At the end of the 1880s, the Anglican All Saints Sisters of the Poor decided to reprint their office book. Their Chaplain, Richard Meux Benson—the founder and Superior of the Cowley Fathers—crossed swords with the Mother Superior over kalendrical revision at the draft stage. ‘Fr Benson did not approve of our office for Our Lady’s Assumption’, wrote Sr Caroline Mary ASSP, ‘and also he struck out of our Kalendar certain Saints: St Francis de Sales, St Aloysius, and St John of the Cross. Mother Foundress felt it very much…’ As Susan Mumm notes in her All Saints Sisters of the Poor (Church of England Record Society, 2001), the nuns acceded to Benson’s demands in Chapter—but then went ahead and had their original version printed anyway.
Such a story begs a number of questions. What makes a saint, and who gets to decide? Who gets to say which saints should be commemorated or invoked by the worshipping community? And who gets to say how those saints are to be treated by those who would look to them either as intercessors or worthy examples of holiness? Within the strict discipline and clear teaching of the Roman Catholic Church those questions are easy to answer. In the wider diaspora of post-Reformation Christianity, however, they become much trickier. The commemoration of King Charles the Martyr was removed from the Book of Common Prayer in 1859; and a number of liturgical observances were suppressed—and others introduced—by Blessed Paul VI’s Mysterii Paschalis of 1969. Saints sometimes come and go.
In the burgeoning plurality of religious life in the nineteenth-century, various groups scrambled to make their presence felt following the emancipation of Roman Catholics and other dissenters from the national ecclesiastical monopoly that the Church of England had exercised for three centuries. The book opens, perhaps inevitably, with the hissing of the Protestant demons in Blessed John Henry Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius: ‘What’s a saint? One whose breath doth the air taint before his death; a bundle of bones, which fools adore, ha! ha!’. Gareth Atkins explains in the Introduction that the volume seeks ‘to explore the enduring appeal of sanctity’ in nineteenth-century Britain, with each chapter focussing on how the cults of particular individuals and groups came to be received across denominational and social boundaries.
Nineteenth-century Roman Catholics had their saints, certainly. The Protestants had their own figures of admiration—although they called them martyrs, or heroes, or forebears. There was also common ground—the Apostles and the Church Fathers, among others understood to have been subito santo in the days before the formalisation of Rome’s official processes of canonisation. Not infrequently the same figure was honoured by different people for different reasons and for different ends; and an astute and important point made by Dr Atkins is that it is unwise to regard the matter of nineteenth-century hagiography as ‘a stable category that commanded universal agreement’. The contents page is devoid of any saintly prefixes, and the English Martyrs beatified by Leo XIII in 1886 take a small ‘m’.
The subjects treated range far and wide: from St Paul (Michael Ledger-Lomas) to William Wilberforce (Roshan Allpress); from the Blessed Virgin Mary (Carol Engelhardt Herringer) to Elizabeth Fry and Sarah Martin (Helen Rogers). Many Protestants took issue with traditional Roman Catholic narratives, and of particular interest to readers of British Catholic History will be William Sheils on St Thomas More, bringing to light some of More’s ‘unsuspecting [Protestant] advocates’; Gareth Atkins on St Ignatius Loyola and “the Protestant confusion” over the gap ‘between the cult and the man’; Lucy Underwood on the English Martyrs and the challenge posed by their beatification to Victorian understandings of the ‘definition of Englishness’; Elizabeth Macfarlane on Blessed John Henry Newman’s Lives of the English Saints, sitting ‘uneasily between scholarship and hagiology’; and Alana Harris on the growth of the peculiarly Scottish cult of the ‘accessible and palatable’ St Thérèse of Lisieux. To all this perhaps we might also link Mary Heimann’s recent work on the Victorian reception of the cult of St Francis of Assisi, which appeared in the May 2017 issue of British Catholic History.
The quality of the material is as high as one would expect (the book grew out of a colloquium funded by the British Academy) and includes contributions both from established academics and from early-career researchers—among others acknowledged in its genesis are Rowan Williams and John Wolffe. There are only two minor grumbles, both aesthetic, and neither of which affects the quality and persuasiveness of the material. The first is that even for my relatively young eyes the text is on the small side. The second is that the illustrations might have been more clearly reproduced. Their selection, however, cannot be faulted. The 1791 depiction of the apotheosis of John Wesley is as delightful as it is whimsical (p. 11); and the rare stained-glass treatment from 1897 of the marriage of the now generally-forgotten Pudens and Claudia (p. 61) is particularly engaging, as is Martha Vandrei’s chapter that it accompanies.
Overall, this work repays close attention. The editor is to be congratulated for having brought together such a selection of scholars, and for having presented a major contribution to the understanding of the religious and historical tensions of the period. In the nineteenth century no Catholic would have dreamed of honouring Martin Luther; but the signals being given by the present Pope, in the year of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, may mean that we are on the cusp of a new era of ‘making and remaking saints’. If that is indeed the case, then this book may well prove more pertinent and necessary to our understanding of the field than its contributors originally envisaged.
