1880–1901—The fin de siècle

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-72
Author(s):  
Clive D. Field
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Growth Rates ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Relative Decline ◽  
Religious Crisis

Since at least the 1970s, historians have traced the origins of the decline of organized religion in Britain to the 1880s and 1890s, some even suggesting there was a ‘religious crisis’. Hitherto, there has been no systematic study of the fin de siècle from a secularization perspective. This chapter investigates religious allegiance, the next churchgoing. There is no strong evidence of a ‘crisis’ in allegiance. Notwithstanding the absence of an official census of religious profession, it does not appear there were dramatic changes during the fin de siècle, and the number failing to identify with a religion remained negligible. However, there were early signs of relative decline among the Free Church and Presbyterian constituencies in terms of both profession and membership, while Episcopalian communicants were reasonably flat. Sunday school growth rates also began to slow, although seven-tenths of children were still enrolled. The Roman Catholic community advanced relative to population.

Literary Movements and Catholic Reform: The Contributions of Abbé Félix Klein

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. T. Talar
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Felix Klein ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Literary Movements ◽  
Catholic Reform

AbstractConnections between Roman Catholic Modernism and the artistic culture of the fin de siècle have received little attention from scholars, as compared to the prominence accorded intellectual, social, and political issues. Felix Klein is one of a handful of those who worked for intellectual renewal who closely followed developments in literature and music, interpreting those developments in a way that favored an agenda of reconciling Catholicism with modernity. In two collections of essays, Nouvelles tendances en religion et en literature (1892) and Autour du dilettantisme (1895) Klein expressed hopes for a return to Catholicism among a cultural elite which I turn would have a larger impact upon a broad public.

The Theology of Carmina Gadelica

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Biblical Literalism ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
High Church ◽  
Editing Process

Alexander Carmichael’s compendium of Gaelic prayers, blessings, and charms, Carmina Gadelica, is one of the most remarkable Scottish art-books of its time, and a fundamental source for the Celtic Christianity movement. It is also exceptionally controversial, given that the evidence of his field notebooks suggests that during the editing process Carmichael and his circle adapted, reworked, and rewrote his originally oral sources for the printed page. Looking beyond debates over authenticity and forgery, this chapter offers broader nineteenth-century contexts in which to situate Carmichael’s magnum opus. Carmina Gadelica is clearly inspired by contemporary political, religious, and cultural developments: the controversies of the 1880s Crofters War; the project of spiritual reinvigoration envisaged by the fin de siècle ‘Celtic Renascence’ movement; and the ferocious Lowland–Highland disputes that eventually sundered the Free Church of Scotland in 1900, the year in which Carmina was eventually published. Another influence was the liturgical, devotional, and aesthetic ideals of High Church Tractarianism as mediated through Carmichael’s Episcopalian wife, Mary Frances MacBean. In Carmina Gadelica, the Oxford Movement met Catholic Hebridean piety, allowing Carmichael to delineate an alternative, pre-Reformation portrait of traditional, communal Highland religiosity as a riposte to contemporary stereotypes of intolerant evangelicalism, strict Sabbatarianism, and uncompromising biblical literalism.

1901–14—‘The Faith Society’?

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-140
Author(s):  
Clive D. Field
Keyword(s):  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Rural Districts ◽  
Civil Marriage ◽  
Relative Decrease ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Relative Decline ◽  
Presbyterian Churches

Most contemporaries and several historians have assessed the religious state of Edwardian Britain pessimistically, but Callum Brown has recently contended it was ‘the faith society’. The picture is actually mixed. Relative to population, religious allegiance was reasonably stable, apart from the Free and Presbyterian Churches, which lost ground in terms of both members (whose numbers mostly peaked around 1906) and adherents. Sunday scholars, already in relative decline since the fin de siècle, peaked in 1904–10. Churchgoing also continued its relative decrease and sometimes fell absolutely. This reduction in attendances was across the board, affecting all three home nations, rural districts as well as towns and cities, and all social classes. Adjusting for twicing, weather extremities, and undercounts of Catholic Masses, perhaps one-quarter of adults worshipped weekly and two-fifths at least monthly. Attenders were disproportionately female. Observance of rites of passage remained strong, albeit the minority preference for civil marriage grew.

Paul Sérusier: Art and Theosophy

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-213
Author(s):  
Nancy Davenport
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Original Design ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
19Th Century France ◽  
The Universe

AbstractThe art of Paul Sérusier and that of his artist friends has been interpreted in this essay as having its roots in the Theosophical themes prevalent in an interdependent circle of authors and spiritualists in 18th and 19th century France. These mystical thinkers were less concerned with the writings and indomitable presence of the acknowledged leading light of Theosophy Helena Petrovna Blavatsky than with a more specifically French national yearning for its imagined Celtic and traditionally Roman Catholic roots, smothered, in their view, by secular and materialistic modern sensibilities. Theosophy, “the essence of all doctrines, the inmost truth of all religions” as defined by the doyenne of French Theosophy Maria, Countess of Caithness and Duchess of Medina-Pomar, led Sérusier to seek elemental truth for his art in a remote inland village in Brittany where he painted for many years, to a Benedictine monastery on the Danube where formerly Nazarene artist/monks had created a system of drawing and painting believed to be based on the original design of the universe, and to the widely read text Les Grands Initiés (1899) by the mystic writer, Edouard Schuré. Sérusier's broad-reaching search for the Theosophical roots of art was one aspect of the fin de siècle malaise that led the arts out of the world into dreams.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

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