In early modern British history, anti-popery is an extremely important concept—though its impact can be seen as much broader. In the introduction of his edited volume Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism, Evan Haefeli argues that the idea’s utility extends beyond histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland and that it should become more broadly prominent in other aspects of British imperial history. In particular, he sees distinguishing between anti-popery and anti-Catholicism as valuable to scholars of early America. Americanists, he avers, have emphasised anti-Catholicism’s irrational, paranoid, and bigoted characteristics. Haefeli suggests that integrating the rational, ideological elements of Protestant opposition to Catholic religion and the politics of the papacy—something akin to Peter Lake’s seminal discussion of anti-popery—is more revealing of the character of early American political culture and the causes of the American Revolution. Thus, one chief objective of this volume is to introduce Americanists to the work of scholars of early modern Britain and Ireland. To this end, Haefeli has assembled a collection of essays surveying existing scholarship and offering some new approaches.

Establishing Haefeli’s vision of the volume’s purpose is necessary for assessing the work’s merits on its own terms. Readers of this journal will undoubtedly find much of value, but the volume is not strictly about Catholics or Catholicism. What the book sets out to achieve as regards surveying existing literature, however, it does well. Three of the contributors to Part I, ‘Foundations’, have provided highly readable, thoughtful syntheses demonstrating mastery of an impressive range of material. Tim Harris posits the distinctive features of both English anti-popery and anti-Catholicism in the seventeenth century, while offering a nuanced analysis of their complicated interactions. Craig Gallagher outlines insufficiently-studied features of Scottish Presbyterian anti-popery between 1550 and 1690, which he observes was primarily directed against other Protestants and was more radical than its English counterpart. Haefeli fills a similar lacuna in his discussion of the distinctive features of Irish anti-popery/anti-Catholicism, which interacted with ethnic prejudices linking Irish ‘barbarity’ with ‘popery’ and permeated the British Empire between 1536 and 1775. The inevitable consequence of the ambitious chronological scope of these chapters is that a reader might crave more about omitted or briefly-addressed topics. Nevertheless, these essays stand as valuable introductions to current scholarship.

The volume also successfully contributes new methodological insight into the study of anti-Catholicism. Part I includes Cynthia J. Van Zandt’s exploration of how the Gunpowder Plot gave rise to concerns about Catholic threats which, in turn, diminished the role of Catholics in the Atlantic world in favour of patterns of Protestant expansion that would check the growth of the Catholic empires of France and Spain. The book’s Part II, ‘Hegemony’, offers three interdisciplinary case studies of anti-Catholicism in action. Andrew R. Murphy, Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, and Susan P. Liebell co-author an excellent chapter about how a set of playing cards depicting Catholic acts of malfeasance, produced during the uproar over the Oates Plot of 1678, reveals the social diffusion, participatory nature, and dystopian rhetoric of anti-popish political theorising. Laura M. Stevens investigates the complexity of Protestant attitudes toward the Virgin Mary at the turn of the eighteenth century. Changes in those attitudes allowed Protestants to accept the Virgin’s non-physical qualities as exemplifying godly virtue, while continuing to reject the ‘popish’ idolatry of an exalted reverence toward Mary’s physical body. Similar ambivalence characterised Protestant stances toward Catholic visual culture, as Clare Haynes reveals in her chapter about Benjamin West’s attempts to navigate the inherent tension between enduring Protestant respect for the technical proficiency of Catholic art and rejection of the theological truths it purported to depict.

The three essays constituting the bulk of Part III, ‘Transformations’, build on each other to examine anti-popery’s significance to the British Atlantic during the ‘Age of Revolutions’ at the turn of the nineteenth century. Haefeli outlines the importance of anti-popery and anti-Catholicism in maintaining British imperial cohesion between 1558 and 1776, when ‘neither naked power nor bureaucratic efficiency could compel colonial loyalty’ (p. 203). Brendan McConville then explores how British toleration of French Catholics in Quebec contributed to the disintegration of this anti-popish imperial logic, somewhat paradoxically resulting in a Franco-American alliance during the revolution that necessitated a reorientation of American anti-popish discourse. Peter W. Walker’s sophisticated analysis examines how these imperial issues informed Catholic attempts to secure toleration in Britain between 1776 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829. During this period, Catholics disassociated themselves from the papacy’s political pretensions—subscribing to a distinction between Catholicism and ‘popery’—and subsequently deployed aspects of traditional anti-popish condemnations of intolerance to facilitate the repeal of anti-Catholic legislation. Haefeli’s conclusion traces the significance of anti-popery and anti-Catholicism to the present. Anthony Milton’s ‘Epilogue’ is a rich consideration of the complexities inherent in developing any universal explanation of anti-Catholicism spanning several centuries and geographical locales. Milton argues for the preeminent importance of keeping the immediate context of any given instance in view.

Haefeli intends the volume to serve as a ‘common reference point for future work’ on anti-popery in British, Irish, and American studies (p. 16). Only time will tell, of course, but the volume has positioned itself adeptly with a full complement of well-written, thoughtful essays, all offering valuable insights to scholars working on the broad range of geographical and chronological subjects it addresses. For scholars of British and Irish Catholic history, this collection provides an enlightening view into the ways that Americanists have approached anti-Catholicism as a prejudice with ongoing political and social legacies that can, in some respects, be compared to anti-Islamism, anti-Semitism, and even anti-Mormon sentiment. The volume is comparatively weak on two key issues, however. First, the argument against maintaining a hard distinction between anti-popery and anti-Catholicism is given short shrift. Haefeli alludes only briefly to Jeffrey Collins’s work on this in his conclusion.Footnote ¹ This diminished counterpoint is all the more curious because so many of the volume’s contributors do not seem to abide by a strict distinction themselves. Second, because the chapters that most consistently maintain this distinction occur early in the volume, there is limited consideration of the connections between British Catholic activity and anti-popery in early modernity. The relative absence of this material may be in keeping with the volume’s internal logic—it is not a book about Catholics or Catholicism per se—but the decision to frame the volume in this way returns us to more fundamental questions about whether anti-popery and anti-Catholicism can be meaningfully separated. If this volume is to serve as the enduring reference point Haefeli intends, some early modernist readers of this journal might well wonder how he envisions their field contributing to future research. Nevertheless, Haefeli acknowledges that there is more work to be done, and even these objections reveal Against Popery’s value as a starting point for further discussion.