Print Culture

Focused on John Henry Newman’s Anglican and early Catholic years (1833–48), this chapter argues for his remarkable insight into the ways in which mass print media were formatively shaping modern religious commitment and community. It shows that Newman organized Tractarian agitation in response to the rise of a competitive and voluntary religious print market that accustomed a broad range of Britons to imagining and contesting Christian community through the circulating printed page. The media strategies Newman pursued ironically resembled those of the Evangelicals he attacked, and exposed tensions between popular and institutional religious authority, as well as between real-world religious communities and those imagined through print. The chapter concludes with Loss and Gain, written shortly after Newman’s Catholic conversion, arguing that in this novel he tries to convert into witnesses for the superiority of his new communion texts and reading practices that helped define the Oxford Movement.