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

by Raymond D. Tumbleson

Overview

This study examines the role of anti-Catholic rhetoric in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. Raymond Tumbleson shows how the fear of Popery, a potentially destabilizing force under the Stuarts, ultimately became a principal guarantor of the Hanoverian oligarchy. Discussing writers from Middleton, Milton and Marvell to Swift, Defoe and Fielding, as well as numerous pamphleteers, the book crosses traditional generic, disciplinary and chronological boundaries between poetry and prose, literature and polemic, the Reformation and the Augustan age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521100892
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/05/2009
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher