Clio's Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790-1899 (review)

ViCTOriAn STUDiES / VOLUME 51, nO. 3 manly beards. Faber, who had a close relationship with his mother, was drawn to Marian devotion while still an Anglican and was criticized for his emotional excesses as a Catholic priest—notably his address of the Virgin Mary as “Mamma.” But he thereby confirmed his masculine authority, for he could identify with Christ, who was also Mary’s son. As Herringer observes, the four men of this chapter defined the Virgin Mary in order to define themselves. Herringer’s study will be primarily useful to historians and religious scholars, since its consideration of Victorian art and literature and the related scholarship is limited. There is a single reference to the pre-raphaelite painters and no mention of John ruskin as an art critic or of Coventry patmore, the poet. These influential figures must qualify the book’s assumption that nineteenth-century protestantism was predictably opposed to roman Catholicism. For example, in her 1852 Legends of the Madonna, Jameson, an Anglican art historian supposedly unsympathetic to Catholicism, wrote: “the Virgins of the old italians . . . look so divinely ethereal that they seem uplifted by their own spirituality: not even the air-borne clouds are needed to sustain them” (75). Her work went through numerous editions. Such Victorian reactions display a degree of accommodation, curiosity, and enthusiasm that Herringer’s study, while revealing much about religious polemics, leaves unexplored. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams Elizabethtown College