Marian
I'm cheerfully plugging away at the paper on the Victorians and the Marian persecutions--if, that is, it's possible to put "cheerfully" and "Marian persecutions" into the same sentence. Strictly speaking, though, it's a paper on the Marian persecutions in Victorian popular history, fiction, and didactic literature. Both Rosemary O'Day and John Vidmar have argued that Catholic historians, especially John Lingard, reshaped nineteenth-century debates over the Reformation; O'Day, for example, suggests that "[e]ven ardent Protestants were converted to the view that the English Reformation was a political act first and foremost, and that the sanctity of Protestant heroes such as Thomas Cranmer and Anne Boleyn was not beyond doubt" [1]. Well, Anne Boleyn's "sanctity" had been in doubt for some time, with or without Catholic historical contributions, but O'Day's first clause doesn't hold true at all in cheap evangelical fiction and tracts. Certainly, most evangelical novelists held no particular brief for Henry VIII, but all of them (from Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna to George Sargent) insisted that the Reformation was first and foremost a theological project--a restoration of primitive Christian truths lost under the accumulated weight of Catholic rituals.
A couple of things interest me here. First, the extent to which novelists inadvertently or deliberately (for aesthetic, political, or theological reasons) did not engage with mainstream historical scholarship, even when that scholarship was accessible. Second, the extent to which the minority Catholic voice only partly shifted the terms of the debate over Mary Tudor and the persecutions. In the first instance, just as it's not at all clear that many religious historical novelists had much (if any) firsthand acquaintance with Catholic theology, it's also not at all clear that those novelists had much (if any) firsthand acquaintance with Catholic history. Protestant novelists mostly cite Protestant ecclesiastical and political historians, although a number of them seem to have known (and disliked) John Lingard's History of England. Even those High Church or moderate Protestants who are more openly influenced by Lingard--Sir Aubrey de Vere, for example, or W. H. Ainsworth--don't engage with other Catholic voices to any appreciable extent. In other words, although I've complained about "one-thinker universes," I'm not as yet seeing any sign that popular novelists felt the need to seek out or address any major Catholic historical voice but Lingard's. There's virtually no mention, for example, of earlier well-known Catholic names like Charles Butler or Joseph Berington, let alone John Milner.
In the second instance, I agree with O'Day and Vidmar that Catholics did manage to alter the prevailing, post-Foxe historical discourse on Mary Tudor, even if the staunchest anti-Catholic writers failed to budge [2]. Granted, many "rehabilitated" Victorian Mary Tudors are borderline hysterics (Sir Aubrey de Vere's Mary Tudor) or stereotypical Unhappy Catholics (L. Pocklington's The Secret Room), but they're hardly unnuanced Bloody Mary types. But Catholic writers don't appear to have influenced representations of the persecutions themselves, even in texts featuring rehabbed Mary Tudors. Both O'Day and Vidmar note that Catholic writers tried not to write about the persecutions, which is one part of the problem. At this point in my research, though, it looks like those who did write about the persecutions failed to develop a coherent approach to them--one that would effectively counteract mainstream Protestant representations. A number of writers accepted Lingard's solution, which was to read the Marian persecutions in the context of sixteenth-century attacks on heresy more generally; there was, however, no agreement on how to understand the persecutions in moral terms. Lay everything at the Protestants' feet? Argue that Mary was, in fact, wrong? Refuse to comment?
[1] Rosemary O'Day, "Historians and Contemporary Politics, 1780-1850," in Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard's Death, ed. Peter Phillips (London: Catholic Record Society, 2004), 103. See also John Vidmar, English Catholic Historians And The English Reformation, 1585-1954 (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). Nicholas Tyacke suggests that Victorian Catholics actually pioneered what's now called the "revisionist" approach to Reformation history; see "Rethinking the 'English Reformation,'" in Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 38 ff.
[2] E.g.: "The throne was now filled by Mary, daughter of Henry VIII., and Catherine of Arragon. The history of her reign, her words and works, and all that she did, are they not written in the chronicles of England with characters of blood?" "Rome's Influence in England: Present and Past. Chapter V. Edward VI., Bloody Mary, Cranmer, Elizabeth," The Bulwark or Reformation Journal 8 (Oct. 1865): 101.