Devotion

“Devotion” examines British critiques of excessive adornment in non-Protestant churches and temples. Most typically, these accounts interpreted religious ornament as the initial, and hence most infantile, stage in the evolution of gold’s various possible uses. Britons documented instances of gilded idolatry in cathedrals from Mexico City to Moscow—and in all cases, half-excused the plunder of such treasures. They confirmed the backward devotional uses of gold abroad by pointing to their own pre-Reformation past. While recollections of British churches before Henry VIII widened the gap between Catholic and Protestant uses of gold, however, they also betrayed nostalgia for a more glorious era—especially among Anglicans who edged closer to Catholicism in the 1830s and in the profusion of town and county histories that appeared after 1780, many of which lamented the absence of adornment in their (now-Anglican) cathedrals.