God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne By R. Howard Bloch (review)

450 BOOK REVIEWS of the two High Church traditions. Perhaps the title and subtitle should be inverted, for the emphasis is on the context of continuity and not on the Oxford Movement. Nockles, himself Roman Catholic and Assistant Librarian and Methodist Church Archivist at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, first surveyed this ground in a widely cited Oxford dissertation in 1982. Based on a wide range of reading, he has expanded and revised the work over a dozen years. He has also opened himself to new intellectual influences, notably the historical revisionism of J. C. D. Clark; his dependence on Clark may even be too much for that famous spinner of paradoxes. One sign of this is the way in which historical analysis has been transformed into historiographical debate. There is some justification for this in the manner in which the old High Church was written out of existence by Tractarian historians from Newman himself to Tom Mozley and Dean Church, swallowed whole by most twentieth-century historians. But Nockles' demolition of this tradition amounts to overkill and complicates the reader's task of following the development of the old High Church and its interaction with the new. Nockles' chapter structure, after the initial "Historiographical introduction," is topical in the manner of religious studies, pursuing a particular problematic from the beginning to the end of his period, and may thus appear repetitive to chronologically oriented readers. A complete bibliography would have been too exhaustive to publish, but he should have compensated for its absence by giving full citations once in each chapter, which might save one from hunting 300 pages back. Nonetheless, Nockles makes a convincing case for his thesis ofthe continuity of the old High Church tradition (the Orthodox party, as it was called in the eighteenth century) and works out successfully the continuities and discontinuities between it and the Tractarians. In the process he recovers a number of important but neglected figures, in particular William Palmer of Worcester College. Neckles concludes that the Tractarians polarized the Church of England into sharply divided parties, tactically to the disadvantage of the High Church generally, but that they brought a spiritual dynamism which the old High Church could never have provided and which, in an age of romanticism, could evoke a response in the younger generation. It is a fair conclusion to a careful study which reserves its polemics only for historians, never for its subjects. Josef L. Altholz University ofMinnesota God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of theAbbé Migne. By R. Howard Bloch. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. x, 152. Í24.95.) As the jaunty subtitle suggests, R. Howard Bloch, professor of French in the University of California at Berkeley, focuses on some human interest aspects BOOK REVIEWS 451 ofthe life and work ofJacques-Paul Migne. He has woven together in a readable account a wealth of information about the immense energy and productivity of the publisher aptly known to his contemporaries as the "Napoleon of the prospectus." Migne is remembered today mainly for the great Latin and Greek Patrologiae , but he actually published a number of other big collections (e.g., ninety-nine volumes of sacred orators) and reference works on an incredible number of subjects. Bloch brings out clearly the strong religious zeal that drove Migne in his endeavors: he wanted to do the Church "the greatest service in the world by reviving in toto its tradition," and thus produce a fully informed and competent Catholic clergy. Migne's very large printing plant, the Ateliers catholiques, was one of the largest businesses in France in the mid-nineteenth century, equipped with title latest mechanical steam presses and employing almost 600 workers. In addition to the texts and reference works, Migne owned and edited some ten newspapers at various times, starting with L'Univers religieux in 1833. Infractions of laws regarding newspapers, and publishing things from other papers—he said it was a public service to assemble and digest news in a journal reproducteur—led to a police record that lengthened steadily over the years. His employees also sued him because of his low wages and some poor working...