The Priesthoods and Apostasies of Pierce Connelly


Book Description

A biography of Pierce Connelly (1804-1883), whose life illustrated various 19th-century themes of what the author calls Anglo-American religious warfare, most notably the role played by several apostate priests, but primarily Connelly, in Victorian spiritual warfare.







First Chaplain of the Confederacy


Book Description

Darius Hubert (1823‒1893), a French-born Jesuit, made his home in Louisiana in the 1840s and served churches and schools in Grand Coteau, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. In 1861, he pronounced a blessing at the Louisiana Secession Convention and became the first chaplain of any denomination appointed to Confederate service. Hubert served with the First Louisiana Infantry in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia for the entirety of the war, afterward returning to New Orleans, where he continued his ministry among veterans as a trusted pastor and comrade. One of just three full-time Catholic chaplains in Lee’s army, only Hubert returned permanently to the South after surrender. In postwar New Orleans, he was unanimously elected chaplain of the veterans of the eastern campaign and became well-known for his eloquent public prayers at memorial events, funerals of prominent figures such as Jefferson Davis, and dedications of Confederate monuments. In this first-ever biography of Hubert, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey offers a far-reaching account of his extraordinary life. Born in revolutionary France, Hubert entered the Society of Jesus as a young man and left his homeland with fellow Jesuits to join the New Orleans mission. In antebellum Louisiana, he interacted with slaves and free people of color, felt the effects of anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit propaganda, experienced disputes and dysfunction with the trustees of his Baton Rouge church, and survived a near-fatal encounter with Know-Nothing vigilantism. As a chaplain with the Army of Northern Virginia, Hubert witnessed harrowing battles and their equally traumatic aftermath in surgeons’ tents and hospitals. After the war, he was a spiritual director, friend, mentor, and intermediary in the fractious and politically divided Crescent City, where he both honored Confederate memory and promoted reconciliation and social harmony. Hubert’s complicated and tumultuous life is notable both for its connection to the most compelling events of the era and its illumination of the complex and unexpected ways religion intersected with politics, war, and war’s repercussions.




Catholics of Consequence


Book Description

For as far back as school registers can take us, the most prestigious education available to any Irish child was to be found outside Ireland. Catholics of Consequence traces, for the first time, the transnational education, careers, and lives of more than two thousand Irish boys and girls who attended Catholic schools in England, France, Belgium, and elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was a long tradition of Irish Anglicans, Protestants, and Catholics sending their children abroad for the majority of their formative years. However, as the cultural nationalism of the Irish revival took root at the end of the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics who sent their children to school in Britain were accused of a pro-Britishness that crystallized into still recognisable terms of insult such as West Briton, Castle Catholic, Squireen, and Seoinin. This concept has an enduring resonance in Ireland, but very few publications have ever interrogated it. Catholics of Consequence endeavours to analyse the education and subsequent lives of the Irish children that received this type of transnational education. It also tells the story of elite education in Ireland, where schools such as Clongowes Wood College and Castleknock College were rooted in the continental Catholic tradition, but also looked to public schools in England as exemplars. Taken together the book tells the story of an Irish Catholic elite at once integrated and segregated within what was then the most powerful state in the world.




Saints and Sinners in Queen Victoria's Courts


Book Description

This chronicle of ten controversial mid-Victorian trials features brother versus brother, aristocrats fighting commoners, an imposter to a family's fortune, and an ex-priest suing his ex-wife, a nun. Most of these trials--never before analyzed in depth--assailed a culture that frowned upon public displays of bad taste, revealing fault lines in what is traditionally seen as a moral and regimented society. The author examines religious scandals, embarrassments about shaky family trees, and even arguments about which architecture is most likely to convert people from one faith to another.




Nativism and Slavery


Book Description

Although the United States has always portrayed itself as a sanctuary for the world's victim's of poverty and oppression, anti-immigrant movements have enjoyed remarkable success throughout American history. None attained greater prominence than the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, a fraternal order referred to most commonly as the Know Nothing party. Vowing to reduce the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, the Know Nothings burst onto the American political scene in 1854, and by the end of the following year they had elected eight governors, more than one hundred congressmen, and thousands of other local officials including the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago. After their initial successes, the Know Nothings attempted to increase their appeal by converting their network of lodges into a conventional political organization, which they christened the "American Party." Recently, historians have pointed to the Know Nothings' success as evidence that ethnic and religious issues mattered more to nineteenth-century voters than better-known national issues such as slavery. In this important book, however, Anbinder argues that the Know Nothings' phenomenal success was inextricably linked to the firm stance their northern members took against the extension of slavery. Most Know Nothings, he asserts, saw slavery and Catholicism as interconnected evils that should be fought in tandem. Although the Know Nothings certainly were bigots, their party provided an early outlet for the anti-slavery sentiment that eventually led to the Civil War. Anbinder's study presents the first comprehensive history of America's most successful anti-immigrant movement, as well as a major reinterpretation of the political crisis that led to the Civil War.







Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel


Book Description

Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel argues that the Creedal doctrines of “the communion of saints” and the “holy Catholic Church” provided Victorian novelists—both Roman Catholic and Protestant—with a means of exploring religious forms of cosmopolitanism. Building on research exploring the divisions between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in Victorian literature and culture, Teresa Huffman Traver considers the extent to which anti-Catholicism, domesticity, and national identity were linked. Huffman Traver connects this research with cosmopolitan theory, and analyzes how the conception of Catholicity could be used to reach beyond national identity towards a transnational community. Investigating the idea of a “rooted” cosmopolitanism, grounded in the local and limited in scope, this Pivot book offers a new angle on how religion, domesticity, and national identity were constructed in nineteenth-century British culture.




Great Britain and the Holy See


Book Description

But Flint's extensive research in the Vatican archives finds that even the most skillful British campaign would have found it difficult to set up diplomatic relations that, for the most part, the Papal government did not want.".




Routledge Library Editions: 19th Century Religion


Book Description

Reissuing works originally published between 1973 and 1997, Routledge Library Editions: 19th Century Religion (18 volumes) offers a selection of scholarship covering historical developments in religious thinking. Topics include the origin of Catholicism in America, sexual liberation and religion in Europe, and the emergence of Atheism in Victorian England. This set also includes collections of sermons and essays from some of the most influential preachers of the nineteenth century.