Just wanted to followup with news of success. After a comedy of wiring errors I finally got an F-RAM going using shiftin and shiftout. Once I confirmed that as working I changed the code to use the hardware SPI port. It is blazingly fast. I'm using running the 18F452 at 20MHz so I can "only" run with a 5MHz clock. Haven't actually timed it (yet) but I think it'll all work out just fine.

If there's any interest I'll post the code in the Code Examples section.

Thanks again, everyone, for all the suggestions.

Best Regards,
Paul