Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. By Frances E. Dolan

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Frances Dolan's Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture artfully models what we might see by resisting the allure of binaries. Instead of insiders versus outsiders, she identifies her subjects as “proximate others”; instead of (Catholic) virginity versus (Protestant) marriage, she focuses on Catholic wives and couples; and instead of delineating the difference between private and public, she exposes the porousness of the boundary. Dolan does not claim that these sorts of categories are reductive or generalizations inadequate, nor does she simply banish anything tarred with a binary brush. Instead, by dwelling on the cross-hatch of oppositional identities, she reveals a historical picture that theorizes the interaction between religion, politics, and gender. For scholars who study other religions and time periods, Dolan's book usefully demonstrates how and why closely-related religious groups deploy gender to mark difference. For specialists in early modern Christianity, Whores of Babylon provides convincing arguments about why Catholic women and (even more surprisingly) the Catholic couple so fascinated pamphleteers, preachers, playwrights, and polemicists as they promoted a white, Protestant, masculine, English national identity.