This project unites French, British and Irish researchers—with their distinctive approaches and scholarly traditions—into exploring a form of “Otherness” in Britain and Ireland from the post-Reformation period up until today.1 This interdisciplinary collection of essays, bringing together historians, literary scholars, sociologists and philosophers, offers a multifaceted vision of issues associated with the “Otherness” of Roman Catholics in Britain and Ireland. It does not claim to identify with a single historiographical tradition but rather seeks to show the complexity of a phenomenon which spans five hundred years. Concentrating on practices, representations and discourses, it reflects the broadening of the historical field to culture since the 1970s, culture being anthropologically understood as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about attitudes towards life.”2
The “cultural turn” has had institutional and epistemological consequences which are relevant to our present project. For instance, by permitting ecclesiastical history to come out of its institutional ghetto, developments in methodologies have encouraged the emergence of a socio-cultural approach to religious history. Transformed perspectives have also resulted in a growing interest in individual voices and experiences and, most crucially for the study of anti-Catholicism, in their symbolic and verbal manifestations and constructions. Our common venture here is thus to offer a “polyphonic history”—recognising, as Peter Burke states, “the value of interaction, interpenetration and hybridization” of our different scholarly backgrounds and exploring the world of anti-Catholicism “between practices and representations.”3
Physical manifestations of Catholic hatred, assaults and violence throughout the early and late modern period are not central to our analysis. Contributors are more concerned with the elaboration, discourse and perpetuation of anti-Catholic prejudice. In his analysis on early modern anti-Popery, the historian Peter Lake stressed the twofold dimension of prejudice against the Catholic “Other,” which expressed irrational fears as well as the conscious assertion of a Protestant identity. As Lake further wrote: “[c]ertainly anti-Popery appealed to people’s emotions. It did so because it incorporated deeply-held beliefs and values and it helped to dramatize and exorcize the fears and anxieties produced when those values came under threat.”4
Is there a single definition of anti-Catholicism? Anti-Catholic sentiment was a complex, protean phenomenon directed against the Roman Church, its prelates and parishioners. It varied according to time and place. The historian John Wolffe has offered researchers a synthetic vision of its key strands.5 Three major aspects might be defined for our present study. First, and more markedly up until 1829 and the passing of Catholic emancipation, anti-Catholicism was set in a constitutional framework, emanating from the State and the legislature (the Penal Laws were meant to disable Catholic subjects on a religious, economic and political basis).6 This constitutional anti-Catholicism resulted from the belief that Catholic subjects were potentially disloyal to the Crown and British institutions. They were thus barred from civic and political positions. In the later nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, constitutional anti-Catholicism was embodied in the debates around the issues of secular and religious State primary education.7 Second, anti-Catholicism also meant anti-Popery, in the sense that it embodied a strong theologico-political prejudice against the “tyrannical” powers of the Pope and the Roman Church. Catholicism was viewed as an illiberal doctrine, in contrast with Reformation principles which affirmed liberty of conscience. Third, anti-Catholicism had a socio-national dimension, meaning that the “Other” was perceived as fundamentally un-English, un-British or un-Scottish—this is where debates on the inclusion of Ireland into a wider British identity come into perspective. This form of anti-Catholicism mobilised ethnic prejudices, based on the demeaning of continental and Irish national identities, considered as being inferior to a strong Protestant British identity.
This collection of essays thus works by multiplying angles and approaches to tackle the composite issue of anti-Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland.8 However, anti-Catholicism was not exclusively a (British) Protestant affair. In the Catholic countries of Europe, anti-Catholicism could thrive in the form of anticlericalism—this was also the case in post-revolutionary France (Valentine Zuber’s chapter explores French manifestations of anti-Catholicism). It is of course difficult to infer, from a range of geographically and historically diverse studies, one single contention, but what this collection as a whole suggests is that there can be no teleological narration of anti-Catholicism—its manifestations have been episodic, more or less rooted in common worldviews, and its history does not end today. To that effect, the chronological boundaries adopted here are fluid in order to reflect the conflictual nature of anti-Catholicism—from the reign of Elizabeth I up to the early twenty-first century. It is hoped that such a thematic and interdisciplinary approach will further help readers to understand how anti-Catholicism evolved and revolved in British and Irish history. In line with current historiographical trends, the first part of this book looks at Catholic and Protestant interactions in discourses and cultural practices and examines the Catholic response to outbursts of anti-Catholicism. Nevertheless, satire and controversy have always fuelled religious and political conflicts—the second part will examine anti-Catholic polemics in their plasticity and adaptability to various political, social and theological contexts. The third part of this collection will be devoted to the study of anti-Catholicism and the emergence of modern national identities, with a focus on Englishness. Finally, the fourth part will explore more contemporary issues, by trying to answer the following question: has anti-Catholicism truly declined since the late twentieth century?
Living Together: Catholic Responses to Anti-Catholicism
Until well into the twentieth century, the history of British Catholics and Catholicism was written by Catholics as a history of persecution and martyrdom. It was, to quote Alexandra Walsham, “an obscure byway and minor distraction from the grand narrative of progress that released the people of England, Wales and Scotland from popish ignorance, superstition and tyranny.”9 One of the main reasons for this separatist and hagiographical methodology was the exclusion of English Catholics from full citizenship from the time of the Reformation onwards—apart from the short interruption of the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558)—until the Emancipation Act of 1829. However, since John Bossy’s pioneering work, influenced by the French Annales, the English Catholic community and their cultural practices have received more historiographical attention.10 In 2005, in the preface to Catholics and the “Protestant Nation,” historian Ethan Shagan wrote that Catholicism “was not a discrete subject but a crucial facet of early modern culture” and made it clear that the purpose of his book was to “pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English historiography.”11 The relationships between Catholics and Protestants in the post-Reformation era have now become a more central subject of study, as it appears essential to “[adopt] a perspective that examines Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, Protestantism and anti-Protestantism as inextricably linked bodies of opinion and practice.”12 There is much evidence that early modern English Catholics interacted with the rest of society in multiple ways: contrary to what has often been assumed, they were not necessarily rejected by their Protestant parishes and continued to participate in local and national politics.13 This was particularly true of a category of Catholics, those called “Church Papists,” who conformed to the Church of England to avoid persecution and fines and who probably found it easier to integrate into the social life of their towns and villages than recusants.14 When Alexandra Walsham chooses the term “coexistence” to designate inter-denominational relationships, she warns us that there should be no idealising of interreligious cohabitation. Although Christian charity made it obligatory to love one’s neighbour, for most seventeenth-century Protestants, their religion was the only true one and Papists remained objects of hatred.15 Thus, the phrase “charitable hatred,” which encapsulates early modern interconfessional relationships, establishes that religious coexistence did not mean mutual acceptance in the seventeenth century.16 There is in fact much evidence that anti-Catholic sentiment persisted at least up until the end of the Hanove...