Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660-1745

This study examines the role of anti-Catholic rhetoric in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. Raymond Tumbleson shows how the fear of Popery, a potentially destabilizing force under the Stuarts, ultimately became a principal guarantor of the Hanoverian oligarchy. Discussing writers from Middleton, Milton and Marvell to Swift, Defoe and Fielding, as well as numerous pamphleteers, the book crosses traditional generic, disciplinary and chronological boundaries between poetry and prose, literature and polemic, the Reformation and the Augustan age.