Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Volume 28) (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)

Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Volume 28) (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) by Franchot, Jenny. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780520086067.

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchots cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America. Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about Americas origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism. Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell―writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction―further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.