Devotional Cultures of European Christianity, 1790-1960 ed. by Henning Laugerud and Salvador Ryan (review)

This fine collection of scholarly essays, most of which were first delivered as workshop and conference papers, explores a variety of devotional cultures and devotional objects in Europe from the end of the French Revolution to the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Devotional Cultures of European Christianity, 1790-1960, opens with two excellent scene-setting pieces, one Protestant and one Catholic. The Protestant case study is an exploration by Arne Amundsen of the "devotion of the simple and pure" in the Haugean movement in Norway, a movement reminiscent of Pietist and Evangelical movements elsewhere. The Catholic case study is a characteristically thoughtful discussion by Sheridan Gilley of "Devotions and the Old Rite" as practiced in Britain, especially Ireland, from the long nineteenth century to the 1960s. Gilley's rejection of simplistic dichotomies between supposedly popular and voluntary as opposed to official and imposed devotions during the nineteenth-century Catholic restoration exposes the limitations of Weberian analysis as well as more recent, instrumentalist interpretations of widespread shifts in religious behavior.

Catholic devotional themes raised by Gilley are explored further in the collection in essays by Brendan McConvery on the effect of Redemptorist missions in spreading religious conformity (and arguably Catholic guilt) throughout Ireland and by Sarah Maclaren on the beatification of pious Italian housewives as a means of combating secularism. A further two articles focus on devotional objects popularly believed to have miraculous properties: Eli Seland looks at how Marian apparitions were represented on "miraculous" and other medals, whereas Ewa Klekot examines the use of paper or fabric Sacred Heart scapulars by soldiers in the Spanish Civil War to stop bullets.

Catholic and Protestant denominational rivalries are explored by Peter McGrail in an analysis of English hymnody; by Frances King in a richly illustrated micro-study of sectarian emblems displayed in Northern Irish homes; and by Henrik von Achen in a particularly fine exploration of medieval revivalist art and architecture across Europe that shows how neo-Gothic, as the self-consciously Christian style of the nineteenth century, sought to re-enchant a secularized, postrevolutionary world.

One of the main advantages of a multiauthored volume on a discrete area of scholarship is that it allows students and scholars to take stock of recent historiographical shifts. What emerges from Henning Laugerud and Salvador Ryan's edited volume is that the notion of an imposed "devotional revolution" on the Catholic world seems finally to have been overturned; that the "feminization" of Catholic piety in the nineteenth century appears to have been a European-wide phenomenon; and that scholars with an interest in devotional shifts over time are increasingly drawn to the study of artifacts rather than simply to prayers, liturgies, and rituals. As is invariably the case with edited collections of this kind, geographical coverage is patchy and the level of detailed research on particular topics uneven. In this particular volume, Protestant devotional cultures are dealt with considerably less extensively than Catholic ones. Only one essay, an examination by Georgios Kordis of neo-Byzantine style in Greek Orthodox iconography, looks at devotion in the Orthodox Church. Although it is refreshing to see both Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula represented in this survey of modern Christian piety, the Catholic devotional cultures of Poland, the Baltic States, and the Habsburg Empire are conspicuous by their absence. Even Hungary is mentioned only as the backdrop for an (albeit interesting) article about Franz Liszt's Via Crucis by Peter De Mey and David Burn.

The volume ought, in this reviewer's opinion, more properly to have been called "Devotional Cultures of Western and Northern European Catholicism, 1790-1960." Alternatively, it might have been expanded so as to become more genuinely representative of European Christianity as a whole: Eastern as well as Western, Orthodox and Protestant as well as Catholic. The book, nevertheless, offers a well-researched and stimulating collection...