Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination
Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination
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USDThis study examines the role of anti-Catholic rhetoric in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. This role was long neglected, being at once obvious and distasteful, a reproach to the heirs of the Enlightenment who prided themselves on their tolerance and did not want to confront its origins in intolerance. Raymond Tumbleson discusses how the fear of Popery, a potentially destabilising force under the Stuarts, ultimately became a principal guarantor of the Hanoverian oligarchy. The range of authors discussed runs from Middleton, Milton and Marvell to Swift, Defoe and Fielding, as well as numerous pamphleteers. Crossing traditional generic, disciplinary and chronological boundaries, this book examines hitherto neglected relationships between poetry and prose, literature and polemic, the Reformation and the Augustan age.
- The first sustained investigation of anti-Catholic rhetoric and its political role in this period; far-reaching interdisciplinary coverage in literature/history/religious studies
- Relates the origins of colonialism, the modern state and nationalist ideology to sectarian divisions which history has wilfully neglected
- Northern Ireland keeps the topic's modern inheritance in the media - there is the possibility of some related review coverage
Reviews & endorsements
"This book merits our attention..." Journal of English and Germanic Philology
"...the great merit of this book is its capacity to move into open academic discussion the fact of the strength of the anti-Catholic bias and the means of creating and sustaining that bias in Stuart and Hanoverian England." Martha Oberle, Seventeenth-Century News
"Tumbleson's provocative, groundbreaking book examines the multiple uses to which anti-Catholicism was put in different periods by different factions, by major authors (Middleton, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Swift, Defoe, Fielding), and by a host of now-forgotten pamphleteers. This is an extremely important book, often brilliant and always learned, on an important and neglected subject." Choice
"...Tumbleson deserves praise for examining lesser-known and long-ignored works of such canonical authors as Milton and Andrew Marvell, revealing aspects of the two writers that have been obscured by a post-Enlightenment literary and political culture determined to obscure its sectarian origins...Tubleson's work helps significantly in illuminating many otherwise puzzling theological issues in seventeenth-century England." Isis
Product details
February 2009Paperback
9780521100892
268 pages
229 × 152 × 15 mm
0.4kg
3 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Constructing the nation, constructing the other: martyrology and mercantilism
- 2. Of true religion and false politics: Milton, Marvell and Popery
- 3. 'The King's Spiritual Militia': the Church of England and the plot of the plot
- 4. 'Reason and Religion': the science of Anglicanism
- 5. Polemic and silence: Jeremy Collier, Elkanah Settle, and the ideological appropriation of morality
- 6. 'Politeness and politics': the literature of exclusion and the 'true Protestant heart'
- Conclusion.
