Both these monographs are the fruit of the ‘Saint Louis Circle’ of Newman scholars, graduate students at Saint Louis University, Missouri, under Kenneth Parker (now of Duquesne University, Pittsburgh). They represent a flourishing renewal of interest in John Henry Newman, especially among younger Roman Catholic theologians in the United States. Michael Shea offers a sophisticated revisionist analysis of the early reception of Newman's Essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845). The standard narrative, as propagated for example in Owen Chadwick's classic From Bossuet to Newman (1957), is that Newman's ideas were marginalised and suspect in the nineteenth century until eventually triumphant in the twentieth. However, by unearthing neglected Italian and French sources, Shea paints ‘a new picture’, arguing that Newman's Essay was well-received in Rome in the 1840s. He protests that for too long Newman scholarship has been guilty of ‘Anglocentric insularity’ (p. 4), partly because Newman's own papers are so abundant, so a corrective is needed by a fresh study of transnational exchanges and intellectual borrowings across linguistic boundaries. In this Shea builds upon some of the trajectories set by Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles's The Oxford Movement: Europe and the wider world, 1830–1930 (Cambridge 2012), insisting that continental archives ‘challenge the hegemony of previous historical paradigms’ (pp. 199–200). Shea shows how Newman was favoured at the Vatican, not likely if his Essay was considered heterodox. In fact it was quoted approvingly in 1847 by the Annali delle scienze religiose, a remarkable endorsement by Rome's premier Catholic journal, a bastion of orthodoxy. Shea demonstrates further that Newman's ideas were disseminated by the Jesuit professor Giovanni Peronne, ‘simultaneously one of the most influential and overlooked figures in modern Catholicism’ (p. 16), and that the theological interaction between the two men should not be interpreted as private censure but as tacit encouragement of the English convert. Shea offers an inverted reading of the Newman-Peronne manuscript, not as an admonition (contra Chadwick) but as ‘an open and mutually enriching exchange among peers’ (p. 148). He enters more speculative territory, however, by suggesting that the nod towards doctrinal growth in Ineffabilis Deus (1854), the papal bull which promulgated the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, may have originated with Newman's Essay mediated via Peronne who was one of the papal commissioners. The evidence for this transfer of ideas is lacking, but Shea has raised an intriguing, and surprising, possibility.

Ryan Marr offers an account of incremental shifts within Newman's ecclesiology over three decades. He characterises the early Catholic Newman, shortly after his conversion, as ‘imbalanced’ by ‘moderately ultramontane leanings’ which emphasised the centrality of episcopal and papal authority (p. 9). However, in 1859 Newman brought the laity fully into the conversation with a ‘ground-breaking’ essay for The Rambler on ‘Consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine’. He proposed an additional counterbalance in his Letter to the duke of Norfolk (1875), in the fallout from the First Vatican Council's promulgation of papal infallibility, arguing that responsibility for testing dogma lay with the schola theologorum, a pushback against the neo-ultramontane papalists. Marr's most innovative and important observation is that Newman's refusal to attend the Council, preferring to work on the completion of his Essay in aid of a grammar of assent (1870), was not a tangential project, but on the contrary was ‘motivated in large part by his concern to oppose deficient understandings of ecclesiastical authority’ (p. 78). Marr reads this philosophical treatise with its focus on the primacy of individual conscience – ‘the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’ (p. 117) – in a new light, as a direct riposte to ultramontane ecclesiology. He maintains the standard line, however, that Newman's broad-based inclusive vision was out of vogue in the nineteenth century until the Second Vatican Council adopted many of his insights in the papal bull Lumen gentium (1964). This chronology is unassailable, though we half expect Michael Shea to retort with the more revolutionary reading that Newman's ecclesiology was welcomed by the Vatican even in the 1870s. But revisionism has its limits. Marr's personal devotion is on display, as he advocates for twenty-first-century Roman Catholics to build upon Newman's teaching: ‘Contemporary theologians can best honor Newman's legacy … not by fossilizing his ecclesiological insights, but by developing them in a way that can prove life-giving for the Church today’ (p. 158). The analysis is adept, though the Lexington Press volume lacks the high production quality of Oxford University Press and there are a surprisingly high number of slips – we read, for example, of ‘Rowman Catholic’ (p. 43) and ‘Neman’ (p. 154).