anti-Catholic Polemic Research Articles

The symbolic function of the portrait of Pope Innocent the X in F.M. Dostoevsky’s story “The Meek One”

RELEVANCE. Pictorial discourse is an essential element of F.M. Dostoevsky’s artistic creativity, which performs a special symbolic function and provides additional semantic load. The purpose of the study is to analyze the symbolic content of the canvas by the Spanish artist D. Velasquez “Portrait of Pope Innocent the X” (1650) in the context of the author’s idea for the story by F.M. Dostoevsky “The Meek One” (1876).MATERIALS AND METHODS. The object of the study is the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky “The Meek One”, published in the November issue of the Writer’s Diary for 1876, as well as handwritten editions and rough sketches for the story. The methodological basis of the research includes the method of comparative historical and hermeneutical-interpretative analysis. The interdisciplinary nature of the research is due to the appeal to theological, philosophical, historical and art criticism issues.RESULT AND DISCUSSION. During the research, the presence of a symbolic correlation between the portrait of the pontiff and the image of the Pawnbroker was revealed. The motives of deception, despotic domination, fear and secret voluptuousness mutually intersect and complement each other, forming a double portrait of the pope and the hero of the story. For Dostoevsky himself, the image of Pontiff Innocent X could be a kind of personification of the Catholic institution of the Papacy and the tendencies hidden in it towards spiritual despotism and absolute domination over man. A vivid artistic device, which was never realized in the final version of the story, acquires special significance and sound in the context of Dostoevsky’s anti-Catholic polemic. CONCLUSION. The symbolic function of the papal portrait has an important conceptual significance, both within the author’s idea of the story “The Meek One” and beyond it in the context of Dostoevsky’s anti-Catholic discourse. The obtained conclusions make important adjustments to the further study of the story by F.M. Dostoevsky, deepening its semantic meaning.

"Puzel" or "Pussel" and the Virgin Mary: 1 Henry VI and Anti-Catholic Polemic

The collaborative nature of 1 Henry VI has long been accepted, like the identity of Christopher Marlowe as one of the play’s authors. This article does not engage with the question of authorship as such, but interrogates Marlowe’s possible involvement in the Joan Pucelle scenes. It investigates what the depiction of Joan La Pucelle as a witch and a whore owes to contemporary anti-Catholic polemic, and argues that the emphasis in the play on the figure of the Virgin Mary is distinctive and significant. It proposes to contextualize the treatment of Joan Pucelle by confronting it to Doctor Faustus and The Massacre at Paris, two plays that were performed the same year as 1 Henry VI at the Rose Theatre.

«Знаете ли, я думал отдать мир папе…»: антикатолический пласт романа Ф.М. Достоевского «Бесы»

We analyzed the anti-Catholic discourse of the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky “Demons” (1872). The object of the study is the religious and confessional views of F.M. Dostoevsky in the aspect of the writer’s polemics with Catholicism and the papacy. The research methodology is based on the principles of comparative and contextual analysis. The interdisciplinary nature of the study is due to the appeal to theological, philosophical, religious-confessional and socio-political issues. The materials of the study were the text of the novel “Demons”, handwritten editions and draft notes to the novel, as well as external to F.M. Dostoevsky’s sources are historiosophical, polemical, historical literature, etc. In the course of an ideological content of “Demons” consistent review, the author identified three areas of anti-Catholic polemics implemented by the writer on the novel pages: anthropotheistic, Christological and socio-political. All three aspects are concentrated in the complex image of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin – a demon, a man-god, an antichrist and novel world impostor. The motive of the worldwide Catholic conspiracy threatening Russia is displayed in the political constructions of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. The practical significance of the results of the study lies in the possibility of their further use in a comprehensive study of F.M. Dostoevsky’s religious and historiosophical system of views, as well as by introducing the results obtained into the educational process for conducting seminars on the history of Russian literature.

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

A ‘Fiction of the Mind’: Imagination and Idolatry in Early Modern England

Abstract This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as ‘idolatry’, and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English Protestants, Catholics were responsible for transforming the good news of the Gospel into a mere fiction of their own making. More than a mere rhetorical posture — though of course it was also that — it is here argued that Protestant anti-Catholic polemic encodes a more generalized anxiety about the role of imagination within religious, social and political life, and thus serves as a microcosm of larger-scale transformations within the intellectual and political discourse of early modern England. Most obviously, the emphasis on the imagination, in particular within Protestant polemics, indicates a new context into which traditional scholastic psychological categories were forced in order to accommodate confessional differentiation and the new political realities of a post-Reformation world. Thus, by understanding just what Protestant polemicists meant by fictions, we can open up deeper continuities across the intellectual and political discourse of the period.

London Catholicism, embassy chapels, and religious tolerance in late Jacobean polemic

Reacting sharply against the whiggish thesis that religious tolerance was a heritage of the Enlightenment, revisionist scholars have pointed to the many pragmatic concessions people made to tolerate those of other faiths prior to the eighteenth century. While they have underscored the contingent relationship of tolerance with neighbourliness in many important case studies, the historiography portrays early modern London as an essentially intolerant society for the city’s Catholics and a church on the margins. Through an examination of London’s embassy chapels reflected in vicious anti-Catholic polemic, this article argues that tolerance was not lacking in Jacobean London. It additionally shows how ambassadors’ chapels sustained a vibrant and visible form of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the capital. Finally, it assesses how contemporaries connected both of these issues to tensions surrounding the ‘king’s two bodies’ and the execution of the royal prerogative. While this places London’s Catholics at the heart and centre of Jacobean religio-political tensions, the article concludes that it is ultimately the circular relationship between tolerance and intolerance that is key to understanding why a contested form of corporate Catholicism survived in the very heart of England’s Protestant kingdom.

On the Wrong Side of History

Abstract This article investigates an episode of anti-Catholic polemic in the late eighteenth century in Germany. It shows how fear over the influence of “crypto-Catholics” masquerading as Protestants and exponents of Enlightenment triggered the conceptualization of “Catholicism” as a social and cultural force beyond Church membership. It shows how Friedrich Nicolai played a leading role in suggesting that Catholics posed a distinct threat to the Enlightenment and the progressive achievements of the last few decades. Guided by Reinhart Koselleck’s insights into the temporalization of fundamental concepts, this article shows how the conceptualization of Catholicism was part of the larger attempt to navigate the dissolution of feudal society. It argues that placing Catholics on the wrong side of history was thus generative of the modern historical regime.

Saints and heroes: Ukrainian hagiographical narratives of the first half of the 17th century between Rome, Constantinople and Moscow

No other period in the history of the Kyiv Orthodox Metropolis gives rise to such contradictory opinions as to the history of the first half of the 17th century. The struggle to preserve the Orthodox identity after signing of the Union of Brest in 1596 and the need to represent the Orthodox way of salvation in anti-Catholic polemics sparked a keen interest in the idea of holiness and saints. This interest, however, did not trigger the canonization of contemporary figures, but rather a reminder of the former hagiographic and historical heritage.

Saints and heroes: Ukrainian hagiographical narratives of the first half of the 17th century between Rome, Constantinople and Moscow

No other period in the history of the Kyiv Orthodox Metropolis gives rise to such contradictory opinions as to the history of the first half of the 17th century. The struggle to preserve the Orthodox identity after signing of the Union of Brest in 1596 and the need to represent the Orthodox way of salvation in anti-Catholic polemics sparked a keen interest in the idea of holiness and saints. This interest, however, did not trigger the canonization of contemporary figures, but rather a reminder of the former hagiographic and historical heritage.

The Church of Scotland and the ‘increase of popery’,c.1690–1714

This article explores representations of ‘popery’ compiled by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland between 1690 and 1714. The ‘increase of popery’ was a ubiquitous phrase in this period. Synods and presbyteries regularly complained of Catholic encroachments in their parishes, and sent extensive reports of the activities of ‘papists’ to the general assembly and its commission. In turn, these national church courts collated these local petitions into longer representations of the ‘state of popery’ in Scotland. Representations have not been examined systematically by scholars. Indeed, representations have often been dismissed as cynical ploys rather than sincere expressions of anxiety at Catholic survival. Yet the very significance of these documents lies in their polemical nature. This article argues that the emphasis on political disaffection in national representations was informed by the Church's fraught relationship with central government, and with rival Protestant groups. Desperate efforts to showcase the necessity of Presbyterian government underpinned national representations of ‘popery’; as such, anti-Catholic sentiments were informed increasingly by the weaknesses of Scottish Presbyterianism as much as by actual Catholic activity. By contextualising representations of ‘popery’ and approaching them as part of a genre, the clerical petition, this article provides new perspectives on the nature of Scottish anti-Catholic polemic.

Politicizing Thomas More's Utopia in restoration England

Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England faced several decades of political and social turmoil. In an era of political questioning, dreams about alternate systems of life and culture were not simply thought-provoking exercises, but were often perceived as being dangerously subversive. Within this context, this essay examines the dominant rhetorical responses in Restoration England to Thomas More's Utopia. Utopia was often brought up in polemics directed against Protestant nonconformists, whom, it was feared, sought the return of an English commonwealth. Nonconformists, alternatively, referred to Utopia in anti-Catholic polemics in an attempt to link English Catholics with the desire to overthrow the monarchy and subvert the English Church. Some Protestant authors went even further and embraced More's Utopia precisely because they were dissatisfied with the restored establishment and hoped to see English society fundamentally reformed.

Polemicist as Pastor: Daniel Featley's Anti-Catholic Polemic and Countering Lay Doubt in England during the early 1620s

In the months immediately before the collapse of the Spanish Match in 1623, an important debate took place between the Protestant controversialist Daniel Featley and John Percy (alias Fisher), the notorious Jesuit polemicist. The accounts of the debate alleged that the meeting was originally intended to be a small, informal, private conference to provide satisfaction to Humphrey Lynde's ageing cousin, Edward Buggs, concerning some doubts he was having about the legitimacy of the Protestant faith. Nevertheless, it is argued that Protestants used this conference to showcase a strong stance against Rome at a crucial moment when Catholicism was beginning to intrude further into England, and deliberately subverted royal policy by engaging Catholics in debate and publishing anti-Catholic polemical works. This was done to increase other Protestants’ confidence that their Church was the true Church and Catholicism was a counterfeit version of Christianity. Ultimately, this episode demonstrates how Protestants’ pastoral concerns about lay conversion could go hand in hand with their polemical activities and gives us a window into the particular mechanisms that Protestants employed as they struggled against the tide of political and ecclesiastical circumstances which threatened to diminish their influence in the 1620s.

MILITANT CATHOLICISM, INTERCONFESSIONAL RELATIONS, AND THE ROOKWOOD FAMILY OF STANNINGFIELD, SUFFOLK, c. 1689–1737

AbstractExplanations of local interconfessional relations in post-revolutionary England tend to highlight the role of Catholic quiescence and compromise in allowing Protestants and Catholics to ‘get along’. By examining the interactions of a Catholic family who were far from quiescent in their religious and political practice, this article suggests that these explanations may overemphasize the compromise of religious minorities, obscuring the importance of the wider local context to the shape of interconfessional relations. The subjects of this study, the Rookwoods of Stanningfield, Suffolk, were active in expression of Catholic religion and its political implications. Contrary to patterns suggested elsewhere, the social and economic interactions of this family with their neighbours illustrate that such ardent Catholicism was not enough to prevent cordial relations with local Protestants. The social and economic importance of the Rookwoods within their community is used to make suggestions as to why they were accepted on the local level against a backdrop of wider anti-Catholic polemic. The example of the Rookwoods implies a need to explore the broader factors which shaped the underlying balance of power on a local level before it is possible to understand the nature of compromises that allowed for peaceful co-existence.

:John Foxe at Home and Abroad

Preface for Patrick Collinson Introduction, D. Loades. At Home: Spital Hospital: A saga of the Reformation in John Foxe's Lincolnshire, David Marcombe Protestant Evangelism in Boston on the accession of Elizabeth: the Ministry of Melchior Smith, Claire Cross Evangelicalism at Boston, Oxford and Windsor under Henry VIII: John Foxe's narratives recontextualized, Magnus Williamson The Martyr Tallies: Robert Persons and his anonymous respondent, Victor Houliston Essex Evangelicals under Edward VI: Richard, Lord Rich, Richard Alvey and their circle, Brett Usher The fleeing Dutchmen? The influence of Dutch immigrants upon the Print Shop of John Day, Elizabeth Evenden 'Most wicked superstition and idolatry': John Foxe, his predecessors, and the development of an anti-Catholic polemic in the 16th-century accounts of the reign of Mary I, Ramona Garcia. Abroad: Feeding the flock with wind: Protestant uses of a Dantean trope, from Foxe to Milton, Nicholas Havely Foxe in the wilderness: the Book of Martyrs in 17th-century New England, Francis J. Bremer A Nicodemite in England and Italy: Edward Courtenay, 1548-1556, Anne Overell John Foxe in the Low Countries, 1566-1914, Paul Arblater Was Haemstede a direct source for Foxe? On le Blas's Pijnbanck and other borrowings, Guido Latre Thanksgiving from Germany in 1559: an analysis of the content, sources and style of John Foxe's Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio, John Wade. Message and Methodology: Stowe's vision of martyrdom in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Margaret Dean 'Foxe' as a methodological response to epistemic challenges: The Book of Martyrs transported, Devorah Greenberg 'Twenty-first-Century Foxe': The online Variorum edition of Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Mark Greengrass, Joy Lloyd and Sue Smith Appendix: The Internet Connection: Claiming John Foxe as their Own. Foxe's Book of Martyrs on the World Wide Web, Janice Devereux Index.

John Donne and Thomas More: An Elizabethan Catholic Legacy

John Donne was related to Thomas More through his mother Elizabeth Heywood, daughter of Joan Rastell, More’s niece. The persistent Catholicism of Donne’s family, and his connections to the powerful English Catholic nobility, grounded him in the Roman Catholic tradition. However, Donne struggled with this faith, writing anti-Catholic polemics (in 1610 and 1614), and he eventually conformed to the English Church in 1615. This was hastened by his illegal marriage (1601), which caused conflict with Sir Thomas Egerton and his wife’s brother, Sir George More. After his entry into the Anglican church in 1615, Donne’s sermons and poems continued to reflect the conflict with his Catholic heritage.

Julie Peakman, Mighty lewd books: the development of pornography in eighteenth-century England, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. xii, 263, illus., £25.00 (hardback 1-4039-1500-8)

This work significantly develops our understanding of obscene and erotic literature and its development as a genre during the eighteenth century in Britain. It is particularly valuable to have the analysis of the production and distribution of obscene materials. Although mechanisms by which obscene literature circulated through the provinces are mentioned, the concentration of the trade in London means that the metropolis forms the chief focus. A number of persistent trends were already in place by the early eighteenth century. Peakman notes the connection between the production and marketing of risque works and of informative manuals about sex which was to persist well into the twentieth century, as well as the persistent recycling and recirculation of material which became so characteristic. Peakman also analyses various genre themes and their relationship to popular and scientific understandings of the body and reproductive physiology of the period. The motif of the eroticized landscape and what one might call botanical or horticultural porn is particularly suggestive. Was this perhaps a uniquely English (nation of gardeners, pastoral trope already well-established in mainstream literature) phenomenon? A rather different resort to fruit and flowers encoded sexual information in later works of sex education, while 1920s Lawrentian sexualizing of the landscape was satirized by Stella Gibbons' 1932 Cold Comfort Farm: Mr Mybug's ‘God! Those buds had an urgent, phallic, look.’ Peakman indicates the associations of erotic literature with the foreign, specifically Italy and France, as well as with the more generally exotic. Many significant early texts were simply translations and adaptations of continental originals. If the notion of Italy as the decadent site of bloody and perverse happenings where anything might go looks back to Renaissance drama, the increasing importance of France would result in French standing as a metonym for obscenity in early twentieth century “French postcards” and advertisements for “French lessons”. A particularly illuminating discovery is that the archetypal vice anglais, flagellation, did not appear as a particular motif in British erotic writing until fairly late in the eighteenth century: although there is some evidence for its existence as an erotic preference and speciality in literary texts and in the paraphernalia confiscated during raids on brothels. Peakman argues for the influence of the flagellation scenes common within the salacious revelations of anti-Catholic polemic (derived from French anti-clerical literature, but given a specifically British twist). By the end of the eighteenth century highly formulaic “fladge” texts, detached from this particular framework of lecherous priests, naive novices and conniving mothers superior and set instead within a stylized but recognizable secular British context, were deploying various tropes already made familiar by studies of Victorian pornography. There is a sub-textual suggestion of a move within pornographic texts from the relatively genial, if unthinkingly male in its preconceptions, bawdry of the early part of the century to increasing interest in relations of dominance and submission, abuse of power, and erotic pain. This therefore pushes Donald Thomas's suggestion, in A long time burning (1969), of a shift in Victorian pornography into scenarios of “greater … unreality” and increased sadism, rather further back in time, to indicate that development was already well under way by the end of the eighteenth century. This is one of several places where one might have liked a bit more contextualization and engagement with other recent works on the development of sexual attitudes and behaviour during the eighteenth century, for example the suggestions of Randolph Trumbach, in Sex and the gender revolution. Volume one: heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London (1998) and Tim Hitchcock in English sexualities, 1700–1800 (1997), concerning increased male anxiety and growing emphasis on penetrative heterosexual sex. Sara Toulalan's work on late-seventeenth-century erotica tends to push back the “origin story” even earlier than Peakman claims. It would also have been intriguing to relate changing tropes within pornography, and its increasing production and dissemination, to the rise of exactly contemporary fears around onanism. What was the dialectical relationship between the insistence that solitary sex was dangerous, and the growing amount of “one-handed literature”? In spite of these cavils, this is an extremely useful beginning exploration of a still under-investigated area: as Peakman makes clear, there are considerable problems of sources and methodology to be taken into account.

Guillaume Maleville et la Bible. Homme d'Église et hommes des Lumières

18th-century French churchmen are too easily imagined after the model of Voltaire's inventions, but not all apologists were so credulous. Guillaume Male¬ ville is particularly interesting because of his hesitations ; he needed well-attested miracles to guarantee revelation, because both defied his credulity. Problems raised by the Biblical text were combined with doubts and reservations about the difference between the values of the Pentateuch and those of contemporaries, as about certain Pentateuch laws. His doubts are here compared to passages in Calmet and Houtteville, who remark that many elements of Catholic theology are absurd. All three apologists thought they had triumphed over the doubts and adsurdities they had evoked but these doubts and absurdities, which parallel the anti-Catholic polemics of several Philosophes and clandestine authors, illustrate an unexpected enlightened dimension in their undoubted orthodoxy.

Anti-Catholicism in Wales, 1900–1960

The decline of anti-Catholic sentiment in twentieth-century England stood in stark contrast to attitudes in Wales, where a distinct and persistent anti-Catholic polemic was common as recently as the 1960s. While research into British anti-Catholicism has ignored the situation in twentieth-century Wales, many of the reasons suggested for the fervent nineteenth-century English hostility seem not only to explain the absence of Welsh animosity in the same era, but also to illuminate the predicament in Wales a century later. What we have is a striking example of historical synchronicity: two eras where the majority Christian denomination, already facing an internal crisis, reacts to a Church that is seen to threaten its existence and status, as well as the national way of life it upholds.

The Iconoclasm of Obeisance: Protestant Images of Chinese Religion and the Catholic Church

AbstractWestern studies of Buddhism emphasize doctrine and meditation, but almost completely ignore devotional practice. Yet, obeisance to Buddha is the primary religious practice of the majority of Asian Buddhists. To account for this disparity, I explore the history of Protestant attitudes towards bowing. In English and German anti-Catholic polemics (and Catholic responses), Chinese and Catholic obeisance are conflated, the lowness of their prostrations emphasized, in contrast to the erectness of Protestant posture in worship. I survey two important encyclopedias of religion (Hastings' of 1914 and Eliade's of 1987), and the work of one of the founders of Sociology, Herbert Spencer, to show the persistance of these perspectives on obeisance.Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Protestants worked to challenge the Jesuit representation of China as enlightened and originally monotheistic. Chinese religiosity was depicted as passive, lazy, infantile, and mindless, lacking any coherent doctrinal system. At times, the Protestant narrative of Christian history (from original pure community to institutional degeneration into idolatry) was superimposed on Chinese history. Obeisance itself was taken as sufficient proof of idolatry, the deceptive “holy mummeries” of Chinese/Catholic ritual.These tensions came to a head when King George III of England sent Lord Macartney to have an audience with emperor Qianlong of China, and Macartney refused to bow. A brief analysis of this well-documented mission reveals the confluence of religious, political, bodily, and gender dimensions. Recent treatments of that mission have missed the Protestant/Catholic dimensions of the issue.Finally I suggest possible extentions of the theoretical concerns of this paper.

Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters

Since the first Christian communities sought to distance themselves from Judaism, Jews and their religion have haunted Christians. The medieval Christian exegetical tradition tried to exorcise the ghost of Judaism by appropriating the Hebrew Bible. Christians transformed it into a book that predicted the coming of Christ and God's rejection of the Jews. ' By thus neutralizing the internal validity of Judaism, Christians could take advantage of the rabbinical tradition as an aid in interpreting Christianized Scripture.2 For Christian exegetes of the Middle Ages from Andrew of St. Victor to Nicholas of Lyra, the rabbis and their commentaries increasingly became a repository of information that could assist in understanding the heavenly language of Moses. Their knowledge of Hebrew, however, did not generally deter Christian scholars from reading Christian sensibilities into the Hebrew Bible. Medieval exegetes were uniformly concerned that the Jews had corrupted the original Hebrew of the Old Testament either by ignorance or through self-conscious attempts to distort predictions about the Messiah.3 Humanist scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation continued to harp on the corrupted nature of the Hebrew text, but the advantages to be reaped from exploiting Jewish sources were too great