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Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, by Mary Heimann; pp. viii + 253. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, 30.00, 555.00.
Mary Heimann's study of Catholic devotion in England between about 1850 and 1914 is a well-researched, readable, and informative work. Acknowledging that "devotion is a private matter impossible for the contemporary, let alone the historian, to judge" (38), Heimann nevertheless argues that devotional practices reveal the beliefs of worshippers in ways that traditional measurements, such as church attendance, do not. Analyzing church-based devotions, popular prayers, and church societies, she concludes that "it was an invigorated English recusant tradition, not a Roman one, which was most successful in capturing the imagination of Catholics living in England from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth" (137).
Heimann judges the popularity of church-based devotions by measuring statistics in the Catholic Directory for the years 1851-1914. The problem, as she acknowledges, is that these statistics give no information about how often a devotion was offered (daily, weekly, monthly) or how many worshippers attended. The two most popular church-based devotions were the Public Rosary, which had been practiced during the recusant period, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which was neither a Roman nor an Italian practice; it probably came from a recusant text, Bishop Richard Challoner's The Garden of the Soul (first published...