Historians who study state formation, secularization, or modernization too often ignore literary criticism on the same subjects. This volume of literary analysis can be a rich resource. Schramm's analysis of nineteenth-century plays and Victorian literature tightly connects all these subjects to theological developments. She directly relates literary output to issues raised by the Catholic Relief Act and Tractarian crisis within the Church of England. Allowing Catholics into the public sphere put pressure on English norms for representing the sacred. Long at the heart of the divide between Protestants and Catholics had been the role for the visual arts in Christian worship. Core to this was the doctrine of the incarnation, with visual representation carrying implications for modern ways of knowing, historical conflicts over theology, and the clash between aesthetics and reason.

Sixteenth century Protestants had outlawed any representation of divinity from the stage. By the nineteenth century, theater was thoroughly secular. However, interest in reviving the biblical and medieval plays that had inspired Shakespeare brought out some of the inconsistencies in control over the theater. Schramm's analysis makes it clear that debates over whether to portray the sacred on the stage were more fraught than were discussions regarding how to present it in literature due to the very-human actors who would represent divinity. The focus on Christ's body and its materiality was alarming to Protestants because it smacked of Catholicism. However, Schramm mines the writing of nineteenth-century literary critics as well as authors to argue that Protestants appreciated “the way in which Catholicism does not demarcate the sacred from the secular” (181). Such a reaction undermined the commitment to secular modernity with its division between the bodily and the intellectual, the public and the private.

English Protestants had assumed the mores and practices of modernity were completely compatible with their theological understandings, especially in contrast with Roman Catholicism. However, Catholics were being integrated into the state, and increasingly the culture—all alongside the groundswell of interest in the English medieval past. The revival of sacred drama was both a critique of the times and revealed the desire for a return to tradition. Scholars as well as cultural gatekeepers were forced to assess which Catholic medieval traditions were harmless. What makes Schramm's analysis of this Victorian response to modernity unique is her connection to early modern theology.

Schramm acknowledges the role of the seventeenth-century Socinians in questioning the doctrine of the Incarnation in general. Along with Unitarians, the Socinians emphasized Jesus as a great man who was an example of how to live. She then connects this to the frequent appearance in the nineteenth century of characters who were vessels for divinity. For historians, such a connection without contextualization seems abrupt, but Schramm is providing a crucial reminder of the profound and continuing vitality of the doctrine of the incarnation to popular heterodoxy in English culture. She highlights the ways Keats, Byron, and Blake all rejected the Christian doctrine of atoning sacrifice via the crucifixion. Increasingly, the role of the martyr or the hero who sacrifices himself came to be seen as more appropriate than a focus on Christ's atoning sacrifice. In fact, many authors wanted to reject the idea of religious violence altogether. Here, Schramm contends: “Victorian dramatists and poets performed valuable theological work” (122) by connecting art to kindness and the communal value of humanity.

All of the focus on traditional arts and drama required community, and the conflict over Christ's presence in the Eucharist also included a critique of the liberal subject, privately and individually, believing and thinking theologically. Instead, there was an emphasis on the bodily, material, and sensory in a way that was a reaction to the modern technological and intellectual priorities. Ultimately, in the era responding to the trauma of industrialization, Schramm argues that representing the sacred, and the focus on the corporeality (and perhaps humanness) of the divine, helped promote the notion of compassion, and even the sacredness of humanity.

Schramm's rich connection between the themes of state regulation of the sacred, secularization, modernity, and popular theology is incredibly deep and insightful. I do wonder whether the Catholic or Protestant readers and observers of this art would have recognized this evolution in their understanding of the incarnation. Schramm's reading of pilgrimage books as “a form of ecumenical worship that united Protestants and Catholics” (182) along with much of her argument that drama and literature focusing on the sacred seemed to represent a softening of Protestant attitudes toward Catholic doctrine seems to stretch the historical evidence. The rampant anti-Catholicism of the nineteenth century included many who read or watched these works, and they seemed not to be interested in nor to recognize this sort of ecumenism or theological evolution.

While the range of evidence (photos of visual art, contemporary literary criticism, theory, drama, poetry, and novels) is admirable, the quick change between genres makes the thesis challenging to follow, and the connections between the chapters is not always clear. Still, this is a welcome integration of modernity's impact on changes in popular theology, literature, and the role of the state in regulating the community's ability to relate to the divine in human form. Schramm's work demonstrates a deepening of the connection between theology and the arts, making it clear that secularization was just as problematic in the nineteenth century as the twenty-first.