sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 11

Travis R. Baker (ed.): Christian Culture and Society in Later Catholic England

In theory, a Festschrift volume is similar to other edited collections of articles on a theme. In practice, it is a different animal and should be assessed as such. It begins with an introduction that includes an appreciation and assessment of the life's work of its recipient before turning to a summary of the contributions that are to follow. The chapters themselves, written by the honoree's former graduate students or other associates, are dictated by the range of his or her interests. These chapters are shorter than most journal articles, comprising case studies or other smaller analyses that are interesting but, being less argumentative in nature, might not have been suitable for publication in journals. Somewhere there is a bibliography of the honoree's publications. In all of these ways, the present volume is typical of the genre. The tests of quality are the calibre of the contributors and contributions and the effectiveness of the introduction. The present volume excels in both regards.

Emmanuel College in Boston, where Logan spent most of his long teaching career, was in his time a small, undergraduate-only Catholic women's liberal-arts college. None of the contributors, therefore, were his former graduate students. The fact that Logan was so prolific a researcher and writer despite his pedagogical responsibilities testifies to his talent and dedication, but so does the fact that the contributors to the volume constitute an impressive line-up of accomplished scholars of the following generation (no fewer than nine with Emeritus titles), each of whom felt indebted to Logan's influence via his published work and, in many cases, personal friendship as well. Logan died just shy of his ninety-third birthday, his publications having spanned fifty-three of those years: he was given much time, and he used it well.

The twenty-two chapters are sorted into four divisions: 'Aspects of Secular and Ecclesiastical Legal Culture' (nine chapters); 'Aspects of Mendicant and Monastic Culture' (seven chapters); 'Aspects of Clerical Culture' (four chapters); and 'English Laymen and the Papacy' (two chapters). While they are too numerous for even brief individual assessments here, this reviewer found them stimulating and informative without exception. Any historian whose scholarship intersects with Logan's will find much to appreciate here.

It is the editor's introduction, however, that most sets this volume apart from so many of its fellows. At seventy-two pages, it includes a paean to Logan, of course, but also an extended historiographical essay giving a remarkable contextualization to each chapter in the book. One will be reading a section interweaving a lengthy and erudite analysis of Logan's work and its context - the pages thick with discursive footnotes, some of which run to several pages in length - and suddenly, seamlessly, one finds oneself reading about one of the contributions to follow in the volume, as naturally placed as if the introduction had been written first and the contributions individually commissioned to fit, rather than the reverse. This, by itself, is impressive writing.

Baker's writing is striking not only for its clarity and the extensive reading behind it - the introduction is followed by its own nine-page bibliography - but also for its individuality. Even before we come to the introduction, Baker's preface (XI-XIII) is written from his distinctly Catholic perspective. He commends here the fact that Logan 'was always fair to all those whom he studied' (XI), which cannot be gainsaid, and it may well be that Logan's own Catholic faith made it easier for him to sympathize with those whom he studied. It is a reach, however, for Baker to claim that Logan was 'unique' among modern historians in seeing the Dissolution of the monasteries as something regrettable: Dom David Knowles' Bare Ruined Choirs, while acknowledging the human failures of Tudor-era monks, hardly applauded the Dissolution, nor does James Clark, one of the contributors to this volume, in his more recent Dissolution of the Monasteries. The swing away from anti-Catholic triumphalism in the historiography of the late-medieval English church more broadly has also been seen for many decades in the work of historians such as Jack Scarisbrick, Robert Swanson (another contributor here), and, of course, Eamon Duffy. Baker may protest too much; but the reader knows who is doing the protesting, and why.

Baker devotes the first sixteen pages of his introduction to arguing for a re-naming of the era in question as 'Later Catholic England' rather than 'late Medieval' or 'pre-Reformation'. What we call a period does matter - perhaps all the more so as we use the terms so often without considering their implications - and this is an argument worth taking seriously. His inclusion of Richard FitzRalph among 'reasonable and courteous critics of the friars' (50), by contrast, is sure to raise a few eyebrows. Nonetheless, many of us were trained out of opinionated, personality-driven writing in our postgraduate studies, yet now we approach, with justified trepidation, an era in which writing is increasingly generated by robots, or by students who strive to imitate the robots' bland prose, never having found their own voices in the first place. Against this backdrop, Baker's writing is a salutary reminder that thoughtful scholarship and writing with genuine character need not be in opposition. If we are to retain the humanity of the historian's vocation, as Logan always did, perhaps this is the form that more of our work will need to take.