The rites of man: The British Museum and the sexual imagination in Victorian Britain

In the nineteenth century, the British Museum possessed a locked store of erotic objects. However, this did not serve to sanitize the rest of the collection. I use the evidence of an anonymous tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of the time, to show how a wave of anti-Catholic agitation led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. A wide range of objects, images and motifs were interpreted as evidence of pagan fertility cults, thus throwing into question the seemliness of the Museum's public displays. However, I use the evidence of an anonymous early Victorian tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of its times, to show that the early Victorian wave of anti-Catholic moral panic led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. Although I cannot and do not claim that this was a mainstream view, I do use this tract to emphasise that there is a ongoing tradition of eroticised readings of sculpture galleries, even ones supposedly purged of explicitly sexual material. That this fact is not widely recognised may be to do with dominant conceptualisations of the separation between art and pornography that date from the Victorian age. Much classical and Hindu statuary may indeed have been intended indirectly if not directly to produce erotic responses. And it we want to fully engage with the power of bodily representations in museum collections it may be sensible to openly acknowledge sexual fetishism as a social construction and, therefore, the diversity and unpredictability of arousal

‘The Catholic Florist’: flowers and deviance in the mid-nineteenth century Church of England

The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic change in the appearance of many ecclesiastical interiors due to the growing popularity of Catholic revivalism in the Church of England. One aspect of this process was the increasing abundance of flowers in churches in defiance of opinions which regarded such practices as incompatible with Protestantism. Such opposition also drew strength from cultural associations between flowers and dangerously alluring femininity and sexuality. It was popularly feared that priests were using flowers to lure women into their clutches. The medievalising work of Pugin and the members of the Ecclesiological Society played a major role in the moral legitimisation of both flowers and floral motifs in the decoration of churches. At the same time, rising living standards were bringing cut-flowers, including those forced in hot houses, within the budgets of middle-class households. The enhanced respectability of flowers as suitable for sacred contexts fuelled the development of an emergent craze for floral decoration in the home. Practices of the use of flowers as ornaments increasingly crossed back and forth between domestic and ecclesiastical contexts. The continued association of blossoms with the realm of the feminine did not, however, lead to sustained moral panic because flower-arranging Anglo-Catholic priests were increasingly seen as effeminates rather than as sexual predators. This analysis of developments in the early to mid-Victorian periods is seen as forming the basis for further work into the subsequent floral interconnections between sacred contexts, aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement

Back to the Future of the Body

What can the past tell us about the future(s) of the body? The origins of this collection of papers lie in the work of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities which has been involved in presenting a series of international workshops and conferences on the theme of the cultural life of the body. The rationale for these events was that, in concepts as diverse as the cyborg, the questioning of mind/body dualism, the contemporary image of the suicide bomber and the patenting of human genes, we can identify ways in which the future of the human body is at stake. This volume represents an attempt, not so much to speculate about what might happen, but to develop strategies for bodily empowerment so as to get “back to the future of the body”. The body, it is contended, is not to be thought of as an “object” or a “sign” but as an active participant in the shaping of cultural formations. And this is emphatically not an exercise in digging corpses out of the historical archive. The question is, rather, what can past lived and thought experiences of the body tell us about what the body can be(come)? Dominic Janes edited this book and contributed this chapter

Queer Walsingham

Book synopsis: Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology

The role of visual appearance in Punch’s early-Victorian satires on religion

Satires on various aspects of contemporary religion can frequently be found in the early Victorian editions of Punch. The more strident forms of Protestant evangelicalism, in the earlier 1840s, and Roman Catholic revivalism, around 1850, came in for particular attack. This pattern was partly the result of a drift in the editorial policy of the publication towards a less radical social and political position. However, Catholicism, in both its Roman and Anglican varieties, was particularly vulnerable to the combination of visual and verbal parody employed by Punch because of that denomination’s stress on visual aspects of worship. Evangelicals, by contrast, employed modes of dress and architecture that were similar to those of the secular world of their time and were, thereby, harder to depict as strange and peculiar. The pages of Punch can, therefore, tell us not only about how various Christian groups were viewed in early Victorian England but also about the ways in which they attempted, with varying success, to parry and pre-empt critique in the print media

Emma Martin and the manhandled womb in early Victorian England

Emma Martin (née Bullock) was born in 1811 and died in 1851. She was a socialist and freethinker. As a child she was strongly religious and at the age of seventeen joined the Particular Baptists – a Calvanist grouping. She remained a believer for a further twelve years. In 1831 she married the Baptist Isaac Luther Martin and they had three daughters. She was very unhappy in the marriage and started to deliver lectures on the role of women. In 1839 she attended her first Owenite social meeting – she was powerfully ambivalent toward the radical views she heard there and she attacked their anti-religious ideas despite their endorsement of her pro women feelings. At the end of that year Isaac moved the family to London and she left him and became a lecturer for the Owenites at a small stipend. This paper begins by examining a remarkable text, published in 1844, which rejected a phallocentric view of religion. Her tract Baptism: a Pagan Rite is inspired by a tradition of comparative religion which had been developed and popularised by anti-clerical comparisons of Catholicism with pagan worship made around the time of the French Revolution. However, other works in this genre, such as Payne Knight’s Priapus (1786) frame their vision of ancient religion around the primacy of phallicism as the central expression of primitive fertility cults and thence as underlying modern Catholic practice. Emma Martin’s work, by contrast, reframed the discussion in two important ways. Firstly, she focussed upon her own experience as a former Baptist so as to sustain a sexualised reading of that denomination. Secondly, her reading centred on the baptismal pool as a womb in which the sinner was reborn. Contemporary accounts critical of baptism indicate that the occasion was feared to be an opportunity for sexual impriority. Martin appears to have seen the act of baptism as an often co-erced fertility ritual. Her other pamphlets, of which several survive, are not directly on gendered themes, but are strongly against religion. Her most active period of writing and speaking lasted until 1845 after which she left the movement to become a midwife. She spent her last years lecturing on gynaecology before dying of tuberculosis in 1851. She thus demonstrated the importance of the womb and its order and disorder as a core element in her practice and sense of duty. By thinking with the womb, she was able to place the female generative process – and its abuses at the hands of men – at the centre of her view of the operation of contemporary society. In this she is strikingly different to other writers of the time on comparative religion who either downplayed the womb as compared with the phallus, or who seem to have regarded the womb as somehow abject

Seeing and tasting the divine: Simeon Solomon’s homoerotic sacrament

Book synopsis: Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form

The Status of Science Fiction as Literature

In this discussion I want to say something about where science fiction has been and where it is now and then comment on where I think it stands in relation to what we ordinarily call "good" literature. But as in all discussions ot science fiction, it is necessary to start with some definition so you will know what I am talking about. Definitions vary widely, and any one if taken literally will lead to some contradiction. Some go so far as to include Arrowsmith, ghost stories, or the Book of Revelation. I don't include any of these. My definition is pretty standard: fiction that has in it some reasonably logical extrapolation of the science of the time, usually coupled with intent. For example, I would exclude Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, even though it has some scientific trapping, because Stevenson intended to present an allegory, and I would also exclude Gulliver's Travels. But I would include Bishop Godwin's The Man in the Moone; a Discourse of a Voyage Thither, which was published in 1638, because it is an account of space travel even though highly impractical.published or submitted for publicatio

The “Modern Martyrdom” of Anglo-Catholics in Victorian England

The word “martyr” was widely applied in the later nineteenth century to a number of Anglican “ritualist” clergy who had been prosecuted for performing overtly “Catholic” liturgical practices. The focal point for such usage occurred when several individuals were imprisoned for having flouted the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874). Supporters of this legislation accused their opponents of being fakes in that their “modern martyrdom” consisted of little more than short spells in prison. However, Anglo-Catholics connected acts of contemporary defiance with those of the confessors of the early Church. A quasi-hagiographic body of discourse began to coalesce around key figures such as Arthur Tooth and Alexander MacKonochie. This process did not get far because the campaign of persecution was swiftly abandoned, however, the term “martyrdom” has subsequently become widespread in the historical discussion of these men even though none of them died for their faith. This episode highlights the way in which martyrdom can be seen in relation to milder as well as more extreme acts of religious repression and witness. But also, in so far as the cults of saints and martyrs can be seen as being substantially constructed through hagiographies and martyrologies, this episode emphasizes the discursive aspects of martyrdom in general and the role of the media in particular in the contested emergence of religious heroes