther produced for the Augustinian church at Diessen, which she sees as partially subversive and potentially unruly through subtle distinctions in gender, age, pose, and position. Chapter five discusses Günther’s Kerkerheiland, a small freestanding sculpture of the flagellated Christ made in imitation of the sculpture that inspired the Wieskirche, one of Bavaria’s most celebrated ecclesiastical spaces. Hertel engages in a close visual analysis of this work to claim that it unites popular piety and institutionally sanctioned Counter-Reformational reform. The next chapter turns to the sculptural groups Günther made for the Church of Saints Peter and Paul at Weyarn, unusual objects that were intended for procession as well as for stationary display. She relates these works to the idea of sculptural vivification, for which she adopts the term Zusammensicht, or synthetic sight, an...

Marquard von Lindau and the Challenges of Religious Life in Late Medieval Germany: The Passion, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary

Reviewed by: Marquard von Lindau and the Challenges of Religious Life in Late Medieval Germany: The Passion, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary Salvatore Calomino Marquard von Lindau and the Challenges of Religious Life in Late Medieval Germany: The Passion, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary. By Stephen Mossman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 318 pages. $120.00. Described as the “most productive German Franciscan writer of the Middle Ages,” Marquard von Lindau is treated here both for significance during his lifetime in the fourteenth century and for his influence on “intellectual history of the later Middle Ages” (1–2). Stephen Mossman devotes an introductory segment of his book to historical information on Marquard’s life and his potential responses to the Avignon papacy. Mossman considers further the variety of Marquard’s works, in German and in Latin. He responds to Nigel Palmer’s comprehensive list of these works by attempting a categorization of Marquard’s œuvre by type. Five major categories proposed include 1) Latin treatises dealing with theological issues, 2) lengthy, allegorical treatises, in both German and Latin, dealing with an approach to or union with God, 3) works in the vernacular on pragmatic issues of Christian life, 4) Marquard’s Latin treatise on philosophy and theology composed as a commentary on John 1: 1–14, and 5) a series of sermons, all written in German, dealing with “contemplative life and mystical union” (24). The diversity and the ambiguity of the intended audience for many of these works lead to a subsequent discussion on Berndt Hamm’s term “Frömmigkeitstheologie” as this concept can be applied to much of Marquard’s output. Since the term “popular piety” has proved to be both unwelcome and inaccurate when used in reference to the work of Marquard and his contemporaries, Hamm’s concept is deemed by Mossman a [End Page 268] more fitting assessment for a canon defined as “a literary and theological genre of its own, occupying a position between Latin Scholasticism and vernacular catechesis at a lower level” (29). As this body of texts is more closely evaluated, the development of German and its increasing importance as an “intellectual language” becomes a topic in reference to theological literature produced in the late fourteenth century. Marquard’s efforts from around 1370 and after are presented here as an innovative reaction to “existing intellectual traditions on particular issues” (36). Such topics, including the depiction of Mary and interpretive understandings of Christ’s suffering in the Passion, are examined in individual chapters in the main sections of this investigation. Mossman’s extensive discussion on the Passion considers first the topics of narrative and contemplative texts in circulation prior to Marquard’s versions. In the following section especially the vernacular works by Marquard are examined yet several of his Latin treatises, with a focus on De reparatione hominis and De perfectione humanitatis Christi, are shown to contain “theological background” vital to the German texts (43). Mossman is able to demonstrate that Marquard’s Passion texts have as their focus primarily the imitation of Christ rather than further narrative additions to the sequential presentations given by his contemporaries. As an illustration of such theses on Marquard the German treatise De anima Christi is examined in considerable detail. Not only the religious tenets deriving from Latin models but also the modified application of these in the German treatise form the basis of Mossman’s presentation. Since De anima Christi is divided into three parts detailing the poverty, humility, and suffering of Christ, the concept of imitation from the initial two segments translates logically as a theme into the final part. Mossman sets up a carefully structured presentation on this third part in which he is able to conclude that the “interior, mental sufferings of Christ” predominate over any of the physical details traditionally associated with the Passion (50). Indeed writers contemporary to Marquard tended to expand on the exterior descriptions of flagellation and defilement, whereas Marquard maintains a consistent adherence to Scriptural authority. In his discussion of related German and Latin treatises on the Passion, Mossman formulates guidelines for analyzing Marquard’s attitudes toward text as well as his reaction to non-Scriptural accretions. Both his vernacular...

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. The disparate topics of articles in this issue are bound by a common concern for power relations and their associated conflicts over spaces, resources, and representations. Michael D. Pante revisits the horse-drawn carriages that served as the most popular means of transportation in American-occupied Manila before the advent of motorized transport in the 1930s. He emphasizes the gamut of representations to which the rig drivers or cocheros were subjected. It is not easy to reconstruct the narrative of these cocheros as an occupational category for the sources tend to speak either glowingly or disparagingly, the latter particularly when the carriages did not disappear despite the spread of motorized transport. Pante states that for now the best that can be done is analyze those representations. Nevertheless, this article provides empirical data on the socioeconomic conditions of cocheros as a group, which locate them in Manila’s social structure. The discussion is also highly suggestive of the multiple meanings of a piece of urban space called a road and the extent to which rules govern or do not govern the human competition over the traversal and temporary use of this space. The article offers a window to social relations between state and society and among members of a highly stratified society that resonate with contemporary Metro Manila. In analyzing a procession ritual in Catanduanes, Ramon Felipe A. Sarmiento retells the narrative of contestation (that begins in the early 1900s) over an object of piety, a stone that was quickly transported from its place in the indigenous spirit-world to that of Marian devotion. Two groups representing popular piety and the institutional church have engaged in a long-running tussle over the possession of this object and the appropriate expression of devotion and the attendant regulations. The procession ritual that emerged, Sarmiento argues, sought to efface its constructed nature and imprint unity and connectedness upon the [End Page 427] path, now a paved road, that links a far-flung village that claims the stone as its own to the parish center that seeks to impose its hegemony. Across this ritual space the oppositional relationship between center and periphery is smoothened out. However, as Sarmiento points out, the procession has also served as the arena for the persistent contestation between village and center. Ritual encapsulates this social tension even as it mediates this conflict. Resources in the uplands have been both highly valued and highly contested, and the exploitation and depletion of the forest reserve suggest the often wilful flouting of state rules, even as upland peasants justle for a share of the resources dominated by large corporate entities. Commercial loggers did not reforest the areas they harvested, and left behind access roads that made it easier for the landless to trek to residual forests and convert denuded land into farms. The government’s final recourse was to ban the export of log and timber in the late 1980s. To restore the forest cover, the state has sought to mobilize upland dwellers in Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) schemes since the 1970s. Jungho Suh argues that these strategies have not been successful because these have not ensured food on the family plate and, like the rest of the forestry sector, have not been linked institutionally to the demand for timber from other industries. Developing CBFM’s connections to other economic sectors is the task of policy. The article by Resto S. Cruz I returns to the theme of our previous two issues: overseas migration. Cruz advocates an approach he calls postfeminization that goes beyond the quantitative calculation of the number of men and women who find their routes to overseas work, but rather delves into a critical analysis of notions of masculinity and femininity in various discursive terrains. Both men and women migrants have been represented in contradictory ways, which emanate from migration’s tensions with gender and kinship ideals that, in turn, are intertwined with class and status hierarchies and anxieties and the place of the Philippines in the global political economy. Cruz argues that sticking to the current discourse on feminization unwittingly replicates middle-class and state constructs, which must be replaced by...

The Consumption of the Sacred: Popular Piety in a Late Medieval Hungarian Town

This paper interprets late medieval religious culture by considering lay expectations of and attitudes towards the clergy. The analysis is prompted by and framed around a convent controversy, which was extensively documented in the course of an ecclesiastical trial. Contemporary ‘convent reform’ is not conceived as an ecclesiastical event, but rather as a symptom of the changing relationship between town and convent. The description of religious provision in the town shows that there was a strong lay demand for the clergy and the rituals performed by them, and that parishioners were ready to invest financially in maintaining local priests, even if it involved considerable additional expenses. The conflict between town and convent can therefore be considered as a result of a liturgical deficit in the spiritual market of the town. The parishioners' behaviour is interpreted as a symptom of the eucharistic and penitential devotional culture of the time, which was regulated in practice by the principle of intercession and the institution of good works. The paper argues that the divergent strands of late medieval religious culture generated a ‘consumption’ of the sacred. The mendicant friars had a special role in the late medieval religious market as they provided opportunities for religious experiences which differed in kind from parish observances.

Leonarde's Ghost: Popular Piety and "The Appearance of a Spirit" in 1628 (review)

Reviewed by: Leonarde's Ghost: Popular Piety and "The Appearance of a Spirit" in 1628 James R. Farr Leonarde's Ghost: Popular Piety and "The Appearance of a Spirit" in 1628. Translated with introduction and annotations by Kathryn A. Edwards and Susie Speakman Sutch. [Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 82.] (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press. 2008. Pp. xiii, 127. $19.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-931-11279-6.) In 1628 a feverish and bedridden woman who had recently given birth claimed to receive numerous visitations from a spirit. At first, the ill woman (Huguette Roy, the wife of a guard in the local militia who was most likely a tradesman) could not identify the ghost, and the ghost was stubbornly unforthcoming about her identity. Eventually, however, it was revealed that it [End Page 815] was the spirit of Roy's deceased aunt, Leonarde Colin. Colin, so Roy reported to the clergymen who were notified of the visits, had been sent by God to assist Roy in her daily housekeeping duties that she could not perform herself. Eventually Colin revealed that this was penance for her earthly sins and had to be performed to release her from purgatory. Roy was the only earthly creature who ever heard or saw Colin, but the local clerical authorities, and Christophe Mercier in particular, were convinced of the reality of the ghost. Indeed, Mercier wrote "The History of the Appearance of a Spirit which Happened in the City of Dole" (1628), the text that the editors translated for this volume. The editors/translators try to preserve "the roughness, vitality, rhythms, and ambiguities of the original manuscript" (p. xiii), but they are cautious to avoid didactically telling readers how to interpret the text. They do, however, offer an extended introduction (forty-one pages) that provides a useful setting for Mercier's account. We are encouraged to see the connections between the popular piety in the daily lives of ordinary people alongside and in conjunction with the concerns and teachings of the institutional church during a period of intense Catholic reformation. A sort of skepticism was invoked by the authorities to determine the veracity of the spirit (demonic or not), but along the way, we glimpse how ordinary people like Roy understood theological teachings of purgatory and, in the demand by the spirit for pilgrimage to Marian shrines in the region, how redemption immersed itself in their own sense of salvation. Roy's religiosity comes through clearly, but, given the apparent skepticism in the gossip of townsfolk and neighbors, readers might wish for more of an interrogation of how the news of this spirit spread and might have been understood by fellow townsfolk. This modest volume could be useful as an ancillary text in an undergraduate course on early-modern religiosity. It holds few surprises for specialists in the field, but the able introduction provides useful insights into popular piety not easily gained from printed texts. If readers grant that the story is based on Roy's projection of what spirits are and can do, then they can discern from this text popular notions of the other world—how it intrudes on this one, what spirits from it can do, what the relation between the living and the dead might be, and what role these notions can fulfill in the ever-changing schemes of salvation to which early-modern folk like Roy and her neighbors were presented with, and upon which they did so earnestly seize. James R. Farr Purdue University Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press

Visual Anorexia in Early Modern British Print Culture

From the 1580s on, Patrick Collinson argued in 1988, Britain was ‘a society suffering from severe visual anorexia’.1 Reformation iconoclasm, rooted in the commandment against graven images,2 turned in the 1580s into iconophobia. The theologically based resistance to religious images grew into a distaste for images altogether. Protestants believed that the representation of the sacred, invisible world was ungodly. Churchgoers risked worshipping images rather than invisible realities.3 This aversion was felt intensively in Britain, where the visual culture – dependent on religious environments and patronage – remained underdeveloped, not only in sacred but also in secular contexts. Churches, domestic interiors, and books lacked decorative representational images. This view of a visually anorexic Britain has been challenged in recent years. In her influential Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (1991), Tessa Watt explored the diverse territory of cheap print and discerned a protestant accommodation of images. Cheap print...

Religion, Politics, and the Parish in Tudor England and Wales: A View from the Marches of Wales, 1534–1553

Historians of early modern England benefit from a rich and varied array of contemporary accounts by individuals that shed light on the local, regional, and wider impact of religious and other policies of successive monarchs. These include the narrative of Robert Parkyn, a Yorkshire priest, of the years 1532–54, Rose Hickman's recollections of Protestant life during the reign of Mary Tudor, to the chronicle of Henry Machyn in 1550–1563, to name but a few. More broadly, too, the history of the book and its import in illuminating various aspects of medieval and early modern popular culture, devotion, piety, reading practices and other related topics has been widely recognised. They have been successfully mined in recent years by various scholars of medieval and early modern England, Ireland, and beyond, from Eamon Duffy to Salvador Ryan and Raymond Gillespie.

Katholische Aufklärung, Volksfrömmigkeit und "Religionspolicey": Das rheinische Wallfahrtswesen von 1816 bis 1826 und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Wallfahrtsverbots von 1826. Ein Beitrag zur aufklärerischen Volksfrömmigkeitsreform (review)

Reviewed by: Katholische Aufklärung, Volksfrömmigkeit und "Religionspolicey": Das rheinische Wallfahrtswesen von 1816 bis 1826 und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Wallfahrtsverbots von 1826. Ein Beitrag zur aufklärerischen Volksfrömmigkeitsreform Eric Yonke Katholische Aufklärung, Volksfrömmigkeit und "Religionspolicey": Das rheinische Wallfahrtswesen von 1816 bis 1826 und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Wallfahrtsverbots von 1826. Ein Beitrag zur aufklärerischen Volksfrömmigkeitsreform. By Volker Speth. [Europäische Wallfahrtsstudien, Band 5.] (New York: Peter Lang. 2008. Pp. xii, 555. $124.95 paperback. ISBN 978-3-631-58009-7.) This volume studies a pivotal moment in the social history of modern German Catholicism, when church and state officials joined efforts to bring order and reason to popular religion. But history did not pivot as the reformers intended. Volker Speth's book details the ten years of administrative machinations leading up to the official 1826 ban on pilgrimages in the Prussian Rhine Province, an event that set the stage for a massive religious revival. Speth focuses on the Rhineland pilgrimages as the clearest indicator of a growing social and cultural confrontation among popular religious identity, statist social discipline, and local communal autonomy. Prussia was just beginning to assert authority over the Rhine Province, part of the post-Napoleonic conservative Restoration, and Rhenish Catholics viewed Prussian rule as foreign. In truth, Prussia had reason to question the loyalty and political stability of the new province. Public assemblies such as pilgrimages, involving the orchestrated movement of large or small groups of people through villages and towns en route to a mass gathering, were a security concern. Some of the popular pilgrim destinations such as Kevelaer and Neuss involved sizable numbers of people crossing district territorial borders. Pilgrimages were a unique problem for the contemporary Catholic hierarchy as well. From the perspective of church leaders whose careers advanced during the Enlightenment, Revolutionary, and Napoleonic periods, pilgrimages were part of an outdated folk culture. The destinations were deemed [End Page 830] sacred through long-established folk tradition. Whereas the participants saw pilgrimages as an act of piety—and an excellent opportunity to get away from home for a brief time—officials reported instances of public drunkenness and carousing as well as pointing up the moral dangers for young women and men trekking across the countryside and sleeping in barns or the open air. For churchmen advancing a more enlightened faith, these pilgrimages were a cultural accretion at best. In the interest of compromise, church and state officials first hammered out schemes for regulating pilgrimages. As Speth shows, however, these attempts only led to frustration as local communities, district administrators, and diocesan clerics could not agree on the pilgrimages to permit or the rules to enforce. Ultimately, the authoritarian state's interest in controlling public assemblies was more pressing than church efforts at convincing peasants to abandon their pre-modern rituals. The study thus culminates with the pilgrimage Verbot in 1826 by Baron Ferdinand August Spiegel, archbishop of Cologne. At first glance, it was an overwhelming victory for modern reformers. But, as Speth argues, the 1826 ban was only a temporary victory for the state administration and a failure for the Enlightened religious reform movement. As an expression of popular piety and local identity, the pilgrimage remained important in the small towns and farming communities. The official ban only deepened the chasm between Catholic Rhinelanders and the Prussian government. What makes this volume particularly important is its exhaustive research on church and state practices as well as its detailed social analysis of the pilgrims. Speth thoroughly covers the historiography of early-nineteenth-century German Catholicism, and his work deepens our understanding of the face-off between popular religion and the Prussian state. Officials interpreted Volk pilgrimages as an expression of an unruly and superstitious culture. Speth's research provides the detailed and nuanced analysis of precisely how the bureaucracies attempted to hem in popular Catholicism. Eric Yonke University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press

Making Muslims Fit for Faiz (God’s Grace): Spiritual and Not-so-spiritual Transactions inside the Islamic Missionary Movement Dawat-e Islami

The Islamic missionary movement Dawat-e Islami is headed by the Memon business man and Barelwi scholar Muhammad Ilyas Qadiri Attar and aims to confront the Deobandi-affiliated Tablighi Jamaat in spreading Sunnah, the lifestyle of the Prophet and the Salaf. Since 2008 Dawat-e Islami has used its own TV station—the Madani channel—to advertise Sunnah-centric Sufism and popular piety through Sunnaization: the Islamization of clothing style, speech and behaviour. Fostering lay leadership and missionary journeys, the brotherhood reinforces a more general trend of making Islamic lifestyles market-worthy, i.e. capable of catching attention and attracting demand, thereby standardizing Sunnah, individualizing Islamic mission, and branding Barelwiyat. Its strategies of mobilization are thus described by applying the metaphors of religious economics.

Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887 – 1934

This book is a rich regional history of Mexican Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Partly as a response to the recent call by historian José Andrés-Gallego to revisit the history of Mexican Catholicism both “as a complex organization and as a way of life,” Edward Wright-Rios brings together the religious perspectives of ecclesiastical authorities, parish priests, and laypeople around the promotion of local devotions (p. 6). He argues that, in the wake of the anticlerical “reform laws” of the 1850s and 1860s, clergymen and parishioners in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca sought to spur a revival of Catholicism through “their common interest in founding, fueling and managing devotions” (p. 4). Religious revitalization in Oaxaca took place at the institutional and popular level. In this view, the Oaxacan Church witnessed two “revolutions,” one administered by Catholic pastors and the other one sustained by women and indigenous peoples.Wright-Rios opens with an examination of the reform program undertaken by Oaxaca’s Archbishop Eulogio Gillow (1887 – 1922). In line with Vatican dictates to bring about a modernization of Catholicism, the Oaxacan prelate assumed the task of transforming popular religiosity and sparking a Catholic renewal among Oaxaca’s population. In addition to destroying the secular power of the Mexican Church, the liberal anticlerical laws of the middle of the nineteenth century altered the foundations of local devotion. As the century drew to a close, male-dominated religious brotherhoods, whose activities largely resided outside the realm of archdiocesan mandates, emerged as the locus of communal religion among indigenous peoples. Gillow encouraged the formation of “canonically structured organizations” to bring these local associations under the control of the clergy, establish devotions managed by the church, and implant a sacrament-driven form of Catholicism. Women, who had played a secondary role within religious brotherhoods, flocked to the church-sanctioned lay associations, thus gaining a crucial voice in the public sphere and becoming key agents in the archbishop’s reform plan.The impact of Gillow’s project was limited at best, particularly in the countryside. The “spirit of association” that accompanied church-sponsored lay organizations found few converts among the indigenous population. Indigenous religious brotherhoods generally retained their autonomy. But neither the prelate nor the clergy under his command were willing to directly confront them. They recognized that a renewed Oaxacan church ultimately depended on preexisting religious structures for the maintenance of popular piety. Churchmen adopted a policy of compromise, “turning a blind eye to heterodox practice, or otherwise accommodating it” (p. 202). Conflict and negotiation stood at the center of Oaxacan popular religiosity.As Wright-Rios indicates, Oaxacan parishioners remained Catholics “in their own way.” The author documents the gulf between Gillow’s modernizing agenda and popular religious sensibilities by examining two apparition movements: the Lord of the Wounds and the Virgin of Ixpantepec. Through their devotion to the Lord of the Wounds, women and indigenous groups sought to reshape rural Catholicism in such a way that it escaped the patriarchal order and control of ecclesiastical authorities. Despite its “heterodox” character, most parish priests tolerated this devotion and its main promoter, Bartola Bolaños. In an illuminating chapter, Wright-Rios investigates the apparition of the Virgin of Ixpantepec in the late 1920s. Women such as Matilde Narváez, major advocate of the Virgin of Ixpantepec, interpreted this Marian apparition as a sign of an impending divine punishment for the modern error of secularism. Although Gillow’s successor, José Núñez, refused to officially recognize this devotion, Narváez and her supporters perceived themselves as central characters in the church’s revitalization campaign.Wright-Rios raises important issues about the history of Mexican Catholicism in the aftermath of the anticlerical reform. Specialists and nonspecialists will find enlightening Wright-Rios’s argument that the history of Latin American Catholicism cannot be understood without situating it in the age of modernity. This work also redirects our attention away from male-directed religious sodalities such as cofradías and mayordomías and brings to the fore the integral role that devout women played in the Catholic renewal of the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, after reading Wright-Rios’s book one wonders to what extent religious change in Oaxaca led to social or political change, especially during the years of the Mexican Revolution. Did apparition movements result in any forms of political mobilization in the face of the revolution’s anticlericalism? Wright-Rios notes that the documentation that might allow us to positively answer this question for the case of Oaxaca “is always sketchy” (p. 279). Nonetheless, this line of inquiry merits consideration if we are to understand Catholicism as part and parcel of this tumultuous modern age.The above comment, however, does not diminish the significance of this well-researched work. Wright-Rios’s ability to weave together church documents, popular accounts, and oral histories, as well as to engage contradictory sources, leaves us with a refreshing institutional and cultural portrayal of Mexican Catholicism.