This chapter traces the history of Roman Catholicism in American politics and society, beginning with an overview of the tenets of the Catholic faith. The chapter then discusses historic tensions and division between Protestants and Catholics, tracing patterns of assimilation and eventual acceptance of Catholicism into American civil religion.

After the death of their beloved dog Whym Chow, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who write collectively as Michael Field, underwent a radical spiritual and poetic shift by converting to the Roman Catholic Church. Each partner viewed this shift differently. Bradley focused on the ways in which Whym Chow’s death represented a rupture in their domestic Trinity, while Cooper focused on the sacrificial aspects of euthanising the dog as an act of their own will. Converting to the Roman Catholic Church impacted both Bradley and Cooper’s relationship with one another and their poetic creativity and dominated the final years of their shared life.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s position as ‘Victorian decadents’ in the early twentieth century. It outlines Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s ambivalent response to fin-de-siècle decadence, as seen in their reactions to the likes of Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book. The chapter then proposes that Michael Field actually became more attached to decadence as the ‘yellow nineties’ waned, focusing on how Bradley and Cooper’s dedication to decadence is expressed most clearly in poems about Whym Chow, their beloved dog whose death in 1906 catalysed their conversion to Catholicism. The chapter finally discusses the decadent tropes found in Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914) and Michael Field’s Catholic poems.

This chapter proposes new readings of the poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love based on ideas of unconventional domesticity, alternative divinity, and queer, chosen families. The chapter explores the ways in which animal characteristics disrupt and subvert conventional poetic form and religious teachings in the volume, specifically elegy and Catholicism. It also focuses on connections between Michael Field’s writing and animal poetry found in the work of other fin-de-siècle and modernist writers. The chapter proposes that these poems can and should be celebrated for their eccentricity, oddity, and queerness rather than overlooked and marginalised within Michael Field’s oeuvre.

This chapter takes up Zola’s self-portrait as Saint Thomas in the wake of his much-commented visit to Lourdes in 1892. The novel he went on to write about the Pyrenean shrine, ‘that divine land of dreams’, was largely based on those supposedly miraculous events he had witnessed, and about which he remained sceptical. This chapter looks to Zola’s Lourdes (1894), in conjunction with the heated polemic it provoked, to better understand the stakes of the author’s divisive foray into matters of Catholic practice and dogma. More than an expression of Zola’s anti-clericalism, the novel aroused debates that were aesthetic as much as ideological, as adversaries argued over questions of representation, proofs, facts, documents, and faithfulness. The chapter reads a set of material penned by Catholic detractors, who were determined to defend the divine status of the miracle, casting Zola’s naturalism as an illegitimate, unbelievable – even, à la limite, idealist – aesthetic mode.

Joyce’s repudiation of Catholic Ireland and his countering declaration of artistic independence are well-known and integral features of his life-long dedication to writing. The most important of Joyce’s Irish predecessors was the poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849), whose tragic life was represented by Joyce as an emblem of the fate of the Irish artist, betrayed through identification of himself with his country. Joyce’s obsession with betrayal manifests itself in the lectures he delivered on Mangan, in Dublin in 1902 and in Trieste in 1907. Wherever he looked, in Irish political or literary history, he found betrayal. The great political crisis that dominated his early life – the fall of Parnell – governed this reading of his country’s past and helped him define the nature of the embattled relationship between him and his Irish audience. Parnell was, in Joyce’s view, a heroic spirit brought low by his own people, who listened to Parnell’s plea that they should not throw him to the English wolves.

The first instalment of Zola’s novel Vérité appeared on 10 September 1902, just nineteen days before the author died under suspicious circumstances that were likely related to his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. The novel provided an allegorical transposition of the contemporary political drama that had divided the nation, but which, as yet, had been denied its proper dénouement. This chapter explores how Zola imagined the right and just resolution of the legal case, as well as of the national crisis it galvanised. Working across Zola’s journalistic and fictional versions of the Affair, it argues that Zola understood the Dreyfus case as an aesthetic problem: as a matter of style, taste, plot, and plausibility. In order for the truth to win out, Zola must imagine the aesthetic and ethical re-education of a nation; and this happy ending involves harnessing an acceptable version of the idealist imagination.

Most religious traditions and movements have majorities of women, but most are led by men and are based on deeply embedded patriarchal assumptions. That underlying reality is played out in multiple different Christian traditions and shapes the subsequent contests for power, representation, and influence. This chapter is animated by a primary question from which other questions naturally flow: What are the characteristics of the religious networks constructed by women and to what extent do they function differently from those built largely by men? In attempting to answer that question, I identify five different kinds of networks representing different varieties of female leadership and participation. It is important to state that this typology should not be read as either an ascension or declension narrative about women’s agency and the role of patriarchy in shaping that agency.

This chapter provides a detailed comparative overview of domestic religion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, setting out evidence of a range of domestic devotional activities as performed by households of different faiths, and introducing the legislation which, to varying extents, restricted the open religious expression of these different communities. It considers how larger domestic gatherings involving participants other than members of the household would have been restricted by legislation such as the Conventicle Acts (1664–89), as well as self-regulation within the recently established Jewish communities. This legislation or congregational law drew a distinction between household and family prayer and ‘gathering for worship’ in domestic spaces. The chapter suggests that domestic gatherings for worship were permitted in certain circumstances, and that these circumstances generally coincided with life-cycle events.

Historians of Christianity, even when innovative in theory and method, have mostly written within national, denominational, or institutional frameworks. Yet many of the most important changes and developments within Christianity have been transnational in scope, trans-denominational in character, and not easily contained within institutional or hierarchical structures. What difference would it make to reimagine the history of Christianity in terms of transnational networks, nodal junction boxes of encounter and transmission, and a greater sense of the core memes and messages of religious traditions and expressions? That is the principal question to be explored in the following chapters.

O’Casey was born into a Protestant family and his father worked as a clerk for the Irish Church Missions, an evangelical society that aimed to convert Catholics. This chapter argues that O’Casey radically reimagined Christianity, depicting characters that inadvertently travesty or re-enact Christianity’s meanings. More broadly, however, he treats the love of the divine as parallel to the love of freedom and country; rather than a strict code, such love is a life-affirming source of inspiration akin to art and poetry. O’Casey’s sophisticated understanding of the value of Christianity has little to do with sectarian differences or superstition, but inheres in caring actions, love of life, and a determination to feed the spirit along with the body.

In the confessional conflict in Italy, neither the liberal anticlerical nation-builders nor the Vatican could gain the upper hand. In this stalemate situation, Italian liberals, after having experienced social liberal welfare ideas in the second half of the nineteenth century, fell back on laissez-faire ideas from the beginning of the nineteenth century. They wanted to see the state confined to a residual role in welfare. This stance created a perverted match with the subsidiarity ideas of Italian Catholicism. By agreeing with the liberals on keeping the state out of welfare, the Vatican saw a chance to hold on to its millennia-old poor relief empire.

This book has compared the evolution of ideas on how a welfare state should look, as well as the institutionalization of these ideas in Italy and Germany, across three centuries. It showed that even the same religion can take very different roads to develop its ideas according to the different institutional (who can vote and under what electoral system) and political (the heatedness of the state–church conflict, the constellation, and number of political actors) conditions despite rather similar starting conditions. The book argues that these factors influence whether it comes to a virtuous or vicious cycle of competition of welfare state ideas. In a virtuous cycle there is an update of social security ideas, while in a vicious cycle no new ideas are generated. The welfare regime a country adopts is largely dependent on the ideational configuration and the dynamics that come with the cycle. There are some functional requirements that are needed to make a welfare state evolve, such as a certain level of industrialization (a cycle on modern state-driven welfare would not emerge in the Stone Age, for example), but only insofar as it puts the problem on the political agenda.

This chapter reflects on Sean O’Casey’s work from a postcolonial critical perspective. The focus is firstly upon his early Abbey plays, especially The Plough and the Stars, which are shown to be significant for postcolonial criticism because of their content, the contexts of their initial Abbey productions, and the ways that key aspects of their critical history play outsized roles in framing understandings of the postcolonial critical endeavour. The chapter shows how O’Casey responded to the political complexities of Ireland’s revolutionary era of the 1910s and 1920s. The chapter then examines O’Casey’s later plays, showing how his responses to the revolutionary era evolved as he dealt directly with postcolonial Ireland and the fascism of the 1930s–1960s.

This chapter reconstructs the interplay between Catholic social ideas in the Italian political economy after WWII. Due to the political proximity of the Vatican and the fascist regime, Italian social Catholicism developed stronger corporatist positions than its German counterpart. The absence of a Protestant–liberal counterweight in Italian Christian Democracy facilitated a stronger embrace of corporatism for the reconstruction of the Italian economy after WWII. After the 1950s, the Italian welfare state and industrial relations, initially based on Catholic social ideas, were increasingly used as a clientelist exchange platform by the Christian Democrats. The fragmented welfare state played a major role in these exchanges. The Italian postwar welfare state therefore initially resulted from the implementation of Catholic social teaching ideas, but the very same institutions were later further expanded and fragmented as a clientelist vote-seeking reservoir. The first part of the chapter follows the ideational development of Catholic social teaching in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that the political relationship between the Vatican and the fascist regime influenced it profoundly. The second part shows how post-WWII Catholic social teaching evolved within the Christian Democratic party. The third part analyzes the extent to which Catholic doctrine found its way into social legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.

When the Abbey Theatre faced rioters in 1926 during the first performances of The Plough and the Stars, the theatre managers decided to continue with the scheduled seven-night run and then to revive the piece three months later. However, despite that boldness in the face of opposition, O’Casey subsequently found himself confronted with various kinds of official and unofficial censorship, both in Ireland and elsewhere. This chapter details that censorship and describes its effect on O’Casey’s work and reputation. The chapter examines O’Casey’s work in the theatre, and also examines censorship of O’Casey’s nontheatrical work, such as Windfalls, I Knock at the Door, and Pictures in the Hallway.

This opening chapter situates O’Casey in the Dublin of his time, describing the existence of O’Casey’s Protestant family in Dublin’s Northside. The chapter contrasts that lower-middle-class existence with the disease and insecurity of the slum areas of Dublin. We encounter the political and cultural sensibilities of the Irish capital’s Catholic working-class population, a population that profoundly affected O’Casey’s life and work. The chapter shows O’Casey to be a writer who moved between and across social and cultural groupings in Dublin, with this part of the volume highlighting the Irish capital’s differing religious and political affiliations in the early twentieth century.