Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660-1745. By Raymond D. Tumbleson. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998. Pp. ix + 254. $64.95.

Anti-Catholic prejudice is not a new topic in English historical and literary studies, but a new study of this prejudice and the methods that opponents of Catholicism employed is welcome. The purpose of Raymond D. Tumbleson's Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination is to "examine hatred of Catholicism" mainly from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth centuries (p. 16), but the roots of this bigotry go back much further, so the author is attentive to the beginnings of anti-Catholicism in Tudor England. Mass hatred often involves the influencing of people's minds by spreading false stories, what we now call propaganda. Totalitarian states have traditionally used false or exaggerated stories to demonize their enemies, but propaganda is often a more interesting topic in regimes that are ostensibly democratic. England from 1660 to 1745 was not a democracy in the sense that we use the term today, but it was not an absolutist tyranny, either.

Paul J. Korshin
University of Pennsylvania