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In Whores of Babylon, Frances E. Dolan offers a perceptive study of the central role that Catholics and Catholicism played in early modern English law, literature, and politics. She contends that despite sharing the same blood, origins, and history as their Protestant antagonists, Catholics provoked more prolific and intemperate visual and verbal representation, and more elaborate and sustained legal regulation, than any other marginal group in seventeenth-century England. This careful and thorough study examines legal and literary representations of the "Catholic menace" during three crises in Protestant/Catholic relations, from the Gunpowder Plot (1605) to the Popish Plot and Meal Tub Plot (1678-80). It also offers the first sustained analysis of the extent to which gender issues informed both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in the early modern period. Available for the first time in paperback, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern England, Catholic history, and gender studies.
“Whores of Babylon is not about religion, as the term has been understood by many scholars who study early modern Catholicism. Religion is not the main concern of this book; religion serves instead mainly to highlight and underline points made about some ways seventeenth-century Englishwomen were valued and employed, used and abused, in print.” —Archivum Historicum
Frances E. Dolan is professor of English at the University of California, Davis.