Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism ed. by Evan Haefeli

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism ed. by Evan Haefeli Mitchell Oxford Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism EDITED BY EVAN HAEFELI Early American Histories. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. xvi + 342 pages. Cloth: $39.50. ISBN: 9780813944913. The ideology of anti-popery, as Evan Haefeli rightly observes in the introductory essay to this superb edited volume, was a “pervasive Anglo-American tradition,” which should be distinguished from straightforward anti-Catholic bigotry by its fusion of “hostility to the religious and political example of the Roman Catholic papacy” (12). As such, anti-popery was “inseparable from British and American understandings of liberty and slavery,” he explains, “justifying the hegemony of Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic up through the American Revolution” (3). As Haefeli notes, despite anti-popery’s well-recognized scope and significance, this extensively studied phenomenon is surprisingly “fragmented” along geographical, temporal, and thematic lines (18). Through this excellent collection of essays, Haefeli brings together the rich—yet constellated—scholarship on the varieties of British anti-popery, providing a fuller portrait of this complex phenomenon. Against Popery is thus not only valuable to historians of religion, politics, and culture in the early modern Atlantic, it is also a usefully comprehensive single-volume resource for scholars of the similarly robust—though substantially different—anti-Catholicism of John Henry Newman’s late nineteenth century. Haefeli’s most conspicuous achievement is to bring the sprawling scholarship on early modern anti-Catholicism under one roof. Comprising contributions from twelve scholars (as well as two chapters authored by Haefeli himself), this volume embraces considerable breadth. Its authors lead us on several excursions out from Britain’s imperial metropole to Post-Reformation Scotland, early colonial Virginia, and to the transatlantic “anti-Irish anti-Catholicism” that shaped Britain’s American colonial project (125). But Against Popery does more than that. Its division into three sections, “Foundations,” “Hegemony,” and “Transformations,” which span from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, imparts a unifying coherence—an overarching argument about the emergence, entrenchment, and evolution of this pervasive and pliable ideology—across the volume’s impressive array of topics, times, and places. Indeed, rather than simply an omnibus of the familiar, these essays trod much new interpretive ground as well. Several highlight new sources and methods, such as Laura M. Stevens’s fascinating exploration of the competing evocations of the Virgin Mary by eighteenth-century British Protestants who at once portrayed her as the epitome of “Catholic idolatry and monstrous femininity,” and a “Protestant [End Page 103] exemplar . . . of godly attributes,” (200) or Clare Haynes’s similar study of the “dualistic approach” Anglo-Americans took to “popish art”: they admired its beauty while “denying its ultimate truth” (228). Others offer new perspectives on old questions, like Cynthia van Zandt’s compelling account of how the shocking (and murky) “gunpowder plot” of 1605 “wove anti-popery into the culture of English America,” and to the colony of Virginia in particular—despite the Old Dominion’s longstanding reputation as “hot Protestant” New England’s comparably cooler counterpart. Or Brendan McConville’s “A Deal with the Devil,” which makes a persuasive case—against prevailing historiographic currents—that “anti-popish or Francophobic fears” were a central “driving force” of the American Revolution (287). McConville’s essay is also a lynchpin in Against Popery’s interpretive arc from “hegemony” to “transformation.” Anglo-Protestant anti-popery in Revolutionary America was not a “fixed . . . political-ideological position,” and Patriot leaders applied these powerful political ideas against the British Crown and Parliament, thereby opening space for an alliance with Catholic France (288). Peter Walker’s subsequent chapter traces the contemporaneous “transformation” of the politics of anti-popery in the imperial metropole. In Britain, he contends, that both Catholics and dissenting Protestants gained rights in the early nineteenth century “not because religious prejudice had disappeared,” but because the “languages of anti-popery and anti-puritanism were . . . refashioned as arguments for toleration” (316). As should be clear, Against Popery offers more than an updated accounting of the varieties of British anti-Catholicism. Indeed, an unmistakable thematic thread can be followed across its multiplicity of authorial voices. As Haefeli succinctly puts...