In 1928-29, politicians of the Irish Free State debated the Censorship of Publications Bill, which included a clause banning print media on contraception. They contended that ignorance of birth control would increase reproductive rates and prevent Irish “race suicide.” W. B. Yeats contested the Bill in the press, in part due to apprehension about Catholic population growth and dwindling Protestant numbers. This chapter positions the Free State’s “race suicide” debates into the context of their eugenic origins, and it argues that Yeats’s reaction to the Bill set the stage for his eugenic plan in On the Boiler, one that responded to what he believed was an Anglo-Irish “race suicide.” Through coded references to Irish class divisions, Yeats proposes restraints on Catholic reproductive rights, strategies of selective breeding among an Irish elite, and population control achieved through violence. His ideas about race and reproduction offer a study of scientific racism that reflects fringe and mainstream rhetoric that endures today in the form of “replacement theory.” An investigation of Yeats contributes to the ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to pinpoint the origins, development, and effects of theories that bring together questions of science, race, reproduction, and rights.

This chapter shows how the material and ritual legacies of apostolic Rome provoked debate among Protestant travellers and called attention to the intertwined legacies of early Christianity and imperial Rome. We demonstrate how one site (St Peter’s Basilica) became a battleground for sectarian readings of the apostolic past. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how anglophone travellers constructed their modernity in opposition to an imagined archaic Italian Other. Yet critics have paid insufficient attention to how religious difference and sectarian identity shaped such attitudes. Catholics had a special commitment to validating the early history of the Roman Church, but Protestants also had an active interest in apostolic legacies. By demonstrating that the earliest Christians practised a simple and earnest form of worship – anathema to the splendour of medieval Catholicism – Protestant commentators vindicated their faith as a return to apostolic authenticity. Yet if British and American travellers wanted to put Catholicism in its place, some Catholics sought to win over Protestant sceptics by appealing to a shared antiquarian epistemology, combining the aesthetic appeal of Catholic ritual with an historicizing emphasis on the material legacies of apostolic antiquity.

It is a commonplace in discussions of Anne Lister to identify her as a self-proclaimed Tory, and eventually a Tory landowner. But the Lister of the diaries also fancied herself a Rousseauvian individualist and something of a Byronic hero, a champion of Romantic individualism that sits somewhat oddly with her sense of social entitlement. I have argued elsewhere that Lister’s conservatism may have been compensatory, a form of normalisation and possibly of protection. In this chapter I complicate those arguments by looking more closely and more broadly at Lister’s politics - and politics with both a capital and a small ’p’. Lister lived during an age of revolution and reaction, of Napoleonic wars, of abolitionist agitation, of the first major Reform Act, of colonial expansion, of early industrialisation and rail travel. What were her attitudes to these major phenomena that do not necessarily line up neatly with a single party? What issues did she care about, and what did being a (non-voting, because female) Tory mean to her? Were there chinks in her conservative political philosophy? Did her views change over time? And is it possible that Lister’s conservatism was not compensatory at all, but rather part and parcel of her self-fashioning as a lesbian?

Cambridge was at the very heart of national events and the great political and religious changes of the Tudor period. By Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, the University was closer to royal power than it had ever been. The author explains how and why the Tudor monarchs became so involved in Cambridge and examines the crisis of Henry VIII’s Break from Rome, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Protestant Reformation. The author includes key figures in Cambridge such as Lady Margaret Beaufort, John Fisher, Erasmus and Thomas Cranmer. She also looks at the early Cambridge Protestant reformers such as Latimer, Ridley and Matthew Parker, who secretly discussed Luther’s ideas at the White Horse Tavern near King’s Parade.

This chapter delves into early modern theories about a key scriptural story, that of Noah’s flood, and the theological implications of explaining the flood in a largely naturalistic manner through appeal to laws of nature. Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes used laws of nature as the basis for a naturalistic account of the creation of the world, and others followed suit. This chapter analyses two accounts of the world’s creation and subsequent dissolution in the flood written in England in the closing decades of the seventeenth century that drew on laws of nature: Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, and William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth. Burnet and Whiston each explore how those early events in the earth’s history might be accounted for through natural processes, making their treatises among the earliest explicit attempts in England to explain key scriptural events chiefly in terms of natural causality.

This chapter looks at prodigies, unusual or unexpected phenomena thought to be personally or communally meaningful. Prodigies were widely thought to be an integral feature of a providentially governed world, and many different occurrences were taken to be communicative signs of God’s disposition toward, or impending judgement of, humanity. Some saw these strange occurrences as miracles and hence instances of divine action, but others dismissed such views as superstitious and misinformed, and conceived of ways to correct them. Following the lead of Francis Bacon, John Spencer was convinced that the explanation of these unusual occurrences should be reformed, and made the case for placing them under the purview of natural philosophy and explaining them naturalistically. This chapter looks at the occurrences that Spencer labelled as prodigies, his strategies for understanding them, the consequences of providing naturalistic explanations of prodigies for the perceived communicative capacities of nature, and the afterlife of Spencer’s analysis among members of the Royal Society

This chapter looks at Epicurean atomism as it was articulated by the physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton. Charleton was among the first in England to advocate for a Christianised version of Epicureanism, a philosophy long considered suspicious because of its purportedly atheistic implications. Charleton countered these concerns by situating Epicurean atomism within a providential picture of the world. This chapter examines the main elements of Charleton’s worldview, the influence of atomism on his providential naturalism, and his understanding of the affective consequences of invoking natural causality in a providentially governed world.

The doctrine of providence traditionally has shaped how Christians view nature. In early modern English Protestant thought the doctrine enveloped natural causality and deployed it in a variety of ways, with God’s government of the created order often believed to occur through the operation of natural causes. To grasp how natural causality was perceived at the time we must therefore appreciate the broader providential context within which naturally caused phenomena were located. This chapter looks at how English Protestants understood some of the main categories used to expound providence, including creation, conservation, concurrence, government,and ordinary and special providence. These categories appear in one form or another in the texts discussed in later chapters.

This chapter looks at chance-based gambling activities like dice and lots. Early modern Protestants thought gambling through such instruments was a widespread societal problem. This chapter analyses competing accounts of how these activities should be understood. It focuses on Thomas Gataker’s deployment of a more naturalistic alternative to the supernaturalistic approaches that some of his fellow Protestants, such as James Balmford, were using to fight back against the problem. Gambling activities may not seem like the other kinds of phenomena in nature studied elsewhere in the book, but to early modern thinkers they involved very similar causal mechanisms to many other kinds of occurrences in nature. They therefore shed considerable light on how Christians at the time thought about and explained many kinds of phenomena in nature.

argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) participates in an oppositional brand of religious politics associated with the poem’s female dedicatees. Building on the system of correspondences in which wife was to husband as subject was to ruler, Lanyer issues a call for “libertie” not as protofeminist appeal but as defense of the rights of the Church and the nation at a time when both were threatened by James’s growing use of his royal prerogative. Reviving the woman-centered discourse of the Protestant Reformation, Lanyer champions an ultra-Protestant corrective to masculine tyranny, the true Church of the persecuted elect represented by the oppressed collective of women. In “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer pays tribute to her primary patron and zealous Puritan Margaret Clifford by representing her as a virtuous monarch whose intimate relation to Christ in her rural retreat recalls the Song of Songs and offers pointed anticourt critique.

The nature of empire is that it is always at heart contradictory, suggesting a totalising unity but not homogeneity or equality. This chapter focuses on three very different Irish men of letters, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Moore and Charles Lever, exploring the contradictions at the heart of their engagement with the British Empire and the imperial project generally, and its influence on their writing. It also suggests ways in which these contradictions are later to be found in one of the great imperial novels – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Charles Gavan Duffy was an Irish nationalist and a prime minister of a British colony, who saw Thomas Moore’s poetry as the product of an ‘imperial mind’. Moore, in his turn, can be seen as the colonised figure incarnate, beholden to imperial patronage for his livelihood and yet able to find ways to express subversive feeling in his poetry and prose. Charles Lever was perhaps the Empire’s favourite Irish novelist in this period, and yet he seldom wrote about the Empire, and when he did, it was almost always negative in tone. Although he was a moderate Tory in politics, Lever’s work suggested that the Irish could never be good Britons, or successful colonists. In contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in so many ways represents the anomalous position of the Irish in imperial terms, is presented as succeeding precisely because of his Irishness, even though he does not know what that is. The contradictions in Kim reflect the ironic relationship between the Irish and the Empire as a whole, and as such the novel can claim to be the greatest ‘Irish’ imperial novel, a term which is itself a contradiction in terms.

For W. B. Yeats, George Berkeley’s youthful reference to ‘We Irish’ marked the beginning of a national intellect based on a perceived distinction between Irish philosophical idealism and the materialism supposedly characteristic of the English. Upon this enigmatic remark of Berkeley’s, Yeats erected a system that offered to illuminate the national characteristics of eighteenth-century authors – most importantly, Swift, Goldsmith, and Burke – including a profound suspicion of abstract ideas. The wealth of eighteenth-century Irish writing, still in the process of recuperation, is not easily accommodated within Yeats’s scheme, however, more readily revealing diversity than similarity. Yet the fact of Irish birth, education, or employment, as much as their subject matter, did mark out writers as Irish, whether the identification was self-willed or imposed by those outside the island. The ways in which national identity manifested itself between 1700 and 1780 are explored through examples of prose, verse, and drama written or published both in Ireland and abroad. In so doing, the chapter outlines the first halting attempts, by male and female writers including John Toland, George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift, Henry Brooke, Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Sheridan, and Edmund Burke, to create the idea of a national Irish literature in English.

The Introduction establishes the subject of this book, Irish Protestant nationalists, and argues that they constituted an important counterculture in the period. It links the historiography of Protestant nationalists with the competing ‘modernist’ and ‘perennialist’ perspectives on the origins of nationalism, and will argue that Ireland constitutes an important outlier, where both classically modernist and perennialist features co-existed, by reference to Irish history since the Tudor conquest. It argues that although parallels with the central European experience can be discerned, it is difficult to meaningfully place Protestant nationalists within frameworks put forward by scholars of continental Europe. The literature on Protestant nationalists is reviewed, and it is suggested that the way forward for historiography is to follow up the implications of the circles that have been reconstructed by biographers, and produce a collective biography that seeks to reconstruct the entire Protestant nationalist experience. The sources used in this book are discussed, and prosopography, the primary methodology which will be employed, is described and justified. The Introduction closes with a brief statistical summary of the Irish Protestant community in 1901.

This chapter considers the attempt during the Marprelate controversy (1589–90) to reprise the rhetoric of plain Englishness as both presbyterian polemic and comic commodity represents a complex set of nostalgias: not for just the medieval history of reformist ploughmen but the more recent reformist era of the 1540s. This bid for authenticity, however, is destabilised by both the tracts’ use of ‘tradition’ as a foil for stylistic experiment and their perceived affinity with the entertainment economy of the late 1580s. As the last part of the chapter argues, ‘Martinism’ was partly the creation of ‘anti-Martinism’ and these salient features can be read through the work of the anti-Martinist critics, in particular pamplets by John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe. The close attention they pay to the textual detail of the tracts represents its own critical tradition, one minutely sensitive to the contemporary resonances of their linguistic affect.

This chapter argues that the phrase ‘the merry world’ – and sometimes even the word ‘mirth’ – acquired a coded status in Reformation polemical print that then shadowed its use in other contexts: a way of expressing nostalgia for the pre-dissolution past that was proximate to, but not identical with, sedition and recusancy. There is evidence that these feelings were widespread, even amongst orthodox Protestants, but also that they remained potentially incendiary. Focusing on a series of disguised-king broadside ballads set in a pseudo-medieval ‘merry’ past, it suggests the historical fictions of cheap print recuperated the psychic materials of merry world complaint as a source of cosy and uncontentious pleasure.