Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture

Frances E. Dolan

Published by Cornell University Press 1999

Whores of Babylon

Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture

Frances E. Dolan

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501734113

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the seventeenth century, the largely Protestant nation of England was preoccupied with its Catholic subjects. They inspired more prolific and harsher criticism and more elaborate attempts at legal regulation than did any other minority group. To understand this phenomenon, Frances E. Dolan probes the verbal and visual representations of Catholics and Catholicism and the uses to which these were put during three crises in Protestant'Catholic relations: the gunpowder plot (1605), Queen Henrietta Maria's open advocacy of Catholicism in the 1630s and 1640s, and the popish and meal tub plots (1678—1680). She uses each crisis as a jumping-off point, an opportunity for speculation, as did contemporary writers. Drawing on political, religious, and legal writings and offering fresh readings of literary texts such as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, Dolan shows how often Catholics and Catholicism were linked to disorderly women.

Dolan maintains that since Catholics were members of many English families and communities and prominent at court, the threat they offered was precisely that they could not be readily isolated and assigned to a category—both laws and polemic struggled to identify Catholics, but never succeeded in establishing a clear line between Catholics and everyone else. In seventeenth-century England, Dolan says, the threat of Catholicism lay in the tension between the foreign and the familiar, the different and the same.

Author / Editor information

Frances E. Dolan is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, also from Cornell.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. “Home-Bred Enemies”: Imagining Catholics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
2. Searching the Bed: Jacobean Anti-Catholicism and the Scandal of Heterosociality Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
3. The Command of Mary: Marian Devotion, Henrietta Maria’s Intercessions, and Catholic Motherhood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
4. “The Wretched Subject the Whole Town Talks of”: Elizabeth Cellier, Popish Plots, and Print Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 256
Illustrations
- Other: 10 halftones
Keywords: Religious Studies; Gender Studies; Media Studies

eBook

Published: June 7, 2019
ISBN: 9781501734113