Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England.

Gilpin, W. Clark

Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. By Arthur F. Marotti. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. xii + 308 pp. $55.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

Over the past decade, Arthur F. Marotti, professor of English at Wayne State University, has edited several notable collections of essays on religion, textual transmission, and national identity in early modern England. His own contributions to those edited volumes investigated the representation of Catholicism in manuscript and printed texts during Elizabeth's reign. In Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy, Marotti revises three of his articles from those earlier volumes and adds two new ones to create a set of thematically focused essays dealing with religious and political language and mythmaking in the century from the 1580s to the 1680s. Ideological representations of Catholicism are central to Marotti's analysis because, as he states at the outset, "English nationalism rests on a foundation of anti-Catholicism" (9). This means that both writing in behalf of English Catholicism and writing attacking it were composed in a cultural context of polemic, partisanship, and the threat of violence. Not surprisingly, therefore, Marotti's key texts are narratives of Catholic martyrdom, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, stories of Catholic plots--some actual, some imagined--against crown and country.

With respect to English Catholic martyrology, Marotti focuses on the reign of Elizabeth, when the monarch's headship of the English church inextricably bound together religious conformity and political loyalty. Beginning in 1577, the government apprehended and executed for treason seminary priests and Jesuits who were entering England as missionaries, such as Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell. Imprisonment and execution also befell their lay supporters, most infamously in the martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow, who was pressed to death in 1586. Marotti provides a lucid account of the composition of both martyrological texts and texts by the martyrs themselves, demonstrating in the latter case how "the reverence for relics began to migrate into print culture, where the remains of a person were verbal," and "the connection between books and the body was stressed" (27).

Marotti explores the propaganda surrounding Catholic plots by examining three "religiously coded events" (10): the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and the trumped-up Popish Plot of 1678-81, in which the allegations of Titus Oates launched a furor during which twenty-four Catholics were executed. These and other moments of crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generated anti-Catholic texts that structured the narrative of English history around "the model of domestic Catholic outrage or threat followed by Protestant deliverance" (132), thereby establishing English national identity as Protestant. At the same time, political actors found they could use "anti-Catholic language and the threat of alleged popish plots to mask a more direct struggle between Parliament and the Crown" (158). Polemical religious texts thus not only shaped the Protestant and Catholic religious communities but also were thoroughly intertwined with the broader ideology and politics of the age.

Since narratives of martyrdom and narratives of national identity exerted reciprocal influence on one another and on the religious communities they represented, the meaning and practice of both Catholicism and Protestantism in early modern England were mutually defined. For this reason, the paucity of comparative analysis in Marotti's text is a significant weakness. Two examples illustrate the difficulty: conversion and the relics of martyrs. Marotti devotes his fourth chapter to "performing conversion," identified by the bland definition that "in early modern England religious conversion meant shifting one's social affiliation from one community to another" (95). During this period, however, English Puritans were elaborating a morphology of conversion that explicitly differentiated itself from Catholic conceptions of the church and personal devotion. The absence of any comparative appraisal reduces the chapter to a series of short, biographic accounts of Catholic converts in which any distinctive features of conversion to Catholicism remain obscured. In the case of relics of the Catholic martyrs, Marotti asserts that the transformation of the martyrs' bodies into saints' relics and the signs and wonders associated with these relics "highlight specifically Catholic practices and beliefs" (78). This important point requires further elaboration and analysis, however, since English Protestants also had their tales of handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of the sufferers and ashes that would consecrate the land. How, more precisely, did the treatment and interpretation of the physical remains of martyrs differ between English Catholics and Protestants, and what were the implications of these differences for their respective narratives of identity?

Arthur Marotti has added a useful volume to the quite significant body of scholarship on Catholicism, persecution, and martyrdom in early modern England written by Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Anne Dillon, Lisa McClain, Susannah Brietz Monta, and others. Collectively, these books do not merely add a new chapter to the religious history of early modern England but substantially rewrite the whole.

W. Clark Gilpin

The University of Chicago