The heart of this book is to demonstrate that Catholics, even in the age of the Counter Reformation, have “maintained traditions of belief and behavior not through single-minded intransigence but by embracing flexibility and change” (4). This flexibility can further be characterized as a “prolonged oscillation” between “accommodation” and “struggles for control” (11). Nathan Mitchell uses the rosary to carry this idea because it has been able to “absorb reframings of reform, representation, ritual, religious identity, and devotions” (3). The consistent approach is to attempt to “reframe” these categories of early modern Catholicism, as five of the six chapter titles indicate.
Mitchell uses Anne Winston-Allen's Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) to launch his reflections, beginning with the period 1585–1610. But this book is no mere extension of Winston-Allen's work into the Reformation, for Mitchell ambitiously mobilizes art historical, standard liturgical, and several devotional texts proper to each period he examines as he brings the meanings of the rosary into the present. For example, the book sees a commonality in the use of the rosary during the Counter Reformation with how art historians have interpreted the genius of Caravaggio—both the devotion and the artist create a “simple and clear spirituality accessible to everyone” (55; quoting Giuseppe Olmi and Paolo Prodi).
Mitchell analyzes Caravaggio at great length, and he draws not only upon modern art historians, but also upon Gabriele Paleotti's interpretation of Trent's decree on sacred images. This man was the reforming bishop of Bologna, and Mitchell nods, too, to Charles Borromeo's “Two Books of Instruction Concerning Church Building” (1577, p. 37). Other painters include Jan van Eyck and Pieter Aertsen (d. 1575), whose paintings such as The Meat Stall “redefine the relation between religious image and the Christian's daily life in the world” (185).
Because of parallels with Caravaggio, Mitchell introduces the mystic Sor Maria de Jesús de Ágreda (d. 1665) as evidence for post-reformation vernacular religious practice and an early modern and distinctive self-awareness. This, in turn, contrasts with Thomas More's “nonmodern view of self-hood” (148). The idea of a new subjectivity in the later years of the post-Reformation depends on the way print culture replaced oral, and this scholarship, too, is summarized.
This reviewer had never heard of Sor Maria de Jesús. As is often the case with his lapidary column in Worship, “The Amen Corner,” Doctor Mitchell brings under examination topics and texts that seldom fit into the standard conceptual schemas. Passages on the medieval Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries provide deep background and a certain “flavor” on ritually expressed attitudes toward the Mother of God, but such an excursus may prove too much for a scholar more interested in the rosary itself or in the Counter Reformation. In the same vein, Mitchell quotes Thomas Merton on properly disinterested prayer, and then discounts Merton as member of the religious elite as a Trappist monk. I should have preferred, then, that Merton not intrude as this passage deflects from the main point (218–19). Still, a compendious book that mentions an ancient hymn of Ethiopian Christians (‘Anqasa Berhan), the genre of Rosencranzbilder, Erasmus, the Battle of Lepanto, Queen Elizabeth I, Philip Neri, Louis Richeome, Leibniz, Charles Dickens, the Plenary Councils of Baltimore, devotion of the Holy Face of Christ, Jean Delumeau, Karl Rahner, and the Texas Department of Corrections will edify the reader who can savor it, a treasury.
The rosary becomes a “ritual”—and even a place of ritual—in England when Catholicism was proscribed and the Catholic sacramental system generally unavailable; hence, the rosary, as a private devotion, reveals freedom from the control of the hierarchy. Mitchell grinds the lens with which to view the rosary in England by considering classic English devotional texts, including Bishop Richard Challoner's, as the book moves forward into modernity.
Mitchell then analyzes American English-language devotional and instructional materials to figure out the real meanings of the rosary on this side of the pond and most recently. The importance of the Grotto on the campus of the University of Notre Dame introduces a chapter that includes an interesting section on Catholic kitsch, with references to Robert C. Solomon and Peter Rob, who describes Catholic religious goods stores as “dire panoplies of standard Catholic iconography” (225). A surprise omission is Patrick Peyton's Family Rosary Crusade, which was massive in the mid-1900s in the United States. Father Peyton, whose cause for sainthood is underway, was a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the same order that founded Notre Dame.
Abundant endnotes (243–312) proclaim the extensive scholarship; some of the informational ones offer tangents that repay perusal, and some conveniently offer websites where readers can view virtual images of the art work into which Mitchell delves. Other notes seem superfluous, given the presumed erudition of the readership—for example, the endnote that sketches the administrative structure of Catholic provinces (headed by archbishops; 299n16). A twelve-page index for such a book falls short. As Mitchell really weaves his text with cross-references, he seems to assume that the reader has a very retentive memory for information-laden earlier passages. Thus the lack of a bibliography vexes. One must hop and scan backwards for sources. For example, the quotation of Luebke, above, is attributed in chapter 2, note 47; a prior reference to the author occurs at the end of an explanatory note 21, and the full publication information occurs in note 19 on the same page.
The unifying chapter titles which “reframe” identity, reform, and representation promise a directness that Mitchell's challenging theme does not support. The depth and detail with which Mitchell considers the disparate primary sources that comment upon—or imply similarities to—the rosary and Marian devotion can obscure the basic thesis, even while they instruct and delight. Indeed, the book is far more ambitious than its title.
