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‘The Body of the Church Is a Mass of Fragments’: The Protestant Invisible Church and Remnant Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century British Prose Fiction

Ferraro, Michael
http://orcid.org/0009-0009-2527-8248
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1700061879680671

Abstract Details

2023, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences).
This study documents patterns of description of Roman Catholic characters, beliefs, cultural attitudes, dispositions, doctrines, worship and ceremonial rites, and visual and material culture in eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British prose fiction. From Daniel Defoe’s Religious Courtship (1722) to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), British prose fiction wrestles with the problem of religious difference between Anglo-Protestants and a defamiliarized Catholic other. Delineating Roman Catholicism the spatial-geographical as well as timebound “constitutive outside” of Protestant Great Britain, numerous British novels portray Catholics and Catholic religion as shadows of a dark age past from which Britain itself has emerged, enlightened and whole. And yet certain features of these fictions belie a clean, easy separation and indeed problematize Anglo-Protestant identity itself. Describing in fetishistic detail Catholicism’s visual and material culture, to emphasize its strangeness and outlandishness to British observers, British writers draw attention to Protestant Britain’s own lack of internal religious unity and coherence, which is often symbolized by the novel’s inability to render a rival Protestant religious imaginary on the page. I argue that the stark contrast between the visible and embodied evidence of Roman Catholic religion and an Anglo-Protestant religious imaginary that both contains and resists Catholic art and artifice, is a constant source of unspoken disquiet and tension in the British novel. British writers of the eighteenth-century wrestle with the question or what Britons have lost or gained in shedding the visual and material culture of Catholicism for comparatively immaterial and rational constructions of faith. In consequence, however, a Catholic religious imaginary and sacramental universe—part of England’s religious heritage from the Catholic Middle Ages—is preserved in the realm of the symbolic, and becomes a challenge to both Protestantism and emergent secularism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The shift from a negative evaluation of Roman Catholicism in early-eighteenth-century prose fiction to a more laudatory reassessment in late-eighteenth-century novels in important respects presages later developments in British religious thought, especially the Oxford Movement of the 1830s that sought to reestablish a Catholic sense of the institutional Anglican Church’s centrality to English and British religious, cultural, and social life.
Linda Zionkowski (Committee Chair)
Michele Clouse (Committee Member)
Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member)
Joseph McLaughlin (Committee Member)
488 p.
British and Irish Literature; History; Literature; Religion; Religious Education; Religious History
Christianity, Eighteenth Century, British Literature, Novel, Prose Fiction, Literary History, Ecclesial History, Catholicism, Protestantism, Religious Philosophy, Invisible Church, Anti-Catholicism, Secularism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ferraro, M. (2023). ‘The Body of the Church Is a Mass of Fragments’: The Protestant Invisible Church and Remnant Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century British Prose Fiction [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1700061879680671

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ferraro, Michael. ‘The Body of the Church Is a Mass of Fragments’: The Protestant Invisible Church and Remnant Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century British Prose Fiction. 2023. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1700061879680671.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ferraro, Michael. "‘The Body of the Church Is a Mass of Fragments’: The Protestant Invisible Church and Remnant Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century British Prose Fiction." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1700061879680671

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1700061879680671
© 2023, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.