ABSTRACT
Making the case for why Christianity and Judaism deserve sustained attention in our accounts of the Victorian period, this chapter focuses on three particularly energizing aspects of recent scholarship in the field. The first section, theorizing religion, reveals how scholars are working with increasingly sophisticated and mobile accounts of religion and secularity. In the next section, on biblical reception, the chapter invites readers to think about the myriad ways in which sacred texts were received and reworked in the Victorian period. And in the final section, the chapter turns to the subject of print culture and religious materiality. Resisting the idea that religion can only involve ethereal and narrowly spiritual conceptions of reality, the section considers how recent work alerts us to the material interests of Christian and Jewish belief and practice.
