English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829

Recent Developments in 17th and 18th‐Century English Catholic Studies

“…Catholicism and Anti‐Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts , Arthur F. Marotti's seminal collection of essays, Frances E. Dolan's Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth‐Century Print Culture , and Raymond Tumbleson's Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660‐1745 broke ground for this approach arguing, in Tumbleson's words, that “anti‐Catholicism must function as both text and context” for Catholicism in England (1). Recent publications including Francis Young's English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 , Gabriel Glickman's The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology and Alexandra Walsham's The Catholic Reformation in Protestant England epitomize this view, which considers how either Catholicism responded to or was in dialogue with external, contextual factors. Walsham's observation of the “necessity of adopting a perspective that examines Catholicism and anti‐Catholicism, Protestantism and anti‐Protestantism as inextricably linked bodies of opinion and practice, which exerted powerful reciprocal influence upon each other” (22) and her encouragement to scholars to explore “the condition of being a proscribed and persecuted minority constrained and shaped the experience of British Catholics and left lasting scars on the memory of subsequent generations” (23) are exhortations to extend outward‐looking inquiry.…”

Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic

“…For Menghi, it is the exorcist who is in charge of the medicinal administration, as well as of the supervision of the ritual. 18 Obviously, exorcism was not similar to other unofficial treatments: the operation was not constituted of a single therapeutic act performed by a healer, but it was a ceremony (Sluhovsky 2007;Young 2016). The ritual of exorcism was entirely administered by the exorcist who worked in the name of the Church.…”