In its specially-commissioned fourteen chapters, this important book discusses an impressively wide range of issues around the theme of male spirituality in the nineteenth century, drawing from history, cultural studies, art history and literary criticism. Topics explored include: ideological and iconographical representations of masculinity across the major Christian denominations; militarism and hymnody; male homosexuality and homoeroticism. The book is not afraid to explore controversial areas, nor to go beyond the generally acknowledged 'canon' of prescribers of gender identity: it includes, for example, leading nonconformist figures like William Booth and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and early gay writers like John Addington Symonds.

Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Preface; J.Tosh Introduction; A.Bradstock, S.Gill, A.Hogan & S.Morgan Soldiers and Saints: the Fighting Man and the Christian Life; J.R.Watson The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism; L.M.Miller Victorian Masculinity and the Virgin Mary; C.M.Engelhardt 'Reading Men More Truly': Charlotte Brontë's Villette; A.Hogan Angry Young Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Tonge; C.Wells-Cole Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery; F.S.Roden Man Apart: Priesthood and Homosexuality at the End of the Nineteenth Century; P.Healy 'A Double-minded Man is Unstable in all his ways': Religion, Doubt, Male Homosexuality and John Addington Symonds on Arthur Hugh Clough; H.J.Booth The Mightiest Evangel of the Alpine Club: Masculinity and Agnosticism in the Alpine Writing of John Tyndall; F.O'Gorman George Eliot, Masculinity, and the (Ir)Religion of Nationalism; M.McCaw Ecce Homo: The Depiction of Christ as the Model of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Lives of Jesus; S.Gill 'Writing the Male Body': Sexual Purity and Masculinity in The Vanguard , 1884-1894; S.Morgan William Booth: Saint or Charlatan?: L.Lauer 'A Man of God is a Manly Man': Spurgeon, Luther and 'Holy Boldness'; A.Bradstock Index