Mystery of the Rosary

The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism by Nathan D Mitchell, 241 pages

The Mystery of the Rosary is not a history of the rosary.  Rather, it is a history of the "reform of the reform" following the Council of Trent, using the devotion to the rosary as the center of the narrative, but also including figures such as St Philip Neri, St Ignatius of Loyola, and Caravaggio.  Mitchell traces the role of the rosary in the rebirth of Catholic confidence after the initial shocks of the Protestant Reformation, especially as a result of the victory of the Holy League over the Turks at Lepanto, and especially in the British Isles, where persecution disrupted the regular reception of the sacraments.  His primary theme, however, is the tension between top-down reforms imposed by the Roman authorities and the affirmation of a modern vernacular Catholicism, the two melding at the parish level.  The very flexibility of the rosary, in this view, with its ability to be both private and public, meditative and repetitive, physical and spiritual, established it as a devotion parallel to and therefore potentially both complementary to and in competition with the official liturgy.

This is an interesting subject, but Mitchell tends to too starkly divide the Counter-Reformation into opposing camps of non-conformist reformers and reactionary papalists, which ignores that every Catholic reform since the Cluniac has been papalist at its core.  In the context of the Counter-Reformation, this neglects St Philip Neri's close relations with a succession of popes, and the obvious case of the Jesuits, who spearheaded the spread of the new interiority while virtually defining ultramontanism.  This is the direct outgrowth of Mitchell's seemingly unexamined assumption that a concern for dogma is incompatible with being "energetic, innovative" and "open to reform".  Generalities abound and sometimes contradict one another - at one point medievals are accused of "intimacy and overfamiliarity" with the Virgin Mary, later the medieval view of Mary is described as that of an "aloof perfect queen", the perspective shifting depending on the point the author wishes to make. 

There are puzzling choices, as when Mitchell refers to the "so-called joyful mysteries" or places "Order of Preachers" in quotation marks.  Bizarrely, he criticizes Bl John Henry Newman at length for describing the long period of Catholic persecution in England as a winter of the faith, tendentiously reading the famous "Second Spring" sermon as a denigration of recusant Catholics, quoting passages describing the Protestant perception of Catholics as if they represented Newman's own attitude, and claiming that Newman "closed the 'Second Spring' sermon" with a "peroration to the Virgin Mary" which somehow highlights his "'more Roman than Rome' piety", even though the sermon in fact ends with an invocation of St Philip Neri, one of Mitchell's reformers of the reform.

There are parts of a good book here, but the whole seems hopelessly muddled, as if confused about its theme and intended audience.  At times knowledge of the time period under examination seems taken for granted, at other times even the most basic information is carefully explained.  It begins as an examination of the changing role of the rosary after the Council of Trent and ends as a defence of the use of the rosary after the Second Vatican Council.  One gets the sense that Mitchell has a definite purpose in mind which binds together the whole (a purpose which would explain why he includes an extended discussion of kitsch in the twentieth century, for example), but if so, it's a purpose he unfortunately never makes explicit.