In Victorian Reformations, Miriam Burstein has presented scholars and their students in the fields of theology, history, and literature with an illuminating study of “one of the Victorian era's most popular, and most loaded, national pastimes”: debating the Reformation (2). After centuries of religious struggle and persecution by both Protestants and Catholics, by 1820 it seemed to many Protestants that Roman Catholicism had been safely relegated to the past. But in 1829, passage of the Catholic Relief Act allowed Roman Catholics once again to sit in the House of Commons; the Oxford Movement raised fears of what John Keble termed “National Apostasy” in an 1833 sermon; and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism combined with the conversion of John Henry Newman and the 1850 restoration of a Catholic hierarchy in England (popularly known as the “Papal Aggression”), stoking fears of a Catholic resurgence. These fears fueled wide-ranging debates carried on in a variety of works that focused on the Reformation as a crucial moment in history, one that defined the very meaning of Christianity itself. Jean-Henri Merle D'Aubigné's 1846 History of the Reformation, for example, was a best seller, and John Foxe's 1563 Book of Martyrs went through seven editions in 1851 alone.

Burstein's elegantly written study is the first work by a literary historian to focus on “controversial historical novels,” that is, on novels that intervene in this public discourse by presenting fictionalized histories of the Reformation. Victorianists will gain a new understanding of how religious controversy has been present, almost invisibly, in many mainstream, canonical works, and, conversely, of how popular novels, little known today, influenced the religious views of large sections of the Victorian reading public.

Burstein's study is organized according to disputes and points of agreement among a wide spectrum of authors from Evangelical, High Church, Anglo-Catholic, and Roman Catholic traditions. The first chapter discusses Walter Scott's 1820 companion novels, The Monastery and The Abbot, which “celebrate the unqualified birth of Protestant modernity out of the Catholic ashes” (20). Chapter 2 examines controversial historical novels that draw on medieval accounts of John de Wycliffe and the Lollard martyrs to show that the true spirit of Christianity existed within the church two centuries before the Reformation in the form of resistance to institutional suppression. Chapter 3 discusses novels that portray Bible reading as essential to Protestantism because it alone teaches that sacred historical narrative—God's word—ought to be accessible to all Christians without interference by the church. Chapter 4 examines novels that “reinvent” the Marian persecutions of 1555–58, the authors of many drawing from Foxe's Book of Martyrs as a reminder of the price that Protestant martyrs paid for their faith. Chapter 5 discusses novels written by Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic authors that represent the Reformation as a “traumatic moment in European history, yet one that could be healed” (181), a moment in which both Marian and Elizabethan persecutions were caused by political and historical forces that had passed into history. Finally, as if to demonstrate how valuable these controversial historical fictions are for understanding canonical texts, chapter 6 interprets Charles Dickens’ 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge, and the coda that follows discusses George Eliot's novel Romola.

The quality of Burstein's scholarship is extraordinary: her analyses encompass some six centuries of primary and secondary sources, ranging from Foxe through Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) and Euan Cameron's Enchanted Europe (2011). Yet this impressive scholarship “reads easily”; many of her references and discussions of sources and interpretations occur in the footnotes, where they do not interrupt the flow of her analysis, but support it impeccably. Burstein's study serves as a model for how to read and discuss literary texts: always incorporating analyses of specific novels, histories, and scholarship into the broader patterns of Victorian religious discourse, while consistently providing fine, close readings of the texts. Finally, Burstein's writing offers a model of intelligent, often witty, handling of complex ideas with balance and detachment—that is, of fairness to all sides on important questions that even today can be fraught with emotion.