Beating against the Wind: Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador by Calvin Hollett (review)

In Beating against the Wind, Calvin Hollett provides an intriguing reinterpretation of Bishop Edward Feild's Anglican episcopate in mid-nineteenthcentury Newfoundland and Labrador. Replete with nautical metaphors that aptly convey the study's setting and overall arguments, the book is both academically rigorous and beautifully written. It constitutes a significant contribution to McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion Series.

While Feild is an ever-present persona, this is not a work of biography. Rather, it is a study of folk religion and popular spirituality in an understudied portion of the British Empire. The narrative is one of local resistance to colonial authority. Appointed bishop in 1844, Feild arrived in Newfoundland determined to impose his own Tractarian interpretation of Anglicanism. Born out of the Oxford Movement, Tractarianism reinforced the supreme authority of the clergy, the sacraments, and Gothic church architecture. This uniform, High Church Anglicanism was radically different from the egalitarian, lay-oriented, evangelical Protestantism that had evolved in many Newfoundland fishing communities, where a "sighting of a clergyman was as rare as the sighting of a cardinal." Hollett convincingly argues that Newfoundland's Anglicans largely rejected Feild's "ecclesiastical colonization." Tractarianism was met with widespread popular opposition, and, ultimately, "Protestant Anglicanism remained the spirituality of choice for a significant proportion of the Church of England in Newfoundland and Labrador."

The book is diligently researched, using a combination of clerical, lay, and colonial sources, in addition to a wide range of contemporary newspapers. In order to frame his argument, Hollett adopts a spatial organization, analysing and comparing popular resistance to Feild in the distinct regions and bays of Newfoundland and Labrador. Following a contextual opening chapter, he begins with the colonial capital of St. John's, where the bishop's alterations to church architecture caused significant ripples of discontent. Subsequent chapters focus on the densely populated Conception Bay, the northeast coast, Placentia Bay, and the south coast. Perhaps the most fascinating chapters are those that examine popular religion on the nineteenth-century settlement frontier. Chapter five focuses on Feild's Anglican mission on the southeast coast of Labrador, while the final chapter studies the failed effort to establish Tractarian Anglicanism on Newfoundland's ethnically and spiritually diverse west coast. The comparisons are effective, highlighting the various ways in which opposition to Tractarianism manifested itself. Resistance to Feild took many forms. From non-attendance and refusal to contribute to fundraising endeavours, to lengthy debates in the columns of both Newfoundland and English newspapers (such as the widely read anti-Tractarian texts by Thomas Collett of Harbour Buffett, Placentia Bay), to, most significantly, the conversion of many thousands of Newfoundland Anglicans to Methodism.

While the introduction and conclusion do well to frame Hollett's research in a firmly transatlantic and transnational context, there was, perhaps, greater scope within the individual chapters for explicit comparisons of Newfoundland resistance to Tractarianism with that elsewhere in British North America and in other colonial settings as well. Ultimately, though, this is not the sort of work that Hollett set out to write, and, as it stands, Beating against the Wind makes an important contribution to the social history of Newfoundland and Labrador as well as to the history of religion in Canada and the broader British Empire.