Against Popery - (Early American Histories) by Evan Haefeli (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that use anti-popery as a framework for interpreting the culture and politics of the British-American world. Anti-popery is identified by scholars of early modern England as an ideology of liberty associated with anti-Catholicism-an opposition to tyranny and corruption associated with the papacy. Spanning three centuries, these essays reveal anti-popery as an agent of cultural and political change, from Protestants' positive engagement with selected aspects of Catholic culture to upheavals like the American Revolution"--

Book Synopsis

Although commonly regarded as a prejudice against Roman Catholics and their religion, anti-popery is both more complex and far more historically significant than this common conception would suggest. As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, anti-popery is a powerful lens through which to interpret the culture and politics of the British-American world.

In early modern England, opposition to tyranny and corruption associated with the papacy could spark violent conflicts not only between Protestants and Catholics but among Protestants themselves. Yet anti-popery had a capacity for inclusion as well and contributed to the growth and stability of the first British Empire. Combining the religious and political concerns of the Protestant Empire into a powerful (if occasionally unpredictable) ideology, anti-popery affords an effective framework for analyzing and explaining Anglo-American politics, especially since it figured prominently in the American Revolution as well as others.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic working in history, literature, art history, and political science, the essays in Against Popery cover three centuries of English, Scottish, Irish, early American, and imperial history between the early sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More comprehensive, inclusive, and far-reaching than earlier studies, this volume represents a major turning point, summing up earlier work and laying a broad foundation for future scholarship across disciplinary lines.

Contributors: Craig Gallagher, New England College * Tim Harris, Brown University * Clare Haynes, Independent Researcher * Susan P. Liebell, St. Joseph's University * Brendan McConville, Boston University * Anthony Milton, University of Sheffield * Andrew R. Murphy, Virginia Commonwealth University * Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, Rutgers University, New Brunswick * Laura M. Stevens, University of Tulsa * Cynthia J. Van Zandt, University of New Hampshire * Peter W. Walker, University of Wyoming

Early American Histories

Review Quotes

An excellent collection. Without exception, these essays are well written and significant, and as a whole, Against Popery makes a valuable and original contribution to scholarship. It cannot be said that anti-popery or anti-Catholicism have been neglected as subjects. Nonetheless, the phenomenon has never received the attention it so richly deserves. As such, this volume is a worthy addition to the scholarly literature.

--Owen Stanwood, Boston College, author of The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire

An excellent volume. The essays are all of high quality: erudite, properly argued, carefully constructed and well-written, and based on a wealth of reading as highlighted by the notes. Each essay is valuable in itself, but, additionally, many of the essays contribute to overarching themes chiefly, perhaps, that anti-Catholic ideology/ideologies, not uniform but protean, could promote political and cultural cohesion in Britain itself and its empire but could also erode or fracture it. The volume is also generally well--and usefully--illustrated.

--Colin Haydon, University of Winchester, UK

These essays nicely explore the complicated ways in which religious intolerance--which is inherently exclusionary--has actually helped to bring people together, forming communities by defining the requirements and limits of faith, patriotism, and freedom. The questions raised are timely, even as the history they interrogate is centuries' old.

--Maura Jane Farrelly, Brandeis University, author of Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860

A collection of excellent essays... Haefeli and his contributors show how anti-Catholic animus often floated free of prejudice against Catholics themselves. Because Catholicism was associated with arbitrary government and religious persecution, Protestants sometimes accused other Protestants of acting like or in the interests of "papists." Haefeli therefore takes issue with Colley's thesis that anti-Catholicism united Britons. Assaults on, say, religious ritualism or the Crown's authority over church affairs were just as likely to divide British, Irish, and Anglo-American Protestants as to bring them closer together. --1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

As a whole, the book . . . provides an excellent overview of current scholarship on anti-Catholicism and anti-popery in Britain and America in the early modern era, convincingly demonstrating the wider significance of its theme for understanding the overall development of the Protestant empire. There is also much insight here that can usefully be applied to the study of later periods and other geographical and national contexts.--Journal of British Studies

About the Author

Evan Haefeli is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University and author of New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty.