Abstract
In some ways this is what research is all about: here non-‘household names’ from the nineteenth century receive unusual exposure, e.g. the uneducated Norwegian pietist Hans Nielsen Hauge – for whom the state church was just a framework for spiritual friendships – in A.B. Amundsen’s essay. The reader soon realises that it is popular, even folk, devotion that occupies most of the attention in this volume: in S. Gilley’s account of the ‘Devotional Revolution’ among the Irish, there flourished Eucharistic and ‘sacred heart’ devotion (to which were added guidebooks to help intensify the experience, of which Newman and Popes approved, but had little influence on.) The comparative late-coming Redemptorists’ mission to Ireland by invitation of Archbishop Cullen of Armagh enabled the dissemination of Alphonsus Liguori’s spiritual teaching –prayer and restraint as a means of salvation against the background of threatening judgement. Again this was not about elite devotional theology shaping the ordinary folk. Anna Maria Taigi (S.F. McLaren tells us) was canonised because, not despite, of being a married ‘saint of the hearth’. It can be argued that Liszt’s Via Crucis’ lack of musical sophistication was compensated by its primal power (P. De Mey and D.J. Burn). H. von Achen contributes a piece on medieval revivalism as an attempt to recover a sense of the spiritual as resisting the inevitability of a fragmenting secularization, finding its refuge in the family unit and the obstinate Gothic church. P. McGrail shows how a Protestant hymnody which was losing its dogmatic hard edges could be used by Catholics, while supplemented by staunchly Catholic paeans to Mary and her martyrs, not least by Cardinal Wiseman. The wish of Leo XIII to reinforce the decision of the Congregation of Rites in 1765 to recognise the Feast of the Sacred Heart helped a symbol that was anti-Jansenist in its inclusivism to become pro-monarchist in France, then anti-communist in the Spanish Civil war, as E. Klekot tells us in the pick of all the essays. All in all a pot-pourri, but research which is valuable to help us grasp the currents on which movements, doctrine and church leaders were carried along.