Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship implicitly or explicitly associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was a dynamic and adaptive religious minority, its leaders among the aristocracy cosmopolitan, its intellectuals increasingly attracted to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and skepticism, and its membership growing among the middle and working classes. This community had an impact on the history of the English nation out of all proportion with its size—and yet its own history is glimpsed only dimly, if at all, in most modern accounts of the period.

The Papist Represented reincorporates the history of the English Catholic community into the field of eighteenth-century literary studies. It examines the intersections of literary, religious, and cultural history as they pertain to the slow acceptance by both Protestants and Catholics of the latter group’s permanent minority status. By focusing on the Catholic community’s perspectives and activities, it deepens and complicates our understanding of the cultural processes that contributed to the significant progress of the Catholic emancipation movement over the course of the century. At the same time, it reveals that this community’s anxieties and desires (and the anxieties and desires it provoked in Protestants) fuel some of the most popular and experimental literary works of the century, in forms and modes including closet drama, elegy, the novel, and the Gothic. By returning the Catholic community to eighteenth-century literary history, The Papist Represented challenges the assumption that eighteenth-century literature was a fundamentally Protestant enterprise.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Little has been said about the relationship of Herbert’s writings to those of John Calvin, yet the latter were abundant and influential in Herbert’s Church of England. Accordingly Picturing Religious Experience studies Herbert’s poetry in relation to those writings, particularly regarding “spiritual conflicts,” which the poet himself said would be found depicted in his book of poems. Much more than is generally realized, Calvin wrote about the experience of living the Christian life—which is also Herbert’s subject in many of his poems. Altogether, this study maintains that Herbert owes to his religious orientation not just themes or details, but an impulse to observe and depict the inner life, and scriptural patterns which significantly contribute to the substance and literary excellence of The Temple.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.