Anthony J. Steinhoff and Jeffrey T. Zalar eds. Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2025. 485 PP. ISBN 9783110573671.
The so-called “religious turn” in modern European history started during the 1980s and produced decades of research and monographs. The list of esteemed authors who contributed to this volume is evidence of the scholarly careers that have been spent exploring the social, cultural, theological, and political impact of faith in the modern world. This comprehensive volume contains twenty chapters about religion in the long nineteenth century (1800-1914). Each essay summarizes the state of research over the last two decades, engages with relevant historical debates, and provides fascinating reading for any academic interested in European religious history. The greatest achievement of this book is its breadth. Typically, historians of modern religion restrict themselves to the study of one particular faith tradition within a singular nation-state. Regarding the book, Anthony J. Steinhoff and Jeffrey T. Zalar state, “Not only does it present a series of chapters that explore the histories of the Continent’s major religious traditions, but each of the volume’s remaining chapters examine its specified topic from the perspective of multiple faith communities. In commissioning the chapters, we urged authors to take into account – to the degree that the current state of the literature allowed – developments across the entire European Continent and throughout the entire century. (3)” This work delivers on this promise and there is no other work on religion in nineteenth century-Europe with such range.
In its early chapters, Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe introduces all major faith traditions side-by-side throughout the entire continent. It reviews Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Popular Religion, and Secularism. In an example of the geographic reach of the volume, Nathalie Clayer’s chapter on Islam spans not only the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, but also Western Europe, Russia, and other parts of Southeastern Europe. Similarly, David Meola explores the multiplicity of “Judaisms” in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe while the other chapters use the Vatican for Roman Catholicism, or theological directions for Protestantism as the organizing principle of the chapter rather than any one nation. The inclusion of the essay by Carolin Kosuch on “Secularism and Unbelief” seems most fitting for a volume summarizing a literature that has so thoroughly debunked the teleological secularization narratives of the past. By treating “Secularism” as a faith tradition of its own and one that was in conversation with other religious traditions, Kosuch captures the entangled relationship between the secular and the sacred with great specificity.
The most innovative aspect of this reference resource is its numerous thematic chapters. Parts II, III, and IV of the book on “Cultures of Knowledge,” “Religion and the Arts,” and “Religion and Civil Society” achieve so much more than simply adding to the checklist of topics of interest to scholars of the nineteenth century. These sections are structured to achieve the primary methodological goal of the book. In the introduction, Steinhoff and Zalar stress their decision to center the book around the term “religious culture” rather than “religious cultures” or “religion.” In doing so they emphasize viewing a Bourdieuian “religious field” that encompassed many faith traditions and analyzing how they related to one another. They organize a volume that avoids assumptions about any one tradition being “paradigmatic” and definitions of religion that might exclude lived spiritual experiences. Instead, this book looks at “the multiple ways in which individuals and communities saw themselves as religious” and “opens up possibilities for comparisons across traditions (5).”
Zalar’s chapter entitled “Publishing and Reading” achieves these ends well by analyzing a larger reading culture that transcended the experience of any single faith tradition. In considering how the reading revolution of the nineteenth century intersected Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant institutions and believers, he draws larger conclusions about how the new prevalence of both “silent” and “extensive” reading challenged religious authorities used to serving as intermediaries between believers and their books. While all faith traditions promoted religious literature, readers no longer engaged exclusively in sacred texts and developed reading styles that made their habits more individualistic and less communal.
Similarly, Yvonne Maria Werner’s chapter on “Gender” explores the scholarship on the so-called “feminization of religion” across the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish realms. By examining these faith traditions inter-relationally, larger patterns emerge. Werner identifies how women, while restricted by notions that spirituality was largely a feminine sphere, also utilized faith as an avenue into the public sphere of social and political action. She also summarized the scholarship of masculinity, observing that men across faith traditions sought ways to “re-code” religion in masculine tones that seemed to be depicted as feminine. However, Werner, also notes significant distinctions in how institutions defined the role of women. While the Protestant Church emphasized only marriage and family as a path for Christian women, the Catholic Church offered celibacy and consecrated religious life as an avenue into the public sphere for women religious.
Daniel Weidner’s “Religion and Literature” illustrates the value of the volume’s emphasis on looking at “religious culture” by illustrating how the secular and sacred intertwined. He argues that literature and religion “co-evolved” throughout the long nineteenth century, from the era of the Enlightenment to that of the fin-de-siècle. He concludes, “While literature both distinguished itself from religion and assumed functions that religion had hitherto fulfilled, religion, meanwhile, reinvented itself through the means of literature” (267). Such examples demonstrate how de-centering any one faith and engaging in comparative work leads to larger conclusions about European religious culture.
An additional feature of this book is that its individual chapters do more than summarize the state of research in their respective fields; they often offer scholarly arguments and suggestions for future research. For example, Steinhoff’s essay on “Education” illustrates the main trend of recent research that emphasizes conflict between church and state over education while simultaneously offering a more innovative view that highlights a surprising amount of cooperation between secular and religious authorities. On the one hand, he highlights how the expansion of formal schooling in the nineteenth century caused religious institutions to lose what had been exclusive control. This led to cultural conflict over how much power religious culture should have over education. Yet, Steinhoff also argues that faith communities relied on schools to educate their followers and often used the expansion of education to raise the intellectual profile of religious leaders and spread knowledge about their traditions. In a similar vein, Norman Etherington’s “Missions and Empire” also does more than summarize the historiography. He provides an overview of past debates about whether or not Christian missionaries paved the way to modern empires. He examines the frequent tensions between missionaries and the new colonial states of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, he confirms findings that European missionaries themselves had minimal impact on conversion rates. Etherington adds extra value to his contribution by calling for future research about indigenous people who were often the ones who spread European faith traditions and made Christianity a global tradition.
Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe does even more than one would expect from a reference work. By gathering essays that exhaustively scrutinize the faith traditions of Europe, encompass the entirety of the century, and cover vast thematic ground, this work stands alone as an authoritative entry point into the study of religion in this era. It can be useful for graduate students searching for new topics, teachers hoping to broaden the coverage of their courses, and experts in need of historiographic summaries and bibliographies. The book’s methodological focus of Bourdieu’s “religious field” and the argumentative sophistication of each chapter should earn this work a broad readership.
Michael O’Sullivan is Professor of History and Director of Global Studies at Marist University. He teaches courses on Modern European History and researches the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Germany. He is author of Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965. It is winner of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies 2018 Book Prize.