The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth‐Century American Religion Claudia Stokes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion Claudia Stokes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.Readers will discover in The Altar at Home a dedicated, scholarly exploration of American sentimental literature in the context of nineteenth century religious faith and the developing theologies of the century. Carefully researched, textured, and we 11-written, the work demonstrates the interlinkages of literary sentimentalism and religious history, making a convincing and compelling argument that sentimental writers manipulated domesticity "to advance controversial new beliefs, practices, and causes such as Methodism, revivalism, and even the legitimacy of a female clergy" (Inside Cover), advocating and depicting religious independence and denouncing competing religious movements for oppressive and hierarchical practices and structures (9).Stokes, in broad, masterful strokes, paints "the religious content, contexts, and consequences of sentimentalism" as showing, above all else, "that the literary archive [sentimentalism] is more capacious and tensile" than may have been previously recognized" (12). Genres of female piety include more than the standard forms of novel, poem, ladies' periodical, and gift book, extending to the hymn, spiritual autobiography, and religious revelation. Carefully structured, the first chapter provides the context that occasioned, what Stokes describes, as "the meteoric rise of the religious press... that by extension fostered the literary sentimentalism" (15). With its signature features of ecumenism, emotionalism, and encouragement of private Bible study, sentimental literature challenged traditional Catholicism seeking to curtail Bible reading by lay people as well as advocated for religious authority and stewardship for women (15). The second chapter examines how sentimental writers helped establish respectability for the hymn genre (16), enabling it to "acquire a genuine foothold in formal religious ritual" as well as enabling "literary women to become legitimate religious authorities" (102). The third investigates the influence of millennialism on sentimental literature, using this pervasive theology to advocate for feminine religious authority. In Chapters Four and Five, Stokes explains that "the sectarian character of sentimentalism" promoted "numerous new religious beliefs" at the same time that it denounced others (17). While Harriet Beecher Stowe's writing influenced the founder of Seventh Day Adventism, Ellen G. White, to write extensively about the central role of domesticity, "Sentimentalism in the mid-century [also] became a source of public mortification for Mormons [in the issue of Mormon polygamy], and they responded by coopting sentimentalism in an effort to defend themselves from public attack and to demonstrate their compliance with normative domestic values" (18). Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, shaped her public persona as religious authority by patterning it after the "idealized sentimental mother" (19).Stokes contributes significantly to the critical discussion, since the 1970s, that views sentimentalism as being deeply grounded in philosophical and religious issues and using domesticity to provide alternatives to the dominant thought of the period. …