Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism.

Abstract

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the foreign practices of the immigrant church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's 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 America's 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 Lowellwriters who sympathized with Romanism and used its imaginative properties in their fictionfurther demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.

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