Bettina Bradbury. Caroline's Dilemma: A Colonial Inheritance Saga. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019. Pp. 336. $95.00 (cloth).

Abstract

Bennett traces the debates around these ideas through chapters titled "The Early Church," "Latin Christianity," "Reformation Protestantism," and "Reason and Religion in Modern History"-that is, understandings of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rational Protestantism. The mood evoked throughout is of confidence and creativity: "Positive reconstruction . . . best describes what Victorian religious historians believed they were accomplishing" (245). It was history, not dogma or the Bible, that would persuade free individuals to recognize the superiority of a broadly conceived Christianity. This is, then, a nicely ambitious book, densely but clearly and stylishly argued. Now and again, Bennett is given to the occasional grandiloquent claim on its behalf. "By illustrating how sequestered dons and comfortable clergy inhabited a discursive continuum with popular preachers and jobbing journalists," he declares, "it demonstrates that higher-level intellectual and scholarly developments drew energy from and galvanized wider attitudinal changes among more middlebrow Victorians" (5). What follows is certainly engaged in consideration of journals, lectures, and sermons alongside the foundation of new professorial chairs, but it feels more like a delineation of the mind of an intellectual culture, along the lines, say, of Stefan Collini's Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850Britain -1930Britain (1991. Most of all, it resembles James Kirby's Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870Scholarship, -1920Scholarship, (2016, whose skillful anatomization of a related but separate milieu, that of the high churchmen who constructed history as an academic discipline in the English universities, similarly put religion at the center of intellectual and professional endeavors in the late Victorian period. Bennett's book, likewise, carries complete conviction, and justifiably so. It is therefore a slight shame that his book-like Kirby's-ends allusively rather than decisively, with the impetus of religious history receding. Religious philosophers, the reader is told, took up the baton instead, focusing on psychology and the problem of mind as places where one might discern God. No doubt this has something to do with the tight word limits imposed by the Oxford Historical Monographs series; and it might also simply be true that the religious progressive historical tradition ended more with a whimper than a bang. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to hear more about whether this was part of secularization or just shifting scholarly fashion.