And the recent pedophile priest scandal, he shows, has revived many ancient anti-Catholic stereotypes."--BOOK JACKET.

Now in Paperback and Study Guide! Since 2003, when it was first published, this astonishing study of the distinctiveness of Catholic culture and the prejudice it has generated has been hailed as a stimulating (Journal of Religion) and eye-opening chronicle (Catholic News Service) with an explosion of creative insight (Andrew Greeley

This edited collection brings together varying angles and approaches to tackle the multi-dimensional issue of anti-Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland. It is of course difficult to infer from such geographically and historically diverse studies one single contention, but what the book as a whole suggests is that there can be no teleological narration of anti-Catholicism – its manifestations were episodic, more or less rooted in common worldviews, and its history does not end today.

Farrelly uses America's early history of anti-Catholicism to reveal contemporary American understandings of freedom, government, God, the individual, and the community.

Winner, 2017 Ragsdale Award A timely study that puts current issues—religious intolerance, immigration, the separation of church and state, race relations, and politics—in historical context. The masthead of the Liberator, an anti-Catholic newspaper published in Magnolia, Arkansas, displayed from 1912 to 1915 an image of the Whore of Babylon. She was an immoral woman sitting on a seven-headed beast, holding a golden cup “full of her abominations,” and intended to represent the Catholic Church. Propaganda of this type was common during a nationwide surge in antipathy to Catholicism in the early twentieth century. This hostility was especially intense in largely Protestant Arkansas, where for example a 1915 law required the inspection of convents to ensure that priests could not keep nuns as sexual slaves. Later in the decade, anti-Catholic prejudice attached itself to the campaign against liquor, and when the United States went to war in 1917, suspicion arose against German speakers—most of whom, in Arkansas, were Roman Catholics. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan portrayed Catholics as “inauthentic” Americans and claimed that the Roman church was trying to take over the country’s public schools, institutions, and the government itself. In 1928 a Methodist senator from Arkansas, Joe T. Robinson, was chosen as the running mate to balance the ticket in the presidential campaign of Al Smith, a Catholic, which brought further attention. Although public expressions of anti-Catholicism eventually lessened, prejudice was once again visible with the 1960 presidential campaign, won by John F. Kennedy. Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas illustrates how the dominant Protestant majority portrayed Catholics as a feared or despised “other,” a phenomenon that was particularly strong in Arkansas.

Responding to recent historical analyses of Post-Reformation English Catholicism, the essays in this collection by both literary scholars and historians focus on polemical, devotional, political, and literary texts that dramatize the conflicts between context-sensitive Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England. They foreground some major literary authors and canonical texts, but also examine non-canonical literature as well as other writings that embody ideological fantasies connecting the political and religious discourses of the time with their literary manifestations.

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