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From 1598, accounts of self-flagellating rituals and dramatic fringe Catholic prac-
tices were recorded in the NewWorld. Simms’s argument is that the Catholic Penitentes
had a shared desire for hiddenness and dissimulation concerning innovative religious
practices with the marranos of the New World. The areas in which they lived were
remote and often not served by priests or other Catholic functionaries, and the rites they
developed incorporated medieval flagellant influences, practices of Franciscan Tertia-
ries, and shamanic activities borrowed from Native Americans. The Penitente strong-
holds of Mexico and New Mexico were also areas in which the Inquisition was
sporadically active and Simms persuasively takes his reader on a journey in which the
New Christians were part of the formation of the Penitente hermanidad (fraternity).
Simms clearly views the preservation, however fragmented, of an ethnic and religious
identity by secret Jews over 400 years as a remarkable feat, though fraught with danger
and difficulty.
The sweep of history and culture covered in Marranos on the Moradas is vast; Simms
links the practices of the New World secret Jews with the phenomenon of Marranism in
the society of medieval through modern Europe, particularly in literature (his books
include A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works (2004) and
a study of the Gibraltar-born author Charlotte Lennox, Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and
the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England
(2004)). Simms’s literary interests are reflected in his detailed exposition of rhetorical
techniques and tropes, and his anthropological curiosity is manifested in the fascinating
chapter on comparative crucifixion movements, “Penitentes, Thaipusam, and the
Filipino Crucifiers: Ecstasy, Agony and Their Social Significance as Festivals of Blood
and Pain,” which is of great interest to the comparative religionist.
Reading Marranos on the Moradas is a difficult and often frustrating process, as
the author is a master of allusion and suggestion, and has developed an argument that
must be followed through many apparently unrelated situations and historical eras,
and which establishes links — some tenuous and some powerful — between phe-
nomena which are usually regarded as entirely separate. Yet the book is extremely
valuable, in that it exhibits very clearly the extreme difficulty of studying the history
of mentalites and the need for attention to a multitude of disparate academic fields
that generally discourages such academic endeavours. This book is recommended to
all interested in Jewish history, Jewish–Christian relations, and religious fraternities
and secret societies.
CAROLE M. CUSACK
University of Sydney
CALLUM G. BROWN:The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation
1800–2000, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2009; pp. xv +304.
When the first edition of The Death of Christian Britain was published in 2001, it
caused something of a sensation. The scholarship on secularisation (broadly the retreat
of traditional religion, specifically Christianity, from the public realm and its loss of
influence in the lives of individuals) in the West had become deeply contested and
Brown’s book took a novel approach to the subject. He argued that, rather than being a
gradual process twinned with modernity (identified broadly with the Industrial Revo-
lution and the Enlightenment), secularisation had struck Britain dramatically in the
1960s when the sexual revolution, feminism, and greater economic choice had affected
268 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY
© 2011 The Authors
Journal of Religious History © 2011 Religious History Association
the condition of women, who found it possible to desert Christianity (both the institu-
tional church and the values and morality espoused by it) en masse. Brown argued that
the discourse of female virtue and domesticity was intimately connected with Chris-
tianity, and when it collapsed Christianity did too.
This second edition, rather than being completely revised throughout, has the addi-
tion of a tenth chapter answering critics of the original book and including references to
recent scholarship that supports and enriches Brown’s originally quite speculative
argument. Brown’s original study was deeply influenced by gender, women’s history,
and discourse analysis, and he has the opportunity to refute critics who accused him of
postmodernist tendencies (which he acknowledges and here nuances further). The
additional chapter revisits recent British history, noting the way that Tony Blair’s term
as Prime Minister encouraged “the perception of a resurgence of religion in Britain”
(p. 201), and data on immigration to Britain are carefully analysed to confirm that
non-Christian migration only became a factor of significance in the 1960s and 1970s.
Many readers were dismayed and offended by Brown’s assertion that Christian
Britain was dying or dead, and he carefully considers the criticism of this position
advanced by others. He similarly considers evidence for premarital sex, the take-up of
the contraceptive pill by women (particularly unmarried women), and finally affirms the
general thesis of the first edition (which now can draw upon better supporting evidence).
The Death of Christian Britain is vividly and compellingly written, and tells an impor-
tant and powerful story that deserves a wide audience. The death that Brown refers to
is not that of Christianity itself, but of a particular culture enmeshed with the Christian
churches that is now all but extinct. The history of Christianity as it now exists in
Britain, and as it may persist into the future, will be entirely different.
CAROLE M. CUSACK
University of Sydney
YOUSSEF CHOUEIRI, ed.: A Companion to the History of the Middle East. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005; pp. 602.
Even though the Middle East is front-page news almost every day, it is almost too easy
to forget that the region has a complex and ancient history. A continuous regional
system for hundreds, if not thousands of years, it has been incorporated into the
Western-dominated world system as a periphery for more than two centuries. Since
then, elites and populations have tried to resist as well as embrace integration with the
outside. Today, it is a land of contrast and extremes, of fabulous wealth and utter
poverty, of modern social solidarities and puritanical religiosity, of ethno-religious
pluralism, and of seemingly uniform political communities.
More often than not, the states and societies of the region have inefficient govern-
ment bureaucracies that underpin illegitimate but populist regimes engaged in still
open-ended processes of nation- and state-building. Studying them reflects the
region’s variegated nature. Warring tribes of scholars, contradictory approaches and
alternative ideologies have laid claim to the field of Middle East Studies, but in
defiance of certain predictions, methodological and paradigmatic cohesion are still
very much elusive.
It is thus clear that studying the history of the Middle East is a daunting task, but one
that Youssef Choueiri has mastered well. In many ways, he has met the challenge and
struck the right balance. A Companion to the History of the Middle East is a worthy
addition to the Blackwell series.
269BOOK REVIEWS
© 2011 The Authors
Journal of Religious History © 2011 Religious History Association