HOR 42 2 Book Reviews 450..510

BOOK REVIEWS 

draws on a good deal of Newman’s lesser-known writings to sketch his pas- toral view of education. Chapter  is about the founding of the university in Dublin, and chapter  addresses the actual lived experience of students and faculty there. Chapters  and  address Newman’s departure and legacy, and his later attempts to allow Catholics to study at Oxford. Several appendix- es include excerpts from Newman’s relevant writings, as well as biographies of those involved in the Catholic University. For those interested in understanding Newman’s contributions to Catholic higher education, both in the sitz im leben of nineteenth-century England and in his influence on modern conversations about Catholic university mission, Shrimpton’s book is required reading.

TIMOTHY P. MULDOON Boston College

The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs. By Emma Anderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, .x+ pages. $.. doi: ./hor..

Emma Anderson’s The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs is an ambitious book. Spanning some four hundred years, Death and Afterlife begins at “the conventional endpoint of the traditional hagiographic narrative” (), tracing the martyrs’“continual remembering and reinvention in the popular, protean collective imagination” () from the moments of their deaths up to the present day. In seven evocatively rendered chapters, Anderson explores “multiple interpretations of the … deaths and legacies” () of René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, Jean de la Lande, Antoine Daniel, Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Nöel Chabanel, illuminating the complex and multivalent circumstances that attended the variously moti- vated deaths of these eight Frenchmen, the mid-nineteenth-century deploy- ment of the cult of the martyrs in the service of national identities on both sides of the Canadian-US border, and the persistent marginalization (and re- peated victimization) of native traditionalists and Catholics alike wrought through hagiographic narrative, imagery, and ritual. Animating Anderson’s history of the North American martyrs is the recog- nition that “truth’s very power and purity lie in its modest acknowledgement of its own partiality and in its reluctance to claim a false and hectoring univer- sality” (). Indeed, asserts Anderson, “the fact that these eight deaths … were seen from a range of perspectives as they were unfolding must be pivotal to any responsible interpretation of them” (). It is to the elucidation of this “range of perspectives” that Anderson dedicates her first chapter

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(in harmony with Timothy Pearson’s recent Becoming Holy in Early Canada, among others), ably untangling the thickly braided context within which Jesuit missionaries encountered the indigenous peoples of North America. Native notions of soul return, ritual sacrifice, and physical incorporation, Anderson insists, are just as critical to understanding these deaths as are Christian ideals of martyrdom. Anderson hews closely to the principle of truth’s partiality throughout the book, exposing the fractures and fissures, the incongruities and intersections, the points of conflict and sites of collaboration, that characterize the cult of the martyrs over the long course of its four-hundred-year history. If the deaths of these eight Frenchmen were, from the beginning, “hybrid events” forged out of “both mutual incomprehension and subtle flashes of profound understanding” (), the history of their reception in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century North America is one marked by a persistent polyphony—sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, but always multiple. Anderson’s best—that is, most analytically nuanced and historiographi- cally astute—chapters are without a doubt those dealing specifically with seventeenth-century interpretations of these eight deaths (her treatment of the “spiritual love triangle” [] between Paul Ragueneau, Jean de Brébeuf, and Catherine de Saint-Augustin deserves particular praise). Subsequent chapters wander a bit and are less firmly anchored in relevant secondary scholarship. This is, however, to be expected given the extensive historical reach and bold ambition of Anderson’s work. Attempting to at once “evoke as well as inform” (since, Anderson explains, “trenchant analysis need not pre- clude vivid description, nor thinking eclipse sensing and feeling”), Anderson succeeds in making “the past palpable” (). The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs will be a valuable addition to any university library and a priceless resource for students and scholars alike who are interested in colonial encounters, North American Catholicism, and the cult of the saints.

MARY DUNN Saint Louis University

Keys to the Council: Unlocking the Teachings of Vatican II. By Richard R. Gaillardetz and Catherine E. Clifford. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, .xx+ pages. $. (paper). doi: ./hor.. This remarkable book covers the Second Vatican Council in less than two hundred pages, and readers acquainted with the genealogy, the procedures, and the theology of the council will marvel at such an accomplishment.