In 2002 Yale University Press published a major contribution to nineteenth-century British history, Frank M. Turner's John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion.Footnote ¹ As an engagement between one of that age's leading historians and one of its titanic figures, this was a book to whet the scholarly appetite. Turner's previous work included such seminal contributions to Victorian intellectual history as Between science and religion (1974), The Greek heritage in Victorian Britain (1981) and Contesting cultural authority (1993).Footnote ² In a dust-jacket endorsement, Boyd Hilton duly commented that ‘expectations for this book run high’, and added: ‘they are not disappointed, for this is his crowning achievement’. At more than 750 pages, yet confined to the Anglican and therefore pre-1845 Newman, this was therefore in every sense a major study, and unsurprisingly listed for the prestigious 2003 British Academy book prize. That Turner's biography was empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous was no less than expected. What made it particularly welcome to scholars of nineteenth-century British religious and intellectual culture was that it moved into terrain where those qualities are not ubiquitous: Tractarian, and in particular Newman, studies.

The kernel of Turner's argument was that Newman students have overwhelmingly approached their subject uncritically via his celebrated spiritual self-portrait in the Apologia pro vita sua of 1864, and duly distorted our understanding both of the situational character of the Oxford Movement, and of Newman's contemporary motives and conduct. In particular, Turner insisted, in taking on trust Newman's famous declamation in the Apologia that his ‘battle was with liberalism’,Footnote ³ historians have lost sight of the degree to which the early Oxford Movement was in fact animated by the threat from Evangelical religion. Writing decades later as a Roman Catholic, Turner argued, Newman had taken care to transmute the movement's character from an anti-Evangelical to an anti-liberal one in order to reassure the many Roman Catholics who had come to regard Newman himself as an ominously anti-authoritarian figure within the Catholic Church. This exaggeration of ‘Tractarian opposition to the interference with ecclesiastical affairs by the political liberals of the 1830s’, Turner suggested, was constructed in order to appeal to later Roman Catholics themselves ‘long subject to denunciation from national political figures’. From the time of the Apologia, therefore, ‘opposition to something called liberalism decades earlier served Newman well in all the quarters that concerned him most and especially in the Roman Catholic Church, where in 1879, on the occasion of receiving his cardinal's hat in Rome, he declared that his entire life had been a struggle against liberalism’.Footnote ⁴ Repudiating this characterisation of Newman's earlier religious life, of its notional internal coherence, and of a wider Tractarian demonology, Turner sought to show that at times the Anglican Newman was vulnerable, confused, contradictory, disingenuous, morbidly introspective and manipulative, an aggressive religious activist by whose often dazzling rhetoric posterity should not have been fooled. And in the course of recovering Newman's Anglican life, and in particular his motives for conversion, Turner went further than any previous biographer – including Geoffrey Faber, whose Oxford apostles of 1933 was the first to explore the possible undercurrents of homosexuality in the movement – in his speculations on Newman's psychology and sexuality, examining such factors as his father's bankruptcy and his sibling relationships, and conjecturing on the possibilities of Newman's misogyny and preference for male company, even his eating disorders, in the determination of his spiritual and confessional identity. The conclusion to emerge from these perspectives was that Newman's conversion, rather than the natural and inevitable course of a spiritual teleology which he mapped for posterity, is inexplicable without reference to a set of veiled and deeply personal motives, prominent among them an anxiety to preserve a quasi-monastic life in the company of young male admirers.

The book's significance was readily recognised in the first harvest of reviews in the non-specialist press. In the Guardian, the historian Tristram Hunt warned a lay audience that it was ‘dense’ and ‘heavy going’, but none the less ‘important’: Turner, he said, had gone ‘where even Strachey feared to tread’ and, in recovering Newman's Anglican life, exposed ‘a very different Cardinal Newman to [sic] that of Catholic lore or the artfully dissembling agenda of the Apologia’. More widely, Hunt recognised the originality and suggestiveness of Turner's claim that, in their aggressive assault on Protestant culture, Newman and the Tractarians may ultimately have done less to foment a spiritual resurgence of Anglo-Catholicism than to help create, in the author's words, ‘a late-century religious and cultural vacuum in the English-speaking world which secular forces would fill’.Footnote ⁵ In the Sunday Telegraph, and though (as we shall see) unsympathetic to many of Turner's conjectures, the prominent Catholic journalist Daniel Johnson acknowledged that it was his ‘merit … to have examined Newman the Tractarian in greater detail than anybody else’;Footnote ⁶ in the Irish Times, and though similarly defending Newman from its conclusions, Brian Cosgrove acknowledged that the book was ‘singularly impressive’ and ‘thought-provoking’, an ‘impressively incisive analysis’.Footnote ⁷ And in the Literary Review, A. N. Wilson wrote that Turner's book drew ‘the most detailed and magisterial picture of nineteenth-century English religious life’, duly recognising that it ‘revolutionises Newman studies’. In parting, Wilson added the single most perceptive remark to appear in any of the forty-odd reviews which the book was to garner. ‘It will be dismissed by those who do not understand its implications’, he anticipated, ‘as an attempt to cast a slur on the great man. In fact it does the opposite. It liberates him from the stranglehold of ecclesiasticism … and reveals a believable human psyche.’Footnote ⁸ Johnson was to be only the first of a swarm of reviewers to protest at any such construction of Newman. ‘Rome’, he intoned, ‘is at present considering his recognition as a saint.’Footnote ⁹ And there's the rub. As Wilson foresaw, scholarly admiration for Turner's portraiture would struggle to be heard amid the howls of execration from a lobby with a common interest: Newman's canonisation.

Scholarly admiration itself was abundant. Jeffrey Cox, for example, writing in the Historical Journal, judged Turner's ‘alternative story’ of Newman's early years – alternative, that is, to the self-fashioning of the Apologia – ‘a classic work of historical revisionism, based on contemporary published and unpublished texts that undermine a widely accepted point of view’. Cox recognised the irresistible empirical weight of Turner's demonstration that the young Newman was conflicted and contradictory, a ‘dirty fighter’ in ecclesiastical politics. Turner's feat was therefore to have constructed nothing less than ‘a new narrative of Newman's path to Rome’; Cox ultimately judged the book ‘an extraordinary achievement’.Footnote ¹⁰ In the Journal of Modern History, W. R. Ward too thought Newman a ‘blockbuster’ and a ‘notable achievement’: a ‘feast of scholarship … in which so many nails are hit firmly on the head’.Footnote ¹¹ Donald J. Dietrich, a theologian writing in The European Legacy, thought the book ‘scholarly, lucid, and definitive’; ‘Turner's methodology and attention to detail’, he wrote, ‘show how the history of theology should be written’.Footnote ¹² Peter Nockles, writing in Albion, although unsympathetic to Turner's conclusions, judged it on the basis of its ‘massive scholarship’ and ‘fertility of ideas’ a ‘monumental’ and ‘remarkable book’;Footnote ¹³ in The Tablet, David Newsome pronounced it ‘most impressively researched’.Footnote ¹⁴ In the American Historical Review, William Schoenl recognised that a consequence of Turner's ‘impressive research’ was that ‘any writer on the subject will henceforth have to take it into account’. Somewhat optimistically, especially given the reception which the book was to receive from a chorus of anglo- and Roman Catholic reviewers, Schoenl added: ‘there can be no more hagiography of Newman during his Tractarian years’.Footnote ¹⁵ Even within that chorus, some scholars acknowledged the magnum force of Turner's opus. James Pereiro, reviewing in Recusant History, styled it a ‘rich quarry’ from a wide range of neglected manuscript and printed sources: ‘he has done a service to the history of the Oxford Movement’, Pereiro wrote, ‘by calling historians' attention to neglected areas, and by opening new lines of research’.Footnote ¹⁶ In Anglican and Episcopal History, Christopher Zealley characterised the ‘extent of his research’ for the book as ‘undeniably impressive’.Footnote ¹⁷ And Richard J. Mammana, in The Living Church, an anglo-catholic Episcopalian journal, dubbed it a ‘close intellectual portrait … Turner is a master of his subject’. Mammana added: ‘This book will provoke strong disagreement, and hopefully enliven Newman studies as a whole in the process.’Footnote ¹⁸ The former, demonstrably, occurred in the aftermath of the publication of Turner's book; the latter, equally demonstrably, did not.

One of the first reviews of the book to appear, and the one which set the tone for much scandalised Catholic commentary thereafter, was that by Ian Ker in the Times Literary Supplement. Ker is a Roman Catholic priest and author of a reverential biography of Newman which suppressed and marginalised episodes which cast its subject in an unflattering light,Footnote ¹⁹ so his enlistment was at the very least mischievous and arguably unethical. In the last decade Ker has contended publicly and repeatedly for Newman's canonisation;Footnote ²⁰ putting Turner's Newman into his hands was like asking a committed creationist disinterestedly to appraise The origin of species. Ker duly penned a boisterously dismissive appraisal of the book, styling it ‘overweight’ – an oddly unselfconscious remark from the author of a 764-page biographyFootnote ²¹ – and ‘vitriolic’;Footnote ²² this was despite his own prior contributions in the field being generously recognised in Turner's acknowledgements.Footnote ²³ So deep is the apparent conviction that Newman studies ought properly to be confined to those in Catholic orders that Ker unblushingly took Turner to task for his lack of ‘objectivity’.Footnote ²⁴ Ker's own biography of Newman of 1988 has recently been reissued, presumably because its publisher sought to capitalise on the attention surrounding Newman's imminent beatification. It contained no internal revisions; Ker simply added a four-page ‘afterword’, where his role as Newman's vicar on earth was underlined by the statement that the 2001 miracle which had, by happy timing, qualified Newman for beatification, came about as the result of a Massachusetts deacon praying for Newman's intercession, in relief of a severe spinal disorder, after watching a television interview with Ker the previous year.Footnote ²⁵ The redoubtable medical board of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints having confirmed this intercession as miraculous, in April 2008, Newman's path to beatification seemed assured.

But then a difficulty emerged. When in October 2008 Newman's remains at Rednal were dug up by order of the Vatican, so that they could be venerated in accordance with Roman Catholic custom, the world was reminded that he had been buried with his close friend Ambrose St John. This generated, as Ker put it, ‘widespread speculation in the international media that there might have been some kind of homosexual relationship between the two friends’,Footnote ²⁶ though, in truth, the hysterical pitch of the denials from Newman's patrons – of which this afterword was a sample – did most to sustain press attention to this story. Ker made the right and reasonable point that the modern eye may easily misconstrue the platonic love of earlier generations, and commute the homosocial to the homosexual; he also insisted that Newman would hardly have been buried with St John had he thought that the gesture might be susceptible to the inference that he was gay. However, the very oddity, dissimilarity as well as scarcity of Ker's other examples of posthumous cohabitation – G. K. Chesterton's secretary asking for her ashes to be buried with both the Chestertons, and C. S. Lewis being buried with his brother – appeared only to underline the unusual nature of Newman's wishes. Moreover, his insistence that the 1957 publication of Newman's Autobiographical writings, as well as the Apologia, ‘made available all the evidence necessary to disprove any notion that Newman was homosexual in his inclinations’,Footnote ²⁷ was a sample of the ahistorical manner in which Newman studies mostly operates – content, in other words, to take Newman's utterances at face value and requiring no corroboration or contextualisation – against the very methodology of which Turner's biography was a protest.

As media interest swelled, the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Archbishop Angelo Amato, commissioned Ker to assemble a refutation of Newman's homosexuality in what is essentially the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, and which appeared on 3 September.Footnote ²⁸ Some of the material of the article in L'Osservatore was reproduced in the afterword to the second edition of Ker's Newman. Quite why a major academic press should have thought it appropriate to collaborate with this agenda is extraordinary; if this wasn't to cross the line between scholarship and polemic, what was? Certainly, it allowed Britain's leading Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Herald, soberly to declare that the claims of Newman's homosexuality had been ‘debunked in a new version of the definitive biography of him’.Footnote ²⁹

It was a striking foretaste of this international furore that one minor feature of Turner's portrait drew attention from Catholic reviewers out of all proportion to its importance in the book: his speculations on Newman's psychosexuality, made in the course of a short section in the middle of the book – ‘Monasticism, homosexuality, celibacy’ – and again in a few suggestive pages in the concluding section, ‘The path taken’. This treatment was therefore a proportionately tiny element of the biography – fewer than thirty pages out of a book of 740.Footnote ³⁰ One is bound to wonder how many reviewers actually read outside the chapters in which it featured: many of their copies fall open at these passages, one suspects, like the dirty bits of Chaucer in a school library. It was, moreover, notably cautious by the standards of the modern biographical genre; indeed, Turner would have been exposed to criticism from many in the broader audience which the book addressed had he not confronted a suggestion which was at least implicit in a great deal of contemporary commentary, and was raised explicitly some seventy years previously in Geoffrey Faber's Oxford apostles, which in places subjected Tractarianism's protagonists to Freudian analysis.Footnote ³¹ Highly original, suggestive and secular-minded, Faber's book has had an enduring notoriety among keepers of the Tractarian flame. The paradox of Faber's book is that, like Turner's, it is regarded as a deeply humane and even empathetic book by everyone except the parti-pris.

Turner's own assessment of Newman's possible homosexuality was therefore professionally imperative; in execution it was evidentially scrupulous, and tonally cautious. He stated plainly of Newman's sexuality that the evidence was ‘at best indecisive and the question not firmly resolvable’;Footnote ³² that ‘over the years all of Newman's comments about love and affection for men are just that – remarks about love and affection with no hint of sexual relation or contact’;Footnote ³³ that the ‘inner feelings so clearly distrusted by Newman could just as well have been heterosexual as homosexual’, or ‘may have just as much related to fears about his aggressiveness and anger’;Footnote ³⁴ and that there is ‘no evidence of open homosexual orientation’ in the Newman coterie.Footnote ³⁵ Yet the candidly speculative analysis in which these qualifications loomed so large provoked an almost comical symphony of protests from his Catholic reviewers, who jostled to denounce the book in what proved an academic portent of the wider 2008 furore surrounding Newman's exhumation. In his Sunday Telegraph review Daniel Johnson wrote that of all the biographer's slurs, ‘Most damaging of all, Turner devotes a long section to “Monasticism, homosexuality and celibacy” in which he speculates about the possible sexual motives underlying Newman's lifelong celibacy, his difficulties with girls, and his close, often tempestuous relationships with his male friends.’ A ‘long section’? It comprised precisely eleven pages, in percentage terms less than 1·5 per cent of the book's contents. No one who had read the remaining 98·5 per cent of the book would have thought it remotely necessary for Johnson to protest that ‘Newman and the best of his disciples were not merely young fogeys with kinky clothes and diets’ (a formulation, incidentally, which appears to suggest that the rest of them were), ‘but ardent in pursuit of the lost sanctity of the ancient Church’.Footnote ³⁶

Turner repeatedly underlined in the book, when raising the issue of Newman's sexuality, that ‘these comments are obviously speculative and tendentious’.Footnote ³⁷ But this most overt of qualifications, bizarrely, did not stop a swarm of reviewers from denouncing elements of the analysis specifically as ‘speculative’ and ‘tendentious’ (and sometimes ‘conjectural’ to boot); strikingly, this was not to repudiate the plausibility of the speculations themselves – an entirely legitimate and indeed critically necessary scholarly exercise – but to repudiate the very legitimacy of historical speculation itself, at least in Cardinal Newman's case. In this vein, and despite conceding that it was ‘copiously documented’, Ian Ker extrapolated from a fragment of the book to characterise it in its entirety as ‘speculative biography’;Footnote ³⁸ Peter Nockles adverted to the ‘speculative nature’ of Turner's arguments and his ‘tendentious attempt’ to question the basis of Newman's journey;Footnote ³⁹ John T. Ford, of the Catholic University of America, objected to Turner reflecting ‘on Newman's actions in conjectural ways’;Footnote ⁴⁰ Christopher Zealley, in Anglican and Episcopal History, pronounced Turner's interpretations at points ‘transparently tendentious’ and ‘wholly speculative’;Footnote ⁴¹ Sheridan Gilley, in the Church Times, protested that Turner's ‘speculation over Newman's sexual orientation’ occupied ‘12 continuous pages’;Footnote ⁴² Digby Anderson, a journalist and Anglican priest, objected four-fold to Turner's ‘speculations’, asking, where there was no evidence, ‘Why speculate?’ (answer: because where there is no direct evidence, that is what historians are compelled to do with the surrounding evidence);Footnote ⁴³ Stanley L. Jaki, a Benedictine priest writing in the US Catholic magazine The New Oxford Review, objected to some of the chapters' ‘tendentious thrust’;Footnote ⁴⁴ James J. Buckley, a professor of theology at a Jesuit private university, retorted to Turner's acknowledgement that some of the commentary was ‘speculative and tendentious’ with the apparently self-sufficient refutation, ‘Yes, it is’;Footnote ⁴⁵ Lawrence S. Cunningham, a Catholic theologian at the Catholic University of Notre Dame, objected to the book's ‘tendentiously’ written character;Footnote ⁴⁶ the Jesuit theologian Edward T. Oakes denounced Turner's ‘empty speculations’ and ‘farrago of subjunctive speculation’;Footnote ⁴⁷ and George W. Rutler, a Catholic priest (converted from Anglicanism), splenetically summarised Turner's hypothesis on Newman's thoughts towards his deceased sister as ‘May have. May have. May have.’Footnote ⁴⁸ This extraordinarily excitable preoccupation with a tiny fraction of a long and rich book was therefore at the very least naïve and uncomprehending of the character and purpose of the book, and at worst – given Turner's explicit and reiterated qualifications – downright dishonest. But thus was the book early placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for the Catholic faithful.

Of course much of this was concern for Newman's reputation masquerading as concern for the proprieties of historical method. Sometimes the conviction was made explicit that Newman, uniquely above other historical figures, should be placed almost literally above such conjectures, which are the pith, stuff and purpose of biography. Jeffrey von Arx, a Jesuit writing in Commonweal, recognised much merit in Turner's attempt ‘to place the young Newman in context’ and conceded that Newman's life yielded ‘rich material for psychologizing’, but protectively placed him ‘beyond analysis’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Ian Ker led a number of reviewers in denouncing Turner's speculations as ‘tasteless’:Footnote ⁵⁰ Peter Nockles thought that Turner's speculations on Newman's ‘body-hating’ and misogyny ‘overstepped the bounds of good taste’;Footnote ⁵¹ Sheridan Gilley thought that speculation had gone ‘over into bad taste’;Footnote ⁵² Stanley L. Jaki held many of Turner's remarks ‘in bad taste’ and ‘unsavory’.Footnote ⁵³ Keith Beaumont, a priest at the French Oratory in Paris, writing in Etudes Newmaniennes, thought that Turner should have shown ‘un peu de modestie et de retenue’.Footnote ⁵⁴ John Richard Orens, reviewing in The Anglican Catholic, the organ of an eponymous ‘Continuing Anglican’ sect, imputed his hypotheses to a ‘half-baked Freudianism’ and thought them ‘unpleasant’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Horizons, Lawrence S. Cunningham dismissed the book as ‘infected with the psycho-history virus’ and some of its suggestions as ‘odious’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Christopher Zealley thought Turner ‘unusual for a recent contributor in that he appears to have no denominational axe to grind’, that he had achieved ‘a rare balance’ in his narrative of the Oxford Movement, and that his ‘evaluations of texts can be original and thought-provoking’, yet somehow that his ruminations on Newman were variously ‘cynical’, ‘bizarre’, ‘crude’, ‘eccentric’, culpable of ‘exaggeration’ and ‘reductionism’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the National Review, George W. Rutler thought Turner's potentially ‘challenging exercise in revisionism’ undermined by his joining ‘the louche company of psychobiographers’. Rutler consoled himself that ‘no Pope will care about the warnings of the John Hay Whitney professor of history’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Needless to add, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History might console himself that no serious student of nineteenth-century British history will care very much about the pope's views on the subject.

This watching brief for Newman's character, the issue of beatification (and higher) often in the background, lay behind the frequent – and in terms of serious historical biography, the distinctly odd – criticism that Turner was insufficiently sympathetic to his subject. Much of this, of course, derived from what can only be regarded as the different values of author and critic, most of whom subscribe to religious creeds which proscribe certain forms of conduct or sexuality as sinful. When the Jesuit Edward T. Oakes styled Turner a ‘scrupulously liberal academic’, it was manifestly in context not meant as a compliment.Footnote ⁵⁹ This projected the conduct or sexuality of a historical subject out of the realms of simple biographical interpretation and into those of perceived moral judgement, so that what most readers would regard as ingenuous explorations of Newman's possible deceptions, self-deceptions, homosexuality, or anorexia, became ‘charges’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this vein, Ian Ker took Turner to task for ‘the venom with which he writes against the Tractarians and especially Newman’,Footnote ⁶¹ while Stanley Jaki indicted Turner for ‘colossal mischief’ and ‘an act of libel’, and thought that Turner (like Charles Kingsley, as provocateur of the Apologia) ‘owed a public retraction of his claim that Newman was insincere’. Jaki thought one of the book's principal deficiencies that it exuded ‘No love, not even some sympathy, for Newman’;Footnote ⁶² in the Church Times, Sheridan Gilley likewise mourned that the book was ‘packed with scholarship and information, but not a line that is written with love’;Footnote ⁶³ James Pereiro thought Turner's reductions from Newman's psychology ‘indefensible’;Footnote ⁶⁴ Peter Nockles felt that ‘Newman just cannot win’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Of course, that pre-existing Newman biography was overwhelmingly written out of love for a perennially winning subject was the very basis of its crippling limitation for historians.

Confronted with Turner's multiply uncongenial interpretation of Newman, and despite often awkwardly acknowledging the distinction and credentials of the author, a succession of Catholic reviewers commended alternative, approved biographies to a fretful readership. James J. Buckley, writing in The Weekly Standard, acknowledged Turner's status as ‘one of the premier historians of Victorian England’, and that the biography was ‘extremely useful in laying out the historical conditions in which the Englishman's conversion occurred’ – the very respect, of course, in which so many other, theologically derived, biographies of Newman are notably deficient. Buckley therefore judged the book ‘quite original’ in its ‘way of questioning the convert’: ‘Turner’, he wrote, ‘offers us resources for rediscovering the radical Newman’. But he none the less faithfully concluded that an accompanying book under review, the in every way slighter, 168-page Newman in the Outstanding Christian Thinkers series, was the ‘more accurate reading of Newman's theology and intellectual life’. This was by the Jesuit theologian and Catholic cardinal, Avery Dulles.Footnote ⁶⁶ In a similar vein, condemning Turner's unprecedentedly broad portrait as ‘narrow’ in Horizons, Lawrence S. Cunningham steered interested parties instead to the late Vincent Ferrer Blehl's Pilgrim journey: John Henry Newman, 1801–1845 of 2001, since it operated ‘more with the hermeneutics of trust’.Footnote ⁶⁷ It certainly did: Blehl, a Jesuit priest, was the official ‘Postulator of the Cause’ of Newman's canonisation and in that role author of the spiritual curriculum vitae of Newman which was submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sourly reviewing Turner in the Catholic Historical Review – which, symptomatically of the wider problem of inveterate partisanship in the reception of the book, is a Catholic review of history, rather than a review of Catholic historyFootnote ⁶⁹ – John T. Ford held that Ian Ker's John Henry Newman was the ‘definitive biography’. This was on the grounds that it was a ‘portrait of Newman as he would have wanted to be painted’, which is a remarkable criterion by which to measure even the validity, never mind the definitiveness, of any historical interpretation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ker's own review insisted that it was improper of Turner to regard the Apologia or Newman's letters as ‘unreliable’.Footnote ⁷¹ In the same fashion, Jaki asserted the superiority of the historical interpretations of ‘the Catholic Newman, whose memory ought to be trusted more than Turner's’,Footnote ⁷² a principle which if upheld would essentially annul all historical inquiry.

Whilst its numerous critics conceived of the book as undermined by Turner's lack of confessional empathy, astonishingly few acknowledged the self-evident counter-argument that their common defence of Newman was itself invalidated by dint of often intense personal sympathy. One hostile reviewer, John Richard Orens, did concede of the High-Church tradition which he was addressing that ‘we have enveloped the Oxford Movement in a hagiographical haze’;Footnote ⁷³ though ultimately also critical of Turner's conclusions, Christopher Zealley acknowledged that ‘Roman Catholics had dominated Newman studies since the upsurge of academic interest in the 1960s’ and that in consequence, as he nicely put it, ‘it would be naïve to presume that studying Newman came closer to being an innocent historical enterprise in the later twentieth century than it had been in the nineteenth’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Recent pre-Turner biographies, as Paul H. Friesen put it in the Dalhousie Review, were ‘modern and scholarly but certainly not beyond prejudice’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Turner's introduction argued that Newman's Apologia had been too successful in deflecting attention from the author-subject's Protestant life, for ‘the details of his life, thought, and publications in the Church of England afterward received at best limited independent investigation’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The key word here, of course, was ‘independent’. Newman studies remains overwhelmingly the preserve of the theologically rather than historically trained, overwhelmingly in Roman Catholic institutions, and overwhelmingly in Roman Catholic orders. It was in this vein that Digby Anderson thought it ‘good to see the self-satisfied Newman appreciation chorus disrupted’,Footnote ⁷⁷ that Tristram Hunt thought it time Newman was exposed to a ‘debunking’,Footnote ⁷⁸ and that Gerald Bray applauded its ‘detailed dissection of the Newman legend’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But the proper defence of Turner's book is emphatically not the simple and instinctive one thus inevitably tendered by some reviewers: that so many books have been written about Newman by anglo- and Roman Catholics who love him, that it is time for one by a Protestant or secularist who might not. For a start, this reviewer has no idea whether Frank M. Turner regards himself as either of those things; Catholic reviewers – which is to say, nearly all reviewers – overwhelmingly supposed that the book was premised on an antecedent sectarian hostility to Newman because they could not otherwise account for a less than pious interpretation.Footnote ⁸⁰

Rather, the necessary defence of Turner's Newman is much more fundamental: that it is a work of history. It was therefore written for a purpose which in most cases his reviewers literally could not comprehend, because they were not engaged in the tasks of historical teaching and writing. There are, it ought to go without saying, numerous legitimate critical reflections which might be made of Turner's biography, as with any piece of historical writing. But since only a tiny minority of reviewers broke out of a preoccupation with the defence of Newman's character, and as often, the promotion of his sanctity, into the realms of legitimate criticism, there never ensued any serious debate of the interpretative questions which the book merited. Perhaps the most obvious of these was the sustainability of Turner's central and abiding distinction between the anti-liberalism which Newman – and, following him, scores of later chroniclers and celebrants – held to characterise the Oxford Movement, and the anti-Evangelicalism which Turner insisted was paramount. Even if Newman might be shown to have elevated the ‘battle’ with ‘liberalism’ in the Apologia, that is to say, it could be argued that he was simply using idioms which had greater resonance in the 1860s than the 1830s (and moreover that Newman had previously shown little disposition to please the Vatican). Turner argued that the Catholic Newman exaggerated Tractarian opposition to political liberalism in the 1830s, since that appealed both to later anglo-catholics who deplored state interference, and to later Roman Catholics oppressed by the censures of liberal politicians.Footnote ⁸¹ But it could be countered that this was itself authentically the context in which Tractarianism was forged. In this vein, Jeffrey Cox was one of several commentators to retort that Turner's substitution of ‘Evangelicalism’ for ‘liberalism’ was an oversimplification which failed to recognise how often Tractarians used Evangelicalism ‘as a metaphor for the broader ills of modern society’.Footnote ⁸² Evangelicalism, in other words, might be conceived as but one of the species of liberalism, and simply its most obvious manifestation in European theology; for a High-Church Oxford don of the 1830s to attack Evangelicalism was therefore simply to attack liberalism at its closest quarter.Footnote ⁸³

There are other, ancillary, questions which might legitimately have been or occasionally were raised of Turner's thesis: that even if accepting the crucial, central distinction between liberalism and Evangelicalism, there remains plenty of evidence for the authenticity of the Anglican Newman's anti-liberalism;Footnote ⁸⁴ that his fairly monolithic treatment of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism reifies it, or imposes upon it a false homogeneity;Footnote ⁸⁵ that key departures such as Newman's theory of development had an earlier gestation than Turner allows;Footnote ⁸⁶ that an aggressive dichotomy between Tractarianism and Evangelicalism can obscure the spiritual or sentimental affinities between these movements (a perception pre-eminently owed to Yngve Brilioth and pursued by Elisabeth Jay and many others since);Footnote ⁸⁷ that the preoccupation with Evangelicalism can obscure Newman's and Tractarianism's often startling and more striking animus towards the old High-Church party, or Hackney Phalanx; or that Turner excessively projects Newman's idiosyncracies onto the wider Oxford Movement and therefore in some respects misrepresents the latter. One imagines that Turner might have welcomed the chance to debate his interpretations in such historical terms as these, but they were altogether marginal to a commentary engaged in the antecedent task of Newman's defence. Tellingly, very few critics attempted to engage with Turner's scholarship outside the speculative fragments to which they objected. Ian Ker made the remarkable claim that the book ‘had very little time for modern secondary sources’,Footnote ⁸⁸ which provoked Turner to do the maths and reply to the TLS indignantly comparing his ‘seventy-nine pages of single-spaced footnotes to recent secondary scholarship and to the most extensive array of early Victorian manuscript and printed materials available in any study of the Anglican Newman’ with Ker's own biography, which had provided ‘thirteen citations to scholarship after 1950, with three of those being to his own work’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Few of those who write on Newman, and therefore almost none of Turner's critics, are professional historians, in the simple sense of being tenured in a university history department. Most are either academic theologians or priests, and many are both. Clerical interest in a figure such as Newman is hardly surprising, but it remains true of the Oxford Movement in general and of Newman studies in particular that, to an unusual degree, its literature is dominated by confessionally sympathetic clergymen, who duly lack either the volition or the ability to contextualise their writing in the wider historical literature of nineteenth-century Britain. The recent Cambridge companion to John Henry Newman, for example, which one might have expected, given its introductory purpose, to reflect wider perspectives on Newman's historical importance, was co-edited by Ian Ker. Of the thirteen contributors, not one was in a university history department; ten were Catholic priests (half of them Jesuits), including a cardinal and a monsignor.Footnote ⁹⁰ Such a book is bound to be consulted by those looking for bibliographical direction; Turner's biography, unarguably the most important to appear since 1988 and arguably in the last fifty years, was not referenced once. Moreover, all its authors to cite the Apologia referred to Oxford's Svaglic edition, published nearly half a century ago in 1967, rather than to Yale's major new edition of 2008 which supplanted it. The latter has a 115-page editorial introduction, separate prefaces to sections of the material, and substantial explanatory footnotes throughout. Its prohibition was not accidental: the editor was Frank M. Turner.Footnote ⁹¹ Sheridan Gilley's opening essay on Newman's ‘Life and writings’ faithfully directed the further reader to the biographies or studies of Dessain (1966), Gilley (1990), Ker (1988) and Merrigan (1990), with no mention of Turner's Newman.Footnote ⁹² Thomas L. Sheridan's essay on Newman and ‘Justification’ scrutinised Newman's early Evangelicalism, then his ‘gradual rejection’ and the formulation of a position defined against it; this was the very motif of Turner's study, yet not a single reference was made to it.Footnote ⁹³ It is one thing for Newman studies to exist as a coterie of like-minded celebrants dedicated to his legacy or indeed his prospects for canonisation, and subsisting on a wholly self-referential tradition. But it is quite another for its principals to be entrusted with introductory and survey texts on Newman, from major academic publishing houses and intended for a much wider scholarly and student audience, wherein major reinterpretations such as Turner's are quietly embargoed.

Since they operate by the standard of his sanctity rather than importance, what Newman's custodians fail to understand is that Newman might be shown to have been slightly or occasionally self-deluding, egotistical, mischievous with the historical record, misogynistic, latently homosexual, or any number of things – and yet remain of colossal historical importance, a giant or genius of a man. A modest earlier attempt to construe Newman three-dimensionally without in any way diminishing his importance was this writer's article in these pages in 1999, ‘Newman, the Tractarians, and the British Critic’, which recovered Newman ‘at his most Machiavellian’ in wresting control of that periodical from its High-Church patrons, and demonstrated the brazen mendacity of his later claims to the contrary.Footnote ⁹⁴ As was underlined elsewhere, ‘the figure who emerges from this episode is a less pious – and more interesting – one than that of biographical convention’;Footnote ⁹⁵ the point was that a sense of Newman's contemporary importance is only enhanced if his extra-spiritual dimensions are integrated. But of course, a historiography which seeks to render Newman human ultimately has no points of intersection with a tradition which regards him as very much more than that.

The great ensuing irony of Turner's prohibition by the Newman industry is that, to anyone except the Newmaniac reader, his Newman will be construed as a major testament to its subject's historical importance. The writer A. N. Wilson perceptively foresaw that it would be ‘dismissed by those who do not understand its implications as an attempt to cast a slur on the great man’ and insisted that ‘In fact it does the opposite.’Footnote ⁹⁶ The journalist Digby Anderson recognised that Newman emerges from the book ‘as more impressive because more human’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The historian Jeffrey Cox recognised that Turner's speculations on Newman's emotional life and sexuality came from ‘a deep intellectual and emotional engagement with Newman’ and ‘does nothing to diminish Newman's stature’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Any reader concerned with Newman's intellectual and theological gifts, and his consequent historical status – as opposed to his credentials for beatification – would be wholly baffled by the notion, ubiquitous in Turner's Catholic critics, that he had somehow belittled his subject. Turner unambiguously pronounces Newman a ‘religious and theological genius’ and beyond that ‘one of the foremost sage voices of late-Victorian intellectual as well as religious life’; his The idea of a university ‘the most influential work on the liberal education in the English language’ and the Apologia the ‘most effective of all Victorian autobiographies’; and therefore ultimately someone through whose ‘gift for the English language … changed the religious and spiritual life of two major communions of the modern Christian world and beyond’.Footnote ⁹⁹ With enemies such as this, the disinterested reader might reflect, who needs friends? Yet, wholly preoccupied with the issue of Newman's moral character as they were, few critics were able to recognise both that the author's very engagement with his subject sprang from, and its exposition only enhanced, a conviction of Newman's towering importance: Christopher Zealley's acknowledgement that Turner's ‘assessment of Newman's importance in the history of Western ideas is flattering in the extreme’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ was at once rare, but perhaps telling in its concern with the ‘flattering’ or otherwise of a cause.

Few of Turner's critics seemed even cognisant of what was in most cases a lack of disciplinary equipment with which to judge the book. Writing in Theology Today, Frederick D. Aquino expressed the usual reservations towards ‘Turner's psychohistorical reading’ but acknowledged that the book was ‘thorough, well researched, and engaging’ and that it ‘requires anyone interested in Newman studies to revisit the connection between Newman and nineteenth-century British evangelicalism’. Properly conscious of his disciplinary limitations, he added: ‘I leave it to historians to debate the details of Turner's biography.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the theological journal The Expository Times, Michael Purcell did a comparably faithful job in reviewing the book, but acknowledged that he was ‘not a historian by nature or inclination’ and that this was ‘a book for scholars (and historians)’.Footnote ¹⁰² This was a creditable lead which, alas, too few theological reviewers followed. In quite the other direction, Ian Ker held Turner incapable of understanding ‘complex theological issues’, without reflecting how many in Newman studies are capable of understanding complex historical ones.Footnote ¹⁰³ Mary Eleanor Hill acknowledged that Turner was ‘a cultural historian of standing’, though ‘not a theologian’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ yet if we are to treat Newman as more than a theologian, and a figure of major cultural importance – as his own modern champions insist him to have been – then it is an extra-theological assessment of the man which is so very necessary. Similarly, Lawrence S. Cunningham wrote that in theology ‘Turner is an amateur’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ which would have been balanced if accompanied by the concession that in history Turner is a professional, and Cunningham himself – and the majority of Turner's other detractors – amateurs. This was a consistent refrain among reviewers of Turner who were theologians – which is to say, the great majority. Keith Beaumont's review in Etudes Newmaniennes was faithful in its précis of the book and fairer-minded than most in its rehearsal of Turner's recovery of Tractarianism's historical context. But in his closing criticisms of Turner's characterisation of Newman, Beaumont made pronouncements on the limits of historical inquiry which no historical biographer could accept. Turner, he wrote, ‘est incapable de comprendre les profondeurs de la vie intérieure de Newman’,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ but this was not (at least apparently) due to some personal limitation of the author – it was due to the inherent shortcomings of historical inquiry itself: ‘l'historien, en tant que tel, n'a aucun accès à ces données de la vie intérieure d'un homme’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Beaumont closed the review with the insistence that ‘l'historien se doit, par souci d'honnêteté intellectuelle, de reconnaître les limites de son enterprise’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ without recognising that the Catholic (clerical) theologian needs equally, as a matter of intellectual honesty, to recognise the boundaries of his own.

What is at stake, therefore, in the fuss over Turner's Newman, is not the plausibility or otherwise of his interpretation. It far transcends that. What is at stake is the legitimacy and remit of historical inquiry itself, when confronted with a vocal interest group whose principles and prejudices are seldom acknowledged. The difference between the book and the great majority of its critics, therefore, is not between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor even religion and secularism, but between history itself and hagiography – a difference not of prejudice, but of methodology. Herbert Butterfield warned as long ago as 1931 that ‘The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Postmodern scepticism over the attainability of such a thing as objectivity in historical scholarship should not be permitted to legitimate the subordination of history to the agendas of the present. In these terms, future generations will assuredly regard Turner's Newman – however plausible or otherwise they might find it – as a major work, and its shrill detractors simply a contemporary echo of the odium theologicum which is the subject of the book.