Reviving the reformation: victorian women writers and the protestant historical novel

Abstract

For Protestant women anxious about the apparent threat posed by a newly “aggressive” Roman Catholicism to modern British culture, the historical novel offered an especially appealing outlet. In particular, novelists turned to the Reformation as a means of generating analogies for and arguments about the current religious “crisis”. The result was a new subgenre of historical fiction, the “Reformation tale”, which writers employed for a number of theological and political purposes: as a warning against a return to the oppressive Catholic past, as a means of modelling the ideal Christian hero, as a way of encouraging political action – even martyrdom. Women novelists without the theological or linguistic training necessary to undertake ecclesiastical history could thus participate in and, perhaps, shape contemporary debates about Roman Catholicism's increasing presence in the public sphere.