The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791 by Geremy Carnes

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 261 seven, “God’s Just Yoke: Power and Justice in Paradise Lost,” focus on the intertangling of politics, power, and divine justice in Paradise Lost, and are particularly relevant to recent debates surrounding Milton’s God. This God’s famous inconsistencies become more understandable as Chernaik locates them within Milton’s lifelong intellectual patterns, and bracingly argues for recognizing these inconsistencies as real, important, and irradicable. Chapter eight, “‘Tyrannie Must Be’: Milton and the Restoration,” is a masterful analysis of how Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes each explore Milton’s own Restoration plight of those “who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society” (181), seeing in Paradise Regained the admirable resistance of the faithful believer in an oppressive society, and in Samson Agonistes the “tragic freedom” (205) of the flawed and oppressed individual in a tyrannous world, where the promise of freedom and justice is providentially distant and delayed. In its comprehensive scope, focused analysis, and lucid engagement with Milton’s writings and intellectual contexts, Milton and the Burden of Freedom is a compelling and challenging book, showing us new aspects of Milton by striving to show us all of him, and refusing to compromise or simplify an irreducibly complicated and powerfully contradictory writer. Claire Falck Rowan University The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688-1791 Geremy Carnes University of Delaware Press, 2017. xlviii + 213 pp. $95 hardback. Geremy Carnes’s The Papist Represented is a captivating read; an extremely insightful analysis of eighteenth-century literature and its synergy with Catholic discourse. This study brings back the lived experiences of past Catholics, inviting the reader to think about the community as a whole, as human and not solely a monolithic body of political activists, Jacobites, or rural gentry living in semi-feudal conditions. Instead, Carnes presents us with a people with fears, emotions, beliefs and, most of all, as a minority striving for acceptance. By comparing eighteenth-century political debate on the civil position of Catholics with the current position of women and LGBTQ communities, Carnes invites Catholic historians to revisit the Religion & Literature 262 relevance of their field. This work is truly thought-provoking. The author draws an interesting parallel with current events, stating that integration in the twenty-first century moved along similar lines as in the eighteenth, when after decades of debate and violence, major legal changes happened over just a few years (comparing the 11 years between the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1778 and the Catholic Relief Act of 1791 with the 2015 repeal of the American same-sex marriage ban of 2004). Carnes clarifies how literature provides an analysis of a changing society and of an evolving political climate with complex issues such as homophobia. The chapter on John Dryden focuses on the meaning and symbolism of the closet, a covert community forced to be discreet and worship privately, along the same lines with today’s gender minorities. In doing so, he challenges the idea of a community repressed and in solitude within a sheltered and intimate gathering, where select people share ideas and experiences. Politics aside, Carnes introduces the importance of literature in the mainstream political debate of the time. He rethinks the concept of modernity, particularly its nineteenth-century Whig construct of being a Protestant product, arguing that minorities were a part of that complex and diverse time. He challenges the narrative of Steve Pincus in 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009) of the eighteenth century as a more secular era, reaffirming instead the role of religion in the secularisation process. He reflects on Catholics as part of the making of modern Britain and looks into their struggles to achieve their own rights, much like contemporary minorities whether racial, gender, or religious. Gender in particular plays a prominent role in the book where the narrative looks at the gendering of the community with female characters depicted as vulnerable, threatened, and condescending. Finally, it explores the identity crisis of Elizabeth Inchbald who expresses the feelings and frustrations of being both a Catholic and a woman. Throughout the book, Carnes contributes to rethinking the narrative of the English Catholic community with various works by Alexander Pope, John...