Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination
Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745

A study of anti-Catholic rhetoric in England, 1660–1745, covering a wide range of literary and historical texts.

Raymond D. Tumbleson (Author)

9780521622653, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 October 1998

266 pages, 3 b/w illus.
23.7 x 16.1 x 2.3 cm, 0.56 kg

Review of the hardback: '… the book is learned, sophisticated, and imaginative … sometimes intricate and often subtle … reflexive, fiercely intelligent, and stylish - it should be read by historians, not least for what it tells us about ourselves and the intellectual climate in which we work.' The Historical Journal

This 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]