Shell, Alison; (2025) Catholic Writing in the Restoration: Mission, Tradition, Opposition. In: Zwicker, Steven and Augustine, Matthew, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

Anti-Catholicism is one of Restoration literary culture’s obscener qualities. This quotation, from John Dryden’s beast-fable The Hind and the Panther (1687), describes Protestant pigeons displaying a caricature of their Catholic adversaries. Such distortions were a powerful stimulus to imaginative endeavour in this period, for Protestants and Catholics alike.2 Writing from the Catholic point of view in James II’s reign, Dryden is deploring a prejudice endemic to his era: one which he himself shared earlier in life, and which continued to pervade the public sphere even under a monarch who was Catholic himself. Thanks to James’s open profession of Catholicism, and a range of other reasons—notably Charles II’s fostering of Catholic interests, and the real and perceived influence of Catholic queens—the fear of Catholics which dated back to the early years of the English Reformation took on acute political and imaginative urgency from the time of Charles’s reinstatement to that of James’s exile and beyond. Among a range of measures designed to curb the perceived Catholic threat, none was more notorious than the Test Act of 1673, which required the holders of public offices to declare their opposition to transubstantiation and receive Holy Communion in the Church of England—and which the Catholic poet Jane Barker, pitting caricature against caricature, declared to be a ‘hideous monsterous beast’.3 This essay considers how Dryden, Barker, and other Catholic writers resisted polemical fabrications, reacted to persecution, advanced their cause when circumstances were favourable, and kept faith with their past and present co-religionists.

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