Tag: Christianity

The Architecture of Victorian Christendom (book review)

Book Reviews, Other

English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith & Revival (John Hudson Publishing) by the eminent architectural historian James Stevens Curl is a book that can be read in more than one way and appeal to more than one kind of audience. It can be read as a work of scholarship; one that spans two distinct but related disciplines, namely Victorian church architecture and nineteenth-century ecclesiology. As an authoritative survey and critique of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English church building, it would

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‘Hearts and Pockets’: Consumerism and the early Salvation Army

Other

Figure 1 (header image): An advertisement for the wide range of goods to be purchased at the Salvation Army Trade Department, including an illustration of shoppers in the ‘Salvation Emporium’ showroom on Clerkenwell Road. From Salvation Army newspaper War Cry, 18 November 1893. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. The notion of a ‘consumer identity’ is simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. We are all consumers; and many of us do our best, in one way or another, to ensure that our consumer

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Gareth Atkins, ‘CRASSH The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Gareth Atkins is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is a member of the CRASSH Bible and Antiquity Project, and is currently working on the reception of saints, religious heroes, and biblical characters in nineteenth-century Britain. The Holmes stereoscope is a Victorian icon. Designed by the American poet and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) and deliberately left unpatented, this cheap wooden frame with its two prismatic lenses allowed viewers in the comfort of

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Whigs and their Hunters

Book Reviews

Michael Ledger-Lomas is Lecturer in the History of Christianity in Britain at King’s College, London. He is the editor, with David Gange, of Cities of God: the Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is currently working on the British reception of St Paul from the eighteenth century onwards. Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, by Catherine Hall, New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2012, xxviii + 389 pp. illustrated, £35 (hardback),

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What Would Jesus Do? The “Occupation” of St Paul’s Cathedral, February 1887.

Victorians Beyond the Academy

By Peter Yeandle, (University of Manchester) On 15 October 2012, the anniversary of Occupy London, four women chained themselves together within St Paul’s Cathedral. Occupy, concerned to contest the malevolent association of politics and finance, targeted not the Cathedral but casino capitalism: a camp was only established at St Paul’s once private security guards had prevented access to the Stock Exchange. One of the most intriguing debates set in train, however, related to the relationship between the Cathedral itself and

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Dominic Janes, ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist’

Other

In ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist,’ Dominic Janes’ continues to develop his study of the history of Christian ethics and aesthetics—first, in the context of the early Church, and secondly, in relation to the nineteenth century. In Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860 (2009), he explored the discourses surrounding ‘idolatry’, which was, in a narrow sense, the worship of idols, but, in a broad sense, could mean

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Vicky Morrisroe, “‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E. A. Freeman, Islam and Orientalism’

Other

In her forthcoming article  in JVC issue 16.1, Vicky Morrisroe explores representations of Islam in the work of the Victorian historian E.A. Freeman. Freeman’s two obscure Oriental volumes emphasize the evils and barbarism of Muslim societies to demonstrate that Britain’s support of the Ottoman Empire was misguided. This article foregrounds Freeman’s fear of the threat posed to Euro-Christendom by Islam and suggests that he was not, as is often assumed, a confident proponent of Western progress. In so doing, it

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