Church History Studies in Christianity and Culture 2009-4

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HURCH HISTOR S TUDIES IN C H R I S T I A N I T Y AND C ULTURE

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY VOLUME 78, NUMBER 4 DECEMBER 2009

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THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY PRESIDENT CHARLES H. LIPPY, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

PRESIDENT-ELECT RICHARD P. HEITZENRATER, Duke University

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY KEITH A. FRANCIS, Baylor University

EDITORS JOHN CORRIGAN AMANDA PORTERFIELD Florida State University

MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL Class of 2009 JOHN M. GIGGIE PATRICIA Z. BECKMAN TIMOTHY TSENG J. PATOUT BURNS CANDY GUNTHER BROWN Class of 2010 CHRISTOPHER BEELEY KATHLEEN SPROWS CUMMINGS STEVEN L. OLSEN QUINCY D. NEWELL Class of 2011 MARGARET BENDER SUSAN E. SCHREINER SCOTT W. SUNQUIST FR. AUGUSTINE THOMPSON, O.P. Council Student Representative 2009–2010 BRANDON BAYNE

The Society was founded in 1888 by Philip Schaff, was reorganized in 1906, and was incorporated by act of the Legislature of the State of New York in 1916.

Vol. 78

December 2009

No. 4

CHURCH HISTORY Studies in Christianity & Culture

Published quarterly by THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY

# 2009, The American Society of Church History

CHURCH HISTORY

Studies in Christianity and Culture

Editors John Corrigan Amanda Porterfield

Senior Assistant to the Editors Monica Reed

Assistants to the Editors Joshua Fleer Shaun Horton Tammy Heise

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY Associate Editors Elizabeth A. Clark Thomas Noble Carlos Eire Hugh McLeod Dana Robert Robert M. Gimello Enrique Dussel

Duke University University of Notre Dame Yale University University of Birmingham Boston University University of Notre Dame Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

CHURCH HISTORY (ISSN 0009-6407)

ARTICLES 731

Tormenting the Tormentors: A Reinterpretation of Eusebius of Vercelli’s Letter from Scythopolis DANIEL A. WASHBURN

756

The Geography of the Monastic Cell in Early Egyptian Monastic Literature DARLENE L. BROOKS HEDSTROM

792

St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century PATRICIA APPELBAUM

814

“Banned in Boston”: Moral Reform Politics and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice P. C. KEMENY

FORUM 847

Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History Introduction ELIZABETH A. CLARK

849

Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History RANDALL STYERS

855

Philosophies of Language, Theories of Translation, and Imperial Intellectual Production: The Cases of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius JEREMY M. SCHOTT

862

The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies DENISE KIMBER BUELL

BOOK REVIEWS 873

AND

NOTES

Cobb, L. Stephanie, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts............................................. Colleen M. Conway

875 877 880 882 884 886 890 892 894 896 899 901 903 904 906 909 911 913 915 918 920 922

Bouteneff, Peter C., Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives ...........................Verna E. F. Harrison Bowes, Kim, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity..........................................Christine Shepardson Cooper, Kate, The Fall of the Roman Household ....................Dennis P. Quinn Burrus, Virginia, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects ........................................................Judith Lieu Davis, Stephen J., Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt ........................................................Caroline T. Schroeder Costambeys, Marios, Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics, and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700 –900...................................................... Kenneth Pennington Campbell, Emma, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography...............Nicole M. Leapley Cartwright, Jane, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales .............................................................. Beth Allison Barr Yeager, Suzanne M., Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative......Timothy L. Stinson Ball, Bryan W., The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley................................................... David Parnham Decker, Rainer, and H. C. Erik Midelfort, trans., Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition ......................... Brian P. Levack Corthell, Ronald, et al., eds., Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. ........................................................ Robert Trisco Parker, Charles H., Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age.............................Howard Louthan Betz, John R., After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary .......................................................................... Kenneth Haynes Mack, Phyllis, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism.....................Charles I. Wallace Newman, Richard S., Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers ........................................... Dennis C. Dickerson Snape, Michael, The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796–1953: Clergy under Fire ...................................... Jonathan H. Ebel Smith, John T., ‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’: Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837–1902 ................D. W. Bebbington Walker, Ronald W., et al., Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy .....................................................Patrick Q. Mason Darch, John H., Missionary Imperialists? Missionaries, Government and the Growth of the British Empire in the Tropics, 1860–1885...........................................................Allan Davidson Slatton, James H., W. H. Whitsitt: The Man and the Controversy ...................................................................... Merrill Hawkins Seat, Karen K., “Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women’s Missions and the American Encounter with Japan.............................................................Noriko Kawamura Ishii

924 925 928 929 930 932 935 938 940 942 945 947 949 952

Cummings, Kathleen Sprows, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era............................................................Colleen McDannell Blum, Edward J. and Jason R. Young, The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections..................Curtis J. Evans Bernardi, Peter J., Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism and Action Franc¸aise: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era............ Richard F. Costigan, SJ Alexander, Paul, Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God..................................................................... Joe Creech Kosek, Joseph Kip, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy.................................. John F. Piper, Jr. Appelbaum, Patricia, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era ........................................................................ Dan McKanan Inboden, William, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment .................................Paul S. Boyer Henold, Mary J., Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement ................Howell Williams Kalu, Ogbu U. and Alaine Low, eds., Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities .........................Frances S. Adeney Chen, Carolyn, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience.................................................................Jeff Wilson Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary ......................................................................... Salvador Ryan Frykenberg, Robert Eric, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present ......................................... Arun W. Jones Ferrell, Lori Anne, The Bible and the People ........................................................... Franc¸ois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles Browning, Don S., and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, eds., Children and Childhood in American Religions..............................W. Michael Ashcraft

955

BOOKS RECEIVED

962

INDEX

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 731 –755. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990503

Tormenting the Tormentors: A Reinterpretation of Eusebius of Vercelli’s Letter from Scythopolis1 DANIEL A. WASHBURN The devil, wrote Eusebius, called together his crowd of followers, who carried us off to the factory of their infidelity, shut [us] in, and claimed this whole power had been entrusted to them by the emperor. Therefore, to these saying many things and to those vaunting their own power in this way, I wanted to make evident that the things which they were capable of were nothing; [so] I, keeping silent all the while, handed over my body as if to tormentors, since the Lord said it could be handed over in persecutions.2

W

HEN the bishop of Vercelli recorded these sentiments in the fourth century, they had about them a familiar ring. Generations of Christians had viewed their sufferings in precisely these terms—as a cosmic battle with an impotent empire and ultimately with the devil himself. But Eusebius’s ordeal was no ordinary agon. Remarkable in this instance was the context: Eusebius set forth these words under the reign of a Christian emperor and in opposition to tormentors led by a fellow bishop.3 Just as he claimed, Eusebius did indeed oppose these forces by means of his body. More importantly, though, he fought them with the pen. In so doing, he furnished 1 I would like to thank Robert Gregg, Dayna Kalleres, Adam Serfass, Tom Hawkins, Stephen Cooper, Susan Treggiari, and, in particular, my anonymous reviewers for their invaluable contributions. 2 Eusebius of Vercelli, Ad presbyteros et plebem Italia 2.3.2 (hereafter cited as ep. 2) (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 9:104–9 [hereafter cited as CCL]). Eusebius remarks that it is licit to “hand over” (tradere) one’s body in times of persecution, perhaps contrasting himself with those who earned the Donatists’ scorn (the traditores). Eusebius may signal that he has committed traditio, though impeccably. On the Donatists and the import of traditio, see W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8–20, 316–18. Simultaneously, Eusebius may have in mind Matt. 24:9: Tunc tradent vos in tribulationem, in the Vetus Latina (Itala 1 Mattha¨usEvangelium, ed. Adolf Ju¨licher [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1938]: 173). 3 On the rhetoric of martyrdom after the age of persecution, see also Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 68– 130, esp. 69, 103–5.

Daniel A. Washburn is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary.

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later generations with a rich, even lurid, account of exile in the Christian Roman Empire. Born in Sardinia, Eusebius advanced in the Roman clergy and became the first bishop of Vercelli in roughly the year 344 C.E.4 He experienced his exile in the wake of the Council of Milan and, from his banishment in Scythopolis, wrote a letter to his home church detailing his hardships. So powerful is that document’s rhetorical force, scholars often uncritically absorb its bias and tropes. While ep. 2 does contain important data about the fourth-century church, interpreters must reckon with the complexity of events lurking behind it as well as Eusebius’s skill as an author. Doing so uncovers a scenario marked by ecclesiastical tension and rivalry.

I. FROM VERCELLI TO SCYTHOPOLIS The reign of Constantius II (337–361 C.E.) witnessed the confluence of religious concern and political compulsion in the exiling of several high-profile bishops. Eusebius of Vercelli numbered among this group, whose members also included Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Liberius of Rome, Lucifer of Cagliari, and Dionysius of Milan. The ancient data inform us that Lucifer, Dionysius, and Eusebius received their banishments because they were unwilling to condemn Athanasius at the Council of Milan in the summer of 355.5 Modern scholarship has debated the exact cause of Eusebius’s exile, questioning Hilary of Poitiers’s claim that Eusebius produced a copy of the Nicene Creed for the bishops present at the council to sign.6 Hilary indicates that Valens of Mursa stymied Eusebius by snatching away his pen. Because he 4 Jerome, De viris illustribus 96 (Gli uomini illustri, Biblioteca Patristica 12, ed. Aldo CeresaGastaldo [Firenze: Nardini Editore, 1988]:200); William Rusch, The Later Latin Fathers (London: Duckworth, 1977), 20. 5 Athanasius, Apologia ad Constantium imperatorem 27 (Sources chre´tiennes 56:118– 19 [hereafter cited as SC]); Sulpicius Severus, Chronicorum libri duo 2.39 (SC 441:312–14); Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiatica (Church History) 10.21 (hereafter cited as HE) (Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten [drei] Jahrhunderte, Neue Folge 6.2:987–88 [hereafter cited as GCS, NF for Neue Folge]); Socrates, HE 2.36.1–5 (GCS NF 1:151–52); Sozomen, HE 4.9.1–5 (GCS NF 4:148– 49). Timothy Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 117, estimates the month of the council as July or August. 6 Hilary, Liber I ad Constantium 8 (Corpus Christianorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 65:186–87, [hereafter cited as CSEL]). Hanns Christof Brennecke, Hilarius von Poitiers und die Bischofsopposition gegen Konstantius II: Untersuchungen zur dritten Phase des Arianischen Streites (337–361) (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 180–82, rejects the historicity of this incident on the logic that the Nicene Creed was unknown in the Latin west at this time and that the silence of Lucifer of Cagliari about the matter suggests that Hilary retrojected his post-Sirmium vision into the account. Other scholars, however, have adduced a myriad of reasons to refute this thesis (many of which still harbor skepticism about Hilary’s trustworthiness and Eusebius’s heroism). R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (Edinburgh: T & T

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refused to condemn Athanasius without this first step taken, Eusebius was banished by Constantius to the eastern empire.7 We pick up Eusebius’s trail next at the city of his banishment, Scythopolis in Palestine. It was here that Constantius sent Eusebius—a choice that was certainly deliberate. Eusebius provides little in the way of information about his surroundings. To discover his context, we must turn to external sources.8 Called Beth Shan (or Beth Shean) in the Bible, this member of the Decapolis became known as Scythopolis in the third century B.C.E.9 Since the Seleucid period, Scythopolis represented a site of regional importance as a nexus of trade routes and producer of linen.10 Soon after Eusebius’s sojourn there, the surrounding province was split between Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Secunda. Scythopolis became the capital of the latter, indicating its continued significance.11 Around Eusebius’s time, it gained a measure of infamy as the site chosen to hold the treason trials under Constantius, executed by the notorious state secretary, Paul “the Chain.”12 Culturally, Scythopolis harbored

Clark, 1988), 461n7, points out that the council’s theological character is revealed by its preliminary condemnation of Marcellus and Photinus. Barnes, Athanasius, 117, argues that Athanasius’s allies would have been likely to switch the debate from personal innocence to theological rectitude. Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 17n62, states that Brennecke’s argument proves “only the oddity of Eusebius’s gesture and its failure to ignite an immediate response.” P. Smulders, Hilary of Poitiers’ Preface to his Opus Historicum: Translation and Commentary (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), 153– 54, contends that Hilary did not have the luxury of misrepresentation because he needed to convince those who either did not care about or did not approve of his cause. Manlio Simonetti, “Eusebio nella controversia ariana” in Eusebio di Vercelli e il suo tempo, ed. Enrico dal Covolo, Renato Uglione, and Giovanni Maria Vian, 177–79 (Rome: LAS, 1997), argues that Lucifer’s silence speaks more to his megalomania than to historical fact. 7 Sulpicius Severus, Chronicorum libri duo 2.39.2 (SC 441:314) and Jerome, Chronicon 239i (GCS 47:239–40) indicate that Constantius himself was involved and likely pronounced judgment. His consistory may have provided some decision-making assistance, but the verdict came from the emperor. If any official proclamation existed, it does not survive. 8 For a concise statement on Scythopolis and bibliography, see G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), s.v. “Scythopolis.” For more detailed accounts, see John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 121–47; Gu¨nter Stemberger, Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century, trans. Ruth Tuschling (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 6– 9, 18, 71–75, 139–40; Nicole Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina: The Pagan Cults in Roman Palestine (Second to Fourth Century) (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 258– 68. 9 Binns, Ascetics, 126– 27. 10 Ibid., 123. Diocletian’s price edict 26.13a–130, 27.8– 29a, 28.7– 37a (Diokeletians Preisedikt, ed. Siegfried Lauffer [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.: 1971], 169– 79) assesses Scythopolis’s linen as of the highest quality. 11 Binns, Ascetics, 128. Stemberger, Jews, 9. 12 Ammianus Marcellinus, 19.12.8 (Loeb Classical Library 300:536). A. H. M. Jones and others, eds., The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971–80): 683 –84: “Paulus ‘Catena’ 4.”

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a deeply Hellenic identity.13 Its remnants indicate a polis replete with Greek deities and traditions. Notably, a temple of Zeus Akraios sat atop its acropolis, and an official inscription recognized Dionysus as the city’s founder.14 Evidence of Christian activity arises from the early fourth century, as preserved by the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea.15 This Eusebius, in his Martyrs of Palestine, records that in the persecutions under Diocletian and his colleagues, the first victim was Procopius of Scythopolis in July of 303.16 Procopius had been deployed from Jerusalem to Scythopolis, where he translated the Bible into Aramaic for the city’s Christians. This fact suggests that the Christian movement there had been modest to that point.17 The church in Scythopolis was likely humble in its size and stature and little braced for the shock of persecution. By the middle of the fourth century, however, the church in Scythopolis had acquired a new prominence.18 This era was dominated by the bishop Patrophilus, a formidable churchman and a loyalist to Constantius’s theological position. In the course of the Trinitarian controversy, Patrophilus established himself as a comrade of Arius and an opponent of Athanasius and eventually the Nicene Creed.19 For instance, early in the controversy he, Paulinus of Tyre, and Eusebius of Caesarea supported Arius’s attempts to worship with likeminded Christians apart from the bishop of Alexandria.20 Patrophilus may well have attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, at which, the fifth-century historian Theodoret tells us, he was one of the few bishops reluctant to condemn Arius.21 13 Jewish and Roman traces lag behind the Hellenic elements. Binns, Ascetics, 135–36, observes that Jews, who were victims of violence in the first century, slowly ebbed back into the city in the following decades. Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina, 260– 62, notes that a statue of Hadrian and a Roman festival, the Saturnalia, mentioned in the Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud Avodah Zarah 1.2.3) represent the only two traces of Romanization. 14 On the temple of Zeus Akraios, see Binns, Ascetics, 131 and Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina, 262; on the Dionysus inscription, Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina, 264. 15 Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina, 258; Binns, Ascetics, 140. 16 Eusebius, Martyrs of Palestine 1.1. This text comes down to us in two recensions, a short and a long version. English translation of both in Hugh Lawlor and John Oulton, trans., The Ecclesiastical history and the Martyrs of Palestine, vol. 2 (London: S. P. C. K., 1928). Only the long version, which survives complete solely in Syriac, mentions Scythopolis. The Greek fragments of the long version (which do not include 1.1) are printed in parallel with their short-version counterparts in SC 55:120– 74 and GCS N.F 6.2:907– 56. 17 Binns, Ascetics, 140. 18 Ibid., 132, regards Patrophilus as the dawn of a second stage for Christianity in Scythopolis, one during which the religion slowly increased. 19 Early in the controversy, Alexander of Alexandria wrote to Alexander of Constantinople and excoriated Arius’s views. Alexander indicates that three bishops of Syria had embraced Arius’s position: Theodoret, HE 1.4.37 (GCS 19:18). Hanson, Search, 17, indentifies Patrophilus as one of these three bishops. 20 Sozomen, HE 1.15.10–12 (GCS NF 4:34–35). 21 Theodoret, HE 1.7.13– 14 (GCS 19:32–33). See Hanson, Search, 156– 157. As the other histories that describe the council, Rufinus, HE 10.5 (GCS NF 6.2:965), Socrates, HE 1.8.31– 34

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After Nicaea, Patrophilus became an adversary of Athanasius and, with the charge that the Alexandrian bishop wished to stop the grain shipment to Constantinople, obtained Athanasius’s exile from Constantine.22 Patrophilus frequented subsequent councils, probably including the one in Milan that led to Eusebius’s exile. A manuscript discovered in the sixteenth century (no longer extant) contained a list of thirty bishops’ names in connection with the council, evidently subscriptions to a letter sent to our Eusebius exhorting him to attend the synod. Among them stood “Stratophilus,” which many scholars take as a variant or misprint of Patrophilus’s name.23 His presence at the Council of Milanese is historically credible. By attending this council on the other side of the empire, he would have brought to it an aura of universality and legitimacy. His anti-Athanasian agenda would certainly have served the council’s purpose. He was thus a vigorous participant in the doctrinal wrangling of the fourth century. Patrophilus also had a learned reputation and a political connection.24 Epiphanius of Salamis, writing in 376, indicates that Patrophilus enjoyed tremendous influence because of his wealth, austerity, and parrhe´sia with Constantius.25 Parrhe´sia was a valuable commodity for a late antique person; it signified the “straight talk” or “free speech” which certain individuals could employ in discussions with the powerful.26 Even after his death, Patrophilus’s memory lingered. According to the seventh-century Chronicon Pascale, Scythopolis’s pagans rose up after Constantius’s death in 361, exhuming the dead bishop’s remains and desecrating them by using the skull as a lamp.27 Clearly, Patrophilus had left an unforgettable mark on the city. Through his exile to Scythopolis, Eusebius came directly into the purview of one of the greatest non-Nicenes of the age. Thus the particulars of Eusebius’s sentence laid the groundwork for a confrontation between two adversarial bishops: one an entrenched Nicene on foreign soil, the other a traditionalist

(GCS NF 1:22– 23), and Sozomen, HE 1.20.1 (GCS 4:41), mention the reluctant bishops but do not name Patrophilus, it is possible that Theodoret added him to the list based on his reputation. 22 Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos 87.1– 3 (H. G. Opitz, Athanasius Werke. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1940, 2.1:165– 66 [hereafter cited as Opitz]); Socrates, HE 1.35.1– 3 (GCS NF 1:85). See Barnes, Athanasius, 23– 25. 23 See Smulders, Hilary, 94, 109–112; Barnes, Athanasius, 117. 24 Concerning Patrophilus’s learned reputation, the fifth-century historian Socrates, HE 2.9.3 (GCS NF 1:98), indicates that he instructed Eusebius of Emisa. 25 Epiphanius, Panarion 30.5.6 (GCS 25:340). The opening line of this work states its date. Philostorgius, 4.10 (GCS 21:63), bears out this privileged relationship. He describes a reversal of fortune activated by Patrophilus in which the bishop reported to Constantius the deeds of Basil of Ancyra, thereby earning exile for Basil and pardon for those that Basil had banished. 26 On parrhe´sia, see Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1992), esp. 61–70, 116–17. 27 Chronicon Paschale 362 (Patrologica Graeca 92:740).

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faced with a strident opponent suddenly on his turf. The image of Scythopolis gleaned from the archaeological record suggests that for a Christian, the city was still something of a religious frontier town. Its deeply Hellenic mores imply that in the middle of the fourth century the Christian percentage of the population remained low. Thus Eusebius and Patrophilus were two bishops with different understandings of their religion, thrown together in a circumstance largely devoid of a Christian populace. The bishops viewed each other from across a city steeped in Hellenism, long in potential converts but short on Christian tradition. It was a scenario ripe for tension and competition. Although Eusebius was later moved from the city, it was here that he penned the work that speaks so vividly of his exilic life. An attempt to untangle ep. 2’s complicated timeline appears in the appendix. For now, it is enough to note its basic features. Ep. 2 is in fact two letters, one embedded within the other. Of the two, the document written first was a libellus, a “little book,” that Eusebius sent to Patrophilus. (To keep the documents straight, I will refer to this libellus as “the note” and the remainder of ep. 2 as “the letter.”) Eusebius composed the note while remanded to a hospitium, that is, an “inn.” In it, he recounts to Patrophilus several indignities that he has recently endured, including being packed off to his enemies’ “factory of infidelity” and, from there, being stripped and dragged through the streets. He couples this grievanceairing with admonishments to the local bishop. Eusebius threatens Patrophilus with a hunger strike if his demands are not met. He further warns that he will fulminate to others against the rough treatment he received. We learn of the note’s contents because Eusebius repeats them in the letter that he sent to his home community. This document, though written later, describes earlier events. It opens with a warm greeting to the laity and presbyters of Vercelli, Novara, Eporedia, and Dertona—the churches in northern Italy formerly under his jurisdiction.28 Eusebius admits that he had grown nervous about his congregation. However, good news along with fructus, some sort of financial donation, arrived through a visit by a deacon Syrus and an exorcist Victorinus. Eusebius indicates that he and those with him began to use the fructus to help the locals, an action that occasioned Satan’s wrath. The devil’s minions abducted Eusebius and placed him in a second hospitium at which he drafted the note to Patrophilus. Eusebius claims that, though he was temporarily freed, he writes from a scenario of involuntary solitude. In fact, only the surreptitious operations of a friendly deacon allow him to transmit the message.

28 Daniel Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 60.

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Most often, Eusebius figures as a background character to one of the more prominent personalities in the Latin Church, such as Hilary of Poitiers or Ambrose of Milan. At those times when Eusebius does appear in conversation, he is seldom a subject in his own right.29 Rather his case furnishes church historians with an example of the acrimoniousness of church politics and the distress that it could generate.30 Echoing Eusebius’s own views, scholarship as a rule presents the bishop as a victim during an ugly period of church politics. In particular, scholars highlight factors which they see as indicative of Eusebius’s humiliation and abuse.31 Typical is Lorenzo Dattrino, who, in his examination of ep. 2, compares the circumstances behind the writing of Athanasius’s Festal Letter to those behind Eusebius’s missive. He concludes that, in contrast to the relative comfort which the former enjoyed among the desert cenobites, Eusebius “writes in cruel and rude imprisonment” and was a “victim of a persecution.”32 Likewise, a recent Italian volume on Eusebius includes multiple statements on his exilic experience, all of which reiterate the traditional refrain. Gilles Pelland, for one, describes Eusebius’s experience thus: “What do we know about Eusebius’s exile? It was harsh. At Scythopolis, in Palestine, the Arian bishop who kept him in custody subjected him to every type of oppression and deprivation.”33 Finally, Monald Goemans determines that both Eusebius and his compatriot Lucifer 29 Ibid., 50, notes the lack of attention which Eusebius has received. Hanson, Search, 508, does the best one can with Eusebius’s theological scraps. 30 Williams Ambrose, 60, writes that “the cruel treatment which Eusebius reports that he received, reveals how ugly were the lengths to which Christian enmity in the fourth century was prepared to go.” Monald Goemans, “L’exil du Pape Libe`re,” in Me´langes offerts a` Mademoiselle Christine Mohrmann, 184 (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1963), argues that while the details of Liberius of Rome’s banishment may be unknown, “we are able, however, to get an idea of the circumstances of his exile through the information that the exiles in other regions give us, and these testimonies show that their lot was far from enviable.” 31 The bibliography used in this article is representative, not exhaustive. For a staggeringly full bibliography (extending from 1581 to 1997) on Eusebius, see Mario Maritano, “Biobliografia eusebiana,” in Eusebio di Vercelli (see note 6), 432–71. A notable exception to these trends is Henry Wace and William C. Piercy, eds., A Dictionary of Early Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century A.D., With an Account of the Principal Sects and Heresies (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999; repr. of A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature, London: John Murray, 1911), s.v. “Eusebius, bp. of Vercellae,”: “He was a troublesome prisoner, having twice all but starved himself to death because he would not accept provisions from Arian hands.” 32 Lorenzo Dattrino, “La lettera di Eusebio al clero ed al popolo della sua diocesi,” Lateranum 45 (1979), 60–82. See also Dictionnaire d’histoire et de ge´ographie eccle´siatiques, s.v. “Euse`be de Verceil,” in which V. C. De Clercq states that Eusebius’s letter presents his “humiliations, insults, and hardships.” Similarly, Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, s.v. “Euse`be de Verceil” (hereafter cited as DThC). 33 Gilles Pelland, “Eusebio e Ilario di Poitiers,” in Eusebio di Vercelli (see note 6), 247.

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“were subjected to countless devices and humiliations.”34 In all, scholars have laid a heavy accent upon Eusebius’s role as a sufferer. In tandem with the theme of abuse comes an emphasis on isolation. P. Godet writes that Eusebius “was confined in turn in Palestine, at Scythopolis, where the Arian bishop Patrophilus himself was his jailer and treated him quite roughly.”35 Manlio Simonetti’s entry on Eusebius in Johannes Quasten’s Patrology indicates that Eusebius was “being held virtually prisoner by Patrophilus.”36 Dattrino calls attention to Eusebius’s “forced solitude.”37 The exiles Eusebius and Lucifer “were thus completely isolated from the outside world and, in large part, deprived of visitation from their friends and fellows,” reckons Goemans.38 Daniel Williams charges that in Scythopolis, Eusebius was “completely cut off from the outside world” and was “prohibited from sending messages of any kind or receiving visitors.”39 Once more, scholars have achieved near unanimity on the subject of Eusebius’s isolation. This presentation of Eusebius’s lot gathers support from the renowned heresiologist of Salamis, Epiphanius.40 Epiphanius’s remark about Patrophilus’s parrhe´sia sits within a larger narrative. An entry in this author’s Panarion relates that he and some companions had gone to Scythopolis. At Scythopolis, Epiphanius met a Jewish count who had converted to Nicene Christianity and who owned Eusebius’s dwelling place. Epiphanius indicates that this man, known as Joseph of Tiberias or Count Joseph, was the only Nicene Christian in Scythopolis, Patrophilus holding sway over all others.41 According to Epiphanius, it was only Joseph’s status as a count that protected him from Arian persecutions.42 The account in the Panarion appears to corroborate Eusebius’s letter in its portrayal of Patrophilus’s reign. Both renditions depict bleak circumstances for the Nicene Christian marooned in Scythopolis. In aggregate, modern scholars have found in Eusebius an illustration of bravery and martyr-like endurance. Though alive after the age of the great persecutions, this bishop suffered similar forces and responded with a classic display of fortitude—according to the conventional view. By concentrating on Eusebius in such a narrow way, previous studies have also tended to compress the events in his story into a single moment. This article seeks 34

Goemans, “L’exil,” 188. DThC, s.v. “Euse`be de Verceil.” Johannes Quasten, Patrology, trans. Placid Solari (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1992) 4:63. 37 Dattrino, “Lettera,” 63. 38 Goemans, “L’exil,” 188. 39 Williams, Ambrose, 61. 40 For example, Simonetti, “Eusebio,” 160. 41 Epiphanius, Panarion 30.5.1–5 (GCS 25:339–40). 42 Ibid., 30.5.6 (GCS 25:340). 35 36

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to move away from these tendencies in interpreting Eusebius and offers a reconsideration of the events in which he took part.

III. THE SKIRMISH IN SCYTHOPOLIS: WHAT CHANGED

AND

WHY

Eusebius gives us the material to fashion a rough chronology (see appendix). Within that outline of events, he discloses three phases of worsening relations: an initial condition of equilibrium, a subsequent state of hostilities, and a final period of order forcibly restored. At the beginning of both the second and third phases, Patrophilus and his crew took aim at Eusebius. Several factors provide a possible explanation for these incursions. For instance, visitors had come from other churches to see Eusebius, and their presence imputed a degree of greatness to the foreign bishop. Additionally, the donation sent from Vercelli revealed that the church there clung to the notion that Eusebius was its rightful head. However, it seems that the proximate cause of Patrophilus’s reactions was local. Throughout his narrative, Eusebius drops several clues indicating that the main issue causing friction between the exiled clergy and existing church was his distribution of charity. First, when Eusebius relates the pivotal moments in his drama, he does so in conjunction with a discussion of his distributions. And while he does not state definitively which factors precipitated those changes, Eusebius does imply a connection between the charity implemented by the Italians and the response taken by the Scythopolitan clergy. Regarding the first such shift, he writes that when he and his allies began a daily dispersion of the fructus, the locals glorified God and acclaimed Eusebius. According to Eusebius: When the devil . . . saw that God was blessed in this work, he roused his Ariomaniacs against us. They indeed had been sighing for a long time not only about this work, but also about their inability to persuade us to their infidelity. Thus the violent men emerged, in this way which he has always used, so that he might terrify with violence and power those whom he was unable to persuade.43 The reader struggles to determine who the real actor is: the devil or Patrophilus. In fact, Eusebius has conflated the two figures into one.44 We are told that 43

Ep. 2.3.1– 2 (CCL 9:105). Eusebius’s contemporary Athanasius imagines the devil as the head of the Arian heresy: Rebecca Lyman, “A Topography of Heresy: Mapping the Rhetorical Creation of Arianism” in Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts, ed. Michel Barnes and Daniel Williams, 45– 62, esp. 54 (Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark Ltd, 1993). Eusebius, too, constructs an Arian straw man, but he dispenses with the apparatus of succession, such that the devil is imminent in the affairs of the Arians. 44

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Patrophilus’s faction had long been exasperated over the Italians’ charity work and their resistance to proselytizing. Eusebius also states that his antagonists’ frustration represented a reaction to his activity, though he places the events within a cosmic framework of good and evil. As he understands it, the devil realized that Eusebius’s charity caused the inhabitants of Scythopolis to exalt God. Eusebius argues that his enemies’ coercion through violence exposes their wrongheaded beliefs. The letter often returns to this motif. Here, though, the main point is that Eusebius acknowledges the devil/Patrophilus’s action as the consequence of the Vercellians’ work in Scythopolis. Eusebius indicates that Patrophilus and his allies had held ill feelings toward Eusebius’s group for quite some time, but it was the charitable work that occasioned the flare-up. Likewise, regarding the switch to the final phase, Eusebius records that after Patrophilus’s men released him, As God willed, we began again to attend to the needy. [Our foes’] savageness had not maintained this enterprise and they squandered our love in their hatred. For scarcely twenty-five days were they able to tolerate this: once more they burst forth and with the destructive violence of the mob, came to our hospitium armed with cudgels, and forced the house open through another gate.45 It is striking that Eusebius refers to his charity work at key moments in the chain of events. Previously, he explicitly cited his charity as the reason for “the devil’s” retribution. Now he indicates that, after his release, his enterprise resumed and produced identical consequences. Undeterred by the first assault on his group, Eusebius rekindled his earlier activities to predictable results. Second, in the demands he enumerates to Patrophilus in the note (see appendix, stage 6), Eusebius stipulates two things: that his clergy be allowed to revive their work, and that he be permitted visitors. By insisting that his ministrations resume, Eusebius gives the sense that this work was central to the controversy. Patrophilus, it seems, wanted that project to stop while Eusebius was adamant that it continue. Third, the actions taken by Patrophilus and his followers reveal a marked concern for the Italians’ operation. In the wake of the first abduction, Eusebius’s adversaries discontinued this endeavor, which suggests that their objective was the cessation of his charity.46 In the twenty-five-day interlude 45

Ep. 2.6.2 (CCL 9:107). His remark that the Arians “had not maintained this enterprise” is misleading; surely the Arians would not have continued his operation. The wealth and charitable enterprises of Patrophilus’s church are impossible to determine. Although Patrophilus was famous for his personal wealth, the church itself may not have possessed the resources to conduct its own ventures. The Arians did eventually commandeer Eusebius’s funds (6.3). On the theoretical distinction of but possible 46

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between the resumption of Eusebius’ charity and the second abduction (see appendix, stages 8 and 9), Patrophilus made no move to curb Eusebius’s project. Whatever Patrophilus’s motives for inaction, Eusebius returned to his charitable activities. He indicates that his opponents could not endure this development. Again Patrophilus’s people captured Eusebius, but this time they went further. His wealth was confiscated and his clergy exiled to other locations. These actions targeted his assets and manpower—precisely the materials that made Eusebius’s venture possible. The reprisal appears to have been calculated to eliminate the Vercellian charity project. For the late antique churchman, charity signified more than a humanitarian gesture. Supporting the humble became a definitive characteristic of a bishop—so much so that correct use of charity even became a barometer of his performance.47 It signaled his concern for the world around him and his capacity to act benevolently on its behalf.48 Thus bishops made their imprint on late antique cities in part by tending to the needy in the region. Of course, when a bishop dispensed charity, he would ordinarily do so from his home see, where his monetary resources and clergy resided. In regions divided by doctrine or schism, such a bishop might have a crosstown rival, each offering assistance to the poor. But rarely would conditions conspire to place a foreign bishop and his charitable front in another’s city. This, though, was the case for Eusebius and Patrophilus. Thus a new bishop offering help for the poor was no simple novelty act in Scythopolis. It suggested that the Italian bishop was exhibiting patriarchal concern for the Palestinian city’s citizens. It further insinuated that Patrophilus was not acting “episcopally” enough, even that Eusebius had to pick up his slack. Further, a show of charity implied that Eusebius, despite his banishment, regarded himself as a capable and qualified shepherd. In fact, it is rather unlikely that he arrived in Scythopolis with his ecclesiastical status intact. The ancient sources do not reveal whether Eusebius was deposed as well as banished by the Council of Milan, nor does Eusebius comment on it.

overlap between a bishop’s private wealth and his church’s communal holdings, see Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 211– 20. 47 Rapp, Bishops, 224. 48 Peter Brown, “Response,” in The Role of the Christian Bishop in Ancient Society, eds. Henry Chadwick, Edward Hobbs, and Wilhelm Wuellner, 21 (Berkeley, Calif.: The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, 1980); Brown, Power, 91; Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002), 79. We may also doubt whether the exchange of food for loyalty was a maneuver unique to late antique bishops. Whether this technique was a reimagining of society or a crude exercise in marshalling support, it had the unmistakable effect of developing throngs of followers behind the bishops who implemented it.

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However, even without direct evidence, we can presume that Eusebius did have his ecclesiastical standing stripped from him.49 Such a council strove to unite clerical and temporal authority.50 In the case of this council, its proceedings even moved from the church in Milan to the imperial palace.51 It would have been very strange for the affair to have concluded with Eusebius’s exile but not his deposition. In short, Eusebius was almost certainly a former bishop when he appeared in Scythopolis. Behaving like an authorized clergyman rejected the objective and message of the council. Ostensibly, the council punished Eusebius by negating his standing within the church and severing his connection to Vercelli. Yet Eusebius continued to act like a bishop by distributing charity to the masses of Scythopolis—a signature undertaking of the late Roman bishop. Thus his work need not have been extensive to provoke a response. A modest distribution could still make a symbolic statement, namely that Eusebius imagined his purpose in Scythopolis, not as a form of chastisement, but so that he might nurture its citizens. Part of Eusebius’s magic—in his operations and in his letter—is his ability to make himself seem episcopal in circumstances that suggested exactly the opposite. We cannot discern the amount of funds dispatched by the Vercellians; neither can we recover the extent of Eusebius’s operation. Eusebius is often at pains to aggrandize his mission. In particular, when thanking the Vercellians, he indicates that the poor within Scythopolis and all who witnessed the Vercellians’ love praised God and venerated Eusebius.52 This image creates the impression of a wide-ranging campaign. However, nothing in the letter reveals a massive program at work. Rather we learn of charitable distributions at various moments and the pious fervor that it inspired. 49

So assumed by Hanson, Search, 334, and Barnes, Athanasius, 117. Barnes attributes this notion to Sulpicius Severus (who does not mention deposition), but the conclusion appears justified. Hilary, Liber I ad Constantium 2.8.3 (CSEL 65:187), trans. Lionel Wickham, Hilary of Poitiers: Conflicts of Conscience and Law in the Fourth-Century Church (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 69, leaves off at a tantalizing point: “The [bishops’] decision speaks for itself as to the kind of decision [sententia] they wrote at length against Eusebius, before they entered the church.” A sententia arrived at by bishops against another bishop was very likely a deposition. 50 The sources register the collusion of religious and temporal authority at the Council of Milan in various ways. Sulpicius Severus, Chronicorum libri duo 2.39.1 (SC 441:312) indicates that the bishops manipulated the emperor. Conversely, Athanasius, Historia Arianorum, 33.7 (Opitz 2.1:201– 2) has Constantius bending canon law to his whims. Theodoret, HE 2.15.1–2 (GCS 19:128) combines the two motifs, such that in his version Constantius first yields to others and then interferes with ecclesiastical affairs. The critical point is that the council took place at the emperor’s behest and at a locale where he himself was: the entire affair aspired to a unanimous front by all parties, imperial and ecclesiastic. 51 Hilary, Liber I ad Constantium 2.8.3 (CSEL 65:187). 52 Ep. 2.2.6 (CCL 9:105). Eusebius here seems to have in mind the local poor ( pauperes . . . ciuitatis ipsius homines) and non-indigenous observers, likely his visitors from other provinces.

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The assets from Vercelli were sufficient to obtain food or other goods for the poor for long enough to irritate the resident clergy. When they ended Eusebius’s program, his nemeses invaded his hospitium and scattered “everything which was of value or which was prepared for the poor” (see appendix, stage 9). Eusebius remarks, “Indeed, they kept what was of value at their place.”53 Thus there remained some leftover capital which Patrophilus or his henchmen appropriated. This moment quite probably marked the end Eusebius’s work with the poor. Unless the church in Vercelli sent more funds, the well ran dry. Ep. 2 does not seem to angle for further donations, nor was its saga likely to inspire contributors to sink further resources into the endeavor. In sum, Eusebius’s operation appears to have taken place on a limited scale. It likely never grew to a substantial size and certainly did not survive Eusebius’s second abduction. The threat of Eusebius’s enterprise was never that it might form a church to rival Patrophilus’s; it was, rather, to plant the seeds of goodwill toward Eusebius and his cause in Scythopolis, a place selected for his exile precisely because it represented unfriendly territory. Eusebius’s actions carried such potential force because they linked public activity with doctrinal outlook. The bishop—and the theological cause that led to his banishment—gained potential distinction because of his attempts to distribute goods to the poor.

IV. FROM VICTIM TO RIVAL: REASSESSING EUSEBIUS This reinterpretation offers alternate understandings of the Scythopolis episode under three headings: Eusebius’s victimhood, his isolation, and Epiphanius’s testimony. Eusebius’s lodgings occupy a central position in his list of sufferings. The bishop often invokes the language of imprisonment to describe his situation. He addresses the note, “to the jailer Patrophilus,” and he compares his lot with that of the common criminal.54 Yet throughout the course of ep. 2, Eusebius stays in different hospitia. The term hospitium covers a range of meanings, from hostels for travelers or lodging places more generally.55 Life 53

Ibid., 6.4 (CCL 9:107–8). Ibid., 4.1, 7.3 (CCL 9:106, 108). 55 See Albert Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-franc¸ais des auteurs chre´tiens (Turnhout: E´ditions Brepols, 1954), s.v. “hospitium”; Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879; often repr.), s.v. “hospitium.” Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 204, describes a hospitium as “a workaday no-nonsense place for housing the rank-and-file traveller overnight”; see also A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284– 602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 2:831; Blake Leyerle, “Communication and Travel,” in The Early Christian World, ed. Philip Esler, 1:452– 74, esp. 463–64 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 54

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in prison would have been very different.56 Eusebius deemphasizes the fact that he began his stay at Scythopolis in one of these outfits (see appendix, stage 1). Rather he chooses to accentuate his confinement when he was forced to stay in a different hospitium. In other words, he moved from one inn to another, not from luxury to paucity. He strenuously objects to being confined at that place, but it is the confinement, not the place, that provokes his indignation. The issue of food unfolds in a similar fashion. Certain accounts give the impression that starvation had been forced upon Eusebius. Food deprivation, on the contrary, was Eusebius’s idea (see appendix, stage 6). To be sure, he complains in the final moments (stage 10) that his captors refused to admit his food-bearing supporters.57 It is unclear at that moment whether Eusebius had reinstated his hunger strike or if his adversaries had revived it for him. In either case, it is clear that Eusebius had changed his tune on the subject of food. Earlier when he instituted his fast, abstaining from food represented a mechanism to coerce his enemies. At this stage, he regards deprivation as a mark of Arian cruelty. Fasting, which was once his decision, has become the epitome of his enemies’ barbarism. The most sensational element in the received presentation of Eusebius is his abuse by the mob, including being dragged naked across the ground. Eusebius’s language, however, does not specify precisely this formulation. It is true that he mentions a foray by a throng that dragged him from hospitium one. During this offensive, Eusebius states that he was on his back and nudatum, which some interpreters take mean “stripped naked.”58 Yet nudatus carries a wider range of meanings, including being “defenseless” or “exposed.”59 It need not imply that Eusebius had all of his clothes removed. He may have been relieved of his priestly vestments or simply exposed as a public spectacle. To be sure, Eusebius endured some form of indignity, but we must be careful not to amplify it beyond what the text requires. It seems probable that, by nudatus, he wishes to connote the helpless or vulnerable position in which he found himself. In the conventional picture of Eusebius, isolation serves as the corollary to the bishop’s suffering. Several factors give the lie to that idea: the clergy who joined him in exile, those Christians from other areas who travelled to see him, the locals who embraced him, and the connections Eusebius maintained with the world beyond Scythopolis.

56 On prisons in the Roman period, see Jens-Uwe Krause, Gefa¨ngnisse im Ro¨mischen Reich (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1996). 57 Ep. 2.6.4 (CCL 9:107–8). 58 For example, Michael Di Maio and Agnes Cunningham, trans., Agnes Cunningham, ed., The Early Church and the State, Sources of Early Christian Thought 4 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 66. 59 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “nudo.”

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To begin with, he arrived in Scythopolis surrounded by an ecclesiastical entourage. His deacons and presbyters, Syrus and Victorinus most visibly, surface at various points during the narrative. We also know that Tegrinus the presbyter joined him in “seclusion” in the second abduction (see appendix, stage 9). Tegrinus, too, was likely one of the Vercellians. Eusebius mentions him by name in the letter, suggesting that he expected the audience to recognize this person. Eusebius also cites the existence of certeri fratres, “the rest of the brothers,” at different places in the letter.60 The fact that he alludes to them as well demonstrates that his band consisted of more than just deacons and presbyters and must have been quite ample. The resultant picture of Eusebius fits with what we can learn or surmise about his contemporaries, who also went into exile with their clergies.61 The concluding juncture of ep. 2’s narrative offers a substantially different picture. Although the letter frequently mentions Eusebius’s clergy, by the end the “Ariomaniacs” had sent his clerical supporters off to various places. Yet this gesture represented the final effort to break up Eusebius’s power base in Scythopolis. Only when Eusebius’s group proved themselves relentlessly determined in their enterprise did Patrophilus’s men move to splinter Eusebius’s entourage. Further, Eusebius, even at the final stage, does not seem to have been entirely deserted. He claims that all of the clergymen from Vercelli had been exiled elsewhere, but he makes a revealing disclosure in his closing benedictions. At the conclusion of the letter, Eusebius writes to his recipients in Vercelli, “Our brothers who are with me, the presbyters and deacons, greet you, as all of us also do.”62 Included here are two distinct categories of devotees present with Eusebius: first, the presbyters and deacons; second, all the rest of “us.” As the latter signifies a general category, the former must represent a special group, one with particular interest in greeting the Vercellians. It appears that some of Eusebius’s presbyters and deacons remained with him even at the end. In addition to the deacons and presbyters from Vercelli, Christians from other regions came to visit Eusebius. Like the Vercellian clergy, these loyalists come 60

Ep. 2.2.4, 9.2 (CCL 9:105, 109). In his final letter from exile, Bishop Liberius complains that “Venerius the agens in rebus has taken away from me my dearest son, the deacon Urbicus, whom I seemed to have as a consolation.” Letter in Hilary, Fragmenta historica B VII.11.1 (CSEL 65:173). Rufinus of Aquileia, HE 11.4 (GCS NF 6.2:1007), trans. Philip Amidon, The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 66, writes that Lucius, bishop of Alexandria, had some desert fathers seized and taken to an island amidst an Egyptian marsh: “The elders were thus taken by night, with only two attendants, to the island, on which there was a temple greatly revered by the inhabitants of the place.” G. F. Diercks, introduction to Luciferi Calaritani Opera Quae Supersunt, CCL 8 (Turnholti: Brepols, 1978), xvii–xviii, suspects that one or two deacons and certainly some scribes would have convoyed Lucifer of Cagliari into exile. 62 Ep. 2.11.2 (CCL 9:109). 61

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to light throughout the narrative, at least until the final phase. Eusebius refers to these Christians as alii fratres, “other brothers.”63 Although we cannot pinpoint the identity of those “other brothers,” external evidence indicates that they were likely admirers who had come to venerate the Nicene hero. The fifth-century writer Sulpicius Severus, in his discussion of the Council of Milan, concludes, “But it is well known that the persons exiled were celebrated by the admiration of the whole world, and that abundant supplies of money were collected to meet their wants, while they were visited by deputies of the Catholic people from almost all the provinces.”64 Sulpicius Severus believes that Eusebius and his ilk were sufficiently famous as to attract widespread attention. The alii fratres could have well been examples of those deputations. Further, Eusebius maintains that some locals in Scythopolis had rallied to him.65 Regarding the dynamics at the close of his narrative (see appendix, stage 9), Eusebius comments, “The Ariomaniacs are thus terrifying the rich, threatening them with proscription, and threatening the poor, having the power to shut paupers up in jail. How insane it is!”66 He develops an image of Scythopolis in which the populace finds itself won over to his side—a point of aggravation for Patrophilus. In consequence, the resident bishop vents his frustration on the helpless citizens. Almost certainly, Eusebius’s account overstates the extent of this revolution. His description of both rich and poor sympathizers conjures the impression of broad-based support. It is revealing, though, that Patrophilus took no action against these individuals: one was hardly necessary. The worst Eusebius can impute to his nemesis is the intention to coerce the natives. Concerning the wider world, Eusebius exhibits a certain bluster about communicating with others beyond his immediate orbit. At a significant moment within the note to Patrophilus, he claims, “I will assemble the churches, which I, though shut in, am able nevertheless to reach through letters. And I will assemble the servants of God so that in their actual convening the whole world can recognize what the true faith, which was established by the universal catholic priests, suffers at the hands of the Ariomaniacs, whom it earlier condemned.”67 Surely Eusebius indulges in a moment of overconfidence when he claims the ability to summon an 63 Ibid., 6.3 (CCL 9:107). His mention in 7.3 of the deuoti fratres, “devoted brothers,” kept from his hospitium (stage 9) most likely signifies another reference to these foreign Christians. 64 Sulpicius Severus, Chronicorum libri duo 2.39.5 (SC 441:316), trans. Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Second Series 11:116. 65 For example, 6.1 (CCL 9:107) cites the placement of lanterns around his inn as a sign of popular welcome; (see appendix, stage 7). 66 Ibid., 8.1 (CCL 9:108). 67 Ibid., 5.2 (CCL 9:107).

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ecumenical council. Nonetheless, his faith in his ability to reach a wide audience had some validity. As the very existence of ep. 2 shows, the bishop did have the capacity to transmit word of his situation to those outside Scythopolis. Although this city was by nature secluded, it was not so remote or cutoff as to preclude communications. The import of Eusebius’s description of Syrus’s efforts to sneak information through enemy lines has been systematically misread. Eusebius evokes a scene laden with cloak-and-dagger intrigue behind the epistle’s transmission. He contends that even though he ought to air his grievances with his tormentors, “we are not able to do these things, nor to publicize their cruelty in letters, because we are guarded by them under an extremely tight watch.”68 He then confesses to his audience that “we barely wrote this letter at all, all the while asking God that he hold off and remove the jailers yet another hour and that he grant that the deacon would bring you some kind of letter of greeting, not just tidings of our distress.”69 Yet Eusebius was indeed able to write about his ill-treatment, and he had done so for several pages. This is apophasis, not evidence of censorship. The real significance of the vignette is that Eusebius at his nadir was still capable of contacting the outside world via letters. The suggestion that a deacon could infiltrate an Arian stronghold and wait while Eusebius composed a letter (six pages long in the critical edition)—and escape unnoticed—strains credulity. Reaching Eusebius was never an impossible mission. Finally, the evidence in the Panarion helps to guide the reconstruction of events. The timing of Epiphanius’s visit is indeterminate, but it certainly seems to have taken place after the proceedings of ep. 2.70 In the relevant 68

Ibid., 9.1 (CCL 9:109). Ibid., 10.1 (CCL 9:109). 70 Two questions surround the timing of Epiphanius’s conversation with Joseph: first, whether it took place during Eusebius’s time in Scythopolis or after it; second, if it was contemporaneous with Eusebius’s stay, then when it took place relative to the events of ep. 2. In regard to the first issue, nearly all scholars place the event in the late 350s or early 360s, that is, during Eusebius’s stay in Scythopolis. One exception is Simonetti, “Eusebio,” 160, who for unstated reasons puts the encounter years after Eusebius’s exile. Stephen Goranson, “The Joseph of Tiberius Episode in Epiphanius: Studies in Jewish and Christian Relations,” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1990), 70– 72, reviews earlier estimates and places the event between 355 and 360, probably in the earlier portion of that range. Goranson’s later chapter, “Joseph of Tiberias Revisited: Orthodoxies and Heresies in Fourth-Century Galilee,” in Galilee through the Centuries: Confluence of Cultures, ed. Eric Meyers, 335– 343 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), mistakenly cites the date as 353, perhaps as a misprint for 358. T. C. G. Thornton, “The Stories of Joseph of Tiberias,” Vigiliae Christianae 44, no. 1 (March 1990): 58, and Hagith Sivan, Palestine in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 180, put the event during Eusebius’s sojourn and around 360 respectively. Concerning the second question, because Eusebius does not mention that his landlord was a Nicene count of Jewish extraction, it seems unlikely that Joseph owned any of the hospitia known to us from the letter. Likewise, if Epiphanius had appeared before the writing of ep. 2, his persona would seem to have merited 69

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sentence, Epiphanius writes, “For in his [that is, Joseph’s] house the blessed Eusebius stayed as a guest . . . when he was exiled by Constantius on account of the orthodox faith; and I and the other brothers came to that place in order to visit this man and we stayed at his house.”71 Epiphanius came to Scythopolis so that he might visit Eusebius, which coheres with the pattern of ep. 2 and the testimony from Sulpicius Severus. Epiphanius also reveals that some “orthodox” presence existed in Scythopolis. Joseph himself stands as one example.72 However, the number of Christians opposed to Patrophilus seems quite limited. It is true that part of Epiphanius’s impetus in recounting this anecdote is to heroize orthodoxy. And to that end, representing opposing forces as menacing and powerful could be a rhetorical ploy.73 Nonetheless, allies of Nicene orthodoxy seem pitifully few. It appears that Eusebius did not spark a religious revolution in Scythopolis. After it received ep. 2, the church in Vercelli, in all likelihood, felt disinclined to commit more funds to the venture. In this case, the support that Eusebius had engendered in Scythopolis may have evaporated along with the capital. If so, then his inroads in Palestine never ran deep. In the long run, Eusebius’s antics seem not to have significantly challenged Patrophilus’s position. Perhaps most intriguingly, at the time of Epiphanius’s visit, Eusebius was lodged no longer in a hospitium but instead with Joseph. Evidently, Eusebius was transferred to Joseph’s house after the saga described in the letter. It may be that Patrophilus rescinded Eusebius’s complimentary room and board. By the time of Epiphanius’s pilgrimage, Eusebius seems to be lodged with the lone man in Scythopolis both supportive of his position and sufficiently affluent to assist him.

V. CONCLUSION: CONSTANTIUS AND

THE

BISHOPS

Ep. 2 is valuable for historians of the church, not merely for the data it provides about Eusebius’s case, but also for the light that it casts upon the confluence of

some special mention in Eusebius’s letter. Thus Epiphanius’s visit most likely fell after Eusebius wrote ep. 2. 71 Epiphanius, Panarion 30.5.2 (GCS 25:339 – 40): . The force of the passage is that Eusebius was lodged with Joseph; Epiphanius came to see Eusebius and thereby met Joseph, from whom he learned tales and lore. 72 Ibid., 30.5.5 (GCS 25:340) also mentions that Joseph was visited by another local Nicene Christian who did not dare reveal himself as such. 73 Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 51.

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ecclesiastical and temporal interests in the fourth century. Particularly significant are the relationship between Patrophilus and the exiled clergyman, the connection between the emperor Constantius and bishop Patrophilus, and the place of ep. 2 among other episcopal literature written in opposition to Constantius. The fact that Patrophilus had Eusebius dragged through the streets has controlled scholars’ understanding of the exchange between the two. Yet this violence, however infelicitous to Eusebius, never spiraled out of control. The fact that it did not may indicate that it was intentional and directed. His outcome stands in marked contrast to a similar case, that of Hypatia, the celebrated female philosopher of fifth-century Alexandria. She, too, experienced mob violence that included being stripped and dragged. For the philosopher, however, this violence ended in her grisly death.74 Because Eusebius did not share Hypatia’s fate, it seems probable that his tormentors did not behave like the mob in Alexandria. That the throng could target Eusebius in this way while leaving him (apparently) uninjured suggests a scenario more carefully managed. If so, then perhaps Patrophilus’s aim was less to do Eusebius serious harm than to rattle and unnerve him. The note that Eusebius wrote to Patrophilus also has the potential to mislead. Indeed, its very existence is strange. It seems astonishing that Eusebius had a duplicate of this document with him at the moment when he composed the letter to Scythopolis (ostensibly in seclusion and under guard). Two main possibilities account for its presence: either Eusebius made and kept a copy of the note, or he reproduced it from memory. The fact that he regards the note as the exact replica of the earlier document weighs in favor of the first explanation. In that case, Eusebius very likely composed the note by dictating it to one of his attendants, keeping a copy for his own records. And, in that case, his having a copyist present further suggests that Eusebius was not subjected to total isolation during the second phase. If Eusebius did retain a copy of the note during his internment in the final phase (which would have been peculiar but certainly not impossible), then he could have inserted it when he drew up the letter. Alternatively, it is possible that the note, as we now have it, represents a draft that Eusebius fashioned for the Vercellians and not the original document. As it stands, the note bristles with bravado. If Eusebius did touch it up with the benefit of hindsight, he perhaps sharpened the document so that it casts its author as the brave victim and Patrophilus as the bloodthirsty villain.

74

Socrates, HE 7.15 (GCS NF 1:360–61). See Edward Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable of Unacceptable Violence?” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. H. A. Drake, 333–42 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006).

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Still, Eusebius had a case. Unless the entire letter is pure fiction, Patrophilus did engineer several attempts to harass Eusebius and cut his support out from beneath him. Understanding Patrophilus’s motives requires us to examine the situation prior to Eusebius’s arrival and theorize about the Italians’ impact. In Scythopolis, Patrophilus must have been a luminary. He harbored a mighty aura as one friendly with the emperor and present at the church’s major decisions. Inhabitants of Scythopolis, Christian or not, certainly recognized him as a gateway to the power centers of the empire. Eusebius’s intrusion threw doubt on those elements of Patrophilus’s character. By coming to town and receiving visitors and admirers, Eusebius implicitly contended that Patrophilus was not an unparalleled celebrity. Quite the opposite, the parade of spectators coming to see the exiled bishop must have indicated that Patrophilus was perhaps not even the most significant bishop in town. And yet we should be leery of an interpretation that looks only to Eusebius and Patrophilus. Of course, Eusebius presses the demographics of Scythopolis into precisely this dichotomy. Throughout the letter, he presents affairs as though his foes were organized around the clear principle of Arian allegiance. To comprehend the historical situation, though, it is necessary to avoid a “Nicene vs. Arian” polarization. While the Scythopolitan church did have an avowedly non-Nicene bishop, we have no means to determine whether its rank-and-file congregants were informed and committed “Arians.” The church in Scythopolis may well have had little concern for doctrinal subtleties; after all, it was a minority community and was probably concerned primarily with group preservation. It is true that in his list of grievances perpetrated by the “Ariomaniacs,” Eusebius gibes that they bemoaned their “inability to persuade us to their infidelity.”75 However, the prior conversation need not have concerned explicitly Trinitarian subjects; it may simply have been an invitation to enter into communion with the church already in place. Still less should we assume that the non-elite members of Patrophilus’s church understood the distinctions between a homoousion and homoiousion creed. Instead, they may well have been motivated simply by feelings of group solidarity. Eusebius’s description is at once historically misleading and rhetorically significant. Scholars have come to resist the impression of fourth-century Christianity as a movement neatly divided into two doctrinal camps.76 That depiction stands, instead, as part of a polemical strategy. In this case, 75

Ep. 2.3.1 (CCL 9:105). See Rebecca Lyman, “Topography,” 45–46; Lyman, “Arius and Arians” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David Hunter, 237– 57 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also David Gwynn, The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the “Arian Controversy” (Oxford: Oxford 76

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Eusebius reduces the complex world of Scythopolis—a majority pagan population surrounding a modest Christian church and a much smaller, foreign Christian element—to a bipolar entity pulled between two antitheses. We must bear in mind that Scythopolis was first and foremost a Greek city and not, as it may seem in Eusebius’s letter, a polity divided by doctrinal fault lines. Presumably, the poor who received Eusebius’s charity and the locals who aided his cause were in large part typical (that is, non-Christian) Scythopolitans. By visualizing his struggles as part of orthodoxy’s clash with heresy, Eusebius constructs an Arian counterpart to his position. However, there is at least one important theological coalition in view: the alliance between Patrophilus and Constantius. In one important respect, Constantius seems to have miscalculated when he entrusted Patrophilus with the oversight of Eusebius. Sending the recalcitrant bishop to Scythopolis served to frustrate one of his key allies. While it is true that Patrophilus leaned heavily on the emperor’s backing, it is also true that an emperor could not assail a church council alone. Such opposition stood in need of notable, impressive bishops to set against celebrities the likes of Athanasius and Hilary. Constantius saddled a comrade with a distasteful administrative chore in looking after the obstreperous exiles from Italy.77 This instance reveals an example of the sort of entanglements that might befall a bishop in league with the emperor. The emperor’s “favor” in this case materialized in the form of a managerial burden.78 Eusebius’s response to Patrophilus’s alliance with Constantius is to undermine the legitimacy of the bishop and emperor alike. And to do so, he cultivated his own martyrial qualities. The letter’s attempts to paint its author as the silent victim and its comparisons with earlier persecutions serve to charge the events with a dramatic contradistinction. He laments his social deprivation in the second abduction, crying, See, holiest brethren, if it isn’t persecution when we who guard the catholic faith suffer these things! Consider whether it is even far worse now than were the deeds perpetrated by those who served idols! Though [the idolaters] sent

University Press, 2007), who argues that those whom Athanasius represents as a unified bloc committed to the principles of Arianism were neither unified nor Arian. 77 The extent to which bishops resembled other authority figures within the Roman bureaucracy is a large and difficult question. In the most extensive modern study of the bishop, Claudia Rapp, Bishops, 274–89, emphasizes that, while bishops took on many of the chores traditional to the city councils and administrators, the episcopacy was not identical to or subsumed into the imperial bureaucracy. 78 Banishing Nicene bishops to areas presided over by non-Nicenes seems to be part of a larger pattern under Constantius. Liberius of Rome was exiled to Beroea where the non-Nicene bishop Demophilus presided: Hilary, Fragmenta historica B VII.7 (CSEL 65:169). On Demophilus’s theology, see Hanson, Search, 101, 565n35, 791– 92, 804–5.

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[Christians] to prison, at least they did not prohibit their supporters from coming to them. So great did Satan wound the churches through the cruelty of the Ariomaniacs!79 Playing the confessor was Eusebius’s reaction to Patrophilus’s operation. As such, Eusebius drew from an established Christian response to temporal power. By describing himself as a “suffering self,” he shifts the implications of the affair: he transforms his persona from chastised deportee to Nicene martyr.80 Naturally, his enemies now take on the role of the persecutors. Their actions become tinged with loathsome qualities: unjust oppression, hatred of (true) Christianity, and desperate use of coercive force. Eusebius’s presentation of his saga is itself part of the struggle. Controlling the narrative is his means to strike back at the forces that remanded him.81 Their actions become, through Eusebius’s presentation, the latest installments in the church’s perpetual conflict with Satan’s forces. By harnessing the rhetoric of martyrdom, Eusebius turned his suffering of abuse into the moral high ground. This choice further eroded an important component of Patrophilus’s mien. In this light, the bishop of Scythopolis ceases to be the righteous deputy invested with worldly and otherworldly power; he becomes instead a latter-day persecutor.82 Thus it is that ep. 2 itself represents an act of rhetorical persuasion and a facet of the dispute. The letter is no simple record of the skirmish; it is one element within it. Ultimately ep. 2 expresses another example of a larger polemical assault by Nicene bishops on the regime of Constantius.83 Eusebius maligns both the veracity of his counterpart’s religion and the legitimacy of the government that would deputize an “Ariomaniac.” His special contribution lies in arguing 79

Ep. 2.7.1–2 (CCL 9:108). I borrow this phrase from Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 7, who examines the “extensive formulation in the culture of the second century that represented the human self as a body in pain, a sufferer.” 81 See also Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 34, who sees martyrdom less as a clash of gods than as a “conflict over order and narrative.” 82 An irony (that a bishop could become a persecutor of the church) which Eusebius is alert to: ep. 2.7.2 (CCL 9:108). 83 Barnes, Athanasius, 132, 174, notes that Athanasius applied a double standard to imperial intervention, lauding government action supporting his position but condemning as improper action against it. He also observes that Athanasius, Hilary, and Lucifer paint Constantius as a tyrant unfit to rule the empire. Mark Humphries, “Savage Humour: Christian Anti-panegyric in Hilary of Poitier’s Against Constantius” in The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Mary Whitby, 201–21 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), shows that Hilary’s Contra Constantium Imperatorem (¼In Constantium) represents an attempt to undermine Constantius’s legitimacy by mocking his adventus (a ceremony enacted by a ruler entering a city) and reinventing his lineage. Lucifer resorted to character assassination; samples adduced by Diercks, Introduction to CCL 8: xiv– xv. 80

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that diabolical forces utilize cunning persuasion first and brutal oppression second. In fact, the salutation sets the stage for Eusebius’s main theme. Eusebius tells his correspondents that he had been forlorn on the grounds that “we did not receive any writings from your Sanctity for a long period of time. For we feared that either some diabolic wile had taken you or a human power had subjugated you to the faithless.”84 In the opening words, he disparages the use of “diabolical wile” and “human power,” forces that he uses throughout the letter to embody the twin tactics employed by his foes. By implication, people who resort to coercion do so because they fail to persuade: anyone reliant on such force must also be theologically bankrupt. The power of the state, in this view, becomes a badge of doctrinal error. Eusebius harnessed his presence and fame to make this argument, and in so doing, cast doubt on the position that Patrophilus stood for. As their conducts became stand-ins for their respective dogmas, Eusebius substitutes a social discussion for a doctrinal one. His position—the Nicene—manifests itself in eleemosynary actions; his opponents’ position takes the shape of cruelty, contempt, and repression. The real consequence of Eusebius’s favorite motif—that physical force betokens failed argument—is that it serves as a theological surrogate. Eusebius has used his patient endurance as an emblem of the Nicene party and Patrophilus’s coercion as part of his construction of the Arian. Thus he himself is responsible for the Eusebius-as-martyr motif. It was the cornerstone of his argument.

VI. APPENDIX: THE TIMELINE IN EP. 2 I divide the events of ep. 2 into three major phases, each containing several smaller stages. Phase One: The Initial Equilibrium Stage 1: From Milan to Scythopolis At the Council of Milan, Constantius banished Eusebius to Scythopolis. Eusebius arrived at his destination probably in the winter of 355 – 356, likely ahead of Patrophilus, who seems to have been at this council but would not have suffered any compulsion to depart in haste.85 At Scythopolis, Eusebius 84

Ep. 2.1.1 (CCL 9:104). Sozomen, HE 4.9.4 (GCS 4:148) emphasizes the speed with which the exiles were conducted from Milan. See also Socrates, HE 2.37.1 (GCS NF 1:152). Eusebius probably took the land route, which would have been cheaper. On land, the Bordeaux pilgrim traveled for 170 days from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, a journey quite similar to Eusebius’s (Casson, Travel, 315). If the council did take place in July and August and if Eusebius made similar progress, then he would have arrived in January or February of 356. 85

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and his entourage domiciled at a hospitium (hospitium one), which Patrophilus had assigned through an imperial bureau, the agentes in rebus (4.1).86 This assignment represents the only action taken by Patrophilus in the first phase. Stage 2: Foreign Visitors The exiled bishop began to establish his status in Scythopolis by receiving deputations of Christians, sympathetic to his cause and foreign to Scythopolis. They brought news from the church in Vercelli, with which Eusebius had not been in contact (1.1 – 2).87 Stage 3: Visitors from Vercelli The deacon Syrus and exorcist Victorinus traveled from Vercelli to Scythopolis. They brought Eusebius letters as well as fructus, literarily, “fruits” (1.2 – 3). Syrus subsequently left Eusebius to see the Holy Land (9.2). Phase Two: Imbalance and Hostilities Stage 4: Charity Begins Eusebius and his clergy used the fructus to help the local poor (2.6).88 Eusebius reports that some locals acclaimed him and praised God (2.6). This may mean that pagans felt moved to glorify the God of those helping them or that Scythopolitan Christians (who had to this point been led by a nonNicene bishop) felt drawn to Eusebius. Stage 5: The “Initial Abduction” A mob assailed Eusebius and shut him up in its “factory of infidelity,” which may have been Patrophilus’s church or simply a headquarters used by his supporters (3.2). Eusebius’s note to Patrophilus also alludes to public brutality (being dragged through the streets), which appears to refer to the same event (4.1). Stage 6: Hunger Strike at a Hospitium Eusebius’s foes transported him to a separate hospitium (hospitium two), confined him to one room (4.2), and permitted neither his clergy nor his 86 The agentes appear only at this stage in the drama. If Eusebius did arrive in Scythopolis first, then perhaps the agentes accompanied Patrophilus, bearing some notice from the emperor on the manner in which the exiled bishop was to be accommodated. The agentes in rebus were an organization that conducted messages and performed some internal surveillance functions, see Jones, Empire, 1:572– 82; William Sinnigen, “The Roman Secret Service,” The Classical Journal 57, no. 2 (November 1961): 65–72. This group was involved in the exilic affairs of Eusebius’s contemporary Liberius of Rome; (see note 61). 87 Eusebius, ep. 2.1.1– 2 (CCL 9:104) refers to “the arrival and visits of many brothers [ plurimorum fratrum]” and “brothers [ fratrum] who came to us from diverse provinces.” We cannot be certain whether the fratres are identical. About the former, he tells the Vercellians that these visitations “demonstrated your presence,” implying that they were either members of Eusebius’s church or non-Vercellians bearing news of Eusebius’s home. Later in the saga (6.3 [CCL 9:107], (see appendix, stage 9), Eusebius mentions “other brothers [alios fratres], those who had come to visit us,” who may be the same as the fratres introduced here. If so, then many of the visitors remained in Scythopolis for a substantial amount of time. 88 This crucial passage is absent from the only English translation of Eusebius’s letter, Di Maio and Cunningham, The Early Church and the State.

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other supporters to see him (3.4). For four days, Eusebius silently listened to their arguments (3.3). They gave him food which he declined, an action which probably marks the beginning of a hunger strike (3.4). Eusebius wrote the note to Patrophilus, indicating that he would not eat until Patrophilus promised to let his companions offer food from hospitium one and visit him in hospitium two (4.2). Furthermore, Eusebius claims that he will tell other churches about the events presently happening (5.2 – 5.3). Stage 7: Demands Met After four days his nemeses capitulated to Eusebius’s demands, evidently by permitting his compatriots to offer charity from hospitium one (6.1).89 Eusebius’s opponents also freed him from hospitium two. Perhaps his hunger strike led to this decision. In any case, his freedom made his second demand irrelevant; Eusebius reestablished himself at hospitium one. Phase Three: Order Restored Stage 8: Charity Resumes Once reunited, Eusebius and his clergy revived their support of the poor. This arrangement held for twenty-five days (6.2). Stage 9: The Second Abduction Eusebius’s foes invaded his residence and conveyed him and the presbyter Tegrinus to a place where they were closely confined (6.2), a third hospitium (7.3). The invaders confiscated Eusebius’s possessions of value and incarcerated his presbyters and deacons (6.3). In addition, Eusebius claims that his foes sent the “other brothers, those who had come to visit us,” to public jail (6.3), prevented the “devoted brothers” from visiting him with the threat of imprisonment (7.3), and allowed him no food-bearing visitors (6.4). Stage 10: The Splintering of the Exiles Three days after the second abduction, most of Eusebius’s clergy were exiled to sundry locations (6.3).90 Patrophilus’s forces permitted Eusebius no visitors for six days after abducting him, after which time they allowed one (6.4). They held this visitor for four days and waited nearly another six before allowing a second (6.5). Stage 11: Return of the Deacon Syrus returned from his pilgrimage (9.2). He must have learned of Eusebius’s whereabouts and made his way to him. In Syrus’s presence, Eusebius wrote ep. 2, in which he embedded a copy of the note he sent to Patrophilus. He describes himself as being carefully guarded and able to send the missive only because of Syrus’s devices (9.2). 89 At two points (3.3 and 6.1 [CCL 9:105, 107]), Eusebius alludes to a four-day span of time in which his keepers allowed no visitors. These references seem to point to the same period. 90 Eusebius writes as though all his clergy were banished, but his closing benediction (11.2 [CCL 9:109]) admits the presence of some.

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 756– 791. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990515

The Geography of the Monastic Cell in Early Egyptian Monastic Literature* DARLENE L. BROOKS HEDSTROM

E

Egyptian monasticism is frequently equated with fantastic stories and achievements of the great Desert Fathers. Nathaniel, for example, never left his cell for thirty-seven years, and Dorotheus remained within his cell for sixty years. Both men were demonstrating their commitment to God, their willingness to embrace suffering, and their need to discipline themselves within the confines of the cell.1 The tales of mighty battles with demons—most vivid in the Life of Antony—and of austere asceticism—such as that of the young Zacharius who allowed his beautiful skin to be eaten away by natron in order to dispel rumors that he was sexually involved with his father—have become components of the metanarrative of Egyptian monasticism.2 Concerns about desire and sexual ARLY

*I would like to thank Nancy McHugh, Tammy Proctor, Tim Vivian, and Heather Badamo for discussing and reading this text at crucial steps in its construction. I especially appreciate the careful readings by two external readers for Church History whose suggestions helped me clarify my argument. 1 Palladius, The Lausiac History, trans. Robert T. Meyer (New York: Newman Press, 1964); Historie Lausiaque: Vies d’asce`tes et des pe`res du de´sert, ed. and trans. A. Lucot (Paris: Picard, 1912), 2.1; 16. 3. (Hereafter cited as HL). Quotes are from Meyer unless otherwise stated. 2 Carion was a married father of two children when he felt the desire to join the monastic community in Scetis. His young son, Zacharias, joined him. Due to the boy’s beauty, rumors began about the two, and they coped by moving south to Thebes. Witnessing the same tension, they returned to Scetis and the boy, in frustration, submerged his body in the natron lake so his skin would be damaged by the salt. The story states that his body was unrecognizable. His selfharm is lauded in the text as a testament to his faithfulness, and he is deemed angelic for his purity and decision to end the rumors. This action was deemed necessary because too many rumors circulated regarding the beauty of the boy and what could be taking place within the cell of Carion. As a leper, there would no longer be speculations about what was happening within the confines of the cell. Carion 2 from the Apophthegmata Patrum. The Apophthegmata Patrum exists in three collections: the alphabetical, the systematic, and the anonymous. (Hereafter the Alphabetical sayings will be cited as AP, followed by the monastic and the saying number, such as AP Moses 6.) All references follow Benedicta Ward, trans., Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (London: A. R. Mowbray and Co., 1975). For the anonymous tradition, I follow Benedicta Ward, trans., The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers: Apophthegmata Patrum from the Anonymous Series (Oxford: SLG Press, 1975). Hereafter the Anonymous collection will be cited by N, followed by the saying’s number found in the Greek Anonymous collection published in a series by, F. Nau, ed., “Histoire des solitaires e´gyptiens,” Revue d’Orient Chre´tien

Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom is Associate Professor of History at Wittenberg University.

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propriety also indicate that monastic communities were aware of the difficulties of celibacy in such close and intimate quarters.3 One place repeatedly recognized as essential for spiritual living was the monastic cell. A story told by John Moschos in the sixth century text, Spiritual Meadow, recalls how a condemned man rebuked a monk for living outside of his cell. The monk thought watching the execution of another human might shock his apathetic heart. The convict asked the monk, “Well now, Abba, have you no cell, sir, nor any work to occupy your hands?” The monk replied that he had both. The convict rebuked the monk, saying, “Go your way, Abba; remain in your cell, sir, and give thanks to God who saved us.”4 A story about Nathaniel, who initially failed in his pursuit to remain within the cell, illustrates the importance of the cell for spiritual training and for reflection upon one’s spiritual and mental discipline. After his first attempt, Nathaniel built a cell closer to the city and resided there a few months. Then a demon visited him and confessed his victory over him, as he was the cause for the monk’s abandonment of the cell. With this admission, Nathaniel vowed to return to his previous residence and embrace a stronger selfdiscipline. To spite the demon, as Palladius writes, Nathaniel refused to cross the threshold of his residence for thirty-seven years. Palladius also notes that, according to his guides, Nathaniel was peculiar because of his very long interment in the cell. As a testament to his convictions, Nathaniel refused to go outside his cell even to help a boy who had fallen. Nathaniel suspected that the demon could take on the guise of a human and had tempted him to come out. The monk trusted his instincts and prayed that if the boy was in need then God would protect him through the night. His wisdom was evinced; the next moment the boy transformed, and the demon dissolved into a “storm and into wild asses galloping off and kicking up stones.”5 Stories of confinement to the cell and of debasement of other settlements (such as the late antique urban environment and other communities that did

10 (1905): 409–14; 12 (1907): 48–68, 171 –181, 393– 404; 13 (1908): 47–57, 266– 83; 14 (1909): 357–79; 17 (1912): 204–11, 294– 301; 18 (1913): 137–46. 3 Terry Wilfong, “ ‘Friendship and Physical Desire’: The Discourse of Female Homoeroticism in Fifth Century C.E. Egypt,” in Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002), 304– 29; Tim Vivian, “Everything Made by God is Good: A Letter Concerning Sexuality from Saint Athanasius to the Monk Amoun,” E`glise et the´ologie 24 (1993): 75–108. 4 John Moschos, Spiritual Meadow, 71. Moschos, The Spiritual Meadow, trans. John Wortley (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1992). 5 HL 16.1– 6.

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not embrace the same angelic life) demonstrate that ordinary spaces were not suitable for monastic living. The closeting or self-immuring within monastic space is significant to understanding that place and space were important for spiritual progress and connectivity with God. The story of the monk and the convict exhibits the locative value of the cell with desert asceticism within the earliest monastic literature. Like Abba Moses, who told a monk that his cell would teach him all things, the convict reminded the monk that he should remain in his cell no matter what the temptation.6 The admonition to pledge one’s body within the confines of the monastic cell, regardless of one’s personal feelings, was one of the more common correctives for a distracted mind. The importance of a monastic cell for spiritual living is central to understanding the technique for requiring relocation—whether to an enclosed wall community or to a more loosely affiliated place, or topos, among a collection of individual residences. The literary study that follows takes into account some of the existing archaeological evidence of Egyptian monastic material remains; however, a caveat is needed here to contextualize the importance of the artifactual evidence for my discussion of the monastic literature. The identification of what constitutes a monastic residence is currently a subject for analysis and debate within late antique archaeology in Egypt.7 The great diversity in form and structure of the extant archaeological material supports an interpretation that monastic space held spiritual significance as dwellings because they were the abodes for monks.8 Ascription of crosses and Coptic prayers indicates that a common set of physical markers was used to equip a space for spiritual living. Yet little evidence suggests one space was used by itinerant monks for longer periods of retreat, such as during a period of extended fasting. By attributing sanctity to monastic spaces, as opposed to non-monastic spaces, the place where monks lived was not just a monastery 6

AP Moses 6. A colloquium was organized by Victor Ghica in January 2009 entitled, “Ermitages d’E´gypte au premier mille´naire,” and held at the Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale in Cairo. At the sessions, several archaeologists working on monastic habitation discussed how to identify monastic spaces and how we might consider the function of particular spaces as monastic or not. The colloquium was the first conference of its kind dedicated exclusively to monastic archaeology in Egypt. A volume of the papers presented is forthcoming. 8 For an introduction to the range of artifactual evidence of monastic habitation in light of early monasticism, see Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, “Redrawing a Portrait of Egyptian Monasticism,” in Medieval Monks and Their World, Ideas and Realities: Studies in Honor of Richard Sullivan, eds. David Blanks, Michael Frassetto, and Amy Livingstone, 11 –34 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). The article surveys some of the early archaeological evidence from the last fifteen years, although most sites have little material that may be firmly dated to the fifth century or earlier. An additional discussion of the limitations of the dichotomous forms of monasticism as either following Pachomius or Antony is found in D. Brooks Hedstrom, “Divine Architects: Designing the Monastic Dwelling Place,” in Egypt in the Byzantine World, ed. Roger Bagnall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 385. 7

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or a cell; rather, these places were sacred spaces. For both occupants and external observers, monastic space was regarded as a gateway to heaven, to God’s angelic kingdom.9 The spatial importance of the cell in the early centuries of Egyptian monasticism evolves into the essential location for seeking God, particularly in communities that were composed of monks who elected to live in smaller groupings with a servant or disciple. The literary sources for the fourth and fifth centuries in Egypt attest to a development in thought in which the cell first became the place of spiritual engagement. Within a military ethos, the monks were armed to battle the mysterious demons that had laid claim to the forgotten landscapes of Egypt. A generation later, the cell evolved into the area to fight personal demons of distraction and depression. The dwelling facilitates true monastic work: the cultivation of a self aligned with God and fellow monastics. The Egyptian monastics, like other late antique holy men and women, used techniques to voluntarily embrace new behaviors and beliefs within an explicitly religious landscape.10 The cell assisted the monk in becoming the holy stranger who used the geography of asceticism for greater dissociation from the non-monastic world.11 The longer he resided within, the more the cell became a panoptic residence, initially monitored by an elder ascetic 9

For the purposes of this discussion, I will utilize artifactual evidence from physical monastic space in the broadest sense. A wide array of monastic archaeological evidence is preserved in Egypt for examination, however, the bulk of the remains postdate the life of Antony and his contemporaries of the Delta, the Desert Fathers. Additionally, documentary evidence provides some assistance in developing a thicker description of the cell and how early monastics may have regarded the cell. While it is tempting to correlate extant physical remains as artifactual testaments of early monasticism, the material dates a century or two after the authorship periods of the literature under review here. The value of the cell in early Egyptian monastic literature points to the rhetorical devices employed to remind the community of the need to use the cell as a confining metaphor in the greater embodiment of ascetic living. The discussion that follows, therefore, rests exclusively within the realm of spatial discourse of monastic authors who shaped a particular view of the cell. I am currently examining the physical remains in a separate study that will bring together the archaeological evidence with sixth, seventh, and eighth century documentary evidence. This study will demonstrate that some of the same themes of sacrality of place and space were embedded into the physical cells of the monks. 10 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1986), 54–65. For specific applications of Foucault’s thought within a Christian and monastic setting, see Michael L. Humphries, “Michel Foucault on Writing and the Self in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Confessions of St. Augustine,” Arethusa 30.1 (1997): 125– 38; Paul R. Kobet, “Athanasius, the Psalms, and the Reformation of the Self,” Harvard Theological Review 99.1 (2006): 85–101; Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). The most recent and effective application of Foucault for Egyptian monasticism is Caroline Schroeder, Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 11 Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 91– 92.

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philosopher, as we will see with St. Antony.12 The spatial configuration of the cell and its value for the religious life of the monk illustrate the need for a spatial turn in the re-reading of early Egyptian monastic literature.13

I. NARRATING MONASTIC GEOGRAPHY I maintain that all of the monastic sources under consideration here speak to three central topics of spatial discourse and the locative value of the cell. The first theme is the cognition of the cell as a realm for teaching and training in the monastic life. In particular, monks learned to regard the built structures of cells, dwellings, and sleeping areas as the unique residence of those committed to a life dedicated to God. Egyptian monastic literature demonstrates that the physicality of space had spiritual significance for monks, especially in their pursuit of union with God. Within these spaces the monks adopted a particular set of exercises, their praxis, for retraining their hearts and minds. The belief that a lived space, such as the cell, had the ability to shape the monastic individual and his community as a whole is an illustration of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus.14 For Bourdieu there is a system of dispositions, or attitudes and behaviors, which create memories within a social space.15 The cell provided the central location in which the monastic habitus was created and recreated.16 As Bourdieu explains more explicitly, habitus may be changed and modified by lived history and experience.17 Monastic adherence to and acceptance of the cell’s importance was essential for making progress. The longer one remained within, the greater the cell’s locative value. The collective memory was thereby defined by specific behaviors—while inside the cell, a monk weaved baskets, braided rope, recited prayers, and offered hospitality. The cell was equally a social space where one honored guests and managed challenges to one’s solitude and routine. Thereby, the cell and its presence within a larger community helped to define the monastic habitus. Anthony Giddens further refines our understanding of how the 12

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1977), 200–209. Kim Knott, “Spatial Theory and the Study of Religion,” Religion Compass 2.6 (2008): 1102–16. 14 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 15 Ibid., 78. 16 For Bourdieu the “habitus is the product of the work of inculcation and appropriation necessary in order for those products of collective history, the objective structures . . . to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions, in organisms (which one can, if one wishes, call individuals) lastingly subjected to the same conditions of existence.” Ibid., 85. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, 2nd ed. (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005), 45. 13

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monks balanced solitude and community through his, like Bourdieu’s, structuralist view of space within a community. He considers the community as agents who continually reconstitute spatial organization through social relations.18 Giddens would frame the monastic cell as a feature of a much larger communal effort to define a group’s identity. By using the cell, which alternates between public and private interactions, the monastic community reaffirmed the values of the community through visitations to cells and assessments of one’s ascetic development. The second theme found in the sources demonstrates the sacrality of the cell as an essential component of the religious geography of Egyptian monasticism. The way in which monastic authors presented the cell, as the special space for the monk, might imply that the cell was reserved only for a solitary. However, most cells as described in the literary accounts are active spaces where visitors and assistants sojourn. The ability to cultivate a mindset that allowed one to welcome the cell and its transformative properties required discipline and continual monitoring. The belief in the sacrality of monastic space laid the foundation for later settlement choices by ascetic communities throughout the Nile Valley.19 The development of and elaboration upon the spatial rhetoric concerning the efficacy of the cell—as exhibited by the ways in which cells were marked with iconographic images and dipinto—illustrates that monks believed the physical environment equipped the occupant to encounter the divine. Henri Lefebvre defines social space as the product of relationships within a space. The individuals who interact with each other in a place are the agents who transform the place into a space.20 For Lefebvre places are designed structures or areas such as temples, towns, and dwellings that can be reproduced. These places then become particular spaces only when individuals become engaged with that space, thereby exhibiting some power over or to the space through their actions and beliefs. The cell in monastic 18

Anthony Giddens, The Construction of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuralism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 19 For an archaeological examination of the importance of the monastic dwelling as a cell, see Brooks Hedstrom, Divine Architects, 368– 89. For an analysis of the art historical evidence of heaven, see Elizabeth Bolman, “Depicting the kingdom of heaven: paintings and monastic practice in late antique Egypt,” in Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300– 700, ed. Roger Bagnall, 408–36 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 20 Space and place have very distinct meanings for Lefebvre, and I adopt those definitions as explained above. Lefebvre further explains that space “implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships—and this despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products).” For Lefebvre, space needs to be examined not as a thing itself but as the area in which social relationships are embedded. He seeks to ask the question of how one space is differentiated from another, concluding that spaces are determined by how they are used, perceived, acted up, and maintained by those within the spaces. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 82–83.

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literature accords with Lefebvre’s consideration that a place gains unique value as a space only when those who interact with the space ascribe locative value to it. The cell is not only a physical structure; it also becomes the essential area for living asceticism, and it is dependent upon the actions performed within it. The geography of monasticism is transformative; the individual creates a space which, in turn, transforms the consideration of the cell within. Gaston Bachelard reaches a similar conclusion about the cherished nature of intimate spaces associated with one’s life. Bachelard understands space as a product. However, the product is not of a public or shared nature as Lefebvre argues. In Bachelard’s argument, space is the product of one’s own thoughts, memories, and dreams that are nurtured or born within the space. A dwelling, therefore, is a space defined by memories from the past, experiences of the present, and hopes for the future.21 Monastic space in late antique Egypt concretely exemplifies several of these theoretical interpretations of space and the community effort to create meaning around that space. For the monks of Egypt, monastic space was built to serve a diversely ascetic community. Monastics practiced a variety of asceticisms as typified by itinerant monks who wandered, eremitic monks who adopted a wide range of seclusion, and monks who sought a formalized community by residing within an enclosed built environment.22 The third theme draws upon Bachelard and Lefebvre to consider how monastic authors considered belief and practice as performative rituals that led to an internalization of the cell within the heart and mind of the monk. When the monk understood how to properly use the cell for spiritual battles and God’s blessing, he could begin the final step of moving away from dependence upon the physical cell through an awareness that the true cell lay within the monk’s own heart. Through both right praxis and proper recognition of the power of the cell as a loosely defined temporal space, the monk was prepared to progress to the final step by completely abandoning a physical definition of the cell. The cell became an image of the interior cell in which God dwelled. Once the monk realized that the cell could refer to an internal and an external cell, the command, “Go, sit in your cell,” attained profound implications. Michel Foucault’s vision of a space that confines, monitors, and reforms behavior provides a model for us to consider the panoptic qualities of the cell as a transformative space affected by both the resident and the performance of spirituality. The cell becomes the monastic 21

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Onion Press, 1964), 6. For descriptions of the itinerant monks and travelers, see Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300–800 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005). 22

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habitus in my reading. This belief is most fully realized by those like Evagrius and Paul of Tamma, who could move easily between the cell and the church, between intimate and extended communities, and between private and public interactions without harming their apatheia.23 Through actions within the geography of the monastic cell, the monks established a social institution created by “concrete acts which, owing to their character of sensuous performance, allow them to appear credible and reliable” for developing a monastic ascetic life.24 Despite the awe of visitors and later historians elicited by the Desert Fathers, we now acknowledge that the desert was not as important for the monastic landscape as was the individuals and individual spaces located in it.25 As James Goehring demonstrates, visitors to monastic sites were responsible for creating a mythologized desertscape.26 Here the construct of the desert and its codification in patristic thought reveal the purpose of an elite minority who attributed uniqueness and power to those who established new communities apart from urban authority. Peter Brown expresses the desertscape myth as “one of the most abiding creations of late antiquity. . . . To flee ‘the world’ was to leave a precise social structure for an equally precise and, as we shall see, an equally social alternative. The desert was a ‘counter-world,’ a place where an alternative ‘city’ could grow.”27 It is also possible that given the location of the cell—as the monk’s residence within the desert—it is mythologized as the interior desert—as the alternative, protected space for study and reflection. The literary accounts are profoundly important for reconstructing the history of monastic thought relating to, one, the relationship between the monk and the physical world,28 two, the importance of the built environment (such as the construction of cells and dwellings), and three, how to recognize the sacrality of monastic space.29 23 For a detailed discussion of the way in which practices shape Bourdieu’s sociology of the built environment, see Gunter Gebauer, “Habitus, Intentionality, and Social Rules: A Controversy between Searle and Bourdieu,” SubStance 93 (2000): 68– 83. 24 Ibid., 75. 25 Judith Adler, “Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 4 –37. 26 James Goehring, “The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.3 (2003): 437– 51; Goehring, “The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1.3 (1993): 281–96. 27 Peter Brown, Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 216 –17. 28 Joseph Patrich, “Monastic Landscapes,” in Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, ed. W. Bowden, L. Lavan and C. Machado (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 413– 46. 29 Hippolyte Delehaye was extremely skeptical of using hagiographic material for writing history. See his caveats for this body of literature in The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 170–86. For more recent assessments of the methodological concerns needed in reading biographies and hagiography, see Lynda Coon,

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In order to read monastic literature to consider the geography of asceticism, I follow the interpretation that hagiographic narratives are shaped by memories of performative religious rituals. While one cannot argue that these rituals and ideas were followed by all monastics, I maintain the literature represents the importance of visuality and practice in the eyes of the monastic authors and their expectations to emphasize the value of spatial order for lived asceticism.30 The literary construction of monasticism by authors such as Athanasius, Evagrius, Palladius, and those who were sources for the History of the Monks of Egypt and the Apophthegmata Patrum, reflects a consciously designed ideal of how one could and should regard the cell and the efficacy of the physical environment. An analysis of the rhetorical expectations and instructions found in the literary sources illuminates the spatial discourse of the first generation of monastics and recounts the codification of daily practice by intellectual elites.31 The ascetic lens shapes the narrative geographies of monastic space by prescribing behavior and exercises that could lead to the authors’ goal: an internalized cell of tranquility, or apatheia—a place free from distractions. The Life of Antony laid the foundation for the distinct nature of space occupied by Egyptian monastics. Athanasius used Antony’s visitors as evidence that visiting Antony was akin to visiting heaven. Antony, within his monastic landscape, was the embodiment of sacredness. The mobility of Antony, in an altered geography, illustrates Thomas Tweed’s notion of the

Sacred Fiction: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographies in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Evelyne Patlagean, “Ancient Byzantine Hagiography and Social History,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–21; Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Felice Lifschitz, “Beyond positivism and genre: ‘hagiographical’ texts as historical narrative,” Viator 25 (1994): 95–104. 30 My theoretical applications are shaped, therefore by cognitive archaeology, which seeks to identify physical markers of religious acts within the archaeological record. For this discussion, I interpret the literary and hagiographical material as the self-constructed view of the cell as one part of the monastic discourse of space. I do not believe monastics actually practiced asceticism as expressed in the ascetic literature, as the ideas found in these texts reflect ideals or desires to which monks could or should aspire. A similar argument for the recognition of ritual behaviors within the physical remains is espoused by cognitive archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew, “The Archaeology of Religion,” in The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology, ed. Colin Renfrew and Ezra B. W. Zubrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47–54. 31 Derek Kreuger expresses the codification of ideals as the way in which authors “inscribed themselves into their writing at the edges of their narratives” and writing through the lens of their own asceticism. Kreuger, “Hagiography as an Ascetic Practice in the Early Christian East,” The Journal of Religion 79.2 (1999): 218.

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sacroscape, by which Tweed means a religious trail or an echo of religious beliefs that is not tied to a particular building or place.32 I find Tweed’s rendering of a moveable sacroscape useful in reconsidering how individuals carry sacred identities and participate in, and are acted upon by, transformation in specifically monastic space. The Sayings33 and the History of the Monks,34 like the Life of Antony, articulate beliefs in the emerging boundaries that shape the world outside the cell as profane while they cast the space within as sacred. Despite the limitations of the oral tradition and its transmission, these sources resonate with the creation of monastic space by Palladius and Cassian.35 The accounts by these two monastic leaders contextualize the behaviors within the cell in ways that Athanasius was incapable of, or uninterested in, incorporating into his biography. The theme of the cell as a training ground is maintained by all the literary sources, and even memory of the first generation affirms the cell as a place to train the body as an athlete would. Finally the examination of the writings by Evagrius and Paul of Tamma, as residents and authors of Egyptian monasticism, reveal the esoteric reading of the built form and how the materiality of the cell maintains spiritual purity and creates a sacred paradise for those able to accept the cell as a sacred realm.36 The spatial rhetoric concerned with the monastic ordering of space—whereby the cell is the central focal point of ascetic practice— situates monastic living apart from earlier philosophical endeavors of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Neo-Platonists. The monastic literature articulates how ascetic life should be led as spiritual exercises were confined to the newly conceived and designed monastic geography. 32 Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 61–62. 33 For a discussion of the use of the founders for establishing the authority or credibility of a saying, see discussion by Graham Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford Early Christian Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Doug Burton-Christie, Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a recent assessment of the historicity and the difficulties of interpreting the Sayings see David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 145– 46. 34 The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1980). (Hereafter cited as HM). 35 John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. and annotated Boniface Ramsey (New York: Paulist, 1997), 43; The Institutes, trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson, in A Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 201 –90 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964). (Hereafter cited as Inst.) Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 36 This discussion is not intended to assess the authenticity of these ideas in the lived experience, as the textual and archaeological material for the fourth century is unfortunately very sparse. Once we move into the fifth and sixth centuries, greater evidence is available in terms of documentary evidence (including dipinti, inscriptions, papyri, and so on) and material remains (as addressed below) for tracing the threads of sacrality present in the early literary traditions.

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II. THE LITERARY CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW MONASTIC LANDSCAPE Athanasius’s Life of Antony is a literary portrait of nascent monastic practice in Egypt, primarily from the position of an admirer, but not a practitioner.37 The biography, as the first formal representation of the monastic life by a Christian theologian, reflects Athanasius’s vision of Antony’s uniqueness as a role model of deep devotion and as a triumphant hero over paganism and unorthodox beliefs.38 Scholars have noted the similarities and obvious parallels between Athanasius’s biography and other classical biographies, especially Iamblichus’s Life of Pythagoras.39 The direct borrowing and mirroring of philosophical texts outside of a Christian setting highlights Athanasius’s desire to cast Antony as the ideal philosopher.40 It is important to note that Antony was not illiterate, as Athanasius presents him.41 While the Life of Antony became a valued text within the early church as an anti-Arian polemic, the Life of Antony is also an important source for identifying themes of monastic living and how religious beliefs were shaped by and within recognized, architectural boundaries.42 37 Athanasius of Alexandria, Vie d’Antoine, ed. and trans. G. J. M. Bartelink (Paris: Les E´ditions du Cerf, 1994). The Life of Antony, trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Press, 2003). I quote from Vivan and Athanassakis unless otherwise stated (hereafter cited as VA). For the Sahidic Coptic life see The Coptic Life of Antony, trans. Tim Vivian (San Francisco: International Scholars Publication, 1995). 38 See the discussions of the Life of Antony in three chapters by Averil Cameron, “Form and Meaning: The Vita Constantini and the Vita Antonii,” 72– 89; Philip Rousseau, “Antony as Teacher in the Greek Life,” 89–110; and Samuel Rubenson, “Philosophy and Simplicity: The Problem of Classical Education in Early Christian Biography,” 110–40 in Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Tomas Ha¨gg and Philip Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 39 Iamblichus, “Life of Pythagoras,” in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, trans. Kenneth Guthrie (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes, 1987). (Hereafter cited as Vit. Pyth.) Arthur Urbano Jr., “ ‘Read it Also to the Gentiles’: The Displacement and Recasting of the Philosopher in the Vita Antonii,” Church History 77:4 (2008): 877 –914; Samuel Rubenson, “Antony and Pythagoras: A Reappraisal of the Appropriation of Classical Biography in Athanasius’ Vita Antonii,” in Beyond Reception: Mutual Influences between Antique Religion, Judaism, and Early Christianity, ed. David Brakke, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Jo¨rg Ulrich (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006), 191– 208. 40 In Rubenson’s analysis, the Life of Antony is an anti-Pythagorean treatise. Fifteen points of comparison throughout the lives of Pythagoras and Antony illustrate Rubenson’s assertion that “It is not merely a question of borrowing passages and images, but an entire understanding of what belongs to the development of a holy man” (“Antony and Pythagoras,” 205). 41 Seven letters, originally written in Coptic, penned by the theologically trained Antony, provide a stark contrast to the mythologized peasant-turned-Christian-monastic-philosopher. See Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). The seven letters also demonstrate that Antony was versed in some NeoPlatonic thought and that Origenist ideas were not a later introduction to Egypt but were evident in the writings of one of the first monastic practitioners. 42 For commentary on Athanasius’s use of the Life of Antony as a political work to defend his teachings, see David Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1998). His final chapter, “The Spirituality and Politics of the Life of Antony,” thoroughly

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The Life of Antony describes four different residences occupied by Antony on his journey to perfection. Each relocation is tied to a specific learning outcome, leading to Antony’s authority as a monastic model of asceticism. Paralleling the account of Pythagoras’s teachings on calming the body and its passions, Athanasius uses Antony’s movements throughout Egypt as an illustration of his growing authority over and command of ascetic disciplines.43 The imperative to relocate illustrates Athanasius’s developing sense of the monastic residence as a performative space—a stage upon which the monk acted out battles and victories as a solider of God.44 E´mile Durkheim recognizes that actions performed within a space are dramas, and in this case Athanasius presents a religious drama of Antony’s call to asceticism.45 All actions by Antony are framed by his acceptance of a religious life and by the spaces in which religious rituals are undertaken. Durkheim states that “a special place must be prepared for [religious life], one from which profane life is excluded.”46 The Durkheimian life of abstinence encompasses all the components of Antony’s asceticism, and to truly embrace this life, Antony withdrew from secular life.47 Antony’s separated and liminal state was followed by his eventual identification with a community of other monastics.48 Antony moved through a new awareness of his need to separate, and he ultimately found his success in a two-stage relocation, first, to a tomb and, second, to an abandoned residence where he engaged in new rituals that led to his eventual reintroduction to a community by the Red Sea. Athanasius’s liminal account of Antony is a textual construction of asceticism and signals what will become acceptable monastic behavior. In addition to the importance placed on separation and relocation, we observe the monk’s similar need to model philosophical behaviors through separation and his increasing need to be a stranger to his own society, as Brown notes in his study of the Syrian holy man.49

explores the issues surrounding Athanasius’s adoption of Antony as a typos of the ideal monk and orthodox believer. 43 Vit. Pyth, 16. 44 Brooks Hedstrom, Divine Architects, 384. The performative nature of rituals and religious actions is explored in Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72–76; Gavin Brown, “Theorizing Ritual as Performance: Explorations of Ritual Indeterminacy,” Journal of Ritual Studies 17.1 (2003): 3– 18. 45 ´ Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields, (New York: Free Press, 1995), 312. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 313–18. 48 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960); Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 49 Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man,” 90.

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Antony’s first relocation was a direct response to his decision to adopt an ascetical life. Athanasius is clear that the new location is an appropriate space for Antony. The space frames an area that that spiritually challenged and educated him. Athanasius demonstrates his belief that Antony must reside alone in a space that would further indicate his emerging authority as a founder of proper monastic living. Antony left his teacher’s dwelling and traveled to some tombs described as distant from his original residence.50 Athanasius does not note why Antony selected one tomb over the others. But due to the ubiquitous nature of the abandoned tombs along the cliffs of the Nile, he would have had several from which to select. Athanasius implies that Antony knew he would face the devil in the Pharaonic tombs and that this knowledge compelled him to relocate.51 In preparation, Antony then adopted a more demanding praxis that provoked the devil, who was determined to defeat the holy man. Athanasius explains that the devil was concerned that Antony might inspire others to fill or occupy the desert or deserted places, which were often regarded as the dwelling places of the demons.52 As David Brakke observes, Antony’s triumph is essential for demonstrating the power of spiritual discipline and daily martyrdom.53 If Antony’s lifestyle inspired others to take up new residences in the deserted areas, the demons would have no sacred realm in which to reside. The transformation of Egypt’s religious landscape from the realm of the older Pharaonic and Greco-Roman complexes to one dotted with churches was a long and somewhat shadowy process.54 Athanasius contends that the way to ensure the transformation was by sending monks who battled demons in their residences, thereby supplanting the old religion with representatives of the new religion.55

50

VA 8. VA 41. VA 8. A general study of the use of the desert for spiritual encounters is Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscape: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lane, “Desert Catechesis: The Landscape, and Theology of Early Christian Monasticism,” Anglican Theological Review 75 (1993): 292–314. 53 Brakke, Demons, 32. 54 David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 55 Brakke, Demons, 216–26. Brakke’s discussion examines the ways in which monks appropriated legitimacy through their occupation of temples—the realms of demons as manifestations of the ancient pagan deities. He is careful to note that the reactivation of cult centers as part of a Christian landscape was not necessarily by force; he writes that the temples “fell into neglect and abandonment, and perhaps much later were devoted to a new use, whether as a church or a monastic dwelling” (218). See also Brakke, “From Temple to Cell, from Gods to Demons: Pagan Temples in the Monastic Topography of Fourth-Century Egypt,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 51 52

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The popularity of Antony’s lifestyle fostered a small following of those who desired to learn from him. The tension reached a climax when a crowd tore down the door to the fortress. Here Athanasius creates a tension in the biography to teach his audience about the importance of the space in which Antony resided. At this point, the Greek version of Life of Antony contains an interesting description that is not preserved in the Coptic version. Antony “came forth as though from some shrine, having been led into divine mysteries and inspired by God.”56 The Coptic states more succinctly, “God was with him.”57 The description in the Greek Life of Antony presents Antony’s residence as a sacred space where he interacted with God.58 Antony appeared transformed, suggesting that his twenty years in the desert were spent in close proximity to God. His appearance was so remarkable that Athanasius says the ascetic was perfectly balanced by reason, without blemish, and was completely healthy despite a diet of bread and water.59 The equation of perfect health and reason with an ascetic lifestyle was a wellcrafted physiological and medical reading of the body in classical and late antique medical treatises.60 Antony’s life within the fortress was seen as such a transformative experience that when he emerged he could not only teach about the benefits of serving God but he could also heal the sick. From this point Antony became an evangelist for the monastic life. He inspired others to fill monasteries in the mountains and in the desert61 Athanasius views the new urban centers as locations where individuals knew they were closer to heaven, indeed, where “they registered themselves for citizenship in heaven.”62 At the third residence, Athanasius presents Antony as a public figure whose reputation drew visitors in search of healing. His popularity attracted the sick, who slept outside his dwelling and left healed.63 Athanasius emphasizes the potency of Antony’s power by equating physical healing with the monk’s 56

VA 14. Coptic VA 14. Georgia Frank examines the trope of luminosity as an indicator of ritualized sacredness in The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims of Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 94, 160–65. In particular her discussion of the fourth-century text of the Apocalypse of Paul, written in an Egyptian setting, has several overt representations of the sacred body evinced by a shinning face. See also Patricia Cox Miller, “Desert Asceticism and ‘The Body from Nowhere,’ ” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 137– 53. 59 Brakke makes a similar observation, stating: “Athanasius self-consciously appropriate the language of paganism for the depiction of the ideal Christian” (Demons, 33). 60 Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Tamsyn S. Barton, Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics and Medicine under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 61 VA 14. 62 VA 14. This citizenship motif is found in the letter to the Hebrews where Christians were identified as citizens who belonged to the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb. 12:22– 23, cf. Phil. 3:20). 63 VA 48. 57 58

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mere presence. The healing value of the physical threshold illustrates Bachelard’s definition that ascribes sacredness to space due to community beliefs. In this example, Athanasius describes Antony’s residence as a conduit of healing power.64 The final step in Antony’s journey to the appropriate space for ascetic living comes when he tired of the interruptions from visitors to his fortress. He decided to move further south to Upper Egypt, but this was not the appropriate choice. Athanasius uses God’s intervention to redirect Antony to the further, or inner, desert: “If you truly desire peaceful solitude, go to the further desert.”65 The further desert was a three-day journey to the east, and he made the voyage accompanied by Saracens who were traveling with their animals, apparently back toward the Sinai Peninsula. Along the journey, Antony selected a high mountain, Mount Colzim, to reside. There he had a source of water, some date palms, and a small patch of arable land. Antony’s final relocation completed his search for the best residence for ascetic living, and Athanasius concludes his dramatic biography with a justification for why monks settle in desert cliffs. With Antony’s new residence, Athanasius explicates the fullest description of what normative monasticism should look like. Antony’s discipline included the usual activities of prayer and fasting, but he also worked a small field and wove baskets in exchange for olives, beans, and oil.66 Antony lived, not alone, but with two companions on Mount Colzim, and he made frequent trips down the mountain to teach the followers who gathered in a loosely affiliated community to learn from him. While Antony is frequently hailed as the father of eremitic monasticism, he spent the end of his life in association with others. Athanasius’s account attests to the process of ascetic training and the importance of different spaces or arenas for spiritual work outside the city or village church. Evidence of viable locations for monastic habitations, such as those imagined by Athanasius, is visible throughout Egypt. The presence of tomb openings demonstrates the human modification to the desert 64 Incubation was a popular practice in the classical and late antique worlds whereby individuals would reside in sanctuaries or near them with the hope of obtaining a dream that would show the individual how to be healed. See Peter Grossmann, “Late Antique Christian Incubation Centres in Egypt” in Salute e Guarigione nella Tarda Antichita, ed. H. Brandenburg, S. Heid, C. Markschies (Vatican: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 2007), 125–40; Grossmann, “The Pilgrimage Center of Abu Mina,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 281– 302; Mary Hamilton, Incubation of the Cure of Disease in Pagan Temples and Christian Churches (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1906); Leslie S. B. MacCoull, “Dreams, Visions and Incubation in Coptic Egypt,” Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 22 (1991): 123– 28. 65 VA 49. 66 VA 53.

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landscape.67 Several Pharaonic tombs at Beni Hasan, Skeikh Said, and Thebes,68 and quarries at Deir el Dik69 and elsewhere, bear signs of Christian modifications, as indicated by the presence of crosses and occasional Coptic inscriptions (see fig. 1).70 Frequently these signs are considered indicative of monastic habitation. Yet I believe we must interrogate this evidence of performative religion. What elements would make these physical signs definitively monastic? Are we able to deduce the sex of the inhabitants? Could these markings be signs of Christian families or places of prayer for local communities? What should we expect in the artifactual record of monastic domestic occupation? These questions are important, as the signs of Christianization have been generally

67 A comparison of the proximity between late antique settlements in Middle Egypt and Pharaonic tombs would suggest tombs were only a minimum of .5– 1.5 km from a village. In Upper Egypt, the banks of the Nile, the width of the flood plain, and then the rise of the desert cliffs would determine the variation in distance between settlements and the location of tombs. For a now outdated summary of the tombs, see Alexander Badawy “Les Premiers E´tablissements Chre´tiens dans les Anciennes Tombes d’E´gypte,” Publications de l’Instiut d’e´tudes orientales de la bibliothe`que patriarcale d’Alexandrie 2 (1953): 67–89, and figs. 1–24. 68 The west bank of Thebes, for example, is now witnessing an active investigation of monastic reuse of Pharaonic monuments. The majority of the sites, however, post-date the monastic literature under examination here. A bibliography of current work until the 1990s is still Terry Wilfong, “The Western Theban Area in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 26 (1989): 89–147. The recent archaeological work on monastic and Christian settlement is rapidly expanding. The following represent a selection only. For Deir el Bachit: Von Ina Eichner and Ulrike Fauerbach, “Die spa¨tantike/koptische Klosteranlage Deir el-Bachit in Dra’ Abu el-Naga (Obera¨gypten). Zweiter Vorbericht,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archa¨ologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 61 (2005): 139 –52. For Deir el Medina: L. Gabolde, Le temple de Deir al-Me´dıˆna. Cairo: Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale, 2002; Monastery of Epiphanius: Catherine Thirard, “Le Monaste`re d’E´piphane a` The`bes: Nouvelle interpretation chronologique,” E´tudes Coptes IX (2006): 367–74; Gurnet Marai: J. Gascou, “Documents grecs de Qurnat Mar’y,” Bulletin de la Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale 99 (1999): 201– 15; Deir el Medıˆna: “E´tude de la ce´ramique du couvent de Saint Marc a` Gournet Mar’ei, fouille de G. Castel, 1970– 1971,” Bulletin de la Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale 105 (2005): 449. For Ramesseum: Guy Lecuyot, “Le Ramesseum a` l’e´poque copte a` propos des traces chre´tiennes au ramesseum,” E´tudes Coptes VI (2000): 121– 34; Sheikh abd el-Gurna Tomb 1152: Tomasz Go´recki, “Sheikh abd el-Gurna (Hermitage in Tomb 1152): Preliminary Report, 2005.” Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean XVII. Reports 2005 (2007): 263–72; Monastery of Kyriacus: Tama´s Ba´cs, “The So-called ‘Monastery of Syriacus’ at Thebes,” Egyptian Archaeology 17 (2000): 34–36. 69 The communities in Middle Egypt have not been systematically excavated or surveyed. Gertrud J. M. van Loon is currently undertaking a project to document the extant evidence of the monastic habitation at Deir Abu Hinnis and at Sheikh Said. For older documentation of the settlements, see Maurice Martin, La laure de Der al Dik a` Antinoe´ (Cairo: Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale, 1971); Michael Jones, “The Early Christian Sites at Tell El-Amarna and Sheikh Said,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 77 (1991): 129–44. 70 I propose four main categories of monastic settlement: adaptive reuse of temples; adaptive reuse of tombs; adaption of natural caves; and purpose-built environments. The latter refers to those structures that are built entirely anew for monastic living and are not salvage constructions. Brooks Hedstrom, Divine Architects, 372 –73.

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Fig. 1. The modification of a Pharaonic tomb with a painted apse, engaged columns, side niches, and accompanying wall paintings with Christian themes is frequently identified as a church. Sheikh Said in Middle Egypt. Date for these alterations is uncertain, although possibly in the eleventh century. (Author’s photo.)

interpreted as obvious signs of monastic reuse without much artifactual or documentary evidence to substantiate such claims. Signs of physically claimed space are visible on Pharaonic monuments in the form of prayers (inscribed in Coptic and Greek), instructions, and graffiti. For example, the walls of the temple at Deir el Medina include passages detailing the sizes of liturgical garments, requests for prayers by humble saints, and statements of funerary commemoration.71 While it is not possible to characterize the Christian markings as signs of efforts to emulate Antony, we can conclude that the evidence reflects religious behaviors and activities within a landscape thought to be previously inhabited by demons. Before the introduction of Christianity, Egyptians perceived the desert both as the realm of evil gods, such as Seth, and, equally, as the realm of the sacred.72 The mystery of the desert land is found in the adoption of words that mean both “a holy necropolis” and “the desert.”73 As early as the Old 71 Chantal Heurtel, Les inscriptions coptes et grecques du temple d’Hathor a` Deir al-Me´dıˆna (Cairo: Institut franc¸aois d’arche´ologie orientale, 2004). 72 Miche`le Broze, Les aventures d’Horus et Seth dans le Papyrus Chester Beatty (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 1996); Ashraf I. Sadek, “Du de´sert des pharaons au de´sert des anachore`tes,” Le Monde Copte 21–22 (1993): 5–11 73 Sadek, “Du de´sert des pharaons,” 10.

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Kingdom, the necropolis was associated with the sacred or segregated land.74 The western bank of the Nile, in particular, was associated with the land of the deceased. This space was hierophantic because the deceased could ascend to heaven from the banks.75 The necropolis was associated with death, but it was also an uncontaminated area because it was the space where one encountered the heavenly places. Even for the ancient Egyptians the desert was a passage to life in the next world. A Syrian text, On Hermits and Desert Dwellers, from the fifth century provides a useful image of how monastic settlement was a form of divinely inspired resettlement within this terrifying but sacred geography. “The desert, frightful in its desolation, became a city of deliverance for them, where the harps resound, and where they are preserved from harm. Desolation fled from the desert, for sons of the kingdom dwell there; it became like a great city with the sound of psalmody from their mouths.”76 Here the Syrian text echoes Athanasius’s expectation that Antony will indeed be the founder of a new city dedicated to the monastic habitus in a landscape that was forgotten. There are three observations about space and its meaning in the Life of Antony that elucidate Athanasius’s attitude toward the built form and its role in monastic living. First, Athanasius demonstrates that the space where an individual practiced asceticism was just as important as the specifics of the ascetic discipline. Each decision by Antony to deepen his ascetic commitment compelled him to move to a new space worthy, according to Athanasius, of shaping and assisting the monk’s pursuit of asceticism. The four locations Antony occupied throughout his monastic life reflect the range of spaces adopted by subsequent generations of monastics: houses on the edge of town, abandoned tombs, abandoned monumental structures (a fortress in Antony’s case), and built structures near naturally forming caves.77 Second, Athanasius correlates monastic residences with spaces 74 James K. Hoffmeier, Sacred in the Vocabulary of Ancient Egypt: The Term dsr, with Special Reference to Dynasties I –XX, (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985) is dedicated to answering Morenz’s call for a detailed investigation into the meaning of d ¼ sr in Egyptian religious theology. 75 Hoffmeier, Sacred, 87; Brovarski, “The Doors of Heaven,” Orientalia 46 (1977): 107–14. 76 “On Hermits and Desert Dwellers,” in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, ed. Vicent L. Wimbush, trans. Joseph P. Amar (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 72. A critical edition of the text is Edmund Beck, trans., Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones (Louvain: Secretariat du Corpus SCO, 1970). 77 Recent surveys of Egyptian wadis around the Theban Valley of the Queens and the Middle Egypt site of Abydos demonstrate that our knowledge of human occupation of caves by Christians will be significantly expanded. See Dawn McCormack, “The Search for Monastic Activity in the Upper Desert of the Abydos Region,” American Academy of Religion Meeting, presentation November 2007 in San Diego, Calif.; Laure Pantalacci, “Travaux de l’Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale en 2004– 5: Ermitages de la montagne the´baine,” Bulletin de la Institut franc¸ais d’arche´ologie orientale 105 (2005): 450– 51.

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where monks could commune with the Divine and battle demons. Monastic space was thereby a location for spiritual encounters; the fact that the tomb or monastery was a place for both holy and evil beings was anticipated and expected by the occupants. In fact, Athanasius expresses this through his description of Antony’s choice to return to the tomb in the hope of obtaining another opportunity to defeat the devil through his persistent asceticism. Third, the Life of Antony illustrates how completely Athanasius presumes others will believe that dwellings were residences of holy individuals. The vivid description of Antony’s appearance after twenty years in the fortress conveys how Christians were taught that space, especially monastic space, was transformative.

III. THE CELL AS

THE INCULCATION OF THE

MONASTIC HABITUS

Early Egyptian monastic authors agree that the cell is the only space in which a monk could learn to live successfully. To locate oneself in the cell is to focus one’s attention in a “built ritual environment” where the building “serves as a focusing lens, establishing the possibility of significance by directing attention, by requiring the perception of difference.”78 Such a belief implies that the architectural forms themselves were active rather than passive agents and, therefore, shaped spiritual devotion and the monastic habitus. Mark Searle articulates how architecture can be viewed as a teacher when practitioners interact with the space and seek its guidance: “While buildings may be constructed out of dead matter, of wood and stone and brick and concrete, their voice is not a dead letter. Buildings live while they remain in use: they continually speak to those who interact with them. . . . our buildings are silent messengers of those gods to whose service they are dedicated and whose sundry gospels are proclaimed.”79 Taking up residence within a monastic community, regardless of its size, was an action that required great mental discipline and a willingness to submit oneself to the very walls of the cell. The complexity of living in a new residence is underscored in several monastic descriptions of successes and challenges. Abba Ammonas, for example, recognizes the challenge that residency in the cell held for most individuals. “A person may remain for a hundred years in his cell without learning how to live in the cell.”80 Just being in the cell did not make an 78 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 104. 79 Gerard Lukken and Mark Searle, Semiotics and Church Architecture: Applying the Semiotics of A. J. Greimas and the Paris School to the Analysis of Church Buildings (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993), 75. 80 Poemen 96. Poemen’s sayings make up the largest quantity of utterances attributed to a single monastic leader. See William Harmless, S. J., “Remembering Poemen Remembering: The Desert Fathers and the Spirituality of Memory,” Church History 69 (2000): 483–518.

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individual a monk; true monastic practice required learning what the cell offered—time alone with God. The cell was an educative space in both practical and spiritual matters.81 When a young monk asked Abba Moses for advice on how to live the monastic life, he replied, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”82 These two sayings represent the range of opinions given by authors regarding the ability of monastics to benefit from the inculcation of the monastic habitus through life confined to the cell. The emphasis upon the individual experience in one’s cell suggests that the ecclesiastic structure, and the rituals tied to it, were not as effective in sustaining the ascetic in his spiritual journey as was the cell.83 The church was part of the monastic landscape, but in the fourth and early fifth centuries, the church as the space in which spiritual work took place is not well attested. The exception is evident in the writings of Shenoute, the late fourth and early fifth century Coptic writer from Atripe who “incorporated the building into his theology of communal asceticism” through the belief that the “building embodies a theology of the ascetic life in which the monument is the material testimony of the monks’ bodies and souls.”84 In Canon 7, Shenoute presents his vision of the ways in which the church affirmed and maintained ascetic purity through purity of the church building and the individual monastic.85 Caroline Schroeder explains Shenoute’s willingness to regard spaces and persons as dwelling places for God as indicative of his adoption of a Pauline interpretative framework. Shenoute believes “that the church and the monk’s body possess the same purpose”—to be maintained as sacred bodies untainted by sin.86 Residency in the cell is fundamental for the cultivation of healthy asceticism. An anonymous saying states, “Just as a tree cannot bring forth fruit if it is always being transplanted, so the monk who is always going from one place

81 Gould classifies the cell’s main function as educative and argues against Philip Rousseau in maintaining the cell did not “function as a means of enforcing ‘privacy’ at all, either in an earlier or a later phase of monastic development” (Gould, Monastic Community, 156). In Gould’s discussion of the relationship between building and maintaining monastic community and the desire to flee community, the cell is an intermediary space to which monks may retreat for further education, but the cell does not, in his reading, ever hold enough value to be regarded as the sole realm of monastic living. 82 AP Moses 6. 83 Caroline Schroeder discusses the lack of sources on the importance of churches for ascetics. Her examination of the sources for the fourth to sixth centuries produces sources only by Shenoute, Paulinus of Nola, and two anonymous authors from the Pachomian order. See Schroeder, Monastic Bodies, 90–92, 118–25. 84 Ibid., 91. 85 Schroeder explicates Shenoute’s teachings in which he equates the church building with the body “that houses both the spirit (God) and the flesh (its material construction)” (Ibid., 92). Within the architectural framing of the corporate body of the federation, Shenoute is able to assert the necessity of proper behavior and adherence to rules. 86 Ibid., 106.

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to another is not able to bring forth virtue.”87 Such statements adduce the centrality of the monastic residence more forcefully than Athanasius’s account of Antony’s ascetic relocations. Whether the audience consisted of monastics or non-monastics, the rhetoric sustains the spatial significance of the cell as the only acceptable and effective training area for a monk. Cassian and Palladius, authors of unified monastic works, explicate the spiritual benefits of labor and its physical ability to retrain the mind. In Cassian’s community, a monk could not leave his cell or abandon his work unless directed to do so by his elder.88 Illustrating his method for selfcontrol, Palladius recounts how Dorotheus, for example, did not lay on a mat or allow himself to stretch out his body when he slept. When he held all night vigils, he wove date-palm rope and observed a partial fast to stay alert.89 The panoptic cell then shows how the physical space may reshape and restructure the impulses of the individual and create a new society based upon monastic values. The behaviors within the ascetic habitus thereby both allow the restructuring of societal relations and emphasize the importance of monastic space for creating a controlled environment for religious praxis. The tension between following one’s own praxis and yearning to know another’s was very real. Monastics were admonished frequently to resist comparisons between each other. Even those who sought to hide their methods were accused of unauthentic living. Abba Serinus told Abba Job, “There is no great virtue in keeping to your regimen in your cell, but there is if you keep it when you come out of your cell.”90 The cell was a challenging place to live the ascetic life if an individual could not control his thoughts, feelings of listlessness, or depression. Those who remained dutifully in their cells could cultivate a continual encounter with the Divine; however, monastic authors did not agree on how the sacrality of the cell was emplaced within monastic geography.

IV. THE EFFICACY

OF THE

CELL

The second theme of the cell as a sacred space is so prevalent in the travelogues and Sayings that monks preferred to shut themselves up in their cells rather than 87 N 204. The idea is further emphasized when Antony states that just as fish will die physically without water, so a monk without his cell will die spiritually. Antony 10. 88 Inst. 15. 89 HL 2.2. A partial fast here means that the monk did eat, but at irregular intervals, and then it was only a vegetarian diet with water. Several monks also adopted severe fasts in which they abstained from all food and water. For a full discussion of the history of early ascetic meals, see Andrew McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 90 Serinus 1.

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risk being outside and missing an encounter with God. The description of relationships between the monastic and the Divine inform us of the ways in which space could be produced, as Lefebvre suggests. A monk sat in his cell, and his disciple knocked on the door. The old man said, “Go away, Abraham, do not come in. From now on, I have not time for the things of this world.”91 Abba Silvanus had a vision of monks being punished for misconduct committed because of distractions associated with the world, and he decided to remain in his cell. He explained, “Why should I seek to see this earthly light, which is of no use?”92 His reaction to the exterior spaces suggests that his cell was of a different nature from the world outside. The monk embraced his cell—for within this space, he believed that a new relationship could be forged to align and retrain his body within a new topography. Therefore, as a result of the beliefs about physical space, the cell was a transformative space wherein relationships could be maintained and cell characteristics reformed. Athanasius introduced the sacredness of the monastic built forms, drawing upon pagan ideas of sacred space in Egypt.93 He did not encourage religious tourism, but the impulse to visit a holy individual was firmly embedded in the rising popularity of monastics as living saints. Some monks, like John of Lycopolis, remained in a cell for thirty years, being cared for by a disciple who brought the necessities of life to a window in his cell.94 The locations of seclusion and self-immuring were interpreted as places where holy individuals resided. The motivation for seclusion stems from the promise of an encounter with God. John the Little said, “Watching means to sit in the cell and be always mindful of God. This is what is meant by ‘I was on the watch and God came to me’ ” (Matthew 25:36).95 The sitting position allowed God to become the focus of all thoughts.96 Once in the cell, the monk devoted himself completely to God and took residence in the heavenly realm. The Sayings express the materiality of paradise in stories of monastics who perceived the 91

Sisoses 27. Silvanus 2. A regional analysis of Pharaonic and later Graeco-Roman Christian Thebes is found in the publication Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes, ed. Peter F. Dorman and Betsy M. Bryan (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Cairo, 2007). Cristina Riggs presents evidence of Roman cemeteries being syncretistic constructions that draw upon GrecoRoman ideals of mortuary design and the sacredness of the Egyptian tomb and its contents in The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 94 HL 49, 35 and HM 1.4. 95 John the Little 27. Compare HL 19. 7–8. Some monks viewed standing in prayer as a more devout form of supplication as with Moses who refused to lie down or even bend his knees during prayer for six years while living in his cell. 96 Poemen explains further that by sitting in the cell and remembering one’s sins the Lord will come and offer help (Poemen 162). 92 93

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cells as sacred spaces. The space outside the cell was Mircea Eliade’s profane space; it was polluted, dangerous, and needed caution. Venturing outside of the cell was to invite uncertainties that could disrupt the care of one’s solitude. Similarly, one of Evagrius’s sayings describes sitting within the cell as behavior that fostered the right environment for remembering God and seeing “the face of God the Father and his Son, the angels and archangels and all the people of the saints, the kingdom of heaven and the gifts of that realm, joy and beatitude.”97 The imageless prayer, of which Evagrius speaks, was properly performed within the monastic residence.98 If it could be achieved, then Evagrius did not anticipate difficulties in encounters between the monk and others, either in his cell or out in the larger community.99 The cell appears as the only place, with the exception of the weekly Eucharist in the church, where prayer and communion with God could be maintained. So crucial was the cell for monastic identity that monks such as Abba Isaac the Theban would flee back to his cell after the weekly service. His fellow brothers joked about his speed, suggesting that he was being pursued by fire; however, what they failed to realize is that Isaac was fleeing them and their conversation. The concern for maintaining one’s ascetic purity is found throughout the History of the Monks, the Lausiac History and Cassian’s writings. These literary expressions provide further explanation for Athanasius’s observation about the differentness of monastic space. Palladius and the author of the History of the Monks convey their concerns about the damage visitors may initiate within a cell. While demons are the more recognized oppositional forces in Athanasius’s understanding of monastic space, Palladius and other monastic authors regard fellow monks and wellmeaning Christian visitors with equal concern.100 The authors of the History 97

Evagrius 1. John of Lycopolis used prayer, hymns, and contemplation to maintain his visions of God (HM 1.45). 98 Columba Stewart, “Imageless Prayer and the Theological Vision of Evagrius Ponticus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9:2 (2001): 173–204. Stewart examines the intellectual and theological shaping of Evagrius’s ideas. He does not take this discussion into the realm of the locative consideration where place and prayer may interact for Evagrius. 99 When one examines the physical residences of the monks in Egypt, such as those at Kellia, Bawit, and Esna, with their complex painted programs of saints, Christ enthroned, and mnemonic devices for prayer, one can appreciate Evagrius’s words that one would truly see heaven if he stayed in his cell. Elizabeth S. Bolman, “Joining the Community of the Saints: Monastic Paintings and Ascetic Practice in Early Christian Egypt,” in Shaping Community: The Archaeology and Architecture of Monasticism, ed. Sheila McNally (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2001), 41–56; Bolman, “Mimesis, Metamorphosis and Representation in Coptic Monastic Cells,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 35 (1998): 65– 77, plates 1 –7. 100 Georgia Frank constructs the late antique pilgrim as one seeking to encounter “embodied sanctity” in “destinations conceived as people.” Frank, Memory of the Eyes, 81–101; Frank, “Miracles, Monks and Monuments: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto as Pilgrims’ Tales,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 483 –505.

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of the Monks and the Lausiac History bear witness to the increasing popularity of visitations to monastic settlements. Moreover, several accounts address problems that arise from continued encounters with visitors. The sacrality of the cell with its power to be a teacher of all things could be threatened by the presence of outsiders who did not share the same concern for the sacrality of the space. The space was not considered sacred because it was a cell; the space became sacred through the activities that took place within that space. The visitor who arrived with a lack of sensitivity could disrupt the monk’s mental work. The harmful person or persons were then asked to remove themselves from the space so that the monastic could continue in his mental discipline. The monk’s cell had a defined purpose; embodiment within the cell could profoundly affect that individual. The cell was the realm for performative acts of devotion. However, the sign of true spiritual maturity or perfection was the recognition that the physical cell was a representation of a sacred space to be nurtured within the ascetic. A true mark of wisdom in monastic thought was the recognition that sacralized space could be internalized in one’s mental consciousness as the physical cell served as a model of the interior cell. The challenge given to each ascetic practitioner was to learn how to view the physical cell as a model of the interior cell.101 Each day as a monastic faithfully embraced the daily activities, he became more completely a citizen of heaven as he was built, spiritually, into “a dwelling place for God” (Ephesians 2:19– 22) and, “like living stones,” being “built into a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5). Cassian explains how it was possible to visualize oneself as a living stone in the construction of a dwelling for God. The temple of God could not be built of “inanimate stones,” but rather, made of a “congregation of saints.”102 The building then became eternal rather than temporal and corruptible. The eternal nature of the building was dependent upon the internalization of a shrine where Christ dwelt. The recognition that individuals were shrines or dwellings for God seemed possible for only the very experienced or spiritually mature monks. For the majority of practitioners, the temptation was very real to conceive of the cell as the only meeting place for God. When Abba Or and Abba Theodore, for example, contemplated that God might visit them, they ran back to their cells in fear that they could miss such an encounter.103

101 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 225. Carruthers considers fully the use of architecture in the High Middle Ages in Europe as a mnemonic devise for allowing one to travel to holy places within one’s imagination. 102 Inst. Pref. 3. 103 Or 1.

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Abba Daniel and Abba Ammoes once went on a journey. Ammoes, Daniel’s disciple, asked when they would settle down in a cell. Daniel replied, “Who will separate us from God? God is in the cell, and, on the other hand, he is outside also.”104 Daniel’s answer to this question reveals his ascetical understanding of the cell’s sacrality: it was not the only dwelling for God; God, rather, was both inside and outside of the cell. Monks were, however, admonished to observe their praxis both internally and externally, to weep inwardly and outwardly, and to build a cell mentally and physically.105 The danger arose when those who left the cell believed that they no longer needed to tend to their hearts and minds. The recognition of the diversity of monastic ascetic practice and the needs of individuals is present in statements that identify the hypocrisy of actions in light of the interiorization of monastic space. Amma Syncletica writes, “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.”106 The Sayings and travelogues elucidate the complexity of spatial thought within the monastic tradition as monks in subsequent generations were urged to visualize the tangible lessons of the cell. The cell, as described in the Life of Antony and in the apophthegms, developed from a sacralized place to become a critical component of successful monastic living. Not only did the cell teach discipline, but it also could model an interior cell that an individual could enter at any time, regardless of place.

V. INTERIORITY AND THE EMBODIMENT OF THE CELL The last theme regarding the spatial configuration of the cell and its relationship to the monastic is the belief that one may embody and interiorize the cell. The geography of lived monasticism within this framework, as found in the writing of Evagrius and Paul of Tamma, suggests that the cell is not just a place, but it is transformed into a space of monastic living that is also moveable. The cell then becomes the monastic habitus and its panoptic qualities, which are used initially to train the body and mind, may then be embodied fully within the person. The development of Egyptian spatial discourse on these ideas of inculcation and re-crafting are most fully developed in texts written by two monks who lived in Egypt and resided in the communities along the Nile and in the deserts. First, the Greek writings of Evagrius serve as an example of monasticism at the large, non-enclosed settlement of Kellia in Lower 104

Daniel 5. Poemen 173, 298; Syncletica 112. 106 Syncletica 19. 105

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Egypt.107 Second, Paul of Tamma’s treatises reflect monastic practices embraced in Middle Egypt and preserve a powerful voice of Coptic monastic thought. His texts are preserved only in Coptic, unlike Evagrius’s works, indicating a particularly Egyptian intellectual tradition of how space should be appreciated by the monastic. Additionally, Paul of Tamma’s monastic residence is unknown to us, so we do not have the luxury of considering the space in which he resided while we examine his highly sacralized language regarding the monk in his cell. It was to the famous site of Kellia, or “the Cells,” that Palladius traveled to study with Evagrius Ponticus (346 – 399).108 Evagrius was ordained lector and later deacon by Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, respectively.109 Palladius recounts that Evagrius left Constantinople under a scandal involving an upper-class woman.110 He traveled to Jerusalem, somewhat disillusioned, and questioned his commitment to the ascetic life. There he met Melania, who urged Evagrius to reconsider and return to the monastic life.111 In 382 he moved to Egypt and lived for almost three years at Nitria as an ascetic before moving to Kellia, where he resided until his death in 399.112 The residences of the monks of Kellia are well known to scholars of Egyptian monasticism. Excavations of many manshubiyyat, or monastic dwellings, reveal a community that spanned an area of over sixteen square kilometers. The excavated material, however, does not date to the residency of Evagrius, but to the two or three subsequent generations of the fifth and sixth centuries. The site of Pherme is located nearby and shares similarities with Kellia, and it was a satellite community with the same architectural traditions of cell and residential designs. A survey of this massive area, from the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, resulted in the identification of at least 1,500 monastic structures—a densely populated community (see fig. 2).113 Today the landscape and the encroaching modern agricultural activities mask the closeness of the monastic residences, as if one is walking down the streets of a close-knit neighborhood in an urban setting. The manshubiyyat are clustered into seventeen discernable areas, of which five exhibited a 107 Evagrius of Pontus, The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); A. Casiday, Evagrius Ponticus (Longon: Routledge, 2006). 108 HL 23.2 states, “I had not disclosed this matter [his desire to leave the monastery] to my neighboring monks or to my teacher Evagrius.” 109 HL 38.2. 110 HL 38.3 and Sozomen, EH 6.29. 111 Several of the letters identified as from Evagrius’s hand were to Melania, who had encouraged him to return to the ascetic life. 112 HL 38.10. 113 Rodolphe Kasser noted at least 1,500 structures during his survey although only 900 of these appeared to be still structurally intact for possible excavation, Kellia: Topographie II (Gene`ve: Georg, 1972).

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Fig. 2. One of fifty monastic complexes at Kellia-Pherme. The closest manshubiya is only seven meters to the east. (Author’s photo.)

higher percentage of occupation than the others.114 The complexes displayed many stages of occupation, remodeling, repairs, and extensions to eventually accommodate several visitors. Given the density of settlement, I contend that the purpose of the cell, in this environment, may have provided the only place to be alone with God. Evagrius’s writings on ascetic practices are directives in how to understand the use of the cell. First, Evagrius addresses specifically the daily challenge of remaining within the cell in order to abide by one’s praxis. In Praktikos 12, Evagrius narrates this challenge: First of all, he [the demon of listlessness] makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour (3 pm), to look now this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of the brethren appears from his cell]. Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor.115 114 Rodolphe Kasser, Kellia 1965 I, (Gene`ve: Georg, 1967), 13– 19. The more densely populated areas are also later in date, sixth to eighth centuries. 115 Evagrius, The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, trans. by John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1981). Praktikos 12, above, begins with a reference to the “noonday demon” who was a spirit of despondency that would strike monks at midday.

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The demon of despondency stirred the monk’s emotions to the point of restlessness, longing for a way to escape a space that appeared both physically and mentally stifling. Evagrius correlates the restlessness of the body in the cell with the untrained mind not yet controlled by the monk. The internal manifestations of the undisciplined mind were demonic beings.116 The demons did not need bodily form to create the same degree of havoc to which Antony or others were accustomed.117 For Bachelard, space is defined by intimate memories that make its worth unique to an individual. Sacredness of space does not, therefore, require the communal identity that is essential for Lefebvre’s construction of spatial identity. Evagrius’s thought follows Bachelard’s description of space as a place for introspection and affirmation of one’s identity. When the demon “instills . . . a hatred for the place” and drives the monk “along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities,”118 we see the essential connectiveness between one’s mind and one’s actions. To reject the cell would be tantamount to rejecting the self and all that a monk might hope to accomplish. For Evagrius, the cell is the contained battleground in which the monk can purify his heart. The physical separation from distractions is only the first step. The real work comes with the psychological discipline that confinement requires. However, Evagrius could see no greater danger to the monastic life than indifference to the importance of the cell. The cell is an extension and reflection of the interior life of the monk. How the cell is used and incorporated into the mental training illustrates the lived asceticism of the monk. The space becomes a physical boundary which defines the mental progress. Evagrius expresses the danger in Praktikos: One must not quit the cell at the hour of temptations no matter how plausible seem the excuses. Rather one should stay seated inside and be patient and receive nobly the attackers, every one, but especially the demon of listlessness who, because he is the heaviest of all, brings the soul to its most proven point. For to flee such struggles and to avoid them teaches the mind to be unskilled and cowardly and a fugitive.119 The rejection of the cell demonstrates a lack of discipline and spiritual maturity in the monk. If he truly knew God, he would willingly remain

On the noonday demon, see Rudolph Arbesmann, “The ‘Demonium Meridianum’ and Greek Patristic Exegesis,” Traditio 14 (1958): 17– 31. 116 Brakke, Demons, 66. 117 Evagrius references the Life of Antony, although his interest is selective as Athanasius’s account describes demons. 118 Praktikos 12. 119 Praktikos 28.

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within the cell. Evagrius suggests that the cell represents not just a temporal location but also a spiritual locale that contains souls. Fleeing from the cell at times of temptation was an admission of weakness since the monk’s mind was not strong enough to control his body. Abandoning the cell in body signified an internal defeat to demons. Such a spiritual defeat was marked by disgrace and shame; the physical flight from the cell informed the community that the monk was unable to resist the power of his own thoughts. Recognizing the need to remain within one’s cell, Evagrius suggests prayer is the only way to combat temptations. In Prayer, Evagrius makes several statements that resonate with the value and function of the cell in the apophthegms. In the Sayings, Evagrius offers practical advice regarding how to use the cell and allow it to teach a monk the proper way to regard the spiritual world. He explains: Sit in your cell, collecting your thoughts. Remember the day of your death. See then what the death of your body will be. . . . Consider also the good things . . . confidence in the face of God. . . . Whether you be inside or outside your cell, be careful that the remembrance of these things never leaves you; thanks to their remembrance, you may at least flee wrong and harmful thoughts.120 Evagrius’s writings provide a further dimension of interpretation of the meaning of the cell in Egyptian monastic thought. J. Bamberger explains Evagrius’s doctrine as a psychological melding of emotions and habits, and here we recall the interplay between the cell as the inculcation of monastic habitus.121 Evagrius urges that a monk “must be altered even in the depths of his spirit, where there lie hidden in the furthest recesses of his being unknown images. . . . Only when these images are healed and restored . . . is the work of his salvation and his perfection fully realized.”122 The necessary cleansing of internal images was the product of the cell’s teaching, and its value could not be replaced by the words of an elder or any other combination of activities. The locative importance of the cell for Evagrius was expressed in the transformative expectations. Evagrius lays out the specific activities and the expected results of faithful adherence to one’s praxis. When demons tempted monks to devalue the cell, Evagrius reminds his audience that the monk’s salvation was intricately tied to whether or not the monk could learn his life-sustaining lessons in the cell. If the panoptic residence was used properly through the adoption of the right actions and 120

Evagrius 1. Bamberger, “Introduction,” in The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, xciii. 122 Ibid. 121

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habits within, then leaving the cell would not be detrimental to the perfection a monk desired. Evagrius does not endorse the idea of itinerant monastic living. The desire to leave one’s cell was dangerous when the impulse was acted upon and the monk gave into the desire, or longing, to live outside of the cell.123 Brakke explains Evagrius’s teachings as a guide through which the monk first learned the strategies of the demons who seek to undermine the introspection and progress of monastic discipline. After gaining command of the demons’ tricks, the monk was then ready to learn Evagrius’s defensive strategies to diminish the power of the demons. The way to manage this ascetic anxiety was to retrain the mind by controlling one’s thoughts through physical labor (plaiting rope and weaving baskets, for example) and by physical confinement in the cell. The thoughts gained dangerous momentum if a monk was unable to resist attention to them (as seen in Evagrius’s description of the monk who sought any excuse to leave his cell and abandon his seclusion). Moreover, if the demonic thoughts evoked an emotional response, then a monk was ruled not by his mind but by his passions, and the demon succeeded. Evagrius’s goal is to heal the “irrational parts of the soul” that tarnish and harm the monk’s intellect that once sought only after God.124 Purity of thought was developed through the willingness to return and remain within the cell where the monk committed himself to prayer and manual labor. Lefebvre provides a framework for us to consider the contemplative qualities of space as areas in which individuals are actors and not observers. Monastics are aware of their space, but “they do not merely enjoy a vision, a contemplation, a spectacle—for they act and situate themselves in space as active participants.”125 Evagrius illustrates how the space of monastic living is a space of activity in which one participates and is not passive: The time of temptation is not the time to leave one’s cell, devising plausible pretexts. Rather, stand there firmly and be patient. Bravely take all that the demon brings upon you, but above all face up to the demon of acedia who is the most grievous of all and who on this account will effect the greatest purification of soul. Indeed to flee and to shun such conflicts schools the spirit in awkwardness, cowardice and fear.126 123

Brakke classifies Evagrian akedia as a demonic desire to leave the cell (Demons, 66). Evagrius is likely criticizing the popularity of non-communal forms of monasticism, which would ascribe superiority to those who live alone and wander between temporary shelters and rely upon the hospitality of communal monasteries and churches. 124 Brakke, Demons, 53; and Praktikos 86 and 89. 125 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 294. 126 Evagrius, Praktikos 28.

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The actual design of the cell was not important in this spiritual context. The central issue was that the cell served as a place where the monk could contain himself and face his spiritual demons. The cell became the monk’s area of prayer. Here the monk was able to see God: “By true prayer a monk becomes another angel, for he ardently longs to see the face of the Father in heaven.”127 Evagrius points to the value of visualizaton and the cultivation of sight within a monastic geography that supported the efforts of ascetic practice. Here, the architecture becomes important, not for what is looked like, but for what it evoked from the individual. Giddens, in reconsidering Foucault’s panoptic structures, casts the disciplinary space as one that is valued not for its physical parts but both for its “relational form” and for how the “farming of space” is essential for retraining.128 The relational quality of monastic space and the participatory engagement by the monk within is found also in the writings of Paul of Tamma.129 Paul provides a valuable Coptic voice to elucidate the development of monastic ideas of sacrality and the use of space.130 Paul’s treatises are known only in Coptic and reflect an indigenous Egyptian perspective from Middle Egypt, as Paul was from the Knopolite nome.131 Paul’s On the Cell is one of two preserved texts primarily dedicated to how one should live life in the cell.132 127

Evagrius, Chapters on Prayer, 113. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 147. Mark Sheridan, “The Development of the Interior Life in Certain Early Monastic Writings in Egypt,” in The Spirituality of Ancient Monasticism, ed. Marek Starowicyski (Cracow: Tyniec, 1995), 96; Sheridan, “Il mondo spiritual e intelleltvale del primo, monachesimo egiziano,” in L’Egitto Cristiano, ed. A. Camplani, 177–216 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1997). Mark Sheridan underscores the value of Paul’s texts when he states “they are precious testimony to what the monks themselves thought about spiritual goals, about the meaning of their life, and what they taught their disciples” (Sheridan, “Development of the Interior Life,” 96). The treatises of Paul can be read alongside the better-known works of Evagrius to consider monastic ideals of the first centuries of Egyptian monasticism. While scholars have suspected a writer in Middle Egypt would inherit fewer ideas from the intellectual traditions of Alexandria, Sheridan has argued convincingly that Paul was strongly influenced by the allegorical school of Alexandria despite his distance from this intellectual center. 130 Paul of Tamma is not mentioned in any sources that were transmitted outside of Egypt: AP, Lausiac History, History of the Monks or the works of Cassian. Paul’s memory and that of his disciple, Ezekiel, have been faithfully preserved in the liturgical service of the Coptic Church. In the liturgy the monks are mentioned during the Commemoration of the Saints, in which their names are preceded by Bishoi (Pishoi) and followed by the two Roman saints, Maximus and Domitius. See The Coptic Liturgy of St. Basil (Victorville, Calif.: St. John the Beloved Publishing House, 1992), 251–55. 131 Tito Orlandi, ed. and trans., Paolo di Tamma: Opere (Rome: C. I. M., 1988). Orlandi argues in Opere for an early fourth-century date for the texts attributed to Paul. His works are far fewer in comparison to those of Shenute (d. 466), the famous abbot of the White Monastery in Akhmim, whose Coptic texts were also not known outside of Egypt. 132 For a translation of On the Cell, see Tim Vivian and Birger Pearson, “Saint Paul of Tamma on the Monastic Cell (de Cella),” Hallel 23.2 (1998): 86– 107. (Hereafter cited as On the Cell and reference is to the line numbers provided by Vivan and Pearson.) Paul’s other works On Humility, On Poverty, Sitting in the Cell, and a letter are found in Tim Vivian, “Saint Paul of 128 129

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On the Cell clearly associates proper praxis within the cell with true spiritual maturity: “Be wise and remain in your dwelling, which is your delight, and your cell will remain with you in your heart as you seek its blessing, and the labor of your cell will go with you to God.”133 This opening statement from the treatise demonstrates the convergence of the cell’s use with its meaning. Paul follows the tradition first expressed in the Life of Antony and later expanded in the Sayings that the cell’s unique role in monastic living was to provide a physical space to train the body and mind in living the holy life. The time in the cell therefore purified the resident through years of discipline. The one who reached a level of spiritual wisdom was able to travel outside the cell without fear of endangering his internal peace. The cell was clearly set aside for the specific work of fulfilling one’s praxis. The cell was “the monk’s tester and teacher,” and Paul claims it was the “anchorite’s wealth.”134 The cell was a healer, the honor of poor men, and a place to fight and overcome the devil.135 In the short treatise referred to by T. Vivian as Sitting in Your Cell, Paul elaborates on the proper activities in the cell. These statements reflect the power of the directive found in other apophthegms: “Go, sit in your cell.” Sitting in your cell do not be idle. Pay attention to how you sit in your cell. Do not act like farm animals being driven by someone, but act like the person driving the animals. Sitting in your cell, keep careful watch over yourself. Do not put your body in the cell while your heart is elsewhere. Sitting in your cell, do not think highly of yourself. Sitting in your cell, allow nothing to chain you down. Let the day’s matters be enough for the day and you will remain at peace. Sitting in your cell, persist with your prayer and your fasting and the struggle taking place in your heart and you will have the qualities of the pure of heart.136 To sit in the cell was the foundational action for all other monastic disciplines, and it is with Paul’s thought that Foucault’s image of selfviewing and cultivation is most clear. In Paul’s thought the cell became the

Tamma: Four Works Concerning Monastic Spirituality,” Coptic Church Review 18:4 (1997): 105– 16. (Hereafter these works cited by title and the line numbers provided in Vivan’s 1997 translation.) Other possible texts written by Paul are discussed by Michel Pezin in “Nouveau fragment copte concernant Paul de Tamma (P. Sorbonne inv. 2632),” in Christianisme d’E´gypte, ed. Jean-Marc Rosenstiehl (Louvain: Peeters, 1995), 15–20. 133 On the Cell 1. 134 Ibid., 36– 37. 135 Ibid., 39; 58; 72; 106. 136 Sitting in Your Cell 108– 11; 113; 115; 117.

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embodiment of one’s ability to control emotions by following a schedule of prayer, fasting, and focus. Paul, like other monastic elders, recognized the danger of turning the adherence to these instructions into a false goal that would lead to pride and jealousy. He warns, “Sitting in your cell, my son, do not be like the hypocrites. Do not turn prayer into work and you will be heard.”137 It was also advisable not to speak with others, but to return to the cell for there “your mind becomes conformed to God.”138 The rhetoric of sacrality of the cell is underscored in Paul’s writings where the cell was exclusively the realm of God. In fact the cell was the preferred location for performative worship. Paul follows other authors in regarding the cell as the only space in which one has certainty that he will encounter God: “For there is no festival like the worship of God in your dwelling. For you will find God in your cell.”139 There is no ambiguity in Paul’s thought about the theological importance of the cell: “If you receive the grace that the cell provides, you will reach God.”140 Seeing God was possible through the adoption of disciplines that monitored one’s passions. In On Humility, practitioners are told to “keep your body holy and the holy angels will come to you and give you joy, and you will see God.”141 On the Cell refers to the cell as a conduit for travel to heaven for the cell was where one would “know God” and keep him within.142 Paul even claims that God would come looking for the monk in his cell, stating that “there is no measure to the [honor] of the cell, and its mysteries are without number.”143 The elevation of the cell as the monastic sanctuary, rather than the altar or the church sanctuary, suggests that monasticism valued private spiritual development above all other forms of piety in the early communities.144 While the weekly communal gatherings were important for the health of the community and for an accounting of sins, the real sanctuary was one that emerged when the monk entered his cell and became part of the holy residence of God. The sacrality of the cell is clear when Paul identifies the monk’s actions in the cell with creating models of the sacred temple furnishings in the heavenly Jerusalem: 137

Ibid., 102– 3. On the Cell 93. 139 Ibid., 12; 13a. 140 Ibid., 15. 141 On Humility 6. 142 On the Cell 2; 34. 143 Ibid., 86; 89. 144 This inversion is unexpected as one sees a plethora of churches in the fifth and sixth centuries, as attested in Peter Grossmann’s catalogue of sites Christliche Architektur in A¨gypten (Leiden: Brill, 2002). One might expect that given monastic resistance to ecclesiastical hegemony that an expression of resistance might be the elevation of the individual cell over that of the cell of the church. 138

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For the incense of God is a wise man in his cell. The altar of God is a wise man in his cell. For his cell is always filled with a sweet smell from the fruit of his good works. The glory of God will appear to him there.145 The association of the monk’s life within the cell with furnishing God’s temple accords well with ideas from Cassian and 1 Peter 2:5 in which monks, or believers, are the living stones used to build God’s temple. Here the interior life in the cell models the interior sanctuary where God dwells. Leslie MacCoull rightly observes that these activities within the cell mimic the actions of a priest performing at the altar.146 The cell was a physical image that modeled a spiritual reality for the monastics; it had spiritual significance for both the practitioner and God. While the Life of Antony and the apophthegms do not so clearly associate the sacrality of the cell with the inner recesses of the temple, there are allusions by Paul to the cell as a sacralized space because God would dwell there. For him the cell became the tabernacle and temple of God. It was here, in a sacred space, where the monk dwelt within the security of the cell. In so doing, the monastic could create an internal cell where God would dwell. This cell could possibly be a manifestation of God as expressed below: Now then, you who are poor, you shall worship God with all your heart and with all your thoughts and with all your strength and with your words, and you shall place your heart in your dwelling as you do in God. . . . For God is limitless. A wise man [in] his cell is without [measure]. For his name is in heaven. His countenance castes forth rays of light from Jerusalem. . . . The measure of a wise man sitting in his cell is the Lord. For he is like God because he is invisible. The wise man in his cell will be hidden from the coming evils. For the wisdom of a wise man understands God’s ways. His heart delights in God. God will give him peace in his cell. Do not forsake God. Do not forsake your cell.147 Paul was a teacher who let his fellow monks know exactly how they should conceive of their cells and what meaning their actions had for their spiritual benefit. The admonition not to “forsake your cell” is found within a long list of benefits from the monastic life lived within the geography of the cell. The transference of tangible sacrality to the interior dwelling may have been a challenge for some to comprehend, but Paul explained the process clearly by 145

On the Cell 52– 55. Leslie MacCoull, “Paul of Tamma and the Monastic Priesthood,” Vigiliae Christianae 53.3 (1999): 316– 20. 147 On the Cell 43– 45; 47–51. 146

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drawing upon the habitus as the basis for building one’s soul while adopting the discipline of sitting in the cell. You shall be a wise man in your cell, building up your soul as you sit in your cell, while glory is with you, while humility is with you, while the fear of God surrounds you day and night, while your cares are thrown down, while your soul and your thoughts watch God in astonishment, gazing at him all the days of your life.148 The value of Paul of Tamma’s writings for reconstructing the spatial discourse in early monastic practice is evident in his allegorical associations between the cell, the monk, and the creation of a space in which God dwelt. Despite Paul’s almost forgotten voice in monastic history, his writings demonstrate the detail with which instructions for cell life were provided. The previously considered passages from The Lives and Sayings allude to the sacrality of the cell and its value as a meeting place for the Divine. However, only Evagrius and, more specifically, Paul of Tamma, articulate the spiritual significance, or desired result, of proper behavior and actions in the cell. The geography of the monastic cell, in their thought, was intended to be flexible in that monks were expected to realize the cell was a space cultivated within as the being in the cell helped to train the mind and the body. The dynamic nature of how to abide within and still leave the cell is what made the monastic cell central in formulating the spiritual life of the monastic.

VI. CONCLUSION The physical space of the cell was an area set aside exclusively for the monastic. As seen in the Sayings, the praxis adopted by an ascetic varied depending upon the individual; such an accepted policy showed tolerance for the struggles that each person faced. However, the location where the praxis was followed remained constant. Regardless of one’s experience, each monk understood the cell was the arena in which true spiritual progress could be made. The conditioning and restructuring of the person by adoption of the monastic habitus illustrates the emphasis placed upon locative transformation. I have suggested that the most complex dimension to the discourse of space in these sources was the belief that actions and images found within the physical cell were in themselves images of the interior, intangible realities of the cell, or dwelling, within. Training in the exterior life would manifest itself in the training of the interior will; by staying within the built cell, one 148

Ibid., 77.

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could learn to stay in the presence of God. The Life of Antony speaks little of how Antony conceived of this final step of interpreting the use of his dwelling, but the sayings of the early Desert Fathers suggest that the monks were already transferring knowledge to encourage monks to seek God, to gaze upon God, and to dwell with God both in and out of the cell. For Paul of Tamma and Evagrius, the internalization and embodiment of the cell within the monastic was the foundation for salvation and progress in the monastic life. For others, this step may have eluded them their whole lives. This might explain why the apophthegms are more practical in their examples and why the writings of Evagrius and Paul exhibit a more developed and highly idealized view of what one could achieve with mental discipline in the cell. The geography of monasticism in early Egyptian literature illustrates a concern for the locative importance of where one lived the angelic life. As more monastic residences and purpose-built structures become visible within the landscape, new concerns emerge that challenge the importance of the cell as a unique component of religious geography. Wills and bills of sale from the documentary record, elaborately painted cells with great variation in execution and programs, and the ubiquity with which monastic space became physically present within the late antique landscape all point to practical concerns that later monastic authorities would need to face. As monastic space became less angelic and more worldly—or susceptible to daily concerns for property, inheritance, and ownership in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries—the more archaeological evidence becomes available for a comparative analysis of the monastic ideals espoused here and the lived monasticism as experienced by monastics striving toward or departing from the monastic habitus.

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 792– 813. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990527

St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century PATRICIA APPELBAUM

A

English-speaking Protestant of the mid-nineteenth century, preparing to explore continental Europe for the first time, might have picked up Octavian Blewitt’s 1850 guidebook to central Italy. Along with its descriptions of Rome, Florence, and Ravenna, the book noted that “Assisi is the sanctuary of early Italian art.”1 A similar book in 1905, however, declared, “Assisi is the city of St. Francis.” Its author added, “The little town has itself become a Religion.”2 For the Anglophone public today, Francis of Assisi is the most familiar of saints other than, perhaps, the Virgin Mary. He is as beloved among Protestants as among Catholics. His image is instantly recognizable and appears well beyond ecclesial confines in such venues as garden statuary and greeting cards. How did this transformation take place? How did a medieval Catholic saint become a fixture of both Protestantism and popular culture? While the complete story is too long to trace here, I shall argue that the figure of Francis emerged into public consciousness among non-Catholics in the Anglophone world over the course of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Large-scale cultural currents, which I discuss below, and particular characteristics of Francis were factors in his acceptance and appropriation. The image that emerged during that process was not uniform, nor was it identical with the popular image of Francis today: for non-Catholics, Francis was not only a historical figure but also a subject for imaginative elaboration, personal relationship, and collective appropriation. I draw evidence from a range of texts, including learned and general-interest periodicals, travel books, popular biographies, and literary essays.3 The appropriation of St. Francis occurred in the context of an ambivalent Protestant encounter with Catholicism—an encounter that began as early as N

1

Octavio Blewitt, A Hand-book for Travellers in Central Italy (London: Murray, 1850), 265. Edward Hutton, Cities of Umbria (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1905), 23. Cf. Guide to Italy and Sicily, 6th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911): “The town . . . owes its celebrity and interest entirely to St. Francis” (55). 3 The history of visual imagery is too extensive to incorporate here and will constitute another phase of this research. 2

Patricia Appelbaum is Adjunct Professor of Religion at Springfield College.

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the late eighteenth century but gained force after 1830. As Jenny Franchot has argued, the encounter was marked by both approach and avoidance, attraction and repulsion. Franchot’s analysis identifies deeper cultural tensions that I do not address here. It is clear, though, that Roman Catholicism retained its historic role in the Protestant mind as the threatening other. Anti-Catholicism was widespread and sometimes violent, as is well known.4 But many non-Catholics responded to the encounter with curiosity, appreciation, and selective appropriation. Travel and genteel education exposed them to the surprising attractions of pre-Reformation art and architecture. Midcentury travel literature dwelt on Catholic peasant and urban life as well. Some writers of fiction—notably the New England Unitarians Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe—explored such Catholic themes as confession and intercession, and a few Anglophone artists and writers formed expatriate colonies in Italy. A few prominent public conversions, and a steady stream of less visible ones, gave further evidence of the Roman church’s attractions. Ambivalence revealed itself in many dimensions. Catholic power attracted and puzzled Protestants as historians struggled to account for the church’s survival “after [its] having been directed offstage nearly four centuries earlier.” Saints proved similarly puzzling; Franchot argues that Protestant writers came to terms with them as heroic individuals acting in spite of, or even against, the church.5 Catholic worship posed yet another problem. The Oxford Movement, beginning in the 1830s, generated controversy as it encouraged the revival of pre-Reformation practices among Anglicans. At about the same time, American mainline Protestants developed a “deeply mixed fascination for Roman Catholic worship.” As Ryan Smith has recently observed, Gothic buildings, visual symbolism such as crosses, and liturgical practices such as processions were derided as “popery” in the 1830s, but they were common in mainstream Protestantism by the 1890s.6 A related phenomenon was the medievalist movement, which was well established in Britain by 1850, reached its height in the United States after the Civil War, and remained influential long after that time. Medievalism was not only an artistic movement but also a far-reaching cultural one. 4 Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California, 1994). Peter Williams described a similar ambivalence in his “A Mirror for Unitarians: Catholicism and Culture in Nineteenth Century New England Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970). Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), provides useful background. 5 Franchot, Roads to Rome, 5, 202– 3, 256. 6 Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 8, 15, 123.

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Against the dominant ideology of progress and the growing industrial economy, medievalism appealed to a desire for simplicity, self-reliance, and closeness to nature. Local and national identity were thought to be more deeply rooted in that context. Proponents regarded the Middle Ages as a time of almost childlike innocence, fresher and purer than the jaded nineteenth century. Gothic architecture shared in the ideal of purity because it followed forms found in nature. More significantly, it relied on human craft, in contrast to the anonymous production of the industrial model. Both medievalism and the encounter with Catholicism contributed to a latecentury phenomenon that T. J. Jackson Lears called antimodernism. Lears linked antimodernism to a larger “transformation of culture” that I do not address here. But his work captures the mental world of educated Victorians who reacted against the alienation and impersonality of modernity. For antimodernists, the Middle Ages represented authentic experience and cultural unity. Peasants, saints, and mystics embodied innocence, simplicity (both material and spiritual), faith, imagination, vitality, nature, access to sacred mystery, and “primal irrationality,” together with, paradoxically, moral strength and self-control. In this reading Francis epitomized the medieval ideal for late-century antimodernists.7 Protestantism struggled with modernity in another dimension as well. Nineteenth-century challenges to traditional belief are well known, among them the rising authority of science, the theory of evolution, and the historical criticism of the Bible. At the same time, a popular theology of consistent, all-forgiving divine love began to displace both Calvinism and evangelical calls to conversion. One consequence of these shifts was a reconsideration of the idea of Jesus. On the one hand, historical criticism generated interest in the historical Jesus while intensifying questions about the miraculous and the supernatural. On the other hand, many liberals, “seekers,” and dissenters distinguished between Jesus himself and church teachings about him, retaining a sense of personal relationship to Jesus even when they drifted away from formal ecclesial structures.8 The result was a widespread emphasis on the human Jesus, his teachings, and his love. A final factor was the ideology of nature. Idealization of the natural world was available in the nineteenth century as a response to disaffection with urban and industrial growth and as resistance to religious authority. It drew 7 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xiii, 142– 44, 151–54, 161. 8 See, for example, Richard Wightman Fox, Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 283. On “seekers,” see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: Harper, 2005).

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not only on the long romantic tradition but also on the newer transcendentalist movement and, later in the century, on nostalgia for the vanishing wilderness.9 Francis’s close association with nature was a far less prominent theme in the nineteenth century than it is in the twenty-first, but it was a persistent undercurrent. Distinctive among saints, it undoubtedly resonated with nineteenth-century sensibilities, even among those who resisted formal religious ties. Within these contexts, I want to look more closely at the process by which Anglophone non-Catholics came to know about Francis and affirmed his legitimacy and at the images of Francis they constructed.

I. THE LIFE OF FRANCIS While a substantial number of Francis’s own writings have survived, they offer only scattered biographical details. For fuller accounts of his life, nineteenth-century authors relied on the official biography written by St. Bonaventure in 1266 and on three early Franciscan narratives—Thomas of Celano’s Vita Prima (1228) and Vita Secunda (1246 – 1247), and the Legenda Trium Sociorum, or Legend of the Three Companions (1246), attributed to Brothers Leo, Rufino, and Angelo.10 The Fioretti, or Little Flowers (ca. 1375), was a major source of folklore and legends about Francis, which some nineteenth-century writers took as evocations of his personality, if not as historical fact. Important later sources were the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum (1643– ) and the history of the order compiled by the Franciscan Luke Wadding beginning in 1625.11 The following is the story of Francis’s life as it is most often told. Francesco Bernardone was born in Assisi in 1181 or 1182. Christened Giovanni (John), he was renamed Francis at an early age. His father was a wealthy cloth merchant, and his mother came from a prominent family. As a young man Francis was lighthearted, outgoing, and extravagant. In his early twenties he moved gradually toward religious commitment, following experiences of battle, imprisonment, and illness. He also tried to identify 9 For detailed historical and theoretical discussion, see Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and her Reconsidering Nature Religion (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2002). 10 None of these was in any sense unbiased, of course; in particular, all reflected political agendas for the future of the Franciscan Order and authority within it. For a more complete bibliography see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 593– 613; Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady, eds., Francis and Clare: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist, 1982), 6– 10, 245–46. 11 Luke Wadding, Annales Ordinis Minorum, 8 vols., 1625–1654, and his Scriptores Ordinis Minorum, 1650.

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with the poor and sick: he was said to have exchanged clothes with a beggar in Rome for a day, and to have embraced and kissed a leper. Francis’s decisive turn toward religion, however, occurred when he heard a divine call to “rebuild my church,” which he took to mean physical reconstruction of a crumbling chapel known as the Portiuncula. To fund this enterprise, he sold a quantity of his father’s cloth and his own horse. Confronted by his angry father, Francis gave back all of his father’s property—not only the price of the cloth, but, in a dramatic gesture, all the clothes he was wearing. Henceforth, declared Francis, his only father would be God. Francis soon gathered a group of close companions whose intention was to be poor and to serve the poor. They supported themselves by manual work and begging, accepting only in-kind gifts, never money. In 1208 Francis sought approval from Pope Innocent III for a simple rule of life. The pope at first refused, then approved the rule and the fellowship, including their itinerant preaching. Four years later a young noblewoman, Clare, left her father’s house to adopt a life of poverty similar to the brothers’; however, she and the women’s order she founded were cloistered. Later Francis created a “third order” for people living in the world. As the orders grew and became more regularized, Francis gradually lost or relinquished supervision of them. Many stories of Francis’s acts and speech have survived. The “Canticle of the Sun” is generally accepted as authentic to Francis. In it, he praises God for “Brother Sun,” “Sister Water,” and other elements of the natural world. Of the legends, a favorite was, and is, the story of Francis preaching to the birds, which grew silent to listen to him. This tale was often retold and frequently depicted in art. Other tales described Francis’s often miraculous interactions with birds and animals, his love of holy obedience, and his willingness to suffer. His narrative of “true joy,” for example, imagined his brothers casting him out into the mud and cold. Francis and his followers also made several missionary journeys to Muslim lands, the most notable being a visit to the embattled Sultan of Egypt in 1219. Toward the end of his life Francis was said to have received the stigmata— wounds in his hands, feet, and sides resembling the wounds of Christ. Signs of his identification with Christ, they were said to have been given by an angel as Francis prayed on a mountaintop. Francis died in October 1226. His death was immediately followed by controversy among Franciscans between the early vision and a more systematized order. There is neither space nor need to describe here the subsequent history of the order or the history of Franciscan studies. Suffice it to say that the order survived, grew, and changed; that it was the subject of both praise and criticism; and that most Protestants from Martin Luther onward regarded religious orders as unnecessary at best and ungodly at worst.

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II. PROTESTANT APPROPRIATION: HISTORY AND IDENTITY But Protestant thinking about Francis and his followers began to change in the mid-nineteenth century. To begin with a chronological summary: a body of literature about Francis written by non-Catholics built up slowly from the 1840s until about 1870. Around that time—the year of the First Vatican Council and the final unification of Italy, an era of increasing prosperity and of growing antimodernism—the pace of publication increased. The sevenhundredth anniversary of Francis’s birth, in 1881, produced a new spate of scholarly literature and popular works. Thus by 1888 it was possible for a book reviewer to say, “The story of St. Francis has been fully and frequently related.”12 This was not a uniform process—some writers in the 1880s and 1890s still had to explain who Francis was and why Protestants should be interested in him—but it was the general trajectory.13 One of the earliest sources of this process was Protestant historicism. As the discipline of church history emerged through the first half of the nineteenth century, Protestants gradually, and not without controversy, came to realize that the history of the pre-Reformation church pertained also to them. Thus the earliest non-Catholic works on Francis—and many later ones as well— present themselves in the first instance as historical projects. Perhaps the most important of these for popular appropriation was an essay by Sir James Stephen, a government official, an evangelical Anglican, and, at that time, an avocational historian. His essay, published in 1847, was itself a review of two French biographies and made reference to an unfinished “History of the Monastic Orders” by the poet Robert Southey. The essay appeared in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic and was reprinted in an 1849 collection.14 Stephen first had to argue that the monastic orders were 12 “Francis of Assisi,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1888, 11 (review of Abby Langdon Alger, ed., The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi, Translated with a Brief Account of the Life of St. Francis, [Boston: Roberts Bros., 1887]). 13 See, for example, “Saint Francis of Assisi,” Lend a Hand 1:5 (May 1886, 277– 83), 277; William John Knox Little, St. Francis of Assisi: His Times, Life, and Work (London: Isbister, 1897), 1– 3. 14 James Stephen, “St. Francis of Assisi,” Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 86 (1847): 1– 42; [Stephen], “[Life of St. Francis],” Littell’s Living Age 14 (1847): 348 –64; [Stephen], “St. Francis of Assisi,” Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature and Art 12 (1847), 83–105; Stephen, “Saint Francis of Assisi,” in Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography (London: Longman, Green, Brown, and Longmans, 1849), 89–153. The biographies he cited were Emile Chavin de Malan, Histoire de Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris: Sagnier et Bray, 1845); and E. J. Dele´cluse, St. Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris, 1844), (i.e. E.-J. Dele´cluze, Gregoire VII, saint Franc¸ois d’Assise, saint Thomas d’Aquin [Paris: J. Labitte, 1844]). Stephen was later Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and was the grandfather of Virginia Woolf (L. S. [Leslie Stephen], “Stephen, Sir James,” Dictionary of National Biography [London: Smith, Elder, 1898], 54:163– 64; Lyndall Gordon, “Woolf [ne´e Stephen], (Adeline) Virginia,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 60:257–66).

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“legitimate object[s] of ecclesiastical history.” He attended to the sources on Francis, noting that they were “more than usually copious and authentic,” and he looked to rational and historical rather than spiritual causes for events.15 In this context he recounted and reflected on the story of the saint’s life. Stephen was not alone in his work. At least three general histories of the church or of monasticism were published between 1855 and 1861.16 Charles Forbes de Montalembert’s Les Moines d’occident depuis saint Benoıˆt jusqu’a` saint Bernard (The Monks of the West, from St. Benedict to St. Bernard) began publication in 1860 and appeared in English translation within a year.17 General ecclesiastical histories, such as Henry Hart Milman’s, also included biographies of saints.18 And in 1856 the German historian Karl von Hase published a life of St. Francis frequently cited by Anglophone writers.19 Thus scholars and educated readers encountered Francis through the study of history. Protestants found much with which to identify. Stephen, for example, argued that the Franciscan order survived its founder’s death because it was a forerunner of the Reformation.20 Franciscans, he said, restored religious purity, engaged with the world, and sided with the weak and humble. Above all, they fostered “the Mission and the Pulpit”—a Protestant trope that was repeated as late as 1886.21 The historian C. K. Adams wrote in 1870 that Francis’s purpose was “the work of a Reformation in the church” in the 15

Stephen, “St. Francis” (1847), 1 –2. Karl von Hase, A History of the Christian Church, trans. from the 7th German edition by Charles E. Blumenthal and Conway P. Wing (New York: Appleton, 1855); and the works by Montalembert and Milman discussed below. 17 Charles Forbes de Montalembert, Les moines d’Occident depuis saint Benoıˆt jusqu’a` saint Bernard, 7 vols. (Paris: Lecoffre, 1860– 77); Montalembert, The Monks of the West, from St. Benedict to St. Bernard, Authorised translation (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1861–79); Montalembert, The Monks of the West, from St. Benedict to St. Bernard, vol. 1 (Boston: Marlier, [1860?]). 18 Henry Hart Milman, History of Latin Christianity, Including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicolas V, 8 vols. (New York: Sheldon, 1860–62). Some later magazines use almost direct quotes from this; it was probably a source. The section on Francis was not changed for the revised edition of 1903 (Milman, History of Latin Christianity, Including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicolas V, 8 v. in 4 [New York: Armstrong, 1903]). Abbe´ Migne’s magisterial Theological Encyclopedia was also in progress; Arnold and Sabatier referred to it (see discussion below), but few others did. 19 Karl von Hase, Franz von Assis: Ein Heiligenbild (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Ha¨rtel, 1856). One American source mentions a Histoire de St. Francois d’Assise (Paris, 1861) by “E. Daurignac” (possibly J. M. S. Daurignac, a pseudonym of J. M. S. Orliac); see [M. G. Gage], “Saint Francis of Assisi,” Christian Examiner 78 (January 1865, 47– 64): 47, 50. Candide Chalippe’s Vie de Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris, 1728) was translated in 1853 (cited in Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order, 598). It seems to have occasioned little popular notice. 20 Stephen, “St. Francis” (1847), 40–42. 21 Stephen, “St. Francis” (1847), 41; “Saint Francis of Assisi,” Lend a Hand, 283; see also [C.K. Adams], “St. Francis and His Time,” The New Englander 29 (July 1870, 371– 99), 399. 16

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period when “the human intellect [sought] to rise up against the Roman yoke and throw it off.”22 Adams’s Baptist colleague Samuel L. Caldwell added, “There is a lesson, too, of the power there is in preaching.”23 Later authors suggested that Franciscans were the Puritans or Methodists of their day; one source in 1884 went so far as to compare him with Dwight Moody.24 This proto-Protestant image of Francis, then, provided both a point of connection and a sense of reassurance for Protestants ambivalent about Catholicism. The image was not uncontested, however. For example, the Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (1870), whose editorial committee was a veritable “who’s who” of evangelical American Protestant scholars, was sharply critical of most claims about Francis. The Cyclopedia cited the documentary sources on the saint, but found in them evidence of an unstable and immoral figure. Francis “imagin[ed]” he heard a call from heaven and “pretended” to perform miracles. The pope “regarded Francis as a madman” but approved the Franciscan order for his own cynical purposes. His approval also served Francis’s own “ambition.” As for Francis’s moral character, the author comments, “Romish casuists say that [Francis’s sale of his father’s goods] was justified by the simplicity of his heart. It is clear that his religious training had not instructed him in the ten commandments.” Nevertheless, the Cyclopædia mentioned the stories about birds with a touch of sentimentality, even while condemning the potential for pantheism. And it made an entirely favorable judgment of Francis’s emphasis on love.25 Among more sympathetic readers, too, the contested areas of Francis’s story were those that were most distant from Protestantism. These readers struggled with official Catholicism, Francis’s obedience to the pope, the meaning of the divine command to “rebuild my church,” the power structures of the Franciscan order, corruption within the order, the mutilation of the human body in ascetic 22 [Adams], “St. Francis,” 382, 371; see also Samuel L. Caldwell, “The Mendicant Orders [St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans],” Baptist Quarterly 11:2 (April 1877, 233– 56), 255– 56; “St. Francis of Assisi,” Littell’s Living Age 173:2240 (May 28, 1887, 515– 25): 515– 17, 520–21. This article claims to be a reprint from the London Quarterly Review. 23 Caldwell, “Mendicant Orders,” 256; see also “St. Francis and the Franciscans,” American Journal of Education, National Series, 8:30 (June 15, 1873, 393–400), 400, and “Saint Francis of Assisi,” Lend a Hand, 280. 24 “St. Francis of Assisi,” Littell’s, 522; “[St. Francis of Assisi],” Quarterly Review 189:377 (1899, 1 –31), 10– 11, 22; Richard Heath, “The Crown of Thorns that Budded,” Contemporary Review 46 (1884: 838 –55), 843. Heath also, however, associated Francis with “Soul” and the sacredness of the universe (838, 847). Philip Schaff’s standard-setting encyclopedia in 1882 devoted one sober page to Francis, but gave twice as much space to St. Patrick, emphasizing his role as a missionary (J. G. V. Engelhardt, “Francis of Assisi, St.,” vol. 1, p. 830; Albrecht Vogel, “Benedict of Nursia,” vol. 1, pp. 240–41; Robert W. Hall, “Patrick, St.,” vol. 3, pp. 1763– 65, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Religious Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal, and Practical Theology, 3 vols. [New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1882]). 25 “Francis of Assisi,” in Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, ed. John McClintock and James Strong (New York: Harper, 1870), 648 –49.

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practice and in the stigmata, and Francis’s apparent disregard for ordinary morality. Difficult as these issues were, however, non-Catholic thinkers did not ignore them; their struggles are consistent with the pattern of attraction and repulsion. In the end, most followed Stephen, consciously or not, by attempting to distinguish usable parts of the Franciscan tradition from “the sophistries or the superstitions of the ages in which they flourished.”26 Or, as a popular article forty years later put it, they admired Francis despite the fact that his teaching was “marred by certain errors of Popery.”27

III. TRAVEL AND ART Anglophone Protestants also encountered Francis through travel. Travel on the European continent, formerly the province of the wealthy on the one hand and artistic expatriates on the other, became increasingly accessible to the middle classes during the nineteenth century, with particularly high numbers after 1870.28 As Malcolm Bradbury has argued, tourists before about 1840 had gone abroad to explore, to discover what was to them the unknown.29 For mid- and late-century travelers, however, the way had already been charted. Culture displaced discovery as the object of the search—“culture” being both the appropriation of intellectual and aesthetic objects and the experience of a whole way of life.30 Travel was a ritual, a visit to cultural “shrines,” the encounter with which was expected to have a transforming effect.31 Assisi was not among the earliest of these shrines. Often bypassed in the midcentury period as tourists explored the larger cities, it appears to have become more accessible at the same time public interest in it was increasing.32 Thus John Murray’s 1857 travel guide read, “There are no inns, properly 26

Stephen, “St. Francis,” 1. “St. Francis of Assisi,” Littell’s, 515–25. 28 In 1865 some 40,000 Americans traveled to Europe (Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism [London: Secker & Warburg, 1991], 105), while in 1891, 90,000 Americans returned from abroad through New York alone (Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel [New York: Viking, 1996], 180). 29 Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages, 7, 145–47; Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3– 4. For American tourists, travel also shaped a sense of national identity. Social inequality, monarchy, and state churches contrasted with democracy; poverty and religious “superstition” with respectable Protestantism (Baker, 202– 24). 30 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 7; Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages, 155– 57. Buzard’s idea of “anti-tourism”—the search for authenticity in the out-of-the-way places, often associated with poverty, peasantry, and pre-modernity—has suggestive implications for travelers’ attraction to St. Francis, but is too complex to document in the present paper. 31 William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 19 and passim; Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages, 188. 32 Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims, 60; Buzard, Beaten Track, 47– 49. 27

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speaking, at Assisi.”33 By 1874, though, things had changed enough that Henry James could comment, “[Baedeker] was at Assisi in force.”34 Appropriating culture meant, in large measure, looking at art. Developing artistic taste and judgment was an essential part of nineteenth-century cultural education; art was understood to be a manifestation of the highest and best human sensibilities.35 Thus it is not surprising that travel guidebooks concentrated overwhelmingly on the works of art to be found in any given place. Indeed, these books could be myopic about other meanings of the sites in question. Murray, for example, advised tourists to stop for a rest at an active Franciscan monastery, but he remarked that it “has little to interest the traveller” beyond a handful of paintings.36 One of the earliest essays on Francis in English addressed cultural interests, even while drawing on Stephen as a source. This essay appeared in the British writer Anna Jameson’s 1850 collection Legends of the Monastic Orders.37 Originally a guide for the growing masses of Anglophone tourists, this book was a standard work in art history through the end of the century. Jameson wanted to explain “those works of Art which the churches and galleries of the Continent . . . have rendered familiar to us as objects of taste while they have remained unappreciated as objects of thought.” She went so far as to say that saints and other sacred figures “have, for us, a deep, a lasting, interest.”38 Thus she offered sacred art to the (generally Protestant) traveler as a vehicle, not only of culture and beauty, but also of religious meaning. 33 John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy. Part I: Southern Tuscany and Papal States (London: John Murray, 1857), 255. 34 Henry James, Transatlantic Sketches (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), 332, originally published as “A Chain of Italian Cities,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1874. “Baedeker” is a reference to a popular series of travel guides. 35 On the evolving role of clergy and religion in art appreciation, see David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford, 1999), 290, 317–19. 36 Murray, Handbook for Travellers, 257. Nathaniel Hawthorne took a similar view in 1858 (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from Hawthorne’s Note-Books in France and Italy, vol. 1, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Works, 19 vols. [Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872], 257–61). 37 Mrs. (Anna Brownell Murphy) Jameson, Legends of the Monastic Orders, as Represented in the Fine Arts, Sacred and Legendary Art, 2nd series (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850); Jameson, Legends, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, n.d.). Jameson referred to Stephen on pages xv and 235. Like Margaret Oliphant (below), Jameson supported herself and a number of family members by writing. She lived independently, apart from a brief unsuccessful marriage. She produced significant work in travel writing and women’s rights as well as in art history, her primary field (Claire Barwell, “Jameson, Anna Brownell,” in The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women, ed. Anne Crawford, Tony Hayter, and Ann Hughes [Detroit: Gale, 1983], 221; Judith Johnston, “Jameson [ne´e Murphy], Anna Brownell,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 29:752–54; H. Neville Maugham, The Book of Italian Travel [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1903], 95). 38 Jameson, Legends (1852), xvii.

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Jameson’s treatment of St. Francis was balanced and extensive.39 Monastic subjects in general were problematic for Jameson, since she accepted the thenprevalent Protestant view of monasticism as unnatural, ugly, and painfully ascetic.40 But, like Stephen, she argued that monasticism was historically important. As for Franciscans, she thought their religious sensibility was overly focused on retribution instead of love, and, unlike many later writers, she acknowledged some of the more bizarre qualities of Franciscan legend.41 Yet she saw in Francis early signs of the “tender spirit of Christianity.” She admired his inclusion of animals in the divine life and the “mission of Christ.” The section on Francis is illustrated with a version of Francis preaching to the birds.42 Jameson and many others linked Francis to Giotto (1276–1337), a hinge between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Giotto’s painting appealed to the nineteenth-century medievalist aesthetic and its valorization of simplicity, 39

Ibid., 227 –38, 239– 69, and introduction. See, for example, G. H. Calvert, Scenes and Thoughts in Europe, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, 1863): “The fictions of the Catholic Church are mostly unsuitable to the Arts; nor can martyrs or emaciated anchorites be subjected to the laws of Beauty” (172). Jameson urged the reader not to be led astray by the vogue for medieval art: “Ugliness is ugliness; the quaint is not the graceful” (Jameson, Legends, 1852, xviii). 41 Jameson, Legends (1852), xxii, 269. 42 Ibid., 261 –62; see also xxii– xxiii, 263– 69. 40

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innocence, and unselfconscious passion.43 At the same time, Giotto was also recognized as an innovator and a humanist, one who departed from the conventions of medieval drawing to depict individual faces and spontaneous gestures. Some of his most important work depicted St. Francis, notably scenes from the saint’s life and death—found in the church of Santa Croce in Florence—and a cycle of twenty-eight frescoes portraying his life—located in the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. Thus anyone looking at Giotto’s work for aesthetic or historical purposes was exposed to narratives about St. Francis. More than that, though, many commentators attributed Giotto’s innovations precisely to his effort to portray St. Francis, assuming that the saint’s humanness and naturalness required a new mode of expression. This idea was circulating as early as the 1850s. It was most fully articulated, however, in a later work—Henry Thode’s widely cited Franz von Assisi und die Anfa¨nge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien (Francis of Assisi and the Beginnings of Renaissance Art in Italy), published in 1885.44 “The men whose hearts glowed with new and burning love for Christ could not rest satisfied with the stiff and hard types of the old Greek art,” wrote one reviewer. And, “it is not till we come to Giotto that we realize all that art owes to Francis.”45 Art, then, offered a legitimate approach to sainthood for ambivalent Protestants, and Giotto’s work offered a legitimate channel to Catholic art. For artistic commentators Francis was a realistic, human figure, a simple and passionate soul, a model of premodern authenticity. They saw in him the unity of culture and spirit that they attributed to the Middle Ages. Yet he also represented a break with the past, recalling the Francis of reform. And he signified for them a true, “tender” Christianity that implicitly transcended institutions.

IV. LITERATURE AND SPIRITUALITY Thoughtful Victorians also encountered Francis in literature. Their first and most important source was Dante, a literary sine qua non for the nineteenth century and a locus for Protestant exploration of Catholicism. The influential American writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Eliot Norton undertook translations of his works beginning in 1859, supplementing the 43

Nineteenth-century critics associated these qualities with the religious and political movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and, increasingly, with St. Francis himself; see, for example, H. Taine, Italy: Florence and Venice, trans. J. Durand (New York: Leopoldt & Holt, 1869), 21. 44 Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfa¨nge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien (Berlin: Grote, 1885). See also Jameson, Legends (1852), xxii; Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Fourteenth Century (London: J. Murray, 1864). 45 “Francis of Assisi and the Renaissance,” Church Quarterly Review 26 (July 1888: 340– 61), 350, 361. See also H. Taine, Italy; Caldwell, “Mendicant Orders,” 252–53; Heath, “Crown of Thorns,” 848; T. H. Darlow, “M. Sabatier’s Life of St. Francis,” Expositor 9 (March 1894): 222–31.

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standard 1814 version by Henry Francis Cary. Together with James Russell Lowell, they formed the Dante Society in 1881.46 Readers of the Divine Comedy (1321) encountered Francis in the Paradiso, primarily in canto 11, which reflects on his marriage to Lady Poverty. But he was also understood as a forerunner to Dante, particularly through the wellknown work of Fre´de´ric Ozanam. A Catholic social critic and historian, Ozanam argued in 1852 that Francis was the first Italian vernacular poet, and as such was both the precursor of Dante and a voice of the people.47 (Jameson made a similar point, although Ozanam was more frequently cited.48) This argument was not universally accepted; one American magazine commented in 1865 that Francis’s writing was full of “life and fervor, but little more” and described one fragment as “but a pensive, monotonous wail.”49 On the other hand, an influential essay by the poet and critic Matthew Arnold followed Ozanam in describing Francis’s poetry as the “humble upper waters of a mighty stream.”50 Arnold’s essay, “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” summarized Francis for a generation of literary readers. First published in 1864, it remained in print until at least 1932. The essay reflected on the breadth and richness of historical Catholicism compared to dry Protestant rationality and went on to compare a late Roman “pagan” text with St. Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun.” Arnold thought pagan religion was reasoned, cheerful, and anchored in present reality. But St. Francis, he wrote, understood suffering, particularly as experienced by common people. Francis responded to suffering, not with his senses, but with his “heart and imagination,” and the “Canticle” offered, not superficial cheerfulness, but joy.51 This, by implication, was true Christianity, transcending suffering rather than denying it. Arnold’s argument recalled once again the simplicity and emotional fervor that outsiders attributed to medieval Catholicism. The Francis who is the source of vernacular poetry is expressive, often spontaneous, and full of imagination and feeling. But he is also poor, humble, and acquainted with suffering. He is implicitly Christ-like without the strictures of organized Christianity. And as a man of the people, speaking the language of the 46

Williams, “Mirror for Unitarians,” 79, 224. Antoine Fre´de´ric Ozanam, Les poe`tes franciscains en Italie au treizie`me sie`cle (Paris: Lecoffre, 1852). 48 Jameson, Legends (1852), xii, 228–29. 49 Gage, “St. Francis,” 62–63. 50 Matthew Arnold, “Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment,” Cornhill 9 (April 1864): 422– 35; Arnold, Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1865); Arnold, Essays in Criticism, First Series (London: Macmillan, 1932); Arnold, “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” in Matthew Arnold: Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962), 212–31. The quote is found on page 224 of the Super edition. 51 Arnold, “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” 227. 47

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people, he is associated with the emergence of Italian national identity, particularly as expressed in language, folk life, and artistic traditions. Arnold was one of many religious liberals, seekers, discontents, and utopians who contributed—alongside more conventional Protestants—to the appropriation and interpretation of Francis. We have already encountered some of these dissenters. Hase, the biographer, was an anti-Catholic polemicist of liberal orientation as well as a historian. Montalembert, the son of a Scottish convert to Catholicism, was a liberal Catholic and an advocate for medieval French art and architecture. Ozanam was a friend of Montalembert and was also the founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a religious order devoted to serving the poor. New England Unitarians were early participants in the conversation.52 Arnold resisted the rationalist Anglicanism of his upbringing, but read widely in religious texts, including the Bible, the Imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ) of Thomas a` Kempis, the Bhagavad-Gita, and American transcendentalist writings.53 These seekers were instrumental in establishing another image of Francis: as imitation of Christ. In him they saw a historical figure, an ordinary human being, who had conformed almost perfectly to Jesus’ example. “[Francis’s] life was beatitude, an embodiment of the Sermon on the Mount,” claimed a writer in a Unitarian periodical.54 To be sure, Protestants of a more orthodox stripe cautioned against identifying Francis fully with Christ.55 For seekers, though, Francis’s human imitation of Jesus meant that other ordinary people might in turn emulate him—even, or especially, if they were alienated from the wider church. And, in the face of contemporary anxieties about biblical criticism, Francis’s life reinforced arguments for Jesus’ historicity. The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan (1823–92) developed this idea most fully. In 1866, when he published his essay, “Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise” (St. Francis of Assisi), he was already well-known as a religious liberal and author of the Vie de Je´sus (Life of Jesus) (1863)—roundly criticized by historian Philip Schaff.56 The essay on Francis was widely cited from the French, reissued in 1884, and published in English translation in 1891.57 52 In addition to Longfellow and Norton, see Gage, “St. Francis”; C. Farrington, “St. Francis of Assisi,” Old and New 2:2 (August 1870), 159–64. 53 Ruth ap Roberts, Arnold and God (Berkeley: University of California, 1983), 77–79, 104–9. 54 Farrington, “St. Francis,” 164; cf. Gage, “Saint Francis,” 50. 55 Milman, History of Latin Christianity, 5:269– 70; [Adams], “St. Francis,” 395. 56 Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, rev. ed. (New York, 1890), 1:853–60, 862 –63, in Klaus Penzel, ed., Philip Schaff: Historian and Ambassador of the Universal Church: Selected Writings (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1991); Penzel, Schaff, 188– 89. The enduring value to liberals of Renan’s book is suggested by the Modern Library edition of 1927, reprinted in 1955, with an introduction by John Haynes Holmes, a prominent Unitarian minister, editor, and pacifist. 57 Ernest Renan, “Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise, e´tude historique d’apre`s le Dr. Karl Hase,” Journal des De´bats 20–21 Aouˆt 1866, repr. in Nouvelles e´tudes d’histoire religieuse, 1e`re ed. (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1884), 323– 51. The references that follow are to the English translation (“Francis d’Assisi

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Renan’s essay was a meditation on Hase’s biography. He began with the question of historical authenticity, which he thought was well established by both Hase and Hase’s French translator, Charles Berthoud. Yet, said Renan, the historical record presented a figure of legendary proportions. He argued against too narrow an interpretation of the record, maintaining instead that the legends pointed to genuine qualities of Francis’s character. Renan presented Francis as a perfect image of Jesus—the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels and the Sermon on the Mount. The life of Francis, he said, is indirect evidence of the truth of the gospels; it showed that Jesus’ way of living was possible. Francis sought only “primitive Christian perfection,” and his followers were simple people “with very little theology.”58 He possessed such purity that he soared above dogma and church. He did not even acknowledge the existence of evil. Yet he was not unearthly: he saw meaning in all of nature, and he was a man of feeling. Here Renan echoed Matthew Arnold, but where Arnold contrasted Francis’s compassion with late Roman religion, Renan contrasted it with Buddhism. At the same time, his language echoed the longstanding Protestant tropes of primitivism and direct response to the gospel. Renan also contrasted Francis with the nineteenth century—its materialism, its cynicism, its mediocrity. He argued that Francis’s central idea was that “to possess is wrong.” Christian poverty was not deprivation, however, but freedom, immersed in nature and dependent on God. Renan argued that Francis’s liberated poverty eventually had a profound effect, not only on religious freedom, as might be expected, but also on art, which calls for lofty ideals and a communal sensibility. “I cannot conceive what a society founded on the selfishness of individual possession can produce that is great.” Thus by embracing the gospel of poverty, Francis made a lasting impact “which our great men of action and our capitalists will never be capable of.”59 This anti-capitalist version of Francis reappeared with great force in the 1890s, as we shall see. In 1870, literature and spiritual seeking converged in the first book-length treatment of Francis’s life written in English. Its author, Margaret Oliphant, combined a historical reading with imaginative and spiritual interpretation. Oliphant had been Montalembert’s Edinburgh translator. She was also a novelist who asked searching religious questions in response to her own unconventional life.60

and the Franciscans, a.d. 1182,” in Renan, Leaders of Christian and Anti-Christian Thought, London: Mathieson, 1891, 108–27). 58 Renan, “Francis,” 116, 122. 59 Ibid., 116, 117, 118, 122. Heath made a similar argument about deprivation and freedom, “Crown of Thorns,” 855. 60 Margaret Oliphant, Francis of Assisi, Sunday Library (London: Macmillan, 1870). Raised as a Scottish Nonconformist, Oliphant ultimately found orthodox theology inadequate. Her husband, an

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Oliphant’s Francis appeared in a series directed at a pious but serious Protestant readership—the Macmillan Company’s “Sunday Library for Household Reading.” Published from 1868 through 1873, this series looked at missionaries, English saints, classical wisdom, hermits, mystics, French Jansenists, English poetry, and German hymnody. Thus it drew on the history of Catholic Europe as well as of Protestant Britain—but very carefully, looking more at rebels, humanists, and individualists than at Roman theologians or churchmen.61 Oliphant herself was sensitive to historical practice and was careful to distinguish history from legend. Her book, which drew on the Franciscan sources, Hase, and Ozanam, was in many ways a straightforward account of what was then known about Francis. Yet, like Renan, she also drew on the legends, using them to enhance her narrative. She also used the narrative as occasion for spiritual reflections. For instance, as she describes Francis’s loss of interest in lighthearted pursuits, she argues that his distraction was not caused by the prospect of embracing poverty. Rather, it was “that startled sense of incongruity which strikes the finer-toned and more sensitive mind” when faced with the contrast between “heaven above so calm and distant, and the aching, moaning earth below.”62 Like her contemporaries, Oliphant simultaneously affirmed Protestant values and showed sympathy for Catholic faith and practice. She argued, for instance, that the extension of papal power was founded in a liberating idea of universal priesthood, however corrupted, and she alluded to Catholic texts such as the Imitatio Christi. Yet she stated unequivocally that Francis’s life was “wholly evangelical.” Both he and St. Dominic, she wrote, “literally [made], as near as they could in the simplicity of their age, a material copy of [Jesus’] life and work.”63 A few years later John Ruskin—the medievalist, art critic, prophet of the Arts and Crafts Movement, professor, prolific writer, and social reformer—entered

artist, never had a large income, and he died while their three surviving children were young. She supported not only the children (none of whom survived her), but also, at various times, her mother, a distant cousin, two brothers, and several nieces and nephews (Merryn Williams, Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography, [New York: St. Martin’s, 1986], 89, 91–97, 139–40). Recent assessments of her work have been more sympathetic than contemporaneous ones; see, for example, Elisabeth Jay, Mrs Oliphant, “A Fiction to Herself”: A Literary Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Oliphant’s most successful series of novels considered problems of power, idealism, and human frailty in small-town churches. Her unfinished autobiography and her letters revealed profound struggles with questions of faith and meaning in the face of personal loss. 61 Contributing authors included the Christian socialist Charles Kingsley, the medievalist George Macdonald, the Anglo-Catholic Charlotte Yonge, and Catherine Winkworth, a well-known translator of German hymns. 62 Oliphant, Francis of Assisi, 14– 15. 63 Ibid., xi– xii, 304, xv.

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into a kind of personal communion with Francis.64 Ruskin had long since rejected the evangelical Protestantism of his youth, but he was then returning to Christian language, though not to Christian institutions, and trying to integrate that language with his aesthetic, moral, and political principles. Among his many projects was the Guild of St. George, a proposed spiritual community that would incorporate art, study, and labor on communally owned land.65 In 1874—the year that Henry James complained about tourism— Ruskin went to Assisi to study and write about Giotto’s paintings. He lived in the sacristan’s cell in the old Franciscan monastery and kept a piece of St. Francis’s cloak. He wrote that Francis had appeared to him in a dream and made him a member of the Third Order, a membership he considered valid. And his copy of an early portrait of Francis by Cimabue, a forerunner of Giotto, resembled Ruskin himself as much as it did the original.66 So Renan, Oliphant, and Ruskin, in different ways, reached beyond the proto-Protestant Francis of mission and pulpit to claim that Francis represented a true Christianity in a broader way—a way that was less doctrinal, more personal, and more expressive, but at the same time more sensitive to the needs of the poor and outcast. To be sure, it was a severe and difficult way, but it was also childlike in its simplicity and filled with joy. This Francis offered an alternative to the alienation that sometimes accompanied Victorian wealth and comfort. And so did the Francis of nature. This image, so widely prevalent in our own time, was only a minor point in the nineteenth century. However, nearly every source at least mentions the poetic “Canticle of the Sun,” or the miracle stories about animals, or the story of Francis preaching to the birds—a scene famously portrayed by Giotto. Non-Catholic writers recognized these stories as legends, but again, argued that they conveyed a truth about Francis’s character.67 In any case they seemed unable to resist repeating them. In addition, Francis’s poverty and mendicancy meant of course that he lived much of his life outdoors. Thus Francis offered a way to affirm the goodness of nature both in an industrialized

64 The following discussion draws on Tim Hilton, John Ruskin, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Alexander Bradley, Ruskin and Italy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987). 65 Both Ruskin and Margaret Oliphant took an interest in Laurence Oliphant (distantly related to the latter), who promoted an American utopian community called the Brotherhood of the New Life, founded by Thomas Lake Harris (Hilton, John Ruskin, 2:145; Williams, Margaret Oliphant, 90, 96). 66 Van Akin Burd, introduction to Christmas Story: John Ruskin’s Venetian Letters of 1876– 1877, ed. Van Akin Burd (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 102, 105; Hilton, John Ruskin, 2:279–80. 67 [Adams], “St. Francis,” 394; John Tulloch, “St. Francis, Part II,” Good Words 18 (1877, 449– 52), 449; C. A. L. Richards, “A Sunbeam from the 13th Century,” Dial 17 (Sept. 16, 1894, 150– 52), 151. Tulloch was a friend of Margaret Oliphant and disapproved of Matthew Arnold’s theology (Tulloch, “Amateur Theology,” Blackwood’s Magazine 113, June 1873): 678– 92.

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society that was beginning to long for its lost wilderness and in religious communions that had tended to fear or ignore the natural world. As noted earlier, the septencentenary of Francis’s birth occurred in 1881, and by the late 1880s he was a widely familiar figure.68 Accessible to middle-class and educated Protestant audiences, Francis’s story also pointed toward social criticism. It spoke to longings for simplicity of soul and undivided spiritual passion. It embraced the paradoxes of premodern economics and aesthetic refinement, humanness and myth, and nature and the supernatural.

V. SABATIER

AND

BEYOND

In 1893 Paul Sabatier’s Vie de Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise was a publishing sensation.69 Sabatier (1858 – 1928) was a French Protestant and a Communist.70 Born in Strasbourg, he served as a pastor until the early 1890s, when he turned his full attention to Franciscan studies. At the same time, he lived on the land as a peasant.71 His book was published in French in 1893, in English in 1894, went into 20 editions (that is, printings) by 1898, and continued in print until the 1930s.72 The Vatican placed it on its “Index” of forbidden books in 1894.73 Travel guides and reference works added it to their lists of recommended reading about Francis and Assisi.74 Tolstoy praised it and was said to have had it translated into 68

In addition to works I have cited, two important books of this period were Pe`re Arse`ne de Chatel, ed., Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1885), and Ruggiero Bonghi, Francesco d’Assisi: Studio (Citta` del Castello: S. Lapi, 1884). The second edition of Bonghi’s book included an introduction by Paul Sabatier, whom I discuss below (Bonghi, Francesco d’Assisi: Studio, 2. ed. [Citta` del Castello: S. Lapi, 1909]). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow also weighed in with “The Sermon of St. Francis,” in Robert Haven Schauffler, ed., Through Italy with the Poets (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908). The poem was first published in 1875 (Samuel Longfellow, ed., Final Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [Boston: Ticknor, 1887], 434) and appeared in a collection in 1877 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed., Poems of Places, [vol. 11], Italy [Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877], 71). 69 Paul Sabatier, Vie de S. Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris: Fischbacher, 1893); Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Louise Seymour Houghton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894); Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Louise Seymour Houghton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894). 70 The introduction to the Life refers to “‘89,” the founding year of the Second International. Sabatier compares it to the emergent “European consciousness” of the High Middle Ages, and suggests that “the mendicant orders were . . . . a true International.” Sabatier, Life, xii, xvii. 71 R. Brown, “Sabatier, Paul,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (Detroit: Gale, in cooperation with the Catholic University of America, 2002), 453; H. D. Rawnsley, “With Paul Sabatier at Assisi,” Contemporary Review 74 (1898): 505 –18. 72 Sabatier, Vie de S. Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris: Fischbacher, 1893, 1931 printing), Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Louise Seymour Houghton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894, 1938 printing). 73 Brown, “Sabatier,” 453. 74 Karl Baedeker, Italy: A Handbook for Travelers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome, 14th rev. ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1904), 71; Edwin Howland Blashfield and Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, Italian Cities (New York: Scribner, 1900), 87.

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Russian.75 It remained a reference point for serious Protestant study until the mid-twentieth century and has recently been issued yet again.76 Scholars have been more skeptical than this response might suggest. The 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica commented that Sabatier’s Francis was an anachronism, “a modern pietistic French Protestant of the most liberal type.”77 John Moorman’s History of the Franciscan Order cites Sabatier’s distinguished work on textual sources but rejects his interpretations.78 On the other hand, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church said that Sabatier’s Life “inaugurated modern Franciscan studies,” and, indeed, it uses scholarly apparatus as Mrs. Oliphant, for example, did not.79 Moorman observed that it “opened the floodgates,” which is undoubtedly true.80 In any case, few scholars have noted that Sabatier’s work represented a culmination as much as a beginning. His thought was very much a product of the later nineteenth century. He began with historical questions and sought to recover the human Francis from the accretions of legend and of ecclesiastical politics. At the same time, he had an undisguised emotional appreciation of Francis. He was in some measure a Christian believer but questioned received interpretations and institutional inertia. He associated Francis with common people, national identity, and the possibility of radical social reform. Whether or not he consciously drew on existing studies, then, it is certain that the ground was prepared for him. Sabatier’s Francis was in every way the accessible, authentic model of the serious individualistic Christian. In Sabatier’s presentation, Francis was a flesh-and-blood human being, the “genius” of the Italian soul, and the embodiment of religious democracy. He offered a religion of action, the imitation of Jesus as the expression of love. Sabatier was anti-ecclesial, antidoctrinal, and almost anti-intellectual, but he tentatively acknowledged the supernatural in the form of experiential spirituality. He disposed of Protestant moral concerns with relative ease, arguing for Francis’s purity in every respect.81 75 Robert Steele, “Sabatier’s Life of St. Francis,” Academy 46, no. 1162 (Aug. 11, 1894, 96–97), 96; Benjamin B. Warfield, “M. Paul Sabatier’s Life of St. Francis of Assisi,” Presbyterian and Reformed Review 6 (1895, 158– 61), 159. 76 Paul Sabatier, The Road to Assisi: The Essential Biography of St. Francis, ed. Jon M. Sweeney (Orleans, Mass.: Paraclete, 2003). 77 Edward Cuthbert Butler, “Francis of Assisi, St.,” in Encyclopædia Britannica (New York: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1910, 937–39), 939. 78 Moorman, History of the Franciscan Order, 596, 598. Sabatier’s most distinctive argument was that the Mirror of Perfection, which he reconstructed from fragments in other sources, was an earlier biography than any other. That argument is now generally discounted. 79 “Francis of Assisi, St.,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed., ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 530–31), 531. Hase and Oliphant are still mentioned as important early biographers; similarly in the 3rd edition (1997). 80 Moorman, History of the Franciscan Order, 598. 81 The stumbling-blocks that troubled earlier Protestant writers were red herrings, Sabatier thought. The cloth that Francis sold was his own, not his father’s. Clare was an agent in her own decisions, not merely a victim of abduction. Relations between the brothers and sisters, he said,

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Sabatier maintained that Francis became a man of the people by actively rejecting the identity to which he was born—wealthy and perhaps noble— and identifying with the poor and outcast. Francis claimed for himself and his followers the identity and social rank of minori, or lesser citizens. Identity with common people implied national identity, which for Sabatier was not only linguistic and poetic but also political. It also implied religious democracy. In Sabatier’s view, the Franciscan movement had been co-opted and repressed beyond recognition by Rome and cooperating power-hungry Franciscans. Had this not happened, the movement would have issued in an entirely laicized Christianity.82 True Christianity, in Sabatier’s view, was a religion of love and action, one that should be engaged with the world. Doctrine, ritual, institutions, and any but the simplest worship were generally corrupt. Faith was something to be lived. Sabatier did not rule out inner or spiritual experience; indeed he described Francis as a mystic. But he carefully distinguished this mysticism from cloistered contemplation: for Francis, it was a direct experience of Jesus and led directly into action. Sabatier differed from many of his spiritually-minded contemporaries by disparaging Thomas a` Kempis’s Imitatio: it was, he thought, too mysterious and too focused on the cloistered life. Nature signified purity for Sabatier. He argued that Francis saw it for what it was, unlike his contemporaries, who tended to over-interpret it. This freshness and simplicity were reflected in artistic representations of Francis, which opened the way to Renaissance realism. Sabatier treated the nature stories as especially clear representations of who St. Francis was. Like Oliphant and others, he distinguished them from historical truth, regarding them instead as iconic images. And the sermon to the birds was the linchpin of his argument. “The sermon to the birds,” he wrote, “closed the reign of Byzantine art and of the thought of which it was the image. It is the end of dogmatism and authority; it is the coming in of individualism and inspiration; . . . marking a date in the history of the human conscience.”83 By 1893, then, St. Francis was a fixture of the Protestant landscape. At this point interpretations burgeoned. An oratorio—written by a Catholic but performed for general audiences in London, New York, and other cities— depicted evening falling over Assisi accompanied by “arpeggios by the strings” and included a Ballad of Poverty with “the chorus joining in the

were spiritually intimate but entirely pure. He also made a somewhat strained case that the sisters were as active as the brothers except where they were limited by being cloistered (Sabatier, Life, 57– 58, 62, 147– 67). 82 Sabatier, Life, xiii. Cf. Oliphant, above. 83 Ibid., 181.

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refrain.” Francis’s call came not in illness or through scripture but direct from Heaven (“women’s chorus”).84 In 1895 Staff-Captain Eileen Douglas of the Salvation Army presented St. Francis as a role model for that organization.85 A year later Canon Knox Little of Worcester Cathedral offered his flock and his readership a Francis for the Anglican via media. Though this Francis was sensitive and impulsive, he was endowed with a “balanced mind,” “frankness,” and “common sense.” His devotion to the Cross issued in “practical, sustained, self-sacrificing effort,” not mere idle contemplation.86 But a more serious coda to the nineteenth century, and a culmination of a different kind, is found in the work of Henry Adams. Adams represents, in one reading, the end of Unitarian dominance in New England, and in another, the fullest development of antimodern religious expression.87 His Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres—privately printed in 1905, published in 1913—is an extended meditation on the Middle Ages as a dialectic between the masculine and the feminine, scholasticism and mysticism, intellect and primal energy. Like many others, Adams associated St. Francis with the aesthetic and emotional unity of the early thirteenth century—a unity he himself seems to have longed for but could not participate in.88 Of the many saints he considers, Francis alone approaches the status of Adams’s ideal, the Virgin—the feminine religious principle that is non-rational, close to nature, and full of love. To understand Francis, says Adams, “one must wander about Assisi with the ‘Floretum’ or ‘Fioretti’ in one’s hand;—the legends which are the gospel of Francis as the evangels are the gospel of Christ, who was reincarnated in Assisi.”89 He suggests, in other words, that one cannot approach Francis through historicism. Instead he evokes the old argument that the historically 84 Edgar Tinel, Franciscus, Libretto by Lodewijk de Koninck, Opus 36, Oratorio; Edgar Tinel, St. Francis of Assisi, trans. John Fenton (New York: Breitkopf & Ha¨rtel, 1890); “‘St. Francis of Assisi’ to be Presented by Oratorio Society,” New York Times, March 12, 1893, 13. A review notes that the work was first performed in 1888 (“A New Oratorio by Edgar Tinel Produced for the First Time in America,” New York Times, March 19, 1893, 13). See also George Bernard Shaw, “Poor Old Philharmonic,” in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, ed. Dan H. Laurence, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw (London: Bodley Head, 1981). 85 Eileen Douglas, Brother Francis, or, Less than the Least, Red-hot Library (London: International Headquarters, 1895). Douglas was also the author of George Fox, the Red-hot Quaker (London: International Headquarters, 1895). See also A. P. Doyle, “St. Francis in Salvation Army Uniform,” Catholic World 65 (Sept. 1897), 760–65, who mentions “the twicetold tale of St. Francis” (760). 86 Little, St. Francis of Assisi; see also his “The Last Days of St. Francis of Assisi,” Sunday Magazine 26, November 1897:754–62. 87 Williams, “Mirror for Unitarians,” 239, 257– 58; Lears, No Place of Grace, 262– 63. 88 Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959, originally published by American Institute of Architects, 1913); Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 355– 68; Lears, No Place of Grace, 262– 63, 279–86; Williams, “Mirror for Unitarians,” 256, 258– 59. 89 Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel, 375.

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questionable legends give a true account of Francis’s character, and he reminds the historically informed reader that the Gospels are also distant in time from the life of Jesus. Above all, the encounter with Francis, and by extension with Jesus, is for him intertwined with the sense of place. The little town has indeed become a religion.

VI. CONCLUSIONS In the Anglophone Protestant world, the figure of St. Francis of Assisi entered public consciousness through history, travel, art, and literature. In the context of nineteenth-century ambivalence about Catholicism, Francis’s historicity made him an acceptable object of study and enabled Protestants to find points of identity with him. His life could be understood in the familiar language of reform, of gospel freedom, and of the individual who follows Jesus without intermediaries. At the same time, travelers on the European continent encountered stories and images of Francis, a sense of place associated with him, and a sense of peoplehood in which he was a key figure. As they found unexpected beauty and vitality in the Catholic Church, the medievalist movement reinforced and shaped their perceptions. Art and literature introduced narratives of Francis and opened up new interpretive possibilities. The midcentury Protestantism of missions, morals, and liberty never disappeared entirely, but it was gradually supplanted by the late-century piety of individuality, personality, nature worship, and unmediated spiritual experience. Antimodernism became more prominent: Francis’s rejection of money and commerce and his “primitive” life close to nature resonated with that movement’s idea of authentic living.90 His story spoke to nineteenthcentury longings for freedom from materialism, for communion with nature, and for authentic religion. Above all, Francis signified the imitation of Christ—the possibility that any person, not just a specially gifted one, could say “no” to wealth and security and live in entire dependence on God. Studies of Francis opened up, among other things, the possibility of radical witness against industrial or consumer capitalism. In the end, though, not many modern admirers of Francis really did give it all up and take to the highways, nor do they today, when ambivalence and irony are the hallmarks of the age. Like Arnold and Adams, many would-be believers hold back from total commitment. They place a statue in the garden and wish they could do better. But the holy figure remains a saint in a very real sense—a person specially gifted and set apart whom ordinary folk admire but cannot emulate. In that sense, the Protestant St. Francis is after all very Catholic. 90

If Jackson Lears is correct that antimodernism also involved psychological rejection of the materialistic father, then Francis’s story surely struck that chord as well (Lears, No Place of Grace, 225–40).

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 814– 846. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990539

“Banned in Boston”: Moral Reform Politics and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice1 P. C. KEMENY

A

laboring on the outside margins of polite literary circles for his entire career, Walt Whitman traveled to Boston in August 1881 to oversee the publication of his Leaves of Grass. The poet was on the verge of enjoying the national reputation that had eluded him for so long. He viewed the publication of the seventh and definitive edition of Leaves of Grass by a leading Boston publisher, James R. Osgood and Company, as a vindication of his lifelong labor. Now Whitman was about to be ranked with other notable Osgood authors, including Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain.2 To be sure, some of New England’s most famous authors had admired Whitman’s poetry. Perhaps the most distinguished author of the day to applaud Whitman’s work was Ralph Waldo Emerson. After reading the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson privately wrote that he found the twelve poems to be “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Yet it was not only, as Charles Eliot Norton protested in an unsigned review in 1855, Whitman’s “self-conceit,” lack of rhyme, and “scorn for the wonted usages of good writing” that hindered his reputation. Whitman also celebrated sexuality, openly “singing of the phallus” and glorifying the “hymen!”3 According to Norton, Whitman mixed “Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism.”4 Other early critics FTER

1 I would like to thank my student assistants, Katherine Conley, Joel Musser, and Ben Wetzel, for their assistance and to express my gratitude to Gillis J. Harp, Jeanne H. Kilde, Bruce Kuklick, H. Collin Messer, Eric Potter, Gary Scott Smith, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful criticisms of earlier drafts of this work. 2 “Literary Notes,” Boston Commonwealth, September 3, 1881, 3; Sylvester Baxter, “Walt Whitman in Boston,” New England Magazine 6 (1892): 714– 21. 3 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W. Blogett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 91, 108. 4 [Charles Eliot Norton], “Leaves of Grass,” Putnam’s Monthly 6 (1855): 321. While Norton wrote that he admired the “original perception of nature,” “manly brawn,” and “epic directness” of Whitman,

P. C. Kemeny is Professor of Religion and Humanities at Grove City College.

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were even less charitable. One reviewer dismissed Whitman’s work as “a mass of stupid filth,” and Charles Greenleaf Whittier reportedly tossed his copy of Leaves of Grass in his fireplace.5 Even Emerson had deep misgivings about the sexuality of some of Whitman’s poems. When Whitman visited Boston in 1860 on the eve of the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass, which included the grouping of twelve poems on sexuality entitled “Enfans d’Adam,” Emerson spent two hours trying to convince him to exclude these poems. Emerson, Whitman later recalled, “did not see that if I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out.”6 When Emerson received a new edition of Leaves of Grass in 1867 that still contained these poems, he asked a mutual friend to “tell Walt I am not satisfied.”7 After that date Emerson’s enthusiasm for Whitman cooled. Other poets of the genteel tradition, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, simply ignored Whitman.8 Given Whitman’s rather tepid reception from America’s leading literary figures, having a distinguished Boston publisher issue the definitive edition of Leaves of Grass was for him a personal and professional triumph. In his negotiations, Whitman was adamant that the “Children of Adam” cluster must be included. “Fair warning on one point,” he wrote the publisher, “the old pieces, the sexuality ones, . . . must go in the same as ever.”9 Upon completion, he threw a grand party for three hundred people. Whitman finally felt vindicated. As he told the Boston Daily Advertiser, he “could not wish for a more beautiful and comforting two months.”10

in a letter to James Russell Lowell he privately confessed, “One cannot leave it about for chance readers.” He added that he “would be sorry to know that any woman had looked into it past the title-page. I have got a copy for you, for there are things in it you will admire.” Charles Eliot Norton to James Russell Lowell, 23 September 1855, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 1: 135. “‘No, no,’ Lowell replied, ‘the kind of thing you described won’t do.’” James Russell Lowell to Charles Eliot Norton, 12 October 1855, Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles Eliot Norton, 3 vols. (1904; repr., New York: AMS 1966), 1:242. 5 Rufus M. Griswold, New York Criterion, November 10, 1855, in Walt Whitman, the Critical Heritage, ed. Milton Hindus (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 31; Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 4 vols. (1905– 1906; repr., New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961), 1:127. 6 Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:51. On the relationship between Whitman and Emerson, see David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 194. 7 John Burroughs Diary, December 1871, quoted in Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades (1931; repr., Fort Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968), 64. 8 Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 174; F. Lannon Smith, “The American Reception of Leaves of Grass: 1855– 1882,” Walt Whitman Review 22 (1979): 153. 9 Walt Whitman to James R. Osgood, 8 May 1881, The Correspondence of Walt Whitman, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 3:224. 10 “Walt Whitman. A Poet’s Supper to his Printers and Proof Readers.” [Camden Post], [18 October 1881], Walt Whitman—A Series of Twenty-Three Newspaper Items with Notes by the

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Whitman’s long hoped for triumph, however, soon evoked controversy. “Our attention,” Suffolk County (Boston) district attorney Oliver Stevens wrote James Osgood in March 1882, “has been officially directed to a certain book entitled Leaves of Grass: Walt Whitman published by you. We are of the opinion that this book is such a book as brings it within the provisions of the Public Statutes respecting obscene literature, and suggests the propriety of withdrawing the same from circulation and suppressing the editions thereof.” Otherwise, Stevens threatened, the charge that the work violated the state’s obscenity law “will have to be entertained.”11 The complaint originated with Frederick B. Allen, assistant rector at Phillips Brooks’s Trinity Church and the secretary of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, a local affiliate of Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Whitman initially agreed to excise a few words from certain poems so long as it was done so “silently.” But when he learned that Osgood, at the district attorney’s prompting, insisted that he expunge several entire poems, mostly from the “Children of Adam” cluster, he refused. Osgood, fearing prosecution, negotiated a settlement with Whitman. He withdrew the book from publication and gave Whitman one hundred dollars, the remaining 225 copies of the book, and the stereotype plates.12 A bitterly disappointed Whitman vowed to gain revenge. Besides unleashing his own coterie of militant devotees against the censorship activities of Stevens, Comstock, and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, Whitman found ready allies in Boston free thinker George Chainey and free love activists Benjamin R. Tucker and Ezra Heywood. Chainey proclaimed that the “Russian Czar was never guilty of greater wrong, nor Spanish Inquisitor of baser injustice.”13 Tucker advertised Whitman’s work in his periodical, Liberty, and brazenly challenged Stevens to prosecute him.14 Heywood also taunted the district attorney and Comstock

Post. Excerpts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana located in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University. 11 Oliver Stevens to James Osgood, 1 March 1882, The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel, 10 vols. (1902; repr., Brosse Pointe, MI: Scholarly Press, 1968), 8:289– 90. 12 James Osgood to Walt Whitman, 4 March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:289; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, 7 March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:290; James Osgood to Walt Whitman, 21 March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:293– 94; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, [23] March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:294; James Osgood to Walt Whitman, [29 March] 1881, Complete Writings, 8:295; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, March 1882, Complete Writings, 8:294; James Osgood to Walt Whitman, [10 April] 1882, Complete Writings, 8:296; Walt Whitman to James Osgood, 12 April 1882, Complete Writings, 8:296–97. 13 George Chainey, “Keep Off the Grass,” This World, June 17, 1882, 8, Container 22, Reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress. 14 Advertisement, “Republished! The Suppressed Book!” Liberty, 22 July 1882, 2.

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in an “Open Letter to Walt Whitman” and published two of his banned poems.15 When Heywood and Chainey were threatened with censorship, Whitman, ironically, declined to speak out publicly on their behalf.

I. PROTESTANT MORAL REFORMERS Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century moral reformers have been the subject of several different historical interpretations. Most historians, as Alison M. Parker contends in her study of the censorship activity of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, view moral reformers as deluded and antiquated remnants of “Victorian prudery.”16 Historians have interpreted these moral reformers as the unenlightened opponents of free speech, a manifestation of status anxiety amid a rapidly changing culture, a movement of cultural elites anxiously defending their social status (and their sons) against immigrants, a backlash against growing women’s rights, or a harbinger of feminist values.17 William R. Hutchison offers an alternative perspective to explain the activities of moral reform societies. Hutchison’s 15

Ezra H. Heywood, “An Open Letter to Walt Whitman,” Leaf Literature, Princeton, MA: Published by Angela T. Heywood, 1882, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 16 Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 4. 17 For representative examples of historical studies that interpret the moral reform movement as opponents to free speech rights, see Robert W. Haney, Comstockery in America: Patterns of Censorship and Control (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1960); Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920– 1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). A number of Whitman scholars also express a whiggish interpretation of the Leaves of Grass controversy. Allen, Solitary Singer, 494–500; Joseph Andriano, “Societies for the Suppression of Vice,” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998), 649; Philip Callow, A Life of Walt Whitman: From Noon to Starry Night (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 353– 54; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 530– 45; Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion: William Douglas O’Connor (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1978), 405–20; Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 237–51. For status anxiety and social control interpretations, see Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribners, 1968); Walter M. Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1987). As elite defenders of family and cultural status, Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusaders: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). As an anti-feminist movement, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Anna Louise Bates, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career (Landham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995). As protofeminists, Parker, Purifying America; Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). On the historiography of reform movements, see Alan Hunt, “Anxiety about Social Explanation: Some Anxieties about Anxiety,” Journal of

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analysis is not only less cynical but also resonates more fully with the stated rationale and actions of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. Moreover, his perspective also corresponds with the perceptions of those who were prosecuted by moral reform organizations. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Protestant establishment at best tolerated religious outsiders. In this regard, Protestant moral reformers were part of the larger Progressive movement, which expressed a less than tolerant ideology toward non-conformists. Consequently, worries about social stability and the moral health of the nation sometimes led mainline Protestants to exert what Hutchison terms a countervailing “antipluralist” or “unitive” impulse. Occasionally, this unitive impulse manifested itself in nativism and the persecution of religious minorities whose behavior—such as the Mormon practice of plural marriages—threatened the moral codes of public Protestantism. At other times, the desire for national unity expressed itself in less violent attempts to exact moral conformity.18 To be sure, the work of the New England anti-vice society was in part a defensive measure by Protestant leaders to preserve Protestant control over public life, and, insofar as their efforts succeeded, it protected their own social and economic security. Yet the activities of the New England Society are better understood as a manifestation of the unitive impulse that Hutchison describes. Nineteenth-century moral philosophy and the Whig-Republican tradition shaped the organic or communal view of society upon which this conviction rested. By regulating the morality of literature and other potential sources of commercialized vice, these moral reformers strove to suppress alternative moralities in order to enable public Protestantism to serve as the common unifying civic morality. The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, which renamed itself the Watch and Ward Society in 1891, took advantage of the opportunity provided by the publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to advance its views of sexuality and literature. This study examines the mainline Protestant establishment’s efforts to define acceptable views of sexuality and marriage in literature during a time when many Protestants practiced, as Hutchison observes, the toleration of pluralism. This study demonstrates that

Social History 32 (1999): 509–28; Donna I. Dennis, “Obscenity Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Law and Society 27 (2002): 369– 81. 18 William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 6, 8, 30–83. On moral reform movements, see Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Wayne E. Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865– 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

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although their views were strongly contested the Protestant establishment had the power (through the state’s obscenity laws, the enforcement of this law by the district attorney, the police, the New England Society acting as an extralegal police force, and the publisher’s fear of prosecution) to enforce conventional Protestant attitudes toward sexuality and marriage and to censor literature that violated traditional standards.19

THE

II. ANTHONY COMSTOCK AND NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE

When Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1882, he unwittingly stepped into a conflict between proponents of free love and Comstock’s anti-obscenity forces that had been raging for a decade. Comstock had previously arrested a number of free love advocates and secured several controversial convictions. In 1868, Comstock launched a one-man campaign after he saw a friend reportedly brought to “ruin” by obscene literature. By 1872, he realized that obscene literature was such “a very large and systematic business” that he needed help.20 He approached the Young Men’s Christian Association for assistance. The wealthy philanthropist and president of the New York YMCA, Morris K. Jessup, met with Comstock and quickly arranged the formation of a Committee for the Suppression of Vice. With pledges of support from the financer J. P. Morgan, mining magnate William E. Dodge, and soap baron Samuel Colgate, Comstock set out to clean up New York. Comstock, however, found it particularly troubling that the United States Postal Service was being used, as he put it, “to assist this nefarious business, because it goes everywhere and is secret.”21 In 1872 – 73, Comstock and his supporters successfully lobbied Congress to amend the nation’s antiobscenity laws. The new federal statute empowered the U.S. Post Office to ban “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publications of an indecent character,” 19 The term “Protestant establishment” and its synonyms are used in a descriptive, not normative, sense. William R. Hutchison, “Preface: From Protestant to Pluralist America;” “Protestantism as Establishment,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vii –xi, 3–17. 20 Charles G. Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime of Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil (New York: Fleming, 1913), 51; Anthony Comstock, “The Suppression of Vice,” North American Review 135 (1882): 484. 21 Anthony Comstock, Frauds Exposed, or How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted; Being a Full Exposure of Various Schemes Operated Through the Mails, and Unearthed by the Author in a Seven Years’ Service as a Special Agent of the Post Office Department and Secretary and Chief Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1880; repr., Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969), 391.

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including information about abortion, from the mail. Penalties for violating the Comstock Act, as it was popularly known, included fines of up to two thousand dollars and as much as five years in prison.22 “This law is a barrier,” Comstock reasoned, “between the souls of our children and the most subtle enemy we have to deal with.”23 Congress also appointed Comstock a Special Agent of the Post Office Department to enforce the law. In May 1873 the YMCA’s anti-vice committee reorganized itself as an independent organization, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, with Comstock as its secretary.24

III. COMSTOCK

AND THE

ANTI-VICE ACTIVISTS

Armed with new federal powers, Comstock launched a crusade in the spring of 1873 to keep objectionable literature out of the mails. Free love advocates stood high on his list. In fact, Comstock had already arrested one of its leading proponents, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a year earlier. Woodhull was a spiritualist, an outspoken feminist, and an individualist anarchist who helped lead the International Workingmen’s Association, Section 12. But it was Woodhull’s advocacy of free love that most troubled Comstock. In an 1871 lecture, Woodhull frankly declared, “Yes I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.”25 Woodhull apparently practiced what she preached. Twice married, she openly 22

Appendix to the Congressional Globe: Containing Speeches, Reports, and the Laws of the Third Session Forty-Second Congress (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Congressional Globe, 1873): 297. At one level, the Comstock Act built upon previous legislation. The first federal law against obscene literature was the Tariff Act of 1842, which gave authority to customs officials to seize obscene material. During the Civil War, Congress had passed a law in 1865 against mailing obscene literature. In comparison to these two laws, the Comstock Act was more farreaching in its scope. Moreover, as Hal Sears observes, the law neither defined obscenity nor specified “whether it intended to be solely a criminal statute (that is, concerned with seizing objectionable matter only as a contingency of the arrest of a violator) or whether it aimed to establish a civil post-office censorship separate from any criminal provisions of the law.” Hal Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 71. 23 Comstock, Frauds Exposed, 425. 24 Comstock, “Suppression of Vice,” 484– 89. On Comstock’s background, the founding of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the 1873 Comstock Act, see Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, 43– 99; Richard Christian Johnson, “Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice, and the American Way” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973), 45– 72; Robert H. Bremner, “Introduction,” in Traps for the Young, by Anthony Comstock, ed. Robert H. Bremner (1883; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), vii –xiv; Bates, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord, 49–97. 25 Victoria Claflin Woodhull, “And the Truth Shall Make You Free.” A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom, Delivered in Steinway Hall, Nov. 20, 1871 and Music Hall, Boston, Jan. 3, 1872 (New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Co., 1872), 23.

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enjoyed many lovers, including Cornelius Vanderbilt. In a November 1872, lecture to the American Association of Spiritualists in Boston, Woodhull was the first to publicize the alleged sexual relationship between one of the nation’s most popular ministers, Henry Ward Beecher, and Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of a close friend. Woodhull hoped to compel Beecher to preach what he apparently practiced as well as to exact a measure of revenge against two of her more prominent detractors, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She followed up this shocking revelation by publishing a detailed story of the affair in the November issue of her newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.26 The day after its publication federal marshals arrested Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, for sending obscene literature through the mail. At their trial in June 1873, the charges were dismissed on a technicality: the obscenity law of 1872 did not include newspapers. Their dismissal helped convince Comstock that the federal obscenity law needed to be revised.27 Although Comstock failed to convict Woodhull, he relentlessly pursued other free lovers. The controversy over the suppression of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass occurred on the heels of heated battles between Comstock and free lovers and the establishment of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. Ezra Heywood, the leading Massachusetts individualist anarchist and free love advocate, took up Woodhull’s cause in his periodical The Word. When the Boston Music Hall canceled a Woodhull lecture under pressure from local authorities, Heywood’s Labor Reform League, meeting in Boston in January 1873, invited her to speak. Denouncing Comstock, she declared that it was “simply nobody’s business what anybody eats, drinks or wears, and just as little who anybody loves.”28 Soon thereafter, Heywood, his wife Angela, and Benjamin R. Tucker organized the New England Free Love League. The Heywoods regularly attacked “Comstock’s insane efforts to stifle investigation of the social question.”29 26 “Arrest of Woodhull and Claflin for Slander of Henry Ward Beecher,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 4, 1872, 4. 27 After the trial, Woodhull went on a lecture tour. A few years later she sailed for England, renounced free love, and married a British aristocrat. For an excellent analysis of the life and thought of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, see Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 28 Victoria Claflin Woodhull, “Moral Cowardice and Modern Hypocrisy; or, Four Weeks in Ludlow Street Jail, the Suppressed Boston Speech of Victoria Woodhull,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, December 8, 1872, 3–7, quoted in Martin Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 80. On the history of the free love movement and its battles with moral reformers, see Sears, Sex Radicals, 3– 149. 29 Ezra Heywood, The Word, January 1876, 2. See also, for example, Ezra Heywood, “Intelligent Motherhood,” The Word, December 1872, 1; Ezra Heywood, Editorial, The Word, February 1873, 3; Ezra Heywood, “Free Love League,” The Word, May 1876, 2; Angela T. Heywood, “Woman’s

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For his part, Comstock certainly attempted to silence free love publications. In 1876, he sent John Lant, editor of the free thought journal, The Toledo Sun, to jail for eighteen months for publishing various alleged obscenities. Nailing Heywood, however, represented the top prize for Comstock.30 Also in 1876, Heywood published Cupid’s Yokes, a free love critique of marriage. This institution, Heywood reasoned, was not “a finality, but, rather, a device to be amended, or abolished, as enlightened moral sense may require.” Relationships between men and women, he contended, should instead be based upon a “mingled sense of esteem, benevolence, and passional attraction,” and “mutual discretion—a free compact, dissolvable at will.” As Angela Heywood insisted, free love did not mean “reckless sexual intercourse” but self-regulation.31 The Heywoods likened the contemporary practice of marriage to prostitution. Little could be done to change marriage, Ezra lamented, because the “religious monomaniac” Comstock prevented the free exchange of ideas by censoring the mails.32 An incident the following year proved Heywood’s point. Comstock purchased a copy of Cupid’s Yokes as well as R. T. Trall’s Sexual Physiology from Heywood through the mail under a false name. In November 1877, Comstock arrested Heywood for violating the federal obscenity law. Heywood’s arrest by the “exponent of sectarian Repression,” as he described Comstock, was a real spectacle.33 Comstock grabbed Heywood by the collar as he walked off the stage after speaking at the Free Love League’s convention in Boston and dragged him off to jail. At Heywood’s January 1878 trial, a Boston jury determined that Trall’s Sexual Physiology was not obscene. But it found Cupid’s Yokes lewd and sentenced Heywood to two years in prison. Heywood immediately appealed the decision.34 Meeting in Boston in May—just a few weeks before the federal appeals court rendered its decision—the New England Free Love League strongly protested Heywood’s conviction. One resolution denounced Comstock’s “lasciviously false reports” about the League. Their reception, they added, indicated “the mental depravity of those in church and state who

Love: Its Relations to Man and Society,” The Word, June 1876, 1; Ezra Heywood, “Free Love League,” The Word, July 1877, 3. 30 Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 100–41; Sears, Sex Radicals, 153–82. 31 Angela T. Heywood, “Men’s Laws and Love’s Laws,” The Word, September 1876, 1. 32 Ezra Heywood, Cupid’s Yokes: The Binding Forces of Conjugal Love. An Essay to Consider some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage, Wherein is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of Sexual Self-Government (Princeton, Mass.: Co-operative Publishing, 1877), 3, 12. 33 Ezra Heywood, letter to the editor, Boston Commonwealth, reprinted in The Word, December 1877, 3. 34 Ezra Heywood, “Trial and Verdict,” The Word, February 1878, 2. See also “Mr. E. H. Heywood’s Case,” Boston Globe, January 25, 1878, 3.

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employ this savage monster to supervise the morals of intelligent people.”35 The free love movement directly challenged the mainline Protestant establishment’s unitive impulse. As anarchists, they threatened to subvert mainline Protestantism’s organic or communal view of society. More obviously, the movement violated conventional Protestant convictions about sexuality and monogamy. In the face of such intolerable defiance, moral reformers felt compelled to suppress the writings of free love activists.

THE

IV. THE ORGANIZATION OF NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE

One day after the Free Love League concluded its meetings, local ministers gathered at Park Street Church to establish the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. The “savage monster” himself traveled to Boston to help organize this anti-vice society. Frederick B. Allen, who had helped Comstock raise support for the New York anti-vice society, organized the Park Street Church meeting. The growing activities of the free love movement, as well as the apparent rising tide of obscene publications, inspired Boston Protestants to organize their own anti-vice society.36 Although Heywood questioned the mental and moral capacity of those who endorsed Comstock’s work, the New England Society attracted support from a broad range of New England Protestant elites. While a pair of prominent conservative clerics—Clarendon Street Baptist Church pastor, A. J. Gordon, and Yale College president, Noah Porter—served on the original board, the overwhelming majority were leading liberal Protestants. The board of directors and board of vice-presidents read like a “who’s who” of liberal Protestant Boston Brahmins. Phillips Brooks, pastor of Trinity Church, Copley Square; William Lawrence, Brooks’s successor as Episcopal Bishop; William Jewett Tucker, a professor of theology at Andover Seminary and later president of Dartmouth College; Robert Treat Paine, founder of Associated Charities; and George Herbert Palmer, a Harvard philosophy professor, were some of the organization’s leaders in the late nineteenth century.37 Most important was Frederick B. Allen who served as secretary from 1878 until 1915 and 35

“Free Love League,” The Word, July 1878, 2. Editorial Notes, The Word, July 1878, 2; “Society for the Suppression of Vice,” Boston Evening Transcript, May 29, 1878, 2. For at least three years, Allen had been raising funds for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice from wealthy Bostonians. Frederick B. Allen, 21 January 1875, “The Suppression of Obscene Literature,” [circular], Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio. 37 New England Watch and Ward Society, Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of The New England Watch and Ward Society, For the Year 1943–1944 (Boston: Office of the Society, 1944), 6– 8 (hereafter cited as Annual Report WWS, [ year]). 36

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president from 1915 to 1925. The New England Society had an easy time raising funds to support its battle against “commercialized vice.”38

V. THE RATIONALES FOR CENSORSHIP Several factors shaped the New England Society’s rationale for censoring works like Leaves of Grass. Most obviously, the organization embraced the late nineteenth-century Victorian view of literature and defended it well into the twentieth century. Several leading New England “apostles” of Victorian culture, most notably Charles Eliot Norton, actively encouraged the work of the Watch and Ward Society.39 Their concern about the moral character of literature motivated many to participate in the organization. “We cannot resist the inference,” Yale president Noah Porter wrote in Books and Reading; or, What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? “that books and reading must exert a powerful influence upon the opinions and principles. This they do both directly and indirectly.” To determine the “moral influence” of a piece of literature, Porter quoted the English romantic poet Robert Southey: “Would you know whether the tendency of a book is good or evil, examine in what state of mind you lay it down. Has it induced you to suspect that that which you have been accustomed to think unlawful, may after all be innocent, and that that may be harmless, which you hitherto have been taught to think dangerous?” In an 1882 popular article on literature, Porter argued that published fiction “rightly used cannot but elevate the soul.” He added that it “is the prerogative of the imagination to lift man to a higher mood, and to suggest to him nobler desires and aspirations.” Bad literature, according to Porter, entailed more than poor diction or “an infelicitous style.” It embodied “bad morals.” Porter was quick to draw what he saw as an important distinction between immodest and immoral literature. The former, for instance, might be a “boldness of speech” rarely found in common conversations. He cited Shakespeare and Milton as well as a few passages in the Bible “which to the mind and ear seem and sound immodest.” Unlike immoral literature, “there is nothing that is fitted to excite lascivious passion or to gratify prurient desire” in this type of literature. In other words, immoral fiction could “beguile to sin” and stimulate “foul and vicious passion.”40 38 Frederick Lewis Allen, Frederick Baylies Allen: A Memoir (Cambridge, Mass.: Privately Printed at the Riverside Press, 1929), 75–80; New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, Annual Report of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice (Boston: n.p., [1883]), 3 (hereafter cited as Annual Report NESSV, [year]). 39 Annual Report WWS, 1893–94, 30. 40 Noah Porter, Books and Reading; or, What Books Shall I read and How Shall I read Them?, 4th ed. (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1870), 62, 72, 59– 60, 89, 90; Porter, “Fiction: Its Capacity to Amuse, Instruct, and Elevate,” Our Continent, February 15, 1882, 9. On Victorian

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In the early twentieth century, the New England Society’s rationale for censorship would selectively employ the quasi-scientific discourse of the social hygiene movement and certain pieces of the works of influential social scientists, such as G. Stanley Hall, who, incidentally, was president of the organization in 1908– 09.41 But in the late nineteenth century the justification for suppression drew its warrant principally from moral philosophy and Protestant theology. Three of the founders of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice—Yale College president Noah Porter, Brown University president Ezekiel G. Robinson, and Amherst College president Julius H. Seelye—taught moral philosophy well into the late nineteenth century. Their moral philosophy textbooks provide insights into an important intellectual justification for the censorship of obscene literature as well as their opposition to the free love movement. In The Elements of Moral Science, Porter outlined the moral reformers’ understanding of human nature and the reputed impact that “licentious literature” had upon individuals and society. According to the faculty psychology common among nineteenth-century moral philosophers, the mind had three functions: “feelings, will, and intellect.” According to Porter, each person had, among other natural desires, appetites “of food and drink, of rest and sleep, and of sex.” The sexual appetite, he explains, “has for its immediate object the transmission of life to other individuals.” The “indulgence” of this appetite, however, is “not indispensable to the health or life of the individual.” This appetite “can be controlled by withdrawing the attention from the objects and thoughts which would excite it.” Each person, Porter explained, “owes it as a duty to himself, to indulge his appetites under the limits and restraints imposed by a fundamental regard to his bodily health and life.”42 Licentious literature poses a mortal danger to a person’s character because it could capture the imagination and drive an individual to abandon all responsibilities in the quest for pleasure. Robinson described the imagination as “one of the fruitful sources of moral good” and “the

literary culture, see Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of our Own Time, 1912–1917 (1959; repr., New York: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 30– 51; Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1 –19. 41 Annual Report WWS, 1908– 1909, 29– 35; Parker, Purifying America, 21– 22. 42 Noah Porter, The Elements of Moral Science, Theoretical and Practical (New York: Scribner, 1887), 22, 325– 26, 333. On Porter as well as nineteenth-century moral philosophy, see Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58– 74; Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edward to John Dewey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 128–45; D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).

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foster-parent of some of the worst” evils. It needed, according to Robinson, “constant care and discipline.”43 To the Protestant moral reformers, the advocates of free love promoted the unrestrained expression of sexual desires just like licentious literature. In stark contrast to Heywood’s vision of sexuality, the moral reformers held that marriage provided the sole morally acceptable context in which the appetite for sexual pleasure could be fulfilled. Only in marriage, insisted Seelye, is “sexual intercourse consistent with virtue.”44 The “penalties of unchastity, and the vice into which it plunges,” although “less marked it may be to the common eye than those of intemperance,” observed Robinson, “are not a whit less ruinous, impairing health, blunting the sensibilities, poisoning the fountain of moral life, and blighting the whole soul.” If these results were not frightening enough, Robinson added that unchastity often led to “idiocy or insanity.”45 Porter castigated free love advocates in his moral philosophy textbook. Free lovers, he wrote, “fail to recognize the fundamental truth, that love is little more than an animal passion, except as it is energized and controlled by the personal will under the sanction of duty, and is perpetuated by a continued and unbroken” marriage vow.46 “Vicious” literature, as Porter explained in Books and Reading, is dangerous because it would “inflame and excite lascivious passion” that would ultimately imperil the family and society. Licentious feelings, like other “absorbing passions,” eventually so pervert the will that the person becomes a brute. “Prurient and salacious literature,” Porter concluded in The Elements of Moral Science, “furnishes abundant opportunity for the heightening and justification of unlawful passion, and the corruption of the individual and the community.” Like free love, licentious literature threatened not only an individual’s character but also civil society because it aroused uncontrollable passions that destroyed marriages and families, which he deemed the foundational institution out of which the state “naturally grows.”47 Claiming that reading obscene literature ruins a person’s character did not justify the censorship of licentious literature by either voluntary associations 43 Ezekiel G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality: Ethical Principles Discussed and Applied (Boston: Silver, Rogers, and Co., 1888), 200. 44 Julius H. Seelye, ed., A System of Morals, by Laurens P. Hickok (Boston: Ginn and Company, [1880], 1896), 51. 45 Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 199, no. 1. According to Seelye, “God, in nature, has surrounded” the sexual passion “by the many checks and safeguards of the native modesty and previous estimate of virtue in the pure, the public disgrace and self-reproach which attaches to the impure, the most inveterate and loathsome diseases which follow in its train, and the debasing of every refined sensibility which follows on the loss of sexual virtue.” Seelye, A System of Morals, 51. 46 Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 470. 47 Porter, Books and Reading, 90; Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 336, 487.

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or the state. Porter, however, offered a rather robust rationale for the suppression of vice by voluntary associations and the state. As outlined in The Elements of Moral Science, individuals have an immutable moral obligation to combat the corruption generated by licentious literature, not only because of the danger that it poses to themselves, but also to others. Porter emphasized that individuals have a moral obligation to “reclaim and recover” their neighbors caught in vice by stamping it out as well as “to prevent these evils and the causes of them.”48 While Porter saw voluntary associations as the most effective means for curbing “vicious” institutions associated with licentious practices, he did not rule out a role for the state in combating and preventing vice. As he explained, “the state not only may, but must, legislate not only for the punishment, but also for the prevention of crime.” The “public order,” he insisted, “cannot be preserved so long as a lower stratum is becoming ignorant and brutalized from one generation to another.”49 The anti-vice activists’ justification for the state’s duty to curb social vices, such as obscene literature, rests upon their organic view of society. Since “man is born in society,” Porter reasoned, he “is a ‘political animal,’ existing in a social organism.” To Porter, the state was simply the family writ large. “It is almost superfluous to say that the state naturally grows out of the family, inasmuch as every family is already a state in miniature.”50 Robinson shared this communal vision of society: “We begin life in this world as members of human society and under civil governments.”51 The Whig-Republican tradition, which dominated New England for much of the nineteenth century, further reinforced this organic view of society because it stressed self-discipline, rational order, and social responsibility.52 Late nineteenth-century Protestant moral reformers certainly did not think that the free market could determine what books should be available for public consumption. Nor did they think what a person read was a matter of individual liberty. The state, in short, had a duty to restrict what type of literature was available to the public in order to safeguard civil morality. But to free love activists, Protestants were legislating personal morality. 48 Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 437, 438. See also, Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 244, 249– 50. 49 Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 493– 94. 50 Ibid., 488, 397, 487, 396, 491. On the organic view of society of Porter and other moral philosophers, see Louise L. Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 129 –30; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 126, 128. 51 Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 205. 52 D. G. Hart, “Mainstream Protestantism, ‘Conservative’ Religion, and Civic Society,” in Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, ed. Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay (Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 199–203.

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The conflict between moral reformers and free love and free speech activists not only pivoted on the alternative views of sexuality but also upon their radically different conceptions of society and view of the state. Whereas the moral reformers in the Whig-Republican tradition embraced an organic view of society, free love activists, such as Ezra Heywood, and free speech advocates, most notably Robert Ingersoll, advanced a radically individualistic view. To Heywood, the free and autonomous individual was the sole building block of a civil society—not the church, family, and state as the moral reformers believed. Like the moral reformers, individual anarchists rested their political views upon the American democratic tradition, but they emphasized a very different part of that tradition. In Social Ethics, for instance, Heywood pointed to the political thought of Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and other “recognized exponents of Natural Law and Order” who teach “that the right to do what we will, provided we invade not the equal freedom of others,” is completely a matter of personal liberty. Whereas the Whig-Republican tradition venerated selfcontrol, orderliness, and the common good, the free love activists represented a radical libertarian strain of the Jeffersonian tradition that separated religion and public life. Consequently, Heywood deemed efforts to regulate sexuality through marriage laws “unnatural” and “unconstitutional.”53 Likewise, any effort to suppress any type of literature constituted an assault on “the natural right of American citizens to acquire and impart knowledge.”54 By contrast, moral reformers like Porter insisted that the community, “as organized into civil government,” has the “duty and right” to “prevent and remove ignorance and vice” by means of “public arrangements.”55 Seelye also argued that the state has a right and the responsibility to “guard the public freedom against all particular encroachments.” He cited prostitution, illicit drugs, gambling, and “immoral speech and publications” as examples of when “individual passion or interest induces some to disregard the public 53 Ezra Heywood, Social Ethics: An Essay to Show that, Since the Right of Private Judgment Must be Respected in Morals, as well as in Religion, Free Rum, the Conceded Right of Choice in Beverages, and Required Power to Decline Intoxicants Promotes Rational Sobriety and Assures Temperance (Princeton, Mass.: Co-operative Publishing, n.d.), 5. One of the chief reasons that the state “must be made unnecessary,” Benjamin R. Tucker argued in the initial issue of his periodical, Liberty, was that the state “stifles thought.” Benjamin R. Tucker, “Our Purpose,” Liberty, August 6, 1881, 1. On Tucker and individualist anarchy, see Wendy McElroy, The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individual Anarchism, 1881–1908 (Landam, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003); Michael E. Coughlin and Charles H. Hamilton, eds., Benjamin R. Tucker and The Champions of Liberty: A Centenary Anthology (St. Paul, Minn.: Michael E. Coughlin and Charles H. Hamilton Publishers, 1975). On Heywood’s view of society, see also Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 56. 54 Heywood, letter to the editor, 3. 55 Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 438.

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rights of man, and invade the freedom of the commonwealth by putting in jeopardy the property, the morals, the health, or lives of others.” According to Seelye, the manufacturers and consumers of products that “contribute to the public disturbance” are “both alike within the sovereign authority to be restrained.” Products deemed “pernicious,” he insisted, “have no protection from law.” Seelye dismissed as a red herring the libertarian claim that the freedom of the press or free speech rights protects those who sell or read allegedly objectionable literature: “The plea of any man that he has a right to use his own as he will, is wholly impertinent.” Because obscene literature endangers the “public peace,” Seelye reasoned, the state’s obligation to civil society entails the suppression of it.56 Moral reformers expressed few misgivings about suppressing obscene literature because, like free love views of marriage, it imperiled public Protestantism as the nation’s common civic morality. Besides moral philosophy, Protestant theology provided another source for the New England Society’s rationale for censorship. The organization was dominated by leading first- and second-generation liberal Protestants.57 Three key convictions lay at the heart of Protestant modernism: the belief that human society is moving toward the realization of the Kingdom of God; the idea that God is immanent in human cultural development and revealed through it; and the conscious adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture.58 The views of George A. Gordon of Old South Church on human sin and social evil offer an important insight into the anti-vice society’s theological rationale for censorship. Gordon, who was a vice-president of the society for forty-two years, carefully balanced his eschatological optimism with moral realism. He expressed great optimism about Western society’s progress. The gradual but “universal movement from darkness to light,” he contended, assures believers “that injustice and inhumanity are not here to stay.” Both corporate and personal evil, he argued, obstructed the “speedy realization” of the Kingdom of God. Gordon identified three sources of personal evil: atavism, a “weakness of human reason,” and the “perversity” of the human will. “The believer in human progress,” Gordon concluded, 56

Seelye, A System of Morals, 139, 173– 74, 174, emphasis added, 175. For example, William Jewett Tucker, who was president of the New England Society in the early 1890s, was tried for heresy in the 1886 at Andover Seminary. His acquittal signaled the victory of the New Theology over Edwardsean Calvinism in the Congregational Church. Phillips Brooks’s 1891 election as Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts likewise marked the triumph of the Broad Church theology in that denomination. Daniel Day Williams, The Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941); Gillis Harp, Brahmin Prophet: Philips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 58 William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1976; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 2. 57

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“must reckon with the fact of wickedness.”59 Destructive literature threatened to nurture an animalism and perversity that could sabotage character and ultimately retard the coming kingdom. Gordon’s effort to adapt religious ideas to modern culture inspired him to reject traditional theological formulations as antiquated.60 Although modernists distinguished between the form and substance of Christian theology and viewed creeds as temporary and changeable, these Victorians considered ethics as immutable as the most staunch old guard Congregationalist. So he gave his wholehearted support to the work of the New England Society to ensure that the Boston youths loitering in Copley Square never put their hands upon Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The expression of theological certainties was malleable to the spirit of the times. Morality was not. Why is it the “duty” of a “private philanthropy” and not the police to ensure “the existence of a healthy social state?” asked Francis G. Peabody, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. When “we want to do a thing,” he told an audience at the New England anti-vice society’s annual meeting, “first of all we do it ourselves, and then in its own place and way the State learns the lesson of public sentiment and obeys it.” He cited the abolitionist movement as an example. “In precisely this way, when the community becomes aware of these subtle, insidious solicitations to sin smouldering in our midst, then first of all the popular conscience speaks, not to blunt public activity but to fortify it and to meet the immediate responsibilities of citizenship.”61 Peabody’s conviction that citizens had a “duty” to curb vice reflects the Protestant presumption that they had a custodial responsibility for American culture. Moral philosophy, Whig-Republican tradition, and Protestant theology nurtured this conviction. Because its members conceived of pernicious literature as a “social problem,” this organization was also one of many voluntary societies that emerged in the late nineteenth century to attempt to reform different aspects of American society that troubled Protestants. The New England Society did not arrest the consumers of lewd literature but rather those who produced and sold it. As its leaders repeatedly insisted, “We concern ourselves with fighting vice as a business, not vice as a diversion; public immorality, not private immorality.” Likewise, the society professed that it did not intend to “supplant” but to “supplement” the work of the police.62 New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, and San Francisco had similar organizations. They were part of a larger late nineteenth-century movement of extralegal law enforcement agencies that attempted to reform municipal 59 George A. Gordon, The New Epoch for Faith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 17, 361, 36–41. 60 Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America, 134. 61 Annual Report WWS, 1897–98, 41– 42. 62 Annual Report WWS, 1914–15, 5, 21; Annual Report WWS, 1923–24, 6.

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governments.63 Other parachurch and professional organizations—such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (which established its own Department for the Suppression of Impure Literature in 1883), the Christian Endeavor, the League of American Mothers, and the American Library Association—also promoted censorship. So did numerous Protestant denominations. In 1895, Protestants established the International Reform Federation in Washington, D.C., to lobby for censorship and other moral reform causes.64 Thus the New England Society was part of a broad array of voluntary associations comprising the Protestant establishment that advocated moral reform, as Peabody put it, to advance “social progress.”65 The informal Protestant establishment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as William Hutchison notes, was comprised not only of powerful Protestant denominations but also of a large network of cultural, literary, educational, and journalistic enterprises, and a personal network of friendships that extended across churches, political life, and virtually all major secular institutions. It also included a host of nondenominational voluntary associations that championed foreign missions, peace, temperance, and various other kinds of moral and social reform.66 The New England Society was the Protestant establishment in action.

VI. THE SUPPRESSION OF LEAVES OF GRASS When Boston district attorney Oliver Stevens threatened to charge Whitman’s publisher with violating the state’s obscenity law in 1882, it was an obscenity law that the New England Society had helped to write. Inspired by the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873, a number of states strengthened their own antiobscenity laws. Massachusetts revised its obscenity law in 1879. The following year, the New England Society successfully introduced an amendment to that law. It prohibited books, pamphlets, ballads and the like “containing obscene, indecent, or impure language” and also works “manifestly tending to the corruption of the morals or youth.”67 The absence of clear definitions 63 The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in 1872, is just one example. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 185– 91. 64 Parker, Purifying America, 5 –6, 35–36; Evelyn Geller, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876–1939: A Study in Cultural Change (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 28; Wilbur F. Crafts, Patriotic Studies of a Quarter Century of Moral Legislation in Congress for Men’s Leagues, Young People’s Societies and Civic Clubs including Extracts from Bills, Acts and Documents of United States Congress Relating to Moral and Social Reforms, 1888–1911 (Washington, D.C.: International Reform Bureau, 1911); Foster, Moral Reconstruction. 65 Annual Report WWS, 1897– 98, 41. 66 Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America, 61. 67 Annual Report NESSV, 1879– 80, 3; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1880 (Boston: Rand, Avery and Co.,

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for the key terms “obscene, indecent, or impure,” as well as the exact meaning of “manifestly” provided the society with plenty of leeway to prosecute publications it deemed obscene. Massachusetts’s law proved to be an important institutional structure that empowered the anti-vice society as it exercised jurisdiction over literature in New England. Less than three weeks after the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice was organized, the U.S. Circuit Court heard Heywood’s appeal. The court was not persuaded by Heywood’s argument that the Comstock Act was “unconstitutional, inoperative and void.” The conviction was upheld and Heywood began serving a two-year sentence at Dedham State Prison in June.68 Outraged free lovers and free thinkers organized an “Indignation Meeting” at Faneuil Hall in early August to protest Heywood’s imprisonment.69 This meeting moved the free lovers to circulate a petition, which gathered a reported six thousand signatures, to secure a presidential pardon for Heywood. Although the moral reformers countered their arguments, in December 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood.70 “A man guilty of circulating writing or publishing obscene books—books intended or calculated to corrupt the young would find no favor with me,” Hayes wrote in his private diary. However, he concluded, “In this case the writings were objectionable but were not obscene, lascivious, lewd, or corrupting in the criminal sense.”71 When Whitman’s

1880), 418; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Journal of the Senate, for the Year 1880 (Boston: Rand, Avery and Co., 1880), 214; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, in the Years 1880–81 (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co., 1881), 64. 68 United States v. Heywood, Circuit Court, Federal Records, vol. 78, 1877– 78, 695– 96, District Court of the United States of America, for District of Massachusetts, National Archives at Boston, Waltham, Mass. 69 Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878, to Protest Against the Injury Done to the Freedom of the Press by the Conviction and Imprisonment of Ezra H. Heywood (Boston: Benj, R. Tucker, 1878); “Free Speech: Great Meeting in Faneuil Hall,” Boston Globe, August 2, 1878, 1; “The Heywood Indignation Meeting,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 2, 1878, 2. 70 “The Pardon,” The Word, December 1878, 2; “Heywood Pardoned,” Boston Globe, December 20, 1878, 4; “Heywood at Liberty,” Boston Globe, January 4, 1879, 4. 71 Rutherford B. Hayes, Hayes: The Diary of a President 1875–1881: Covering the Disputed Election, the End of Reconstruction, and the Beginning of Civil Service, ed. T. Harry Williams (New York: David McKay, 1964), 184– 85. This victory inspired free lovers to seek a pardon for another convicted free love activist and editor of the The Truth Seeker, D. M. Bennett, who had been arrested by Comstock. A judge had sentenced Bennett to thirteen months in prison and fined him three hundred dollars in June 1879. This time the anti-pardon campaign, which gathered the signatures of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Talbot, Unitarian theologian James Freeman Clarke, and a number of leaders in the New England Society, won. “The Opposition,” The Word, September 1879, 2; “Free Speech, Free Mails,” The Word, October 1879, 2; Robert G. Ingersoll to Rutherford B. Hayes, 2 July 1879, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B.

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publisher withdrew Leaves of Grass in April 1882, the level of discontent among free lovers with the “vulgar, superstitious, vindictive conspiracy against civil rights” by Comstock and other “narrow-minded blockheads” in anti-vice societies had been brewing for more than two years.72

VII. WHITMAN AND THE “WHITMANIACS” RESPOND TO THE SUPPRESSION OF LEAVES OF GRASS “I have heard nothing but expurgate, expurgate, expurgate, from the day I started,” Whitman told Horace Traubel, his longtime friend and secretary. “Expurgation is apology—yes, surrender—yes, an admission that something or other was wrong.”73 Once Whitman and Osgood severed their relationship, the poet went on the attack. While Whitman published only one response to the controversy, he plotted with two of his closest confidants— Richard M. Bucke, the superintendent of the London Insane Asylum in southwest Ontario, and William D. O’Connor, a novelist who worked at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.—to challenge what the latter termed “the greatest outrage of the century.” O’Connor had attempted to rally political contacts in Washington, D.C., including the free thinker Robert Ingersoll, to persuade the U.S. Attorney General to pressure Stevens into reversing his threat of prosecution.74 Having failed, he turned his attention to marshaling outrage against the suppression. Like “a skunk to a barn-door, as an example to deter,” O’Connor wrote, Comstock “ought to be crushed, signally, publicly, in the interest of free letters and the rights of thought.”75 In a letter to the Springfield Republican in May 1882, Bucke attacked the suppression of Leaves of Grass. The work, he wrote, was not obscene but “the most honest, pure, religious and moral” book ever published. Whitman’s crime, Bucke argued, was that he believed “in the grandeur and good of humanity in all its parts and relations,” including “his sexual

Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio; Anthony Comstock to Rutherford B. Hayes, 7 July 1879, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont, Ohio. On Hayes and the controversy over Heywood and Bennett, see Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior & President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 383– 86; Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 118– 19; Sears, Sex Radicals, 166–68, 171–72. 72 “Mrs. Hayes’ Censorship of the Press,” The Word, March 1880, 2. 73 Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:150–51. Despite his objections to expurgation, Whitman had a hand in, or at least approved, four different expurgated editions of Leaves of Grass. Ed Falsom, “Leaves of Grass, Junior: Whitman’s Compromise with Discriminating Tastes,” American Literature 63 (1991): 641– 63. 74 William D. O’Conner to Richard M. Bucke, 29 April 1882, Container 53, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress. 75 William D. O’Conner to Walt Whitman, 17 April 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:193.

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passion, and the organs and the acts” by which this passion “finds its gratification.” The suppression of any book under any under circumstance, Bucke added, was “wrong, inexpedient and contrary to the spirit of this age.”76 In three essays published in the New York Tribune between May and August, O’Connor, who had made a career of defending Whitman from obscenity charges, largely repeated the same two points that Bucke had made but did so with a great deal more histrionics. O’Connor declared that Emerson, “our man of holier heart,” had praised the twenty-two passages that Stevens deemed allegedly obscene. O’Connor ridiculed Osgood’s “shameful transaction,” mocked the district attorney’s banning of “liberty of thought,” and berated Comstock for waging a “holy war” against the poet. In O’Connor’s second letter, he responded to a critic who pointed out that Emerson had cautioned Whitman against publishing the “Children of Adam” poems. O’Connor’s final letter scorned “the musing owl” of the New York anti-vice society. “So long as Mr. Comstock chooses to confine his industry to the removal of the stuff which Dutch and English lust produced,” he argued, “all may be well with him.” But “let him dare to throw into his night-cart that pearl of great price . . . and he will find himself the centre of a tornado.”77 Comstock eagerly took up the challenge. Not only did the two leading “Whitmaniacs,” as one Whitman scholar described Burke and O’Connor, denounce the suppression of Whitman’s work but two nationally prominent free lovers, Ezra Heywood and Benjamin R. Tucker, and one locally notorious free thinker, George Chainey, also quickly joined the fray.78 Chainey’s and Heywood’s initial participation came unsolicited but Tucker’s involvement was in part courted by O’Connor. During the late spring and summer of 1882, O’Connor corresponded extensively with them and fed them details about the suppression, including copies of correspondence between Whitman, Osgood, and Stevens. Given their similar views of sexuality and free speech as well as their common criticisms of Protestant Christianity, Whitman and free lovers and free thinkers were natural allies. In fact, one of Whitman’s earliest reviewers proclaimed Leaves of Grass to be a manifestation of the “lecherous lips” of 76

R. M. Bucke, letter to the editor, Springfield Republican, May 23, 1882, 1. William D. O’Connor, letter to the editor, New York Tribune, May 25, 1882, 3; John W. Chadwick. letter to the editor, New York Tribune, May 25, 1882, 7; William D. O’Connor, letter to the editor, New York Tribune, June 18, 1882; William D. O’Connor, “Mr. Comstock as Cato the Censor,” New York Tribune, August 27, 1882, 5. O’Connor’s most notable contribution to American literature was his 1866 apologia of Whitman in the wake of his dismissal from the Department of the Interior in 1865, The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1866). On O’Connor’s role in defending Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882, see Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion, 123–38. 78 Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion, 132. 77

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the burgeoning free love movement.79 Whitman even got fired from his position with the Interior Department in 1865 because Secretary of the Interior James Harlan believed the poet “was a free lover.”80 Drawing upon the passional theory of sexuality introduced to America by the French utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, and developed by, among others, John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community, free love advocates and Whitman held an unbridled commitment to sexual self-determination. Whitman also distinguished between “adhesiveness,” or comradeship, and “amativeness,” or heterosexual love.81 Like Ezra and Angela Heywood, Whitman glorified sexual relations based solely on amativeness or passionate attractions. Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote in 1888, “is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality.”82 Victorian Protestants, like those in the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, by contrast, insisted that sexual impulses should only be expressed within the confines of marriage. In the eyes of Homer Sprague, president of the New England Society, the “self-styled reformers” of the free love movement wanted to “reconstruct society on a new foundation” by “bringing back the golden age of monkeydom and—liberty!”83 The moral philosopher Noah Porter was somewhat less melodramatic in his assessment of free love. The movement, he wrote, “dethrones the will from its appropriate dominion over the feelings, and releases the emotions from their responsibility to the conscience.” As a result, free love not only destroys marriage but also “a wholesome and most necessary discipline to the duties of good citizenship and of personal responsibility.”84 79

Griswold, New York Criterion, November 10, 1855, in Walt Whitman, ed. Hindus, 31. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 2:798, quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 456. 81 Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 207– 210, 222, 225, 461; William H. Schurr, “Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The Making of a Sexual Revolution,” Soundings 74 (1991): 126; David Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 139; Rosemary Graham, “The Prostitute in the Garden: Walt Whitman, Fanny Hill, and the Fantasy of Female Pleasure,” ELH: English Literary History 64 (1997): 484– 85. 82 Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” November Boughs (1888), reprinted in Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, ed. David McKay (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1900), 556– 57. 83 Homer B. Sprague, “Societies for the Suppression of Vice,” Education 3 (1882): 74. At the height of the Leaves of Grass controversy, one moral reformer wrote: “The passions are normally and gradually developed in man as in the lower animals; but the brutes are under no restraint. Instinct, impulse, and opportunity determine their actions. Yet, as passion strengthens, it stimulates the imagination. Marriage, only, affords legitimate gratification. Lust, indulged in thought or deep apart from love, is moral impurity; sexual love with lust, apart from wedlock, is the spirit of adultery. This is the strain placed by God, human nature, and law, upon man.” J. M. Buckley, “The Suppression of Vice,” North American Review 134 (1882): 495 –96. 84 Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 478. 80

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Whitman’s “Children of Adam” cluster offered a dramatically different understanding of sexuality. He urged Americans to return to the Garden of Even and recover the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve before the fall.85 Like free love advocates, Leaves of Grass celebrated sexuality unfettered by the fig leaves of social convention. Space permits only two brief examples. “Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and Lusty by Nature,” Whitman begins his ode “To a Common Prostitute.” Unapologetic, the author sings the praise of the woman he has hired for sex: “My girl I appoint with you an appointment, / and I charge you that you make preparations to be worthy to meet me.”86 According to one Whitman scholar, the poet “gives a modern vision of Christ’s compassionate treatment of Mary Magdalene by fusing democratic sympathy with images of beauty and ennoblement.”87 In the first stanza of “A Woman Waits for Me,” the author articulates his pounding desire for the woman who is anticipating his arrival. The second stanza suggests that sex is a natural part of creation. The third and fourth stanzas emphasize how both the man and the woman speak of the pleasures of physical contact: “Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex, / Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.” The final four stanzas describe the act of intercourse. “I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me. / Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself.”88 Given Whitman’s exaltation of sexual self-determination based upon passional attraction, it is little wonder that the moral reformers sought to suppress his work. Whitman also shared with free love advocates a common commitment to free speech. As noted above, he scorned expurgated editions and the infringement upon his constitutional right to free speech. After Whitman was fired from his position in 1865, O’Connor denounced the dismissal as but one manifestation of the effort “throughout Christiandom” to “obstruct the freedom of letters.”89 As individualist anarchists, Ezra and Angela Heywood and Benjamin R. Tucker cherished free speech as a sacred right. After his 1878 conviction at the hands of Comstock, Heywood asked “whether the American people, themselves . . . or Anthony Comstock, shall decide what books may be read; whether freedom of conscience, of speech, of the press, and of the mails, the most precious and indispensable achievements of civilization, are to be permanently suppressed in these States.”90 85

James E. Miller, Jr. “Children of Adam (1860),” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 115. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 387. 87 Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 230. 88 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 101– 03; Maire Mullins, “A Woman Waits for Me (1856),” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 794– 95. 89 O’Connor, The Good Gray Poet, reprinted in Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion, 202. 90 Ezra H. Heywood, “The Outlook,” The Word, August 1878, 3. 86

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Whitman, the free love activists, and the free thinker George Chainey also held in common a similar critique of Protestant cultural hegemony. This is not to say, however, that Whitman, free lovers, and free thinkers had similar religious views. Heywood, who had aspired to become a Baptist minister while attending Brown University, was a spiritualist. Tucker and Chainey were atheists. Tucker, for example, gleefully asserted that the French Enlightenment had “brought the authority of the supernatural into disrepute. The Church has been declining ever since.”91 Chainey, also a former Baptist minister, excoriated Protestant Boston from his “Infidel Pulpit” every Sunday afternoon in Paine Memorial Hall.92 Whitman, by contrast, viewed himself as a prophet of a new post-Christian religion. Informed by transcendentalism and religious romanticism, Whitman believed that the divine presence in all of creation was part of its evolutionary process toward higher perfection. At the human level, as one Whitman scholar observed, “this divine force manifested itself in the instinctive desires of the soul—desires for sex, love, freedom, immorality—which could only be satisfied through the soul’s participation in divinity.”93 What Whitman did share with Tucker, Chainey, and Heywood was an antagonism toward public Protestantism. “The churches are one vast lie,” Whitman insisted. The “priests are continually telling what they know well enough is not so, and keeping back what they know is so. The spectacle is a pitiful one.”94 To Heywood, the Comstock Act expressed an “incarnate Intolerance” paralleled only by “Medieval Inquisitions.”95 Tucker denounced both liberal Protestant moralists and orthodox theologians. “The sickening gush and cant of some of these ethical cranks is not a whit less contemptible 91

Tucker, “Our Purpose,” 1. Benjamin R. Tucker, “Mr. Chainey’s Gospel,” Liberty, November 12, 1881, 2. Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 21. Whitman once described Leaves of Grass to Traubel as a “New Bible.” Complete Writings, 9:6. According to Kuebrich, the role of religion in Leaves of Grass is best understood not as one theme among others but constituting “a coherent world view that informs the other themes and integrates them with one another.” As such, he notes, Leaves of Grass is designed “to emancipate the human subject and promote his or her development. After announcing himself as a saving prophet in ‘Song of Myself,’ Whitman immediately leads the reader through two sequences: ‘Children of Adam,’ designed to sanctify the body and liberate heterosexual passion; and ‘Calamus,’ designed to liberate men from emotional repression, call for new levels of male intimacy, and united the soul with God. . . . he presents a vision of a loving God who not only provides for evolutionary and historical progress but also personal immortality and the soul’s ongoing development in the afterlife.” Kuebrich, Minor Prophecy, 10; Kuebrich, “Religion,” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 583. 94 Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1332, quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 238. Whitman once told Traubel that “the negative virtues of the churches are the most menacing, to me the most abhorrent, of all professed virtues. . . . The morals of the churches: they might be morals if they were not something else: I have always looked about to discover a word to describe the situation: how Jesus and the churches have got divorced: how the institution has destroyed the spirit.” Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 1:97 –98. 95 Heywood, letter to the editor, 3. 92 93

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than the orthodox bigot’s whining over the Blood of the Lamb,” he complained. “With cool effrontery,” he insisted, they both “set up standards, ways, and methods of conduct and then simper, scold, and dictate over other people’s ways and walk in life,” and constantly strive to inflict the penalties of social ostracism upon those “who morally choose to mind their own business.”96 When the Osgood edition of Leaves of Grass came out in the fall of 1881, free lovers “praised all its naked truthfulness and purity.”97 After the New England anti-vice society successfully suppressed Leaves of Grass in 1882, Whitman responded to his critics in an article published in the North American Review.98 The poet observed two prevailing American attitudes toward sexual matters. The “conventional one,” fueled by “Puritanism,” advocated an ignorance and repression that resulted in “ill births, inefficient maturity, snickering pruriency,” and “human pathologic evil and morbidity.” The second, “by far the largest,” found expression in “erotic stories” that dwelt on “sensual voluptuousness.” Whitman called for “a new departure” that viewed “the sexual passion in itself, while normal and unperverted,” as “inherently legitimate, creditable, not necessarily an improper theme for a poet.” He aspired to redeem the subject from the “pens of blackguards” and show that “motherhood, fatherhood, sexuality,” and all that “belongs to them,” can be “openly and joyously” addressed from the “highest artistic” perspective. Might not, Whitman concluded, “the Creative Power itself deign a smile of approval?”99 The new edition, however, left some reviewers wincing. In the New York Tribune, one asked “whether anybody—even a poet—ought to take off his trousers in the marketplace.”100 Other 96

“Morality and Purity Cranks,” Liberty, August 9, 1883, 5. Benjamin R. Tucker, “Leaves of Grass,” Liberty, November 26, 1881, 3. Walt Whitman to John Burroughs, 28 April 1882, Correspondence, 3:274. 99 Walt Whitman, “A Memorandum at a Venture,” North American Review 134 (1882): 546– 48. To Whitman’s dismay he could not shake the association with erotic literature. Apparently people wrote Whitman letters or sent him writings that were obscene. He got one such letter and showed it to Traubel and said: “It has always been a puzzle to me why people think that because I wrote Children of Adam, Leaves of Grass, I must perforce be interested in all the literature of rape, all the pornograph [sic] of vile minds. I have not only been made a target by those who disposed me but a victim of violent interpretation by those who condoned me. You know the sort of stuff that’s sent to me here.” Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:119. 100 “New Publications,” New York Tribune, November 19, 1881, 6. Like Whitman’s contemporaries, Whitman scholars today continue to disagree over whether Whitman offered a true alternative to both erotic and Victorian literature. David Reynolds, for instance, argues that Whitman offered a “chaste alternative” and “a new objectivity to the exploration of human sexuality” when compared to the erotic writing of his day. Beneath the American Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1988), 223; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 298. Rosemary Graham, by contrast, argues that “Whitman’s best erotic writing owes a substantial debt to pornography,” especially the eighteenth-century British erotic classic, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or as it is better known, Fanny Hill. “The Prostitute in the Garden,” 569– 97. On the sexuality of Whitman’s poetry, see also Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 44–47, 327–28, 330; Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet (New York: 97 98

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newspapers and literary journals applauded Osgood’s decision to withdraw Leaves of Grass from circulation. Society, one critic wrote, “has the right and the duty to step up and say, No, you shall not do this.” Yet others denounced the decision. Massachusetts, one Boston Globe editorial complained, has put “the thumb-screws upon thought and consigns ideas to dungeons built by ignorance and infested by squatting toads of hypocrisy and sham modesty.”101

VIII. FREE LOVERS AND FREE THINKERS TAKE UP WHITMAN’S CAUSE Free love advocates and free thinkers, having battled moral reformers for more than a decade, eagerly took up Whitman’s cause. In a “sermon” in early June 1882, George Chainey proclaimed, “How delightful to recline at one’s ease in the summer grass! How exasperating to want to do so,” he added, “only to be told by some official sign to keep off the grass!” Chainey praised Whitman’s poetry for exalting “the glory of the body as well as that of the soul. . . . In his sight, no part or passion of the body is to be slighted or regarded as vulgar.” Chainey repeated Emerson’s admiration of Whitman’s work. He also viciously denounced the “autocratic, inquisitorial, selfappointed guardian of the public morals” who trampled upon “the sacred rights of the liberty of conscience.”102 Chainey, ironically, was about to encounter one such custodian of public Protestantism, Edward S. Tobey, the postmaster of Boston and one of the founding vice-presidents of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. Fearing that he might be prosecuted for violating the Comstock Act, Chainey’s printer refused to publish the sermon because This World included Whitman’s poems, “To a Common Prostitute” and “A Woman Waits for Me.” After checking postal guidelines, Chainey issued the number as a special supplement and consulted the Boston postmaster, Tobey, who, after reading the poems and checking his regulations, determined that the issue could be mailed. But Tobey, as Chainey recounted in letters to both O’Connor and Whitman, had second thoughts about the matter. He consulted the district attorney, Oliver Stevens, “who aroused his doubts as to its mailability.” Tobey then decided to refer the entire matter to the postmaster

Oxford University Press, 1989), 308 –23; Allen, Solitary Singer, 64; Paul Zweig, Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 12; Schurr, “Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” 101–28. 101 “The Suppression of Walt Whitman,” Literary World, June 3, 1882, 180; “Leaves of Grass,” Editorial, Boston Globe, May 28, 1882, 6. 102 Chainey, “Keep Off the Grass,” 3, 4, 6 –7, 8. Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 142– 60.

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general in Washington, D.C.103 At this point, O’Connor leaped into the fray. O’Connor wanted “to draw the enemy’s fire until some act of resistance is committed.” He hoped that either the New England Society or Comstock would engage him in a fight so that he could further discredit them and, more importantly, force them into court where he could secure a legal vindication of Leaves of Grass.104 O’Connor might have also wanted to reassure the Philadelphia publisher, Rees, Walsh and Company, who had agreed to reprint the Osgood edition, that Leaves of Grass was immune from persecution.105 Moreover, controversy might help “secure a prodigious sale” of books.106 O’Connor recruited Robert Ingersoll to help him persuade the acting postmaster general in Washington, D.C., to allow Chainey’s periodical to be distributed. “We had a red-hot time over the outrage,” O’Connor wrote Whitman.107 The postmaster general told Tobey to release the publication for circulation.108 Tobey dragged his feet for several days before actually placing This World in the mail. Indignant over the delay, Chainey confronted Tobey and told the postmaster “that he has the Gospel to comfort him and Jesus to forgive him all the lies he has told about this business.”109 As soon as news of the suppression of Whitman’s poetry hit the streets, Benjamin R. Tucker sarcastically praised the state for banning the “villainous teaching” of Whitman and saving “our pure and innocent youth” from his “fiendish designs.”110 He also lambasted the “asinine postmaster” for attempting to suppress This World.111 Since the New England Society worked in a much more circumspect fashion than the publicity-seeking Comstock, Tucker also provided O’Connor throughout the controversy in the spring and summer of 1882 with information about who was behind the 103 George Chainey to William D. O’Connor, 27 June 1882, Container 22, reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; George Chainey to Walt Whitman, 27 July 1882, Container 194, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; Boston Daily Advertiser, June 20, 1882; and “ ‘The Late Attack on Walt Whitman’s Book.’ From the Philadelphia Press,” n.p., two newspaper clippings included in George Chainey to William D. O’Connor, 11 July 1882. Excerpts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana located in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University. 104 Benjamin R. Tucker to William D. O’Conner, 9 July 1882, Container 63, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress. 105 Walt Whitman to William D. O’Connor, 9 July 1882, Correspondence, 3:296. 106 William D. O’Connor to Walt Whitman, 20 July 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:60. 107 William D. O’Connor to Walt Whitman, 29 June 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 3:50. 108 James M. Marr to Postmaster, Boston, 1 July 1882, Container 22, reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress. 109 George Chainey to William D. O’Connor, 11 July 1882. Excerpts from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana located in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University. 110 Benjamin R. Tucker, “Obscenity and the State,” Liberty, May 27, 1882, 2. 111 Benjamin R. Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, July 22, 1882, 1.

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suppression of Leaves of Grass.112 Like O’Connor, Tucker hoped to bait the anti-vice society into defending the suppression in a court of law. In late May, Tucker offered to republish Leaves of Grass in order to “invite the authorities to dispute my right to do so.”113 Whitman never replied to the offer. Undaunted, Tucker began advertising the sale of Leaves of Grass in the pages of his journal and invited the authorities to take him to court. The postmaster general’s decision to permit Chainey to circulate two of Whitman’s poems may have left the New England Society reluctant to make Tucker into a martyr. In late August, Tucker complained, “We have offered to meet the enemy, but the enemy declines to be met.”114 Ezra Heywood surpassed both O’Connor and Tucker in his vitriolic denunciations of the mainline Protestant efforts to coerce conformity to its moral vision through suppression. According to one diatribe, the “orthodox obscenest,” Anthony Comstock, had become “President de facto of these States” in 1873. Despite the setback handed the moral reformer in 1878, Heywood asserted, “President de facto Comstock’s lieutenants are still seeking ‘smut,’ still mousing for ‘obscenity’ in literary ‘Grass.’” Heywood emphatically concluded, “Lascivious censors who presume to say who shall & who shall not read this book are turned ‘out to grass’ to browse on thistles of wrath” and the “nettles of contempt” that “their idiocy provokes.”115 In August 1882, Heywood published a special supplemental edition, The Word “Extra,” with Whitman’s poems, “To a Common Prostitute” and “A Woman Waits for Me,” as well as an “Open Letter to Walt Whitman.” The “dark spirit of persecution which hanged Quakers,” Heywood complained, “now revisits Massachusetts to hunt down & exterminate unpopular reformers who assert Personal Liberty, freedom of the press, of the mails and the right of private judgments in morals.”116 Heywood achieved what Tucker could not: Comstock arrested him in late October on four counts of violating the federal obscenity statute.117 Heywood finally had another chance in open court to rebuff mainline Protestant efforts to compel conformity to its vision of sexuality, literature, 112 Benjamin R. Tucker to William D. O’Conner, 4 July 1882, Container 63, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; William D. O’Connor to Benjamin R. Tucker 6 July 1882, Container 22, reel 13, Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress; Tucker to O’Conner, 9 July 1882. 113 Benjamin R. Tucker to Walt Whitman, 25 May 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:253–54. 114 Benjamin R. Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, August 19, 1882, 1. 115 “The Sovereignty of Liberty,” The Word, August 1882, 2. See also, “Inspiration Versus Censorship,” The Word, July 1882, 2. 116 Walt Whitman, “To A Common Prostitute,” The Word—Extra (1882), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Heywood, “An Open Letter to Walt Whitman.” 117 “The Latest United States Assault,” The Word, December 1882, 2.

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and the common good. Attempting to rally support for his upcoming trial, he sent Whitman a copy of the “Open Letter” in early November.118 Whitman did not reply. Meanwhile, the Heywoods launched a series of literary salvos against the “obscenists” of the New England anti-vice society, against the U.S. government for allowing “itself to become basely subservient to ecclesiastic, church Intrusion,” and against the “religio-political pimp,” Comstock.119 At the April 1883 trial, the first two charges against Heywood were immediately dropped on a technicality: the original indictment did not actually include the words of the two allegedly obscene poems and Cupid’s Yokes because they were too lewd to be included in the court records. The remaining two charges concerned Heywood’s advertisements for vaginal syringes, or “Comstock syringes,” as Heywood called them. The jury found Heywood not guilty.120 O’Connor and Whitman privately rejoiced over Comstock’s defeat. “The news of Comstock’s disaster,” a gleeful O’Connor wrote, “gave me the greatest relief and exultation.” Whitman gloated too. Comstock, he told O’Connor, “retires with his tail intensely curved inwards.”121 Whitman’s silence in response to Heywood’s appeal for assistance seems very strange, especially since they shared similar views of sexuality and a common commitment to free speech. After Heywood contacted him in November 1882, Whitman wrote O’Connor that “I see nothing better for myself or friends to do than quietly stand aside & let it go on.”122 The reason for Whitman’s silence is twofold. Despite their similarities, Whitman did not share the Heywoods’ desire to abolish marriage. In his North American Review article, Whitman called marriage “the foundation and sine qua non of the civilized state.”123 Shortly before Heywood’s trial in 1883, Whitman told O’Connor that he desired “to remain entirely aloof & silent (& send no money).”124 O’Connor shared Whitman’s opinion: “I don’t like Heywood’s ways, and I don’t like the Free-Love theories at all, but he has his rights, which these devils trample on.”125 Whitman’s reluctance to be 118

Walt Whitman to William D. O’Connor, 12 November 1882, Correspondence, 3:314. Ezra Heywood, “Trial of the Case, UY.S.G. v. E.H.H,” The Word, January 1883, 2; Angela T. Heywood, “The Woman’s View of It—No. 2,” The Word, February 1883, 2 –3; Ezra Heywood, “Citizen Right vs. Class-Rule Assault,” The Word, March 1883, 2. 120 Ezra Heywood, “Citizen Right Vindicated,” The Word, May 1883, 2; Benjamin R. Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty, June 9, 1883, 1; Benjamin R. Tucker, “The Value of the Heywood Victory,” Liberty, June 9, 1883, 3; Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 144–46. 121 William D. O’Connor to Walt Whitman, 17 April 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:90– 91; Walt Whitman to William D. O’Connor, 14 April 1883, Correspondence, 3:338– 39. 122 Whitman to O’Connor, 12 November 1882, Correspondence, 3: 314. 123 Whitman, “A Memorandum at a Venture,” 548. For other evidence of Whitman’s critic of free love views of marriage, see Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 223– 24. 124 Walt Whitman to William D. O’Connor, 29 March 1883, Correspondence, 3:335. 125 William D. O’Connor to Walt Whitman, 27 October 1882, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 4:323. On the day of Heywood’s trial, O’Connor wrote Whitman, “To-day is the day set for 119

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identified with Heywood and the free love movement was not entirely unusual even among social progressives in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1879, the National Liberal League fractured over whether to support a campaign to repeal the Comstock Act, as free love activists in the organization demanded, or to merely advocate the revision of federal obscenity laws. League president Francis E. Abbot and vice-president Robert Ingersoll favored revision, not abolition, of the Comstock Act because they feared the free speech movement was being hindered by its critics’ association of the movement with the promotion of obscene literature and the free love movement. Comstock, Abbot declared, “has done a great deal of dirty but most necessary work.” About free lovers Ingersoll said, “Let them spend their time examining each other’s sexual organs, and in letting ours alone.” When free lovers succeeded in getting the league to support total repeal in 1879, Abbot quit in frustration. Ingersoll followed suit the following year.126 Whitman, in other words, was not alone in his misgivings about the free love movement. The poet also remained distant because he was keenly aware that any association with free lovers would damage his already fragile reputation. When the Reverend William F. Channing invited him to lecture in Boston as part of a series organized by Angela Heywood’s sisters, Josephine and Flora Tilton, Whitman wrote O’Connor that he declined the invitation because of scheduling conflicts and added, “I shall certainly not do anything to identify myself specially with free love.”127 Before Heywood’s acquittal in 1883, O’Connor told Whitman that he “did perfectly right in keeping aloof and not contributing to the defense. Your connection could not help him and might hurt you. ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves are powerless,’ says Euripides, and Heywood is certainly a champion jackass.”128

Heywood’s trial, and cold shivers run over me as I think of it. I can’t help some sympathy for the devilish fool, despite the mischief he is likely to do to us.” William D. O’Connor to Walt Whitman, 27 March 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 3:566. 126 Lawrence B. Goodheart, “The Ambiguity of Individualism: the National Liberal League’s Challenge to the Comstock Law,” in American Chameleon: Individualism in Trans-National Context, ed. Richard O. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 133– 50, quotations are on 145. At the National Liberal League meeting in 1878 just before he resigned, Ingersoll said: “I believe that the family is the unit of good government, and that every good government is simply an aggregation of good families. I therefore not only believe in perfect civil and religious liberty, but I believe in the one man loving the one woman.” Robert Ingersoll, “Convention of the National Liberal League,” The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 12 vols. (New York: Dresden, 1909), 12:233– 35. On Abbot and the controversy within National Liberal League over free love, see Sydney Ahlstrom and Robert Bruce Mullin, The Scientific Theist: A Life of Francis Ellingwood Abbot (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987), 11– 27. 127 Whitman to O’Connor, 12 November 1882, Correspondence, 3:315. 128 William D. O’Connor to Walt Whitman, 1 April 1883, Traubel, With Walt Whitman, 2:260.

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IX. CONCLUSION While the banning of Leaves of Grass in Boston did boost sales of the Philadelphia edition, the suppression of the volume did not enhance Whitman’s reputation.129 When James Russell Lowell produced a list of great literary figures to be inscribed on the Boston Public Library in 1895, he omitted Whitman’s name.130 Libraries in Boston and Cambridge placed Leaves of Grass on restricted circulation.131 Only after his death in 1892 did Whitman begin to enjoy a national reputation. In the subsequent generation, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud would give scientific credence to Whitman’s views of sexuality. Yet Whitman’s poetry was more than an important precursor to later writers who defied the Victorian Protestant vision of sexuality. Whitman exerted a great deal of influence on subsequent generations of poets. As literary scholar Harold Bloom observes, “All major American poetry since Whitman is Whitmanian.”132 While important because it offered a radical alternative to, and critique of, the dominant Protestant morality, the free love movement had only a limited impact. Comstock, as well as moral reform societies in Boston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Baltimore, and San Francisco, among other cities, successfully prosecuted free love activists during the late nineteenth century. Comstock in fact arrested Heywood two more times after the Leaves of Grass controversy. While he escaped punishment after his first arrest, he served two years in prison after his 1890 arrest.133 The suppression of Leaves of Grass was not a decisive triumph for the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. While the organization stopped the circulation of the Osgood edition in Boston, it did not prevent the publication of the definitive edition. Moreover, Chainey’s periodical was not prohibited from the U.S. mails. Yet the successful banning of Leaves of Grass was nevertheless an important victory for the society. The law they had written was enforced in Massachusetts. The society would write a number of new laws to prevent the circulation of literature they deemed 129 According to Reynolds, the Leaves of Grass edition produced by the Philadelphia publisher Rees, Welsh and Company quickly went through five printings by the end of 1883. In December of that year, Whitman received a royalty check for more than $1,200. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 543 –44. 130 William S. Kennedy, The Fight of a Book for the World (West Yarmouth, Mass.: Stonecraft Press, 1926), 115. 131 Charles B. Willard, Whitman’s American Fame: The Growth of His Reputation in America After 1892 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1950), 26. 132 Harold Bloom, “Bloom on Walt Whitman,” in Walt Whitman, Classic Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2007). Bloom’s Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID¼WE54& SID¼5&iPin¼CCVWW001&SingleRecord¼True (accessed March 22, 2009). 133 Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 147–81.

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obscene. Between 1880 and 1905 the organization successfully introduced ten new laws or amendments to curb the sale of obscene literature. The organization also proved to be remarkably successful at prosecuting the peddlers of objectionable literature as well as gambling, prostitution, and the sale of illicit drugs. For instance, between 1893 and 1897 the society helped convict 95 percent of the 539 people it arrested. This success rate persisted through the first two decades of twentieth century. In 1918, the society boasted that it had a conviction rate of 98 percent over the course of its history.134 The members of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice also learned important lessons from their first major public controversy. Unlike the publicity-seeking Comstock, the organization did not publicly threaten to suppress publishers or authors. Nor did it advertise the books it had successfully banned. The organization cultivated cooperative relationships with the police and local district attorneys and selectively used public criticism as a final measure to prompt them into action. In 1891, the society sought to distinguish itself from the controversial Comstock by renaming itself as the New England Watch and Ward Society. For a generation, the Watch and Ward Society attempted to control literary consumption in New England. In an 1891 review of the controversy, one free love advocate lamented the cultural power of the moral reformers. “Even now the lewd terrorism is so potent that large publishing houses surrender books & plates to these sodomists, & great daily newspapers bow to their maggot-brained, rotten-hearted despotism.”135 The power of the Watch and Ward Society only grew in the early twentieth century. In 1915, the organization and the Boston Bookseller Association formed a committee to review allegedly objectionable books. If the committee unanimously determined that a volume transgressed Massachusetts’s obscenity law, an “informal notice” was distributed to all Massachusetts booksellers who “quietly” withdrew the book or risked prosecution. The society had a similar arrangement with the New England Magazine Sellers Association.136 For more than a generation, the unitive impulse of the mainline Protestant establishment set the limits of its willingness to tolerate allegedly salacious literature. A Victorian understanding of literature, late nineteenth-century moral philosophy, Whig-Republican political tradition, and liberal Protestant theology provided the intellectual warrant for the suppression of alternative moralities that threatened the moral codes of public Protestantism. In the 134

Annual Report WWS, 1896– 97, 20; Annual Report WWS, 1917–18, 22. A. E. G. “Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” The Word, January 1889, 2. 136 “Boston Discusses Its Censorship Problem,” Publishers’ Weekly, May 28, 1927, 2118–20; Annual Report WWS, 1915–16, 32. 135

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1920s, Ferris Greenslet, the head of Houghton Mifflin Company, complained that the Watch and Ward Society had prevented Boston from playing a significant part in the decade’s literary renaissance.137 In the eyes of Whitman, Heywood, and their allies a generation earlier, Protestant cultural hegemony controlled literature in New England. As one critic put it, The Church is responsible for Comstock. He is her agent. He does her bidding, and earns the salary which she pays; and her clergymen rush to his defence when he falls into difficulty, or gets criticised in the newspapers. The Church owns Comstock, and he runs the United States courts. It may as well be understood first as last, a new struggle has started for ecclesiastical supremacy in the State.138 A generation would pass before critics of the Protestant establishment could successfully topple the Watch and Ward Society. While it had encountered significant opposition during the late nineteenth century, the Protestant establishment largely defined and enforced the parameters of acceptable literature about sexuality and marriage in New England.

137 Ellen B. Ballou, The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin’s Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 548– 59. 138 Letter from Theron C. Leland, 29 July 1878, Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, 62.

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FORUM: Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History Introduction ELIZABETH A. CLARK

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the theme for the 2009 spring meeting of the American Society of Church History was announced as “Mission and Empire in the History of Christianity,” the moment seemed ripe to propose a session on “Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History.” Three of the papers from that session, in revised form, are offered here. The first, by Randall Styers, provides a succinct survey of the development of postcolonial theory, a critique that emerged as formerly colonized areas of the world gained at least nominal independence from Western powers. Indigenous peoples were joined by cosmopolitan intellectuals in protest— political, to be sure, but also literary and artistic—against the effects of colonization and its aftermath. This critique of the master narratives of Western discourse, Styers notes, raises challenges for historians of Christianity. The imperialism of modern European nations and the United States, as well as that of ancient Rome, offers an excellent arena for exploration. Two brief case studies illustrate these points. Jeremy Schott explores the construction of “imperial knowledge” in the writings of three late-ancient intellectuals (two Neo-Platonic philosophers and Eusebius of Caesarea) who mined “wisdom” from distant times and foreign places to promote the superiority of their own present claims to knowledge and power. Centuries-old ritual practices and classical theories of language provided ammunition for late-ancient philosophers’ struggle to appropriate, and hence control, the mysterious wisdom of ancient Egypt. The Christian Eusebius, for his part, worked to carve out an “imagined” conceptual space for the new religion: existing in a limbo between Hellenism and Judaism, Christianity had descended from “Hebrewness” but had cast off “Jewish” ethnic particularity. Borrowing from other peoples’ books, Eusebius crafted a transcendent, universalizing, “placeless” Christianity. Denise Kimber Buell probes intersections between the early twentiethcentury Western obsession with Spiritualism, inspired by “occult” currents in India, and the developing study of ancient Christianity. In an era when HEN

Elizabeth A. Clark is John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion at Duke University.

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“Gnostic” texts were becoming known in the West, Indian spiritualists seemed to offer a comparable source of ancient mystic wisdom. Buell explores how a British scholar of early Christianity (B. H. Streeter) claimed the powerful mystique emanating from a native Indian Christian who purported to hear the voices of “Christian” spirits—spirits that importantly challenged the rival claims of Theosophists in India. Streeter thought his adventure in India comparable to experiencing “the Greco-Roman Empire of the second century,” an experience that enabled his ability to historicize (in postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase) a “subaltern past.” Both Schott and Buell show how native “pasts” can be raised up to aggrandize intellectuals of a present dominant culture in their struggle with competitors—whether that “present” was situated in the early fourth century or the early twentieth. Both show the instability of temporal borders, as the past becomes a resource for constructing and retaining present hegemony. Moreover, ancient and modern imperialism’s exploitation of raw materials in their colonies forms a parallel to dominant intellectuals’ appropriation of the wisdom of the colonized for their own purposes, whether they mine it from bearers of ancient, mysterious spirits or from libraries stuffed with ancient, arcane texts. The papers by Schott and Buell, different in subject matter, converge in the questions they pose. Can the practices, indeed, the very language, of a “subordinated” culture be translated into that of the dominant group without losing something—a loss that concerns issues of power? How, as scholars of religious history, do we treat questions of agency and subjectivity—so central to postcolonial theory—when the people whom we study claim that there are “agents” beyond the human? Do not such claims violate the canons of rationality to which historians (along with ancient philosophers) agree to conform? As Buell asks, “What might it mean to recover pasts that destabilize our sense of what constitutes rationality and agency?” As all three panelists note, postcolonial theory raises unsettling questions. Who is entitled to engage in this theorizing? Whose voices get recovered? Can Westerners “authentically” represent the views of those whom their own cultures have repressed? Does not the formation of Christian identity, like all identity-construction, depend upon setting up an “other” as a negative foil, in this case, the non-Christian, the heretic, the apostate? Have political and economic—“material”—forces become submerged in the academic discussion of “representation,” of literature and textuality? Has the history of the colonized been lost in the process? These brief essays, we hope, will stimulate further discussion of postcolonial theory in relation to the history of Christianity.

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 849 –854. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990552

Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History RANDALL STYERS

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the early years of the seventeenth century, as Europe pursued its conquest of new parts of the world, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, one of his final plays. The Tempest is the story of a group of European travelers who are shipwrecked on what we are told is “an uninhabited island.” But the island is actually not uninhabited—Shakespeare’s dramatis personae for the play includes a listing for “Caliban, a savage and deformed slave.” Caliban is indeed portrayed as savage, practically half animal—his name itself is an anagram for “cannibal.”1 The figure of Caliban is often cited as a vivid template of how early modern Europeans imagined the inhabitants of the rest of the newly discovered world (of course, they imagined many of their fellow Europeans in similar terms). The type of cultural image Shakespeare created in Caliban would be repeated over and over in European literature, and it became a staple in early European and American ethnography and anthropology. These representations were an important component of the ideology of conquest, and they circulated not only among Westerners but also among non-Westerners, particularly those living under colonial control. These representational dynamics constitute one of the key themes of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory is a central strand of the critical scholarly discourse that has gained academic prominence throughout the world since the 1960s. My purpose in this brief essay is to offer an overview of this scholarly movement and then to identify a set of basic questions relevant to assessing its value as a critical methodology. As I examine these critical questions, I will also consider some of the important resources postcolonial theory offers for the study of Christian history. Contemporary postcolonial theory emerged largely as a critical response to the enormous impact of European and American colonialism on global N

1 See William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Alexander Text of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1951), 1; and Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 66.

Randall Styers is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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culture. We can trace Europe’s colonial expansion roughly from the conquest of the Americas, but it gained a fevered pitch particularly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The extent of Western colonial control of the nonWestern world is extraordinary. By 1914, on the eve of the First World War, European powers and their emigrants occupied or controlled 85 percent of the surface territory of the globe.2 Scholars still work to parse the various factors that allowed Europe to become so remarkably successful in effecting this control, but by 1916 Lenin could declare that “for the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible.”3 With nothing left to conquer, European powers began to turn more directly on one another; the Carribean poet Aime´ Ce´saire would conclude that mid-twentieth century fascism was merely colonialism brought home to Europe.4 The Second World War so devastated most European colonial powers that their empires crumbled, and the majority of their colonized territories soon gained nominal independence, though most remain subject to Euro-American cultural and economic imperialism and military dominance. Postcolonial theory takes as its impetus the massive changes in global and national cultures that have occurred following the Second World War; it emerged from anti-colonial movements in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as activists joined with intellectuals in cultural resistance to colonialism and in the production of new forms of knowledge.5 A convenient milepost for the emergence of postcolonial theory is the year 1952. In the early 1950s, high modernism dominated Western art and culture. But early in that decade significant cultural transformations began to emerge. France, particularly, was absorbing the repercussions of changes in its global power, as the futility of its efforts in Indochina and the bitter costs of the Algerian war for independence became increasingly apparent. In 1950 Ce´saire published an influential pamphlet—his Discourse on Colonialism attacking the violence and brutality of the colonial enterprise. Within a few short years Franz Fanon published his groundbreaking book, Black Skin, White Masks, and Fidel Castro defended his fight against the pro-American government in Cuba in a pivotal speech, “History Will Absolve Me.” The

2 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 8; and Raymond F. Betts, Europe Overseas: Phases of Imperialism (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 21–35, 46– 60. 3 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939 [1916]), 76 (emphasis in original). 4 See Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 2 –3; and Aime´ Ce´saire, Discourse on Colonialism, intro. Robin D. G. Kelley, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1950]). 5 See Young, Postcolonialism.

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year 1952 also saw the first reference to the “Third World” by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy.6 Throughout the 1950s, the leading figures of anti-colonialist discourse, writers like Fanon, Ce´saire, and the Tunisian Jewish theorist Albert Memmi, published a series of texts that shaped critical analysis of the operations and effects of colonialism. In 1958 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, a powerful indictment of the bias and blindness of the West.7 Other new fiction from colonized and recently decolonized peoples began to circulate, describing the effects of life under colonial domination. The 1960s and 1970s saw major developments in anti-colonialist literature. Fanon was responsible for another milestone, his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth—an assault on Western racism introduced to Western audiences through an influential preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. In his introduction, Sartre lauded Fanon’s mastery in displaying the “Manichean delirium” on which the West’s self-understanding had been founded.8 And then in 1978 Edward Said published Orientalism, which played a central role in the emergence of postcolonial studies as a distinct academic enterprise.9 By the 1980s this mode of critical thought gained a prominent position within the international intellectual mainstream, as much greater attention was turned to how imperialism affected Europe’s colonies and to the responses from former colonies and their peoples. In the decades since, new scholars from an array of traditions, nationalities, and disciplines have expanded and deepened these early analyses, moving this scholarship into a broad range of new directions.10 Postcolonial theory is commonly framed as a form of political opposition or resistance, and a number of interlocking themes dominate: the complex cultural and national identities of colonized and decolonized societies (through permutations of gender, race, religion, and culture), the ways in which the power of the colonizer dominates the knowledge and representation of the colonized, and the dynamics of

6 See Ce´saire, Discourse on Colonialism; Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]); Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me (New York: L. Stuart, 1961 [1953]); Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une plane`te,” L’Observateur politique, e´conomique et litte´raire 118 (August 14, 1952): 14; and Young, Postcolonialism, 161– 81. 7 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 1994 [1958]). 8 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, intro. Jean-Paul Satre and Homi K. Bhaba, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]). 9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 10 See, for example, the essays collected in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London: Routledge, 1996); and Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996).

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decolonization as the formerly colonized work to reconfigure their selfunderstandings and cultural identities. This body of critical literature offers a number of important resources for our analysis of the place of religion in various social contexts and for how we narrate religious history.11 One of the most significant contributions of this critical method lies in the tools it offers in helping us analyze the dynamics of identity—the identities of individuals and the conflicting and interdependent identities of communities and cultures. At its best, postcolonial theory also offers nuanced analysis of the operations of power, both on the intercultural level and in its internalized forms. Yet there are a number of important questions to be asked about this mode of critical analysis. In considering the value of postcolonial theory for the study of Christian history, let me focus on three central, interrelated lines of critique. The first line of questioning begins with the term itself, “postcolonial” theory. The word “postcolonial” was coined in 1985 by the Australian cultural theorist Simon During,12 and this label was quickly adopted to encompass a broad range of critical literature arising in response to European and American colonialism.13 This term, “postcolonial,” overtly signals a relation to the broad range of contemporary critical movements prominent in recent decades—postmodern, poststructural, post-Marxist, even postfeminist. These terms mark an important shift in literary and cultural theory, as scholars seek to intervene against the master narratives of Western discourse and to move new voices toward the center of various scholarly and social debates. But of course all of these “post-s” are highly contested. For our purposes in considering the study of Christian history, note both the ambiguity in postcolonial theory between colonialism and its aftermath and also the complex—and competing—dynamics of identity formation that feed on this 11 Among the many important recent texts utilizing postcolonial methods in the study of religion, see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Derek R. Peterson and Darren R. Walhof, The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002); and Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 12 Simon During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today?” Landfall 39 (1985): 366 –81. 13 For broad scholarly reflection on the nature of this term, see Young, Postcolonialism, 15– 69; and Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism.

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ambiguity. The term itself seems both to link and to divide a past and a present, the colonizer and the (de)colonized. This ambiguity reflects far broader conceptual debates about the nature and objectives of postcolonial theory. What exactly is the term intended to signal concerning the dynamics of domination and liberation? What types of voices are scholars seeking to recover, and how should claims to “authenticity” be gauged? Some critics argue that the very concept of postcolonialism immediately begins to deconstruct “because it designates far too many things, all at once.”14 Contemplating this analytical muddle leads us to see both how dependent the identities of the colonizer and the colonized are on their foils and how unstable every identity ultimately is. As we consider the history of Christianity, we can see how the efforts to consolidate and maintain Christian identities constantly depend on the demarcation of the non-Christian, the heretic, the apostate. Identity depends on difference—difference that must be incorporated and internalized, even as it is disavowed—and yet difference itself is constantly changing. Second, one of the central critiques of contemporary postcolonial theory involves the social position of those who do the theorizing. There are obvious, important differences—and conflicts—among theorists coming from Euro-American cultural and critical traditions, scholars who come originally from non-Western traditions but now work in the Western academy, and theorists from non-Western countries working in non-privileged academic or social settings. Most contemporary postcolonial theory is produced by a relatively narrow class of Western-trained writers and thinkers, and many critics question the politics of this form of knowledge. They argue that postcolonial theory needs to be understood as a product of globalizing capitalist social structures—a cultural mechanism serving largely to mask harsh material realities beneath a shallow, astheticizing moralism.15 In the context of the study of Christian history, these lines of critique press us to consider exactly how critical the tools of postcolonial theory might actually be. At the same time, though, they compel us to maintain a focus on the material conditions that lead to the production of texts—both the social mediation of knowledge within the historical contexts and traditions we study and, then, the role of the historian in mediating between past and present. Some of the most significant contributions of postcolonial scholars can be found in their reflections on these dynamics of cultural mediation. 14 Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Mongia, 283, citing Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Mongia, 294–320. 15 See, for example, E. San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); and Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura.”

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Finally, one of the central aspects of postcolonial studies is its focus on representation, particularly literature and other forms of textuality. A number of key postcolonial writers have found literature to be an extremely productive medium for political intervention, and postcolonial theory has been dominated by the study of texts—both texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest that participate in the framing of the cultural other and texts that talk back in a effort to undermine Western hegemony. Many theorists defend this emphasis by explaining that they focus on the political and ideological components of textuality, not simple aesthetics, and by arguing that representational politics is a central arena of class struggle.16 But critics often point to the rarified nature of this analysis, its distance from concrete political engagement, and the ways in which it reflects the narrow class interest of the theorists themselves. As Ania Loomba states, in much postcolonial theory “the meaning of ‘discourse’ shrinks to text, and from there to ‘literary text,’ and from there to texts written in English,” since those are the texts most familiar to the critics.17 The cultural superstructure dominates analytical attention at the expense of the more basic economic and material realities of exploitation. Again what is the relevance of this challenge to the study of Christian history? On one level, of course, these tools of textual analysis are a great gift to historians who focus primarily on the analysis of texts.18 Postcolonial methods are readily adaptable to the analysis of the archive. At the same time, though, the critics press us to think more directly about the relation of those textual traditions to political and economic dynamics beyond the texts. The challenge for historians is to think concretely and creatively about these dense dynamics—the ways in which ideology and social practices are interconnected, mutually constituting one another. In his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi argued that “the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history.”19 Colonizers have indeed exercised extraordinary power in defining what counts as history, who counts as a subject, and what counts as knowledge. But colonization has rarely succeeded in the effort to expunge the colonized from history. Just as postcolonial writing demonstrates the potential for fighting one’s way into the revision of the historical narrative, so also the papers that follow offer new insights into how the historian can contribute to efforts to contest and amplify that narrative.

16

See Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 29. Ibid., 84. See in this regard Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 19 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: Orion Press, 1965 [1957]), 91. 17 18

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 855 –861. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990564

Philosophies of Language, Theories of Translation, and Imperial Intellectual Production: The Cases of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius JEREMY M. SCHOTT

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OSTCOLONIAL theorists have often examined the ways in which intellectual practices are conditioned by and contribute to imperial systems of knowledge and power. Scholars of late antiquity, for their part, have pointed to the ways in which late-ancient religious and ethnic identities were constructed linguistically and textually. This paper examines the works of three contemporaries—the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre and Iamblichus of Chalcis and the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea—in order to explore the ways in which ancient linguistic theories and practices served as a kind of border-post in which late-ancient intellectuals constructed and contested imperial subjectivities.

I. EGYPTIAN FICTIONS: PORPHYRY, IAMBLICHUS, AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE In the late third or early fourth century, the philosopher Porphyry sent a letter to an otherwise unknown Anebo, purportedly an Egyptian priest. The letter is an example of the popular genre of ero¯tapokrisis, or “question-and-solution literature.” Porphyry poses a series of metaphysical and theological ze¯te¯mata, “questions,” that anticipate a reply on the part of Anebo that will supply luseis, “solutions.” Although “Anebo” did not respond to Porphyry, his letter was answered by Anebo’s teacher, “Abamon,” in the form of a long treatise that has come to be known by the title On the Mysteries of Egypt (Myst. I.1 –2).1 The fifth-century Neoplatonist Proclus easily recognized that 1 All references to De Mysteriis are to the Greek text and English translation in Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Herschbell, eds. and trans., Iamblichus: On the Mysteries (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003).

Jeremy M. Schott is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

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“Abamon” was really none other than Porphyry’s former pupil and present disputant, Iamblichus. In Porphyry’s letter and “Abamon’s” reply, then, we have a polemical exchange between two scions of Greek philosophy written in the form of an elaborate epistolary fiction that was as transparent to their contemporaries as it is to modern scholars. How are we to understand the odd ethnic play in these texts? Porphyry’s letter and Iamblichus’s response mark a critical debate in lateancient Platonism over the value of theurgy. As practiced by Iamblichus and others, theurgy consisted of ritual incantations and other practices held to purify the philosopher’s soul and assist its ascent from the realm of matter and becoming to the realm of Intellect and Being. Porphyry objected to theurgy for a number of reasons: it seems to presume that the gods are passible and subject to human cajoling; ritual offerings suggest that the gods experience sense-perception; and theurgical divination smacks of the laughable excesses of the devotees of Cybele or Magna Mater (Myst. I.11.37.4 – 5; 15.48.11 – 12; III.9.117.10 – 12, 118.1 –2). One of Porphyry’s objections concerns late-ancient philosophy of language. First, Porphyry questions the use of “meaningless names” (sequences of nonsense syllables) in the ritual invocations that theurgists practiced (Myst. VII.4.254.11 – 12). Iamblichus answers that “meaningless” names do not signify conceptions in the human intellect, but are rather “united” with the gods non-discursively (Myst. VII.4.255.13 –256.2).2 Next Porphyry asks, “why, of meaningful names, do we prefer the barbarian to our own?” (Myst. VII.4.256.3 –4). Why should Greeks use Egyptian, Persian, or other nonGreek names when invoking divine beings rather than “Hellenizations” of those names—why should a Greek invoke “Thoth” rather than “Hermes”? Iamblichus responds that certain barbarian languages use names that are better fitted to the nature of the gods they name. To translate the barbarian names into Greek would be to dilute their imaging of divine essence. Porphyry’s critiques assume a “conventionalist” theory of language, developed from his reading of Aristotle’s On Interpretation, which holds that words signify the mental images we form of perceived objects. The relationship between signifier and signified depends only on the agreement of a community of language users.3 On this view, words can be translated into another language without losing any of their meaning or power. Thus Porphyry inveighs against the theurgists: they must assume that certain gods understand only Egyptian, while the idea that foreign names possess special 2 For an excellent discussion of the theurgic function of divine names in Iamblichus, see Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul. The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 110–11, 179–88. 3 Aristotle De Int. 16a3–8.

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power is a flight of fancy (Myst. VII.5.258.1 –2;5;8 –10). Iamblichus’s responses, in contrast, assume a “naturalist” theory of language based on his reading of Plato’s Cratylus. According to this theory, different languages use different combinations of sounds, all of which stand as better or worse versions or materializations of putative ideal signifiers.4 Thus Iamblichus argues that the Hellenes’ desire to translate everything into their native tongue contributed to the “decline” of ancient theurgical language and the necessity of its “restoration” by theurgists (Myst. VII.5.259.4 –12). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was common to read Iamblichus and Porphyry as symptomatic of the late-antique miscegenation of classical Greek culture. Late-ancient philosophers’ dabbling in irrational barbarian religious and cultural traditions tainted the purity of classical Greek rationality, in this reading.5 More recently the debate between these two philosophers has been read as an example of “multi-culturalism,” or at least a tempering of Greek chauvinism.6 Each of these assessments miss a larger point; namely, that the manner in which these philosophers handle the difference between Greek and barbarian reflects the discursive systems of power that condition the imaginative geography we find in these texts. Lateancient Platonists inhabited a system of knowledge and power that situated the philosopher/philologist as an active knowing subject and Egypt and the barbarian (or the Orient and the Oriental) as the passive object of scholarly analysis and academic production. Edward Said’s description of nineteenth century Orientalist philology is apt: “what was the philologist on the other hand if not . . . a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, a liberal critic whose work harbored the most esoteric notions of temporality, origins, development, relationship, and human worth?”7 Iamblichus’s “naturalist” theory of language claims for theurgists a privileged heuristic and hermeneutic position in relation to all linguistic expression. “Meaningless” names bear value not as embodied sounds but as terms of ontological connectedness to transcendent universals. To speak this most potent, authentic type of language is to occupy a privileged subject 4

See, for example, Plato Cratylus 431d; 439a. E. R. Dodds, for example, considered theurgy symptomatic of a late-antique “age of anxiety” in Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); J. B. Bury remarked of Neoplatonism, “it is a fall or failure of something, a failure of nerve” quoted in Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 7– 8. 6 See, for example, Mark Edwards, Culture and Philosophy in the Age of Plotinus (London: Duckworth, 2006), 117– 19; Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in late antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 38–40; John J. O’Meara, “Indian Wisdom and Porphyry’s Search for a Universal Way,” in Neoplatonism and Indian Thought, ed. R. Baine Harris (Norfolk, Va.: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982), 5 –25. (Porphyry’s interest in barbarian wisdom “may be an interest peculiar to Porphyry or of a developing or weakening Neoplatonism” [my emphasis, 22].) 7 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, rev. ed. (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 133– 34. 5

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position that lies outside the parameters of anything one would normally consider linguistic or semantic; it thus transcends ethno-cultural particularity. “Meaningful” ethno-culturally specific phonemes (for example, Egyptian and Persian words), on the other hand, are valorized to the extent they image the essence of transcendent being. Iamblichus claims the power to mine these native languages for elements of the ancient, sacred language. It is not Egyptian or Persian language as Persian or Egyptian that Iamblichus values, but putatively ancient phonemes that have been removed from their ethnocultural and syntactic contexts and situated within the theurgist’s incantations. Insofar as it offers a theoretical basis for universal translation, Porphyry’s “conventionalist” theory of language is also a powerful tool for extracting and constructing ethnological knowledge. The possibility of secure translation is, after all, an implicit theoretical basis for the Letter to Anebo; Porphyry can pose Greek philosophical questions in Greek to his putatively Egyptian addressee about Egyptian theology and, in turn, expect an intelligible response in Greek, because foreign, Egyptian signifiers must be unproblematically translatable. We are now in a better position to reconsider the “why” of this correspondence. Why do these two philosophers conduct this elaborate Egyptian pantomime? What does it mean for the Letter to Anebo and On the Mysteries to be about Egypt? The place in which Iamblichus and Porphyry interact with Egypt is emphatically not Egypt. At least it is not any Egypt that Porphyry or Iamblichus could have visited in 300 C.E. “Abamon” and “Anebo” help Porphyry and Iamblichus conjure an imagined Egyptian past. This epistolary fiction creates temporal and spatial distance between an esoteric, venerable Egyptian past and any contemporary, embodied Egyptian reality. As Porphyry and Iamblichus each establish a privileged position in relation to Egyptian traditions that are putatively ancient and foreign, these rivals are also competing for dominance and prestige within late-third and early fourth-century Platonism. There are homologies here between the practices of empire and the practices of philosophy.8 The periphery is a source of raw materials for imperial 8

Here I adopt the concept of “homology” from Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Bourdieu describes cultural production as a field of social relations in which agents compete for symbolic capital and power. The field of cultural production is structurally homologous to other fields, all of which are homologous to the prevailing “field of power,” or dominant set of power relations in a society at a given moment in history (44– 45). In the later Roman Empire, the field of power would be constituted by imperial relations of domination and subjugation; the homologous field of cultural production in which Porphyry and Iamblichus write is shot-through with the same relations of power. Bourdieu’s concepts are also helpful because they account for the fact that “‘symbolic capital’ is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized,” although it derives its ultimate value from the fact that its accumulation within

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production—and these Greek philosophers mill the raw material of Egyptian tradition into usable philosophical products much as the grain of Egypt was milled to feed Rome, and later, Constantinople. The provinces are also convenient theatres of war. Much as the great battles that led to the foundation of the Roman Empire were fought far from Rome and often with Egyptian proxies, Porphyry and Iamblichus fought a key battle of lateancient Platonism in an imagined Egyptian territory and with imagined Egyptian surrogates.

II. EUSEBIUS: THE LIBRARY AS IMPERIAL BORDER-POST AND MARKETPLACE The same discourses of (imperial) knowledge and power at work in Porphyry’s debate with Iamblichus also conditioned early Christian intellectual production. In the beginning of his Gospel Preparation, Eusebius considers the questions that may be put to the Christians: “In all likelihood someone may raise the aporia: who are we who propose to take up the pen, that is, are we Greeks or Barbarians, or what might there be between these?” Christians might be said to “cut out for themselves a new, trackless desert path, that keeps neither the ways of the Greeks nor of the Jews” (PE 1.2.1 – 4).9 Christianity is an ethnological quandary that demands resolution and clarification. Eusebius exploits this limbo between Hellenism and Barbarism, Jew and Greek. According to the Preparation, Christianity is precisely what others might fear—a people identified by the explicit rejection and erasure of ancestral identities. To carve out this imagined territory between Hellenism and Judaism, Eusebius sets up a synkrisis, or formal rhetorical comparison, of Hebrew theology with that of the Greeks and other gentiles (PE 7.11.13). But Eusebius faces a conundrum—Hebrew theology is found in Jewish books. Eusebius solves this problem by making his Hebrews reside in a territory between Jew and Gentile (PE 7.8.20). Hebrewness (and Christianity) is defined by adherence to a timeless, universal, transcendent theology, in contrast to the embodied, parochial customs of Jews and other

the field provides material, economic, and political benefits within the larger field of power (75). Thus relating the philosophy of language to the politics of a larger field of imperial power does not reduce the practice of philosophy to the practice of empire; rather, it helps to set into relief aspects of cultural production (indeed some of the very ground of the possibility of that production) that often go unrecognized (or are denied) by the producers themselves. 9 Text: Karl Mras, ed., Eusebius Werke Bd. 8: Die Praeparatio Evangelica. GCS 43.1, 43.2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1954, 1956).

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ethne¯.10 As I have suggested elsewhere, this simultaneous affirmation and denial of ethnicity is a site of productive ambivalence in which Eusebius constructs Christianity as an ethnos descended from the Hebrews and understands membership in that group as the transcendence of ethnicity and embodiment.11 The category “Hebrew” creates a tear in the ethnological fabric, exposing a gap between the warp of Judaism and the woof of Hellenism—a gap within which Eusebius can assemble Christianity. Eusebius’s construction of Christianity requires a physical space as well— the locus of readability and interpretability constituted by written language. In being written, theologies become readable, making it possible to remove them from their ethno-cultural contexts and place them in the arena of rhetorical comparison, synkrisis. Thus the Caesarean library lies like a tantalizing palimpsest behind the whole of Eusebius’s work. Though he does not discuss the history or role of his library explicitly in the Preparation, he does reflect on another—the library of Alexandria. He provides extensive quotations from the Letter of Aristeas, well-known to Eusebius and to modern scholars for its account of the origin of the Septuagint. Eusebius prefaces these selections with his own brief account: God, foreknowing the ascendancy of the Romans and the role their empire would play in making possible the transmission of Christianity to all peoples, prompted Ptolemy to commission Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible for “public libraries” (PE 8.1.6 – 8). The Ptolemaic library figures as the place in which traditions become readable through translation into an imperial koine¯ (Greek), and in turn, in which theologies become available for circulation and comparison. The universal (oikumenikos) library and the empire (oikumene¯) are homologous; the Ptolemaic library (like Eusebius’s own) is a collection of different nations’ books, much as the empire is constituted by diverse peoples. The library is a marketplace where Eusebius can acquire the textual raw materials that serve as fodder for the mill of his own intellectual productions. The library is also a border-post where Eusebius can orchestrate the intertextual migrations and incursions that constitute texts such as the Gospel Preparation and the Ecclesiastical History.

10 On Eusebius’s distinction between “Hebrews” and “Jews,” see Jean Sirinelli, Les vues historiques d’Euse`be de Ce´sare´e durant la period pre´nice´enne (Dakar: Universite´ de Dakar, 1961), 147–63; Jo¨rg Ulrich, Euseb von Caesarea und die Juden: Studien zur Rolle der Juden in der Theologie des Eusebius von Caesarea (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 57– 132. 11 Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 153. See also Aaron Johnson, “Identity, Descent, and Polemic: Ethnic Argumentation in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12:1 (2004): 23–56, and Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews. The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 29– 32.

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III. CONCLUSIONS: SYNCRETISMS AND FRACTURED SUBJECTIVITIES We should not conclude that Iamblichus’s and Porphyry’s Egyptian drama or Eusebius’s construal of Christian identity is as successfully or securely hegemonic as the foregoing reading suggests. “Abamon” undoes Iamblichus. The authorial subject of On the Mysteries is fractured and unstable. Throughout, Iamblichus/Abamon vacillates between the first person plural (“we Egyptians”) and the third person plural (“the Egyptians, they”), signaling the anxiety that accompanies any attempt to “go native.”12 Iamblichus’s Egyptian persona destabilizes the very hermeneutic privilege he seeks to secure by adopting it in the first place. Eusebius’s intertextual construction of Christianity is also fraught with anxiety. The greatest threat to his construal of Christian identity is the Caesarean library itself. Its collection of texts represented a tangible deconstruction of Eusebius’s Christian text, a text that is itself a bricolage of quotations from Greek, Jewish, and other nations’ books. As border-post and marketplace, the library is a site of ethno-cultural contact and synthesis. But, the library is also marked by all of the anxiety and tension of a market or border crossing. At a border crossing, contact and synthesis stand a hair’s breadth from miscegenation. Eusebius must manage his inventory, making sure that the ethno-cultural identities of his books are marked clearly. Both the later Platonism of Porphyry and Iamblichus and the Christianity offered in Eusebius’s Preparation are often seen as evidence for ethnocultural “relations”—either Neoplatonic “eclecticism” or the Jewish-Greek “syncretism” of Alexandrian-Caesarean Christianity. A postcolonial reading of these texts, however, suggests that syncretism is not something that happens “out there” in the realm of inter-religious conflict and that finds its way into written texts. Syncretism is an intertextual effect—the traces of specific modes of reading and writing and the imagined ethno-geographies and ethno-histories (and attendant politics) that these practices assume.

12

Evident throughout the De Myst., but some excellent examples occur in VII.1.249.10–11 (. . . boulomai to¯n Aigyptio¯n ton tropon te¯s theologias dierme¯neusai; houtoi gar . . . [“. . . I would like to explain the mode of the theology of the Egyptians; for they . . .”] and X.7.293.1 (Auto de tagathon to men theion he¯gountai . . . [“Good itself they consider . . .”]). At Myst. I.1.5–10, Iamblichus signals, in effect, the kaleidoscopic tendencies of his masquerade: “I am presenting myself to take up the discussion; and you, for your part, if you will, imagine that the same person in now replying to you as he to whom you wrote; or, if it seems better to you, posit that it is I who discourses with you in writing, or any other prophet of the Egyptians—for it makes no difference. Or better still, I think, dismiss from your mind the speaker, whether he be better or worse, and consider what is said, whether it be true or false, rousing up your intellect to the task with a will.”

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 862– 872. # American Society of Church History, 2009 doi:10.1017/S0009640709990576

The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies1 DENISE KIMBER BUELL

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explore how postcolonial theory may be productive for early Christian studies, I suggest we take an indirect approach and foreground spiritualism, which flourished during the height of the British Empire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of spirit communication in the present—central to modern spiritualism—was cast by the emerging disciplines of comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, and psychology as emblematic of “primitive” thinking.2 At the same time, classicists, historians, and biblical scholars produced a rash of publications on the afterlife, many of which are published versions of endowed public lectures on immortality and afterlife.3 With particular attention to the writings of classicist and biblical scholar, Burnett Hillman Streeter (best remembered for his four-source hypothesis to the synoptic problem4), I show that the postcolonial interventions of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gauri Viswanathan highlight the significance of colonial O

1 Special thanks to Lawrence Buell, Jacqueline Hidalgo, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, and Jason Josephson for their comments. 2 For example, E. B. Tylor, a central figure for both anthropology and comparative religion, viewed spiritualists as evidence of an unfortunate “survival” of a primitive way of thinking otherwise attested primarily in uncivilized colonial or yet to be colonized contexts. See Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Explaining Religious Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199. 3 These include: Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality (Harvard, from 1896); Foerster Lecture on the Immortality of the Human Soul (UC Berkeley, from 1928); Drew Lecture on Immortality (Oxford University, by the 1910s); and Read-Tuckwell Lectures (University of Bristol, established in the 1930s). Many other endowed lecture series included talks by classicists and biblical scholars on the afterlife between 1900–1930 (for example, Franz Cumont, Afterlife in Roman Paganism: Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1922]; Eugenie Strong, Apotheosis and After Life: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire [1915; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for the Libraries Press, 1969]). 4 See B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A study of origins treating of the manuscript tradition, sources, authorship, and dates (1924; 4th impression, revised; London: MacMillan, 1930), esp. 149– 360; 483 –562. Students of the Bible and early Christian history are not, however, encouraged to read his study of the Fourth Gospel, which draws on psychology and comparative

Denise Kimber Buell is Professor of Religion at Williams College.

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encounters and spiritualism for scholarly mappings of early Christian formations. Of the range of distinctive colonial experiences addressed by postcolonial theory, I focus on India and its relationship to British scholarship, given Streeter’s interest in the early twentieth-century Indian Christian, Sundar Singh, whom he promoted as a mystic capable of securing Christian missionary efforts in India and revitalizing Christianity in Great Britain.5 I suggest that we may better understand the grip of the category of Gnosticism by placing it in relationship to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practices and representations of colonialism and spiritualism; but I also conclude that the terms of debate about spiritualism indicate limits to postcolonial theory’s value to early Christian studies, limits that turn on how postcolonial theory negotiates colonized subjects who credit non-human sources as effective challengers of colonial oppression. I posit no direct links between spiritualism and postcolonial theory. To juxtapose them, however, helps dramatize both the benefits and limits of postcolonial theory for the writing of early Christian histories.6

I. COLONIALISM AND “GNOSTICISM”: CHRISTIAN MISSION VS. THEOSOPHY IN INDIA Modern spiritualism’s heyday was in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritualism’s loose central propositions—that individual personality persists after death and that communication between human and spirit planes is possible, empirically verifiable, and open to all—were articulated and embraced by women and men of all classes. Spiritualism was regularly

mysticism (The Four Gospels, 361– 481), let alone his publications on spirits, immortality, the relation of science and religion, and comparative religion (for example, Streeter et al., Immortality: An Essay in Discovery co-ordinating scientific, psychical, and biblical research [New York: MacMillan, 1917]; Streeter et al., Spirit: God and his relation to man considered from the standpoint of philosophy, psychology and art [London: Macmillan, 1919]; Streeter, Reality: A New Correlation of Science and Religion [London: MacMillan, 1926]; Streeter, The Buddha and the Christ: An exploration of the meaning of the universe and the purpose of human life [The Bamptom Lectures for 1932; New York: Macmillan, 1933]). In their survey of New Testament scholarship, Stephen Neill and Tom Wright write, “Of Burnett Hillman Streeter (1874– 1937) . . . it is impossible to write without affection, tinged in his case with a little amusement” (Neill and Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986, 2nd ed. [1988; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 131). 5 B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy, The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion (London: MacMillan, 1923). 6 That is, I shall not consider how postcolonial theory can yield fruitful interpretations of early Christian history nor how a consideration the Roman Empire might nuance modernist understandings of colonialism—though both are useful (see, for example, Jeremy Schott’s essay above).

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associated with activism, especially abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and anti-imperialism.7 Although most spiritualists were of North American, British, or Continental Christian upbringing, spiritualist propositions were variously inflected to critique and/or reform institutionalized Christianity as well as to establish new religions, including Theosophy. Spiritualism flourished concurrently with British imperialism, the Tu¨bingen School of higher biblical criticism, and the acquisitions by the Bodleian Library of the Bruce Codex and the Berlin Museum of the Berlin Codex—two of the three codices containing texts identified as “Gnostic” before the 1945 discovery at Nag Hammadi.8 Theosophists laid claim to the texts in these codices as, in the words of one Theosophist, “Fragments of a Forgotten Faith.”9 Scholars of early Christian history did not miss this link either, even though they were largely hostile to both contemporary Theosophists and ancient “Gnostics”; for example, Streeter understood ancient Gnostics as theosophical.10 Theosophists were also the main Western rivals to Christian mission and colonial administration in early twentieth-century India. In his 1913 trip to India, Streeter encountered both Christians and Theosophists who negotiated British colonialism (and Western Christian missionary efforts) in part by appeal to communications from spirits. At the same time, many of Streeter’s British and North American contemporaries were still attending se´ances and fascinated by spiritualism. In his co-authored book about Christian mystic, Sundar Singh, Streeter directly contrasts the Christian knowledge Singh gains through ecstatic visions with those claimed as legitimate by Theosophists. Streeter’s advocacy of Singh was informed by the conviction that communication from the spirits continues today, a view not simply generated inside Christian mystical and prophetic traditions but also the hallmark of the modern spiritualist movement. As such, his promotion of Singh may be interpreted 7 Since Ann Braude’s influential Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America (Boston: Beacon, 1989), many have written on spiritualist activism; for example, Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998); and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). 8 The third codex identified as containing “Gnostic” material prior to the Nag Hammadi find is the Askew codex containing Pistis Sophia, purchased by the British Museum in 1795. 9 See, for example, G. R. S. Mead, The Gnostics: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten; A Contribution to the Study of the Origins of Christianity (1900; repr., New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960). Mead presents himself as a Theosophist. 10 Streeter, “What we know of Gnostic theosophical speculation is so grotesque that we are apt to wonder what there was about the movement that made it so alluring to that age as to become a really formidable enemy to the Church. No doubt its chief appeal lay in the dualism which offered a solution, theoretical and practical, to the problem of evil” Primitive Church: Studies with special reference to the origins of Christian Ministry (The Hewett Lectures 1928; London: MacMillan, 1929), 6 –7.

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as a kind of response to competing spiritualist interpretations of spirit communication, especially Theosophy. Although it would be inaccurate to depict Theosophists as free of imperializing baggage, scholars of the British empire have argued that “spiritualism, and Theosophy in particular, played a significant role in the development of a radical, anticolonial politics both in Britain and India.”11 Gauri Viswanathan writes: “it is within the colonial context that spiritualism is seen most powerfully to loosen boundaries between closed social networks . . . the otherworldiness of the occult offered . . . possibilities for imagining colonial relations outside a hierarchical framework.”12 She specifically has in mind the impact of Theosophy. Ten years after founding Theosophy from, and in response to, spiritualism,13 Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott arrived in India in 1880 with a splash. They garnered interest in their synthesis of western traditions and so-called Oriental wisdom,14 the latter acquired through medium communications from Indian spirit “masters,” also known as “mahatmas.” Viswanathan argues that “the [Theosophical] masters’ communications of occult secrets stage an encounter with a past suppressed by the onset of Western modernity and secularism. They brilliantly combine critique of both colonialism and secularism by admitting the occult into the making of worldly relations, and [thereby offering] a more inclusive account of the world than the one allowed by imperial, secular histories,” one that “would make room for the histories of the people whose knowledge is mined and appropriated.”15 The passivity central to communication through mediums alters the typical understanding of colonial relations in which the colonizer is active and the colonized passive. That is, rather than simply representing “natives” because they cannot represent themselves, Theosophists and spiritualists were prepared to hear spiritual truths from “native” spirits whose teachings might lead to critiques of colonial administration. Streeter and his co-author, A. J. Appasamy, offered a competing alternative to theosophical claims by promoting the Christian Singh as someone through whom 11 Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 58. 12 Gauri Viswanathan, “The Ordinary Business of Occultism,” Critical Inquiry 27:1 (Autumn 2000): 2– 3. 13 Theosophy was closely associated with spiritualism but rejected its understanding that mediumistic trance is available to all, instead appealing to a body of revealed knowledge that they linked both with ancient Christian Gnosticism and, more immediately, with Indian sages, the “mahatmas.” Also unlike spiritualism, theosophists had formal meetings, organizations, and texts, even as many continued to participate in spiritualist activities such as se´ances. 14 For more on Theosophy in India and Britain, see Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 177–207. 15 Viswanathan, “Ordinary Business,” 19. As she continues, “the bureaucratization of occult knowledge” also calls into question the “notion that secularization is a break with religion” (20).

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authoritative spiritual teachings are transmitted. Yet their book supports Viswanathan’s point insofar as these scholars serve as Singh’s literary medium of sorts. Streeter and Appasamy quote Singh extensively about his mystical visions. These quotations directly address the issue of how Singh’s Christian visions differed from those of the Theosophists. Singh portrays his Christian visions as occurring during a waking state in which he “listen[s] to spirits, especially the holy spirit, as they talk to me.”16 He differentiates his visions from those of spiritualists and Theosophists.17 Singh judges that the spirit communication received by the likes of Blavatsky are transmitted by “spirits of the lower world,” in fact, naming “certain theosophists and other well known persons both dead and alive whom he believed to have been deluded by these false spirits [but] hinting it might be unwise for us to print them.”18 Streeter found Singh’s Christian-inflected version of spiritualist claims about the persistence of communication from the spirit world compelling in contrast to the theosophical and other non-Christian ones. Postcolonial theory helps train our attention on how India was not simply a contested mission field and British colony but also a site for imagining authoritative and potentially transformative communications from spirits in ways that may have informed how scholars of early Christian history constructed and imagined “Gnosticism.” The next section takes a closer look at the temporal blurring in Streeter’s writings to suggest additional ways that postcolonial theory helps explain the significance of the colonial present of India for Streeter’s construction of the Christian past.

II. SUBALTERN PASTS AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVES “Anyone who has studied the intellectual religious and social background of the Early Church as recovered by recent research, and then visits India,” Streeter writes of his own 1913 visit, “wakes up to find that, so far as the religious 16

Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 136. Singh also differentiates his Christian visions from those he experienced pre-conversion through yogic practices, which he views as trance states achieved through self-hypnosis. 18 Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 151, 152. Singh may be using spiritualist interchangeably with Theosophist in this context, but Theosophists would have felt the potential sting of this critique more than spiritualists. Spiritualists were not especially bothered by deceiving spirits or even fraudulent mediums—these underscored the indeterminacy of communication not the authenticity of spirits or the possibility of truth; this position radically undermines any claims of certainty about whether one has truth (for especially perceptive remarks on this topic, see Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 18, 67). Both Theosophists and Christians pulled back from such radical indeterminacy, however. Theosophists and Singh aimed to persuade listeners of the authenticity of their spirit communications, locating these communications as consistent with their portrayal of a larger organizational, ethical, and philosophical program. 17

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situation is concerned, the centuries have vanished and he is again . . . in the Graeco-Roman Empire of the second century.”19 This description of waking up at the edge of the British Empire as similar to time-traveling to the early Roman Empire offers an untimely illustration of what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as a “subaltern past” in his postcolonial analysis of historiography: “the capacity (of the modern person) to historicize actually depends on his or her ability to participate in nonmodern relationships to the past that are made subordinate in the moment of historicization. . . . Let me call these subordinated relations to the past ‘subaltern’ pasts.” Streeter was obviously no subaltern, but Chakrabarty’s point is not about identity so much as power: “Elite and dominant groups can also have subaltern pasts to the extent that they participate in life-worlds subordinated by the ‘major’ narratives of dominant institutions.”20 In other words, it is because we have experiences like Streeter’s that we can craft compelling narratives about early Christianity, but we must suppress such experiences as not fitting the rules of evidence, rationality, and scholarly distance. Streeter’s experience of the present collapsing into the past defies conventional norms of historical narrative,21 and his publications on specifically early Christian topics do not mention it.22 Rather, he adduces it to address questions such as: How will indigenous Indian traditions, 19 Ibid., 253. To this sentence Streeter appends a footnote: “This experience occurred to myself in 1913, and, a little later, quite independently, to my friend Mr. T. R. Glover, of Cambridge” (253). Streeter’s phrasing recalls Johannes Fabian’s points about how colonized others get framed as occupying anachronistic time (see Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], esp. 15–18, 25– 31). Whether we see it as an imperializing gesture or an intriguing disjuncture, Streeter finds in India the past of his own tradition, eliding Christianity-allied British Empire by analogizing the minority status of Christianity in British colonized India with that under Roman imperial rule. 20 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101. “Thus what allows historians to historicize the medieval or the ancient is the very fact these worlds are never completely lost. We inhabit their fragments even when we classify ourselves as modern and secular. It is because we live in timeknots that we can undertake the exercise of straightening out, as it were, some part of the knot (which is how we might think of chronology)” (112). 21 As Michel de Certeau writes, “Modern western history essentially begins with a differentiation between the present and the past. In this way it is unlike tradition (religious tradition), though it never succeeds in being entirely dissociated from this archaeology, maintaining with it a relation of indebtedness and rejection.” (Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley [French original 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 2). 22 We might ask how Streeter’s travels subsequently altered the way he imagined the second century; in his later book Primitive Church, Streeter emphasizes the dynamic, experimental character of second-century Christians and the lack of any single original or apostolic form of ecclesial organization: “In the Primitive Church no one system of Church Order prevailed. Everywhere there was readiness to experiment, and, where circumstances seemed to demand it, to change. . .. it is permissible to hint that the first Christians achieved what they did, because the spirit with which they were inspired was one favourable to experiment. In this—and, perhaps, in some other respects—it may be that the line of advance for the Church today is not to imitate the forms, but to recapture the spirit, of the Primitive Church” (Primitive Church, 261 –262).

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primarily defined as Hinduism here, shape Christianity as it develops in India? How will Indian Christianity interact with European Christianity? Linking his experience of the Indian religious landscape to the latest “recent research” on early Christianity, Streeter offers this characterization of secondcentury Christianity: “In the first and second centuries A.D. the wandering ‘prophet,’ whether mystic, preacher, theosophist or ascetic proved to be a useful ferment, a valuable stimulus to experiment and thought, but also a source of danger and distraction to the Church.”23 This may read like a historical reconstruction from a scholarly study of early Christianity, but it amounts to a justification of India as an imperial mission field, underscored by the affirmation that time in colonized space has reinforced the author’s understanding of antiquity. Unlike spiritualists, Streeter does not claim that his time-bending experience provides him with new knowledge that might upset existing scholarly insights or offer different grounds for knowledge. Streeter and Appasamy use this image of the interaction of individual holy people and organizational structure (“the Church”) to advocate cooperation in the colonial mission field between individual holy people, like Singh, who offer a “new vision” for Christianity, and “organizers of corporate worship and teachers of the achievement of the past in doctrine and in ethics.” They figure Singh as a “valuable stimulus” to Christianity, especially because of his regular communications with spirits.24 Streeter thereby re-signifies theosophical claims to ancient wisdom. He and his theosophical rivals see affinities between early Christian Gnosticism and modern Theosophy, but Streeter positions Theosophists—ancient and modern—as the problematic kind of wandering prophet, a source of “danger and distraction” for “the Church,” both in the Roman and British Empires. In casting India as a place where one can encounter the ancient past, Streeter sounds like a romanticizing imperialist who projects his current ideals for Christianity onto the past. But his experience also echoes those of his European and North American contemporaries—those women and men who communicated with spirits and thereby lived and exemplified “nonmodern” relationships with the past. Chakrabarty’s distinction between two modes of relating to the past usefully dovetails with other historiographical interventions, 23

Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 253. Ibid., 254. Depictions of Singh resonate with the idea that colonized subjects occupy a different time: “while we do not suggest that the Sadhu is on the same plane as St. Francis or St. Paul, we feel that, from having known him, we understand them better” (viii). They further note: “coming from the presence of Sundar Singh, men forget themselves, they forget him—but they think of Christ” (xv); during a visit to England, Singh was mistaken for Jesus (42– 43). Streeter and Appasamy quote Singh approvingly, but we also see traces of colonial anxieties when they ask him about the content of spiritual transmissions. They ask him twice if he has had visions like those in the Apocalypse of John; he says, “yes, but only like those of the end of the text” (122), never like the middle (123). In another context, Singh also denies an affinity with Book of Revelation (196). 24

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including those formulated within some feminist and literary theories. That is, by setting modern “rational,” historical narrativizing apart from “pasts that resist historicizing” but are constitutively necessary to historical writing and suppressed in its production,25 Chakrabarty helps recover the suppressed history of spiritualism and colonialism in early Christian studies, especially in the construction and interpretation of “Gnosticism.” But, as the next section suggests, scholars of Christian history may find fewer benefits from postcolonial theory when it comes to theorizing agency.

III. SOME LIMITS TO POSTCOLONIAL THEORY FOR CHRISTIAN HISTORY Postcolonial theory often attempts to recover subaltern pasts, ideally to make the colonized into agents both of history and, potentially, of radical democratic futures. As Talal Asad puts it, in his critical remarks on this project, “more often than not, it is history in the active voice: everywhere, local people are ‘making their own history,’ ‘contesting it,’ ‘borrowing’ meanings from Western dominators, and ‘reconstructing’ their own meanings. This notion of history emphasizes not only the unceasing work of human creators but also the unstable and hybrid character of their creation.”26 Without making explicit links to contemporary political, ethical, or religious goals, scholars of early Christian history have found postcolonial theory productive precisely to emphasize the unstable and hybrid acts of self-creation and negotiation entailed in the production of early Christian identities and practices in the spaces of the Roman Empire.27 Yet as Asad and Chakrabarty (among others) have noted, subaltern studies and postcolonial theory usually position the colonized—the subaltern—in terms of a modern western notion of a subject (characterized by consciousness of self) whose agency is linked to being a subject.28 Accounts of agency that do not neatly align with subjectivity self-evidently pose problems from that standpoint.29 Scholars of early Christian history 25 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 101. Chakrabarty also calls these modes History 1 (“the past ‘established’ by capital” [64]) and History 2 (“a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1” [66]) when analyzing historiography using Marx (see 62– 71). 26 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 2. 27 See, for example, Rebecca Lyman, “Hellenism and Heresy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11:2 (2003): 209–222; and Laura Nasrallah, “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic,” Harvard Theological Review 98.3 (2005): 283– 314. 28 See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 12– 16. 29 For further discussion of this challenge in a different register, see Mary Keller’s persuasive work, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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regularly encounter such accounts that attribute agency to divine and demonic sources.30 Chakrabarty articulates the dilemma for historiographical conventions of rationality: “Historians will grant the supernatural a place in somebody’s belief system or ritual practices, but to ascribe it any real agency in historical events will . . . go against the rules of evidence that gives historical discourse procedures for settling disputes about the past.”31 Chakrabarty cites Rudolf Bultmann, Streeter’s slightly younger contemporary, to support this point that history is a science that must presume a closed system—one whose business is not to rule in or out God’s existence or God’s intervention in history but only to demonstrate human causes and effects.32 To illustrate the challenges of conceptualizing subaltern pasts, Chakrabarty discusses a nineteenth-century colonial rebellion in India by a group known as the Santal who testified “that God was the main instigator of the rebellion;” to follow historiographical norms, “the Santal’s statement. . . . has to be . . . converted into somebody’s belief or made into an object of anthropological analysis.”33 “But,” Chakrabarty adds, the Santal with his statement “I did as my god told me to do” also faces us as a way of being in this world, and we could ask ourselves: Is that way of being a possibility for our own lives and for what we define as our present? Does the Santal help us to understand a principle by which we also live in certain instances? [With t]his question. . .. the Santal stands as our contemporary, and the subject-object relationship that normally defines the historian’s relationship to his or her archive is dissolved. . . .34 To accept Chakrabarty’s dare of cultivating a nonmodern relationship with the Santal would necessitate taking seriously the distinction between agency and subjectivity that the Santal exemplify and suspending the conventions of temporal difference. What might it mean to recover pasts that destabilize our sense of what constitutes rationality and agency? Spiritualists, North American and European contemporaries of the Santal, offered a kind of anti-Enlightenment/ anti-modernist critique with their embrace of temporal fluidity and spiritual 30

See also Denise Kimber Buell, “Imagining Human Transformation in the Context of Invisible Powers: Instrumental agency in second-century treatments of conversion,” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, ed. Turid Karlsen Seim and Jørunn Okland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Press, 2009), 263 –284. 31 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 104. 32 Ibid., 104–105, quoting Rudolf Bultmann’s essay “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?” in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1985), 244. 33 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 105. We still find this distantiation in scholarship on early Christian miracles and exorcisms. 34 Ibid., 108.

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agency (often unmoored from institutional constraints). Spiritualism “challenged the very organization of meaning in modern life.”35 Although elaborated more in sitting rooms than academic papers, spiritualism shares with postcolonial theory a concern for re-signifying dominant logics—especially of spatial and temporal relations—and transforming ethics and material practices. Viswanathan also hints at a more direct intersection, noting the function of spiritualism in colonial India: “Otherworldliness (which sometimes takes the form of occultism) is an attempt to recuperate meaning from a suppressed past, which in being suppressed leads to a fragmentary view of history.”36 This fragmentary character of suppressed history is a key result of what Chakrabarty calls the submersion of “subaltern pasts.” Things that may seem silly or weird to us—like spiritualism—may have something to teach us about rationality and reason. Without claiming any causal links, I have suggested that both postcolonial theory and the practices of early Christian historiography are more entangled with spiritualism and its concerns than we have recognized. While only further study can sustain this proposition, I have suggested that the idea of spirit communication in the present, central to modern spiritualism, finds indirect responses in scholarly reconstructions of Gnosticism in early Christianity as well as in postcolonial reconstructions of subalterns in colonial struggles. By the early twentieth century, we find extensive scholarly discussions of “Gnosticism” as a crucial heresy in the formation of “orthodox” Christianity,37 yet studies of the modern history of the category of “Gnosticism” have not explored its relationship to theosophy (or spiritualism more broadly). Spiritualism incited many critics and skeptical inquirers, including those who formed psychical research societies and academics who shaped the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and comparative religion.38 Psychical research societies, composed of academics and 35

Cottom, Abyss of Reason, 32. “Spiritualism was everything reason and the rationalized professions were laboring not to be, everything they wanted to overlook, or to survey and repress at the same time. It was popular, unhierarchical, inconsistent, disorganized, idiosyncratic, uneducated, uncultivated, and so, in short, undignified” (41). 36 Viswanathan, “Ordinary Business of Occultism,” 19. 37 For example, “Any elementary text-book of Church History will tell us that the special preoccupation of Church thinkers during the second century was the struggle with ‘Gnostic’ heresies, in the course of which a firmer and clearer orthodox presentation of Christianity emerged” (F. C. Burkitt, Church and Gnosis: A Study of Christian thought and speculation in the Second Century [The Morse Lectures for 1931; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931], 3. See also Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 55– 109. 38 For example, sociologist Herbert Spencer’s “ghost theory” of the origins of religion as veneration of dead ancestors might seem to have an obvious connection to spiritualism, but so too his pioneering articulation of the concept of “culture” as the invisible bonds that constitute a

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interested “laypeople,” took spiritualists as objects of study, often arguing that while spiritualists themselves were misguided, the phenomena with which they were concerned was real.39 In the name of rationality, these enterprises all demanded critical distance and objectification to render their subject matter knowable. We have inherited the demand of rationality and critical distance in our own practices, and postcolonial theory (as well as quite a few others, including feminist theory) has helped articulate some of its costs and challenges. Like psychical research, postcolonial theory makes colonial struggles the object of its concern, almost always within academia, and must wrestle with how to represent them, even as it allies itself with its transformative goals. Does postcolonial theory appeal to those of us in early Christian studies who distance ourselves from theological and religious locations in part because it, like feminism, and, dare I say spiritualism, preserves the value of moral, ethical and political commitments even while deliberately critiquing any totalizing claims to reason, knowledge, or power? Does postcolonial theory also, however, appeal because it preserves, even as it struggles with, the academic prioritization of rationality?

group. In his study of the development of the notion of culture, Herbert notes how this smacks of “the occult” and is “potentially scandalous” “for a would-be objective and empirical science” while quite explicitly drawing on language used by spiritualists to express their conviction in the invisible communication and forces between humans (Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 14). Anthropologists have continued to take views and practices about death as well as spirit possession as areas of central concern since the late nineteenth century. 39 See Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 200.

Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 873 –954. # American Society of Church History, 2009

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

doi:10.1017/S000964070999059X

Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. By L. Stephanie Cobb. Gender, Theory, and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xiii þ 208 pp. $50.00 cloth. In Dying to Be Men, L. Stephanie Cobb argues that early Christian martyr texts functioned to shape Christian group identity and enhance the selfesteem of individual members. In this sense, the martyr texts are more educational propaganda than objective history. In particular, the martyr texts display the masculinity of the earlier Christian martyrs (both men and women), thereby aligning Christian comportment with a central value of Roman society. Following the introduction, chapter 1 presents the theoretical base for the work that includes insights from modern social identity theory alongside an overview of perspectives on sex and gender in the Roman world. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner provide the foundation for the sociological aspect of the argument. The discussion of gender is based on insights from the now standard repertoire of secondary literature on gender in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This includes especially the work of Michel Foucault and Thomas Laqueur and edited volumes by David Halperin and John Winkler. The focus on social identity theory enables Cobb to move away from historical readings of the martyr texts (what actually happened?) as well as individual psychological analyses of the martyrs (were they religious fanatics?). It provides a useful framework for understanding why the texts were written and why they take the shape they do. Social identity theory posits that human beings categorize the world in order to bring meaning to their lives and especially to affirm the self’s role in society. Group identity is constructed in the service of self-esteem. The theory suggests that there are three aspects of group formation: categorization, identification, and comparison. According to Cobb, each of these three categories is at work in the martyr texts. The process of self-categorization is seen in the way the characters of the martyr texts conform to certain attributes of Christian identity. Cobb’s gender analysis suggests that these attributes—courage, strength, reason, justice—are (not

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coincidently) what defined ideal masculinity in the Roman world. This display of manly traits would be reinforced by a comparison to the unmanly behavior of non-Christians. Emphasizing the Christians’ superior masculinity would enhance Christian self-esteem and help solidify group identity. The rest of the argument unfolds in three chapters. Chapter 2 examines the most explicit means of masculinization of the Christian martyrs: their depiction as gladiators and athletes. The chapter includes discussion of the amphitheater as liminal space; the border between barbarism and civility; and of the gladiator, a character both revered and reviled. While this chapter is informative, one wishes there was more discussion of the martyr texts themselves in light of the detailed discussion of Roman gladiatorial practices. The main point, which comes only toward the end of the chapter, is that identification with the gladiator meant linking the Christians to a figure who, though potentially a symbol of humiliation, was viewed as a masculine ideal in the Roman world. In speaking of martyrs as gladiators, the early Christians could make a similar shift. Especially the figures of the auctorati, paid volunteers who would demonstrate their courage by risking their lives in the amphitheater, would be useful for the portrayal of the martyrs. Like the deaths of the auctorati, the martyrs’ deaths could be viewed as a volitional and thereby noble death rather than a lethal punishment executed by Rome. Less convincing is Cobb’s link between the martyr texts and a particular interpretation of the Roman spectacles that view them as displays of Roman protection (or lack thereof) rather than Roman punishment. If the amphitheater is liminal space, situated on the edge of barbarism, the gladiatorial death may be seen as a dramatic display of what happens when one is removed from Roman protection—one dies. What interests Cobb in this interpretation is the shift in emphasis from being killed to dying, since the discourse of martyr texts make a similar move. Still, the meanings behind this shift in emphasis are so different that making the connection raises more problems than insights into the material. Chapter 3 focuses on the discourse of the martyr texts, especially the more subtle ways that they link their heroes to masculine virtues. Cobb points to the complex of virtues that are on display in the texts—virtues such as selfcontrol, volition, mastery of the passions, and knowledge of justice, all of which contribute to the identification of these Christians as true men. The texts also offer comparisons designed to secure this self-identification. The “other” are either less manly (pagans and Jews) or completely unmanly (the apostate Christian). Most helpful is chapter 4, which examines the ambiguous depiction of the “masculinized” female martyr alongside the embodiment of traditional feminine attributes, especially maternal qualities. Cobb argues that this complex gender identity was necessary for dealing with the multiple

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positions of the female martyrs. They needed to be manly with respect to their external opponents because being Christian meant being more masculine than the other. But because internally the community maintained traditional gender roles, the female martyrs also served as models for proper female deportment. One minor point: Cobb cites divine marital imagery as part of this feminine aspect of the female martyrs—Perpetua is called “wife of Christ” and “God’s beloved.” But such language is applied just as readily to men in early Christian texts and likely points to a different gender dynamic. In this case, both male and female are depicted as women with respect to the ultimate man, God. Overall, Dying to be Men is a well-written and worthwhile contribution to the growing number of studies on the function of gender in early Christian texts. Together, this body of scholars makes a convincing case for the central role of gender identity—particularly the construction of ideal masculinity— in early Christian discourse. As Cobb illustrates, depiction of the early Christian martyrs as true men was a major strategy for solidifying group identity and enhancing the self-esteem of its members. The consistent portrayal of Christians as ideal men across a range of early Christian texts helped the movement gain credibility and status internally—and eventually externally—at a time when “being a man” was a widely accepted cultural value. Colleen M. Conway Seton Hall University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990606

Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. By Peter C. Bouteneff. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. xv þ 240 pp. $22.99 paper. This superb study of early Christian interpretations of Genesis 1–3 fills a major gap in the literature. It traces several themes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament through the second-century Christian apologists, Irenaeus and Origen, to the fourth-century Cappadocians. Bouteneff uses the first three crucial chapters of the Bible as a case study, enabling him to trace the origins and growth of early Christian methods of interpretation. He shows that Genesis 1–3 was largely ignored in the Hebrew Bible, though Jewish inter-testamental writers focused on them, providing several different interpretations of Adam and paradise. In the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters, Adam appears as a contrast to Jesus Christ, who inaugurated the new humanity. Beginning in the New Testament itself, early Christians used typology and allegory to make

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positions of the female martyrs. They needed to be manly with respect to their external opponents because being Christian meant being more masculine than the other. But because internally the community maintained traditional gender roles, the female martyrs also served as models for proper female deportment. One minor point: Cobb cites divine marital imagery as part of this feminine aspect of the female martyrs—Perpetua is called “wife of Christ” and “God’s beloved.” But such language is applied just as readily to men in early Christian texts and likely points to a different gender dynamic. In this case, both male and female are depicted as women with respect to the ultimate man, God. Overall, Dying to be Men is a well-written and worthwhile contribution to the growing number of studies on the function of gender in early Christian texts. Together, this body of scholars makes a convincing case for the central role of gender identity—particularly the construction of ideal masculinity— in early Christian discourse. As Cobb illustrates, depiction of the early Christian martyrs as true men was a major strategy for solidifying group identity and enhancing the self-esteem of its members. The consistent portrayal of Christians as ideal men across a range of early Christian texts helped the movement gain credibility and status internally—and eventually externally—at a time when “being a man” was a widely accepted cultural value. Colleen M. Conway Seton Hall University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990606

Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives. By Peter C. Bouteneff. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008. xv þ 240 pp. $22.99 paper. This superb study of early Christian interpretations of Genesis 1–3 fills a major gap in the literature. It traces several themes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament through the second-century Christian apologists, Irenaeus and Origen, to the fourth-century Cappadocians. Bouteneff uses the first three crucial chapters of the Bible as a case study, enabling him to trace the origins and growth of early Christian methods of interpretation. He shows that Genesis 1–3 was largely ignored in the Hebrew Bible, though Jewish inter-testamental writers focused on them, providing several different interpretations of Adam and paradise. In the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters, Adam appears as a contrast to Jesus Christ, who inaugurated the new humanity. Beginning in the New Testament itself, early Christians used typology and allegory to make

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connections between Old Testament figures and events on the one hand and Christ on the other, to show him as the center of history. Early Christian interpreters and theologians, following the lead of the New Testament, developed these methods extensively. Yet, they also took literal meanings seriously. Their biblical interpretations generally emphasized moral paraenesis and Christology. A counterexample, the second-century apologist Theophilus of Antioch rejected typological exegesis and never mentioned Christ. Bouteneff sees these two absences are closely connected (73). Yet, as Bouteneff shows, early Christian methods of interpretation are more complex and varied than simple typology. Irenaeus highlights his signature concept of recapitulation. The book quotes Eric Osborn as identifying eleven ideas as combined in this key concept (78). The chapter on Origen, the seminal exegete and theologian, is at the book’s center, as he stands between the second-century beginnings of Christian reflection and the Cappadocians. Bouteneff’s summary of Origen’s methods of interpretation and his manylayered readings of Genesis are masterful and up-to-date. One of this book’s many strengths is that, while depicting a broad consensus in the contours of early Christian exegetical methodology, it highlights how each of the authors studied and approached scripture in a distinctive way. For instance, the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus “are peppered throughout with biblical references, applied with or without regard to their context, literally, allegorically, typologically” (141). Yet, Gregory of Nyssa focuses on points in scripture that interest him theologically while ignoring other points. Thus, “he fixates on the geometry of the trees of Eden,” asking which is at the midpoint of the garden, “and ignores the component of ‘knowledge’ so central to the scriptural account” (154). The book, like the early Christian readings of Genesis that it studies, has multiple levels of meaning. With exemplary clarity, it skillfully traces and interweaves several narratives, one of which is the history of early Christian biblical interpretation. Besides this, it introduces the reader to major early Christian theologians. It also summarizes their writings on Genesis 1 – 3. A noteworthy example is Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise On the Hexaemeron, which has not yet been translated into English (133– 36). Yet, Bouteneff’s book is not only an introduction but it also contains many insights of interest to specialists. His original synthesis of Gregory’s rather difficult anthropology is a good example. Bouteneff traces several themes in the Genesis narrative throughout the book. Interpretations of Genesis 1 emphasize the wonder of God’s creative work. Paradise is understood in different ways, but there is little speculation on its character; instead, early Christians look toward the eschaton. Adam often represents every human being, as in Gregory of Nazianzus, for whom “Adam is us” (144). Yet, he also plays an important genealogical role.

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BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

The descriptive material in this book is an end in itself, worth reading repeatedly and pondering. There may be some mistakes, since in a work of such broad scope a few errors of detail are perhaps inevitable. For instance, Ephrem the Syrian was a contemporary of Gregory of Nazianzus, not a “later figure” (174), though these two gifted poets lived in different cultural worlds. However, Bouteneff draws two conclusions significant for contemporary theological discussions. First, early Christians were not concerned about the number of days creation took. The time in which God’s creative work occurs is mysterious and surely functions differently from the time we humans know. In fact, Irenaeus speaks of a backward causality, in which humankind was made in the image of Christ incarnate. Early Christians really identified him as the beginning. From this perspective, Bouteneff concludes, there need be no conflict between Genesis 1–3 and modern science. Moreover, the story of Adam and Eve can teach us about our human condition, whether or not we regard them as historical figures. Second, though Adam’s sinfulness was an example of human sinfulness in general, all the writers studied in the book, including especially Paul, affirm human freedom and hold each person accountable for his or her own sins. The Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12 and Augustine’s interpretation in terms of “original sin” can thus be bypassed in a theology drawing from the rich earlier history Bouteneff depicts. The Greek writers he studies do not hold that later humans inherit Adam’s sin, though they do affirm that death is inherited from him. Verna E. F. Harrison Saint Paul School of Theology

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990618

Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. By Kim Bowes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvi þ 363 pp. $95.00 cloth. Kim Bowes presents a remarkable synthesis of archaeological and textual materials from around the Roman Empire, with a focus on the West, in a book that without doubt makes a significant contribution to the study of early Christianity, the shifting dynamics of the later Roman Empire, and the world of late antiquity more generally. Using archaeological data that has not yet informed most scholarship on late antiquity, Bowes argues that private Christian practices and places played a widespread, influential, and hitherto largely unrecognized role in shaping “the early Christian topographies of both city and countryside in East and West” (218). She thus hopes to reshape

877

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

The descriptive material in this book is an end in itself, worth reading repeatedly and pondering. There may be some mistakes, since in a work of such broad scope a few errors of detail are perhaps inevitable. For instance, Ephrem the Syrian was a contemporary of Gregory of Nazianzus, not a “later figure” (174), though these two gifted poets lived in different cultural worlds. However, Bouteneff draws two conclusions significant for contemporary theological discussions. First, early Christians were not concerned about the number of days creation took. The time in which God’s creative work occurs is mysterious and surely functions differently from the time we humans know. In fact, Irenaeus speaks of a backward causality, in which humankind was made in the image of Christ incarnate. Early Christians really identified him as the beginning. From this perspective, Bouteneff concludes, there need be no conflict between Genesis 1–3 and modern science. Moreover, the story of Adam and Eve can teach us about our human condition, whether or not we regard them as historical figures. Second, though Adam’s sinfulness was an example of human sinfulness in general, all the writers studied in the book, including especially Paul, affirm human freedom and hold each person accountable for his or her own sins. The Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12 and Augustine’s interpretation in terms of “original sin” can thus be bypassed in a theology drawing from the rich earlier history Bouteneff depicts. The Greek writers he studies do not hold that later humans inherit Adam’s sin, though they do affirm that death is inherited from him. Verna E. F. Harrison Saint Paul School of Theology

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990618

Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. By Kim Bowes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvi þ 363 pp. $95.00 cloth. Kim Bowes presents a remarkable synthesis of archaeological and textual materials from around the Roman Empire, with a focus on the West, in a book that without doubt makes a significant contribution to the study of early Christianity, the shifting dynamics of the later Roman Empire, and the world of late antiquity more generally. Using archaeological data that has not yet informed most scholarship on late antiquity, Bowes argues that private Christian practices and places played a widespread, influential, and hitherto largely unrecognized role in shaping “the early Christian topographies of both city and countryside in East and West” (218). She thus hopes to reshape

878

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narratives of Christian development in late antiquity by supplementing studies of the church as a public institution with a compelling history of the ways in which private worship, largely of the empire’s wealthy elite, produced particular Christian traditions, complicated clerical authority, helped to define the relation of the individual to the church, and spread Christianity around the empire. The book’s introduction provides a coherent overview of Bowes’s arguments and describes well the gaps in scholarship that the project addresses. Bowes hopes “to reexcavate the private” (2), private churches and private worship, in an effort to expose evidence that has been missing from academic reconstructions of Christianization. Such evidence, in turn, sheds light on the often complex and sometimes tense relationships between those elite who traditionally held authority and the Christian clergy who were newly gaining public authority in the fourth century. These new conversations also further nuance perceptions of fourth- and early fifth-century accusations of heresy that often rendered private worship as dangerously heretical as it fell outside the oversight of the church’s public officials. By combining archaeological and textual data, this volume contributes to any number of varied aspects of late Roman and early Christian studies. Chapter 1 sets the stage for her claims through an in-depth discussion of traditional Roman religions and a deft contrast with second- and third-century Christianity. She concludes that similar structures—families, patrons, houses, household shrines—that are shared between Christian and traditional Roman cultures actually “mask a radically different ideology of the private and its concomitant public” (59). Because Roman law narrowly defined public religious practice, everything else fell under the category of the private, and in light of such breadth, “the pagan religious private was, in some sense, a neutral category” (59). Pre-Constantinian Christians, however, worked under different constraints that resulted in “a hierarchization in which the communal was often preferred to the private” (60). While Bowes carefully defines many of her terms, a discussion of the parameters of “religion/religious” would have strengthened this chapter’s claims. When she writes, for example, that “the private . . . was the default legal category for Roman religious action” (21) and recognizes that even Christians “seem to have held imperial priesthoods, abstaining from sacrifice but presiding over games and other rites” (22), she raises thorny questions of how to apply modern concepts of “religion” to the ancient world. If legal definitions distinguished certain public priestly acts from all others, in which ways are public and private acts equally “religion”? Does a Christian who abstains from sacrifice but not from presiding over games see both acts as equally “religious”? The difference that she traces remains persuasive, but future work may helpfully nuance her discussion. Chapter 2 is a powerful chapter that traces an impressive swathe of material in order to draw conclusions about private Christian worship in Rome and

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

879

Constantinople. For Rome, Bowes traces the history of the city’s powerful elite families and the crowded urban landscape, demonstrating that titular churches represent a complex relation between elite patrons and Christian clergy that is unique to the city of Rome, and that Christianity was practiced much more widely within the city—through prayer, lamp-lighting, relic cult, private liturgies with domestic clergy, and asceticism—than scholars have presumed. She likewise demonstrates private Christian worship within Constantinople, and she reveals a striking difference in the dynamics between clergy and elite patrons in the two cities. This chapter represents a rigorous and adept handling of a striking amount of archaeological and textual material and will transform the way scholars imagine Christianity in this period. Chapter 3 examines the role of rural estates in the Christianization of the countryside in the West, persuasively challenging earlier scholarship that presumed that the bishops and local clergy were the primary force for spreading Christian practice. Instead Bowes reveals the significant role played by the estates—the places they provided for worship, and the patterns of behavior their owners modeled for those who were under their influence—and the tensions that such estate-based Christianity created with the urban episcopacies. As Bowes concludes, “Estate-based communities were simply different from those envisioned by the episcopate, and their hierarchy and very raison d’eˆtre were seigniorial, not episcopal” (188). In Chapter 4, Bowes demonstrates that these multiple competitions over public and private also shaped heresiological accusations, such as those against Manichees. As bishops struggled to establish their authority over the empire’s elite though imperial edicts and conciliar canons, they insisted that private worship in the home deviated from orthodox public Christian worship. Female ascetics, traditionally valorized for their private isolation, found themselves particularly at the crossroads of this rhetorical struggle. In this book, Bowes reconfigures traditional narratives of “the Christianization of the aristocracy” and “the Christianization of space” (220) and redefines some aspects of “Christianity’s relationship with its Roman past” (222). As with any work, this volume is understandably shaped by the author’s disciplinary training. In this case, her frequent use of “the Peace of the Church” as a chronological marker and a few uncharacteristically flatfooted assumptions about religion betray her training outside of Religious Studies and provide opportunity for future nuance. This is more than balanced, however, by the rich array of information that she is able to bring to bear on the study of early Christianity from her training in Art and Archaeology and by her insightful and intelligent analysis of the material. While a relative paucity of evidence for private worship cautions against broad generalizations, Bowes carefully navigates the available evidence in order to draw persuasive and significant new conclusions about the history

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of Christianity in late antiquity that will fundamentally reshape the way scholars narrate some aspects of early Christian history. Christine Shepardson University of Tennessee – Knoxville

doi:10.1017/S000964070999062X

The Fall of the Roman Household. By Kate Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 319 pp. $99.00 cloth. Since the publication of her first book, The Virgin and the Bride (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), Kate Cooper has become one of the preeminent historians of women and the family in late antiquity. In her new book, Cooper again confirms why. With great clarity and erudition, The Fall of the Roman Household argues that the ancient Roman familia transformed during late antiquity and ushered in a new, Christianized one—created out of the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious realities of the later Western Roman Empire. To chart this, Cooper examines the role of the woman, particularly the domina within the familia. After a preface that outlines the state of the scholarship on the Christianization of marriage in the West, chapter 1, “The Battle of this Life,” explores how the battle motif entrenched in late antique culture filtered into Christian literature. Her focus is on two Latin conduct manuals: the anonymous Ad Gregoriam in palatio, which is translated in full in the appendix, and Ferrandus’s Ad Reginum Comitem Paraneticum. Using a comparative method, with a vast command of the relevant ancient and late Roman literature, Cooper shows how the upper-class family became soldiers on the front lines of senatorial ethics in Christ’s militia. In this, the domina takes a central role. The next chapters continue to examine the Ad Gregoriam, while at the same time looking anew at the literature of the senatorial class of the fifth and sixth centuries. Chapter 2, “The Obscurity of Eloquence,” considers the hitherto underemphasized role senatorial lay Christianity had in shaping Christian ethics in late antiquity. Cooper focuses on how writers such as Cassiodorus and Boethius, as well as the Ad Gregoriam, constructed an “exuberant senatorial Christianity” (61). These sources emphasize harmony between Christian ideals and ancient Roman values of tradition, family, and property. Chapter 3, “Household and Empire,” puts economics at center stage in evaluating the ethical positions of the senatorial aristocracy. Placing the transformation of the Roman household within the larger context of the empire, Cooper connects religious history with the political, economic, and social contexts of the late Roman world.

880

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of Christianity in late antiquity that will fundamentally reshape the way scholars narrate some aspects of early Christian history. Christine Shepardson University of Tennessee – Knoxville

doi:10.1017/S000964070999062X

The Fall of the Roman Household. By Kate Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 319 pp. $99.00 cloth. Since the publication of her first book, The Virgin and the Bride (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), Kate Cooper has become one of the preeminent historians of women and the family in late antiquity. In her new book, Cooper again confirms why. With great clarity and erudition, The Fall of the Roman Household argues that the ancient Roman familia transformed during late antiquity and ushered in a new, Christianized one—created out of the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious realities of the later Western Roman Empire. To chart this, Cooper examines the role of the woman, particularly the domina within the familia. After a preface that outlines the state of the scholarship on the Christianization of marriage in the West, chapter 1, “The Battle of this Life,” explores how the battle motif entrenched in late antique culture filtered into Christian literature. Her focus is on two Latin conduct manuals: the anonymous Ad Gregoriam in palatio, which is translated in full in the appendix, and Ferrandus’s Ad Reginum Comitem Paraneticum. Using a comparative method, with a vast command of the relevant ancient and late Roman literature, Cooper shows how the upper-class family became soldiers on the front lines of senatorial ethics in Christ’s militia. In this, the domina takes a central role. The next chapters continue to examine the Ad Gregoriam, while at the same time looking anew at the literature of the senatorial class of the fifth and sixth centuries. Chapter 2, “The Obscurity of Eloquence,” considers the hitherto underemphasized role senatorial lay Christianity had in shaping Christian ethics in late antiquity. Cooper focuses on how writers such as Cassiodorus and Boethius, as well as the Ad Gregoriam, constructed an “exuberant senatorial Christianity” (61). These sources emphasize harmony between Christian ideals and ancient Roman values of tradition, family, and property. Chapter 3, “Household and Empire,” puts economics at center stage in evaluating the ethical positions of the senatorial aristocracy. Placing the transformation of the Roman household within the larger context of the empire, Cooper connects religious history with the political, economic, and social contexts of the late Roman world.

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

881

The final chapters focus on the transformation of marriage in late antiquity and the role of the domina as a model martyr and ascetic. Chapter 4, “Such Trustful Partnership,” explores in detail the creation of the sexually active marriage as a form of askesis. Cooper shows that the Christianization of marriage occurs during late antiquity and not the Middle Ages, as the previous generation of scholars of marriage, especially Georges Duby in The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), has maintained. With the success of Christian asceticism, sexually active marriage was considered a second tier of asceticism. The new ideal was that the bishop became the arbiter of familial piety and justice. Charting this shift, her focus is on the ways in which Christian household manuals from late antiquity construct the roles of women within the elite senatorial class. Christianity plays only a contributing part in this shift; it is rather the social, political, and economic forces of the later Roman Empire that shape the new Christian family. For Cooper, “late Roman history really does not need to be divided into two historiographical streams, one oriented to economic, political, and military infrastructures while the other considers religious matters and ‘private life,’ in each case with a minimum of reference to the other end of the spectrum” (8). As this historian shows masterfully, that is simply not how history works. Chapter 5, “The invisible enemy,” connects the late antique vision of life as a spiritual battle with the reinvention of marriage within the context of late ancient and early medieval spirituality. Using the imaginary landscape of spiritual warfare as a model, Cooper shows how Latin writers borrowed the metaphor to explore the problems of Christian public authority as well as the inner struggle with invisible enemies. “Like the plague,” Cooper writes, “the prospect of war sharpened the urgency and rhetorical point of the habit of self-examination” (204). The matron is an athlete for Christ, a martyr for the fight against evil for the good of the familia. The fact that this work does not have a concluding chapter is a regrettable omission since the many intersecting themes within this important transformation in the late Roman world just begs for a final synthesis. In this way, the work feels more like a collection of related essays built around a close reading of Ad Gregoriam. Also, one may argue whether “fall” in the title is a useful metaphor when it comes to the Roman family, especially in work that speaks so much of transformation. Certainly the title serves more of an ironic function. Further, although the translation is clear and even poetic at times, an inclusion of the Latin text of the translation of the Ad Gregoriam in palatio would have been of great benefit to the scholar. Furthermore, it should also be noted that the scope of the study is understandably exclusive to the senatorial and literate householder classes of later Rome—a very small group indeed. For a vast majority of the Roman population, Cooper has nothing to say. Methodologically, focus on Christian household manuals can only serve

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to peer into literary constructions and idealized types inherent in the texts. Little beyond the highest classes can be seen here. For a more inclusive cross-section of the late Roman famila, see Kim Bowes’s impressive Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Nevertheless, for a model of probing the aristocratic household and the role of the domina within the literary world of the late Roman West, there are few better than Kate Cooper. Dennis P. Quinn California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990631

Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects. By Virginia Burrus. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xxii þ 193 pp. $45.00 cloth. The early Christian fascinated anxiety about (or anxious fascination with) the body has provoked much analysis over the last twenty years with questions of its gendered representation increasingly exercising a controlling voice. Although the cover illustration of The Nude Eve demonstrates that such concerns are hardly to be avoided, Virginia Burrus adopts the lens of shame both to scrutinize a thread that runs through this material in a range of early Christian texts and to explore its potential for contemporary society. There are four substantive chapters, each adopting a different starting point, developed through the re-reading of key texts: first, the exposure of the martyr’s body; second, the incarnation and the capacity of flesh to convey the divine; third, the deliberate embracing of chastisement or humiliation within asceticism; fourth, the verbalization of such in confession and in the relentless search for something to confess. These four chapters are prefaced by a brief introduction, emphasizing the early Christian shameless adoption of shame, and concluded by what is labeled an “afterword” but which bears a manifesto-like quality. Whereas many studies of early Christian attitudes of the body tend toward the lachrymose, Burrus traces their sorry after-effects and argues for a willingness to name and to embrace shame as a creative response in a world divided by the politics of difference. This combination of an acceptance of the insights of recent scholarship with a challenge to move toward a positive retrieval is to be welcomed. In her other publications, Burrus has shown herself a sensitive reader of early Christian texts, especially those from the worlds of martyrdom and asceticism. And so it is here. She ranges widely, allowing her different examples to develop

882

CHURCH HISTORY

to peer into literary constructions and idealized types inherent in the texts. Little beyond the highest classes can be seen here. For a more inclusive cross-section of the late Roman famila, see Kim Bowes’s impressive Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Nevertheless, for a model of probing the aristocratic household and the role of the domina within the literary world of the late Roman West, there are few better than Kate Cooper. Dennis P. Quinn California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990631

Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects. By Virginia Burrus. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xxii þ 193 pp. $45.00 cloth. The early Christian fascinated anxiety about (or anxious fascination with) the body has provoked much analysis over the last twenty years with questions of its gendered representation increasingly exercising a controlling voice. Although the cover illustration of The Nude Eve demonstrates that such concerns are hardly to be avoided, Virginia Burrus adopts the lens of shame both to scrutinize a thread that runs through this material in a range of early Christian texts and to explore its potential for contemporary society. There are four substantive chapters, each adopting a different starting point, developed through the re-reading of key texts: first, the exposure of the martyr’s body; second, the incarnation and the capacity of flesh to convey the divine; third, the deliberate embracing of chastisement or humiliation within asceticism; fourth, the verbalization of such in confession and in the relentless search for something to confess. These four chapters are prefaced by a brief introduction, emphasizing the early Christian shameless adoption of shame, and concluded by what is labeled an “afterword” but which bears a manifesto-like quality. Whereas many studies of early Christian attitudes of the body tend toward the lachrymose, Burrus traces their sorry after-effects and argues for a willingness to name and to embrace shame as a creative response in a world divided by the politics of difference. This combination of an acceptance of the insights of recent scholarship with a challenge to move toward a positive retrieval is to be welcomed. In her other publications, Burrus has shown herself a sensitive reader of early Christian texts, especially those from the worlds of martyrdom and asceticism. And so it is here. She ranges widely, allowing her different examples to develop

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

883

the train of thought; the narration is interspersed with dialogue with more recent theorists such as Irigaray and Kristeva when discussing believers’ participation in Jesus and in Jesus’ flesh in John, Levinas in preparation for “the pursuit of humiliation,” and Foucault and Derrida in relation to Augustine’s Confessions. The introduction invokes several recent analysts of the concept of shame, while her dialogue-partners in the afterword are primarily Martha Nussbaum and Jean Bethke Elshtain. This procedure certainly enriches readability, although at times the repetition of overblown images and language jars (see below). The straightforward re-reading or re-telling can be seductive, but after a while the reader may feel that she is being coerced into accepting Burrus’s encounter with the text and is not being given the freedom, or the knowledge, to disagree—especially since the narratives tend toward summary. There is little engagement in detail with the textual strategies which direct the reader’s attention and interpretation, or with the possibility of alternative readings. The question also arises whether the shame is identified by the (or this) modern reader of the texts or if it is one that the texts themselves admit. Clearly, the latter is often the case, but it is not always so. All this renders the book something of a personal journey; indeed, it starts with—in cultural studies, now almost de rigueur—an autobiographical reflection on the author’s own experience of the rhetoric of shame from her grandmothers (“my shame”). This already signals something that may be more problematic than is admitted: the grandmothers are identified by their own cultural heritage and experience, acknowledging—as indeed Burrus does—that categories of shame as here unfolded may be culturally specific. Yet frequently it feels as if shame is being treated as a universal coinage. The questions that need to be asked more clearly are, what is (or was) it that constructs particular experiences or actions as in some way “shame-ful”; and, of whose shame are we speaking, given that in many contexts the deeds or actions of one person are felt to bring shame upon another? Related to this universalizing is a tendency to use the terminology of shame pervasively. The discussion of flesh in the Gospel of John assumes that carnality necessarily involves shame: “In the joying, there is both a shaming abjection of flesh and a passage through the boundlessness of abjection into the infinitude of sublimity” (47). This is not a position that all Johannine interpreters would adopt. As in the following quote, “shame” is routinely associated with “abjection” and “abysmal,” both somewhat overworked concepts: “incarnational Christology . . . reflects a common and ongoing preoccupation of ancient Christian thought with the abysmal fecundity of an abjection that is always edged with the sublime” (80). In the conclusion, too, Martha Nussbaum’s position is articulated in terms of “shame” although the quotation that heads the chapter speaks of society’s “humanity.” Perversely, the insistent creation of a rhetoric of shame may divest it of its productivity.

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These concerns may also invite more consideration for the hopes of the afterword, for it is precisely a feature of the contemporary context that different concepts of the nature of shame co-exist within different sections of society. Further, the society in view, whether consciously or not, feels unequivocally to be that of the United States, explicitly referred to as “the American Empire” (149). Are the narrowing of audience and the potential alienation of a reader “from elsewhere” the inevitable concomitants of a selfconscious ideological or cultural re-reading of the past? If so, perhaps this should give the scholarly community, so often rightly resistant to any narrow nationalism, pause for thought. Perhaps one answer is to see this book as the opening up of a conversation, inviting the named dialogue partners as well as its readers to a response. It deserves to succeed as such. Judith Lieu University of Cambridge

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990643

Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt. By Stephen J. Davis. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xviii þ 371 pp. $130.00 cloth. Stephen Davis has crafted an outstanding book. Few people could have written this study, and the scholarly community is indebted to Davis for his unique areas of expertise. “Coptic Christology” suggests a survey of historical theology in Christian Egypt. Davis, however, takes the reader well beyond traditional intellectual history by addressing how theologies were enacted in lay and ascetic piety and how they expressed particular political commitments and religious identities, which were forged in the diverse and complicated environment of Egypt. The book employs methodologies from ritual studies and literary theory, particularly the work of the late Catherine Bell. It benefits from close attention to material culture, building on recent studies on textiles and painting. Davis’s facility with Greek, Coptic, and Arabic literature is evident throughout, and his prior work on gender, asceticism, cultural memory, and Coptic history has contributed to this study. Davis begins with an introduction to “Alexandrian Greek theology.” Davis summarizes Christology from the second through fifth centuries, presenting the most salient material from Basilides, Valentinus, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, and others. He focuses on two central questions: how was the act of divine embodiment accomplished in the person of Jesus, and what

884

CHURCH HISTORY

These concerns may also invite more consideration for the hopes of the afterword, for it is precisely a feature of the contemporary context that different concepts of the nature of shame co-exist within different sections of society. Further, the society in view, whether consciously or not, feels unequivocally to be that of the United States, explicitly referred to as “the American Empire” (149). Are the narrowing of audience and the potential alienation of a reader “from elsewhere” the inevitable concomitants of a selfconscious ideological or cultural re-reading of the past? If so, perhaps this should give the scholarly community, so often rightly resistant to any narrow nationalism, pause for thought. Perhaps one answer is to see this book as the opening up of a conversation, inviting the named dialogue partners as well as its readers to a response. It deserves to succeed as such. Judith Lieu University of Cambridge

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990643

Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt. By Stephen J. Davis. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xviii þ 371 pp. $130.00 cloth. Stephen Davis has crafted an outstanding book. Few people could have written this study, and the scholarly community is indebted to Davis for his unique areas of expertise. “Coptic Christology” suggests a survey of historical theology in Christian Egypt. Davis, however, takes the reader well beyond traditional intellectual history by addressing how theologies were enacted in lay and ascetic piety and how they expressed particular political commitments and religious identities, which were forged in the diverse and complicated environment of Egypt. The book employs methodologies from ritual studies and literary theory, particularly the work of the late Catherine Bell. It benefits from close attention to material culture, building on recent studies on textiles and painting. Davis’s facility with Greek, Coptic, and Arabic literature is evident throughout, and his prior work on gender, asceticism, cultural memory, and Coptic history has contributed to this study. Davis begins with an introduction to “Alexandrian Greek theology.” Davis summarizes Christology from the second through fifth centuries, presenting the most salient material from Basilides, Valentinus, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril, and others. He focuses on two central questions: how was the act of divine embodiment accomplished in the person of Jesus, and what

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consequences did that act have for human salvation? In various ways, he argues, these Alexandrian writers understood the Incarnation as an event that facilitated humanity’s own participation in divinity. This premise is the organizing thread for the remainder of the book. Cyril’s influence on Coptic Christian religiosity is keenly felt. Although Athanasius usually looms large in a “church history,” in Davis’s book, Cyril eclipses him. Part 1, on “Coptic Literature and Liturgy,” contains a chapter on monastic leader Shenoute and another on Eucharistic liturgy. Davis considers several of Shenoute’s sermons and shows that the monk incorporated theologies and biblical hermeneutics from Alexandrian patriarchs into his own heresiology and into a lay and monastic piety. The recitation of Jesus prayers, the realization of Christ’s body in the sacraments, and the veneration of Mary as Theotokos are the ritual enactments of Incarnational theology. Chapter 2 demonstrates that compared to other liturgies, medieval Coptic liturgical texts emphasized the sanctification and consumption of the Eucharist in ways that ritually contributed to the sanctification and divination of the human person. Church buildings, icons, lighting, and incense provided sensory reinforcement of the liturgical references to the Incarnation and of the power of the sacraments. Sacred space and material culture are the focus of part 2. Chapter 3, on pilgrimage and the cult of the saints, includes an analysis of a liturgical procession at Shenoute’s monastery. Shenoute and the sacred space affiliated with his relics are conflated with Christ’s Transfiguration and the holy family’s sojourn in Egypt. The veneration of the saint becomes a medium for the pilgrims’ own transformation and participation in the Incarnation. They “discover Christ in the process of encountering one who, like Mary, ‘bore Christ’ in his bodily labours—and who, like Christ himself, experienced glorification in the body” (125). Chapter 4 examines images of Christ in textiles and church wall paintings. In wearing garments adorned with images of Jesus, believers literally were clothed with Christ and closed the gap between themselves and the divine. Gazing on images of Mary nursing the infant Jesus allowed Christians to participate in the Incarnation because this act invited the viewers to imagine that they, too, were nourished by the vital fluid that fed Christ’s body. Part 3 turns to medieval Arabic Coptic literature written in the apologetic context of a dominant Muslim culture. Chapter 5 concentrates on the influential tenth-century author Sa¯wı¯rus ibn al-Muqaffa’. Sa¯wı¯rus adapted Alexandrian Christology using Islamic vocabulary and language. His work simultaneously explained and defended the doctrine of the Incarnation to Muslims and assured Christians (now a religious minority) of the “eschatological hope” (230) promised by the Incarnation. The final chapter concerns thirteenth-century writers in Cairo who used rhetorical strategies and theological terminology common to contemporary Islamic philosophical

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literature. They defended the Incarnation in the face of Muslim concerns for the complete unity of God and the utter incorporeity of God, among other issues. A postscript traces the legacy of these Christological developments in two modern contexts: the refutation of European Calvinists by the patriarch of the church and a twenty-first-century monk’s defense of the notion of deification. The latter argues that humans continue to experience deification through the Incarnation by participating in the Eucharist and by becoming monks whose bodies manifest religious transformation. Davis provides two appendices with translations of Coptic and Copto-Arabic texts used in this study as well as a thorough bibliography and index. This excellent book provided only two disappointments. Part 3 does not attend as much to ritual contexts and material culture as the rest of the volume. Davis’s argument about the physicality of the Incarnation as it is ritually and practically experienced fades as he shifts to more philosophical issues. The chapter needs either an explicit discussion of this shift—seemingly due to the nature of the most prominent Coptic Arabic sources, an interesting development in itself—or (since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a cultural renaissance in Christian Egypt) an analysis of elements of material culture with Christological significance (for example, the wall paintings at Saint Anthony’s monastery, other icons, illuminated manuscripts) in addition to what is in this section. Second, the book needs more commentary about the extent to which ideas originating in the more “heretical” early writers (or even the orthodox but complicated Clement) influenced and survived in later Egyptian Christian religiosity. Coptic Christology in Practice should be read by scholars interested in Christology, ritual studies, or the intersections of theology and material culture, as well as those working on Christian Egypt or Christian-Muslim encounters. This book is a model for scholarship because it exhibits both interdisciplinarity and the expertise of the specialist. Caroline T. Schroeder University of the Pacific

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990655

Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics, and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700 – 900. By Marios Costambeys. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 388. $115.00 cloth. This book is a dense and difficult read that desperately needed a good editor. The introduction begins well by putting Farfa in its historical context and discusses

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literature. They defended the Incarnation in the face of Muslim concerns for the complete unity of God and the utter incorporeity of God, among other issues. A postscript traces the legacy of these Christological developments in two modern contexts: the refutation of European Calvinists by the patriarch of the church and a twenty-first-century monk’s defense of the notion of deification. The latter argues that humans continue to experience deification through the Incarnation by participating in the Eucharist and by becoming monks whose bodies manifest religious transformation. Davis provides two appendices with translations of Coptic and Copto-Arabic texts used in this study as well as a thorough bibliography and index. This excellent book provided only two disappointments. Part 3 does not attend as much to ritual contexts and material culture as the rest of the volume. Davis’s argument about the physicality of the Incarnation as it is ritually and practically experienced fades as he shifts to more philosophical issues. The chapter needs either an explicit discussion of this shift—seemingly due to the nature of the most prominent Coptic Arabic sources, an interesting development in itself—or (since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a cultural renaissance in Christian Egypt) an analysis of elements of material culture with Christological significance (for example, the wall paintings at Saint Anthony’s monastery, other icons, illuminated manuscripts) in addition to what is in this section. Second, the book needs more commentary about the extent to which ideas originating in the more “heretical” early writers (or even the orthodox but complicated Clement) influenced and survived in later Egyptian Christian religiosity. Coptic Christology in Practice should be read by scholars interested in Christology, ritual studies, or the intersections of theology and material culture, as well as those working on Christian Egypt or Christian-Muslim encounters. This book is a model for scholarship because it exhibits both interdisciplinarity and the expertise of the specialist. Caroline T. Schroeder University of the Pacific

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990655

Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics, and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700 – 900. By Marios Costambeys. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi þ 388. $115.00 cloth. This book is a dense and difficult read that desperately needed a good editor. The introduction begins well by putting Farfa in its historical context and discusses

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the sources for writing the history of the monastery in the early Middle Ages but then meanders from one thing to another for more than fifty pages. First Costambeys discusses the chronicle of Gregory of Catino—called “Farfa’s great high medieval historian” twice on pages 7 and 8—then he switches to a description of Farfa’s geographical setting on the slope of Monte Acuziano, in which we are told that “English travelers in the nineteenth century also noted that the slopes of the hill were heavily wooded” (9). We also learn that the Farfa River, which gives the monastery its name, was recognized for the quality of its waters since antiquity. Costambeys’s evidence is a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid (7.715) that says nothing of the sort. Then we leave geography and return to Gregory of Catino. His reliability is explored; a short excursus is made on sources outside the scope of the book’s chronological framework; and Gregory’s collection of canon law is discussed for two pages. The author avers that Gregory compiled the collection to “defend Farfa’s patrimony against the specific threat to it from irresponsible abbots and from the pope,” accepting Boynton’s conclusions about the collection’s purpose. Half the collection does deal with rights and property, and I believe that the editor of the collection, Theo Ko¨lzer, came to a much more balanced conclusion about Gregory’s purpose that is far more convincing—“Schwerpunkt der Collectio Farensis ist der Schultz des Kirchengutes in weitesten Sinn” (Collectio canonum Regesto Farfensi inserta, Monumenta iuris canonici, Series B, 5 [Citta` del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1982], 74). But why are we reading about a twelfth-century canonical collection in a book that treats the period 700–900? Costambeys then turns to the subject of how documents were produced in early medieval Italy (19 – 48). Costambeys poses an impossible question: what was Gregory’s methodology for selecting documents to include in his work? We then move on to the scribes, their “authorial voices” (35), the arengae of the documents, and, finally, the “highly speculative” (45) idea that the arengae are taken in part from liturgical texts. This discussion is important for diplomatics but should not have occupied a large swath in a book on Farfa. The introduction grinds to a halt with another excursus on theories of monastic patronage that are now current among early medievalists. There have been a number of good books on Farfa. Perhaps that is why Costambeys never gives the reader a coherent description of the monastery’s founding in about 700 and its early history. If one already knows the story, there are brief references to Thomas of Maurienne scattered throughout the book but nothing more. Instead, the first sentence of chapter 2 announces that the author will “examine the operation of political power claimed by the rulers of Sabina up to the mid-ninth century” (62). The result is an examination of twenty-eight charters dating between 724 and 787. We do not receive, however, a detailed discussion of the charters or their contents.

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Only the donors and their purposes are listed in Costambeys’s text. I found it particularly frustrating that the crucial terms in the charters are not defined but consistently left in Latin. A term like “gualdus” can be equivocal. Nonetheless, the author has a responsibility to report to his readers what he and earlier scholars have concluded about the meaning(s) of the term. After all, the term has been discussed for a long time (see Leo Wiener, Commentary to the Germanic Laws [1915], 84 –88, or Heinrich Tiefenbach’s Studien zu Wo¨rtern volkssprachiger Herkunft in karolingischen Ko¨nigsurkunden [1973], 62) and most recently by Chris Wickham. Chapter 3 treats the relationship between the various other powers surrounding Farfa. Here Costambeys gives a much more satisfactory accounting of the documentary evidence. His discussion of a court case involving the bishops of Rieti and Farfa in 776 is particularly illuminating. Chapter 4 examines the prosopography of the monks and abbots of Farfa, chapter 5 looks at the landowners in the Sabina, the area surrounding Farfa, and chapter 6 deals with the leading families in the Sabina. Chapter 7 focuses, finally, on Farfa. Costambeys begins this chapter with the same text with which he began chapter 1. His interpretation of the text is problematic; his analysis underlines a theme that runs unchecked through the book: power. There is almost nothing in the book about Farfa as an ecclesiastical institution. The document reports a very interesting court case that Gregory of Catino included in his history, in which Lothar I reported on an earlier hearing in Rome between Farfa and Pope Paschal I. Property of Farfa had been despoiled. Sergius, papal lawyer (advocatus) and bibliothecarius, unsuccessfully tried to justify “ius et dominatio” over Farfa. The abbot of Farfa, Ingoald, countered with documents from Lombard kings and Charlemagne. The gathering, including Paschal, was convinced by Ingoald’s arguments and evidence. Costambeys translates the denouement: The same Apostolic Lord not only recognized that he himself had no lordship over the rights of that monastery, except consecration, but also reinvested Leo who was advocate of our party and of the same monastery . . . with all the properties located both in the Sabine territory and in Romania, which the power of the predecessors of the same Pope Paschal had unjustly taken away from the same monastery through their orders. (1) The Latin text reads: Idem domnus apostolicus non solum se recognovit nullum dominium in iure ipsius monasterii se habere, excepta consecratione, sed etiam omnes res tam in territorio Sabinensi quam et in Romania sitas, quas ex eodem monasterio potestas antecessorum eiusdem Paschalis pape˛ iniuste abstulerat per

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iussionem ipsius . . . revestivit Leonem, qui de parte nostra eiusdemque monasterii advocates erat. A key sentence is mistranslated: it should be rendered “which the officer (Potestas) of Paschal’s predecessors unjustly plundered by his command.” “Potestas” does not mean power in this sentence, but office holder. “Ipsius” refers back to “potestas,” not to Paschal’s predecessors. Otherwise it would have been “ipsorum.” Even more basically, Costambeys does not analyze the legal situation. The “Potestas” had dispossessed persons from property claimed by Farfa. The monastery brought suit to vindicate their rights. The “Potestas” was no longer in office (potestas antecessorum eiusdem) and was not present when the case was heard in Rome. The text does not state that previous popes had ordered the “Potestas” to confiscate property of Farfa. Costambeys assumes they did. The text attributes the command to confiscate properties only to the “Potestas” (iussio ipsius). From the ease with which Paschal capitulated, we may infer, but cannot be certain, that the pope did not view the actions of the “Potestas” as exercising papal rights. This evidence does not demonstrate that the early ninth-century papacy focused on Farfa as a plum to be picked. Nor does it prove that the abbots of Farfa struggled constantly, in the words of the author, “to stave off the threat of papal domination” (1). His generalization may be true but cannot be proven on the basis of the evidence of this court case—an ex parte report at that— that he highlights in two chapters. The major theme of this book centers on outsiders claiming authority over Farfa and the abbots defending their rights. The claims of lords, patrons, and prelates are, I admit, an element present in the history of almost every European monastery in the Middle Ages. But there is more to the story in the early Middle Ages. The final chapter in the book deals with Farfa under the Carolingians. Costambeys argues that Farfa was more important during this time than generally recognized because the Liber pontificalis “is still . . . underproblematized” (273), not a particularly helpful observation. Our other main source, The Regestrum Farfense, has a missing folio that covered the years 773– 775. Since these years are those in which Charlemagne deposed the Lombard king Desiderius, Costambeys regrets their absence, with good reason. The chapter focuses on this key period before and after Carolingian replaced Lombard rule in Central Italy. In large part Costambeys’s analysis in this chapter is a long gloss on Thomas F. X. Noble’s The Republic of St. Peter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984). His disagreements with Noble are primarily ones of emphasis and, unless one is thoroughly familiar with Noble’s work, hardly noticeable. The only time his opinion comes through clearly is on the penultimate page of the book when he writes that “it is hard to conceive of the papacy as running a ‘state’ in any

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meaningful sense in this period” (351), with no reference to Noble. His exposition makes for irenic and elegant scholarly debate, but I think that key issues will be completely lost on all but the most informed readers. Kenneth Pennington The Catholic University of America

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990667

Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography. By Emma Campbell. Gallica 12. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. xii þ 274 pp. $105.00 cloth. In this, her first monograph, Emma Campbell observes that Old French hagiography is a privileged medium for examining how relationships function. She endeavors to show how saints’ lives depict social and sexual relations in order to see how these texts represent a move beyond human systems, connecting human and divine, and strengthening communities of belief. In these texts, saints articulate a point of contact between the human and heavenly. The subject of the text, the saint-to-be, stands at the threshold between the earthly and celestial and is transformed and becomes holy, providing a connection between the audience of the saint’s life and God. Campbell reads a variety of saints’ lives to analyze how this transformation occurs and argues that it is affected by way of the saint’s participation in and renunciation of social relationships. Campbell explicitly chooses a theoretical rather than a historicist approach, using a variety of theories to lay bare these relationships and examine how they are transformed. These include anthropological theories of the gift, kinship, and community in addition to queer theory. The book’s first half is dedicated to this analysis of the saints’ negotiation of human and divine relationships. In the second half, Campbell focuses on the reception of the lives, examining how larger religious communities are built and strengthened by their relationship to the text. In the final two chapters, Campbell looks at how the saints’ lives collected in two manuscripts might relate to one another, this time imagining a more specific audience: the possessors of the actual manuscript. The first section of the book, “The Gift,” relies on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s work on the economy of the gift and argues that saints often demonstrate their withdrawal from human society and their commitment to God by refusing gifts given in a social context. This idea is already familiar to readers of the Vie de Saint Alexis, Campbell’s first example text, where Alexis rejects the earthly father and the attendant social relationships, goods, and honors in favor of the

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meaningful sense in this period” (351), with no reference to Noble. His exposition makes for irenic and elegant scholarly debate, but I think that key issues will be completely lost on all but the most informed readers. Kenneth Pennington The Catholic University of America

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990667

Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography. By Emma Campbell. Gallica 12. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. xii þ 274 pp. $105.00 cloth. In this, her first monograph, Emma Campbell observes that Old French hagiography is a privileged medium for examining how relationships function. She endeavors to show how saints’ lives depict social and sexual relations in order to see how these texts represent a move beyond human systems, connecting human and divine, and strengthening communities of belief. In these texts, saints articulate a point of contact between the human and heavenly. The subject of the text, the saint-to-be, stands at the threshold between the earthly and celestial and is transformed and becomes holy, providing a connection between the audience of the saint’s life and God. Campbell reads a variety of saints’ lives to analyze how this transformation occurs and argues that it is affected by way of the saint’s participation in and renunciation of social relationships. Campbell explicitly chooses a theoretical rather than a historicist approach, using a variety of theories to lay bare these relationships and examine how they are transformed. These include anthropological theories of the gift, kinship, and community in addition to queer theory. The book’s first half is dedicated to this analysis of the saints’ negotiation of human and divine relationships. In the second half, Campbell focuses on the reception of the lives, examining how larger religious communities are built and strengthened by their relationship to the text. In the final two chapters, Campbell looks at how the saints’ lives collected in two manuscripts might relate to one another, this time imagining a more specific audience: the possessors of the actual manuscript. The first section of the book, “The Gift,” relies on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s work on the economy of the gift and argues that saints often demonstrate their withdrawal from human society and their commitment to God by refusing gifts given in a social context. This idea is already familiar to readers of the Vie de Saint Alexis, Campbell’s first example text, where Alexis rejects the earthly father and the attendant social relationships, goods, and honors in favor of the

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heavenly Father and attendant spiritual gifts. Campbell explains that Alexis not only refuses human exchange but also engages in spiritual exchange instead: his self-denial and gifts to others act as gifts to God. Campbell shows that Guillaume de Berneville’s Vie de Saint Gilles similarly demonstrates the “renunciative gift,” as Gilles, too, abandons his inheritance, lands, and social role. Instead of distributing his wealth as a lord in an earthly social and economic system, he relies on God’s generosity for his survival. Again, the refused human gift performs as a gift to God, affirming a spiritual relationship that imitates and replaces the social relations abandoned by the saint. The ensuing analysis of the Vie de Saint Jean l’Aumoˆnier shows that the system that enables one to interact with God requires not only “remissive gifts,” but ultimately the reassessment of how one perceives materiality itself. The believer must learn to see the material world in spiritual terms and recognize that the gift was never the saint’s in the first place, but rather a gift of God. By returning what was never his, the saint acknowledges divine sovereignty. The second half of the chapter applies this approach to lives in which saints face literal rather than figural martyrdom, including Saints Lawrence, Alban, Foy, Andrew, and Georges. Here the saints’ self-sacrifice performs as the remissive gift. In chapter 2, the second half of “The Gift” section, Campbell looks at the role that the saint’s gender plays in the economy of the gift, pointing out that although all possessions are gifts of God, in order to give them up, the saint has to first be seen as possessing them in the human sense. As female saints have limited claims to social position and possessions to renounce, they often function more as objects than subjects of exchange, specifically as marriage objects. Refusing this social role often takes the form of virginity. Gender and sexuality are thus inextricably bound. On rare occasion, Campbell stretches her interpretations too far, oversexualizing the text in her readings. In analyzing The Life of Saint Catherine, she states that the empress does not desire union with god but “longs for” and “desires” the saint. Later, when Catherine encourages the empress to take Christ as her husband as she herself has done, Campbell calls this “spiritual polygamy.” These, Campbell explains, are examples of hagiography creating spaces of “unlivable” and “queer connectivity” that build foundations for communal relations for the audience of saints’ lives (113). Here hagiography is indeed “attempting to think beyond the limits of human relationships,” but it seems this space beyond is not so much an “environment in which queer desires and modes of connection become possible” as it is a spiritual sphere where sexual metaphors so clearly indicative of human limitations give way to a space beyond sex (i). Despite this minor issue, Campbell’s book is extremely useful. She has a gift for clear writing and always explains the theory in question before applying it to the texts. The only exception is chapter 6, where Campbell brings queer

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theory to bear most centrally. After reading this chapter, I am still not sure I understand neither how exactly its theoretical frame, based on Carolyn Dinshaw’s idea of “the touch,” informs the texts at hand nor how it might allow connections between the medieval past and the postmodern present as claimed. Even so, Campbell’s interpretation of the saint’s lives examined in this chapter (two versions of The Life of Mary the Egyptian) is enlightening and convincing, as are the other examples of close readings in the book. Although the title Medieval Saints’ Lives proves a bit broad, Campbell’s claims to engage Old French hagiography as a whole are fitting, given the number of texts she examines. All those interested in hagiography, medieval kinship, and reading communities will read the book with interest. Nicole M. Leapley Saint Anselm College

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990679

Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales. By Jane Cartwright. Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. xviii þ 301 pp. $85.00 cloth. Jane Cartwright’s insightful collection of essays accentuates the uniqueness of female sanctity in medieval Wales and connects it to the broader traditions of religious women and female piety in medieval Europe. Although her expressed intent is “to investigate the roles women played in relation to religious life in Wales and highlight the wealth and variety of Welsh sources” (1), Cartwright’s examination of hagiography, vernacular poetry, and material culture also demonstrates the important role played by local traditions and lay piety in the development of Welsh Christianity. Cartwright invests the greater part of her examination in exploring how female saints functioned in medieval Welsh literature and culture. Drawing from Welsh versions of Marian texts, vernacular poetry, and images of the Virgin (such as Our Lady of Cardigan whose miraculous candle burned for nine years), she establishes that “internationally popular saints” such as the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Katherine of Alexandria were just as “fashionable” in Wales as they were in Europe (75). At the same, characteristics important to Welsh culture helped determine which saints would flourish in Wales and even flavored the appearance of European saints. For example, Cartwright argues that Mary’s reputation as a generous intercessor for all people made her particularly attractive to the Welsh emphasis on lay piety. “Mary’s humanity, her eagerness to intercede on behalf of all sinners, meant that she was particularly amenable and her local

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theory to bear most centrally. After reading this chapter, I am still not sure I understand neither how exactly its theoretical frame, based on Carolyn Dinshaw’s idea of “the touch,” informs the texts at hand nor how it might allow connections between the medieval past and the postmodern present as claimed. Even so, Campbell’s interpretation of the saint’s lives examined in this chapter (two versions of The Life of Mary the Egyptian) is enlightening and convincing, as are the other examples of close readings in the book. Although the title Medieval Saints’ Lives proves a bit broad, Campbell’s claims to engage Old French hagiography as a whole are fitting, given the number of texts she examines. All those interested in hagiography, medieval kinship, and reading communities will read the book with interest. Nicole M. Leapley Saint Anselm College

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990679

Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales. By Jane Cartwright. Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. xviii þ 301 pp. $85.00 cloth. Jane Cartwright’s insightful collection of essays accentuates the uniqueness of female sanctity in medieval Wales and connects it to the broader traditions of religious women and female piety in medieval Europe. Although her expressed intent is “to investigate the roles women played in relation to religious life in Wales and highlight the wealth and variety of Welsh sources” (1), Cartwright’s examination of hagiography, vernacular poetry, and material culture also demonstrates the important role played by local traditions and lay piety in the development of Welsh Christianity. Cartwright invests the greater part of her examination in exploring how female saints functioned in medieval Welsh literature and culture. Drawing from Welsh versions of Marian texts, vernacular poetry, and images of the Virgin (such as Our Lady of Cardigan whose miraculous candle burned for nine years), she establishes that “internationally popular saints” such as the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Katherine of Alexandria were just as “fashionable” in Wales as they were in Europe (75). At the same, characteristics important to Welsh culture helped determine which saints would flourish in Wales and even flavored the appearance of European saints. For example, Cartwright argues that Mary’s reputation as a generous intercessor for all people made her particularly attractive to the Welsh emphasis on lay piety. “Mary’s humanity, her eagerness to intercede on behalf of all sinners, meant that she was particularly amenable and her local

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shrines, holy wells and images, helped reinforce the belief that Mary cared for ordinary folk” (66). Similarly, Katherine of Alexandria’s Welsh Life neither emphasizes her extensive education (as found in the Legenda aurea) nor describes Christ as her lover or spiritual spouse (as occurs in most other English and Continental versions). Cartwright suggests that these omissions rendered the Welsh Catrin more accessible to a lay audience by minimizing her appearance as a professional religious woman. Local female saints also played a critical role in the Welsh Church. Balancing their better-known and canonized sisters, the proliferation of local saints such as Non and Gwenfrewy buttress Cartwright’s claims that, in Wales, sanctity was “locally conferred” and that, contrary to previous assertions, “there were in fact a significant number of Welsh women saints” (93)—even if they were not all canonized. On the one hand, the local female saints mostly reflect European patterns of holiness: focus on their virginity, beauty, femininity, and intercessory powers. On the other hand, there are some significant deviations from these standards. St. Non, who enjoyed much popularity in medieval Wales, is perhaps the most notable exception as she is one of the few raped female saints in Western Christianity. Cartwright argues that Non’s subsequent maternity is the origin of her sanctity and popularity, as it made her “a more relevant role model for medieval Welsh women than some of the virgin martyrs” (121). Maternity was certainly not exclusive to Welsh saints (the Virgin Mary and St. Anne are two clear examples), but Cartwright notes that there are more maternal saints in Wales than elsewhere in Europe. She connects this emphasis on motherhood among Welsh saints with the limited role played by women religious in Welsh culture and the limited support provided by Welsh society to their negligible number of native nuns. “Bearing in mind that there were so few nunneries in medieval Wales, it seems likely that private devotion rather than claustration was the mode of religious expression generally preferred for Welsh women” (194). In short, female sanctity and spirituality in medieval Wales was significantly influenced by the priorities of lay culture. The domestic and maternal qualities of female saints were accentuated, making their lives more accessible to, and more appropriate role models for, lay women. As Cartwright ably demonstrates, “The Life of Martha stresses the importance of being a good host/ess and emphasizes that Christ rewards generosity and hospitality in the Christian household. The most important miracle story in the Welsh Life of Mary Magdalene centres on a lay family, rewarded for their conversion and adherence to the Christian faith . . . Catrin herself, although she is a virgin martyr, is a religious heroine whose wisdom, faith and chastity provided an appropriate role model for lay women and adolescents in noble families” (174 – 75). This correlation between lay piety and female sanctity also helps explain the rather unusual—at least from a European perspective—absence of professional religious women in medieval Wales.

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Although one certainly wished for a concluding chapter that would have provided greater synthesis for the material and an annotated manuscript bibliography that would have helped readers better follow the textual analysis, Cartwright’s study achieves its goal: it gives us a much better understanding of how female sanctity and lay piety functioned in medieval Wales. It also underscores the importance of manuscript studies, brings into the historical conversation Welsh texts that have been overlooked by medieval scholars, illuminates interesting parallels among Welsh religious texts and both their European and English counterparts (such as John Mirk’s Festial), and demonstrates the lay didactic purpose of vernacular hagiography. Thus Cartwright’s study sheds important light on “the intersection of women’s history and religion” both in medieval Wales and in the greater European context (2). Beth Allison Barr Baylor University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990680

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. By Suzanne M. Yeager. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ix þ 255 pp. $90.00 cloth. That Jerusalem was central to medieval political and religious thought is widely known; it was (and remains) a holy city to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, was sought after by empires, crusaders, and pilgrims, and stood at the geographical (and geopolitical) center of many medieval maps. Yet the full range and impact of this centrality has not been sufficiently accounted for in scholarship focusing on medieval narrative texts, a deficit that Prof. Yeager’s study makes considerable progress toward redressing. Focusing primarily on English works, Yeager considers a wide range of texts, including first-person accounts of pilgrimage, crusading literature, romances, and devotional writing. Chapter 1 is a study of accounts of pilgrimage from three authors: the anonymous fourteenth-century author of Itinerarium cuiusdam Anglici, 1344 – 45; William Wey, who wrote several “user-friendly” travel itineraries in the mid-fifteenth century; and Richard Torkington, who wrote Diarie of Englysshe Travell early in the sixteenth century. While choosing one work each from three consecutive centuries does not provide a sufficiently broad background to document how pilgrim narratives changed more broadly across this chronological span, the tradeoff is that the reader benefits from Yeager’s nuanced observations of both the similarities and differences in

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Although one certainly wished for a concluding chapter that would have provided greater synthesis for the material and an annotated manuscript bibliography that would have helped readers better follow the textual analysis, Cartwright’s study achieves its goal: it gives us a much better understanding of how female sanctity and lay piety functioned in medieval Wales. It also underscores the importance of manuscript studies, brings into the historical conversation Welsh texts that have been overlooked by medieval scholars, illuminates interesting parallels among Welsh religious texts and both their European and English counterparts (such as John Mirk’s Festial), and demonstrates the lay didactic purpose of vernacular hagiography. Thus Cartwright’s study sheds important light on “the intersection of women’s history and religion” both in medieval Wales and in the greater European context (2). Beth Allison Barr Baylor University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990680

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. By Suzanne M. Yeager. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ix þ 255 pp. $90.00 cloth. That Jerusalem was central to medieval political and religious thought is widely known; it was (and remains) a holy city to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, was sought after by empires, crusaders, and pilgrims, and stood at the geographical (and geopolitical) center of many medieval maps. Yet the full range and impact of this centrality has not been sufficiently accounted for in scholarship focusing on medieval narrative texts, a deficit that Prof. Yeager’s study makes considerable progress toward redressing. Focusing primarily on English works, Yeager considers a wide range of texts, including first-person accounts of pilgrimage, crusading literature, romances, and devotional writing. Chapter 1 is a study of accounts of pilgrimage from three authors: the anonymous fourteenth-century author of Itinerarium cuiusdam Anglici, 1344 – 45; William Wey, who wrote several “user-friendly” travel itineraries in the mid-fifteenth century; and Richard Torkington, who wrote Diarie of Englysshe Travell early in the sixteenth century. While choosing one work each from three consecutive centuries does not provide a sufficiently broad background to document how pilgrim narratives changed more broadly across this chronological span, the tradeoff is that the reader benefits from Yeager’s nuanced observations of both the similarities and differences in

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how pilgrim writers represented Jerusalem—as both a physical and spiritual destination—to readers back home in England. The second, third, and fourth chapters each focus on a representative text that offers insight into the variety of ways that medieval authors negotiated and understood the complex historical relationship—whether real or legendary— between England and Jerusalem. The subject of chapter 2 is Richard, Coer de Lyon, a crusading poem surviving in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century versions that relates (and sought to reinvent) England’s role in the Third Crusade. Yeager’s analysis of the poem demonstrates both how Jerusalem was imagined as an object of crusader zeal in medieval England (and western Europe more broadly) and how the poem’s depiction of Jerusalem as the rightful inheritance of the English during the crusades of the twelfth century mapped onto the current events of the Hundred Years’ War and England’s claims to rightful ownership of French territory. Chapter 3 focuses on The Siege of Jerusalem, a fourteenth-century alliterative poem that has recently been the subject of increasing critical attention after years of neglect. Part of a large body of literature known as the Vengeance of Our Lord tradition, the poem anachronistically re-imagines the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, portraying the Roman soldiers as chivalric Christian knights besieging Jerusalem and destroying the Jewish temple in an act of retribution for the crucifixion of Christ. Yeager’s “counter-reading” of the poem, a typological reading that argues that the Romans “become the adversaries of Christendom” while the Jewish victims “occupy a martyr-like role as Christians” (107), will likely fail to convince many critics who have struggled with what most see as the poem’s overt anti-Semitism, but her argument is a thoughtful and welcome addition to an emerging scholarly discussion that seeks to deepen our collective understanding of the poem through mapping the complex textual, historical, and political traditions to which it is connected. Chapter 4 centers on The Book of Sir John Mandeville, a book of purported travels that is famous both for the wide diversity of source materials that its author subsumed within it and its wide dissemination throughout medieval Europe in a number of translations. Although the diverse receptions of the book mirrored its many sources, Yeager focuses on the book’s “reception as a devotional narrative,” especially by English audiences, in keeping with the goals of her study (108). Having considered narratives of crusades and pilgrimages to what she terms “Terrestrial Jerusalem,” along with a narrative of its destruction, Yeager here develops more fully the theme of a parallel “Celestial Jerusalem,” which has been acknowledged throughout the book even when discussing texts that deal with the actual, earthly Jerusalem. The final chapter concerns a cluster of texts that demonstrate the “interrelationship between politics, practical warfare, and medieval Christian theology,” including Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pe`lerinage de la vie

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humaine (including its translation into Middle English), The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, and Philippe de Me´zie`res’ Songe du Viel Pe`lerin and Epistre au Roi Richard (136). As suggested in the chapter’s title—“Beyond the Celestial and Terrestrial Jerusalem: the Promised Land in western Christendom”—it examines how the rhetoric of crusading and pilgrimage literature were used to recast both England and France as Promised Lands in the west. Yeager shows that the holy city can be the object of travelers’ spiritual itineraries even if they never leave home, and documents how Jerusalem remained central to medieval devotional thought well after any realistic hopes of possessing it though military actions had passed. There is much to admire in this monograph, which covers a lot of ground succinctly and thoughtfully in the 172 pages that contain the introduction, chapters, and conclusion. The detailed notes and comprehensive bibliography that constitute the rest of the book, meanwhile, attest to the extensive research and documentation behind Yeager’s efforts, and they will serve as useful references to the many readers who will no doubt utilize her work to further their own research. This book offers much to those studying any of the works analyzed in detail within the chapters as well as to those who are interested more generally in pilgrimage, the crusades, or medieval devotional thought. It also plays an important role in bringing together scholarly discussions in these areas, which often remain much more separated from one another in modern scholarship than they were in medieval thought or practice (as demonstrated by the manifold intersections documented in this study). Finally, Yeager persuasively argues that narratives relating the quest for and conquering of Jerusalem were frequently instrumental in shaping how subsequent authors understood and related the events of later medieval history, including the Hundred Years’ War and the Papal Schism. As such, these narratives deserve much more attention than they have received, and Yeager’s work is an important contribution to their study. Timothy L. Stinson North Carolina State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990692

The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley. By Bryan W. Ball. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008. 236 pp. $62.50 paper. We hear from time to time of mortalists, but they—for all that Thomas Hobbes and John Milton dwelt in their midst—have not enjoyed the kind of profile that

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humaine (including its translation into Middle English), The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, and Philippe de Me´zie`res’ Songe du Viel Pe`lerin and Epistre au Roi Richard (136). As suggested in the chapter’s title—“Beyond the Celestial and Terrestrial Jerusalem: the Promised Land in western Christendom”—it examines how the rhetoric of crusading and pilgrimage literature were used to recast both England and France as Promised Lands in the west. Yeager shows that the holy city can be the object of travelers’ spiritual itineraries even if they never leave home, and documents how Jerusalem remained central to medieval devotional thought well after any realistic hopes of possessing it though military actions had passed. There is much to admire in this monograph, which covers a lot of ground succinctly and thoughtfully in the 172 pages that contain the introduction, chapters, and conclusion. The detailed notes and comprehensive bibliography that constitute the rest of the book, meanwhile, attest to the extensive research and documentation behind Yeager’s efforts, and they will serve as useful references to the many readers who will no doubt utilize her work to further their own research. This book offers much to those studying any of the works analyzed in detail within the chapters as well as to those who are interested more generally in pilgrimage, the crusades, or medieval devotional thought. It also plays an important role in bringing together scholarly discussions in these areas, which often remain much more separated from one another in modern scholarship than they were in medieval thought or practice (as demonstrated by the manifold intersections documented in this study). Finally, Yeager persuasively argues that narratives relating the quest for and conquering of Jerusalem were frequently instrumental in shaping how subsequent authors understood and related the events of later medieval history, including the Hundred Years’ War and the Papal Schism. As such, these narratives deserve much more attention than they have received, and Yeager’s work is an important contribution to their study. Timothy L. Stinson North Carolina State University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990692

The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley. By Bryan W. Ball. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008. 236 pp. $62.50 paper. We hear from time to time of mortalists, but they—for all that Thomas Hobbes and John Milton dwelt in their midst—have not enjoyed the kind of profile that

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scholars, over the past decades, have constructed for other dogmaticians of questionable orthodoxy. Surely one reason for this is evidentiary: English mortalist opinions predating the mid-seventeenth century need to be teased out of source material that is relatively scant and likely to be oblique, elliptical, or hostile. Another reason, doubtless, has to do with the doctrinal trickiness of the subject: mortalism presents itself in distinguishable strands, but it is often a fine scantling that separates one strand from another, and there may be difficulties in determining whether a given mortalist voice utters on behalf of the soul’s “sleep” or the soul’s “death.” Bryan Ball’s book is the first dedicated study of early-modern English mortalism since Norman T. Burns’s groundbreaking monograph of 1972, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton. Ball, a specialist in early-modern eschatology, generously acknowledges the high quality of the scholarship that informed Burns’s monograph, and, fittingly, he frequently engages with conclusions drawn by Burns. But he establishes the need for a new account of mortalism: recent studies of likely subjects ignore mortalist dimensions that, by Ball’s lights, should have been explored, and in several respects Ball takes his reader beyond significant limitations of scope and conception within which Burns had worked. He extends Burns’s temporal range by looking back, briefly, to Wycliffite and Lollard theology, by compensating for Burns’s “indefensible” (15) omission of John Locke, and by carrying the story of English mortalism through the eighteenth century. He considers texts, dating within the period studied by Burns but overlooked by the latter, whose anthropological language he considers either determinedly mortalist or at least susceptible of mortalist interpretation. He works into his doctrinal survey some coordinating narrative threads not evident in Burns: the seedbed of English mortalism was Anabaptist-inflected Kent and Sussex, whence emerged the most voluble Baptist mortalists of the mid-seventeenth century; the early preponderance of the soul-sleep strand of mortalism in England was destined for an overturning with the triumph of the more authentically mortalist souldeath strand, whose proponents carried the day—and eventually colonized the establishment—during the second half of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. Ball handles a technical subject with admirable clarity, authoritatively directing his reader through a concentrated and challenging intellectual environment, offering helpful explanations and assessments along the way. Mortalism concerned itself with the state of the soul following the death of the body. “Psychopannychism” maintained the mortalist view that the soul was not inherently immortal but insisted nevertheless that it was able to subsist, independently of the body, in a state of “sleep,” of unconscious “rest.” “Thnetopsychism” held that such sleep must be viewed metaphorically, that the soul suffered death and dissolution at the cessation of bodily life. Only at

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the general resurrection would the soul obtain the gift of immortality—the blessing that flowed from Christ’s resurrection, made manifest at his second coming. Mortalist truth, so conceived, vanquished the vast fraud of the papist penitential system, and Ball capably articulates the polemical bite and the eschatological hope that energized the commitment to Christian mortalism. It is much to Ball’s credit that he lays bare the ideological purchase of earlymodern mortalism, and proceeds to offer accessible expositions of the (variously thnetopsychist) views of England’s principal mortalists from the 1640s to the end of the eighteenth century. Some shortcomings may be noted. Lack of evidence sabotages the thesis of mortalism’s Anabaptist-driven Elizabethan spread. A lurching pen betrays the frustration of an unsubstantiated wish: “it is quite possible” that two Dutchmen martyred at Smithfield were mortalists; “it would be surprising indeed if mortalism, implicit or explicit, had not found its way across the Channel”; “perhaps” Bullinger’s translator “may have seen [Bullinger’s sermons] as a timely response to mortalism’s growing appeal to English minds”; “in the absence of more conclusive documentary evidence,” the translations of Calvin and Bullinger provide “important glimpses into the existence of English mortalism in the later decades of the sixteenth century” (63–65, 67). Would that these plausible notions were sustained by sufficient evidence to clinch the case. Curiously, Ball does not send out a life-raft to the Muggletonians, whose condescending treatment at the hands of Burns recently drew fire from William Lamont (Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652–1979 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006], 86, 117–118). Lamont’s remarks show us how congenial the thnetopsychist and adventist Muggletonian mind was to the sort of conceptual terrain inhabited by Ball’s mortalists, but the Muggletonians are not treated in Ball’s book and Last Witnesses is not listed in the bibliography. Other omissions include such interesting figures as Gerrard Winstanley, Jacob Bauthumley, and Laurence Clarkson, whose annihilationism had come within the purview of Burns (and Christopher Hill). Ball contends that “psychopannychism cannot be regarded as a true expression of thorough-going mortalism” and that this laurel must be awarded to thnetopsychism (21), which held that the soul, incapable of independent existence apart from the body, slept only in a figurative sense between death and resurrection. More thoroughgoing still, one imagines, is the theology of the annihilationists, who “alone,” Lamont observes, “are the true mortalists” (Last Witnesses, 117). Ball, however, doubting the “Christian” credentials of their mortalism (20), chooses to overlook them. Presumably this, too, is why Ball refuses Burns’s lead in offering analysis of the Dutch founder and English followers of the Family of Love. Burns, for all his worthiness, “is rapidly becoming dated” (15): this adjudication serves Ball as a principal justifier for his own updated study. The risk that Ball must accept is that by excluding some unequivocal advocates of

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mortalism his reader will be left with little recourse but to turn for guidance, here and there, to an older book. David Parnham Victoria, Australia

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990709

Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition. By Rainer Decker. Translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort. Studies in Early Modern German History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. xv þ 262 pp. $45.00. During the past three decades, the once fashionable thesis that the papacy and the inquisitors who operated under papal authority were primarily responsible for the great European witch-hunt has come under attack. Historians have pointed out the crucial role that secular and episcopal courts played in the early years of witch-hunting, the low number of prosecutions in Italy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the relatively high number of executions in many Protestant countries. Rainer Decker’s illuminating study of the papacy’s involvement in witch-hunting from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century represents the most sustained and comprehensive contribution to this revisionism in witchcraft studies. Decker’s revisionism, however, bears no signs of confessional bias or special pleading. He fully recognizes, for example, that the papacy did play a role in the formation of the composite notion of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and that the Inquisition conducted a large number of witchcraft trials in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But for the period after 1542, when Pope Paul III established the Roman Inquisition, also known as the Holy Office, the papacy’s record on witchcraft was marked by theoretical skepticism and judicial restraint. Unlike the medieval Inquisition, which had also operated under papal authority, the Roman Inquisition was a highly centralized institution that exercised jurisdiction over the Italian mainland and a few locations outside Italy. The Dominicans and Franciscans who staffed this institution compiled a remarkably lenient record in prosecuting witches, especially after the death of the intolerant Pope Paul IV in 1559, just as the European witch-hunt was entering its most intense phase. In the city of Rome the Inquisition executed its last witch in 1572, and by the 1630s it stopped prosecuting witches throughout Italy. Part of the reason for this exceptionally low number of prosecutions and executions was a growing skepticism among jurists and inquisitors regarding

899

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

mortalism his reader will be left with little recourse but to turn for guidance, here and there, to an older book. David Parnham Victoria, Australia

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990709

Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition. By Rainer Decker. Translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort. Studies in Early Modern German History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. xv þ 262 pp. $45.00. During the past three decades, the once fashionable thesis that the papacy and the inquisitors who operated under papal authority were primarily responsible for the great European witch-hunt has come under attack. Historians have pointed out the crucial role that secular and episcopal courts played in the early years of witch-hunting, the low number of prosecutions in Italy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the relatively high number of executions in many Protestant countries. Rainer Decker’s illuminating study of the papacy’s involvement in witch-hunting from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century represents the most sustained and comprehensive contribution to this revisionism in witchcraft studies. Decker’s revisionism, however, bears no signs of confessional bias or special pleading. He fully recognizes, for example, that the papacy did play a role in the formation of the composite notion of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and that the Inquisition conducted a large number of witchcraft trials in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But for the period after 1542, when Pope Paul III established the Roman Inquisition, also known as the Holy Office, the papacy’s record on witchcraft was marked by theoretical skepticism and judicial restraint. Unlike the medieval Inquisition, which had also operated under papal authority, the Roman Inquisition was a highly centralized institution that exercised jurisdiction over the Italian mainland and a few locations outside Italy. The Dominicans and Franciscans who staffed this institution compiled a remarkably lenient record in prosecuting witches, especially after the death of the intolerant Pope Paul IV in 1559, just as the European witch-hunt was entering its most intense phase. In the city of Rome the Inquisition executed its last witch in 1572, and by the 1630s it stopped prosecuting witches throughout Italy. Part of the reason for this exceptionally low number of prosecutions and executions was a growing skepticism among jurists and inquisitors regarding

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the reality of the witches’ sabbath, the nocturnal assemblies where large numbers of witches allegedly worshipped the devil and engaged in a variety of immoral activities. Medieval inquisitors had played a role in creating this fantasy, but sixteenth-century demonologists conducted a spirited debate on the subject, which Decker discusses at length. In this debate the skeptical voices of Italian jurists, including Andrea Alciati, fostered a reluctance of Roman inquisitors to accept the testimony of witches. Papal authorities also displayed considerable skepticism regarding the reality of demonic possession, a phenomenon that often led to witchcraft prosecutions. Decker first became aware of this papal attitude toward possession when he discovered a correspondence with the Vatican regarding a witch-hunt in the German city of Paderborn in 1656–57. Decker’s research on this case, which he published in 1994, marked the beginning of his work in the previously inaccessible papal records that became his main sources in writing this book. The Roman Inquisition did prosecute large numbers of offenders for practicing magic. The medieval Inquisition had claimed jurisdiction over magic on the grounds that it involved making a pact with the devil and was therefore heretical. In the late sixteenth century, however, the Roman Inquisition showed little interest in prosecuting offenders for practicing maleficium, or harmful magic, the crime that lay at the core of most witchcraft trials. The main forms of magic that the Inquisition prosecuted were love magic and divination, activities that were not usually linked to witchcraft and did not merit the death penalty. The only magical practices that deserved capital punishment in the Roman Inquisition after 1559 were necromancy, which involved an explicit pact with the devil, and attacks on the Eucharistic host for magical purposes. Even then, few of these cases ended in execution. The low number of convictions and executions for witchcraft in the Roman Inquisition, just like those of the Spanish Inquisition, owed much to the enforcement of strict procedural rules that recommended caution and discouraged the use of torture. Decker is not the first historian to recognize the Roman Inquisition’s cautious approach, but he presents the clearest account of its development in the wake of a conflict over a witchcraft trial in southern Italy in 1593 – 94. After investigating this witch-hunt, Pope Clement VIII released the accused witches, who had been named by two demoniacs, and prosecuted the local bishop for torturing subjects without sufficient evidence and for failing to appeal the case to Rome. Giulio Monterenzi, the inquisitor whom the Holy Office sent to investigate the incident, then drafted a set of rules for use in witchcraft trials. These instructions were widely distributed in manuscript during the 1620s and published anonymously as the Instruction Concerning Witchcraft Trials in 1657. Rome had more success enforcing these procedural guidelines in its

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tribunals than in the secular courts, over which Rome could exercise no formal control. The sustained effort of the Holy Office to persuade the secular courts in the trilingual Swiss territories north of the Alps, known as the Grisons, to adopt a more moderate, tolerant approach toward accused witches, especially during a severe witch-hunt in 1654 – 55, met with only limited success. Moreover, Italian secular courts, like their Spanish counterparts, continued to execute witches well into the eighteenth century. As late as 1780, two years before the last European execution for witchcraft, an inquisitor in Bergamo in northern Italy went to great lengths to secure the release of a witch whom secular authorities in the Grisons had arrested and brutally tortured. Decker’s book, which was originally published in German in 2003, will find its main audience among ecclesiastical and witchcraft historians as well as those interested in the history of criminal justice. Its broad chronological range, references to the broader history of witchcraft in Europe, and excellent translation by H. C. Erik Midelfort also make it suitable for undergraduates encountering the history of witchcraft for the first time. Brian P. Levack University of Texas at Austin

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990710

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. v þ 324 pp. $40.00 paper. Collected here in a developed form are eleven of the papers that were presented at a conference held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in October, 2002. Of the four editors and eleven contributors, eleven are specialists in English literature; of the other four, one, Caroline Hibbard is a historian; another, Peter Davidson, is a professor of Renaissance Studies; Jane Stevenson a professor of Latin; and Heather Wolfe a curator of manuscripts. Nevertheless, historians can learn much from most of these essays. The introduction, written by the editors, presents an excellent overview of the historiography of the Catholic presence in early modern England. In the first essay, Davidson studies recusant Catholic spaces—that is, rooms, buildings, chapels, and even prison cells—not only in England but also in Scotland, Rome, and Valladolid that are identifiable in their carved and

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tribunals than in the secular courts, over which Rome could exercise no formal control. The sustained effort of the Holy Office to persuade the secular courts in the trilingual Swiss territories north of the Alps, known as the Grisons, to adopt a more moderate, tolerant approach toward accused witches, especially during a severe witch-hunt in 1654 – 55, met with only limited success. Moreover, Italian secular courts, like their Spanish counterparts, continued to execute witches well into the eighteenth century. As late as 1780, two years before the last European execution for witchcraft, an inquisitor in Bergamo in northern Italy went to great lengths to secure the release of a witch whom secular authorities in the Grisons had arrested and brutally tortured. Decker’s book, which was originally published in German in 2003, will find its main audience among ecclesiastical and witchcraft historians as well as those interested in the history of criminal justice. Its broad chronological range, references to the broader history of witchcraft in Europe, and excellent translation by H. C. Erik Midelfort also make it suitable for undergraduates encountering the history of witchcraft for the first time. Brian P. Levack University of Texas at Austin

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990710

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. v þ 324 pp. $40.00 paper. Collected here in a developed form are eleven of the papers that were presented at a conference held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in October, 2002. Of the four editors and eleven contributors, eleven are specialists in English literature; of the other four, one, Caroline Hibbard is a historian; another, Peter Davidson, is a professor of Renaissance Studies; Jane Stevenson a professor of Latin; and Heather Wolfe a curator of manuscripts. Nevertheless, historians can learn much from most of these essays. The introduction, written by the editors, presents an excellent overview of the historiography of the Catholic presence in early modern England. In the first essay, Davidson studies recusant Catholic spaces—that is, rooms, buildings, chapels, and even prison cells—not only in England but also in Scotland, Rome, and Valladolid that are identifiable in their carved and

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painted decorations, symbols, inscriptions, and architectural designs. He dwells on Sir Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge at Rushton, Northamptonshire, and Alexander Pope’s grotto at Winchcombe. Stevenson, in “Women Catholics and Latin Culture,” considers both nuns in convents on the Continent and secular women in families—especially mothers teaching their children—and gives examples of women who demonstrated an ability to read and write Latin in prose and verse; the language identified them with their religious heritage. With nineteen photographs (unfortunately black and white) Sophie Holroyd scrutinizes the ornate vestments embroidered by Helena Wintour (d. 1670) for their design, concept, choice of colors and materials, symbolism, and iconography. Through a parallel reading of the Jesuit Henry Hawkins’s emblem book, Partheneia Sacra, and the gentlewoman’s images, especially flowers in the Marian garden, Holroyd sheds light on the latter’s devotional practices, in which veneration of the Immaculate Conception was prominent. Under the title, “A Cosmopolitan Court in a Confessional Age: Henrietta Maria Revisited,” Hibbard offers a fresh view of the queen’s life prior to the Scottish crisis and furnishes both a long introduction on the internationalism of royal courts and a broad survey of the literature on the reign of Charles I. The French queen’s chapel at Somerset House was the center of her patronage of English Catholics for which she was demonized by Protestants and identified as the principal enemy of the public good. In “Gender and Recusant Melancholia in Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalene’s Funeral Tears” (of which only brief excerpts are given), Gary Kuchar contends that Mary Magdalene’s experience at Christ’s tomb is a prefiguring of the recusants’ endurance “of social isolation and religious abandonment while providing a model example of how one should cope with such marginalization” (136). The author also detects Southwell’s anxieties over female empowerment in the tension between the Augustinian epistemology represented by Mary’s ardent love and the Aristotelian ethics of moderation required by the poem’s homiletic purpose. Dame Barbara Constable, a Benedictine nun at Cambrai and a prolific writer, is the subject of the essay by Wolfe, who quotes copiously from Constable’s reflections on idleness, learning, prayer, and reading to illustrate her spiritual difficulties. Dame Barbara was the primary transcriber in the 1640s and ‘50s, especially of the literary contributions of Father Augustine Baker to her convent, but she also gathered materials from many authors for the use of confessors and spiritual directors, priests, monks, nuns, and lay people. Molly Murray analyzes first the early modern autobiographical narratives that recount conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism taken from the responsa of students entering the English College in Rome and then the literary implications of this formalist conversion in the autobiography of William Alabaster and his relationship to St. Augustine.

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Anne M. Myers uses Father John Gerard’s Autobiography of a Hunted Priest to show the meaning of relics and rosaries for the life of the Catholic body in England and maintains that the existence of a valued relic proves the existence of a believing community. Mark Netzloff, in “The English Colleges and the English Nation: [William] Allen, [Robert] Persons, and [Richard] Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” ponders the multiple and competing narratives of English nationhood written by Catholics and spells out the distinct ways in which Catholic polemical texts composed on the Continent formulated English national identity. In a rather dense and opaque essay Catherine Sanok examines The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England in order to investigate the intersection of gender and nationalism. Some early modern recusant writers constructed a distinctly Catholic nationalism through narratives of female saints such as these thirty-six legends. Lastly, in “Anthony Munday’s Translations of Iberian Chivalric Romances: Palmerin of England, Part I as Exemplar,” Donna B. Hamilton, setting her subject in the context of contemporary European events, shows that such translations “helped create a public sphere in which the Catholic perspective remained a competing voice and offered a counternarrative that represented the larger Catholic world positively as advantageous to England’s safety and identity,” and she asserts that such views “were thoroughly consonant with Catholic loyalism” (288). Though most of these essays are highly specialized, they all add variegated tesserae to the mosaic of early modern English Catholic culture. Footnotes are abundant and filled with references to primary and secondary sources but are inconveniently placed on pages following the body of each essay. The carefully compiled index enables the reader to trace persons, places, and concepts throughout the essays. The book should appeal to scholars in a variety of disciplines. Robert Trisco The Catholic University of America

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990722

Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age. By Charles H. Parker. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. xiv þ 332 pp. $49.95 cloth. Faith on the Margins is a fascinating study of Dutch Catholicism that traces the fate of this confessional community from the late sixteenth century up through the Jansenist schism of 1702. The focus of Parker’s book is the

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BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

Anne M. Myers uses Father John Gerard’s Autobiography of a Hunted Priest to show the meaning of relics and rosaries for the life of the Catholic body in England and maintains that the existence of a valued relic proves the existence of a believing community. Mark Netzloff, in “The English Colleges and the English Nation: [William] Allen, [Robert] Persons, and [Richard] Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” ponders the multiple and competing narratives of English nationhood written by Catholics and spells out the distinct ways in which Catholic polemical texts composed on the Continent formulated English national identity. In a rather dense and opaque essay Catherine Sanok examines The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England in order to investigate the intersection of gender and nationalism. Some early modern recusant writers constructed a distinctly Catholic nationalism through narratives of female saints such as these thirty-six legends. Lastly, in “Anthony Munday’s Translations of Iberian Chivalric Romances: Palmerin of England, Part I as Exemplar,” Donna B. Hamilton, setting her subject in the context of contemporary European events, shows that such translations “helped create a public sphere in which the Catholic perspective remained a competing voice and offered a counternarrative that represented the larger Catholic world positively as advantageous to England’s safety and identity,” and she asserts that such views “were thoroughly consonant with Catholic loyalism” (288). Though most of these essays are highly specialized, they all add variegated tesserae to the mosaic of early modern English Catholic culture. Footnotes are abundant and filled with references to primary and secondary sources but are inconveniently placed on pages following the body of each essay. The carefully compiled index enables the reader to trace persons, places, and concepts throughout the essays. The book should appeal to scholars in a variety of disciplines. Robert Trisco The Catholic University of America

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990722

Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age. By Charles H. Parker. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. xiv þ 332 pp. $49.95 cloth. Faith on the Margins is a fascinating study of Dutch Catholicism that traces the fate of this confessional community from the late sixteenth century up through the Jansenist schism of 1702. The focus of Parker’s book is the

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Holland Mission, a cooperative effort between the clergy and the laity to restore the fortunes of the Roman Church. His analysis broadens our understanding of religion both in Netherlands and more generally across early modern Europe in two significant ways. First, his examination of Dutch Catholicism is an important case study of how a minority faith was able to survive and even grow on society’s margins in a repressive environment. Parker effectively critiques a simplistic but celebrated view of an open and tolerant Dutch society that has frequently informed our understanding of this region in the seventeenth century. He argues that religious coexistence in the United Provinces developed in a context of both conflict and concord. Second, Parker illustrates how Catholic reform in Netherlands occurred without the support of either the state or an officially recognized church. Instead, it was the product of a unique form of collaboration between an active clergy and a committed laity. Parker describes how elite families helped create a new infrastructure to support the clergy and care for the poor after the secularization of church property. Women, in particular, played an especially critical role as the Catholic Church worked to reestablish itself in Dutch culture. Howard Louthan University of Florida

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990734

After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary. By John R. Betz. Illuminations: Theory and Religion. Malden, Mass.: WileyBlackwell, 2009. xv þ 355 pp. $99.95 cloth. In After Enlightenment, John R. Betz undertakes two projects: first, he has produced the best and fullest survey of the life and writings of Johann Georg Hamann in a generation, helpfully including many passages from Hamann’s letters and publications and commenting intelligently on the style, theology, philosophy, and (to a lesser extent) historical context of Haman’s notoriously obscure oeuvre; second, he has written an intellectual history covering Hamann’s relation to the major figures of his time as well as his subsequent influence on and reception by philosophers and theologians down to our own day. This history, Betz believes, points the way to an alternative to the failed enterprises of both modernity and postmodernity, as Hamann has already “anticipated” thinkers like Barth (288), Buber (158), Derrida (175, 227), Hegel (75, 258), Nietzsche (191, 313), Heidegger (175, 227,

904

CHURCH HISTORY

Holland Mission, a cooperative effort between the clergy and the laity to restore the fortunes of the Roman Church. His analysis broadens our understanding of religion both in Netherlands and more generally across early modern Europe in two significant ways. First, his examination of Dutch Catholicism is an important case study of how a minority faith was able to survive and even grow on society’s margins in a repressive environment. Parker effectively critiques a simplistic but celebrated view of an open and tolerant Dutch society that has frequently informed our understanding of this region in the seventeenth century. He argues that religious coexistence in the United Provinces developed in a context of both conflict and concord. Second, Parker illustrates how Catholic reform in Netherlands occurred without the support of either the state or an officially recognized church. Instead, it was the product of a unique form of collaboration between an active clergy and a committed laity. Parker describes how elite families helped create a new infrastructure to support the clergy and care for the poor after the secularization of church property. Women, in particular, played an especially critical role as the Catholic Church worked to reestablish itself in Dutch culture. Howard Louthan University of Florida

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990734

After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary. By John R. Betz. Illuminations: Theory and Religion. Malden, Mass.: WileyBlackwell, 2009. xv þ 355 pp. $99.95 cloth. In After Enlightenment, John R. Betz undertakes two projects: first, he has produced the best and fullest survey of the life and writings of Johann Georg Hamann in a generation, helpfully including many passages from Hamann’s letters and publications and commenting intelligently on the style, theology, philosophy, and (to a lesser extent) historical context of Haman’s notoriously obscure oeuvre; second, he has written an intellectual history covering Hamann’s relation to the major figures of his time as well as his subsequent influence on and reception by philosophers and theologians down to our own day. This history, Betz believes, points the way to an alternative to the failed enterprises of both modernity and postmodernity, as Hamann has already “anticipated” thinkers like Barth (288), Buber (158), Derrida (175, 227), Hegel (75, 258), Nietzsche (191, 313), Heidegger (175, 227,

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327), Kierkegaard (59, 86, 95, 282, 288), Saussure (145, 332), and Wittgenstein (313). The book is organized into five parts, divided by chronological periods of Hamann’s career. A chapter surveying the “Life and Writings” of the period begins each part and is usually followed by two further chapters investigating individual texts more closely. The introduction to the book gives a brief history of Hamann research and an overview of the argument; the conclusion considers Hamann in relation to a postmodern “triumvirate” of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Betz quotes from Hamann generously, including much material that has never before appeared in English. Moreover, he is an excellent translator, and in a number of instances his version is superior to previously published translations or offers a valuable alternative to them. For example, Betz translates from the Aesthetica in Nuce that God “may speak through creatures—through circumstances—or through blood and fire and billows of smoke, wherein the language of the sanctuary consists” (132). For “die Sprache des Heiligtums,” previously translators offered “the sacramental language” (Crick) or “the language of holiness” (Dickson; Haynes). Though Betz is not explicit about it, his rendering of the phrase makes it clear that Hamann had specifically in mind the early Rabbinical phrase for Hebrew, leshon haqodesh, “the language of the Temple,” “the holy language.” The tact and sensitivity of his English versions are nearly constant. Excellent, too, is Betz’s description of Hamann’s metacriticism as “a kind of merciful deconstruction, which leaves his interlocutors room to think freely . . . [F]or Hamann, the art of metacriticism consists precisely in kenotically disappearing behind one’s communications in order to allow one’s interlocutors to appropriate all the more freely what has been said.” He quotes Hamann appositely: “The lectio of a true critic consists merely in dissolving the text of his other brothers into its elements, without violently or uncharitably interfering with his ability to consent” (305). Despite the anachronism of “deconstruction” (which Betz elsewhere uses to render “auseinandersetzen” [156]), this is a good account of one of the two poles of Hamann’s writing, its “metacritical-deconstructive” aspect (312). The resulting style is one of great difficulty, compression, and obliquity, which demands and receives from Betz much “patient exegesis” (204), though inevitably, with a writer so elusive, Betz is occasionally impatient in his paraphrases—above all when he replaces Hamann’s own words with a vocabulary of nihilism that is alien to him (though prominent in Jacobi, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger). The other pole, the “positive-constructive” (312) aspect of Hamann’s style, is one of Lutheran piety and devotion. I do not agree with Betz that Hamann’s theological commitments can be philosophically elaborated as a theory of embodied and acculturated reason, but disagreement

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is normal with Hamann; there is no critical consensus on the positive content, if any, of his philosophy. I have graver reservations about Betz’s second project, his intellectual history of modernity and postmodernity, damaged, it seems to me, by relying on an old demonology of the Enlightenment and by a superficial engagement with thinkers besides Hamann. Historians are reluctant to refer to “the Enlightenment,” much less to an “Enlightenment project” in order not to perpetuate a polemical historiography which projects a fantasy Enlightenment onto the past in order to make some intervention in the present. As James Schmidt has shown (“What Enlightenment Project?” Political Theory 28:6 [December 2000]: 734–57), these projections commonly take the form of deriving a convenient, recent outrage (examples in Betz’s case include nuclear physics [152], the Holocaust [202], and abortion [267]) from some suitably abstract idea, such as instrumental reason, rights-based autonomous individualism, or secularism, which the Enlightenment is said to have conceived. The problems with such accounts are that eighteenth-century German thinkers subscribed to a far more diverse and inconsistent set of views than can be represented by simple generalizations such as “the Aufkla¨rer” (142, 143, 189, 229) or “secularism” (7, 17, 75). Kant, Lessing, and Mendelssohn are complex figures whose views are easy to mistake. The reason why Hamann’s parodies of their work are so powerful and effective is that they are offered as parodies, in parodic and metacritical style. Concepts do not themselves possess historical agency, as Hamann knew and was eager to correct in Jacobi, who gave us “nihilism” in the first place. The depictions by Jacobi and Hegel of a fatally self-destructive Enlightenment still influence our views of the period, as do the even more relentless, insidious, and nihilistic versions offered by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno, Derrida, and others, but they are hazardous guides to Hamann. Kenneth Haynes Brown University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990746

Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism. By Phyllis Mack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii þ 328 pp. $99.00 cloth. Rutgers historian Phyllis Mack has effectively trained her attention—for the second time—on a group of early modern British women previously under-appreciated by secular scholars. In this much anticipated sequel to her

906

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is normal with Hamann; there is no critical consensus on the positive content, if any, of his philosophy. I have graver reservations about Betz’s second project, his intellectual history of modernity and postmodernity, damaged, it seems to me, by relying on an old demonology of the Enlightenment and by a superficial engagement with thinkers besides Hamann. Historians are reluctant to refer to “the Enlightenment,” much less to an “Enlightenment project” in order not to perpetuate a polemical historiography which projects a fantasy Enlightenment onto the past in order to make some intervention in the present. As James Schmidt has shown (“What Enlightenment Project?” Political Theory 28:6 [December 2000]: 734–57), these projections commonly take the form of deriving a convenient, recent outrage (examples in Betz’s case include nuclear physics [152], the Holocaust [202], and abortion [267]) from some suitably abstract idea, such as instrumental reason, rights-based autonomous individualism, or secularism, which the Enlightenment is said to have conceived. The problems with such accounts are that eighteenth-century German thinkers subscribed to a far more diverse and inconsistent set of views than can be represented by simple generalizations such as “the Aufkla¨rer” (142, 143, 189, 229) or “secularism” (7, 17, 75). Kant, Lessing, and Mendelssohn are complex figures whose views are easy to mistake. The reason why Hamann’s parodies of their work are so powerful and effective is that they are offered as parodies, in parodic and metacritical style. Concepts do not themselves possess historical agency, as Hamann knew and was eager to correct in Jacobi, who gave us “nihilism” in the first place. The depictions by Jacobi and Hegel of a fatally self-destructive Enlightenment still influence our views of the period, as do the even more relentless, insidious, and nihilistic versions offered by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno, Derrida, and others, but they are hazardous guides to Hamann. Kenneth Haynes Brown University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990746

Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism. By Phyllis Mack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii þ 328 pp. $99.00 cloth. Rutgers historian Phyllis Mack has effectively trained her attention—for the second time—on a group of early modern British women previously under-appreciated by secular scholars. In this much anticipated sequel to her

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

907

prize-winning analysis of the early Quakers, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), Mack examines Methodist women (and men) in the latter part of the long eighteenth century. As in the earlier volume, she has made the subject her own. Heart Religion draws on a trove of little-used British sources, mainly letters and diaries, in the Methodist Archive and Research Centre at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester. In assessing this evidence Mack supplements her own historical and women’s studies expertise, her wide theoretical reading, and her wonderful historical imagination by immersing herself in the secondary literature on early Methodism (and particularly early Methodist women) generated in the last half-century. As an “outsider” she brings fresh eyes to the material. She has patiently explored the spiritual lives of the early Methodists and elicited what their experiences might mean for their own self-construction and for gender roles, religion, and modernity in general. She takes their voices seriously, shaping them in the process of interpreting them, to be sure, but never caricaturing or dismissing them. The result is a rich and original look at the early movement as central to the development of the Enlightenment project. The center of her thesis is the long-recognized creative tension in Wesley’s theology, when he cobbled together the medieval tradition of “holy living” with the seemingly contradictory Reformation rediscovery of “salvation by grace through faith.” Mack finds something of the same pattern in the wider Methodist culture. Speaking not of Wesley, but of his “ordinary” followers, she argues that, as individuals confronted issues of self-definition, sexuality, physical illness, and human love, their Enlightenment ideals and Protestant theology both contradicted and reinforced each other, and this combustion of ideas and values heightened the tension inherent in Christian thought, between the desire for passivity and self-abnegation on the one hand, and the urge toward self-transformation and world-transformation, on the other. (14) The result was a new “aggressive spiritual agency,” emotionally based yet disciplined, that “generated Methodism’s world-wide missionary project” (15). In this same spirit Methodism “offered the religious seeker not a set of dogmas or a display of religious hegemony, but a series of conundrums”: the simultaneous condemnation and employment of “enthusiasm”; a renewal movement that was also part of the state church; an appreciation of both asceticism and modern medicine, celibacy as well as family; a belief in original sin along with social progress; and an ethos that comprehended an elite hierarchy and an anti-elitist community (26 – 27). Her first chapter analyzes the Wesleys’ hymns, sermons, and letters in describing how Methodism educated emotions, achieving what she calls a “managed heart.”

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Chapter 2 follows with a description of conversion experiences, demonstrating how they might provide both “emotional release and the beginnings of emotional selfmastery” (27). Two subsequent chapters (3 and 4) deal respectively and extensively with “men of feeling” and “women in love,” teasing out the gendered differences in the early Methodist experience of life and piety—involving at one level the way men and women related differently to Methodism’s “grand depositum,” Christian perfection. Of particular note are Mack’s reflections in chapter 4 on the key roles played by women in the movement as well as the close friendships they developed with one another. While she detects no “overtly lesbian relationships,” she uncovers what she calls “an erotics of friendship, a valorization of romantic gestures and emotions that were consciously cultivated as an aid to spiritual progress” (154). Chapter 5 follows with a focus on gender and suffering, drawing heavily on the writing of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (1739–1815), famous in her own right and the wife and widow of Wesley’s lieutenant, John Fletcher, vicar of Madeley in Shropshire. Mack discovers fascinating discourses on the benefits of both health and illness, on care for the body and asceticism in the Methodist experience, reflecting, again, her interpretive principles of agency and self-abnegation. Chapter 6 brings to the fore another under-analyzed phenomenon, the Methodist “culture of dreaming” under the rubric of “agency and the unconscious”—another highly gendered set of activities and reflections. Mack argues the “power of dreams to generate individual reflexivity and to assist the religious seeker in shaping her own autobiography” (257), but that does not begin to catch the nuanced reading of reported dreams, themselves odd, intriguing and poignant, that she offers. The final chapter considers “Methodism and Modernity” and suggests that “the new Methodist culture developed as vigorously as it did” following Wesley’s death, not so much due to evangelical confidence (John Walsh) or the counter-revolutionary “chiliasm of despair” (E. P. Thompson), but rather to something closer to David Hempton’s category, an “expansionist dynamic.” However, in addition to such organizational and theological energy, Mack touts the solution Methodism offered to the “internal problems” of “agency and passivity, gender and emotion” (262). Like Hempton, she acknowledges change as well as continuity, comparing two generations of Methodist preachers, represented by the simple piety of the Yorkshire itinerant John Pawson (1737–1806) and the educated piety of the more settled Dr. Adam Clarke (1762–1832). Unfortunately, as Mack notes, the latter period also sponsored a Methodist version of evangelical domesticity, and offered much less respect for the women’s preaching and leadership. In such a wide-ranging and searching book, one that will drive conversations and research for years to come, “insiders” can excuse Mack for not being fully at home in the Methodist context and idiom. For instance she twice alludes to E. P. Thompson’s famous rant on Methodist sexual repression with his quotation of the Moravian

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hymn, “O precious Side-hole’s cavity/I want to spend my life in thee” (4, 52)— using it as an example of Methodist hymnody (Charles Wesley could be graphic, but not like this). Some details are off in the otherwise helpful appendix, which lists people dealt with in the text. The Wesley brothers’ father is described as “the Nonconformist [sic] rector of Epworth church.” (312) Likewise, their mother Susanna’s name is misspelled (312, 328), though it is correct in her one mention in the text (140). Though it is unfair to criticize an author for failing to address what she did not set out to do, it is clear that some of the same issues of emotion, Enlightenment agency, and Christian abnegation are already present in the writings of Susanna Wesley a generation before Mack’s analysis begins. Charles I. Wallace Willamette University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990758

Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. By Richard S. Newman. New York: New York University Press, 2008. xxi þ 361 pp. $34.95 cloth. Richard Allen (1760 –1831) has become an iconic historical figure as probably the best known African American leader in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His involvements as the founder of a major black denomination, as a principal spokesman for Philadelphia’s black population, as an anti-slavery and anti-colonization advocate, and as a pioneer in black economic development establish him as a required presence in any narrative about early American and African American history. Though ministers and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church still celebrate his birthday annually on the second Sunday of every February, the bishop’s significance goes far beyond his hagiographical status in AME lore. The subject of Allen’s broader importance is what Richard S. Newman tries to capture in this superb new biography of America’s first black elected and consecrated bishop. Newman believes that Allen’s historical impact lies in two unexplored areas. First, Newman presents him as a black founding father in the American nation. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others in the pantheon of national patriots adopted and articulated a civic language that affirmed divinely ordained rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the American citizenry. This terminology defined the new nation and seemingly insured the freedom and equality of its inhabitants. This lofty rhetoric, however, narrowly applied to a special stratum of the population and ignored those who were not propertied

909

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

hymn, “O precious Side-hole’s cavity/I want to spend my life in thee” (4, 52)— using it as an example of Methodist hymnody (Charles Wesley could be graphic, but not like this). Some details are off in the otherwise helpful appendix, which lists people dealt with in the text. The Wesley brothers’ father is described as “the Nonconformist [sic] rector of Epworth church.” (312) Likewise, their mother Susanna’s name is misspelled (312, 328), though it is correct in her one mention in the text (140). Though it is unfair to criticize an author for failing to address what she did not set out to do, it is clear that some of the same issues of emotion, Enlightenment agency, and Christian abnegation are already present in the writings of Susanna Wesley a generation before Mack’s analysis begins. Charles I. Wallace Willamette University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990758

Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. By Richard S. Newman. New York: New York University Press, 2008. xxi þ 361 pp. $34.95 cloth. Richard Allen (1760 –1831) has become an iconic historical figure as probably the best known African American leader in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His involvements as the founder of a major black denomination, as a principal spokesman for Philadelphia’s black population, as an anti-slavery and anti-colonization advocate, and as a pioneer in black economic development establish him as a required presence in any narrative about early American and African American history. Though ministers and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church still celebrate his birthday annually on the second Sunday of every February, the bishop’s significance goes far beyond his hagiographical status in AME lore. The subject of Allen’s broader importance is what Richard S. Newman tries to capture in this superb new biography of America’s first black elected and consecrated bishop. Newman believes that Allen’s historical impact lies in two unexplored areas. First, Newman presents him as a black founding father in the American nation. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others in the pantheon of national patriots adopted and articulated a civic language that affirmed divinely ordained rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the American citizenry. This terminology defined the new nation and seemingly insured the freedom and equality of its inhabitants. This lofty rhetoric, however, narrowly applied to a special stratum of the population and ignored those who were not propertied

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white males. Richard Allen recognized that this freedom language did not include African Americans especially the majority who were slaves. As an ex-slave himself, Allen, in his daring and creative role as a pamphleteer, joined the public discourse about liberty and citizenship and pressed claims for the rights of blacks and urged the abolition of slavery. Because Allen inserted himself into these civic discussions, Newman convincingly asserts that he and his contemporaries—namely Absalom Jones, Phyllis Wheatley, and James Forten—belong to this enlarged enclave of founders of the American republic. Newman asserts that white founding fathers were not alone in occupying the discursive space where discussions took place about liberty and to whom these God-given rights belonged. They shared this rhetorical arena with Richard Allen who eulogized George Washington and offered opinions about issues pertaining to the body politic. Juxtaposed to the freedom rhetoric of white patriots stood Allen’s commentaries about how the United States should be envisaged. Second, Newman is mindful of recent scholarship in the field of Atlantic World studies. These scholarly works explore the colonial era, overseas expansion, and the early national period by examining the intricate interactions of peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. When the black experience is viewed within these extensive transatlantic contacts, a larger view of Allen and his multiple activities emerge. Hence, his connections to the new republic in Haiti, his cooperation with black emigrationist and ship captain Paul Cuffee, his opposition to the international slave trade, and his ties to Morris Brown, Denmark Vesey, and other Charleston blacks whose incubated insurrection against slavery in AME meetings demonstrate the wide reach of Allen’s Atlantic World involvements. Many of these facts about Allen are familiar, but Newman’s fresh perspective deepens his scholarly treatment of the bishop and his place within these Atlantic World contexts. There is a third area, however, where Newman is less daring and repeats conventional wisdom about Richard Allen’s faith formation. Hence, a rigorous interrogation of Allen’s Methodism cannot be found in this otherwise provocative biography. He adopts the familiar descriptions of Allen’s sobriety and upright and abstemious living often associated with Methodists. Allen’s Wesleyan beliefs went deeper than these exterior characteristics and should be shown as the link between his salvific and social witness. Allen internalized Methodism and talked in terminology that most Wesleyan followers recognized. When he was converted and recounted the experience in his autobiography, he noted that his “dungeon shook” and his “chains flew off” (40). This phraseology drew from Acts 12:7 and from the third stanza in Charles Wesley’s widely sung hymn, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain an Interest in the Savior’s Blood.” His conversion narrative resembled the testimonies of other Methodist believers and anchored Allen in a salvific

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BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

process where the sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost brought renewal to the individual and deliverance from sin. This spiritual holiness emanating from his religious being spilled over into social holiness in which Allen, the Wesleyan adherent, sought the renewal of self and society in order to remake both into the image of Christ. Hence, Allen’s spiritual and social holiness help to explain his expansive involvements in church and civic affairs. Moreover, his background with Methodists and their racially egalitarian attitudes and actions in sacred and secular settings became the standard by which he judged the peculiar behavior of whites at St. George Church. Their spiritual declension was manifested in racist behavior and reckless disregard for the inclusivity that Methodists formerly had championed. Racists among the Methodists were corrupting the Wesleyan movement, and Allen launched African Methodism as a new reflection of the religious experiences and interactions that led to his conversion and commitment to Methodist evangelicalism. There is more to Allen’s Methodism than what Newman presents especially the relationship between his Wesleyan beliefs and his blended religious and public ministries. Though these religious facets of Allen’s life are not fully explored, Newman correctly notes that Methodism empowered the ex-slave both spiritually and socially and enabled him to function fully as a self-reliant clergyman and citizen. The Allen whom Newman describes was tenacious and simultaneously solicitous and manipulative of whites. Also, he was tough-minded in business, both as an employer and property owner. All of these same attributes aided his unyielding fight against white Wesleyan attempts to take control of his black church, and these characteristics also explain his success in establishing an independent African American denomination. Scholars and students, already familiar with Allen, will know him even better after reading the Newman biography. Dennis C. Dickerson Vanderbilt University

doi:10.1017/S000964070999076X

The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796 – 1953: Clergy under Fire. By Michael Snape. Studies in Modern British Religious History 18. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2008. xviii þ 447 pp. $95.00 cloth. It is not especially hard to understand why the historiography of religion and war has begun to blossom. Studies on the intersection of these two global forces are topical today in ways that all can feel. Less widely perceived is the crying need for such studies. Despite the large and rapidly expanding

911

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

process where the sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost brought renewal to the individual and deliverance from sin. This spiritual holiness emanating from his religious being spilled over into social holiness in which Allen, the Wesleyan adherent, sought the renewal of self and society in order to remake both into the image of Christ. Hence, Allen’s spiritual and social holiness help to explain his expansive involvements in church and civic affairs. Moreover, his background with Methodists and their racially egalitarian attitudes and actions in sacred and secular settings became the standard by which he judged the peculiar behavior of whites at St. George Church. Their spiritual declension was manifested in racist behavior and reckless disregard for the inclusivity that Methodists formerly had championed. Racists among the Methodists were corrupting the Wesleyan movement, and Allen launched African Methodism as a new reflection of the religious experiences and interactions that led to his conversion and commitment to Methodist evangelicalism. There is more to Allen’s Methodism than what Newman presents especially the relationship between his Wesleyan beliefs and his blended religious and public ministries. Though these religious facets of Allen’s life are not fully explored, Newman correctly notes that Methodism empowered the ex-slave both spiritually and socially and enabled him to function fully as a self-reliant clergyman and citizen. The Allen whom Newman describes was tenacious and simultaneously solicitous and manipulative of whites. Also, he was tough-minded in business, both as an employer and property owner. All of these same attributes aided his unyielding fight against white Wesleyan attempts to take control of his black church, and these characteristics also explain his success in establishing an independent African American denomination. Scholars and students, already familiar with Allen, will know him even better after reading the Newman biography. Dennis C. Dickerson Vanderbilt University

doi:10.1017/S000964070999076X

The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796 – 1953: Clergy under Fire. By Michael Snape. Studies in Modern British Religious History 18. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2008. xviii þ 447 pp. $95.00 cloth. It is not especially hard to understand why the historiography of religion and war has begun to blossom. Studies on the intersection of these two global forces are topical today in ways that all can feel. Less widely perceived is the crying need for such studies. Despite the large and rapidly expanding

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bodies of writing on religion and on war as separate topics, very few scholars have considered the many spaces where they intersect. The range of potential topics is vast indeed. Religion and war propaganda; the religious lives of soldiers; the effects of war on religious movements; moral histories of war; and religion, nationalism, and memories of war are but a few. Two relatively recent books, Doris Bergen, ed., The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), and Richard Budd, Serving Two Masters: The Development of American Military Chaplaincy, 1860 – 1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), have approached the question of religion’s role in war by focusing on the military chaplain, easily the least understood fulltime clergy in the Western world. Military chaplains have been poorly understood in history and in our current moment because they do not fit easily into any one category. They are professional ministers with denominational affiliations, but they often do not serve churches per se and are plagued by questions of whom they ultimately serve. They wear uniforms and work in the military, but they are not soldiers and they have long been dogged by charges of military irrelevance. Scholars and students, contemporaries and comrades have often commented on the betwixt and between status of the military chaplain, speculating as to which of the many interests weighing on her or him is primary. Into this conversation steps Michael Snape with his detailed, chronological study of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department (RAChD), the institution charged with assigning and managing chaplains in the British Army. From 1796 to 1953 (Snape’s chronological frame), through the expansion and contraction of the British Empire, through two world wars, and into the early stages of the Cold War, Snape follows the development of the department and the stories of the men who shaped it and served in it. Snape draws on an impressive array of archival and published sources to describe the “broader military, religious, political, and cultural significance” (364) of the RAChD and to argue that in order to properly understand the department one must resist the urge to place it apart from British society. Given this goal, his decision to approach the topic using an institutional historical model makes a great deal of sense even when it leads the reader into apparent bureaucratic backwaters. As Snape ably demonstrates, the successes and the failures of the RAChD were those of an institution among institutions and were intimately connected to the changing religious and social climates of Great Britain. The RAChD rose, fell, and rose again in response to developments within the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and dissenting churches of Great Britain and to the demands placed upon it by the British army. The tug and pull of these organizations and the sometimes visionary, sometimes myopic leadership of the RAChD created the situations into which British clergymen were placed,

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determined the jobs they were supposed to do, and shaped the attitudes of those with whom and for whom they worked. Snape balances this institutional perspective with tales of the chaplains in action, never letting the reader forget that actual people with complex identities and varied experiences took on the often unenviable task of ministering (and preparing to minister) to men at war. Snape’s opening and closing salvos against the “pacifist” bias in past studies of military chaplains are somewhat dissonant with the tone of the rest of the book. This bias, he argues, has kept chaplains from getting a fair shake when it has not foreclosed consideration of them as subjects or redirected discussions of their work into articles that presuppose and then “prove” the illegitimacy of Christian ministry in the military. Snape’s extended discussion of this bias adds little to the book that his careful and sympathetic presentation of his evidence does not accomplish on its own, and this reader wishes that he would have trimmed it back somewhat. For much of the twentieth century, voices calling out chaplains for hypocrisy or sycophancy have been matched in number and volume by voices emphasizing the importance of providing for soldiers’ spiritual needs. For the bulk of its pages, Michael Snape’s long-overdue scholarly look at British chaplains goes about the more important work of laying a foundation for future inquiries into the spiritual life of an empire and those who served it. Jonathan H. Ebel University of Illinois

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990771

‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’: Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837– 1902. By John T. Smith. Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic, 2009. viii þ 233 pp. $70.00 cloth. In 1872 a Buckinghamshire teacher protested that he was “the parson’s fag, the squire’s doormat, church scraper, professional singer, sub-curate, land surveyor, drill master, club collector, parish clerk, letter writer, librarian, washerwoman’s target, organist, choirmaster, and youth’s instructor” (60). The Anglican schoolteachers of Victorian England often felt, as this one certainly did, grossly exploited. They sometimes worked for a pittance and yet the expectations imposed on them were huge. Their resentments were voiced against their superiors, the parish clergy. The illustration and explanation of this tension is the subject of this book by John T. Smith, a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Hull in England. The theme has not previously been addressed at book length, and the discussion

913

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determined the jobs they were supposed to do, and shaped the attitudes of those with whom and for whom they worked. Snape balances this institutional perspective with tales of the chaplains in action, never letting the reader forget that actual people with complex identities and varied experiences took on the often unenviable task of ministering (and preparing to minister) to men at war. Snape’s opening and closing salvos against the “pacifist” bias in past studies of military chaplains are somewhat dissonant with the tone of the rest of the book. This bias, he argues, has kept chaplains from getting a fair shake when it has not foreclosed consideration of them as subjects or redirected discussions of their work into articles that presuppose and then “prove” the illegitimacy of Christian ministry in the military. Snape’s extended discussion of this bias adds little to the book that his careful and sympathetic presentation of his evidence does not accomplish on its own, and this reader wishes that he would have trimmed it back somewhat. For much of the twentieth century, voices calling out chaplains for hypocrisy or sycophancy have been matched in number and volume by voices emphasizing the importance of providing for soldiers’ spiritual needs. For the bulk of its pages, Michael Snape’s long-overdue scholarly look at British chaplains goes about the more important work of laying a foundation for future inquiries into the spiritual life of an empire and those who served it. Jonathan H. Ebel University of Illinois

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990771

‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’: Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837– 1902. By John T. Smith. Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic, 2009. viii þ 233 pp. $70.00 cloth. In 1872 a Buckinghamshire teacher protested that he was “the parson’s fag, the squire’s doormat, church scraper, professional singer, sub-curate, land surveyor, drill master, club collector, parish clerk, letter writer, librarian, washerwoman’s target, organist, choirmaster, and youth’s instructor” (60). The Anglican schoolteachers of Victorian England often felt, as this one certainly did, grossly exploited. They sometimes worked for a pittance and yet the expectations imposed on them were huge. Their resentments were voiced against their superiors, the parish clergy. The illustration and explanation of this tension is the subject of this book by John T. Smith, a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Hull in England. The theme has not previously been addressed at book length, and the discussion

914

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is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of the Roman Catholic and Wesleyan Methodist experiences for the sake of comparison. It is established in the first place that the clergy of each of these bodies were strongly motivated to provide and sustain schools for their flocks. The occupants of the pulpits commonly also ran the schools. In practice, though not in theory, even in the later years of the nineteenth century a parish clergyman was the sole manager of a rural Anglican school. Catholic priests, whose duties could include the distribution of “endless varieties of sweetmeats” (33), equally controlled the parish education, though the power of the Wesleyan minister was constrained by his being moved on to another circuit every three years. The teachers were expected, and often contractually required, to contribute their labor to the ecclesiastical affairs of the area such as the running of the church choir, whose voices were drawn from their schools. Wesleyans, however, were again an exception, not imposing additional duties on those who taught in their schools. In the middle years of the century, Anglican clergy were overwhelmingly educated at the English universities, so they enjoyed a high social status that was supported by a substantial income. The teachers, by contrast, were of lower social origin, lacked a university education, and were poorly paid (Wesleyans again excepted in the last respect). The resulting social gulf created its own problems, with those responsible for nurturing the young objecting to being treated as dependants. Over time, however, the gulf narrowed. On the one hand, the clergy were less commonly university-trained and, as agricultural depression affected incomes from the 1870s, less well remunerated. On the other hand, the teachers were better prepared, and teaching was turning into a profession. The creation of the Association of Church Teachers in 1854 to challenge clerical dominance was an early symptom of the resulting friction that lasted down to the end of the century and beyond. Among Roman Catholics, the clergy had never enjoyed high status, so there was less scope for combat, but nevertheless the inexorable advance of professional standards meant that in 1892 a National Union of Catholic Teachers held its first annual conference. The Wesleyan Methodists, by contrast, suffered no more than occasional brushes because the ministers were transient and the schoolteachers more autonomous. After 1870, with the creation of school boards by the state to provide public education wherever the churches had failed to supply it, the clergy of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church played prominent parts, especially in the countryside, in order to defend their own denominational interests against the upstart educational institutions. Once more the Wesleyan ministers did not stay long enough to participate in a similar way. So the overall picture is of persistent problems between clergy and teachers among Anglicans and Catholics, but not among Wesleyans. The case is made out on the basis of extensive trawling through the surviving records of schools of the three denominations, though it is noticeable that they are nearly all in the

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north of England, together with Lincolnshire, the areas closest to Hull. It is doubtful, though, whether a wider geographical spread of primary sources would have yielded a different perspective because in the south of England the tensions in the agricultural areas would have been, if anything, more acute. There is, however, a gap in the coverage. The Wesleyan schoolmasters were often not career educationalists but young men waiting for admission to the denomination’s ministry. They were more at the beck and call of the resident minister—whose report on their behavior could determine their future—than this book suggests. Yet the analysis is cogent and supported by ample quotation from the primary sources that give an admirable feel for the period. Here is a portrayal of a significant missing piece of the social reality of Victorian England. D. W. Bebbington University of Stirling

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990783

Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy. By Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi þ 430 pp. $29.95 cloth. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and Paiutes killed some 120 men, women, and children in September 1857, has been the subject of heated debate for more than a century and a half. A convoluted documentary record, legal prosecutions and cover-ups, and competing family, cultural, and religious identities have combined to foment a swirling torrent of explanations and revisions, accusations and counter-accusations. Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ronald Walker, Richard Turley Jr., and Glen Leonard, is one of a recent spate of books trying to make sense of the gruesome tale for a modern audience. All three authors are practicing Mormons, and have spent much or all of their careers (including the research and writing of this book) in the LDS Church’s employ. Readers must therefore take, on faith, the authors’ claim that the book is the result of a “fresh approach based upon every primary source,” and that LDS Church leaders, who control much of the archival material related to the massacre, “supported [the] book by providing full and open disclosure” (x – xi). The ultimate question for this book’s credibility, perhaps more than most, is whether the authors gain the reader’s trust. The short answer, for most readers, should be yes. Massacre at Mountain Meadows deserves to be the standard account of the massacre for both LDS

915

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

north of England, together with Lincolnshire, the areas closest to Hull. It is doubtful, though, whether a wider geographical spread of primary sources would have yielded a different perspective because in the south of England the tensions in the agricultural areas would have been, if anything, more acute. There is, however, a gap in the coverage. The Wesleyan schoolmasters were often not career educationalists but young men waiting for admission to the denomination’s ministry. They were more at the beck and call of the resident minister—whose report on their behavior could determine their future—than this book suggests. Yet the analysis is cogent and supported by ample quotation from the primary sources that give an admirable feel for the period. Here is a portrayal of a significant missing piece of the social reality of Victorian England. D. W. Bebbington University of Stirling

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990783

Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy. By Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi þ 430 pp. $29.95 cloth. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and Paiutes killed some 120 men, women, and children in September 1857, has been the subject of heated debate for more than a century and a half. A convoluted documentary record, legal prosecutions and cover-ups, and competing family, cultural, and religious identities have combined to foment a swirling torrent of explanations and revisions, accusations and counter-accusations. Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ronald Walker, Richard Turley Jr., and Glen Leonard, is one of a recent spate of books trying to make sense of the gruesome tale for a modern audience. All three authors are practicing Mormons, and have spent much or all of their careers (including the research and writing of this book) in the LDS Church’s employ. Readers must therefore take, on faith, the authors’ claim that the book is the result of a “fresh approach based upon every primary source,” and that LDS Church leaders, who control much of the archival material related to the massacre, “supported [the] book by providing full and open disclosure” (x – xi). The ultimate question for this book’s credibility, perhaps more than most, is whether the authors gain the reader’s trust. The short answer, for most readers, should be yes. Massacre at Mountain Meadows deserves to be the standard account of the massacre for both LDS

916

CHURCH HISTORY

and non-LDS researchers and readers, updating Juanita Brooks’s fine but now outdated The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950), and surpassing other recent treatments, most notably Will Bagley’s useful but flawed Blood of the Prophets (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). Walker, Turley, and Leonard have provided a tightly written, riveting narrative; even those previously familiar with the story will be drawn in by the heart-wrenching pathos of chapter 13, where the killing is described in detail. While its prose is commendable, the real quality of the book rests upon the impressiveness of its research and the soundness of its analysis. The authors quickly put to rest any suspicion that they will adopt an apologist tone. In the very first sentence of the preface, they assign primary blame to the Mormon perpetrators, accusing them of a litany of crimes from deceit to treachery to cold-blooded murder. While assessing the secondary responsibility of a number of actors—including President James Buchanan and the federal government, Brigham Young and other LDS leaders, some of the more boastful and provocative emigrants, and some Paiutes—the book demonstrates that it was local Mormons, led primarily by Isaac Haight and John D. Lee, who orchestrated and carried out the massacre. The perpetrators’ behavior is analyzed so as to be understood (as much as mass murder can be), but it is never excused, and it is ultimately characterized as “premeditated, evil, and cunning” (199). Given the intense emotions surrounding the massacre, both in 1857 and since, this book is remarkably calm, lacking the hysterics of some other accounts. Although the authors clearly disagree with some of the recent literature on the massacre, their writing never becomes polemical or tendentious. If anything, their reluctance to engage other authors on key points is sometimes a negative, as it would be helpful to readers to see more clearly where these authors differ from other major interpreters. The authors reserve their most overt disagreement with previous scholarship, appropriately, for the question that investigators have pursued since the earliest inquiries into the causes of the massacre. The authors explicitly counter Bagley’s argument that Brigham Young essentially ordered the attack on the emigrants, contending that “neither chronology nor unfolding events confirm such a charge” (146). Though absolved of direct responsibility, Young does not escape without criticism, however: his declaration of martial law after hearing about the advance of the federal army in July contributed to heightened Mormon militancy, and his insufficiently clear Indian policy issued in August “may have confused some local leaders” (137). A particular strength of Massacre at Mountain Meadows is its contextualization of the violence, both as a psychological reaction to anti-Mormon persecution of the 1830s and 1840s, which deeply scarred the nineteenth-century Mormon

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mind, and as a manifestation of Mormons’ participation in the broader antebellum culture of extralegal violence employed to preserve individual and community rights against outside threats. The book also profitably draws on various modern studies of religious violence and mass killing, helping its analysis transcend the literatures of Mormon and Western history. Accordingly, the authors conclude that, “The conditions for mass killing—demonizing, authority, obedience, peer pressure, ambiguity, fear, and deprivation—all were present in southern Utah in 1857” (xiv). What remains missing from this list of conditions, and from the book’s title, is any mention of religion. To be sure, religion is never far from the forefront, and the authors chronicle a number of aspects of early Mormonism that helped set the stage for the massacre: millennialism, dualism, obedience to church hierarchy, the Mormon Reformation, LDS doctrines about the “Lamanites” (Native Americans), militant sermons by church leaders, and so forth. But while the authors go to great lengths to demonstrate that Mormons were responsible for the massacre, they skirt the issue of whether Mormonism is at all accountable. Whereas other historians have made much of three contemporaneous instances of Mormon violence against non-Mormons, here the cases are mentioned only in passing (109, 126, 139). Furthermore, the oath made as part of the nineteenth-century LDS temple covenant to avenge “the blood of the prophets” (referring to Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s murder, and providing the title for Bagley’s book), is barely mentioned (14). The authors seem to have opted for a tight, readable narrative dealing only with what they believe are the direct, proximate causes of the massacre, consciously leaving ancillary causes for other scholars’ elaboration and the aftermath of the massacre for a forthcoming volume. Ultimately, the book presents Mountain Meadows as an “American tragedy,” not an essentially Mormon or religious one. In so doing, it privileges the question of how “ordinary humans” can perform atrocious acts (xiii) but never fully confronts the equally important (but different) problem of at what point religious structures, institutions, and ideologies are responsible for the harmful actions of their adherents. Early Mormonism appears here as a tradition containing possibilities for both peaceful reconciliation and violent extremism. Indeed, in this excellent volume readers of every stripe—from undergraduates to scholars to the general public—will find not only the finest extant account of the tragedy at Mountain Meadows but also a window onto the potential, but by no means inevitable, power of religion to contribute to mass violence. Patrick Q. Mason University of Notre Dame

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CHURCH HISTORY doi:10.1017/S0009640709990795

Missionary Imperialists? Missionaries, Government and the Growth of the British Empire in the Tropics, 1860– 1885. By John H. Darch. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. xxii þ 288 pp. $39.99 paper. The relationship between British Protestant missionary evangelization and the growth of British imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century was multifaceted. This dual interaction between the missionaries and the complexity of British imperial aspirations and expansion is surveyed in this book through six case studies. These studies focus primarily on the Anglican Melanesian Mission and the labor trade, Methodists and the annexation of Fiji, the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the British Protectorate in Papua, the failed proposal to transfer The Gambia to France, Church Missionary Society (CMS) involvement in Lagos and Yorubaland, and the repercussions of slavery in East and Central Africa. The comparative approach highlights similarities and differences both within and between the Pacific and West and East Africa. The author’s attention is centered largely on the missions and their imperial relationships so that indigenous agency is largely passed over (the Buganda Mission is the major exception). The conclusion reached is that while the missionary task was primary for the British Protestant missionaries and their supporting societies, most of them nevertheless contributed both consciously and unconsciously to the advance of British imperialism. This approach fits in with the work on mission and empire by other scholars such as Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter. What Darch contributes is a detailed, nuanced study which highlights the varying influences of different individuals such as imperial activists like John Paton in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and reluctant imperialists like W. G. Lawes in Papua. The study holds in creative tension the locale of missionary action in the Pacific and Africa, and the metropolitan response seen in London in the Colonial and Foreign Offices, the missionary societies, and Parliament. The opening chapter on “Missions and Missionaries” provides helpful background although there is a much larger preceding history which does have relevance for this study. In the Pacific, for example, the CMS and Wesleyans were closely involved in New Zealand becoming a British colony in 1840, and the LMS, after over forty years of work in Tahiti, experienced the humiliation of French annexation in 1842. These actions became part of the missionary and imperial experience that influenced missionary administrators, missionaries, and politicians in the period covered by this book. The murder of the LMS missionary, John Williams, at Erromanga, New Hebrides (Vanuatu), in 1839 (depicted on the cover of the book), is also part of this backstory.

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The author makes excellent use of both British missionary and government primary papers, pointing to the richness of the archival sources available for this kind of study. Some of the Pacific secondary sources are somewhat dated. W. P. Morrell, Britain in the Pacific Islands (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), for example, is frequently cited. While representing a rather old fashioned imperial Anglocentric approach, Morrell is still very useful because of his use of primary sources and sensitivity to the interrelationship of the themes of mission and imperialism, which have sometimes been ignored or misrepresented by more recent historians. Darch has drawn particular attention to the role played by missionary intermediaries and supporters in Britain who were informed through their direct links with missionaries. Henry Venn, the CMS clerical secretary, receives deserved attention. Venn was the leading British missionary theorist of his age. Through his contacts both in England and with the missionaries, Venn was in touch with what was happening on “the mission field” and able to interact with politicians and business leaders in advocating for indigenous rights and missionary interests. The flow of letters between England and the missionaries—and the occasional visits to Britain by people like David Livingstone, John Paton, and James Chalmers—helped publicize the missionaries’ perspectives and provide firsthand information for missionary and humanitarian activists. The murder of Bishop Patteson at Nukapu in the Solomon Islands in 1871 became the catalyst for the British Parliament to set up the Western Pacific High Commission to oversee the actions of British subjects in the Pacific. This was in part precipitated by the nineteenth-century evangelical campaigns against slavery and the linking of Patteson’s death with the abuses associated with the recruitment of Melanesian laborers to work on sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji. Slavery provides a linking theme between some of Darch’s case studies. But in each place, as he rightly notes, the nature of this “slavery’s” history and impact varied. Only in its extreme abuses did the labor traffic in the Pacific approximate that of African slavery. These nuances could easily be lost when pressure groups and missionary propagandists were advocating their cause in London. The tragedy of missionary idealism and propaganda, when confronted with the social and geographic realities of Africa, is seen in the disastrous beginnings of the Livingstone-inspired Universities Mission to Central Africa and the LMS Central African Mission. Darch’s study centers on the contests over imperial policies and the role of missionaries and their supporters in influencing them. The absence of the indigenous voice reflects the way in which missionaries and imperialists were largely acting for, rather than with, the local people. At several points in the book, the author uses the word “discovered” anachronistically for what was new knowledge for Europeans but what was already well-known to Africans. This issue of perspective was at the heart of the Victorian missionary enterprise and

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the expansion of British imperialism. While Darch concludes that “Missionaries were primarily messengers of the Christian gospel and its attendant values,” he has creatively pointed to the ways in which the missionaries and their agencies also became involved in “incidental imperialism—an ‘imperialism of result’ rather than an ‘imperialism of intent’ ”(246). Allan Davidson St John’s College, Auckland

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990801

W. H. Whitsitt: The Man and the Controversy. By James H. Slatton. The Jim N. Griffith Series in Baptist Studies. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2009. xi þ 348 pp. $40.00 cloth. James Slatton has provided us an examination of a major conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention that resulted in firings, the creation of new seminaries, and the formation of powerful alliances of pastors and denominational officials based on theological allegiances. For observers of American religious life who are familiar with the moderate-fundamentalist conflict of the SBC that began in 1979, this description of Slatton’s book may seem to promise another examination of this still-contemporary development. However, Slatton has immersed himself in the study of a movement that predates the current conflict by almost a century, the Landmark controversy and the firing of Southern Baptist Seminary president and professor of church history, William Heth Whitsitt. Slatton’s study, based upon papers and diaries that he discovered in the possession of a direct descendent of Whitsitt, gives a detailed and readable biography of a key figure in the Landmark Movement. The Landmark Movement was a restorationist-type movement in Southern Baptist life that emphasized that Baptist churches were formed in the first century C.E. and existed in an unbroken line to the present. As a form of American frontier apostolic successionism, the Landmark Movement emerged in a time of intense denominational rivalry in the United States. With various denominations making claims of superiority, the Landmark Movement put many Baptists in the position of claiming that their church was the only true church and that all other denominations were somehow deficient. Never the position of the first Baptists of the 1600s, Landmark successionism appeared on the scene in the United States through the work of Nashville minister and editor, J. R. Graves, and it quickly gained a dominant position in the Southern Baptist psyche. To question its tenets was to risk the label of Baptist heretic.

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CHURCH HISTORY

the expansion of British imperialism. While Darch concludes that “Missionaries were primarily messengers of the Christian gospel and its attendant values,” he has creatively pointed to the ways in which the missionaries and their agencies also became involved in “incidental imperialism—an ‘imperialism of result’ rather than an ‘imperialism of intent’ ”(246). Allan Davidson St John’s College, Auckland

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990801

W. H. Whitsitt: The Man and the Controversy. By James H. Slatton. The Jim N. Griffith Series in Baptist Studies. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2009. xi þ 348 pp. $40.00 cloth. James Slatton has provided us an examination of a major conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention that resulted in firings, the creation of new seminaries, and the formation of powerful alliances of pastors and denominational officials based on theological allegiances. For observers of American religious life who are familiar with the moderate-fundamentalist conflict of the SBC that began in 1979, this description of Slatton’s book may seem to promise another examination of this still-contemporary development. However, Slatton has immersed himself in the study of a movement that predates the current conflict by almost a century, the Landmark controversy and the firing of Southern Baptist Seminary president and professor of church history, William Heth Whitsitt. Slatton’s study, based upon papers and diaries that he discovered in the possession of a direct descendent of Whitsitt, gives a detailed and readable biography of a key figure in the Landmark Movement. The Landmark Movement was a restorationist-type movement in Southern Baptist life that emphasized that Baptist churches were formed in the first century C.E. and existed in an unbroken line to the present. As a form of American frontier apostolic successionism, the Landmark Movement emerged in a time of intense denominational rivalry in the United States. With various denominations making claims of superiority, the Landmark Movement put many Baptists in the position of claiming that their church was the only true church and that all other denominations were somehow deficient. Never the position of the first Baptists of the 1600s, Landmark successionism appeared on the scene in the United States through the work of Nashville minister and editor, J. R. Graves, and it quickly gained a dominant position in the Southern Baptist psyche. To question its tenets was to risk the label of Baptist heretic.

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William Heth Whitsitt was one of the original faculty members of the newly organized Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, formed in Greeneville, S.C., before the Civil War, and relocated to Louisville, Ky., after the Civil War. A trained church historian who studied in Europe, Whitsitt intended to embrace the world of scholarship and not merely the world of practical ministerial education. His “discovery” of widely available and largely unused primary documents from the early period of Baptist history made him aware of what was indisputable by the standards of historical scholarship—Baptists practiced baptism by affusion for the first decades of their existence and adopted immersion only after having been a movement for several years. His findings, published in academic and non-denominational venues, were unnoticed when he was a professor but were discovered after he assumed the presidency of the seminary. As forces lined up, and as the divisions came to involve personality and theology, Whitsitt became a man under siege and eventually was forced from his leadership at Southern. He settled in Richmond and taught at Baptist-related University of Richmond until his death. Slatton’s work meticulously examines Whitsitt’s papers and diaries, as well as the extensive collection of materials related to these years at the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Baptist History Society, and the James P. Boyce Library of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to these sources, the study examines the materials of numerous state denominational papers, which themselves divided over the issue. This examination of Whitsitt provides a needed supplement to earlier unpublished dissertations that did not have access to the primary documents discovered by Slatton. The book is well-written and accessible and of interest to all readers who have interest in a specific aspect of nineteenth century southern Protestant religious conflict. Naturally, students of Baptist history will especially find the book helpful. The book does not, however, examine secondary literature in the field very extensively, nor does it integrate studies of other Whitsittrelated people and events into the study. Missing, for example, are references to the important dissertation examination of J. R. Graves by Marty Bell and the study of B. H. Carroll by Alan Lefever. In addition the book stresses the theological basis of the conflict between Whisitt supporters and the Landmark Movement without examining other contributing factors to the conflict, such as class division and an urban/rural division. These issues do not diminish the strengths of the book, though. James Slatton’s study of W. H. Whitsitt is an important study of this key figure in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention and it will remain a standard source for this topic. Merrill Hawkins Carson-Newman College

922

CHURCH HISTORY doi:10.1017/S0009640709990813

“Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women’s Missions and the American Encounter with Japan. By Karen K. Seat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xvii þ 193 pp. $22.95 cloth. The transnational reappraisal of American history during the past two decades has revived scholarly attention to the American women’s foreign missionary movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historian Ian Tyrrell had warned that the past scholarship in transnational perspective tended to emphasize the transatlantic perspective and repeatedly called for more scholarship on the transpacific perspective. He further argued in 2007 that the transpacific perspective was a promising framework because “American involvement in the Pacific in the nineteenth century was part of a global outlook” and would thus produce “a new way of conceptualizing American history as a whole” (“Looking Eastward: Pacific and Global Perspectives on American History in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 [2007]: 42). Seat’s book appeared in a timely fashion as an important addition to such growing scholarship. Seat explores the story of Elizabeth Russell, an exemplary woman missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church who sailed to Japan in 1879 and founded a progressive girls’ school—Kwassui Jo Gakko¯ in Nagasaki—during the turbulent Meiji period. Japan was rapidly modernizing to seek parity with Western powers at that time. Unlike other studies that explore the origins of the women’s missionary movement and the contents of the missionary work in the foreign fields, Seat focuses her work on how the missionary experience in Japan transformed Russell’s outlook on gender and race and suggests the possible impact of such transformation on American Protestantism and on American culture at large. Building on the arguments of postcolonial theorists such as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Seat claims that the global encounters of American missions in the late nineteenth century were important “sites of American cultural production” and that such missionary experience “triggered new discourses in the United States regarding gender and race” (xiii, xvi). Overall, Seat develops a well-balanced argument based on this framework. By combining a wide array of secondary literature with the primary sources of Elizabeth Russell’s writings and the monthly missionary magazine published by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, titled The Heathen Woman’s Friend (renamed Woman’s Missionary Friend in 1896), Seat examines Russell’s changing perceptions of gender and race as she developed Kwassui Jo Gakko¯. By portraying Russell’s struggle with both the Japanese government and other Methodist Episcopal Church missionaries in northern and eastern Japan, Seat

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923

reveals the more complicating construction of gender ideology in modernizing Japan. She further attempts to connect Russell’s case study to the larger question of how foreign missionary experiences broadened and liberated the Protestant ideology on gender and race. Within this attempt lie both the strengths and the weaknesses of Seat’s work. First, on the transformation of Russell’s gender ideology, Seat successfully situates Russell’s ideas and nature to what she inherited from her mentors in her educational background, namely Emma Willard and Sarah Foster Hannah, who founded Troy Seminary and Washington Female Seminary respectively. Inheriting the consistent quality of “great self-assurance” from these mentors (27), Russell sought the highest standard and the best location for women’s higher education during its most difficult times. Hence, Kwassui Jo Gakko¯ became the only missionary girls’ school in Japan to incorporate Latin and Greek into the curriculum. The argument on the ideological connection was convincing because the three figures actually knew one another, and Seat successfully identifies the ideological thread that weaves them together. Seat’s argument about the spiritual origins of Russell’s motivation is equally convincing. In addition, Seat demonstrates in readable and lucid writing that the foreign missionary experience liberated and expanded the women missionaries’ gender roles. Yet, when it comes to the discussion of the impact of Russell’s transformed ideologies of gender and race on American Protestantism at large, the connections seem haphazard and fail to show the underlying thread that links the transmission of ideas. Russell was an exemplary figure, sometimes at odds with WFMS missionaries in northern and eastern Japan. Instead of discussing why Russell’s thoughts and strategies contrasted sharply with those of other WFMS missionaries, Seat seeks to connect Russell’s ideas with those of Helen Barrett Montgomery, the president of the Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society who was considered the principal spokeswoman of the women’s mission movement and a major proponent of women’s rights. Seat claims that “the WFMS heavily promoted the work of Helen Barrett Montgomery” (146). Nonetheless, it is a leap in logic to generalize and identify the gender ideologies of Russell and Montgomery as a significant transformation of the gender ideology of American Protestantism and American culture at large. Second, another hallmark of this study is how Seat captures the subtle transitions Russell makes in her ideas about race through her experience as the mother of her adopted Japanese daughter, May Russell. Compared with incidents in China—the case of Gertrude Howe, for example, who trained some of the first Chinese female missionary doctors—missionary adoptions of Japanese girls have rarely been documented in previous scholarship. Seat argues that Russell “transcended her ethnocentrism” through this experience (117). Russell sent May to the United States at the age of eleven to train her to be her

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prote´ge´ and successor, but it failed as May died before Russell’s own death. Drawing on Russell’s writings and Joseph Henning’s work, Seat connects this argument to the larger question of the changing perceptions of “race,” “heathenism,” and “civilization.” Again, the book falls short of showing the impact of an individual’s transformed ideology of race on the racial ideology of American culture at large. Yet the discussion provokes new perspectives and insights for a comparative study on adoption and missionary work. Seat’s book is a well-written, provocative, and valuable addition to the growing literature on transnational history of the women’s foreign missionary movement. Noriko Kawamura Ishii Otsuma Women’s University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990825

New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. By Kathleen Sprows Cummings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvii þ 296 pp. $45.00 cloth. This volume makes a major contribution to women’s history by taking seriously religion as a category of analysis for understanding Progressive Era reform impulses. Cummings focuses on four relatively unknown American Catholic women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, founder of the all-female Trinity College in Washington, D. C.; Philadelphia educator, Sister Assisium McEvoy; and Katherine Conway, Boston editor and anti-suffragist. These and many other lesser-known Catholic women simultaneously condemned and emulated the “New Woman” of the turn of the century. Catholic women cast their activities as simply the latest way that dutiful Daughters of the Church sought to better humanity. Women who changed things were not doing anything “new,” they stood firmly within Catholic traditions of female activity. Looking backwards and evoking traditional gender ideology, women expanded, rather than constricted, opportunities open to them. Catholicism, not simply the state, protected women’s rights. Cummings not only unearths forgotten primary sources but she also sets the ideas she uncovers into the larger context of American women’s history. Introducing gender and Catholicism into Progressive Era history is long overdue. More than a study of Catholic reformers, this book helps us understand why many religious women rejected feminism and yet acted as feminists. Colleen McDannell University of Utah

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prote´ge´ and successor, but it failed as May died before Russell’s own death. Drawing on Russell’s writings and Joseph Henning’s work, Seat connects this argument to the larger question of the changing perceptions of “race,” “heathenism,” and “civilization.” Again, the book falls short of showing the impact of an individual’s transformed ideology of race on the racial ideology of American culture at large. Yet the discussion provokes new perspectives and insights for a comparative study on adoption and missionary work. Seat’s book is a well-written, provocative, and valuable addition to the growing literature on transnational history of the women’s foreign missionary movement. Noriko Kawamura Ishii Otsuma Women’s University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990825

New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. By Kathleen Sprows Cummings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvii þ 296 pp. $45.00 cloth. This volume makes a major contribution to women’s history by taking seriously religion as a category of analysis for understanding Progressive Era reform impulses. Cummings focuses on four relatively unknown American Catholic women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, founder of the all-female Trinity College in Washington, D. C.; Philadelphia educator, Sister Assisium McEvoy; and Katherine Conway, Boston editor and anti-suffragist. These and many other lesser-known Catholic women simultaneously condemned and emulated the “New Woman” of the turn of the century. Catholic women cast their activities as simply the latest way that dutiful Daughters of the Church sought to better humanity. Women who changed things were not doing anything “new,” they stood firmly within Catholic traditions of female activity. Looking backwards and evoking traditional gender ideology, women expanded, rather than constricted, opportunities open to them. Catholicism, not simply the state, protected women’s rights. Cummings not only unearths forgotten primary sources but she also sets the ideas she uncovers into the larger context of American women’s history. Introducing gender and Catholicism into Progressive Era history is long overdue. More than a study of Catholic reformers, this book helps us understand why many religious women rejected feminism and yet acted as feminists. Colleen McDannell University of Utah

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

925

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990837

The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections. Edited by Edward J. Blum and Jason R. Young. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2009, xxii þ 281 pp. $45.00 paper. Edward Blum and Jason Young have put together a very important collection of essays on different dimensions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on, writings about, and uses of religion. Blum and Young regard this book as building on Blum’s W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), which they assert (quite oddly, given that the author himself is one of those making this claim and the book is still being debated) “shattered the common portrayal of Du Bois” by scholars such as David Levering Lewis, Arnold Rampersad, Shamoon Zamir, and Eric Sunquist (xi). I hesitate to say that the book is primarily about Du Bois’s personal religiosity because the editors acknowledge that the focus is on what Du Bois said, not what he did, and that it is not a study of his church attendance (or lack thereof), or how, if at all, he lived religion (xx – xxi). The collection then is about explicit religious and biblical references in Du Bois’s writings and speeches, the ways in which people heard and interpreted Du Bois (in religious and spiritual terms), Du Bois’s use of religion as an impetus for social justice and a means of inspiring and challenging others, and as an aesthetic orientation to suffering and tragedy (which brings us closest to questions about his personal religiosity). The book illuminates aspects of Du Bois’s life that deserve careful and more detailed attention and indeed seems to make the case for a more synthetic biography of Du Bois (even in light of Lewis’s magisterial work!) with the many questions and issues in mind that are raised by the individual authors. The book is divided into four parts and twelve chapters: part 1, “Was W. E. B. Du Bois Religious”; part 2, “The Importance of Souls” (a reference to the title of his important book, The Souls of Black Folk [1903], and the meaning of “souls” as a religious and spiritual term in Du Bois’s capacious vocabulary); part 3, “Rhetorics of Religion and Redeeming Lynch Victims”; part 4, “Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism” (which is principally a reflection on what Du Bois knew of these religions and how they figured in some of his writings). Because the essays vary considerably in their topic of analysis and in their general conclusions, I will discuss only a few of them, though all of them require careful reading and prompt further inquiry into Du Bois’s long and complex life. In part 1, Phil Zuckerman’s “The Irreligiosity of W. E. B. Du Bois” is the most straightforward dissent from the general theme of the book to reclaim Du Bois as a religious thinker. Zuckerman writes that Du Bois was a freethinking, irreligious critic. He points to Du Bois’s distance from any

926

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social circle of religiously active groups (whether churches or close personal friends) and his commitment to sociological research that relativized religious beliefs, values, and institutions, and viewed religion as a social construction. Zuckerman does not so much prove this for Du Bois as to make an argument about a general tendency among the founders of sociology and what he perceives as a logical corollary to a commitment to a “sociological perspective” (12 – 13). Zuckerman rounds out his argument for Du Bois’s irreligiosity by pointing to his Marxism and his “visceral intolerance” of religious hypocrisy (for which he found lots of evidence in American Christianity). It is important to note that Zuckerman acknowledges the presence of religious metaphors in Du Bois’s writings and the importance of religion in his intellectual and scholarly imagination. Furthermore, he concedes that Du Bois was keenly aware of the significance of religion for African Americans. Yet, Zuckerman concludes that Du Bois rejected Christianity and ceased attending church as a young man and rarely returned. From his thirties onward, Zuckerman insists, Du Bois never expressed a “sincere belief” in any traditional Christian beliefs and doubted the efficacy of most Christian practices (5). In short, Du Bois was the irreligious figure that most biographers have written about, contrary to Blum’s recent attempt to reclaim Du Bois’s “spiritual power” (xi). Although I am not at all satisfied with some of the conjectures in Zuckerman’s essay and though I find his analysis of live options for Christian belief and practice in Du Bois’s day a bit simplistic, his attention to the details of Du Bois’s criticisms of religion, Du Bois’s estrangement from churches and religious communities, and his willingness to concede that religion was still important to Du Bois in literary and instrumental terms all strike me as fundamentally sound. Any assertions of Du Bois’s alleged personal religiosity must reckon with the salient issues that Zuckerman raises. Dwight Hopkins’s “W. E. B. Du Bois on God and Jesus” and Jonathan Kahn’s “The Pragmatic Religious Naturalism of W. E. B. Du Bois” complete part 1. I am not convinced that Hopkins’s theological gloss on Du Bois reflections on religion, especially by using standard Christian categories, is the most helpful way to read Du Bois’s writings, though Jesus in Du Bois’s literary imagination is quite fruitfully addressed by Hopkins and other authors in the volume. Kahn’s illuminating essay argues that Du Bois was a pragmatic religious naturalist, by which he means one who embraced religious resources to address the realities of race and social justice and yet who rejected metaphysical commitments and claims of supernatural truth. By seeking to elucidate the intersection of intellectual traditions to which Du Bois was indebted (particularly pragmatism) and his usage of “religious modalities” (biblical language, the figure of Christ, religious songs, moral virtue, and religious

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927

experience) because of his immersion in the cultural stuff of black communities, Kahn profoundly deepens our understanding of Du Bois’s relationship to religion (44 – 45). Part 2 includes essays by Anthony Pinn, Craig Forney, and Terrence L. Johnson. In my view, these essays (in addition to Kahn’s) are the most important kinds of analyses of Du Bois that should be developed further. Pinn agrees with Kahn’s description of Du Bois as a pragmatic naturalist. Yet Pinn is especially interested in Du Bois’s “understanding of and posture toward religion and the study of religion,” which he renders as a hermeneutics of aesthetics as soul or depth (71). For Pinn, Du Bois “recognized in religion and religious experience a cultural resource, an often nonverbal format for addressing the absurdity of life” (75). Similarly, Forney examines the profound and lasting impact that death and dying in black communities in the late nineteenth century had on Du Bois’s social thought. Forney points to the harsh circumstances of black life (and the seeming intransigence of racism and social injustice), striking an existential blow against the young scholar’s commitment to and belief in scientific investigation, human reason’s ability to advance solutions to societal problems, and universal laws of progress and social advancement (85 – 87). Although not quite the most accurate or compelling way to put it, in my view, Forney states that Du Bois emerged from these painful experiences as one who “found guidance in the Christian faith of African Americans” (87). Perhaps a more felicitous way to put this is that Du Bois, as Pinn notes, found a new orientation to suffering and religious experience in light of his encounter with the religious culture of blacks in the South, even though he never “believed” the tenets of the Christian faith. Johnson adds to the personal dimensions of Du Bois’s life, suggesting that his “tragic soul-life” was rooted in a “moral ideology of struggle, sacrifice, and hope” (115). Johnson argues that Du Bois found many of these cultural and religious resources through his participation in and study of black life. What all of these authors suggest is that Du Bois’s actual encounter with and ongoing study of African American life in the South produced a lasting reorientation of his thinking with respect to what we might call the cultural resources of religion, though this has to be clearly distinguished from his critical stance on religious belief and institutions. One wishes at times that the authors said more about how Du Bois’s racialist writings bore on his attribution of soul genius to black folk and how this related to more general claims about religion. Given that Du Bois was critical of black and white religious belief, practice, and institutions, what was it that led him to find resources within black religious culture and not within white religious traditions (as the authors seem to suggest)? After all, Du Bois consistently criticized hypocrisy in both communities. Was this orientation that Pinn and others write about a product of his romantic racialist understanding of African American culture?

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This book is a necessary corrective to previous accounts that depict Du Bois as a dogmatic atheist or primarily as a hostile agnostic who had no use for religion. It invites us to consider the porous and evolving boundaries between the secular and the religious, even as most of the essays take seriously Du Bois’s frequent criticisms of the actual religious beliefs, practices, and institutions that existed in his day. Attention to all of these complexities and ambivalences is the only way forward if we are to continue the entirely worthy and necessary study of W. E. B. Du Bois. Curtis J. Evans University of Chicago

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990849

Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism and Action Franc¸aise: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era. By Peter J. Bernardi. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. xii þ 297 pp. $79.95 cloth. Action Franc¸aise was a militant rightist movement in France begun in the late 1890s by Charles Maurras with the goal of replacing the Third Republic with some kind of traditional monarchical regime. It had a powerful appeal to many Catholics because the strongly anticlerical republic had passed laws against Catholic orders and schools. Thousands of schools were closed. Then in December 1905 the Law of Separation assigned control of all church buildings and property to the State. Thus it was not surprising that large numbers of Catholics were attracted to a movement that vigorously attacked the republic for its secular, liberal, and democratic ideas and strove to restore an authoritarian, pro-Catholic regime. His Catholic adherents knew that Maurras himself was agnostic and positivist, but they liked his view that the help of the Roman Church was essential to the restoration of the greatness of the French nation. In this book, Peter Bernardi studies the works of Maurice Blondel (1861– 1949) criticizing Maurras and Action Franc¸aise and the writings of a Jesuit named Pedro Descoqs (1876 – 1946) defending them. Blondel was wellknown for his 1893 book L’Action in which he offered an interpretation of the relation of the natural and the supernatural different from mainline scholasticism. In 1909 Blondel began defending the Semaines sociales, seminars on social justice conducted by social-minded Catholics inspired by Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. These seminars had been attacked by Descoqs, an admirer of Maurras, as tainted by a social “modernism,” a serious charge

928

CHURCH HISTORY

This book is a necessary corrective to previous accounts that depict Du Bois as a dogmatic atheist or primarily as a hostile agnostic who had no use for religion. It invites us to consider the porous and evolving boundaries between the secular and the religious, even as most of the essays take seriously Du Bois’s frequent criticisms of the actual religious beliefs, practices, and institutions that existed in his day. Attention to all of these complexities and ambivalences is the only way forward if we are to continue the entirely worthy and necessary study of W. E. B. Du Bois. Curtis J. Evans University of Chicago

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990849

Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism and Action Franc¸aise: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era. By Peter J. Bernardi. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. xii þ 297 pp. $79.95 cloth. Action Franc¸aise was a militant rightist movement in France begun in the late 1890s by Charles Maurras with the goal of replacing the Third Republic with some kind of traditional monarchical regime. It had a powerful appeal to many Catholics because the strongly anticlerical republic had passed laws against Catholic orders and schools. Thousands of schools were closed. Then in December 1905 the Law of Separation assigned control of all church buildings and property to the State. Thus it was not surprising that large numbers of Catholics were attracted to a movement that vigorously attacked the republic for its secular, liberal, and democratic ideas and strove to restore an authoritarian, pro-Catholic regime. His Catholic adherents knew that Maurras himself was agnostic and positivist, but they liked his view that the help of the Roman Church was essential to the restoration of the greatness of the French nation. In this book, Peter Bernardi studies the works of Maurice Blondel (1861– 1949) criticizing Maurras and Action Franc¸aise and the writings of a Jesuit named Pedro Descoqs (1876 – 1946) defending them. Blondel was wellknown for his 1893 book L’Action in which he offered an interpretation of the relation of the natural and the supernatural different from mainline scholasticism. In 1909 Blondel began defending the Semaines sociales, seminars on social justice conducted by social-minded Catholics inspired by Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. These seminars had been attacked by Descoqs, an admirer of Maurras, as tainted by a social “modernism,” a serious charge

929

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

during the anti-modernist campaign of Pius X. The articles of both Blondel and Descoqs deal mainly not with ecclesio-political topics but with quite deep, and at times dense, philosophical and theological issues. Each maintained that the other was not really faithful to basic Catholic thinking on the distinctness of and the relationships between the natural and the supernatural. Each became at times overly severe in criticizing the other. Bernardi aptly characterizes Descoqs’ view as “Restorationist,” favoring monarchy as the only way to maintain order in society, and Blondel’s as “Transformationist,” meaning Catholics, in a new era, need to appreciate and work with groups and movements interested in the social justice that Christ surely wanted. Bernardi leads us through these essays very patiently and clearly, with abundant and meticulous references to Blondel and Descoqs, and very valuable references to other literature and to background material. A major crisis for conservative French Catholics occurred in 1926 when the Vatican, after lengthy study of Maurras’s writings, issued a condemnation of Action Franc¸aise. (The condemnation was really written in 1914 but not published because of tensions in that period when World War I was beginning.) Descoqs, quite disturbed, wrote several pieces saying that the Holy See erred in its judgment on Maurras, but he did not publish them. Blondel, vindicated and quite pleased with the Church’s statement, wrote several more essays spelling out again his critique of the ideas of Maurras that certainly differed from Catholic philosophy and theology. Bernardi concludes with quite perceptive comments about some contemporary Catholic groups and tendencies that resemble the Left and Right groupings of the early twentieth century. This is a very scholarly book on a significant twentieth-century Catholic controversy. Richard F. Costigan, SJ Saint Louis University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990850

Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God. By Paul Alexander. The C. Henry Smith Series. Volume 9. Telford, Pa.: Cascadia, 2009. 429 pp. $26.95 paper. Paul Alexander offers a theological argument that pentecostals should restore the pacifism that marked the movement’s inception. Alexander undergirds his argument with a historical narrative that, first, positions pacifism as central to the ethos of early pentecostalism, and not merely, as other scholars have argued, a peripheral though commonly held position on war. (His

929

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

during the anti-modernist campaign of Pius X. The articles of both Blondel and Descoqs deal mainly not with ecclesio-political topics but with quite deep, and at times dense, philosophical and theological issues. Each maintained that the other was not really faithful to basic Catholic thinking on the distinctness of and the relationships between the natural and the supernatural. Each became at times overly severe in criticizing the other. Bernardi aptly characterizes Descoqs’ view as “Restorationist,” favoring monarchy as the only way to maintain order in society, and Blondel’s as “Transformationist,” meaning Catholics, in a new era, need to appreciate and work with groups and movements interested in the social justice that Christ surely wanted. Bernardi leads us through these essays very patiently and clearly, with abundant and meticulous references to Blondel and Descoqs, and very valuable references to other literature and to background material. A major crisis for conservative French Catholics occurred in 1926 when the Vatican, after lengthy study of Maurras’s writings, issued a condemnation of Action Franc¸aise. (The condemnation was really written in 1914 but not published because of tensions in that period when World War I was beginning.) Descoqs, quite disturbed, wrote several pieces saying that the Holy See erred in its judgment on Maurras, but he did not publish them. Blondel, vindicated and quite pleased with the Church’s statement, wrote several more essays spelling out again his critique of the ideas of Maurras that certainly differed from Catholic philosophy and theology. Bernardi concludes with quite perceptive comments about some contemporary Catholic groups and tendencies that resemble the Left and Right groupings of the early twentieth century. This is a very scholarly book on a significant twentieth-century Catholic controversy. Richard F. Costigan, SJ Saint Louis University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990850

Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God. By Paul Alexander. The C. Henry Smith Series. Volume 9. Telford, Pa.: Cascadia, 2009. 429 pp. $26.95 paper. Paul Alexander offers a theological argument that pentecostals should restore the pacifism that marked the movement’s inception. Alexander undergirds his argument with a historical narrative that, first, positions pacifism as central to the ethos of early pentecostalism, and not merely, as other scholars have argued, a peripheral though commonly held position on war. (His

930

CHURCH HISTORY

institutional focus is the Assemblies of God). Second, he argues that pacifism, though an increasingly minority position, nevertheless held sway among pentecostals even through the Second World War; again, a position contrary to the widely-held idea that pacifism disappeared from pentecostalism after the First World War. Third, Alexander posits that pentecostals were co-opted by Cold War conservatism to accept the rule of conscience on matters of war, a decision marked by the Assemblies’ acceptance of that position as official in 1967, overturning the pacifist position adopted in 1917. As a contribution to the history of pentecostalism, Alexander offers evidence that pacifism was probably the majority position on war among early pentecostals and that this position persisted among a small but vocal minority even through the Second World War; nevertheless, Alexander needs a more sophisticated historical argument to establish that pacifism was central to the ethos and worldview of pentecostalism, especially through the Second World War, rather than merely a position on the ethics of war. Perhaps his most interesting contribution, and one that could be expanded further by historians, is the Assemblies’ acceptance of conscience as an arbiter of ethical questions. Joe Creech Valparaiso University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990862

Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. By Joseph Kip Kosek. Columbian Studies in Contemporary American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xii þ 352 pp. $50.00 cloth. Joseph Kosek’s Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy is the first serious work on the history of pacifism in America to appear in a number of years. It was a doctoral dissertation at Yale, but it does not suffer from the ailments of many doctoral dissertations. Instead of too much detail on too small a subject, Kosek gives his readers a reasonable amount of information on a substantial subject. The topics included are pacifism in America, the role of religion in American life, the importance of nonviolence in social change in America and around the world, and the role of key American and international figures in formulating a nonviolent theory and a process to achieve that change. Key figures include John Haynes Holmes, A. J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Kirby Page, Edmund Chaffee, John Nevin Sayre, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, Bayard Rustin,

930

CHURCH HISTORY

institutional focus is the Assemblies of God). Second, he argues that pacifism, though an increasingly minority position, nevertheless held sway among pentecostals even through the Second World War; again, a position contrary to the widely-held idea that pacifism disappeared from pentecostalism after the First World War. Third, Alexander posits that pentecostals were co-opted by Cold War conservatism to accept the rule of conscience on matters of war, a decision marked by the Assemblies’ acceptance of that position as official in 1967, overturning the pacifist position adopted in 1917. As a contribution to the history of pentecostalism, Alexander offers evidence that pacifism was probably the majority position on war among early pentecostals and that this position persisted among a small but vocal minority even through the Second World War; nevertheless, Alexander needs a more sophisticated historical argument to establish that pacifism was central to the ethos and worldview of pentecostalism, especially through the Second World War, rather than merely a position on the ethics of war. Perhaps his most interesting contribution, and one that could be expanded further by historians, is the Assemblies’ acceptance of conscience as an arbiter of ethical questions. Joe Creech Valparaiso University

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990862

Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. By Joseph Kip Kosek. Columbian Studies in Contemporary American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xii þ 352 pp. $50.00 cloth. Joseph Kosek’s Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy is the first serious work on the history of pacifism in America to appear in a number of years. It was a doctoral dissertation at Yale, but it does not suffer from the ailments of many doctoral dissertations. Instead of too much detail on too small a subject, Kosek gives his readers a reasonable amount of information on a substantial subject. The topics included are pacifism in America, the role of religion in American life, the importance of nonviolence in social change in America and around the world, and the role of key American and international figures in formulating a nonviolent theory and a process to achieve that change. Key figures include John Haynes Holmes, A. J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Kirby Page, Edmund Chaffee, John Nevin Sayre, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, Bayard Rustin,

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

931

James Farmer, and Martin Luther King Jr. These are not all household names, even to those familiar with the subject. Gregg in particular emerges from relative obscurity. The organization that is front and center is the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a product of World War I. Organized in England, it arrived in the United States in 1915. Not all introductions are created equal, but Kosek’s opening pages are essential to understand what he is trying to achieve. His book is about a slice of American pacifism, the part that is Christian nonviolence that emerges in the era in American history from World War I through the civil rights movement. He includes the witness of the peace churches, the movement to end war in the 1920s and 1930s, conscientious objectors during World War II, the antinuclear protests in the 1940s and 1950s, the opponents of the Vietnam War, and the key events of the civil rights movement, but this is not a book about any of these things in particular. They are the settings in which he develops his thesis. He offers occasional information about organizational changes in the FOR, but his book is about ideas, not an institution. This book is an intellectual history, and if it is not the best, it gives the best a run for it. The thesis is the history of a “radical religious vanguard” which chose Christian nonviolence as its guiding principle. Repulsed by the violence of World War I, these individuals gathered under the umbrella of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, although not all were members of it, to work out the meaning of Christian nonviolence in an America and a world continuously engaged in war. “Gathered” means they were all working on the idea of Christian nonviolence, not that they sat around a room and talked. Some of them did that, of course, but Kosek’s main sources are books and articles, public speeches, publications of the FOR, and letters in many manuscript collections. Kosek is to be congratulated for the large number of manuscript collections, unpublished and published, that he found and used skillfully. Kosek argues that none of the initiating parties to what became a decadeslong discussion knew where it would lead, or who might join it. They generally eschewed dogma, “all war is evil,” and engaged in a dialogue, sometimes better called a debate, about the nature of Christian nonviolence and how it might be used in society. What did Christian nonviolence mean if it did not mean the end of war? New people joined the informal group along the way, including some of the most remarkable thinkers of the twentieth century. Unpredictable events, like Gandhi’s actions in India and later the bus boycott in Montgomery, opened new avenues for reflection and debate. Kosek follows the chronology of the era but notes that ideas have lives of their own and appear and then lay dormant for a time only to reappear. No single individual emerges as the key person in this long discussion, although

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CHURCH HISTORY

Kosek gives Gregg and Muste considerable space for their arguments and praise for their part in reaching a conclusion. And the conclusion is that by putting the “problem of violence at the center of its theory and practice,” the Christian nonviolent tradition “offers an alternative model of political action and an alternative history of the twentieth century” (1). The book contains six chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter, beginning with those engaged in and after World War I, creates a series of conversations over the meaning of Christian nonviolence and how best to put that theory into practice. Chapter 1, “Love and War,” features Page, Holmes, Eddy, and Muste. Chapter 3 introduces Gandhi and Gregg. Niebuhr makes his appearance in chapter 4. Chapter 5 turns to the debate that occurred during World War II and bears the appropriate title, “Tragic Choices.” The sixth chapter turns the spotlight on the civil rights movement and bears the title, “The Age of Conscience.” The conclusion is more than a summary and is as important as the introduction. In it Kosek invites his readers to engage in the continuing dialogue. This is a book that anyone seriously interested in American religious history in the twentieth century can engage at a number of points. Christian nonviolence is not a household concept and has many possible meanings. Putting a discussion of those in the text rather than in footnote 9 of the introduction might helped clarify the meaning of the term. Chapter 6 has an important title, but can be misleading. The 1940s through the1960s constituted “an age of conscience,” not “The Age of Conscience.” In the long course of American history, the 1830s through the 1850s was another “age of conscience.” These are minor things. Gentle reader, if you have even a remote interest in this topic, pick up this book and read. John F. Piper, Jr. Lycoming College

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990874

Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era. By Patricia Appelbaum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiv þ 330 pp. $39.95 cloth. In Kingdom to Commune, Patricia Appelbaum does two things. First, she offers a rich account of what she calls “Protestant pacifist culture” during the middle of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the ethnographic turn in the study of American religion, she argues that “pacifism is not a purely intellectual, moral, or ethical stance but

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Kosek gives Gregg and Muste considerable space for their arguments and praise for their part in reaching a conclusion. And the conclusion is that by putting the “problem of violence at the center of its theory and practice,” the Christian nonviolent tradition “offers an alternative model of political action and an alternative history of the twentieth century” (1). The book contains six chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter, beginning with those engaged in and after World War I, creates a series of conversations over the meaning of Christian nonviolence and how best to put that theory into practice. Chapter 1, “Love and War,” features Page, Holmes, Eddy, and Muste. Chapter 3 introduces Gandhi and Gregg. Niebuhr makes his appearance in chapter 4. Chapter 5 turns to the debate that occurred during World War II and bears the appropriate title, “Tragic Choices.” The sixth chapter turns the spotlight on the civil rights movement and bears the title, “The Age of Conscience.” The conclusion is more than a summary and is as important as the introduction. In it Kosek invites his readers to engage in the continuing dialogue. This is a book that anyone seriously interested in American religious history in the twentieth century can engage at a number of points. Christian nonviolence is not a household concept and has many possible meanings. Putting a discussion of those in the text rather than in footnote 9 of the introduction might helped clarify the meaning of the term. Chapter 6 has an important title, but can be misleading. The 1940s through the1960s constituted “an age of conscience,” not “The Age of Conscience.” In the long course of American history, the 1830s through the 1850s was another “age of conscience.” These are minor things. Gentle reader, if you have even a remote interest in this topic, pick up this book and read. John F. Piper, Jr. Lycoming College

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990874

Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era. By Patricia Appelbaum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiv þ 330 pp. $39.95 cloth. In Kingdom to Commune, Patricia Appelbaum does two things. First, she offers a rich account of what she calls “Protestant pacifist culture” during the middle of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s. Building on the ethnographic turn in the study of American religion, she argues that “pacifism is not a purely intellectual, moral, or ethical stance but

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exists in a matrix of culture and lifeways” and that the pacifist cultural matrix of the twentieth century was “historically contingent,” shaped by a variety of accidental factors (2). Appelbaum uses a mix of sources to illuminate pacifist culture, devoting one chapter to the “pacifist vernacular”; another to liturgies, plays, and pageants; and yet another to the “iconography” of pacifist artists. She explains how pacifists associated in such groups as the Fellowship of Reconciliation imitated exemplary “heroes” from Jesus to Gandhi and told themselves stories about soldiers making friends across enemy lines and women offering breakfast to armed intruders. Such practices molded Protestant pacifists into a distinct “folk.” This is an illuminating approach to a group of people who might seem to be significant primarily for their failures. Protestant pacifists could not keep the twentieth century from becoming the bloodiest on record, but they could sustain a shared identity. Reading Appelbaum’s book, I repeatedly mused that if there is any meaning to the contested category of “religion,” one of its traits might be that it is better at sustaining group identities than at changing the world. Appelbaum’s second task is to chart a historical transition. Around 1940, she claims, the flavor of Protestant pacifist culture changed. In a “turn of the cultural kaleidoscope,” a tradition that had been optimistic about modernity and at home within the Protestant mainline became instead “antimodern,” “sectarian,” and committed to “pacifism itself” rather than to “Christianity as the source of pacifism” (3). The new pacifists streamed into Friends General Meeting, helping to push that strand of Quakerism toward a post-Christian spirituality. They also “milked goats for peace” at more than a dozen agrarian communities. Appelbaum’s account of this transition illuminates the roots of 1960s communalism. Anyone who has gone folk dancing just before “crossing the line” at a military base will find here a convincing explanation of how those two practices became intimately linked. I was perplexed by several aspects of Appelbaum’s argument. She bookends her narrative with case studies of World War I pacifist Harold Gray and Cold War peacemaker Marjorie Swann, but the differences she highlights have more to do with gender than with a turn away from modernity. She never fleshes out the picture of pacifism before the transition, concentrating instead on identifying the cultural strands that would coalesce in 1940. This omission makes it difficult to assess the transition. Was the old pacifism a longstanding tradition or an ephemeral expression of the post – World War I zeitgeist? Did the new pacifism emerge because modernist pacifists turned sectarian, or because they ceased to be pacifist? (In both cases, the latter answer is closer to the truth.) Appelbaum’s terminology expresses unresolved tensions. One of the words she uses to describe the new pacifism is “sectarian,” echoing

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Valarie Ziegler’s distinction (in her study of antebellum pacifism) between the “sectarian radicals” of the New England Non-Resistance Society and the “champions of Christian civilization” in the American Peace Society (The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 3). But Appelbaum also acknowledges that, unlike classic sects, post-1940 pacifism “permitted multiple belonging,” “lacked explicit rules for discipline and expulsion,” and was dispersed among diverse theologies and organizations (43). Thus, in the epilogue she claims that “folk group” is a better term than “sect” (206). I wish she had made this terminological choice more consistently, reserving “sect” for those few postwar pacifists who joined the Bruderhof or other theologically exclusive groups. Similarly, Appelbaum’s most frequent label for the transition is “paradigm shift,” a term borrowed from Thomas Kuhn. But she also describes the new pacifist culture as an “abeyance structure”—a term used by sociologist Verta Taylor to describe “structures that preserve the lore and skills of a movement in small social units until conditions favor the movement’s resurgence on a larger scale” (34). A footnote implies that Appelbaum was introduced to this concept late in her research. I wish that she had consistently replaced “paradigm shift” with “abeyance structure,” for the latter term beautifully conveys the way in which communal and agrarian practices helped pacifists keep the faith through World War II and the Cold War, allowing them to emerge as mentors for the new Vietnam generation of activists. “Paradigm shift,” by contrast, implies a decisive and non-reversible change: after Einstein, there is no going back to Newton. American pacifist culture is more like a swinging pendulum. Had Appelbaum extended her narrative back to the beginning of the twentieth century, she would have found agrarian Tolstoyans at Georgia’s Christian Commonwealth farm; had she looked forward she would have found mainline Protestant leaders condemning the Iraq War with one voice. Even the shift from normative Protestantism to a looser spirituality is nothing new: back in the 1850s the pacifist Henry Clarke Wright espoused a religion of humanity, while others moved from Protestantism to spiritualism. This is not to challenge Appelbaum’s persistent use of the term “Protestant,” but to radicalize it. She rightly defines “Protestant culture” broadly enough to include Quakers and Unitarians; I would add that the socially radical wing of American Protestantism has always had a fuzzy boundary with post-Christian spiritualities that drew converts from Protestantism and shared its bias against centralized authority. Prior to Vatican II, the line separating Catholics and Protestants in America was actually sharper than that separating Christians from non-Christians, and many social radicals were “Protestant” in their thinking without being Christian.

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This is one of two new books devoted primarily to the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The other, Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), is a more conventional institutional history, and readers who wish to know who did what and when will want to read it first. Remarkably, the books offer distinct accounts of the Fellowship’s legacy: for Kosek, it paved the way for the use of Gandhian nonviolence in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements; for Appelbaum, the heirs of the Fellowship could be found on hippy communes, Quaker meetings, and interfaith dialogue groups. Both accounts are correct, and their juxtaposition suggests that twentieth-century pacifism may have more surprises in store for historians. Dan McKanan Harvard Divinity School

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990886

Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945 – 1960: The Soul of Containment. By William Inboden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xi þ 328 pp. $80.00 cloth. William Inboden has made a signal contribution to Cold War history and to post-1945 American religious history. This well-written and impressively researched work convincingly documents the centrality of religion in shaping interpretations of the Cold War’s meaning by U.S. leaders, not only ecclesiastical figures, but also top policymakers, especially Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (As Inboden acknowledges, Dean Acheson is notably absent.) Inboden begins with the (generally ineffectual) early-postwar foreign policy pronouncements and initiatives of the Federal (later National) Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches; singles out Reinhold Niebuhr for particular attention; and traces how the liberal –evangelical – fundamentalist split in American Protestantism, as well as Protestant suspicions of Roman Catholicism, complicated efforts to forge a united position on early Cold War issues. Inboden then explores how religious and providentialist convictions shaped the Cold War ideology of Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles, and other government leaders. The rhetorical trope contrasting America’s “spiritual values” and “atheistic communism” that pervaded presidential oratory and government propaganda, he insists, was not mere window dressing but an expression of firmly held beliefs about the fundamental nature of the conflict.

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This is one of two new books devoted primarily to the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The other, Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), is a more conventional institutional history, and readers who wish to know who did what and when will want to read it first. Remarkably, the books offer distinct accounts of the Fellowship’s legacy: for Kosek, it paved the way for the use of Gandhian nonviolence in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements; for Appelbaum, the heirs of the Fellowship could be found on hippy communes, Quaker meetings, and interfaith dialogue groups. Both accounts are correct, and their juxtaposition suggests that twentieth-century pacifism may have more surprises in store for historians. Dan McKanan Harvard Divinity School

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990886

Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945 – 1960: The Soul of Containment. By William Inboden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xi þ 328 pp. $80.00 cloth. William Inboden has made a signal contribution to Cold War history and to post-1945 American religious history. This well-written and impressively researched work convincingly documents the centrality of religion in shaping interpretations of the Cold War’s meaning by U.S. leaders, not only ecclesiastical figures, but also top policymakers, especially Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (As Inboden acknowledges, Dean Acheson is notably absent.) Inboden begins with the (generally ineffectual) early-postwar foreign policy pronouncements and initiatives of the Federal (later National) Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches; singles out Reinhold Niebuhr for particular attention; and traces how the liberal –evangelical – fundamentalist split in American Protestantism, as well as Protestant suspicions of Roman Catholicism, complicated efforts to forge a united position on early Cold War issues. Inboden then explores how religious and providentialist convictions shaped the Cold War ideology of Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles, and other government leaders. The rhetorical trope contrasting America’s “spiritual values” and “atheistic communism” that pervaded presidential oratory and government propaganda, he insists, was not mere window dressing but an expression of firmly held beliefs about the fundamental nature of the conflict.

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Inboden documents Truman’s repeated assertions in his speeches, and even more explicitly in his private jottings, that God had destined America to usher in a millennial era of justice, peace, and human freedom, while vanquishing atheistic communism in the process. Although a “Christian nation” (Truman’s phrase, 112), America had failed God by embracing isolationism after World War I but had now been granted a second chance to fulfill its destiny. Inboden traces Truman’s persistent efforts, in cooperation with America’s long-time Vatican emissary, Myron Taylor, to persuade religious leaders to throw down the ideological gauntlet to communism by putting aside doctrinal differences and affirming their shared commitment to basic “spiritual values.” But to Truman’s annoyance, Protestant – Catholic and Catholic – Orthodox tensions, as well as growing fissures within U.S. Protestantism, doomed his efforts to forge a religious united front against communism. A fascinating chapter on New Jersey Senator H. Alexander Smith, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and convert to Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament movement, documents Smith’s diary entries recording daily communications from God on specific foreign policy issues. (When the messages from on high seemed weak or unclear, Smith blamed his cigar smoking.) Another chapter explores the role of present and former Protestant missionaries to China in shaping U.S. China policy. While united in their concern for China’s fate, these individuals offered mixed advice. Some, like Minnesota Congressman Walter Judd, embraced the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, a militant Christian, while others favored accommodation with Mao Zedong’s communists. Inboden’s concluding chapters on Dulles and Eisenhower deal with a decade well-known for its embrace of civil religion, from the addition of “God” to the nation’s currency and Pledge of Allegiance to presidential prayer breakfasts, a National Day of Prayer, and cabinet meeting prayers. Nevertheless, Inboden adds a wealth of detail. Tracing Dulles’s Presbyterian roots and role in the Federal Council of Churches’ Commission on a Just and Durable Peace in the 1940s, Inboden rejects the bifurcation that some have found between Dulles’s early liberal internationalism and his later militant nationalism. Where others see discontinuity, Inboden finds an underlying consistency. He also traces the Eisenhower administration’s frustrations with the liberal Protestant establishment and its links to the burgeoning evangelical movement. Billy Graham and Ike’s pastor, Rev. Edward Elson of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church, enjoyed significant influence in these years. The conservative Quaker Elton Trueblood served as the United States Information Agency’s “Chief of Religious Information.” The Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order (FRASCO), headed by Edward Elson and Charles Wesley Lowry, a colorful anti-communist activist from Oklahoma, had close administration ties.

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At FRASCO’s 1954 Washington conference, 250 religious notables heard speeches by Vice President Nixon; Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission; Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Eisenhower himself, who exhorted Americans to “take the Bible in one hand and the Flag in the other, and march ahead” (284). Participants in FRASCO’s 1955 conference called for a worldwide “revival of faith in God” to counter godless communism (285). Inboden also documents Elson’s role in encouraging the Eisenhower administration to distance itself from Israel and reach out to the Muslim Middle East, a region of extensive Presbyterian missionary activity. This reversal of Truman’s policy roused the ire of Niebuhr, whose pronouncements on Eisenhower and Dulles invariably dripped with contempt. Inboden’s conclusion notes the irony that in the post–1960s years, religion did indeed powerfully influence international relations but hardly in the irenic fashion envisioned by Truman and Eisenhower. Under the “Polish pope” John Paul II, the Vatican pursued its own anti-communist agenda. Protestant evangelicals emerged as a potent political bloc, pushing their sometimes apocalyptic worldview. While U.S. legislators pressured Russia to permit Jewish emigration to Israel, religious Zionists and their evangelical allies defended Israel’s controversial West Bank occupation. As Shiite Muslims overthrew the Shah of Iran and vilified America as “the Great Satan,” Sunni Muslim jihadists drove the Russians from Afghanistan—and later turned on the United States. (And, one might add, religious zealotry fanned the flames of conflict in former Yugoslavia and between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.) With this definitive history of the early Cold War’s religious aspects, what now remains is to integrate this account with the less ethereal strategic and economic calculations that also preoccupied Washington and that dominate most diplomatic histories—the UN debates over atomic energy, the 1948 Berlin crisis, NATO, Truman’s H-bomb decision, the Korean War, NSC-68, the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup in Iran, the Geneva Summit, big-power rivalries in Africa and Latin America, Dulles’s preoccupation with forging military alliances encircling the Soviet Union, debates over nuclear strategy and atmospheric nuclear testing, the influence of U.S. defense contractors (Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”), and so on. Apart from the debates over China and Middle Eastern policy, little of this nitty-gritty reality falls within Inboden’s illuminating but narrowly focused study. Also absent is any hint of a counter-discourse to all the high-level talk of God’s role in the Cold War, of America’s allegedly universally shared religious beliefs, and of the United States as a “Christian nation.” One gets little sense that America also included millions of secularists, atheists, and casual non-churchgoers, or that separation of church and state and the freedom to worship God or not were core national values.

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Still, this valuable work highlights a neglected strand of early Cold War intellectual history, both inviting a reassessment of the initial stages of the U.S. – Soviet conflict and setting the stage for what lay ahead, from the role of Catholic prelates, Protestant ministers, and Jewish rabbis during the Vietnam war to President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 pledge to “rid the world of evil.” Plus c¸a change . . . . Paul S. Boyer University of Wisconsin – Madison

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990898

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. By Mary J. Henold. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii þ 292 pp. $32.00 cloth. Mary J. Henold’s Catholic and Feminist is a noteworthy and exciting contribution to emerging studies on post – Vatican II Catholicism in America as well as gender studies and religion. Catholic and Feminist appeals to a broad readership as Henold deftly crafts a narrative detailing the rise of women’s activism within American Catholic culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. She directly confronts the seemingly unlikely pairing of feminism within a patriarchal institution, asking not only “if or why women were Catholic feminists, but how and thus analyzes the nature and significance of Catholic feminism as a distinct branch of American feminism” (3). Using multiple archival and oral history sources, Henold provides an analysis of Catholic women—many of whom are women religious—and their negotiations of multiple loyalties, various movements, shifting goals, and ultimately changing identities. She argues that while at times the Catholic feminist movement shared themes with the secular movement, Catholic feminists created a distinctive brand of feminism inspired by their faith and growing awareness of social justice issues. They developed their own language, agenda, and protest. In short, Catholic feminism organically emerged out of experience, the language of faith, and even the teaching of the Catholic Church. Women of the Saint Joan’s International Alliance United States Section summed up their self-identification: “We are feminists BECAUSE we are Catholic” (83 –84). Henold acknowledges early influences, such as the Sister Formation Conference, the Grail, the Christian Family Movement, Catholic women writers in the early 1960s, and eventually the “new” nuns, who began to question “Eternal Woman” rhetoric emphasizing self-sacrifice and passivity.

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Still, this valuable work highlights a neglected strand of early Cold War intellectual history, both inviting a reassessment of the initial stages of the U.S. – Soviet conflict and setting the stage for what lay ahead, from the role of Catholic prelates, Protestant ministers, and Jewish rabbis during the Vietnam war to President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 pledge to “rid the world of evil.” Plus c¸a change . . . . Paul S. Boyer University of Wisconsin – Madison

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990898

Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. By Mary J. Henold. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii þ 292 pp. $32.00 cloth. Mary J. Henold’s Catholic and Feminist is a noteworthy and exciting contribution to emerging studies on post – Vatican II Catholicism in America as well as gender studies and religion. Catholic and Feminist appeals to a broad readership as Henold deftly crafts a narrative detailing the rise of women’s activism within American Catholic culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. She directly confronts the seemingly unlikely pairing of feminism within a patriarchal institution, asking not only “if or why women were Catholic feminists, but how and thus analyzes the nature and significance of Catholic feminism as a distinct branch of American feminism” (3). Using multiple archival and oral history sources, Henold provides an analysis of Catholic women—many of whom are women religious—and their negotiations of multiple loyalties, various movements, shifting goals, and ultimately changing identities. She argues that while at times the Catholic feminist movement shared themes with the secular movement, Catholic feminists created a distinctive brand of feminism inspired by their faith and growing awareness of social justice issues. They developed their own language, agenda, and protest. In short, Catholic feminism organically emerged out of experience, the language of faith, and even the teaching of the Catholic Church. Women of the Saint Joan’s International Alliance United States Section summed up their self-identification: “We are feminists BECAUSE we are Catholic” (83 –84). Henold acknowledges early influences, such as the Sister Formation Conference, the Grail, the Christian Family Movement, Catholic women writers in the early 1960s, and eventually the “new” nuns, who began to question “Eternal Woman” rhetoric emphasizing self-sacrifice and passivity.

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Yet, she pinpoints Vatican II as the catalyst for feminist awareness within the church. Henold documents how women became painfully aware of their near exclusion from the historic council but nonetheless were eager to shape a vision of church renewal. A myriad of Catholic feminist organizations sprung up after the Second Vatican Council, particularly between 1965 and 1974. Henold traces the rise of prominent feminist voices, particularly female theologians such as Mary Daily and Elizabeth Farians, who are at first optimistic about renewal, reform, and shared power in the Catholic Church. They re-appropriated Christian symbols, wrote extensively on church history, and were doing theology. Eventually they led part of the movement in a more radical direction, although Henold points out that terms such as liberal and radical “were very much in flux at the time” (76). Early into the 1970s, many of these women moved away from Catholicism, finding feminism and the church irreconcilable. Others, particularly women religious, carved out a feminist space in the church, choosing a path Henold calls “loyal opposition,” focusing a strategy on consciousness-raising and social justice while simultaneously “criticizing/educating/lobbying the hierarchy” (94). Henold exposes theological fractures, increased tensions, and confusion in the burgeoning movements and organizations by focusing on the issue of women’s ordination, particularly the first Women’s Ordination Conference in 1975. While women religious made up the bulk of feminist leadership, Henold’s coverage of lay voices and the Deaconess Movement as related to women’s ordination provides much-needed insight into the lives of everyday Catholic women who without the support of a women’s community came to feminism along different paths and contributed different goals and loyalties for church renewal. Liturgy played a dual mode of activism in the movement: (1) fueling controversies over the roles of male priests in feminist liturgies and redefining the meaning of the Eucharist, and (2) providing a space for women to seek renewed spirituality, healing, and protest. Henold documents the liberal and reconciling tone of these liturgies despite palpable frustration with church authorities over women’s issues. Often these liturgies were shared by separate woman-centered services removed from traditional liturgies, but they still combined protest with reconciliation. As the movement galvanized around women’s ordination and moved into the late 1970s, many more women had left the church. Others continued attempted dialogue with American bishops while simultaneously carving out their own space on the church’s margins. Henold’s care and attention to detailed case studies of movement leaders is helpful as she traces the overall themes and changing sentiments of women integrating competing visions of the church with feminism. She argues that ultimately “the movement (and many individuals) adopted a position of ‘sustained ambivalence,’ ” moving farther

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away from reconciliation with church hierarchies and a total vision of renewal to the creation of their own separate communities on the margins (11). Henold’s work offers readers an analysis of changing Catholic identities in the final decades of the twentieth century. She judiciously reveals tensions within the diverse movement and traces the intricate layers of networking among feminist Catholics. By focusing on ordination, Henold is able to trace a unique Catholic feminist movement in which prayer and liturgy become sustainable forms of protest. Yet because the movement galvanized around women’s ordination, in a way, the women calling for renewal were bound to the institution seeking legitimacy within the church (115). She respects her subjects and conveys their faithful optimism for renewal, while demonstrating they were not naive but pragmatically strategic. Henold weaves together a narrative of shifting and splitting relationships with the institutional church. Catholic and Feminist is an important historical study that exposes the debates over social reform, power, politics, and religion. Howell Williams Louisville, Ky.

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990904

Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities. Edited by Ogbu U. Kalu and Alaine Low. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. xiv þ 365 pp. $45.00 paper. This interesting collection of essays grew out of papers presented at an international conference on Protestant missions and the religious aspects of globalization held in at the Hammanskraal Campus of the University of Pretoria in 2001. The essays take perspectives that privilege Third World indigenous and local contributions to recent trends in world Christianity. Organized into sections on theory and context, globalizing tendencies in Christianity, ministerial formation in theological education, and local influences in charismatic and pentecostal transformations, the volume clearly situates contemporary Christianity in non-Western locales: China, Africa, South America, and Asia. That focus alone makes this a worthwhile addition to a growing literature on globalization and religion. Editor Ogbu U. Kalu frames the discussion using the metaphor of changing tides to outline the chapters and present some of his own perspectives on the issues addressed. Paul Freston then brings correctives to globalization and

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away from reconciliation with church hierarchies and a total vision of renewal to the creation of their own separate communities on the margins (11). Henold’s work offers readers an analysis of changing Catholic identities in the final decades of the twentieth century. She judiciously reveals tensions within the diverse movement and traces the intricate layers of networking among feminist Catholics. By focusing on ordination, Henold is able to trace a unique Catholic feminist movement in which prayer and liturgy become sustainable forms of protest. Yet because the movement galvanized around women’s ordination, in a way, the women calling for renewal were bound to the institution seeking legitimacy within the church (115). She respects her subjects and conveys their faithful optimism for renewal, while demonstrating they were not naive but pragmatically strategic. Henold weaves together a narrative of shifting and splitting relationships with the institutional church. Catholic and Feminist is an important historical study that exposes the debates over social reform, power, politics, and religion. Howell Williams Louisville, Ky.

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990904

Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities. Edited by Ogbu U. Kalu and Alaine Low. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. xiv þ 365 pp. $45.00 paper. This interesting collection of essays grew out of papers presented at an international conference on Protestant missions and the religious aspects of globalization held in at the Hammanskraal Campus of the University of Pretoria in 2001. The essays take perspectives that privilege Third World indigenous and local contributions to recent trends in world Christianity. Organized into sections on theory and context, globalizing tendencies in Christianity, ministerial formation in theological education, and local influences in charismatic and pentecostal transformations, the volume clearly situates contemporary Christianity in non-Western locales: China, Africa, South America, and Asia. That focus alone makes this a worthwhile addition to a growing literature on globalization and religion. Editor Ogbu U. Kalu frames the discussion using the metaphor of changing tides to outline the chapters and present some of his own perspectives on the issues addressed. Paul Freston then brings correctives to globalization and

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religion discourse by focusing on Third World perspectives in his essay, “Globalization, Religion, and Evangelical Christianity: A Sociological Meditation from the Third World.” He advocates paying more attention to those voices on issues such as the use of global data on religions, growing constraints on religious freedom in many parts of the world, and the importance of conversion and mission activity from the Third World as a key theme in the religion and globalization conversation. He also reflects the general theological thrust of the book in his discussion of the need to distinguish between evangelicalism and fundamentalism in Christianity. Many of the authors of this volume speak for the evangelical and charismatic constituencies of Christianity, and they would, of course, eschew the label of fundamentalism. Various critiques of points of view of First World scholars in the religion and globalization debate run throughout the text and are helpful reminders to scholars that the historical location of historians and theologians greatly influences the ways they interpret history. Paul Freston criticizes Mark Juergensmeyer’s assumption that a common “religious” point of view can be a basis for resisting “the secular” (26 –27). Jehu J. Hanciles in his chapter, “African Christianity, Globalization, and Mission,” takes Paul Gifford to task, claiming that Gifford overemphasizes the “externality” factor in African Christianity (82 – 83). Dana L. Robert notes the lack of attention to internationalism as a counterpoint for understanding both indigenization and globalization during the inter-war period in North America (94). In Sebastian C. H. Kim’s article, “The Kingdom of God versus the Church,” he recounts P. Chenchiah’s critique of Hendrick Kraemer’s views on the centrality of the church in spreading Christianity in India (140– 42). Chenchiah saw the church itself as an obstacle to mission in India and argued instead for the centrality of inter-religious relations as a critical element in understanding the Christian message (141 – 42). In addition to those critiques, positive contributions on Third World situations and perspectives add texture and particularity to the discussion. Brian M. Howell and Anthony dela Fuente present a fascinating account of Protestantism and popular culture in the Philippines by using localization theory in critiquing popular films in “Redemption and Progress: Analogies of Protestantism and Popular culture in the Philippines.” Edith L. Blumhofer draws the reader into the rich cultures of India and pentecostalism with her descriptions of Pandita Rambai in “Consuming Fire: Pandita Ramabai and the Global Pentecostal Impulse.” Diane Stinton graphically portrays images of Jesus in “Local Portraits of Christ in Africa Today: Jesus as Chief/King in Ghanaian Christianity.” And Philomena Njeri Mwaura illuminates the gender changes that both globalization and Christianity are introducing to Kenyan society in “Gendered Appropriation

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of Mass Media in Kenyan Christianities: A Comparison of Two Women-Led African Instituted Churches in Kenya.” Indications in a number of articles that indigenous forms of Christianity mingle with theologies brought by Americans make the case that Third World Christianity is not purely a Western transplant. The rich content of this volume does not, however, exempt it from some of the usual difficulties faced by edited works: a diffused focus, unbalanced sections, and some arbitrariness in essay topics. The well-developed section on local agency and charismatic and pentecostal transformation presents rich and original essays. But the section on cultural and socio-political dimensions of global process presents the reader with only one essay—a case study at that. The section on ministerial formation includes one article on evangelical universities and another on the North China Theological Seminary in the early 1900s. One wonders why ministerial formation is the topic here and not inter-religious leadership formation, an area more germane to the overall subject matter. Or one might ask why “The Globalizing Impulse in Christianity” section stops after two excellent essays on the period between World War I and World War II and does not include an essay on late twentieth-century or current globalizing issues in contemporary Christianity, the overall topic of the book. Perhaps we ask too much of an edited volume. Bringing together the essays in this book enriches the reader’s knowledge of the interstices of Christianity and globalization. The focus on Third World influences and the input from scholars in those settings demonstrate that Christianity in those contexts does not merely reflect a hegemonic Western influence but includes creative movements that incorporate local traditions. And the essays one might wish to read, plus the questions raised by the essays included, present crucial areas of research that scholars can pursue to further the discussion of global processes and local identities in contemporary Christianity. Frances S. Adeney Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990916

Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience. By Carolyn Chen. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii þ 230 pp. $38.50 cloth. When non-white groups immigrate to the United States, they form conservative religious organizations that act as ethnic enclaves, preserving ancient Old

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of Mass Media in Kenyan Christianities: A Comparison of Two Women-Led African Instituted Churches in Kenya.” Indications in a number of articles that indigenous forms of Christianity mingle with theologies brought by Americans make the case that Third World Christianity is not purely a Western transplant. The rich content of this volume does not, however, exempt it from some of the usual difficulties faced by edited works: a diffused focus, unbalanced sections, and some arbitrariness in essay topics. The well-developed section on local agency and charismatic and pentecostal transformation presents rich and original essays. But the section on cultural and socio-political dimensions of global process presents the reader with only one essay—a case study at that. The section on ministerial formation includes one article on evangelical universities and another on the North China Theological Seminary in the early 1900s. One wonders why ministerial formation is the topic here and not inter-religious leadership formation, an area more germane to the overall subject matter. Or one might ask why “The Globalizing Impulse in Christianity” section stops after two excellent essays on the period between World War I and World War II and does not include an essay on late twentieth-century or current globalizing issues in contemporary Christianity, the overall topic of the book. Perhaps we ask too much of an edited volume. Bringing together the essays in this book enriches the reader’s knowledge of the interstices of Christianity and globalization. The focus on Third World influences and the input from scholars in those settings demonstrate that Christianity in those contexts does not merely reflect a hegemonic Western influence but includes creative movements that incorporate local traditions. And the essays one might wish to read, plus the questions raised by the essays included, present crucial areas of research that scholars can pursue to further the discussion of global processes and local identities in contemporary Christianity. Frances S. Adeney Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990916

Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience. By Carolyn Chen. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii þ 230 pp. $38.50 cloth. When non-white groups immigrate to the United States, they form conservative religious organizations that act as ethnic enclaves, preserving ancient Old

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World traditions that hinder their assimilation into American culture—right? Not necessarily, as Carolyn Chen’s fine new study, Getting Saved in America, demonstrates. Chen’s narrative instead shows how in some cases newer immigrants become significantly more religious than they were in their home countries, how this religious activity often takes the form of modernist, more “rational” Christian and Buddhist spirituality than the forms they experienced at home, and how this increasing religiosity actually serves to inculcate or express decidedly American values as its practitioners transition into their new society. Getting Saved in America is based on two years of fieldwork that Chen performed in the San Gabriel Valley, near Los Angeles. Her two primary sites of ethnography were an independent Taiwanese evangelical church and a Buddhist temple whose headquarters are based in Taiwan. Both serve large constituencies of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States and their descendants. An important background fact is that Taiwanese immigrants are largely educated, middle-class professionals; it also noteworthy that while Christianity is a tiny minority in Taiwan, it was disproportionately represented among the first immigrants who laid the foundations for the Taiwanese community in America. Chen estimates Christians to be 20– 25 percent of the Taiwanese-American population (the numbers are roughly the same for Buddhists as well), with Protestant and especially evangelical forms by far the majority. One of the most interesting things that results from this sort of fieldwork among two different groups is the natural comparison of Christians and Buddhists, whom Chen finds to have much in common but also to display intriguing differences. Most of the Christians are not initially attracted to the church for its theological or ethical teachings—indeed, few are particularly religious at all. Their primary motivations are social. Newcomers want somewhere to hang out, a place to make business or romantic connections. They seek new social networks in America since their families and old networks are far away in Taiwan. It is only subsequently that they become interested in religion and decide that at least some of the evangelical Christian message and practice makes sense to them. The church tends to draw members into an ever-tighter net of mutual relations so that one’s free time (and finances) is increasingly devoted to the church community. In the end, Christianity comes to partially replace the traditional Confucian mode of Taiwanese ethics, and the church replaces the extended family. Yet the actual values are largely similar, and the amount of inter-personal entanglement in larger social webs is at least as great. By contrast, the Buddhists are mainly driven to attend the temple by more overtly religious questions, such as concerns about death. The temple provides a far looser social structure, with much less intimate inter-personal

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ties between members. Whereas the Christians think of themselves, first and foremost, as members of a particular church, the Buddhists focus more on their interconnection with Buddhists worldwide and humanity in general. The Buddhists are also far less “pushy” with their religion, viewing their way as superior but by no means the only authentic religious path. In fact, the aggressive proselytizing by Taiwanese-American Christians is a frequent stimulus that pushes people into the Buddhist temple, where they seek an alternative to what they interpret as the obnoxious religiosity of their coethnics. Here we see that religious diversity in the community, rather than relativizing religion, actually increases the total amount of community religious activity, and that Christian actions not only increase the number of Christians but also drive up the numbers of other religions and stimulate new counter-developments in Buddhism. Both religions are remarkably similar, however, in how they inculcate new forms of self-discipline in their believers, which is part of a larger shared shift toward this-worldly religious attitudes and orientations. In the American environment of greater religious and personal freedom, both Christians and Buddhists voluntarily take on far more restrictive individual codes of conduct and develop more psychologically sharpened practices of meditation and prayer for scouring the heart and mind in search of sinful thoughts and emotions. The gender dynamics within both groups also show notable changes in the New World situation. Women especially tend to benefit from distance from the constraining social networks of Taiwan (though there are downsides too), and their newfound religiosity allows them to assert independence from oppressive family obligations by asserting the primacy of their religious, rather than domestic, duties. Men, meanwhile, benefit from having an alternate system for achieving status and value, particularly in the face of white racism and other factors that frustrate their professional aspirations. Both Christians and Buddhists are also similar in how each view the other as superstitious and shallow in their spirituality, and they believe their own group to be more representative of genuinely American values of equality, democracy, and modern scientific reasonableness. The arrangement of clearly defined subjects into discreet chapters (“Becoming Christian,” “Becoming Buddhist,” “Becoming American Men and Women,” and so on) lends Getting Saved in America value as a potential classroom resource, as excerpts can be pulled out to fit a variety of different course topics. And while there are a fairly high number of spelling and grammar errors for a university press publication, the language is mostly clear and accessible, well within the reach of undergraduates. Chen has thus provided a valuable new resource for both researchers and teachers, one which well compliments other studies on immigrant religion by focusing on

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its transformative, not just preservative, aspects. Scholars of both religious studies and sociology will learn much from this work. Jeff Wilson Renison University College, University of Waterloo

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990928

Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. By Miri Rubin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. xxvi þ 535 pp. $35.00 cloth. This latest ambitious project of distinguished medieval historian Miri Rubin of Queen Mary, University of London, which builds on the earlier work of scholars such as Hilda Graef, Marina Warner, and Jaroslav Pelikan, proves, in the words of a Hollywood film released some years ago, that there truly is “Something about Mary.” In just over four hundred pages, Rubin attempts to trace the “ideas, practices and images” (xxi) that developed around the cult of Mary and the socio-political worlds in which her image was shaped from early Christianity until about 1600, with a concluding section which brings the story up to the twenty-first century. What sets Rubin’s work apart from previous studies is the breadth of source material covered—art, literature, music, preaching material, with a special emphasis on miracle tales—but especially non-Christian source material regarding Mary, most notably examples which highlight how the figure of Mary often became a flashpoint in Jewish/Christian polemic of the Middle Ages, a fascinating subject on which Rubin is very well placed to expound given her previous work in this area. Rubin’s work is divided into six parts containing twenty-three chapters. Two of these parts (the first seven chapters) are devoted to the period before the year 1000, charting Mary’s appearance in the gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, and her adoption by imperial Christianity, which emerged in the fourth century. The writings of well-known church fathers such as Origen, Athanasius, and Ambrose on Mary are touched upon, but the most interesting of these vignettes is surely that given over to the lesser-known, evocative hymns of Ephrem the Syrian. The idea of the “making of Mary” is a recurrent theme throughout Rubin’s work, and one of the areas that Rubin draws out particularly well is Mary’s centrality to imperial authority and orthodoxy in the heart of the empire at Constantinople, Mary’s “special city” (63). The importance of the establishment and celebration of feast days of Mary through the centuries is underlined by Rubin throughout, and the

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its transformative, not just preservative, aspects. Scholars of both religious studies and sociology will learn much from this work. Jeff Wilson Renison University College, University of Waterloo

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990928

Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. By Miri Rubin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. xxvi þ 535 pp. $35.00 cloth. This latest ambitious project of distinguished medieval historian Miri Rubin of Queen Mary, University of London, which builds on the earlier work of scholars such as Hilda Graef, Marina Warner, and Jaroslav Pelikan, proves, in the words of a Hollywood film released some years ago, that there truly is “Something about Mary.” In just over four hundred pages, Rubin attempts to trace the “ideas, practices and images” (xxi) that developed around the cult of Mary and the socio-political worlds in which her image was shaped from early Christianity until about 1600, with a concluding section which brings the story up to the twenty-first century. What sets Rubin’s work apart from previous studies is the breadth of source material covered—art, literature, music, preaching material, with a special emphasis on miracle tales—but especially non-Christian source material regarding Mary, most notably examples which highlight how the figure of Mary often became a flashpoint in Jewish/Christian polemic of the Middle Ages, a fascinating subject on which Rubin is very well placed to expound given her previous work in this area. Rubin’s work is divided into six parts containing twenty-three chapters. Two of these parts (the first seven chapters) are devoted to the period before the year 1000, charting Mary’s appearance in the gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, and her adoption by imperial Christianity, which emerged in the fourth century. The writings of well-known church fathers such as Origen, Athanasius, and Ambrose on Mary are touched upon, but the most interesting of these vignettes is surely that given over to the lesser-known, evocative hymns of Ephrem the Syrian. The idea of the “making of Mary” is a recurrent theme throughout Rubin’s work, and one of the areas that Rubin draws out particularly well is Mary’s centrality to imperial authority and orthodoxy in the heart of the empire at Constantinople, Mary’s “special city” (63). The importance of the establishment and celebration of feast days of Mary through the centuries is underlined by Rubin throughout, and the

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reader is afforded a front-row seat as some feasts—such as the Purification and Assumption under Charlemagne—are prescribed for universal observance, and other later, would-be feasts of Mary—such as her spasimo, or swooning on Calvary—are rejected, the latter by Pope Julius II (d. 1513) on the advice of the future Cardinal Cajetan (362). Undoubtedly, the most rewarding sections of Rubin’s work are those which treat of the High and Late Middle Ages (parts 3 – 5). This is not merely due to the explosion of the Marian cult, which occupied these centuries, but it is also Rubin’s special area of expertise, and this is very evident. Here the reader finds a veritable Aladdin’s cave of riches as Rubin traverses huge swathes of territory in search of the various incarnations of Mary in the Middle Ages, from the cloisters of Cistercians and medieval women mystics to the streets of university towns where Mariology was discussed and debated—and also where, some streets away, she was employed as a bulwark against “heretics” and Jews—to medieval parish churches and, on occasion, right into individual households. Here Mary became, to paraphrase one of Rubin’s section titles, ubiquitous and abundant; Rubin’s range is no less impressive, moving from Ireland to Iceland and from Bohemia to Ethiopia. However, it is the very richness of the medieval sections of Rubin’s book that exposes a critical structural lacuna in the work as a whole. As a medievalist, one can certainly relish the sumptuous tapestry of material offered by Rubin in the middle sections; however, this reviewer wonders whether specialists of other periods might not feel somewhat shortchanged as a result. In fact, the work gives the impression of something that began as a detailed study of Mary in the Middle Ages (which it achieves superbly) and was later expanded to include earlier and some later material. This misrepresentation is also a problem when it comes to the title of the work, which does not suggest a cut-off point of around 1600 followed by what appears to be a token whistle-stop tour of succeeding centuries. It could be argued that Rubin might have been well advised to restrict herself to the Middle Ages in this examination or, alternatively, write what would necessarily be an even larger work, which would have allowed her the space she would clearly need to cover other periods in more detail. In a work that is beautifully presented and lavishly illustrated, it is, however, regretful to note that Prof. Rubin has been poorly served in the editing process. There are numerous examples of simple typographical errors of spelling and syntax to be found throughout the work, most of which one would have expected to be discovered before the text went to print. In one notable example, Rachel Fulton’s 2002 work From Judgment to Passion (New York: Columbia University Press) is incorrectly cited as From Judgement of Compassion (425). There are also occasional factual slips such as the claim

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that monoenergeia denotes the belief in one, single will in Christ; rather it denotes one “activity” in Christ, being here confused with the Monothelite doctrine (68). One also gets the impression in places that the writing may have been rushed; perhaps some of these issues can be addressed in future editions. One additional observation concerns the frequent use of the word “worship” to connote devotion to Mary; while there is little doubt that the Middle Ages in particular were not short of instances of Mariolatry, perhaps a less loaded term such as “venerate,” would be more appropriate when referring to more restrained examples of affection. These observations aside, Rubin’s Mother of God is to be warmly welcomed as an outstanding contribution to the field, particularly by medievalists of all hues, who will find here a mine of fascinating material which will provide rich fare for scholars far into the future. Salvador Ryan St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth

doi:10.1017/S000964070999093X

Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. By Robert Eric Frykenberg. Oxford History of the Christian Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxxii þ 564 pp. $150.00 cloth. It might very well be true, as the author muses toward the end of this study, that it is impossible for any one person to possess the vast “expertise and grasp and insights” necessary to write a thorough history of Christianity in India (455). However, Prof. Frykenberg has been studying the religious and political history of India for approximately fifty years, and he would be one of a small group of scholars who could make a serious attempt at this possibly impossible endeavor. Rather than a narrative of Christianity in India from the beginnings to the present, this work presents a series of explorations of important historical developments in the history of Indian Christianity. After an introductory chapter and two helpful chapters that lay out the geographical, ethnographical, sociological, and religious context of the Indian sub-continent, the first historical development that the author explores is the tradition of the Thomas Christians, who claim that their church was founded by the Apostle Thomas in 52 C.E. The historicity of this claim is judiciously treated, as is the development of the Thomas Christian community in South India. Frykenberg next examines the advent of Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the

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that monoenergeia denotes the belief in one, single will in Christ; rather it denotes one “activity” in Christ, being here confused with the Monothelite doctrine (68). One also gets the impression in places that the writing may have been rushed; perhaps some of these issues can be addressed in future editions. One additional observation concerns the frequent use of the word “worship” to connote devotion to Mary; while there is little doubt that the Middle Ages in particular were not short of instances of Mariolatry, perhaps a less loaded term such as “venerate,” would be more appropriate when referring to more restrained examples of affection. These observations aside, Rubin’s Mother of God is to be warmly welcomed as an outstanding contribution to the field, particularly by medievalists of all hues, who will find here a mine of fascinating material which will provide rich fare for scholars far into the future. Salvador Ryan St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth

doi:10.1017/S000964070999093X

Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. By Robert Eric Frykenberg. Oxford History of the Christian Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxxii þ 564 pp. $150.00 cloth. It might very well be true, as the author muses toward the end of this study, that it is impossible for any one person to possess the vast “expertise and grasp and insights” necessary to write a thorough history of Christianity in India (455). However, Prof. Frykenberg has been studying the religious and political history of India for approximately fifty years, and he would be one of a small group of scholars who could make a serious attempt at this possibly impossible endeavor. Rather than a narrative of Christianity in India from the beginnings to the present, this work presents a series of explorations of important historical developments in the history of Indian Christianity. After an introductory chapter and two helpful chapters that lay out the geographical, ethnographical, sociological, and religious context of the Indian sub-continent, the first historical development that the author explores is the tradition of the Thomas Christians, who claim that their church was founded by the Apostle Thomas in 52 C.E. The historicity of this claim is judiciously treated, as is the development of the Thomas Christian community in South India. Frykenberg next examines the advent of Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the

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Church’s disparate attempts to establish pockets of Christianity and Christendom in South India. Next come some fascinating biographies of famous and important evangelical Christian missionaries, and the churches they spawned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, again in southern India. Chapter 7 explores the complicated genesis and development of the British Raj through the mechanism of the British East India Company, stopping short of the high imperial era (1857–1947). The author’s implicit argument seems to be that British imperialism manifest itself in Christianity almost solely through the workings of the Anglican establishment, which he explores in chapter 9. Preceding this, in chapter 8 he examines a few key mass conversion movements of low caste groups in the South. Chapter 10 takes up conflicts between South Indian Christians who had come out of low caste backgrounds with various groups of influential Hindu elite. This chapter has a decidedly anti-Brahminical perspective, based on the experiences of the “Dalit,” or “outcaste,” of Indian society, who predominate in the Indian Christian community. Then follows a discussion of mission education, which Frykenberg argues evolved in response to pressures from the upper classes of Indian society. Chapter 12 usefully delineates the complicated development of various groups and traditions within the Roman Catholic Church in India, while the next chapter is mostly devoted to the story of Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), a famous high caste Hindu convert. The final development in Indian Christianity that Frykenberg explores is Christianity in North-East India, and he closes this long monograph with a “Conclusion and Epilogue.” It is evident that Prof. Frykenberg’s interest and expertise lie in South Indian Christianity up to about 1850. My own study has been of Christianity in parts of North India (as distinguished from North-East India), which the author ignores, perhaps justifiably since Christians are concentrated in South and North-East India. However, there are some overall serious historiographical problems with this study which must be noted. First, there is a completely ahistorical treatment of caste in India, as though Indian social structures have been fixed and unchanging since time immemorial. As Susan Bayly has convincingly demonstrated in Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), social structures in India have been constantly changing and adapting to Moghul and British rule. Second, perhaps in reaction to the dangers currently presented by violent fundamentalist Hindu movements, Prof. Frykenberg leaves completely unexplored the very important symbiotic relationship between British imperialism and Indian Christianity during most of the important nineteenth century. Instead, the reader is left with the impression (455) that the fundamental relationship between British imperialism and Christianity was one of indifference or conflict (see, for example, his description of William Carey on page 323). This simply is not

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true, especially in the long nineteenth century. Third, this study makes no mention whatsoever of the issue of race. Again, the author may be reacting to recent historical work that at times overemphasizes the role of race in European/Indian relationships since 1500, but to ignore this issue completely is to ignore a crucial element in Indian Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, Prof. Frykenberg almost completely ignores the voluminous scholarship on Indian history that has been produced in the last thirty or so years (see 460 – 61 for such an admission), which is a fourth problem with this study. Attention to at least representative literature would have prevented certain romantic and naı¨ve readings of primary materials. A representative example of such readings is his description of the Naga culture of North-East India: “Since Nagas, from time immemorial, had lived in a Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ where war of every village against every village, and every tribe against every tribe, often made life ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ all members of a village community (sang) had to be ready, on the instant, for armed combat” (432). Such a caricature of Naga culture easily arises from uninformed, prejudiced Indic/Sanskritic as well as European/missionary perspectives, something that the people of North-East India have been fighting against for well over a century. It would be interesting to compare this work with other recent broad studies of Indian Christianity, for example Leonard Fernando and G. Gispert-Sauch’s Christianity in India: Two Thousand Years of Faith (New Delhi: Viking, 2004) and Rowena Robinson’s Christians in India: An Anthropology of Religion (New Delhi: Sage, 2003). The relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and perspectives could be better assessed in such a comparative study. Despite the problems of the work under review, this monumental undertaking further brings to public view how ancient, large, variegated, and vibrant a tradition is Christianity in India today. Arun W. Jones Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990941

The Bible and the People. By Lori Anne Ferrell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. xiii þ 273 pp. $32.50 cloth. Specialists of religious and literary history are well acquainted with the work of Lori Anne Ferrell, presently professor of English and History at Claremont Graduate University. Her book Government by Polemic, James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603– 1625

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true, especially in the long nineteenth century. Third, this study makes no mention whatsoever of the issue of race. Again, the author may be reacting to recent historical work that at times overemphasizes the role of race in European/Indian relationships since 1500, but to ignore this issue completely is to ignore a crucial element in Indian Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, Prof. Frykenberg almost completely ignores the voluminous scholarship on Indian history that has been produced in the last thirty or so years (see 460 – 61 for such an admission), which is a fourth problem with this study. Attention to at least representative literature would have prevented certain romantic and naı¨ve readings of primary materials. A representative example of such readings is his description of the Naga culture of North-East India: “Since Nagas, from time immemorial, had lived in a Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ where war of every village against every village, and every tribe against every tribe, often made life ‘nasty, brutish, and short,’ all members of a village community (sang) had to be ready, on the instant, for armed combat” (432). Such a caricature of Naga culture easily arises from uninformed, prejudiced Indic/Sanskritic as well as European/missionary perspectives, something that the people of North-East India have been fighting against for well over a century. It would be interesting to compare this work with other recent broad studies of Indian Christianity, for example Leonard Fernando and G. Gispert-Sauch’s Christianity in India: Two Thousand Years of Faith (New Delhi: Viking, 2004) and Rowena Robinson’s Christians in India: An Anthropology of Religion (New Delhi: Sage, 2003). The relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and perspectives could be better assessed in such a comparative study. Despite the problems of the work under review, this monumental undertaking further brings to public view how ancient, large, variegated, and vibrant a tradition is Christianity in India today. Arun W. Jones Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

doi:10.1017/S0009640709990941

The Bible and the People. By Lori Anne Ferrell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. xiii þ 273 pp. $32.50 cloth. Specialists of religious and literary history are well acquainted with the work of Lori Anne Ferrell, presently professor of English and History at Claremont Graduate University. Her book Government by Polemic, James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603– 1625

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(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998) changed the way we now consider James I’s religious policy, and students of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods cannot do without the excellent sourcebook on Religion and Society in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2005) that she edited with David Cressy. Five years ago Ferrell curated an exhibition on The Bible and the People at the Huntington Library to mark the fourth centenary of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference. A spin-off from this event, the present book shares its title, highlights, and limitations. “The Bible” here means the Christian Bible in English, and “the People” the inhabitants of the British Isles and the United States from the eleventh to the twentieth century. Structured in eight chapters—four for the period 1066 – 1800, followed by two thematic ones on Bible reading and illustration, then two on the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—The Bible and the People is less a scholarly work than a free-wheeling commentary about some of the principal elements of the Huntington exhibition, here represented by fifty-five blackand-white photographs that range from the Gundulf Bible produced in Rochester during the second half of the eleventh century to the 2003 magazine-format New Testament, Revolved, for teenage girls. Ferrell wears her vast erudition lightly. Her book has no bibliography and the notes are scant. Decidedly personal in tone, it abounds in one-liners that should catch the attention of the undergraduate students who appear to be the intended audience of The Bible and the People: the scriptures were a “delivery system for spiritual and secular ideas alike” (5); the Geneva Bible “a book that today undoubtedly would be called the Bible for Dummies” (83); and so on. But does this winsome book fulfill its objective of drawing the English Bible “into the realm of cultural history” (6)? Ferrell is convincing in her overall description of the Bible in post-Reformation society as torn “between its textual inaccessibility and its textual availability” (156). The Protestant doctrine of scriptura sola did paradoxically create a “boom market in scriptural aids” (132) right from the start in the sixteenth century that would end up in the twentieth with the “scripture’s seemingly inexhaustible malleability in appealing to . . . strategic groups of the population” (220). She is also right to balance the impressive variety of forms taken by biblical artifacts (which Ferrell takes undisguised pleasure in describing) with the “remarkable stability of the Christian Bible as a text” (242). The Bible and the People is nevertheless marred by oversimplifications verging on downright error that seriously compromise its utility. This is particularly evident in the chapters that deal with medieval Christianity and the Catholic Church after the Reformation. The role of the papacy in biblical

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matters during the medieval period, for example, is greatly exaggerated. Pope Damasus might arguably be considered “the leader of the Christian church based in Rome” in 382, but he certainly did not “proclaim the Christian Bible’s canon” at that time (7). The attribution to Damasus of the chapter De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in the Decretum Gelasianum was made only at the end of the eighteenth century. Widely accepted throughout the nineteenth century, the major part of the Decretum Gelasianum is now generally considered by specialists to be an anonymous sixth-century forgery, following Ernst von Dobschutz’s study Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in kritischen Text herausgegeben und untersucht (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912) and Charles Pietri’s, Synode de Damase ou Decret de Gelase in Roma Christiana (Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 1976). Philological evidence apart, the idea that the pope as bishop of Rome would have then had the authority to impose a scriptural canon on the nascent Christian empire is anachronistic. Similarly the period 800– 1100 was not “characterized by the extent of the political and religious influence of the papacy” (14) in the diffusion of the Vulgate. The great editions of the Jerome translation during the Carolingian era did not involve the papacy at all but were due instead to ecclesiastical advisors to Charlemagne and his successors, such as the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin of York, and promulgated by order of the emperor, not the pope. It is equally misleading to assert that after the Council of Trent “in the . . . Roman Catholic Church, access to the Bible was restricted to the clergy, a rule effectively enforced by the concomitant rule that the text remain in Latin” (86). That was by and large true of Italy and Spain but certainly not of the rest of Catholic Europe. In France, in the Catholic states of Germany, and in Netherlands, Catholic translations in the vernacular were immediately counterposed to Protestant ones and continued to be published throughout the early modern period. In these mixed Catholic/Protestant territories the vernacular scriptures were considered to be the “judge of controversies,” and it was essential that each Christian “people” have its own translation to be employed in the ideological battles that separated them. This travesty of things medieval, Continental, and “popish,” should not be brushed off as marginal to the project of The Bible and the People. The Protestant Bible in English cannot be properly understood in its full originality without a serious presentation of the world from which it was “wrested . . . to be returned to ordinary believers” (3). All in all, the book is a disappointment. One expected, and expects, far better from such a fine scholar as Lori Anne Ferrell. Franc¸ois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles Florida State University

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CHURCH HISTORY doi:10.1017/S0009640709990953

Children and Childhood in American Religions. Edited by Don S. Browning and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore. The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. viii þ 233 pp. $72.00 cloth; $23.95 paper. This volume fills a gap in the literature of childhood studies. Social scientists are increasingly studying children as agents in societies and cultures, but they are only beginning to address religious issues in the lives of children and their families. Religious studies scholars, on the other hand, focus on the religious beliefs and practices of adults, and they are only beginning to investigate children’s religious lives. Several scholars have published works on children and Christian theology and spirituality, but so far no one has tried to bring together in one book a collection of essays on children, childhood, and religious traditions, both Christian and non-Christian. Browning and Miller-McLemore’s edited collection does just that. Eleven essays pinpoint children and childhood in specific religious traditions, while two more are thematic in nature. In the first essay, Margaret Bendroth considers the changing models of childhood in mainline Protestant denominations. Her excellent historical overview takes the reader from the nineteenth-century child nurture theology of Horace Bushnell to the twentieth-century model of children as problems. Bendroth draws upon her extensive knowledge of mainline Protestantism to situate debates about children and childhood within these denominations. The second essay is equally provocative. John P. Bartkowski and Christopher G. Ellison, scholars of evangelical Protestantism, argue in their essay that evangelical advice literature contains a basic contradiction reflected in childrearing attitudes among evangelical parents: children are tainted by original sin and must be sternly disciplined using physical techniques like hitting the child, but a loving God cares for children and thus parents should treasure them with intimacy and affection. Many of the essays that follow are merely descriptive, providing sound information about children in specific religious cultures but not making arguments as do the first two essays. These include Jennifer Beste’s essay on American Catholicism, Elliot N. Dorff’s essay on Judaism in America, David C. Dollahite’s essay on Mormons, Roger Iron Cloud and Raymond Bucko’s essay on Native Americans, Jane I. Smith’s essay on Islam in America, Raymond Brady Williams’s essay on Hinduism in America, and Jeffrey Meyer’s essay on Confucianism in America. To their credit, these authors closely follow the instructions of the editors, who told them to write about doctrines and children, adult/child relationships, religious formation, and religion and institutions like governments and public schools.

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The volume is something like a handbook, then, in giving readers a ready-touse guide for understanding children in a given church or non-Christian religion. Two other essays go beyond the minimum required by the editors: Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’s essay on African American Christianity, or the black church, and Rita M. Gross’s essay on American Buddhisms. Gilkes writes from her own deep experience as a part of the black church as well as from her many years of studying it. Her essay has two parts. The first is a nuanced description of children in African American Christianity. The second is an attempt to supply what the black church is missing: a wellarticulated theology of children. Until now, African American churches relied on folk wisdom about children to guide childrearing and religious education. Gilkes argues that it is high time that black Christians operated from a sensitively constructed child theology that reflects the complexity of both the black church experience and the challenges of postmodern life. Gross’s essay is based on the author’s decades-long participation in Buddhist practice as well as her equally long and respected career as a scholar of Buddhism. She uses several pages of her essay to discuss the two contrasting types of Buddhism in the United States: immigrant Buddhism and convert Buddhism. The former is composed of immigrants from Asian cultures, the latter of mostly white, middle- and upper-class Americans who began practicing Buddhism as adults in the 1960s and 1970s. Immigrant Buddhist groups now have several generations living in America, and they struggle with many of the same issues regarding children and assimilation that face other immigrant groups. The convert Buddhists are now reaching middle-age years, and their children have grown to adulthood. They, the parents, had to invent childrearing practices and educational programs for those children from scratch. In this regard they resemble another population of babyboomers and their children, the Wiccans and Neopagans, who would have made an interesting addition to the book with an essay of their own. Finally, the last two essays in this collection address themes that cut across traditional and denominational boundaries. Paul D. Numrich looks at religious or parochial schools, and Emily Buss considers legal issues related to children and religion. All of the authors are knowledgeable about their respective traditions. Some, like Dorff, Gilkes, Dollahite, Iron Cloud, Bucko, and Gross, are “insiders” and speak as such, in some cases clearly identifying themselves as participants in the cultural and religious worlds about which they write. Other authors are outsiders, but their record of scholarship on the traditions that they cover in this volume is impressive, and that scholarship pays off in the detail and insight they provide in their essays. I found no weak essays in this collection. The book is well worth having in your school or university library.

954

CHURCH HISTORY

The one thing missing, which the editors admit that they did not intend to include, was the experiences and voices of children themselves. Occasionally a specific child or teenager who accomplished something noteworthy is singled out in an essay. Otherwise we do not hear from the children about whom this book was written. This reviewer still considers Robert Coles’s The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) to be one of the best single-volume studies of children’s self-reported religious or spiritual experiences and ideas. But much work is surely being done, and will continue to be done, to further the insights that Coles provided in his classic study. As that work and other scholarship on children and religion continues, this edited volume will stand as an indispensable source for multiple approaches to questions of children, childhood, and religion in America. W. Michael Ashcraft Truman State University

BOOKS RECEIVED Atwood, Craig D., The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Baum, Gregory, The Theology of Tariq Ramadan: A Catholic Perspective. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Beasley, Nicholas M., Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650– 1780. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. Bielfeldt, Dennis, Mickey L. Mattox, and Paul R. Hinlicky, The Substance of the Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2008. Bitel, Lisa M., Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Boyce, James J., Carmelite Liturgy and Spiritual Identity: The Choir Books of Krako´w. Medieval Church Studies 16. Turnhout: 2008. Brady, Thomas A., German Histories in the Age of the Reformations, 1400 –1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bremer, Francis J., Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Brodman, James William, Charity & Religion in Medieval Europe. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Bruschi, Caterina, The Wandering Heretics of Languedoc. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Byrne, Ryan, and Bernadette McNary-Zak, eds., Resurrecting the Brother of Jesus: The James Ossuary Controversy and the Quest for Religious Ethics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Calvini, Ioannis, Commentarii in Epistolas Canonicas. Opera Exegetica Veteris Et Novi Testamenti 20. Ed. Kenneth Hagen. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2009. Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, vol. 3. Trans. Suzanne, Noffke. Medieval Renaissance and Text Studies 329. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, vol. 4. Trans. Suzanne, Noffke. Medieval Renaissance and Text Studies 355. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007.

955

956

BOOKS RECEIVED

Chinchilla, Perla, and Antonella Romano, eds., Escrituras de la Modernidad: Los Jesuitas entre Cultura Reto´rica y Cultura Cientı´fica. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2008. Coakley, Sarah, and Charles M. Stang, eds., Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Collins, James M., Exorcism and Deliverance Ministry in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of Exorcism in Modern Western Christianity. Studies in Evangelical History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. Couchman, Judith, The Mystery of the Cross: Bringing Ancient Christian Images to Life. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 2009. Cunningham, Mary B., and Elizabeth Theokritoff, The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge Companions to Religion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Daly, Robert J., ed., Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity. Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009. Daunton-Fear, Andrew, Healing in the Early Church: The Church’s Ministry of Healing and Exorcism from the First to the Fifth Century. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. Dekar, Paul R., Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community. New Monastic Library: Resources for Radical Discipleship. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2009. Delville, Jean-Pierre, and Marko Jacˇov, ed., La Papuate´ Contemporaine (XIXe – XXe sie`cles) il Papato Contemporaneo (Secoli XIX –XX). Bibliote`que de la Rhe Fascicule 90. Colectanea Archivi Vaticani 68. Louvain-la-Nueve: Bibliote`que de la Revue d’Histoire Eccle`siastique, 2009. Driver, Lisa D. Mougans, Christ at the Center of the Early Christian Era. The Westminster History of Christian Thought. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Duffy, Eamon, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Dunning, Benjamin H., Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Espinosa, Gasto´n, ed., Religion and the American Presidency: George Washington to George W. Bush, with Commentary and Primary Sources. The Columbia Series on Religion and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

BOOKS RECEIVED

957

Flesberg, Evon O., The Switching Hour: Kids of Divorce Say Good-Bye Again. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 2008. Furnish, Victor Paul, The Moral Teaching of Paul: Moral Issues. 3rd ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 2009. Goodhart, Sandor, Jørgen Jøgensen, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams, eds., For Rene´ Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth. Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009. Goodwillie, Christian, and Jane F. Crosthwaite, Millennial Praises: A Shaker Hymnal. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Gordon, Bruce, Calvin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Gritsch, Eric W., Toxic Spirituality: Four Enduring Temptations of Christian Faith. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2009. Ha¨berlein, Mark, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730 – 1820. Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Harington, Sir John, The Epigrams of Sir John Harington. Ed. Gerard Kilroy. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Helmer, Christine, ed., The Global Luther: A Theologian for Modern Times. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2009. Hingst, Amanda Jane, The Written World: Past and Place in the Work of Orderic Vitalis. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Hwang, Alexander Y., Intrepid Lover of Perfect Grace: The Life and Thought of Prosper of Augustine. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Hyde, Helen, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Studies in History. New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2009. Janzen, Rod, Paul Tschetter: The Story of a Hutterite Immigrant Leader, Pioneer, and Pastor. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 114. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2009. Jenkins, Philip, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Johnson, Luke Timothy, Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.

958

BOOKS RECEIVED

Johnson, William Stacy, John Calvin: Reformer for the 21st Century. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Kaldellis, Anthony, The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kaplan, Benjamin, Bob Moore, Henk Van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann, eds., Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1702. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2009. Kaufman, Ivan J., “Follow Me”: A History of Christian Intentionality. New Monastic Library: Resources for Radical Discipleship. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2009. Kearney, James, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England. Material Texts. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Kelly, Duncan, ed., Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought. Proceedings of the British Academy 155. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ker, Ian, and Terrence Merrigan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman. Cambridge Companions to Religion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kim, Jin Heung, Scripture et Patrum Testimoniis: The Function of the Church Fathers and the Medievals in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Two Eucharistic Treatises: Tractatio and Dialogus. Publications for the Institute of Reformation Research 5. Apeldoorn, Netherlands: Instiuut voor Reformatienonderzoek, 2009. King, Benjamin John, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England. Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Klassen, Peter J., Mennonites in Early Modern Poland & Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Knell, Matthew, The Immanent Person of the Holy Spirit from Anselm to Lombard: Divine Communion in the Spirit. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. Lane, Anthony N. S., A Reader’s Guide to Calvin’s Institutes. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009. Lantzer, Jason S., “Prohibition is Here to Stay”: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

BOOKS RECEIVED

959

Lenton, John, John Wesley’s Preachers: A Social and Statistical Analysis of the British and Irish Preachers Who Entered the Methodist Itinerancy before 1791. Studies in Evangelical History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. Lewis, James R., and Sarah M. Lewis, eds., Sacred Schism: How Religions Divide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Littlejohn, W. Bradford, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2009. Locke, Kenneth A., The Church in Anglican Theology: A Historical, Theological and Ecumenical Exploration. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Lothian, James R., The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Church, 1910– 1950. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Mannion, Gerard, Chiesa e Postmoderno: Domande per l’Ecclesiologia del Nostro Tempo. Scienze Religiose 21. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 2009. McDonald, Lee Martin, Forgotten Scriptures: The Selection and Rejection of Early Religious Writings. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2009. McNally, Michael D., Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion. Religion and American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Mowbray, Donald, Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology: Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2009. Moberly, R. W. L., The Theology of the Book of Genesis. Old Testament Theology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Murdoch, Brian, The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe: Vernacular Translations and Adaptations of the Vita Adae et Evae. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nesvig, Martin Austin, Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Noll, Mark A., The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 2009. O’Brien, Elmer J., The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era: American Christianity and Religious Communication, 1620– 2000: An Annotated Bibliography. ATLA Bibliography Series 57. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2009. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Małgorzata, The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

960

BOOKS RECEIVED

Orchard, Stephen, Nonconformity in Derbyshire: A Study in Dissent, 1600– 1800. Studies in Christian History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. O’Sullivan, Benedict, Medieval Irish Dominican Studies. Ed. Hugh Fenning. Portland, Ore.: Four Courts, 2009. Paul, Barbara D., That All May Be One: Historical Essays on the Wisconsin Conference of the United Church of Christ. Deforest: Wisconsin Conference of the United Church of Christ, 2009. Reybillard, E´ric, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity. Trans. Elizabeth Rawlings and Jeanine Routier-Pucci. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009. Reynolds, John Mark, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 2009. Roberts, Dyfed Wyn, Revival, Renewal, and the Holy Spirit. Studies in Evangelical History and Thought. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2009. Robinson, Thomas A., Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early JewishChristian Relations. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2009. Robisheaux, Thomas, The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Rose, Anne C., Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Rubin, Miri, and Walter Simons, eds., Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100 – 1500. The Cambridge History of Christianity 4. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ryan, James Emmett, Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950. Studies in American Thought and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Seay, Scott D., Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. Shedinger, Robert F., Was Jesus a Muslim?: Questioning Categories in the Study of Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 2009. Sommerfelt, John R., Christianity in Culture: A Historical Quest. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2009.

BOOKS RECEIVED

961

Stanley, Brian, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009. Sweeny, Douglas A., Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 2009. Taylor, Larissa Juliet, The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Thatcher, Tom, Greater than Caesar: Christology and Empire in the Fourth Gospel. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 2009. The´ry, Julien, Famille et Parente´ dans la Vie Religieuse du Midi (XIIe –XVe Siecle). Cahiers de Fanjeaux 43. Toulouse: Editions Privat, 2008. Thuesen, Peter J., Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Toy, John, ed., English Saints in the Medieval Liturgies of Scandinavian Churches. Subsidia 6. New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2009. Van Asselt, Willem J., Michael D. Bell, Gert van den Brink, and Rein Ferwerda, eds., Scholastic Discourse: Johannes Maccoviu (1588–1644) on Theological and Philosophical Distinctions and Rules. Publications for the Institute of Reformation Research 4. Apeldoorn, Netherlands: Instiuut voor Reformatienonderzoek, 2009. Whytock, Jack C., Continental Calvinian Influences on the Scottish Reformation: The First Book of Discipline (1560). Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellon, 2009. Wills, Gregory A., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1859–2009. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Winn, Christian T. Collins, “Jesus is Victor!”: The Significance of the Blumhardts for the Theology of Karl Barth. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 93. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2009. Witte, John Jr., The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Yates, Nigel, Preaching, Word and Sacrament: Scottish Church Interiors, 1560–1860. New York: Continuum, 2009.

INDEX TO CHURCH HISTORY 2009, VOLUME 78 ARTICLES Appelbaum, Patricia, St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century ..................... Brooks Hedstrom, Darlene L., The Geography of the Monastic Cell in Early Egyptian Monastic Literature ................................................... Brown, Samuel, Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden ................................................................ Bulthuis, Kyle T., Preacher Politics and People Power: Congregational Conflicts in New York City, 1810–1830 ....................................... Ciappara, Frans, Trent and the Clergy in Late Eighteenth-Century Malta ..... Dowland, Seth, “Family Values” and the Formation of a Christian Right Agenda ............................................................................. Ebel, Jonathan, The Great War, Religious Authority, and the American Fighting Man ...................................................................... Harrison, Anna, “I Am Wholly Your Own”: Liturgical Piety and Community among the Nuns of Helfta ....................................................... Kemeny, P. C., “Banned in Boston”: Moral Reform Politics and The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice.................................. Lee, Timothy S., What Should Christians Do about a Shaman-Progenitor?: Evangelicals and Ethnic Nationalism in South Korea ...................... Mews, Constant J., Liturgists and Dance in the Twelfth Century: The Witness of John Beleth and Sicard of Cremona ........................................ Michelson, Emily, Luigi Lippomano, His Vicars, and the Reform of Verona from the Pulpit .................................................................... Neal, Lynn S., Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clarke, and the Art of Religious Intolerance ................................................ Sharkey, Heather J., An Egyptian in China: Ahmed Fahmy and the Making of “World Christianities”........................................................ Wacker, Grant, Billy Graham’s America ............................................ Wang, Peter Chen-Main, Caring Beyond National Borders: The YMCA and Chinese Laborers in World War I Europe..................................... Washburn, Daniel A., Tormenting the Tormentors: A Reinterpretation of Eusebius of Vercelli’s Letter from Scythopolis ................................ Wu, Albert, “Unashamed of the Gospel”: Johann Hinrich Wichern and the Battle for the Soul of Prussian Prisons........................................

792 756 26 261 1 606 99 549 814 66 512 584 350 309 489 327 731 283

FORUM The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies .................................................... Denise Kimber Buell Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History Introduction ................................................................ Elizabeth A. Clark

962

862 847

963

INDEX Philosophies of Language, Theories of Translation, and Imperial Intellectual Production: The Cases of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius ....................................................................... Jeremy M. Schott Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History ......... Randall Styers

855 849

BOOK REVIEW FORUM What Makes a Prophet: The Case for Uchimura Kanzo¯ ....... Darrell E. Allen The Limitations of the Genre of the Heroic Individual Biography ...................................................................................... Gary L. Ebersole An Impression of J. F. Howes’s Japan’s Modern Prophet ...... Shibuya Hiroshi Response to Comments on Japan’s Modern Prophet ............... John F. Howes

134 143 147 151

BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS Blanton, Virginia, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695– 1615, Sto¨ber, Karen, Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c. 1300–1540, and Evans, J. Wyn, and Jonathan M. Wooding, eds., St. David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation ......................................................... Joseph F. Kelly Curtis, Heather D., Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900, Opp, James, The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880– 1930, and Peters, Shawn Francis, When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law ............................................................... Pamela E. Klassen Lahr, Angela M., Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism, and Phayer, Michael, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War ..... Dianne Kirby Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion, and Savage, Barbara Dianne, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion ....................................................... Clarence E. Hardy III Giggie, John M., After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915, Rolinson, Mary G., Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927, and Dallam, Marie W., Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer .................................................................... Beryl Satter Harrison, Peter, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, and Livingstone, David, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins ........................................... Matthew Day

159

640

164

647

652

632

964

INDEX

Horsley, Richard, ed., Christian Origins, Burrus, Virginia, ed., Late Ancient Christianity, Krueger, Derek, ed., Byzantine Christianity, Bornstein, Daniel E., ed., Medieval Christianity, Matheson, Peter, ed., Reformation Christianity, Porterfield, Amanda, ed., Modern Christianity to 1900, and Bednarowski, Mary Farrell, ed., Twentieth-Century Global Christianity ......................................................................... Philip Jenkins

658

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Alexander, Dominic, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages .............................................................................. Laura Hobgood-Oster Alexander, Paul, Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God ................................................................................................ Joe Creech Appelbaum, Patricia, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era ...................... Dan McKanan Ball, Bryan W., The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley ...................................................................... David Parnham Bergunder, Michael, The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century ................................................................ Dale T. Irvin Bernardi, Peter J., Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism and Action Franc¸aise: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era .................................................... Richard F. Costigan, SJ Betz, John R., After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary ........................................................................ Kenneth Haynes Billingsley, Scott, It’s a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement ........................... Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews Blum, Edward J., and Jason R. Young, The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections ............................................. Curtis J. Evans Bourdua, Louise, and Anne Dunlop, eds., Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy .............................................. Joseph P. Byrne Bouteneff, Peter C., Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives ................................... Verna E. F. Harrison Bowes, Kim, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity ......................................................... Christine Shepardson Browning, Don S., and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, eds., Children and Childhood in American Religions ........................... W. Michael Ashcraft Bruce, Scott G., Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition c. 900 –1200 ........................... Constant J. Mews Burnham, Louisa A., So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc ..................................... Christine Caldwell Ames Burrus, Virginia, Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects .................................................................................. Judith Lieu

713 929 932 896 438

928 904 240 925 401 875 877 952 183 187 882

INDEX Burton, Janet, and Karen Sto¨ber, eds., Monasteries and Society in the British Isles in the Later Middle Ages ...................................... James M. Powell Byrnes, Joseph F., Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France ............................................. Edward J. Woell Callahan, Richard J., Jr., ed., New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase ............................... Michael Pasquier Campbell, Emma, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography ...................................... Nicole M. Leapley Cartwright, Jane, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales ..................................................................................... Beth Allison Barr Chandler, Andrew, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century: The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform, 1948–1998 ............................................................... William H. Petersen Chen, Carolyn, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience ...................................................... Jeff Wilson Clark, James G., The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism ...................................................................................... Sharon K. Elkins Clossey, Luke, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions ................................................................................... Thomas Worcester Cobb, L. Stephanie, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts ............................................. Colleen M. Conway Cohen, Charles L., and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America ................................................... Peter J. Wosh Cohen, Raymond, Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Groups Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine ......................... Simon Goldhill Cole, Andrew, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer .............................................................................. J. Patrick Hornbeck II Conser, William H., Jr., and Rodger M. Payne, eds., Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture ............................ Charles F. Irons Conway, Colleen M., Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity ................................................................. L. Stephanie Cobb Cooper, Kate, The Fall of the Roman Household ................. Dennis P. Quinn Corthell, Ronald, et al., eds., Catholic Culture in Early Modern England .............................................................................. Robert Trisco Costambeys, Marios, Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics, and the Abbey of Farfa, c. 700–900 ................................................................................ Kenneth Pennington Cothren, Michael, Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral ......................................... Mary Weitzel Gibbons Cummings, Kathleen Sprows, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era .................................................................................. Colleen McDannell Curran, Charles E., Catholic Moral Theology in the United States: A History ....................................................................... Aline H. Kalbian

965 399 421 423 890 892

440 942 396 687 873 470 232 678 463 379 880 901

886 189

924 720

966

INDEX

Darch, John H., Missionary Imperialists? Missionaries, Government and the Growth of the British Empire in the Tropics, 1860–1885 ........................................................................................ Allan Davidson Davis, Morris L., The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era .................................. Richard J. Callahan, Jr. Davis, Stephen J., Coptic Christology in Practice: Incarnation and Divine Participation in Late Antique and Medieval Egypt .............................................................................. Caroline T. Schroeder Decker, Rainer, and H. C. Erik Midelfort, trans., Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition ........................................................... Brian P. Levack D’Elia, John A., A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America ..... Kathryn Lofton Dichtl, John R., Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic ........................................... Michael Pasquier Dickson, Gary, The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory ........................................... Anne Llewellyn Barstow Durston, Alan, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 ............................. Michael A. Uzendoski Evangelisti, Silvia, Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 ............................................................................. Sherri Franks Johnson Farmer, Jared, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape ................................................................... Quincy D. Newell Fea, John, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America ................ Kerry Walters Ferrell, Lori Anne, The Bible and the People ........................................................ Franc¸ois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles Fitzgerald, Timothy, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories ................................ Kathryn Lofton Frykenberg, Robert Eric, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present ........................................................................ Arun W. Jones Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard, eds., Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia .................................. John D. Basil Garnett, Jane, et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives ................................................................................... Eileen Groth Lyon Giffords, Gloria Fraser, Sanctuaries of Earth, Stone, and Light: The Churches of Northern New Spain, 1530– 1821 .......................... Peter W. Williams Gonza´lez, Ondina E., and Justo L. Gonza´lez, eds., Christianity in Latin America: A History ................................................ Iain S. Maclean Gwynn, David M., The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the “Arian Controversy” ........................................................................................ Rebecca Lyman Hall, Amy Laura, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction .......................................... Margaret Bendroth

918 433

884

899 701 221 185 406 403 429 413 949 461 947 444 704 406 457

386 436

INDEX Hampton, Stephen, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I .............................................. Paul S. Seaver Hankins, Barry, American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement ................................ Lewis V. Baldwin Heal, Bridget, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 ............. David J. Collins, SJ Henold, Mary J., Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement ....................... Howell Williams Herrin, Judith, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire ........................................................................ Dorothy de F. Abrahamse Heyman, George, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict ....................................................................... Michael Whitby Hicks, Leonie V., Religious Life in Normandy, 1050—1300: Space, Gender and Social Pressure ............................................................. Sara Ritchey Humes, Edward, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul .......................................................... Jeffrey P. Moran Hur, Nam-lin, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti- Christianity, and the Danka System ................. Robert Entenmann Inboden, William, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment ................................................... Paul S. Boyer Irons, Charles F., The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia ........................................................................................... John B. Boles Jackson, Nicholas D., Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity: A Quarrel of the Civil Wars and Interregnum .................................................................................. William M. Abbott Jacob, W. M., The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680–1840 ................................................................ E. Brooks Holifield Kahlos, Maijastina, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360– 430 ......................................................................... Jeremy Schott Kalu, Ogbu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction ........... Dana L. Robert Kalu, Ogbu U., and Alaine Low, eds., Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities ...................... Frances S. Adeney Kaplan, Benjamin J., Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe .................................. Keith P. Luria Kidd, Thomas S., The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America ..................................................... Ava Chamberlain Kriebel, David W., Powwowing among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World ........................ Gary L. Ebersole Kosek, Joseph Kip, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy .................................................... John F. Piper, Jr. Lamb, Matthew L., and Matthew Levering, eds., Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition ................................................................... Maura Jane Farrelly Lambert, Frank, Religion in American Politics: A Short History ........................................................................................ Randall Balmer

967 689 473 191 938 178 173 674 706 208 935

419

409 213 384 475 940 195 216 449 930 442 716

968

INDEX

Lamont, William, Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652– 1979 ............................................................................... William H. Brackney Lesser, M. X., Reading Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography in Three Parts, 1729–2005 ....................................... David W. Bebbington Loud, G. A., The Latin Church in Norman Italy ................ Neslihan Senocak Lutz, Jessie Gregory, Opening China: Karl F. A. Gu¨tzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827–1852 ..................................................... Michael Lazich Mack, Phyllis, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism ...................................... Charles I. Wallace Macy, Gary, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West ....................................................... Constance H. Berman Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F., and Reid L. Neilson, eds., Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier ................................................................................. Randi Jones Walker Manchester, Laurie, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia .............................. J. Eugene Clay Martin, Dale B., Inventing Superstition from the Hippocratics to the Christians .............................................................................. Svetla Slaveva-Griffin McCafferty, John, The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633–1641 ....... William M. Abbott McGuckin, John Anthony, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture ................ Robert R. Phenix, Jr. Mitchell, Claire, Religion, Identity, and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief .......................... Edward J. K. Gitre Monroe, John Warne, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France ........................................... Bret E. Carroll Moore, Jonathan D., English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology .......................... Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. Morgan, D. Densil, Wales and the Word: Historical Perspectives on Religion and Welsh Identity .................................................. Marcella Biro Barton Murray, Bruce T., Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective .............. Eric Michael Mazur Music, David W., and Paul A. Richardson, “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story”: A History of Baptist Hymnody in North America ...... Paul Westermeyer Newman, Richard S., Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers ..... Dennis C. Dickerson O’Toole, James M., The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America ....................................................................................... Sharon M. Leon Parker, Charles H., Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age ......................................................... Howard Louthan Pereiro, James, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism .................................................................... Rowan Strong Phipps, William E., Supernaturalism in Christianity: Its Growth and Cure .............................................................................. Charles H. Lippy

211 693 390 225 906 180

432 230 381 206 454 237 427 203 251 244 718 909 468 903 227 246

INDEX Purkis, William J., Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c. 1095–c. 1187 ..................................................... Christopher Tyerman Ramsay, Jacob, Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam ................................ Jean Michaud Razzari Elrod, Eileen, Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography .............................. Randall M. Miller Reinis, Austra, Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519– 1528) .......................................... Carlos M. N. Eire Rivard, Derek A., Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion ..................................................... James A. Brundage Robert, Dana L., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 ..................................... Emma Wild-Wood Robinson, Edward J., Show Us How You Do It: Marshall Keeble and the Rise of Black Churches of Christ in the United States, 1914 –1968 ................................................................................ Dennis C. Dickerson Roeber, A. G., Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America ................. Katherine Carte´ Engel Rommen, Timothy, “Mek Some Noise”: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad ......................................................... Ennis B. Edmonds Rosell, Garth M., The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism ......... Darren Dochuk Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary .... Salvador Ryan Ruffin, J. Rixey, A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic ................................... Kirsten Fischer Scheck, Thomas P., Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen’s Commentary on Romans ................................. Robert J. Hauck Seat, Karen K., “Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women’s Missions and the American Encounter with Japan .......... Noriko Kawamura Ishii Shaw, Susan M., God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society ........................................................ Howell Williams Simpson, James, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents ........................................ Dale Walden Johnson Slatton, James H., W. H. Whitsitt: The Man and the Controversy ....................................................................................... Merrill Hawkins Smith, Christian, and Michael O. Emerson, Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money ................... Joel A. Carpenter Smith, John T., ‘A Victorian Class Conflict?’: Schoolteaching and the Parson, Priest and Minister, 1837–1902 ................................. D. W. Bebbington Snape, Michael, The Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, 1796– 1953: Clergy under Fire ..................................................................... Jonathan H. Ebel Spangler, Jewel L., Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century ............................................................................................ A. G. Roeber Spencer, Carole Dale, Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism; An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition .... R. Melvin Keiser

969 392 425 224 682 676 466

696 411 451 699 945 415 171 922 711 200 920 709 913 911

219 248

970

INDEX

Spicer, Kevin P., Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism .......................................................................................... John Cornwell Spier, Jeffrey, ed., Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art ................................................................................... Cherie Woodworth Starkie, Andrew, The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 ................................................................ Charles Wallace, Jr. Stjerna, Kirsi, Women and the Reformation ........... Mary Elizabeth Anderson Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700 –1850 .............................................................................................. John Wolffe Tutino, Stefania, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 ......................................................................... Robert Trisco Umble, Diane Zimmerman, and David L.Weaver-Zercher, eds., The Amish and the Media ...................................................... Kristy Nabhan-Warren Van Dam, Raymond, The Roman Revolution of Constantine ..................................................................................... Jeremy M. Schott van Rhijn, Carine, Shepherds of the Lord: Priests and Episcopal Statutes in the Carolingian Period ................................................. Thomas F. X. Noble Vromen, Suzanne, Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis ...... Robert M. Ehrenreich Walker, Ronald W., et al., Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy ........................................................................ Patrick Q. Mason Watkins, Carl S., History and the Supernatural in Medieval England ............................................................................. Jeffrey Burton Russell Webster, Charles, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and the Mission at the End of Time .............................................................................. Eric Lund White, Christopher G., Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1940 ................. Robert C. Fuller Wilkinson, Robert J., Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament ........................................................................................ Joseph P. Byrne Wilson, J. Matthew, ed., From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic ........................................... Mark Silk Worcester, Thomas, The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits ...................................................................................... Hilmar M. Pabel Wormald, Patrick, and Janet L. Nelson, eds., Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World .............................................................................. Geoffrey Koziol Yeager, Suzanne M., Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative ...... Timothy L. Stinson

235 669 692 681 215 198 447 175 672 698 915 394 685 694

193 242 458 387 894

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CONTENTS ARTICLES 731 Tormenting the Tormentors: A Reinterpretation of Eusebius of Vercelli’s Letter from Scythopolis Daniel A. Washburn

756 The Geography of the Monastic Cell in Early Egyptian Monastic Literature Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom

792 St. Francis in the Nineteenth Century Patricia Appelbaum

814 “Banned in Boston”: Moral Reform Politics and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice P. C. Kemeny

847 FORUM 873 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 955 BOOKS RECEIVED 962 INDEX

“St. Francis Preaching to the Birds” from Every Sunday: an Illustrated Journal of Choice Reading (Boston), 1870. Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at: journals.cambridge.org/chh