Journeys in Church History: Essays from the Catholic Historical Review ed. by Nelson H. Minnich (review)

In 2007 the Catholic Historical Review initiated a series of essays inviting colleagues who have made distinguished contributions to church history to reflect on their own professional lives and work. Edited by Nelson H. Minnich, this book reprints the first fruits of this program, essays by Elizabeth Clark, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jean Delumeau (as translated by Daniel V. Frascella), John W. O’Malley, S.J., Margaret Lavinia Anderson, and Philip Gleason. It is an intellectual treasure to have these six essays between the covers of a single book.

Minnich organizes the volume in the chronological order of the periods which the essayists have made their own: Clark on patristics, Bynum on medieval Christian thought and practice, Delumeau and O’Malley on early modern Catholicism, Anderson on political Catholicism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, and Gleason on American Catholicism. Beyond clarifying their chosen subjects’ cultural and historical contexts, each essay reprises how the contributor’s own publications have made these topics part of the historiographical mainstream. As a group, the essays show both the utility for church history, and the limits, of insights drawn from areas as diverse as ethnography, network theory, post-modern theory, gender studies, cliometrics, social history, neo-Scholasticism, art history, and rhetoric. Apart from Delumeau, whose story takes us into the uplands of French academia, the contributors’ careers offer a capsule history of the fortunes of church history in American higher education from the 1960s to the present. Gleason has spent his whole career as student and teacher at one institution, the University of Notre Dame, assisting its development into a nationally regarded research university. While O’Malley has taught at a series of Jesuit institutions, his early career, as he tells us, benefited richly from Harvard’s old boy network. The lack of similar mentoring there for women was a factor moving Bynum away from Harvard, eventually holding chairs at Columbia and the Institute for Advanced Study. Both Anderson and Clark thrived at private liberal arts colleges that enabled them to shape their own early programs, before moving respectively to Berkeley and Duke.

Readers will be intrigued by the autobiographical features of these essays. Some contributors found and developed their subjects and methodologies basically on their own. Others had their research topics handed to them by their professors. In some cases it was reading a particular book, or accepting an invitation to speak at a conference on a hitherto unrehearsed topic—or eating a gelato in Florence—that proved to be a professional game-changer. The essays of Bynum and Anderson tell us more about their own subject-matter findings than do the other essays. But readers will learn much from all of them, as well as having the decided pleasure of making new acquaintances even as they re-encounter old friends and much-revered authorities.

It is to be hoped that the editor of CHR will continue the series so auspiciously launched in 2007, and that reprints of the essays of other luminaries in the field will take their place side by side with the collection so warmly welcome in the volume under review.