Over the past fifty years there has been a great deal of interest in how nineteenth-century Britons viewed their relationship with the area they knew as the “Holy Land.” It has long been recognized that much of the British interest in the region was driven by religious motivations, whether in terms of Palestine's history, romantic appeal, or purported role in the fulfilment of prophecy. At the same time, this interest clearly meshed with imperial concerns surrounding British influence in the tottering Ottoman Empire, including preserving access routes to India. As a result, much of the scholarship has focused on the ways in which perceptions of the Holy Land in the period represented a species of Orientalism. Amanda M. Burritt's new book, Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, attempts to add some nuance to this position, developing the more complicated position influentially set out in Eitan Bar-Yosef's Holy Land in English Culture (2003). Where Bar-Yosef emphasized the way in which English representations of Palestine reflected an idealized view of England itself, Burritt emphasizes the importance of a genuine interest and focus on the land.

At the center of this book is Burritt's claim that artistic representations of the Holy Land were key in forming British attitudes toward Palestine. These artworks developed against a background of internal church controversy, a desire to provide support for the historicity of scripture, and increasingly affordable and accessible travel to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Yet Burritt is clear that her book should not be considered “art history” as such—rather, she uses the lens of art to explore wider cultural concerns. For Burritt, “a new Protestant visual rhetoric developed based on personal experience of the Holy Land” (3). This enabled a concept of Protestant “pilgrimage” to emerge, one based on sacred geography rather than on sacred sites.

Burritt examines this through case studies of the work and life of three notable artists: David Roberts, David Wilkie, and William Holman Hunt. Each developed different emphases. Roberts's paintings focused on the physical land and its topography, offering subscribers to his popular lithographs the opportunity to walk, figuratively speaking, in Jesus's footsteps. Wilkie emphasized the development of what he called in his journals “Scripture painting,” stressing the historical and cultural accuracy of his paintings as a corrective to the imaginative rendering of Jewish history in the renaissance masters. While also expressing an interest in historical accuracy, the later Holman Hunt was just as interested in the subtle spiritual messages of his paintings. Burritt argues that he crafted finely honed typological images, drawing on established techniques from Victorian preaching and biblical hermeneutics.

Burritt is adept at introducing nuance to scholarly discussions that are too often rooted as much in present political realities in Palestine as the nineteenth-century context. While openly acknowledging the importance of imperialism for British artists and writers, she also pushes the discussion beyond a simplistic presentation of orientalism. The artists she examines were inconsistent—capable of expressing racist and colonialist ideas about the people they met at some times, while at others producing sympathetic cultural studies of their subjects. One of the book's major strengths is the emphasis Burritt places on contextualizing her sources. The way in which the British artists she examines described local culture to patrons, funders, or politicians often differed markedly from what they wrote in their journals or to their families. They tailored their observations to their audience. Likewise, their art was motivated not simply by ideological concerns. These artists were also working to the demands of the marketplace. Although their artistic decisions have sometimes been read ideologically (for example, Roberts's reluctance to paint individuals in the Holy Land as a dismissal of the relevance of non-Europeans), they also need to be interpreted in the context of the individual artist's wider work (Roberts struggled with painting figures, and he showed the same reticence in painting his native Scotland).

While overall Burritt's argument is convincing, there are areas where she might have developed her points further. The careful contextual source analysis of Roberts and Wilkie's writings is less apparent in the discussion of Holman Hunt, whose statements are treated less critically than are those of Wilkie and Roberts. Burritt often bases the contextual material about internal disputes within English Christianity, particularly when it deals with science, faith, and doubt, on dated secondary sources rather than engaging with more recent work. The same applies to the sections on biblical typology and hermeneutics in the later chapters, which only scratch the surface of the background and importance of this form of interpretation in nineteenth-century Protestantism. At times, there are also issues with the book's structure. For example, the two chapters on Holman Hunt feel like one large chapter split down the middle without clear signposting as to why. The frequency of subheadings (sometimes every two or three pages) can also sometimes impede the flow of the argument.

Nonetheless, these editorial issues are minor. Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century offers a helpful new way to look at the relationship between nineteenth-century Britain and the Holy Land. It is interesting that many of Burritt's observations about attitudes toward the land resemble those traced in Aron Engberg's recent ethnography of Christian Zionist volunteers in twenty-first-century Jerusalem, Walking on the Pages of the Word of God (2020). Burritt's book will therefore be of interest not only to students and scholars of art, religion, or colonialism in the nineteenth century, but also to those looking at the roots of contemporary Christian attitudes toward Israel and Palestine.