Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a compelling collection that uses sixteen focused essays to tell a larger story about the intersections of religion, politics, and national identity in the nineteenth century. In the introduction, editor Gareth Atkins points towards that larger whole even as he recognizes that Making and Remaking Saints only scratches the surface of nineteenth-century ideas about sainthood and sanctity. Atkins frames the volume as an attempt to show how saints and the idea of sanctity provided a site at which to debate many political and intellectual questions of the day. The saints, Atkins argues, challenged nineteenth-century thinkers to confront their own connections to the past, to grapple with discontinuities with that past, and to struggle with the meaning of revealed religion in an increasingly secularized age.

Each of the essays in Making and Remaking Saints tells its own story even as it suggests the volume's broad narrative, and the range covered by those stories makes it difficult to characterize the collection in its entirety. Nevertheless, the essays seem to fall into three groups. Some seek to make sense of the cultural meanings of figures like St. Paul and the Virgin Mary, who unquestionably were part of the history of all sects and denominations of English Christianity. Michael Ledger-Lomas's chapter on Paul typifies this category. Paul was central to all varieties of nineteenth-century Christianity; at the same time, however, Paul's miraculous experience of a risen Christ posed challenges to increasingly skeptical, liberal Protestants who, as Ledger-Lomas demonstrates, went to great lengths to preserve Paul's status as exemplar by reading his experience in psychological rather than miraculous terms. A second set of essays focuses on saints whose lives became sites at which religious and national identities intersected. Andrew R. Holmes, in his essay “Patrick,” for instance, argues that Irish Presbyterians validated a non-Roman Catholic version of Irish identity by finding in Patrick the founder of a “primitive, proto-Presbyterian Church” (83). Similarly, Lucy Underwood, in her essay on the English Catholic martyrs, shows how martyrs of Reformation-era England became both part of a conservative Roman Catholic story and part of the effort to weave that story into a broader narrative of English identity. A final set of essays considers those individuals who were not saints (in that they were not canonized by the church) but whose lives were interpreted through various lenses of sainthood. A particularly compelling example of this sort of essay is Helen Rogers's “Elizabeth Fry and Sarah Martin.” Rogers argues that Elizabeth Fry's work in Newgate prison made her a saintly model that others, like Sarah Martin who took up her own work in nineteenth-century prisons, could follow. In her analysis of both Fry and Martin, Rogers shows how the idea of saintliness legitimized women in their roles as activists; she further shows how the idea of saintliness complicates the expected class and social divisions that we might expect to see between women like Fry and Martin and the prisoners with whom they worked.

Not all of the essays in Making and Remaking Saints fit neatly into these three categories. Some, such as William Sheils's “Thomas More,” blur the lines between them. Others provide historical context. With her chapter “John Henry Newman's Lives of the English Saints,” for instance, Elizabeth Macfarlane offers a much-needed contribution to Newman scholarship: a well-researched and concise documentation of Newman's involvement with this important mid-century project. All of the essays in the volume, however, share certain characteristics. They are well researched, the contributors having gone to great lengths to situate their work within a broad scholarly conversation about nineteenth-century religious thought. Moreover, though each essay is itself only the smallest fragment of the larger story of sainthood in the nineteenth century, taken as a whole, the book succeeds in showing the complexity and the nuances of that story.

The volume, however, is not without its shortcomings. The decision to rely on endnotes for each chapter without offering a comprehensive bibliography (a decision perhaps out of the hands of the editor) will make it more challenging for scholars to benefit from the careful research that has gone into the collection. More significantly, the format creates two challenges for readers. First, the volume seems to lack a clear reason for the ordering of the essays. While each is a self-contained argument, the book might have benefited from a clearer rationale for how the essays fit together. Second, the space allotted for individual essays sometimes does not afford sufficient room for the authors fully to tease out the implications of their arguments. Carol Engelhardt Herringer, for instance, ends a brief section of her chapter on the Virgin Mary by suggesting that “perhaps invoking the Virgin Mary may have been a way to respond, obliquely, to the uneasiness generated by the queen” (54). Nothing in the chapter suggests that Engelhardt Herringer's claim is without merit (and this reader looks forward to a future publication that further develops the idea), yet little sustains it. These qualifications typify a recurring pattern in the book, in which authors suggest ideas that might have been more fully explored in a longer article.

Setting aside those shortcomings, Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an important book. If its overarching premise that religious discourse provided a space to discuss and contest different interpretations of history feels familiar, the volume excels in applying that principle, showing just how complex that negotiation process could be. Concluding his introduction, Atkins expresses his hope for the project: “if the essays that follow succeed in provoking further research, this book will have achieved its purpose” (22). By that standard, Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain will most certainly be a success for readers interested in the ways in which religious thought shaped and was shaped by the intellectual currents of the period.