Exploring the Holy Land: Harriet Martineau’s Comparative Theology

Abstract

Scholarship on Harriet Martineau’s prolific career as a public intellectual, journalist, and economist often overlooks her engagement with comparative theology. This neglect is due to the narrow scope of theological studies in the nineteenth century that excludes women from public engagement on the topic, rather than recognizing the ways in which they contributed to understanding across a range of religions and denominations. Martineau’s interdisciplinary work meant that she was unusually well-placed to promote comparative theology. This essay examines Martineau’s approach to comparative theology from her earliest prize-winning essays written to promote Unitarianism to those of the Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic faiths, through to her more complex engagement with the history of theological development in Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848).