Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630–1690

Abstract

In his Experiment in Criticism (1961), C. S. Lewis wrote: In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here … I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. Antoinette Sutto's first book does something very similar for the history of Maryland. In her admirably slim, engagingly written, and fascinating study, she breaks with the tradition of most histories of colonial Maryland and places this small, unique colony into a much wider world, which highlights not only its “uniqueness” but also its greater comprehensibility. Maryland considered in isolation presents a colony apart, Catholic in a Protestant empire, officially religiously tolerant when toleration was often considered treasonous, essentially ruled by a “proprietor.” But, viewed through the transatlantic lens provided by Sutto, Maryland comes into broader focus. Despite being on the edge of the “known world,” seventeenth-century Maryland was not isolated, but intimately intertwined with religio-political worlds geographically far removed from the colony.