Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism by John Shelton Reed (review)

88BOOK REVIEWS non-Muslims (except for Parsis) came as individuals and did not form communities , but they brought new influences to some English individuals in theosophy and Vedanta; Islam produced an English community with a mosque in Liverpool led by a convert, Abdullah Quilliam, of whom he gives a fascinating account. This useful volume does not stand alone: not only is it conceived as part of an ongoing course, but its essays complement and enhance those of the original volumes for scholars. Collectively, they represent the maturation ofVictorian religious history. Josef L.Altholz University ofMinnesota Glorious Battle:The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. ByJohn Shelton Reed. (Nashville, Tennessee:Vanderbilt University Press. 1996. Pp. xxiv, 357. $34.95.) The subtitle of Reed's book indicates his approach. In dealing with the "Ritualist " phase ofthe Anglo-Catholic revival, one engages practices as much as doctrines , practices that constituted "symbolic affronts to central values of Victorian middle-class culture" and in some cases "actual threats to those values " (p. xxii). Clerical dress, liturgical vocabulary, liturgical artifacts and gestures, the practice of auricular confession, eucharistie devotion, the establishment of sisterhoods functioned as signs of identity to those who converted to the movement and generated vocal, occasionally violent, and eventual legal opposition from without. Reed addresses the problem of why a style of religious behavior that had been abandoned in the Church of England succeeded in attracting active partisans. In answering it he explores the institutional context of the Church of England and the broader social context of demographic and technological change. He does so as a sociologist, adopting a social movement perspective on the revival that views it as a countercultural movement. Reed is judiciously modest in his claims here. He does not argue that this is the only, or even the most important way of positioning Ritualism. But he does propose that "a number of the movement's otherwise puzzling characteristics become perfectly understandable when viewed in this light" (p. xxiv). Moreover, this is not a case of a sociologist using historical data to test sociological theory. The product of some two decades of research, the book shows a grasp of the sources that is both broad and deep. The sociological perspective orients the historical analysis; it does not overwhelm it. Indeed, the narrative would not suffer if more were made of the sociological infrastructure. The account begins with the relationship of Ritualism to the Tractarians, delineating continuities between the two phases of the revival, as well as differences introduced by the expansion of a lay following. Its development through the 1840's and 1850's, into the 1860's is set out, highlighting the practices BOOK REVIEWS89 adopted, their relation to doctrine, factors that favored their adoption and spread, as well as those which hindered their control and containment. The interaction of Ritualists with other portions of the Church of England, especially its right wing, is explored. The core ofthe analysis focuses on the types ofpeople who converted to the movement and, to a lesser degree, who opposed it. Each of the groups attracted to the movement—clergy, urban poor, women, and young men—"can be seen as culturally subordinate or in decline" (p. xxiii). This general observation is translated into specific factors which fostered the adherence of members of each of these categories. The principal themes of the opposition are taken up, with a separate chapter devoted to the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) and its failure to achieve its intended result. Some of this failure must be attributed to developments internal to Ritualism. As it attained middle-class respectability , as its first generation ofconverts gave way to those born and raised in the movement's practices, and as these practices influenced other portions of the Anglican Church, Ritualism progressively lost its countercultural character . By the 1890's a "movement that had once protested bourgeois values was itself becoming middle-class, even suburban" (p. 263). There is a lot to like in this book. Reed's style is a refreshing change from the convoluted writing stereotypically associated with social scientists. He is able to do justice to some of the eccentric characters attached to the movement and some of its...