Emma Major's Madam Britannia: Women, Church and Nation, 1712–1812 is a densely executed and important monograph that seeks to trace the “complexity and diversity of patriotic femininity” in the eighteenth century (9). This involves uncovering the many ways in which “privileged, Anglican, cultured women” were perceived to be, and constructed themselves as, significant agents within the national church, and indeed within the national community more broadly (4). Intriguingly, Major points to the fact that the term churchwoman first emerged in the early eighteenth century. This was a multilayered enterprise. Within a host of texts, the Church of England was itself designated as “female,” a personification that, according to Major, was one factor encouraging contemporaries to valorize women as especially virtuous embodiments of Georgian England. Perhaps more telling, however, are women's own reconstructions of national history. Contemporary cultural critics such as Hester Thrale Piozzi and Elizabeth Montagu provided significant threads for this tapestry in their appropriation of Elizabeth I as a model for the patriotic Georgian woman.
At the core of the book lie the familiar figures of the bluestockings. Major is able to provide a refreshing treatment of this well-trodden terrain by unpicking the very category of bluestocking. She reminds us that Montagu and her associates included men within the term and that they viewed the appellation as only a partial facet of their diverse intellectual and religious lives. Indeed, Major traces the increasing preoccupation with political concerns among the circle, exploring how “[p]ublic worries become a form of conversational currency” (185).
The figure of “Britannia” provides Major's central motif within this narrative. As she demonstrates, from the beginning of the period, Britannia was integral to how the new Protestant monarchy was represented. Yet by the late eighteenth century, masculine representations of the nation—John Bull and indeed the figure of George III himself—had become ascendant. Nevertheless, this did not equate to any simple demise in how women were conceptualized in relation to the body politic. On the contrary, the cataclysmic global events of the 1790s propelled many women to a new and more urgent sense of their own duty to intervene in public affairs. While Major's claims concerning the centrality of religious discourse in responses to the French Revolution is hardly a novel finding, the scholarly expertise with which she executes the claim is illuminating. In an analysis that includes consideration of lesser-known works such as Hannah More's essay on Saint Paul, Major demonstrates how More attempted to reconfigure a public role for women—one defined by Christian duty rather than the gendered constraints of polite femininity. More's Strictures on the modern system of female education (1799), notes Major, employed the words public and religion with seven times the frequency as the terms private and domestic.
Major's strengths in this study lie in her close, finely textured readings of elite texts. This is not a methodology that allows her to definitively support her contention that women were integral to the practice of Anglican Christianity, however suggestively the issue is handled. This would require a more empirical survey, and one that contrasted female activity more closely with male practices of religious and philanthropic engagement. Certainly a consideration of historical assessments of Georgian masculinity, many of which have been so attentive to male religiosity, would have helped to further refine Major's thesis. Yet one book can only do so much, and Major has provided us with a wealth of readings to take the curiously neglected story of female Anglicanism forward in a host of ways.
This is a fluidly written and occasionally idiosyncratic text, full of scholarly excursions and digressions. While the wide-ranging discussions do repay slow and careful reading, a tighter and more controlled text might have helped to deliver Major's important message with greater clarity at times. This is an issue compounded by the book's structure and divisions. Chapter headings and subsections are often evocative rather than clearly descriptive of their contents. Moreover, given that the author did not have space to discuss such apposite issues as female prophecy, or to consider more fully the significance of denominational differences and relationships, the rationale for chapter 3 in particular (which focuses upon two male-authored texts, Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Amory's The Life of John Buncle) is not immediately apparent, to this reader at least.
Nonetheless, this remains a wonderfully rich and impressive study. It provides an original new assessment of women's public and religious sensibilities, and it also demonstrates convincingly that female religiosity was central to contemporaries’ conceptualization of public life. Women helped to define the Anglican church, and they were critical to its praxis. In the process, they played an integral role in establishing the contours and intricacies of British national identity.
