Catholic France Research Articles

Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 by Robert Emmett Curran (review)

Reviewed by: Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 by Robert Emmett Curran Jason K. Duncan Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783. By Robert Emmett Curran. ( Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2014. Pp. xviii, 315. $29.95 paperback ISBN 978-0-8132-2583-8.) Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once famously remarked that “anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in American history.” In a masterful work by a senior scholar covering the first two centuries of history in British America, Robert Emmett Curran illuminates what Schlesinger meant. Devoting his introduction to the European background of this story, Curran demonstrates the long-term consequences of Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church in the 1530s. As England struggled for the better part of two centuries to determine if it would be a Protestant or a Catholic kingdom, its colonies in the New World became caught up in the turmoil. The effect of this history on American Catholics was enormous. Once the scene shifts to America, Curran gives much attention to Maryland, the closest thing there was in those lands to a “Catholic colony.” He traces the doomed ventures of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, to forge a pluralistic society in the Chesapeake. Those efforts ran aground in the light of an invasion by Puritans in the middle of the seventeenth century and the imposition of the penal laws in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. Nonetheless, Maryland Catholics remained a distinct and viable community, albeit one forced to keep much of its religious life hidden. Catholics in New York were less fortunate. Jacob Leisler, a German Calvinist, took advantage of the expulsion of James II, a Catholic, to expel New York’s Catholic leadership, appointees of the now deposed Stuart king. What Catholics remained in New York had to endure close to a century of oppression and systematic denial of their religious and political rights. Curran deftly recovers the overlooked plight of Irish Catholics of the West Indies, some of whom were essentially enslaved after Oliver Cromwell had them sent to Barbados and other colonies. As tragic, or worse, was the fate of the Catholic Acadians. Caught between the struggle for power in America between Great Britain and France, they were forcibly expelled from their homes in the 1750s, victims of a brutal process that today would be described as ethnic cleansing. It was during that Seven Years’ War that anti-Catholicism in British America reached a peak. What came next was truly stunning—a revolt against British rule in America, one fueled in part by anger, especially in New England, over the Quebec Act of 1774. That law granted to Catholics in lands gained from France [End Page 674] full legal protection. The religious liberties of Protestants were also guaranteed, but no matter. Curran explains how patriots in the thirteen colonies now saw George III as taking a turn toward Rome similar to that of the Stuart kings. In the war that followed, most American Catholics, having little stake in the status quo, supported the Revolution. There were Catholics, notably in Pennsylvania, where the religious climate had been more tolerant, who remained loyal to London. The course of the War for Independence, involving as it did a patriot alliance with Catholic France, changed the direction of history for American Catholics. It also did not hurt their cause that none other than Benedict Arnold claimed his defection came from principled opposition, as a good Protestant, to the entry into the war of Catholic France. In one of the great ironies of the American Revolution, Catholics benefited enormously from its results. Soon after British ships sailed away from New York City in late 1783, for example, Catholics in that city emerged from their isolation, took their newly recognized rights in hand, and established their first parish. One of the many strengths of Papist Devils is Curran’s deft use of recent scholarship on early American Catholic history, both published and unpublished. He may have missed an opportunity or two to integrate this history somewhat more into the general narratives of colonial America. Even so, Curran demonstrates in convincing style why Schlesinger’s claim must...

Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art, the secular, and Catholicism in Paris

In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non‐religious’ space of the French church are self‐evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.

Gender, Colonialism, and the Queerness of Dreams: Seventeenth-Century Dreamwork

This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed peoples of Catholic France and “New France”—through the lens of gender. In the case of early modern Atlantic dreaming, gender and its confusions in the social imaginary are not tied to the historical practice of female-bodied persons. The femininity investigated here is positional and symbolic. There are many kinds of “female” in the early modern shake-up: the terms of sex and gender lose purchase in an avalanche of novel categories at least transitionally operative in the social and epistemological chaos of the period. Confronted by the colonial New World, European gender and other fundamental categories are visible as fragile arrays of power relations, grounded in opposing forms of consciousness.

Pierre Bayle's The Condition of Wholly Catholic France Under the Reign of Louis the Great (1686)

Summary This is the first English translation of Pierre Bayle's political pamphlet, Ce que c'est que la France toute catholique of 1686. Now that Bayle has received renewed attention from scholars such as Jonathan Israel and Gianluca Mori, it is time to introduce his political ideas to English-speaking readers who cannot read the original. And although a selection of the political writings from the Historical and Critical Dictionary has been published, much of Bayle's political thought has not been translated. This translation complements recent editions of Bayle's Thoughts on the Comet and Philosophical Commentary, along with a forthcoming translation of his Conversations Between Maxime and Themiste. A substantial introduction explores the context and reviews scholarly interpretations, and notes to the text explain references.

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

„Dichtung und Wahrheit“: Goethes anatomische Forschung an der Universität Jena

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the most renowned German poets of the late Age of Enlightenment. However, his engagement went far beyond literature especially relating to politics and natural science. Goethe, primarily trained as a lawyer, developed his own theory of colors and even challenged the concepts of Isaac Newton. His discovery of the human intermaxilary bone questioned all the dogmas of the religious-minded world of the 18th century. Together with the anatomy professor Justus Christian Loder, Goethe performed comparative anatomy and proved the conceptual uniformity of humans and animals on 27 March 1784. Even though, Félix Vicq d'Azyr described the intermaxilary bone simultaneously in Catholic France, Goethe's findings were politically accepted due to the liberal Protestantism of the Duchy of Weimar. Nevertheless, leading anatomists of the century (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Petrus Camper and Samuel Thomas v. Soemmerring) mainly rejected Goethe's postulates which led to a delayed publication in 1820; almost 36 years after writing his original manuscript. Today, Goethe's discovery is known to be a fundamental basis for the development of Charles Darwin's theory of phylogenetic evolution. Nowadays, the Department of Anatomy contains the Museum Anatomicum Jenense which was founded by the Duke of Weimar, Carl August and Goethe and entails Goethe's premaxillary bones as its main attraction. The University values the cultural heritage of Goethe's contribution to Medicine and provides access to the collection to the public and generations of medical students. Still today Goethe's legacy is noticeable in the halls of the Alma Mater Jenensis.

Going Home to the Holy Land: The Jews of Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century French Catholic Pilgrimage

In 1806, Viscount Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand set out, in his words, “to complete the circle of studies that he had always promised [himself] he would achieve” by undertaking a trip to the Orient. The result was the Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem. This was an account of his pilgrimage, a notion that he alluded to somewhat self-consciously: “It may seem strange today to speak of wishes and of pilgrimages, but on this point I am not restrained by a sense of modesty, and for a long time now, I have aligned myself with the class of the superstitious and the weak. I may be the last Frenchman to leave my country to travel to the Holy Land, with the ideas, the goal, and the sentiments of an old pilgrim.”1 Chateaubriand was to be proven wrong. Pilgrimage was one way that Catholics maintained their attachment to their idea of France in what was a rocky century for the church: in the middle of the century, in particular, there was an extraordinary rise in expressions of Catholicism. The rise and role of popular pilgrimage, such as the journey to Lourdes, as a means of creating a Catholic community and ensuring the ongoing vitality of Catholicism in France has been well documented.2 The story of those pilgrims who ventured further afield has not been so closely examined. Yet pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while not accessible to all, was nonetheless also intrinsic to the process of imagining and maintaining French Catholicism. At the end of his description of his stay in Jerusalem, Chateaubriand took the reader on one final metaphorical tour. Amid what he called the “extraordinary desolation” of the Holy City, he sought to leave the reader with an image that he found “even more extraordinary”: the continued existence in

‘[T]he anguish and horror of her mind defied all control’: The Fragmented Manuscript and Representations of the Past in Ann Radcliffe'sThe Romance of the Forest(1791)

Focusing on the Gothic trope of the discovered manuscript, this essay examines Ann Radcliffe's representations of the past in The Romance of the Forest ( 1791 ). Radcliffe's third Gothic novel is set in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic France, but was published in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. The narrative follows the plight of its orphan heroine, Adeline, who finds herself taking refuge in a ruined abbey located in a gloomy French forest under the protection of Pierre de la Motte (a Frenchman fleeing Paris with his family). During her stay, Adeline enters a secret room and unearths a decaying manuscript. From this point onwards, the narrative is interspersed with fragments of the script, which records the harrowing experiences of someone who was murdered there many years ago. Concentrating on the manuscript and Radcliffe's utilisation of the Burkean sublime for historical purposes, this paper contends that The Romance of the Forest can be read as a complex response to shifting notions of history engendered by the outbreak of the French Revolution. What does Radcliffe's representation of the script reveal about the past and to what extent are her historical attitudes shaped by the culturally chaotic events of the early 1790s?

Timothy Verhoeven . Transatlantic Anti‐Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century . (Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History.) New York : Palgrave Macmillan . 2010 . Pp. ix, 230. $80.00.

Timothy Verhoeven's study of anti‐Catholicism as a transatlantic phenomenon in the middle decades of the nineteenth century makes for lively and informative reading. In addition to fulfilling all the orthodox criteria of scholarly history (with immaculate documentation and scrutiny of its sources and thorough coverage of existing literature), it is a book whose intellectual scope and engaging composition are likely to make it appealing to several different audiences. Anyone interested in the tensions between religion and secularism will find much stimulation, as will those who follow the ups and downs of Franco‐American relations, or those concerned with issues of gender. It is a tribute to the author's ingenuity that, while he firmly anchors his work in its historical time and rarely makes any explicit reference to present‐day relevance, such relevance emerges constantly, with arresting clarity. But that, of course, is what makes good history. The question of what does make good history is yet another dimension of Verhoeven's book, which is positioned within the historiographical shift from national perspectives to transnational ones. The author rightly argues that anti‐Catholicism is an especially good candidate for such treatment, not just because the Roman Catholic Church is a transnational institution, but because anti‐Catholics from different national settings closely followed each others' writings. In this context, linkages between predominantly Catholic France and the predominantly Protestant United States were particularly strong.

Demons, Saints, and Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962) (review)

Reviewed by: Demons, Saints, and Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962) Mark Thiel, Michelene E. Pesantubbee, and Michael Steltenkamp S.J. Mark Clatterbuck, Demons, Saints, and Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2009) Summary Review Through The Indian Sentinel magazine, the author of Demons, Saints, and Patriots offers a thoughtful study of Catholic perceptions of Native American evangelization in the United States. Comprised of over 7,000 pages of illustrated text, the Sentinel contains one of the most sustained, intimate, and comprehensive records of twentieth-century mission life up to the Vatican II era. Published by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions for subscribers in the United States and Europe, and written and illustrated primarily by missionaries in the field, it features articles about diverse Native peoples and equally diverse missionaries. Throughout, it captured the missionaries’ motivations, assumptions, hopes, and struggles that shaped their vision of Native America, while chronicling the two-way human dynamics of religious conversion. The author, Mark Clatterbuck, noted a lack of scholarly research involving the Sentinel. However, since its online deployment in 2007, increasing numbers of scholars and the public have found and used this rich resource, and for some extensive research, Demons, Saints, and Patriots holds promise as a supplemental aid. Demons, Saints, and Patriots analyzes the mission enterprise through the Sentinel, and in so doing, it explores the radically conflicting portraits of Native people and missionaries against a backdrop of unfamiliar Native cultures. It discusses a plethora of topics about missionaries—their changing self-identities, perceptions, methods, and challenges amid their changing understanding of Native American peoples, languages, and cultures. It explores Native-Catholic syncretism, Native Catholic leadership, and changing U.S. government-Catholic Church relationships in Indian affairs coupled with mission support of government efforts for the World Wars. Also included are discussions on Native Catholic “cultural dysfunctionality” (chapters 2 and 3) and the Sentinel’s cessation, Vatican II-prompted interreligious dialogue, and the Tekakwitha Conference’s transformation from a missionary to a Native Catholic organization [End Page 9] (chapter 5). Notable among the author’s conclusions is a theory that church support for the World War efforts derailed development of Native church leadership. Clatterbuck researched his book primarily with monographs and unpublished documents from two archival collections, one of which was misidentified. Most sources focused on aspects of religious studies, including ones pertaining specifically to Native Catholics. Also included were sources relating to Indian social conditions, identity, culture, and relations with non-Indians. In particular, the later chapters would have benefited from a broader use of sources beyond the Sentinel, especially for concerns that have received relatively less scrutiny in the scholarly literature. While missionary involvement with Native regalia suggests cultural conflict and dependency, Native leaders have long shared cultural capital when cultivating mutual relationships. The Ojibwa leaders depicted in the cover illustration were ancient allies of Catholic France who defeated in battle future U.S. presidents Washington and Taylor and who gave birth to the fighting Ojibwa Catholic priest, Father Phillip Gordon. More recently, nearby Potawatomi used similar techniques in a successful bid for a now lucrative casino next to Marquette University. Because the Sentinel’s 1962 demise occurred without notifying its readers (249–252), the author made assumptions based solely on the impact of changes in U.S. society and the Catholic Church. Not considered were the unusual personal proclivities of its publisher and Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (BCIM) director, Rev. John B. Tennelly, which Kevin Abing described in Directors of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, a series of biographies published online. Abing noted that Tennelly “…was reserved, fastidious, bookish and shy, and [under his leadership] the BCIM seemed to take on some of those same qualities.” In summarizing the Tekakwitha Conference’s history and transformation, Clatterbuck stated that it formally invited its first American Indian speaker in 1978 (255), and in so doing, he ignored its earlier reform efforts such as the 1971 annual meeting, which featured Oglala activist Birgil Kills Straight as its keynote speaker. That event and others are described in the minutes of the conference’s annual...

No Home in Exile? Elizabethan Catholics in Paris

A sense of homelessness is generic to exile, yet the homeless state of Elizabethan Catholic exiles in Paris was distinct from that of their coreligionists and contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. Although several hundred English Catholics were in Paris in the 1580s, they lacked their own institutional centre in the city. This shaped the character of their experience overseas and their relationship with their Parisian hosts. Without a dedicated centre, they found a number of different ways to establish a niche for themselves in the French capital, in many ways interacting directly with their hosts. Some of this large group also chose to change their legal status abroad by seeking to be naturalised by the French Crown. Whilst always remaining oriented towards England and hoping or working for Catholic restoration at home, their homeless state in exile encouraged a number of different engagements with Catholic France.

An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings , and: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (review)

Reviewed by: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings, and: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding David Fate Norton, Macdonald Professor of Moral Philosophy EmeritusAdjunct Professor of Philosophy David Hume . An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Stephen Buckle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xlii + 232. ISBN 0-521-84340-9, cloth, $55. ISBN 0-521-60403-1, Paper, $23.99. ISBN, Adobe eBook, 0-511-27122-9, $19.00. David Hume . An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford World's Classics, ed. Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. lxv + 238. ISBN 0-199-21158-2. Reissued 2008. ISBN 0-199-54990-7. Paper, $16.95. Of these two new editions of Hume's An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [Enquiry or EHU], Stephen Buckle's was published in early 2007, Peter Millican's a few months later. Buckle follows the usual prelims (Acknowledgments, Contents), with a 12,500-word "Introduction"; a "Chronology" (1711–1779) of Hume's life and publications; a helpful presentation of "Further reading"; and a "Note on the text." Then, following a lightly annotated text of the Enquiry (with Hume's endnotes converted to footnotes), he adds these other items from the Hume corpus: A Letter from a Gentleman; three essays, "The Sceptic," "Of Suicide," and "Of the Immortality of the Soul"; eight "Selections from Hume's letters"; and My Own Life. A nine-page index of names and topics completes the volume. Those familiar with Buckle's highly original monograph, Hume's Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [HET] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) will find little to surprise them in his Introduction to the Enquiry. After brief accounts of Hume's early life and the lack of success of what is characterized as his "decidedly Sceptical" Treatise, a work that describes humans as guided in thought and action by custom and habit rather than by reason, and of his failure in 1745 to win appointment as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (ix–xvi), Buckle turns to the Enquiry. Unlike the Treatise, which he describes as presenting "itself as contributing to a new spirit of philosophy already abroad among English philosophers," the Enquiry, he argues, "presents itself as a defence of serious thinking against shallowness, obscurity and superstition." It is with this aim in mind that the Enquiry is said to begin with a defence of serious philosophy joined to an attack on the shallowness of the Christian Stoicism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and a further attack on "superstition," Hume's code word, in his 1741 essay, "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm" [E-SE], for Roman Catholicism. This attack on superstition and Hume's focus on Catholic miracles in EHU 10 (from his opening attack on the recurring miracle of the real presence in the Eucharist to his objections to the well-attested miracles at the tomb of the Abbé Paris), coupled with the inclusion of "school metaphysics" [End Page 293] among the books said to be deserving of the flames at the close of EHU 12, lead Buckle to suggest that the "official target" of the Enquiry is Catholicism. But while Catholicism may have been the official target of the work, Buckle goes on to say that the anti-Catholicism of the Enquiry was only "a defensive smokescreen," some modest misdirection that Hume could hope would, in the late 1740s, play positively in a Britain at war with Catholic France and Spain and still recovering from the panic produced by the 'Forty-Five' (a pro-Stuart attack on Hanoverian Britain). The Enquiry, Buckle concludes, has as its primary purpose a critique of religion in general (xvi–xx). (Buckle does not mention that in his Natural History of Religion [NHR] Hume routinely treats a wide variety of religions as "superstition." NHR was first published in 1757, nine years after the first edition of EHU, but beginning with the 1758 edition of Hume's collected works, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects [ETSS], was published coincidentally with EHU and E-SE.) Buckle next argues that the account of the relation of the Enquiry to the Treatise...

Cholera and Kulturkampf: Government Decision Making and the Impetus to Establish Nursing as a Secular Occupation in Prussia in the 1870s

With regard to the history of nursing in Germany, the nineteenth century turned out to be a century of success for the denominational motherhouse organizations-both for Catholic orders and for Protestant deaconesses. Owing to the revival of Catholicism, Catholic orders in particular1 proliferated throughout Germany, and the provision of nursing services was an important part of their social work. However, in the 1870s, the fact that the expulsion of Catholic orders from Prussian territory during the Kulturkampf coincided with a cholera epidemic gave the idea of the secular training of both women and men in nursing-an otherwise negligible item on the list of governmental priorities-a prominent place on the political agenda. This article explores the reasons why the Prussian state, despite the political, social, and health crises that it was passing through, ultimately decided to do next to nothing-a decision that determined the future of nursing in Prussia for decades to come. Aspects of the Prussian Health System with Regard to Nursing In Prussia, nursing was not recognized as part of the health professions, such as medicine and midwifery. If the occupation of medical aide (Heilgehilfe), also known as medical servant (Heildiener), was given legal status in the 1850s, it was only in order to fit the requirements and the convenience of physicians. Medical aides were allowed to give medical assistance and carry out minor surgery delegated to them by a physician.2 There were no minimum requirements for entry into nursing practice and no state nursing examination. Medical aides were generally not formally qualified or educated; indeed, in the early nineteenth century many seem to have been illiterate.3 Unlike Catholic France and Spain, early modern Protestant Prussia was not even remotely a breeding ground for nursing orders. Since, at the Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, which shaped the political map of Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia acquired the Rhineland and Westphalia-regions where the Catholic religion was dominant-Catholic affairs took on an unprecedented importance for the Prussian government. From the early nineteenth century onward, Catholic orders-spreading from France as well as growing in native German soil-took the opportunity to offer nursing services that state and local poor relief could not, or would not, provide. Nursing was part and parcel of their social work, and their nursing traditions ensured that knowledge and experience were handed on from the experienced nurse to the inexperienced. 4 In part, the nursing traditions were supplemented by physicians' lessons. The organization of orders in motherhouses served as a model for Theodor Fliedner (1800-64), who founded the Protestant deaconess movement in 1836. Animated alike by the misery of the population and by denominational competition, motherhouses of orders and deaconesses spread throughout Germany. The work of these nurses garnered them a fine reputation among the general population. Their devoted patient care, provided almost free of charge, made them an attractive proposition for treasurers in charge of town hospitals. 5 During the German Wars of Unification in 1863, 1864, and 1870/71, they contributed much to the care of the sick and the wounded soldiers. They served as a model for the Red Cross sisterhoods, which-in a German peculiarity-adopted the motherhouse system from their denominational counterparts. The significance of denominational nursing in Prussia is underlined by admittedly not very reliable statistics taken from the year 1876, when only females with some sort of nursing experience were counted. Of a total of 5,226 nurses, 3,409 were Catholic and 1,063 were deaconesses. A total of 327 came from other sisterhoods and associations, such as the Red Cross, and there were an additional 427 nurses of various backgrounds.6 Prompted by the tensions of the 1870s, the question arose as to whether a successful non-Catholic alternative to the Catholic orders could be established. …

An Irish Informer in Restoration England: David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679–81

An Irish Informer in Restoration England:David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679-81 John Gibney (bio) Personal histories from the early modern era are often obscure, and David Fitzgerald's is no exception. But for a brief period his life comes to light, attracting attention as one of a number of dubious Irishmen to allege before the English parliament in November 1680 that the Catholic Irish, organized and funded by the Catholic Church, intended to massacre Irish Protestants and assist a French invasion of Ireland, after which a combined Franco-Irish force was to attack England and embark upon a similar massacre of English Protestants. The supposed existence of a conspiracy for an Irish rebellion had been part of the allegations made in August 1678 by Titus Oates, a highly dubious figure whose essentially criminal career "included lying, cheating, blasphemy, and sodomizing young boys."1 Oates had been an Anglican preacher, a naval chaplain, and a convert to [End Page 249] Catholicism; he was expelled from two continental seminaries before returning to England to concoct his fabulous if terrifying story. Oates's allegations precipitated and underpinned the Popish Plot in England, the outburst of anti-Catholic fervor prompted by his revelations about a Catholic conspiracy to wipe out Protestantism in the Stuart kingdoms. The most obvious Irish dimension to these events would be the execution in London of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic primate and archbishop of Armagh, in July 1681. Plunkett was convicted on spurious charges of attempting to facilitate a French invasion of Ireland, but even aside from this infamous case, allegations of Irish Catholic plots had been a recurring theme in the events that had unfolded.2 Over time the Popish Plot gave way to the so-called Exclusion Crisis, the intense political struggle that arose between 1679 and 1681 over the vexing question of who would succeed Charles II as king. In 1678 the heir to the throne was a Catholic: Charles's younger brother James, Duke of York, who had been tainted by Oates's allegations. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Catholicism, York's faith was inevitably contentious, and over the next two years a campaign to alter the succession would be conducted both inside and outside the English parliament. This eventually became a concerted effort specifically to exclude York from the succession, and one notable element in this campaign would be the promotion of ostensible Irish informers who could supposedly prove the existence of a plot involving an Irish Catholic rebellion. The reasoning behind this was straightforward: the Catholic Irish had rebelled before, and in 1641 it was believed that they had done so in an appallingly brutal and sectarian manner. Vastly exaggerated accounts of the torture and massacre of British Protestant settlers became the stock perceptions of the 1641 rebellion as it came to occupy a special place in the Protestant imaginations of both Britain and Ireland.3 If the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis rested upon the [End Page 250] assumption that a Catholic attack on Protestants in the Stuart kingdoms was imminent, these perceptions of 1641 as a wholesale sectarian massacre made it an obvious model for what this might entail. When in January 1679 an informer alleged that the French and the papacy had plans for an invasion of Ireland at the expense of the Protestant interest there, these claims carried a particular resonance, according to Gilbert Burnet, for "the memory of the Irish massacre was yet so fresh as [to] raise a particular horror at the very mention of this."4 What Burnet had in mind was 1641. The exclusion campaign ultimately rested upon fears of a Catholic monarch derived from a more general fear of an international Catholic threat across Europe, especially in the form of an expansionist Catholic France.5 This dovetailed with a rich vein of English anti-popery that drew upon the memory of critical events in Protestant history in order to illustrate the persistent danger that England faced from Catholicism.6 The Popish Plot could be (and was) incorporated into a pattern of Catholic threats and providential deliverance stretching from the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s, through...

Reading the Bible in early eighteenth-century Dublin. The Huguenot pastor Henri de Rocheblave (1665-1709)

The almanacs for 1686 provide arresting images of the triumphalism that swept through Catholic France when, on 17 October 1685, XIV signed the edict of Fontainebleau revoking the edict of Nantes, which had granted legal status to Protestants for three generations. According to the almanac makers, who as usual were grinding a political axe, the Revocation was foremost among the achievements of Louis le Granm la terreur et l'admiration de l'univers during the previous year. ne of their images transmits a pithy political message about the way the Revocation was perceived, and was meant to be perceived, by the public. the main engraving portrays XIV graciously acknowledging the submission of the Republic of Genoa, whose dogs bows low before the French king. Under Louis's feet, significantly, the central cartouche illustrates the demolition of the temple of Charenton the place of worship for the Reformed community in Paris, which began on Monday 22 October 1685 and continued over the next six days. In art as in life, the systematic demolition of Protestant temples was as much about the submission, even the subjection, of the Huguenots to the king, as it was about their conversion to the king's religion.

The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000

1. Introduction Hugh McLeod Part I: 2. The secularisation decade: what the 1960s have done to the study of religious history Callum G. Brown 3. Christendom in decline: the Swedish case Eva M. Hamberg 4. New Christianity: indifference and diffused spirituality Yves Lambert Part II: 5. Established churches and the growth of religious pluralism: a case study of Christianisation and secularisation in England since 1700 David Hempton 6. Catholicism in Ireland Sheridan Gilley 7. Long-term religious developments in the Netherlands, c. 1750-2000 Peter Van Rooden 8. The potency of 'Christendom': The example of the 'Darmstadter Wort' (1947) Martin Greschat Part III: 9. The dechristianisation of death in modern France Thomas Kselman 10. The impact of technology on Catholicism in France (1850-1950) Michel Lagree 11. Semantic structures of religious change in modern Germany Lucian Holscher Part IV: 12. Master-narratives of long-term religious change Jeffery Cox 13. A missiological postscript Werner Ustorf.

Degrading Forms of Pantomime: Englishness and Shame in De Quincey

Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that 'decent drapery', which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them ... and for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent and self-respecting part of society, we must look to literature, or to that part of the German, which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French. (1) ********** THOMAS DE QUINCEY BEGINS HIS CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM Eater by identifying himself as an English writer with English Feelings. His nationalism is defined in contradistinction to the markedly different behaviors of the exhibitionist and Germans, whose self-disclosures he finds to be shamefully indecent. Scars and ulcers, corporeal metaphors for metaphysical traits, create a spectacle that should be, in all decency, concealed. Throughout much of his writing, De Quincey describes the desired literary and cultural characteristics of English identity as distinct from continental mores and their insidious infiltration into English sensibilities. While much analysis has been done of De Quincey's reactions to the Empire's commodities and its imported infections, I am fascinated by a more proximate other that displays itself time and again in De Quincey's lesser-known writings. (2) This European other--more specifically, the against whom England waged wars from 1793-1815--is definitionally opposed, and thus foundational, to De Quincey's sense of Englishness. I am not challenging the indisputable fact that English national identity was formed in large part by its imperial incursions, but rather shifting emphasis from what has become, in recent criticism, the most pressing of nineteenth-century international relations. In light of recent scholarship on De Quincey's orientalism that links his political fears of the Orient with his personal psychological guilt, I propose a reading of his shorter pieces on European cultural differences and the power of English nationalism, namely English Mail Coach, French and English Manners, and Pronunciation. In describing the manners and morals of continental Europeans, De Quincey is formulating a sense of his national identity that stems from negation--he is not (or German)--as much as from any more positive sense of community. But I suspect that his supercilious descriptions of the civilized other derive from the insecurities, embarrassments, and failures that define De Quincey's own personal identity and, by extension, his sense of national identity as well. In recent years, scholars have postulated different theories about British nationalism. (3) Eric Evans cogently describes two of these interpretations. The first focuses on the experience of waging war against Catholic France, which caused the elite of England, Scotland, and Wales to unify as both Protestant and British. With the threats of invasion that occurred in the 1790's and then in the early 19th century, British patriotism defined itself through a repulsion not only of physical incursions but also of culture. This identity was essentially conservative, propagated by the elite and the middle-classes against a common enemy, and defined oppositionally. As Evans states, A growing sense of national identity can, therefore, be a function of patriotic response to external challenge .... To resist it, a sense of Protestant British identity was invoked against a threat variously characterised as Catholic or atheist (224). The second interpretation of British patriotism, according to Evans, is based on the radicalism prominent in the period. This sense of national identity was egalitarian and independent, based as it was upon the insistence that the ruling elite be overthrown. Norman Yoke theory proposed that ever since 1066 true English liberty and freedom had been lost, and that the English must look to their Saxon ancestors to challenge the authority of the ruling classes. …

Political Identities in Changing Polities

HENRY VIII was, as we know, a bit of an opportunist. In 1521, at a time when Henry had allied England with the Habsburgs against France and also laid claim to the French crown, he wrote a pamphlet criticizing Martin Luther’s doctrines. For his efforts, the pope dubbed Henry “Defender of the Faith.” Churchmen, however, began voicing doubts about that title no later than 1525, when Henry levied a major tax on church property to pay for his wars with Catholic France. As the pope himself delayed sanctioning Henry’s divorce from Catharine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, Henry sacked his papal legate, Cardinal Wolsey, and, after some maneuvering, declared the English church independent of Rome. The break with the pope brought Henry substantial church revenues. In 1534, Henry rammed through the Act of Supremacy, which made him and his successors heads of an independent English church; he also rendered refusal to take an oath of recognition, a capital crime of high treason. Utopia author, former chancellor, and future saint Thomas More lost his head for just such a refusal. By 1536, with the help of Thomas Cromwell, Henry was having Anne Boleyn executed on a trumped up charge of adultery, beginning dispossession of the monasteries, publishing William Tindale’s translation of the Bible, and putting down major rebellions against his religious innovations. Within three years, nevertheless, he issued the Six Articles, which defined SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Political Identities in Changing Polities* CHARLES TILLY *An earlier version of this paper served as keynote address at the conference “Redefining Europe,” New York University, November 30, 2001. A few paragraphs are adapted from Tilly (2002). beliefs and practices greatly resembling those of the Catholic Church except in their substitution of the king for the pope. Through all these gyrations, Henry’s enforcers missed no opportunity to seize church revenues or to raise money from church members. After Henry’s death in 1547, English believers had to follow twists and turns through reigns of a rather more Protestant Edward VI, a quite Catholic Mary, and a warily Protestant Elizabeth I. The sixteenth century dragged ordinary English people through a maze of alternating religious and political identities. Eamon Duffy, in his dense, complex, but ultimately vivid reconstruction of parish life in sixteenth-century Morebath, Devon, has demonstrated how deeply the top-down turmoil stirred by Henry VIII and his successors shook local social relations and practices (Duffy, 2001). Duffy’s chief historical informant, the long-serving vicar Sir Christopher Trychay, did his best to protect his initially Catholic parishioners from the opposite dangers of over-eager reform and dogged resistance. But changing definitions of religious and political affiliation, with their accompanying obligations , impoverished the local church, destroyed the rough equality of household involvement in parish affairs that had characterized the early sixteenth century, and caused recurrent struggles of locals with outsiders who sought to impose or profit from the current realignment. Henry’s 1547 Injunctions, for example, combined an attack on votive lights and sacred images with dissolution of the chantries that had supported memorial masses, the proceeds going to pay for war with Scotland. In sheep-raising Morebath, this reform simultaneously struck at practices that entwined religion with kinship and forced sale of the church sheep, whose wool had provided the major income supporting local devotions. Most of the time Morebath’s people fought their identity battles with weapons of the weak. In 1549, however, they paid the 606 SOCIAL RESEARCH expenses of sending five local men to a rebel camp near Exeter in what came to be known as the Western Rebellion. More or less simultaneously Edward VI’s regime had imposed the Protestant Book of Common Prayer plus new taxes on sheep and cloth to support the expanding wars against France and Scotland. The rebels of 1549 centered their demands on the restoration of religious life as defined toward the end of Henry’s reign: largely Catholic beliefs, practices, and identities within an independent Church of England. The king’s forces, backed by foreign mercenaries , slaughtered the rebels. No commoners were going to decide the content of England’s religious and political identities as...

Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1780–1945 by Richard D. E. Burton (review)

978 Reviews intellectual mapping which will continue to aid, to fascinate, and to challenge scholars for many years to come. University of Kent Philip Robinson Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, iy8g-ig4^. By Richard D. E. Burton. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2001. xv + 395 pp. $36.50. Revisiting Paris with Richard D. E. Burton is an exhilarating experience. In an immensely well-informed study ofwhat might be called 'monumentalites', he interprets the major tourist sights as historical sites, illuminating every scene in the flickering glare of violence. His route takes him from the Bastille to the Place de la Concorde, from the Place Vendome and the Invalides to the Hotel de Ville, from Pere Lachaise to Notre-Dame (with Claudel finding his faith again), and from the Sacre-Cceur, the Tour EifTel, and the Champs de Mars to the Vel' d'Hiv' and the poky courtroom where Petain was convicted. Whether even Marian manifestations endow the Rue du Bac with similarly resonant significance might be questioned, but the account of the episode contributes to the overall picture. It is of a city perennially in turmoil, bathed in blood, inflamed by symbols and memories as much as by intellectual ideals or palpable injustices. Atrocity was all the more sinister because it assumed a sacrificial aspect. Beneath the dreams and nightmares of a century and a half Burton sees 'the seemingly irresistible spread of a secular worldview' (p. 265). Perhaps there is an alternative argument. Catholicism in France showed even greater powers of survival than monarchical principles that have manifested their attractions, albeit in quite a variety of forms, through a succession of republics. The consequence was a polarization in attitudes that has militated against gradual development; the norm, as Burton shows so vividly, has been bitter contestation rather than mutually tolerant consensus. Much of the interest of Burton's study, like a good deal of the force of his rhetoric, derives from his concentration on Paris as the cockpit of France, but perspective might come from comparisons with neighbouring states. Burton writes in an engaging style, generously sharing a rich store of information and the reflections of a particularly lively mind. The way some of the evidence is handled may, however, raise doubts. At the end of an account of the killing of the vicomte de Launay after the fall of the Bastille, Burton records how the pastry cook Desnot, who had been assaulted by him, was invited to cut off the head of the corpse. Unable to handle a sabre, he used a kitchen knife he happened to be carrying. As ifthe detail were not gruesome enough in itself and sufficientlyeloquent in its own way, Desnot's knife is described as 'phallic' (p. 33). Beguiling though anthropological interpretations are, the phallus is not an organ with a cutting edge. It is also noted that Louis XVI, for his part, was beheaded by an executioner who had inherited his position and was himself the leading representative of a particular caste. The circumstance is, for Burton, 'a parodic replica ofthe Bourbon dynasty' (p. 44). Point taken, but irony is diminished by the recollection that the transmission of offices down generations was a general characteristic of the ancien regime. Sympathetic on more than one occasion to the unfortunate women whose heads were shaved at the Liberation, Burton is not above inviting sniggers at Louis XVI's phimosis (p. 42). Identifying the Sacred Heart as 'strawberry-like' (p. 179) is not much help in understanding a major force in religious life. It would be easy to go on, for Burton aims hardly less to provoke than to inform in a richly allusive history that has the breath of life and controversy. The publishers MLR, 97.4, 2002 979 are mean with illustrations, the maps of Paris are poor, and the heavy grotesque type for the initial letter of the firstword in each chapter is disfiguring. University of East Anglia, Norwich Christopher Smith L'Expression du sentimentdans I'ceuvre de Benjamin Constant. By Victor Kocay. (Studies in French Literature, 48) Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Mellen. 2001. viii + 342pp. ?59.95; $99-95This work grew out of an earlier project...

Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France

T| NHE French effort to Christianize the natives of seventeenthcentury North America coincided with one of the last great periods of European (especially French) hagiography.1 Thus, when Catholic France boasted of its missionary achievements, it spoke less of pagan nations converted to the True Faith than of saints vaulted into heaven. The Jesuit Fran~ois Du Creux chose these revealing terms in dedicating his Historia Canadensis to King Louis XIV: Your New France, Louis, has many saints of that very kind that the Apostle mentions everywhere in his Epistles.2 Like the annual Jesuit Relations on which it was based, Du Creux's work is studded with long digressions on the deeds of martyrs and ascetic visionaries, their edifying deaths, and their miraculous post-mortem intercessions; these biographical interjections interrupt the flow of the historical narrative, but they also impart an inner logic to the whole. Historians mining the Catholic missionary sources in search of rich veins of ethnographic description and historical chronicle are well aware of the sacred biography element, though they seldom reflect on it, pre-