English Catholic literary culture, 1640-1660: Reading, politics, and emotion

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My research will explore the literary culture of English Catholics during the turbulent 1640s and 1650s. It will ask how these generically varied and richly imaginative texts attempt to construct communities of affect, allegiance, and shared belief. I will ask how writers articulated forms of Catholic communal identity amid the splintering of political allegiances and religious identities provoked by the Civil Wars and emergence of the English Republic. I will pay close attention to reading both in terms of material traces of reading practice and in terms of metaphors for reading and interpretation. Whilst literary and historical scholarship on both the English Civil Wars and early modern Catholicism has greatly diversified in recent decades, the writing of mid-century Catholics has been sorely neglected. My work will thus not only reveal a neglected aspect of literary history but also contribute to critical debates over the relationship between literary texts, emotion and memory.The project will explore coterie poetry circulating in manuscript among Catholic families; devotional poetry and prose, including Richard Crashaw's late works; Catholic drama, including the plays of James Shirley and Joseph Simons S.J; royalist romance; and political tracts. Encompassing English and Latin, print and manuscript, and texts produced both in England and among the exile diaspora on the Continent, my research will illuminate the variety of forms and genres through which English Catholics represented their experience of historical and cultural upheaval. Since Nigel Smith argued that literary genres were transformed during the English Revolution and David Norbrook recovered the history and literature of English republicanism in the 1990s, scholarship on this period has diversified to include overlooked writers and issues. Alison Shell has convincingly argued for the significance of Catholic writing to the early modern imagination and revealed how Catholic texts responded to exile and divided loyalty. Susannah Monta, Christopher Highley, Arthur Marotti, and Molly Murray have explored Catholic literature in terms of martyrdom, nationhood, cultural anxiety, and conversion. Yet all these scholars pay only passing attention to the mid-century, concentrating instead on late Elizabethan and post-Restoration writers, notably Southwell and Dryden. My thesis will be the first sustained study of the Catholic literature of England's revolutionary decades. In order to understand how these texts articulate experience, I will adopt two related methodologies. First, I will borrow the critical terminology of what Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis have called the 'affective turn' in early modern studies. I will contribute to debates over affect, embodiment and inter-subjectivity by examining the rhetorical construction of emotional communities in Catholic literature. Secondly, my inquiry will be grounded in the history of reading. It will attend closely to the material traces and sites of transformative textual encounters, from recusant country houses to exiled religious colleges. Developing William Sherman's work on the participatory, interactive quality of reading, I will emphasize the differences between particular interpretative communities. I will contest Stephen Zwicker and Kevin Sharpe's model of mid-century reading as exclusively antagonistic and narrowly 'political' by revealing the variety of ways in which English Catholics read contemporary experience. My project will reveal the complex and generically diverse ways in which mid-century Catholic writing reconfigured politics, emotion, and community-making. It will revise our understanding of this unprecedented moment in English literary and political history and establish new avenues for approaching the nexus of religio-political identity, affect, and reading in early modern studies.