Finish line

I see something looming ahead of me.  Could it be...yes, it's the end of the Victorian anti-Catholic sermons article.  And this is a remarkably good thing, because the article is, alas, somewhat tardy--albeit not fatally so.  (If you're one of my students, you did not hear me say that.)

As I've mentioned before, my original prospectus for this article collapsed under the weight of that very frustrating concept known as "the evidence."  (Drat you, evidence!) I intended to write about shifting articulations of anti-Catholic sentiment from about 1820-1900 or so; this, however, required the articulations in question to actually shift.  They didn't.  Instead, while there was more angst about some things than others at various points in time--for example, questions about territory and schism suddenly came to the forefront during the Papal Aggression--the rhetoric, the prooftexts, and the core theological arguments all remained stable.  Which, of course, should not have surprised me, given that even today there's still an exegetical cottage industry devoted to proving that the Church of Rome is, indeed, the Whore of Babylon.  Moreover, as I found when I was at the British Library last summer, anti-Catholic sermons really do drop off noticeably once you reach the last quarter of the century--although, interestingly enough, other kinds of anti-Catholic propaganda keep chugging right along.  (Many of the Victorian anti-Catholic novels in my personal collection, for example, date from the 1870s and later.)   As a result, the article mostly settles in the 1828-1852 range, which is when arguments were most heated and the sermons most numerous.