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This collection of essays examines the place of ‘saints’ and sanctity in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that holy men and women were pivotal in religious discourse, as subjects of veneration and inter-confessional contention. Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonization had disappeared, they continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Even in an age of confessional strife, doubt and secularisation, devotional practices and language remained central to how both Christians and their opponents reflected on that changing world. Making and remaking saints is significant, then, because until now no-one has explored how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a fruitful metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group. Together they will attract not just historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt
by the general, rather than the particular, world of the spiritual or numinous. But the dilemma is that, despite this urge away from particular dogmaticism, the Irish writer, in representing a culture in which the religious has been so pervasive, can hardly be expected to avoid the terminology of the religious. This problem was addressed interestingly, if not entirely satisfactorily, by John F. Deane in the introduction to his valuable anthology Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt: The Cold Heaven.8 Deane says that his material is: poetry that has sprung from a
Venice, 1550-1670 , Oxford, 1983 , p. 117. For further debate on this subject, see Edwards, ‘Religious faith and doubt in late medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450-1500’, Past and Present , 120, 1988 , pp. 4-5 and ‘Why the Spanish Inquisition?’, Studies in Church History , XXIX, 1992 , pp. 227-9. 34
Victorian schoolchildren looking for references to Tarshish, Tyre and Ophir would find them in Rider Haggard's 1885 adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines , but they were designed to give a sense of the exotic rather than to bolster belief. Conclusion Like much current work on nineteenth-century religion, this chapter has sought to nuance received assumptions about the direction of cultural and intellectual travel. On the one hand it shares the scepticism of recent work towards the now tired paradigm of ‘faith and doubt’ that takes
experience: the dead of both sides are interred together and the bravery of one side is commemorated by the other. Emblematically it foreshadows the famous closing lines from Wilfred Owen’s poem, Strange Meeting: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now …’11 Faith and doubt: The ambiguity of war memorial symbolism Owen himself was killed just one week before the end of the war, also in an action that involved a canal – the
Faith and Doubt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 19–40. 14 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871–72), I: pp. v–vii; IV: p. 371. 15 Rowland E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1893), I: p. 116. 16 Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Almond, Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1989); Clinton Bennett, Victorian
). 16 Richard Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers (Praeger: Westport, Conn., 2003); Daniel Todman, ‘ “Sans Peur et sans Reproche”: The Retirement, Death and Mourning of Sir Douglas Haig, 1918–1928’, Journal of Military History 67 (2003), 1083–1106; Allen J
the most comprehensive discussion of evangelicalism, see D. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). For the Oxford Movement, see P B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ). For Broad Churchmen, see E. Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Education, 1986 ), Chapter 3