Modern British church history has tended to fall into one of three quite distinct categories of scholarship – intellectual or theological history, institutional history and the social history of religion. In this ground-breaking book, Frances Knight effectively unites all three, in the process unlocking genuinely original insights into much-neglected aspects of English religion in the 1890s and 1900s.

Knight argues that scholarship has tended to play down or ignore the relationship between the new mood of aestheticism that swept through literary, artistic and elite culture in the period, especially in London, and contemporary expressions of religion. Although many Christians were appalled at the moral implications of the new fashions exemplified by figures such as Pater, Wilde, Beardsley and Symons, in practice Christian responses were manifold and varied. Even the impatience of many of the fin de siècle artists with Victorian sexual attitudes was not altogether without its defenders amongst church leaders. The ‘long’ 1890s, Knight suggests, was a ‘decisive decade’ (p. 3) in which challenges to older views of Christian morality and behaviour began to gain ground, anticipating twentieth-century developments. A new appreciation of the significance of art, and of its theological potential, fused with radical experiments and perspective in social Christianity across the spectrum of Christian belief, though the aesthetic of Catholicism – in both its Roman and Anglican forms – proved especially appealing.

The argument, stated thus, is important enough in encouraging scholars to step away from the simple polarity of religious respectability and bohemian life still encountered in some discussions of the period. But the originality of this book lies as much in the method as it does in the argument itself. Taking a single decade – albeit a ‘long’ one – this way, and concentrating on the theme of church reactions to fin-de-siècle culture, enables Knight to cover a very diverse range of evidence, evoking unexpected and generative comparisons between culture and religion. In the first part of the book, a sequence of chapters surveys diverse artistic and literary streams of the period, drawing attention to persistent religious themes and outcomes. Even decadence, it seems, frequently had religious undertones – something especially evident in the apparent affinity between aspects of homosexual culture and Anglo-Catholicism. In the second part, Knight turns the lens around, and looks more directly at religious contexts, including especially the religious life of London, and social Christianity. Here again she uncovers a variety of unexpected connections, not always directly to the artistic world of the fin-de-siècle as such, but rather to manifestations of a similar impatience with the inherited rigidities of mid-Victorian orthodoxy. The roots of Christian feminism can be identified in part in that impulse. Knight's discussion of familiar names such as Stewart Headlam, Charles Spurgeon, W. T. Stead, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, William Booth, P. T. Forsyth and Percy Dearmer is threaded through with references to literary and cultural figures, and brings to light a common (though hardly monolithic) interest in art as a form of religious expression.

Knight's immersion in the literature of this period, and in the critical reception of it, thus enriches our understanding of the religious world of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and helps us to grasp how it mutated into the seemingly very different religious culture of the early to mid-twentieth century. Some aspects of this have been written about before, not least by Hugh McLeod. But Knight is the first scholar to have attempted such a radical fusion of cultural and religious history. Some may feel that her overall interpretation of the period is a little too optimistic in tone: one suspects that her sympathies lie particularly with those who looked forward hopefully into the twentieth century, rather than those who perceived British Christianity to be on the verge of a precipice. There may, then, be somewhat understated themes here – growing signs of institutional collapse, fears about the future prospects of Christian mission, and the sense of a ‘crisis’ of Christian theology about which, for example, Mark Chapman has written. One may also wonder just how much Knight's perspective would need to shift if greater attention were to be paid to the cultural life of the provinces and regions outside the metropolis. But this is really to ask Knight to write another book. What we have in this account is itself a remarkable scholarly achievement, and one that will undoubtedly help to change perceptions of the religious world of the late nineteenth century.