Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism, edited by Evan Haefeli, includes both essays originally presented in 2008 at a conference on transatlantic anti-Catholicism and essays specially written for this volume. The chronological coverage of the contributions (which might usefully have been made explicit in the title), extends from the later sixteenth century to the early nineteenth.
In his stimulating introduction, Haefeli immediately articulates a key argument that runs through some of the chapters: the value of making a distinction between anti-Catholicism “animus to Roman Catholics and their religion”, and anti-popery “deriving from hostility to the religious and political example of the Roman Catholic papacy” (1–2). Anti-popery indeed could be directed against both Protestants and Catholics, either because they were perceived as deliberately or unwittingly assisting the papacy or because they were deemed to be behaving in a popish manner. The distinction is then argued even more robustly in Tim Harris's chapter on seventeenth-century England, which opens with the bold assertion that “Anti-Catholicism and anti-popery were not the same thing” (25). As Haefeli acknowledges, the boundaries between them “are fuzzy” (1), but, as the contributions in Against Popery illustrate well, the potentialities of pursuing the analytical separation.
The chapters are organized into three sections: those in “Foundations” focus on the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the chapters in “Hegemony” are concerned with the implied dominance of anti-Catholicism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the chapters in “Transformations” examine the place of anti-Catholicism in the revolutionary era from the 1770s to 1829. There are, however, some chronological overlaps between the sections. “Foundations” includes, alongside Harris's chapter on England, studies of Virginia by Cynthia van Zandt, of Scotland by Craig Gallagher, and of Ireland by Haefeli. “Hegemony” is thematic rather than geographical in its coverage, including a multiauthored analysis of representations of the 1678 Popish Plot on playing cards; Laura Stevens’ account of the complex and shifting attitudes of British Protestants to the Virgin Mary; and Clare Haynes's investigation of the comparable ambiguities in attitudes toward Roman Catholic art, centered on the career of Benjamin West.
Haefeli opens “Transformations” with his own longue durée survey of the enduring prominence of anti-popery in America throughout the colonial period. Hence, he argues the Quebec Act of 1774 “destroyed [colonists’] faith in the empire” (222) and that anti-popery quite as much as secular liberalism inspired American independence. In the next chapter, Brendan McConville argues that the subsequent American alliance with Catholic France was a consequence of pragmatic necessity that was at odds with the enduring anti-Catholicism and Francophobia of the population as whole. Peter Walker then traces the advance of religious toleration in Britain during the half century after 1780, arguing that the Gordon Riots discredited anti-popery in ways that proved to the long-term advantage of Catholics. Against Popery is rounded off by a conclusion from Haefeli and an epilogue from Anthony Milton, who helpfully highlights the fluidity and complexity of anti-Catholicism.
Like any multiauthored book, Against Popery suffers a little from repetition and apparent inconsistencies but achieves significant coherence through Haefeli's substantive and editorial contributions. As a whole, the book therefore 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.
As Haefeli acknowledges, there is nevertheless “certainly more work to be done” (297). In particular, his claim (5) that he is bringing together “disparate and widely scattered” work on anti-Catholicism and anti-popery needs to be qualified by the recognition that, with only two exceptions, the contributors are all based at institutions in the United States. This assemblage of work primarily by American scholars should therefore be read alongside another collection of essays edited by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille and Géraldine Vaughan, Anti-Catholicism in Britain and Ireland 1600–2000: Practices, Representations and Ideas (2020), which includes studies by British and French researchers. As Haefeli and his collaborators so effectively demonstrate, anti-Catholicism has been a transatlantic movement, and further advances in understanding it are likely to be facilitated by transatlantic collaboration among historians.
