Catholic Literature and Print Culture in English

Abstract

Abstract In the long eighteenth century, the years leading up to Catholic emancipation in Britain and Ireland have often been characterized as a ‘silent’ period in Catholic literature and culture. This is reflected in John Henry Newman’s ‘second spring’ sermon as well as in scholarly accounts of the modern Catholic literary revival and early modern recusant writing. A closer formal and historical examination, however, reveals that, in addition to literary achievements by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, Catholic writing in English during this period underwent a much more complex, extensive, and experimental development in two ways. First, beginning with John Gother’s turn to popular books of devotional instruction after the 1688 Revolution, there emerged an important print network of texts that helped disparate Catholics constitute what Joshua King has termed an ‘imagined spiritual community’. Second, despite often eschewing literary genres such as plays and novels, these devotional, apologetic, historiographic, and instructional works experimented with narrative and dramatic techniques to form a proto-literary tradition of imaginative writing. These efforts were marked by a complex ‘two-fold’ consciousness of writing as a religious minority that had been misrepresented and misread in Protestant Britain. This essay tracks these developments from Gother through Bishop Richard Challoner and into the years preceding Catholic emancipation, when Catholic writing not only adapted new print media such as the periodical and gained more literary notoriety but also became increasingly divided over how to represent the Catholic community’s past, present, and future to the nation at large.