1. The single most significant book on American antebellum Catholicism remains Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860 , first published in 1938. Brownson's essay "The Laboring Classes" is reprinted in Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists , 436-46.

2. Horace Bushnell, " Barbarism the First Danger": A Discourse for Home Missions , 24. My investigation of what Catholicism meant to the antebellum Protestant imagination is indebted to Edward W. Said's Orientalism , an inquiry into the imaginative contours and political functions of Orientalism for the European mind, functions that exceed "mere political subject matter or field" to constitute a range of discursive gestures, "a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world" (12).

3. David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature," in David Brion Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967). A recent application of the "conspiratorial" and "paranoia" thesis to nineteenth-century American literature is Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance . For a fine piece arguing that conspiratorial thought was natural to the Enlightenment pursuit of understanding human motivation, see Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style.'' The great benefit of this essay is that it does not stigmatize conspiratorial thought but instead illuminates it as a logical outgrowth of the eighteenth-century celebration of ratio-

nality. For Bishop England's discussion of the nicknames for Catholicism, see The Works of the Right Reverend John England , 4:415-30.

4. Examples of such scholarship include Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture; Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation; Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts . For an intriguing critique of New England's bid for national primacy, see Anne Norton, Alternative Americas . All this scholarship builds on the work of Perry Miller's New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century and New England Mind: From Colony to Province ; and Sacvan Bercovitch's Puritan Origins of the American Self and American Jeremiad . For a brief treatment of these issues, see Russell Reising, The Unusable Past , especially chap. 2, "The Problem of Puritan Origins in Literary History and Theory."

5. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 , ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s; David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear ; Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857 . Stampp notes that "by 1857 the northern wing of the American party, though still exerting considerable power in several states, was rapidly losing its membership to the Republicans" (38).

6. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People , 540-54; Edwin Scott Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America .

7. For a comprehensive argument against the notion that there was any such thing as a single Protestant Way in nineteenth-century America, see Michael Zuckerman, "Holy Wars, Civil Wars," Prospects 16 (1991): 205-40. Antebellum Protestants, notwithstanding the proliferation of Protestant sects, frequently used the term "Protestant Way," however, precisely to distinguish from Rome what they felt was a core Protestantism. For a recent argument against there being any standard Christianity widely practiced by Americans, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith , an example of newly pluralized church denominational history. Philip Gleason argues in a corresponding vein that antebellum Catholicism had no single identity. Discussing German Catholic immigrant struggles with liberal German immigrants of the "Forty-Eighter type" (19), whose anticlericalism led them to endorse the anti-Catholicism of the Know-Nothing party, Gleason writes that in nineteenth-century Milwaukee "anticlericals mocked the Catholic religion by leading a cow to the walls of a convent and baptizing it amid the grossest of vulgarities" (20). Gleason provides a useful discussion of the internal dissensions among immigrant Catholics and particularly the conflicts between the liberal ''Americanizers" and conservative thinkers anxious to preserve ethnic and linguistic identity ( The Conservative Reformers , chap. 2).

8. The most comprehensive discussion of the Indian captivity genre remains Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; see also his Fatal Environment . For a recent discussion of Indian captivity, see Mitchell R. Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of

Mourning , especially chap. 4. James Axtell, The Invasion Within , remains the single best ethnohistorical treatment of English and French missionary efforts in North America. See also his After Columbus , especially chaps. 1, 2, 8.

9. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs . Studies of nineteenth-century Catholicism, principally sociological in focus, include Patrick W. Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates; Jay P. Dolan, Catholic Revivalism and The Immigrant Church; Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith; James Hennesey, American Catholics . A good brief treatment of the theological and philosophical divergences in Catholic and Protestant thought is James M. Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics; see also Robert McAfee Brown and Gustave Weigel, An American Dialogue .

10. "Sulla Morale Cattolica Osservazioni di Alessandro Manzoni," Christian Examiner 25 (1839): 274.

1. "Europe and America," American Quarterly Review 9 (June 1831): 419.

2. Cotton Mather, Selections , 3. Jonathan Edwards, from the History of the Work of Redemption (1739), as quoted in Alan Heimert & Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening , 25.

3. Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption , 22. Edward's implicit association of Roman Catholicism with indifference would prove crucial in the later antebellum struggle against "popery."

4. My understanding of nineteenth-century American religion has been informed by the following works: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860; Robert N. Bellah & Frederick E. Greenspahn, Uncivil Religion; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, especially chap. 6, "The Right to Think for Oneself"; R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, especially chap. 2; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith . My understanding of the Reformation is additionally indebted to A. G. Dickens and John M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought; and Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1799-1870 , vol. 1. Further afield, studies that have significantly shaped my approach to the study of religion are Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy , especially chaps. 1-9; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger and Natural Symbols; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures , especially part 3; Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy; Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic

Imperative in Culture and Criticism; Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain .

5. "De Maistre and Romanism," North American Review 79 (Oct. 1854): 373. See also Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition , for numerous examples of the Protestant consensus that pervaded nineteenth-century schoolbooks. Elson notes of these texts: "The mingling drops in the American ocean are assumed to be male, white, Protestant, and from Northern European shores" (263).

6. Referring to the romantic historians, David Levin, in History as Romantic Art , writes: "They all believed that the essential libertarian gene was Teutonic" (74). See also Tuveson's discussion of the Anglo-Saxon myth at the base of the concept of Manifest Destiny, in Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation , 125. Archbishop Martin J. Spalding of Baltimore gives the counterversion of the Teutonic myth by arguing that only the Roman church could save European society from the barbarians of the north. See his History of the Protestant Reformation ( 1866), 1:19. A superb recent treatment of racialism and millennial thought is Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny .

7. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 42-50. Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise , notes that "Luther's interpretation [his second commentary on the Revelation of John], partaking of the optimistic futurism of New World idealism, became extremely influential among Protestant reformers" (79). See also William A. Clebsch, Christianity in European History . As Clebsch notes, while Christianity put history into motion, the meaning of that history was declared constant: "To Augustine belongs the credit or blame, as one may choose, for the Christian theory that the present age was the last age, a time of waiting, the saeculum senescens . Time passed. Life went on for men and women, but the meaning of history sat still. Nothing would importantly change" (94). Nineteenth-century American Protestants, while subscribing to this understanding, newly insisted on the dynamism of Protestantism and projected onto Roman Catholicism many of the politically and psychologically unsavory aspects of the Christian stasis, or "time of waiting." For a discussion of Protestant millennialism and its impact on nineteenth-century American historiography, see Dorothy Ross, "Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America," American Historical Review 89, no. 1 (1984).

8. "Michelet's Life of Luther," North American Review 63 (Oct. 1846): 434. Cf. Tuveson: "The Discovery of America, and later the American Revolution were placed in a sequence of victories beginning with the Reformation" (24). Such Hegelian views were of course current in Europe as well. As Peckham argues, "One can interpret the function of nineteenth-century historicism as redeeming by restoration and purification whatever is subjected to historical explanation. The pattern that now emerges is "redemption by history" or, more properly, "redemp-

tion by historicizing" (Morse Peckham, Romanticism and Behavior , 33. For a careful discussion of the schisms in New England Protestantism's historicizing of its Puritan past, see Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture , chap. 9, "The Politics of Historiography." Buell argues that the disagreement between Arminian and orthodox approaches was formative; he describes the embattled religious scene of mid-century New England: "Intradenominational warfare had begun to subside, as orthodoxy started to liberalize, Unitarianism moved in a temporarily more conservative direction in recoil from the Transcendentalist menace, and Congregationalists of all stripes began to perceive that the rise of the Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics, not to mention the 'nothingarians,' had created a permanent state of denominational pluralism" (226). Buell's analysis, although it does not treat the issue of Catholicism, is useful for understanding the often bitter local conflicts behind Protestant historicizing. For Emerson's statement about the buffalo-hunter from his 1849 essay "Power," see The Complete Works , 6:348.

9. Studies of the impact of those divisions on nineteenth-century American literature include Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism ; Anne Norton, Alternative Americas; Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts; John P. McWilliams, Jr., Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character ; Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter ; Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy .

10. Spalding, The History of the Protestant Reformation , 1:66. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

11. The best single discussion on Protestant iconoclasm remains John Phillips, The Reformation of Images . For an intriguing religious argument about the historical formation of "idolatry," see Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances . See also, W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology , especially chap. 6, "The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm." Two recent treatments of iconoclasm in relation to American culture are Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism; and Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane . My thinking on the relation between New World "history" and the "flesh-bound" powers of Rome is additionally indebted to Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word and Interfaces of the Word . See also Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight , especially chap. 5. Miles discusses competing Protestant and Catholic understandings of the visual.

12. Foxe's Book of Martyrs , ed. G. A. Williamson, 87. Further citations of this work appear parenthetically in the text. In Foxe's description of the burning of Thomas Haukes in 1555, the theatrical narrativizing of the persecution is gruesomely apparent in the audience's sudden acquisition of a shared interpretation with the sufferer:

In the which [flames] when he continued long, and when his speech was taken away by violence of the flame, his skin also

drawen together, and his fingers consumed with the fire, so that now all men thought certainely he had bene gone, sodainely and contrary to all expectation, the blessed servant of GOD, beyng myndfull of his promise afore made, reached up his hands burning on a light tier (which was marvueilous to behold) over his head to y living God, and with great rejoyling, as seemed, strooke or clapped them three tymes together. At the sight whereof there followed such applause & outcry of the people, and especially of them which understode the matter, that the like hath not comonly bene heard. ( Acres and Monuments of Martyrs [1583 edition], 2:1592-93)

Foxe insists that he is a historian: "In speaking whereof I take not upon me the part of the moral or divine philosopher, to judge of things done, but only keep me within the compass of an historiographer" ( Foxe's Book of Martyrs , 457).

13. See Buell, New England Literary Culture , for the nineteenth-century quarrel over Mather's reputation (218-24). Mather's implicit appropriation of Foxe's role is in Mather, Selections, 5 .

14. For a description of one such Bible burning, see Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 158 .

15. Elson, Guardians of Tradition , 295. See also Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory , for a discussion of the pedagogical achievement of this American optimism.

16. Miles, Image as Insight , provides an especially thorough explanation for the intrusive power of counter-Reformation imagery. For an analysis of post-Civil War America's quest for authentic images that would bestow verisimilitude, if not authenticity, on American experience, see Miles Orvell, The Real Thing .

17. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture , broadly treats the Protestant culture's diminishing effectiveness as a wide-spread "feminization"—a declension in part due to the encroachment of female fiction on masculine clerical discourse. On the earlier Franklinian project of effacing the self into republican America's "print culture" and from thence into civic virtue, see Michael Warner, "Franklin and the Letters of the Republic." Although Warner depicts the Franklinian project as politically powerful, by the antebellum decades many Americans were uncomfortably aware of the depleted power of the written.

18. "History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Germany, Switzerland, etc.," Christian Examiner 32 (1842): 27.

19. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change . For an imaginative and historically dense discussion of the ideological impact of reading Scripture and, more particularly, novels on female "private judgment," see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word .

20. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography , 4-5.

21. Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple , 31.

22. Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 157-59. Billington does not discuss the impact of John Foxe but notes that "Cheever also attacked the [Champlain Bible] burning in his Hierarchical Despotism , 144, as a revival of the Spanish auto-da-fé in the United States" (165 n.101). For Roman Catholic perceptions about the beauties of the Protestant Bible, see Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence , 97.

23. See Levin, History as Romantic Art , for the association of artifice and immorality. David Noble makes much the same point in discussing America's vision of itself: "Romanticism and democracy must replace rationalism and republicanism before the artificial complexities of historical culture were transcended and progress reached in its culmination in mankind's organic harmony with nature" ( Historians against History , 15).

24. Speaking of the colonial preacher Thomas Shepard, Bercovitch notes: "Shepard's equation of new life with New World, and of baptism with the Atlantic as a greater Red Sea, became a staple of early colonial autobiography. It has its counterpart in the sermons on grace, with their recurrent application of nautical language to the process of conversion. To be sure, the application is traditional. Yet as several critics have observed, its frequency, specificity, and poignancy in colonial writing is [ sic ] extraordinary" ( The Puritan Origins of the American Self , 118).

25. "Neander's Church History," North American Review 80 (Jan. 1855): 205.

26. "The Errors and Superstitions of the Church of Rome," Christian Examiner 55 (1853): 51.

27. W. C. Brownlee, "The Importance of American Freedom to Christianity," The Christian Review 1, no. 2 (1836): 201. As editor of the American Protestant Vindicator , Brownlee, a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, was one of our most prominent nativists.

28. See Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence , for an account of the Unitarian Leicaster Sawyer's rewriting of the Bible (97-106). On Horace Bushnell, the era's most important theorist of a "romantic" and "symbolic" Christianity, see Conrad Cherry, ed., Horace Bushnell: Sermons; H. Shelton Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin , chap. 7; James O. Duke, Horace Bushnell . For an analysis of Bushnell's position concerning Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and writers of the American Renaissance, see Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom of Words , chap. 2.

29. "Sacrifice," Christian Examiner 65 (1858): 318. My reference to the effect of disestablishment on Virginia church architecture is indebted to Upton, Holy Things and Profane , 96.

30. See Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity , on the spirit newly available to the American masses. I am not aware of any

study that satisfactorily theorizes the relation between such religious democratization and the practices of often brutal exclusion involved in the formation of American selfhood, as discussed by Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America , and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages .

31. "Balmes on Civilization," Christian Examiner 52 (1852): 184.

32. "A Roman Beatification," Christian Examiner 58 (1855): 107, 117.

33. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Stephen E. Whicher, 312.

34. "Orestes A. Brownson's Argument for the Roman Catholic Church," Christian Examiner 47 (1849): 247.

35. "De Maistre and Romanism," North American Review 79 (Oct. 1854): 375.

36. Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States , 52, 136. Morse's fellow nativist William Nevins sounded an uncharacteristically hesistant note on this issue. Speaking of the Roman Catholic church, he wrote: "I think I see her going down already, although I know many suppose she is rising in the world" ( Thoughts on Popery , 85).

37. "Reaction in Favor of the Roman Catholics," Christian Examiner 23 (1838): 26.

38. Nicholas Murray [Kirwin, pseud.], " The Decline of Popery and Its Causes ," 20. Cf. Murray's more hostile image that popery is "like a vessel bound by a heavy anchor and a short iron cable to the bottom of the stream, while the tide of knowledge and freedom are rising around it" (32).

1. "Bartol's Pictures of Europe," North American Review 82 (Jan. 1856) [A review essay on C. A. Bartol's Pictures of Europe ]: 33.

2. "Burgos and Its Cathedral," Illustrated Magazine of Art 1 (1853): 269. See also William L. Vance, America's Rome , a magisterial presentation of American perceptions of classical, Catholic, and contemporary Rome. Joy S. Kasson, Artistic Voyagers , more broadly investigates the impact of Europe on writers and painters of the American Renaissance.

3. The Journals of Francis Parkman , ed. Mason Wade, 1:141. My use of the term interiority to describe the young Parkman's experience of the cave and hidden shrine is one that will recur throughout the book and is meant to suggest how antebellum Protestants experienced the peculiar quality of the Catholic aesthetic—composed not only of sublime or claustrophobic architectural enclosures (literal "interiors," into which Protestants actually or imaginatively traveled) but also of an emotional state of being caged or sheltered in an imagined Catholic container. As

I hope my argument will make clear, antebellum Protestants were very much concerned with rendering such "interiority" available to the public gaze.

4. This was primarily a New England, not a southern phenomenon. The most intriguing recent work on the different sensibility of southerners in antebellum America remains Anne Norton, Alternative Americas . On the complex dynamics involved in the New England authorial search for a past, see Eric J. Sundquist, Home as Found ; John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics ; Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation .

5. For a discussion of this filial dynamic at work in the eighteenth-century American revolutionary consciousness, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims . For a discussion of white perceptions of savagery, see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization .

6. C. A. Bartol, Pictures of Europe Framed in Ideas (Boston: Crosby, Nichols and Co., 1855), 204 (as quoted in "Bartol's Pictures of Europe," North American Review 82 [Jan. 1856], 61).

7. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing , 250.

8. George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy , 1:203.

9. The Journals of Francis Parkman , 1:132.

10. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order , 20. Ambivalence toward this Catholic feudal past found a powerful expression in the following passage from the Christian Examiner :

The visitor, musing over the remains of a feudal castle, trampling under his feet towers and battlements levelled to the ground, and arches, and monuments, and fragments of armor, cannot repress a pang of regret, as his fancy runs back to the days of greatness, of valor, and of courtesy that are no more; and in his chivalrous enthusiasm he forgets that from that rocky nest the bloody falcon rushed forth, the pirate of the air, the terror of the valley, and that while he wheeled his indefatigable course through the firmament, at every uttering of his ominous shriek, at every shaking of his mighty pinions, a harmless flock was quaking with anguish and terror within the inmost recesses of their foliage.

("Sulla Morale Cattolica Osservazioni di Alessandro Manzoni," Christian Examiner 25 [1839]: 304). For a discussion of neomedievalism in postbellum America, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace . In antebellum America the influential architect Andrew Jackson Downing appropriated Gothic design for the American Protestant home; his style, Carpenter's Gothic, was immensely successful. Catharine Beecher even selected the Gothic style as the ideal one for the Christian home in her influential domestic treatise, The American Woman's Home , 23-42. In antebellum America, the interest in medieval church design was less

nostalgic than anxious, an anti-Catholic quest for a pure, invincible union of spirit and flesh that avoided the perils of literal or figurative miscegenation or, in the theological sense, the perils of transubstantiation. For a Catholic reading of neomedievalism, see Philip Gleason, "American Catholics and the Mythic Middle Ages" in Keeping the Faith .

11. Quoted in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville as Lecturer , 130. As Sealts explains, Melville's lectures are "composite texts," paraphrased and summarized by professional reporters (viii).

12. Martin J. Spalding, The History of the Protestant Reformation , 1:214.

13. See Jonathan Culler, "Semiotics of Tourism," 129-30. Culler discusses the historical distinction between "traveller" and "tourist" as the "terms of an opposition integral to tourism" (130). Antebellum accounts reveal significant confusion on the part of tourists; if they are semioticians in Culler's sense ("The sightseer confronts the symbolic complex head on and explores the relation of sight to its markers'' [134]), they are dazed ones. See also Dean MacCannell, The Tourist .

14. "Michelet's Life of Luther," North American Review 63 (Oct. 1846): 445; "Remarks on Mystery," Christian Examiner 17 (1835): 216. Or as the nativist William Nevins put it: "The advantage is, that we have daily and hourly the opportunity to consult the Author of the Bible on the meaning of it" (William Nevins, Thoughts on Popery [1836], 9).

15. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun , 101. I am indebted to Professor Jay Fliegelman of Stanford University for this allusion to antebellum epistolary cross-writing.

16. Harvey Wish, The American Historian , 4. For the millennialist impulse fueling such divisions, see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic .

17. Nicholas Murray, " The Decline of Popery and Its Causes, " 23. Murray, writing under the pseudonym Kirwan, became so popular for his anti-Catholic polemics that converts to Catholicism became known as Kirwanites. See Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 261 n.82.

18. "The Romish Hierarchy," North American Review 82 (Jan. 1856): 111.

19. "The doctrine of the New Testament is onward, and forever onward" ("The Churches and the Church," Christian Examiner 41 [1846]: 196).

20. "The Holy Week at Rome," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 9 (1854): 322. The article was probably written by James Jackson Jarves since the same phrase appears in his Italian Sights and Papal Principles As Seen through American Spectacles , 297.

21. Mme de Staël, Corinne; or, Italy , 81.

22. Walt Whitman, "Preface to the 1855 Edition of 'Leaves of

Grass,'" in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose , 411; the quotation also appears in Frederick Somkin, Unquiet Eagle , 58.

23. Washington Irving, "Westminster Abbey," in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon , 140. As if implicitly addressing the contrast between English abbey and Roman catacomb, Irving writes of the former: "It is the place, not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and meditation" (138).

24. "The Holy Week at Rome," Harper's New Monthly Magazine , 324.

25. The Journals of Francis Parkman , 1:142.

26. On the Gothic in American literature and culture, see J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing ; Donald A. Ringe, American Gothic ; and, more generally, the collection of essays in Juliann E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic . On the Gothic as daughterly confinement within the remembered maternal body, see Claire Kahane, "The Gothic Mirror," in Shirley Nelson Garner et al., eds., The Mother Tongue , 334-51. My use of the term Gothic in describing antebellum tourist responses to Rome is indebted to the feminist and psychoanalytic arguments of the essays collected in Garner et al.'s volume.

27. John O'Sullivan, "The Democratic Principle," Democratic Review 17 (1845); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny , discusses O'Sullivan's essay, 219-20. For Melville's observation on the earth as monastery, see "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 , 172.

28. Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims , 120.

29. John Calvin, as quoted in Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven , 148. For "nurseries of piety," see "Burial of the Dead," Christian Examiner 31 (1842): 151.

30. For a wide-ranging discussion of Protestant piety and its domestic setting, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher . For an account of Catholic piety in the home, see Ann Tares, The Household of Faith . For the nineteenth-century denial of death's physicality, its sentimental repudiation of the suffering body, and consequent changes in graveyard art and visiting habits, see David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death , 167-96.

31. George W. Greene, "Visits to the Dead in the Catacombs of Rome," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 10 (1855): 579.

32. "A Reminiscence of Rome," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 15 (1857): 742. Further references appear parenthetically in the text. This hysteria was not just a literary event. Anatomical remains left about the grounds by students of a St. Louis medical school nearly touched off a riot among fearful Protestants. See Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 237 n.52.

33. Chandler, A Dream of Order , discusses the early eighteenth-century custom of constructing artificial Gothic ruins: "The false past,

almost as well as the true past, could teach a sense of the sublime" (185).

34. "The Catacombs of Rome," Atlantic Monthly 1 (1858): 815.

35. "The Catacombs of Rome," 815. A related form of ancestral bonding appeared in the antebellum spiritualist movement, which, in fashioning a world of concerned spirits to whom one could appeal, offered a Protestant version of intercession to spiritually beleaguered Americans. See Russell B. Nye, Society and Culture in America, 1830-1860 , 283-320, for an account of the movement. See also Richard Silver, "The Spiritual Kingdom in America: The Influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg on American Society and Culture, 1815-1860." See also Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow, eds., The Haunted Dusk , especially Carolyn L. Karcher, "Philanthropy and the Occult in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Brownson, and Melville," 67-97 .

36. "The Catacombs and the Church of Rome," Christian Examiner 43 (1847): 284.

37. Willis, Pencillings by the Way , 1835 (New York: Scribner, 1852), p. 398, as quoted in Vance, America's Rome , 1:75. In glimpsing the skeletal remains of martyrs, these affluent and increasingly liberal Protestants felt closer to Christ; to visit the catacombs offered empirical support for their wavering faith in Revelation.

38. "Kate O'Connor. A Story of Mixed Marriages," Metropolitan 2 (1854): 537.

39. "The Catacombs of Rome," 520. Further references to this article appear parenthetically in the text. Many writers also tried to prove that Catholic saints had really been Protestants. See for example, W. C. Brownlee, The Religion of the Ancient Irish and Britons not Roman Catholic, and the Immortal Saint Patrick Vindicated from the False Charge of being a Papist , 2d ed. (New York, 1841). I am indebted to Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade (371 n.36), for this reference.

40. Nevins, Thoughts on Popery , 33.

1. Edward Everett, The Discovery and Colonization of America and Immigration to the United States , 8.

2. Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century , vii.

3. Hayden White, Metahistory , describes the fictionality that attends such historical truthfulness. "Historical 'stories' tend to fall into the categories elaborated by Frye precisely because the historian is inclined to resist construction of the complex peripeteias which are the novelist's and dramatist's stock in trade. Precisely because the historian is not (or claims not to be) telling the story 'for its own sake,' he is inclined

to emplot his stories in the most conventional forms—as fairy tale or detective story on the one hand, as Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire on the other" (8). For a recent treatment of the vexed issue of impartiality in nineteenth-century historiography, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream , 1-108.

4. William Hickling Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico . Further references to this work appear parenthetically in the text. The best single account of America's romantic historians remains David Levin, History as Romantic Art .

5. Adolph de Circourt to William Hickling Prescott (hereafter WHP), June 7, 1847, in The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847 , ed. Roger Wolcott, 645.

6. For WHP's letter home about the naval purchase of his history, see Correspondence , 590. Prescott's biographer, C. Harvey Gardiner, claims that Mexico was "included in the library of every American fighting ship" after sailors on the USS Delaware petitioned for a copy. See Gardiner, William Hickling Prescott , 249.

7. WHP to Gen. Cushing, as quoted in George Winston Smith and Charles Judah, Chronicles of the Gringos , 407.

8. As quoted in Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny , 238. An account of American animus against such "idol worship" is contained in Samuel E. Chamberlain's memoirs of the Mexican War; describing a grisly massacre of Mexican civilians in a cave, Chamberlain writes: "A fire was burning on the rocky floor, and threw a faint flickering light on the horrors around. . . . A rough crucifix was fastened to a rock, and some irreverent wretch had crowned the image with a bloody scalp" ( My Confession , 88). Chamberlain's manuscript, written between 1855 and 1861, was not published until 1956 in a condensed version for Life magazine.

9. Prescott, "Bancroft's United States" (1841), in Biographical and Critical Essays , as quoted in Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic , 51.

10. WHP to his sister, May 30, 1847, Correspondence , 643.

11. "The Mexican War," Massachusetts Quarterly Review 1 (1847): 51. Having inherited significant holdings in banking, insurance, and railroad stocks, Prescott was less than sympathetic to the agricultural expansionism of slaveholding interests. "The Texas project is very distasteful to most of the North," he wrote to the Mexican statesman Lucas Alamán in 1845, "and the party to which I belong view it with unqualified detestation" ( Correspondence , 533-34). Hearing of congressional sanction for the annexation of Texas, Prescott described it "as the most serious shock yet given to the stability of our glorious institutions.'' See "Bancroft's United States," in Biographical and Critical Essays , 164.

12. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott , 2:32.

13. For a discussion of opposition to the Mexican War, see John H. Schroeder, Mr. Polk's War .

14. "Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico," Christian Examiner 35-36 (1844): 210. The review was written by George Ticknor Curtis. Levin, History as Romantic Art , treats the various anti-Catholic traits in Prescott's work to demonstrate the opposition of the romantic historians to reactionary European power.

15. "Spanish Devotional Poetry," North American Review 34 (Apr. 1832): 292.

16. Prescott, "Bancroft's United States," 180. For "another, yet the same," see the review of William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, North American Review 58 (Jan. 1844): 169.

17. Prescott, "Bancroft's United States," in Biographical and Critical Essays , 181.

18. As quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny , 239.

19. WHP to Fanny Calderón de la Barca, Feb. 28, 1844, in Correspondence , 447; Prescott also eagerly anticipated that shortly after its publication Mexico could be abridged for school use.

20. Prescott, Literary Memoranda , 2:86.

21. WHP to Edward Everett, Sept. 28, 1840, Correspondence , 162.

22. Writing in 1844 of the tariff debates and the territorial disputes over Texas and Oregon, Prescott claimed to "take refuge from these political squabbles among the Andes, where I am trying to dig out a few grains of Peruvian gold" (WHP to Lord Morpeth, Nov. 30, 1844, Correspondence , 520).

23. Prescott, Representative Selections , ed. William Charvat and Michael Kraus, cxiii. Such an affection for adolescent virility configures Prescott's account of the sixteenth-century conquest, in which the forward motion of conquistadorial energy confronts Mexico, whose femininity is either modestly concealed or frankly displayed. Both forms of the feminine invite possession. "At their feet," Prescott writes of Cortés's army, "lay the city of Tezcuco, which, modestly retiring behind her deep groves of cypress, formed a contrast to her more ambitious rival on the other side of the lake, who seemed to glory in the unveiled splendors of her charms, as Mistress of the Valley" ( Mexico , 402). That antinomy between labor and recreation is a gendered one as well, for Aztec culture and landscape claim the seductions and perils of the feminine, against which "the genius and enterprise of man have proved more potent than her spells'' (10). Later, comparing Montezuma's pomp and bigotry to those of Louis XIV, Prescott provides a portrait of the Aztec monarch less as vitiated Mexican than as helpless woman. "He might be said to forego his nature; and, as his subjects asserted, to change his sex and become a woman" (438).

American soldier accounts of the 1846 campaign testify to the continuing feminization of Mexico. If some Mexican women "were public in their open admiration of the . . . fair skin [and] blue eyes" of the American invaders, as one soldier memoirist claimed, such preferences for American men only confirmed the dubious virility of the Mexican male. Chamberlain's account of the torture deaths of twenty-three "Yankedos" (Mexican women who consorted with American troops) confirms the feminine degeneracy of the Mexican priest and layman. The Yankedos were "violated, ears cut off, branded with the letters 'U.S.' and in some cases impaled by the cowardly 'greasers,' who thus wreaked their vengence on defenceless women" ( My Confession , 237).

Even critics of the war appealed to Mexico's sexual inferiority as a defense against the masculine expansionism of the United States. "Why, if the United States were to conquer all Mexico, viewed as a military exploit the glory of the deed would be nothing. As well might the Horseguards at London claim glory because they had chased a crowd of women from Billingsgate, and driven them up Ludgate Hill" ("The Mexican War," Massachusetts Quarterly Review 1 [1847]: 51). Prescott's Mexico —with its crucial introduction of native American cultures—afforded its author the opportunity to exteriorize the contradictions he had earlier isolated in the figure of Spain's Queen Isabella. While conflicts between an emancipatory nationalism and a persecutorial Catholicism are uneasy constituents of his portrait of Isabella, Prescott naturalized them in that text by appealing to a transcultural mythology of contradictory womanhood.

24. Review of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico ," North American Review 58 (Jan. 1844): 209.

25. Theodore Parker, "The Character of Mr. Prescott as an Historian," Massachusetts Quarterly Review 2 (1849): 247-48.

26. "Prescott as an Historian," North American Review 83 (July 1856): 96. Parkman's work was similarly praised: "The air of verity is over his pages," declared the Christian Examiner 51, in "Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac" (1851): 381. The view that Parkman is a realist has long prevailed, with critics mistaking his irony for impartiality. Thus Parkman's biographer distinguishes him from Gibbon by claiming that the American historian was ''under no compulsion to discredit the reality of the forces that had attracted him to its opposite" and that he therefore "achieved a unique kind of historical impartiality." See Howard Doughty, Francis Parkman , 85-86.

27. Review of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, North American Review 58 (Jan. 1844): 181-82.

28. As quoted in Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture , 203.

29. Review of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico , 179.

30. As quoted in Gardiner, William Hickling Prescott , 209. Prescott's works were especially indebted to the novels of Walter Scott, expert resurrectionist of a feudal past whose submission to a centralizing Protestant modernity is both inevitable and tragic." Waverley, " said Prescott, was "Shakespeare in prose" ("Sir Walter Scott," North American Review [Apr. 1838], in Essays from the North American Review , ed. Allen Thorndike Rice, 24).

31. Ruminating on the Gospel in his journal, for example, Prescott voiced his skepticism about the Bible: "It is in vain to look for moral certainty in an affair of historic testimony" ( Literary Memoranda , 1: 209).

32. Buell, New England Literary Culture , briefly suggests that the romantic historians saw the "purely narrative . . . as a guarantee of objectivity" (209). See also Lionel Gossman, "History as Decipherment," for an intriguing argument that "the historical imagination of the nineteenth century was drawn to what was remote, hidden, or inaccessible: to beginnings and ends, to the archive . . . [to] the so-called mute peoples . . . whose language and history remained an enigma" (25). I am indebted to Gossman's larger claim that nineteenth-century romantic historiography is typified by ''tension between veneration of the Other" and the desire to "domesticate and appropriate it" (40).

33. Referring to the "moral standard" (6) of his day, Prescott reasons in the introductory pages of his history that such progress enables his impartiality. "I have endeavored not only to present a picture true in itself, but to place it in its proper light, and to put the spectator in a proper point of view. . .. to surround him with the spirit of the times" (6). Although concluding that the historian must judge historical actions by eternal standards but actors by the standards of their time, Prescott did not extend such tolerance to all his historical actors. As much as Cortés benefits from his author's relativism, Montezuma suffers, for his time was not properly a historical era but rather a timeless "twilight" outside the providential continuum, a dusk that images the stasis of the "barbarian" condition. Much as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia positions blacks in a static category of fixed inferiority while according Indians a measure of participation in the white culture's progressive destiny, Prescott's Mexico immobilizes the Aztec while granting partial developmental potential to the Spaniard. What Archbishop Hughes did not acknowledge was that this toleration of the white Catholic was necessary to justify the conquest of the Indian Catholic.

34. Prescott, Literary Memoranda , 2:145.

35. Literary Memoranda , 2:32.

36. WHP to Lucas Alamán, March 30, 1846, in Correspondence , 583; also see Pascual de Gayangos to WHP, Correspondence , 107,

specifically his praise for WHP's "freedom from all political as well as religious bias."

37. Review of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, North American Review 58 (Jan. 1844): 177.

38. As quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny , 215-16, 246.

39. Horace Bushnell, " Barbarism the First Danger ": A Discourse for Home Missions , 5, 12.

40. "The character of the native population . . . [is] also fruitful in the elements of the poetical and the picturesque, and enable[s] the writer to throw the charm of fiction over his pages, while adhering scrupulously to the unvarnished truth." Review of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico , 161.

41. Ibid., 179.

42. Prescott, Literary Memoranda , 2:69. Prescott concludes his "Bancroft's United States" as follows: "Truth, indeed, is single, but opinions are infinitely various, and it is only by comparing these opinions together that we can hope to ascertain what is truth" ( Biographical and Critical Essays , 182).

43. Prescott, Representative Selections , lxvii. In a style that "has no marked character at all" (Review of Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico, North American Review 58 [Jan. 1844]: 208). Prescott's layered and contradictory meditations on Spanish and Aztec character and a universalized human nature also register nineteenth-century culture's growing preference for racial over environmental explanations of character. The earlier environmental paradigm, which stressed the improvability of national character with the shift from a degenerate European context to a regenerate American one, optimistically located a potential for change at the very heart of the individual. Prescott's ethnocentric revision of this earlier environmental paradigm denies any possibility of improvement to the Aztec while allowing the Aztec all the capacities for degeneration. "These pure and elevated maxims, it is true, are mixed up with others of a puerile, and even brutal character, arguing that confusion of the moral perceptions, which is natural in the twilight of civilization" (41). For a discussion of the antebellum subordination of environmental to racial conceptions of character, see Knobel, Paddy and the Republic .

44. As quoted by Charvat in Prescott, Representative Selections , xx.

45. Prescott, Literary Memoranda , 2:163. Habitually describing his authorship in the terms of the conquest his history records, Prescott complained in his journal of the obligations of book reviewing that interrupted him in the later stages of composing Mexico : "Nothing but a friend could have dragged me so soon—if ever—into harness again,— and just as I am storming the Aztec capital! Within a few days only of its fall" ( Literary Memoranda , 2:97). Such an unimpeded transit from

historiography to politics had already been enacted at the text's origins as well—origins characterized by a proprietary struggle between Prescott and the senior historian Washington Irving. Irving's History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) had established him as antebellum America's chief interpreter of Spanish culture. Having chosen Spanish history as his particular subject in 1826, Prescott found himself in an uncomfortable (because largely doomed) rivalry with the popular Irving, whose history of Columbus had already deprived Prescott of some of his most "dramatic" material (Charvat, in Prescott, Representative Selections , xxvii). Prescott consoled himself with the greater literary power of Cortés's exploit: "The Conquest of Mexico though very inferior in the leading idea, which forms its basis, to the story of Columbus, is on the whole, a far better subject; since the event is sufficiently grand, and as the catastrophe is deferred—the interest is kept up—through the whole" Literary Memoranda , 2:68). But when Prescott turned to the writing of Mexico , he once again encountered Irving, who again ceded the terrain to the younger historian. The preface to Mexico graciously acknowledges Irving's retreat from their contested historical territory. ''By a singular chance," writes Prescott, "I have found myself unconsciously taking up ground which he was preparing to occupy. It was not till I had become master of my rich collection of materials, that I was acquainted with this circumstance; and, had he persevered in his design, I should unhesitatingly have abandoned my own, if not from courtesy, at least from policy" (6-7). Irving later wrote: "I doubt whether Mr. Prescott was aware [that I] gave him up my bread" (as quoted by Charvat, xxxiv).

46. Prescott, Literary Memoranda , 2:69.

47. Literary Memoranda , 1:52. The phrase "effeminate native of Hispaniola" is taken from Mexico ; in context it reads: "The ferocious Goth, quaffing mead from the skulls of his slaughtered enemies, must have a very different mythology from that of the effeminate native of Hispaniola, loitering away his hours in idle pastimes, under the shadow of his bananas" (36).

48. Literary Memoranda , 2:145. The remark refers to The Conquest of Peru .

49. WHP to Professor Nippoli, March 5, 1869 (Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society), as quoted in Levin, History as Romantic Art , 125.

50. Prescott, "Madame Calderón's Life in Mexico ," in Biographical and Critical Essays , 184. For a brief discussion of Madame Calderón's life, see The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847 , xv-xvi.

51. Prescott, "Madame Calderón's Life in Mexico, " 184.

52. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, The Catholic History of North America . Striving to legitimate Catholicism, McGee writes: "In the character of the first archbishop and the first president we find many points of personal resemblance, which we cannot think either trivial or fanciful" (92). But McGee's courting of mainstream culture disguises a more genuine hostility, which surfaces in later descriptions of his enterprise: "The work of historical retribution has only begun; but with the blessing of God it will be followed up, until we show our boastful Anglo-Saxon theorists that the race they thought politically dead in Europe had a resurrection in America, and that from America it can still send its strong voice across the waves, to tell our motherland to be of good cheer, for the day of her deliverance also will assuredly come round" (121). Further references to McGee are given parenthetically in the text.

53. The American Protestant Vindicator , December 25, 1834, as quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 120.

54. "Sulla Morale Cattolica Osservazione di Alessandro Manzoni," Christian Examiner 25 (1839): 273.

55. Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century , 99. Further references to this volume are given parenthetically in the text. For his part, the nativist W. C. Brownlee explained the ubiquity of the Jesuit in terms subscribed to by Parkman's history of the Jesuits: "The truth is, human nature is at best a popish sort of thing,—prone to erect itself into a supreme arbiter, eager to gain the ascendancy, ready to 'deal damnation' upon every foe or rival; and studious of preeminence even in that religion which teaches humility and self-denial" (W. C. Brownlee, "The Importance of American Freedom to Christianity," Christian Review 1, no. 2 [1836]: 214).

56. Doughty, Francis Parkman , discusses Parkman's "instinct for the baroque" (257).

57. Quoted in Doughty, 252-53.

58. "Balmes on Civilization," Christian Examiner 52 (1852): 180.

59. In History as Romantic Art , David Levin discusses how the romantic historians (Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman) all "worked out the affinity of Catholic and infidel" along the lines of sensuality and superstition. According to Levin, their most significant similarity was that both groups were reactionary, a cardinal flaw to the progressive historians. For Bancroft (whose work Parkman studied carefully), the Indian was savage, not "natural," and, like the Catholic church, "inflexibly attached to the past" (129). Levin's summary of perceived Indian traits suggests even closer parallels to antebellum stereotypes of Catholics: "He is baffled by abstractions, dominated by his senses, limited to materialism, difficult to improve, addicted to treachery,

loose in morals, irresolute in formal combat" (133). One of Parkman's biographers suggests the context for this symbolic identification of Catholic and Indian in observing of Parkman's youthful Italian and American expeditions: "Parkman's Roman days with their climax in his stay at a Passionist convent were in a lesser way comparable to his Magalloway expeditions or, later, his sojourn among the Oglala Sioux" (Doughty, Francis Parkman , 78). I disagree with Doughty's estimation that Parkman's Roman experience "was less direct in its bearings on what he was to do, and was not of a particularly dramatic cast" (78). A later biographer claims uncritically that Parkman was "right, in the main, to make the impracticality of the Jesuits and their co-workers the butt of irony and invective" (Robert L. Gale, Francis Parkman , 129).

60. Francis Parkman, "European Journal," Dec. 24, 1843, in The Journals of Francis Parkman , ed. Mason Wade, 1:125. The passage is also quoted by Doughty, 69.

61. Parkman, journal entry, Feb. 27, 1844, Journals , 1:180. For a further example of Parkman's integration of his early tourist experiences in Italy into his historical account of Jesuit missionizing, see the footnote where Parkman reminisces about his stay in a Passionist monastery while touring Italy ( Jesuits , 197 n.2). It is worth noting that Parkman entertained himself during his monastery visit by reading Cooper's Pioneers .

62. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam , 170. For a recent and largely unsympathetic examination of Parkman's strenuous masculinity, see David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance , chap. 7. For an insightful argument that Parkman's illness was born of the cultural imperative to be manly, so that the historian "conceived of his own body and so worked it into the context of his definition of ideal manhood as to make it an inescapable prison," see Kim Townsend, "Francis Parkman and the Male Tradition," 100.

63. Francis Parkman to Mary Dwight Parkman, as quoted in Doughty, 394.

64. Parkman, journal entry, 1843-44, Journals , 1:130.

65. As quoted in Wilbur R. Jacobs, "Francis Parkman's Oration 'Romance in America,'" American Historical Review 68, no. 3 (1963): 695, 697.

66. "The Founder of the Jesuits," North American Review 59 (Oct. 1844): 420. Catholic apologists simply reversed the insult. See Martin J. Spalding's character sketch of Luther that detailed his decline into sensuality: "His own deterioration, and the work of the Reformation were both gradual; and they went hand in hand" ( The History of the Protestant Reformation , 1:78). For a more recent example, see Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929).

67. Quoted in Sister Marie Leonore Fell, The Foundations of Nativism in American Textbooks , 31.

68. For Parkman's bias against the Indians and its detrimental effect on his histories, see W. J. Eccles, "The History of New France According to Francis Parkman," William and Mary Quarterly 18 (1961): 163-75; and the more persuasive article by F. P. Jennings, "A Vanishing Indian: Francis Parkman versus His Sources," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 87 (1963): 306-23. In a more favorable vein, Parkman's bias has been analyzed as integral to the creation of his powerful narrative voice. See Richard C. Vitzhum, "The Historian as Editor," Journal of American History 53 (1966): 471-83.

69. "Woman in Her Psychological Relations," Journal of Psychological Medicine 4 (1851): 32.

70. W. Newnham, Essay on Superstition , 229.

71. Francis Parkman, "A Convent at Rome," Harper's 81 (1890): 448-54.

72. D. C. Stange, "Abolition as Treason," Harvard Library Bulletin 28 (1980): 159.

73. Letters of Francis Parkman , ed. Wilbur R. Jacobs, 1:178. I agree with Doughty's perplexed appraisal that "there is something almost uncanny in the way his complex of maladies shaped his life to the best deployment of his powers, and ruthlessly fitted its lines to a profounder realization of his purpose than he could have otherwise achieved" ( Francis Parkman , 224). Doughty is moved to speculate that Parkman's illness functioned as his demon or muse without pondering the cultural contexts for such a "daemonic" (225) illness.

74. Francis Parkman, VassaIl Morton , 405. Cf. Parkman's letter of September 4, 1861, to the editors of the Boston Daily Advertiser : "There is a close analogy between the life of nations and of individuals. Conflict and endurance are necessary to both, and without them both become emasculate" ( Letters , 1:142).

75. Orestes A. Brownson, "Rome or Reason," in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson , 3:298. Brownson's review of Parkman's Jesuits originally appeared in the Catholic World (1867).

76. The "Autobiography of Francis Parkman," in "Remarks by the President," Special Meeting, Nov. 1893, Massachusetts Historical Society, proceedings, 352. For those interested in the history of American mania this "Autobiography," actually a letter Parkman wrote to George Ellis in 1864, made public only posthumously at Parkman's request, is a fascinating and important piece. Parkman's third-person description of the imperialist expansion of his impulses—"Labor became a passion, and rest intolerable. . . . Despite of judgment and of will, his mind turned constantly towards remote objects of pursuit, and strained vehemently

to attain them" (353 )—recalls Charles Brockden Brown's portraits of the Wieland father and son. Parkman wrote a second autobiographical letter in 1886 to Martin Brummer that largely repeats his earlier letter.

77. "The Founder of the Jesuits," North American Review 59 (Oct. 1844): 420.

78. Parkman, "Autobiography," 355.

79. Parkman, "Autobiography," 353. Parkman recurs to the term vehemence to diagnose the attitude that brought on his illness and impelled his historical studies. Hence my use of it in quotes.

80. Little work has been done on nineteenth-century masculinity on the order of T. Walter Herbert's provocative new study on Hawthorne, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). An early study that remains invaluable is Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament .

81. Francis Parkman, "Autobiography," 357.

1. Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims , 201.

2. John S. C. Abbott, " Conquest of Mexico," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 12 (1855): 3.

1. On the subversive potential of the Gothic in antebellum fiction, see especially David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance , part 2; Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents , chaps. 6-8.

2. Martin Luther, "The Pagan Servitude of the Church," in Martin Luther , ed. John Dillenberger, 284.

3. The Journey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536 . (Subsequent references to this volume are given parenthetically in the text.) Cabeza de Vaca refers to himself as "naked" in his dedicatory preface. The first American edition of this captivity narrative was printed in 1851 by Buckingham Smith for private distribution. See also Rolena Adorno, "The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios ," Representations 33 (1991): 163-99.

4. "Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues of the Society of Jesus Among the Mohawks," in Richard VanDerBeets, ed., Held Captive by Indians . Subsequent references to this work are given parenthetically in the text. Following his ransom, the mutilated missionary was granted papal dispensation to celebrate mass. Returning to New France, Jogues was captured and killed by Mohawks on October 18, 1646. Along with seven

of his companions, he was canonized in 1930. See New Catholic Encyclopedia , s.v. "North American Martyrs." Even if Jogues's focus did not include Protestantism, Jesuit missionaries in Maryland were already involved in such polemics. See James Axtell, "White Legend: The Jesuit Missions in Maryland," in After Columbus ; Axtell notes that missionary efforts with Indians were delayed because of the "large number of Protestants who arrived in 1638 [who] needed to be saved from heresy" (77).

5. Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century , 195. Indeed, Parkman's representation of Jogues's torture, by resisting the enumeration of its details, "which would be as monotonous as revolting" ( Jesuits , 317), thereby shifts the focus of Jogues's experience from the numinous closer to the depravities of the "savage." Parkman's continuing discomfort with Jogues's piety surfaces in his concluding focus on the martyr's laudable aggressiveness: "We have seen how, during his first captivity, while humbly submitting to every caprice of his tyrants and appearing to rejoice in abasement, a derisive word against his faith would change the lamb into the lion, and the lips that seemed so tame would speak in sharp, bold tones of menace and reproof" (403).

6. For a profound meditation on Mary Rowlandson's ambivalent embrace of her captivity, see Mitchell R. Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning . The conflict provoked by a trauma resistant to exegetical purification and ordering that characterizes Rowlandson's narrative is powerfully absent in Jogues's account of his traumatic captivity, where bodily torments and loss are continually energized by the promise of martyrdom. As a Puritan minister's wife, needless to say, Mary Rowlandson had no access to the psychological support Jogues enjoyed in a celibate fraternity whose elite members were spiritually enthralled by the "Canadamania" that swept France and fueled such missionary ventures. The best single study of the Jesuits in Canada is James Axtell, The Invasion Within .

7. Parkman also includes this particular detail from Jogues's narrative, otherwise titled "Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the Society of Jesus, among the Mohawks," describing the missionary "carving the name of Jesus on trees, as a terror to the demons of the wilderness" ( Jesuits , 322).

8. For a contemporary study of bodily pain's insidious defeat of language and of the subject's potentially consolatory, if not redemptive, power to gain control, see David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain . My thinking about the rhetorical representation of bodily pain remains indebted to the work of Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain , especially chap. 4, "The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making"; and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism , especially part 1, "The Ideology of Asceticism."

9. Isaac Penington, Works , 2:371. The quotation is also cited by H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America , 50. Penington (1616-1679) became a Quaker in 1657 and suffered repeated imprisonment for refusing to take oaths. His is a classic example of the righteous exploitation of captivity for spiritual and political power.

10. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence , chaps. 3-5. As Slotkin notes of the Puritans: "Their concept of the city on the hill had been based on the principle of resistance to the forces of superstition, paganism, passion, nature and unreason symbolized by Catholicism and tribalism" (121).

11. My account of such a theological family romance draws on Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny'" (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works , 17:219-56; and René Girard's analysis of "fascination with the insolent rival" (12) in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel .

12. John Williams, "The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion," in Puritans among the Indians , ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Subsequent references to this work are given parenthetically in the text. Williams's narrative saw eight editions between 1707 and 1800.

13. For an account of Eunice Williams's life, see Alexander Medlicott, Jr., "Return to the Land of Light," New England Quarterly 38 (1965): 202-16. Eunice's statement about losing her soul appears in Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence , 100-101. Several other New England girls taken as captives to Canada during the Indian wars became Catholics; some, like Lydia Langley of Groton and Mary Ann Davis of Salem, went on to become nuns. See Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America , 24ff. For a discussion of the daughterly struggles of another New England captive-turned-convert, see Alice N. Nash, "Two Stories of New England Captives," 39-48.

14. "Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc., in the Captivity of John Gyles, Esq.," in VanDerBeets, ed., Held Captive by Indians , 98.

1. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 154.

2. John Hughes, " The Decline of Protestantism and Its Cause, " 26. Barbara Welter, "From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard," discusses the episodic resurgence of nativist hostilities. Welter usefully seeks to examine Protestant hostility without undue reference to "paranoia."

3. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West , 141, 116. Bryan Le Beau, "Saving the West from The Pope," discusses nativist anxiety about the vulnerability of the Mississippi River Valley and the establishment of successful Catholic schools. St. Louis University had nearly three hundred students, Protestant and Catholic, by 1855.

4. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men , 230. An account of the sectional politics of nativism that remains useful is W. Darrell Over-dyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South .

5. Pope or President? 350. The notion of hidden government appears in a favorable light, however, in contemporary discussions of the family. William A. Alcott's Young Wife suggests that the husband's eduction of the wife should proceed "by indirect means—silent, gentle, and often unperceived, but always operative" (24). The parallel to the hated methods of alleged papal intrigue is a close one.

6. For the roots to American civil religion, see the classic study by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ; and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America .

7. Helen Dhu [pseud.], Stanhope Burleigh , ix.

8. Ibid., xiii.

9. Isaac Taylor, Loyola , 16. Popular novels reiterated the image of Jesuit control extending from individual psyche across the entire globe. Overhearing the conspiratorial plans of his superiors, one Jesuit novitiate claimed: "The veil withdrawn, I beheld myself face to face with one of the most mysterious powers which has ever been known to reduce to system, on a vast scale, the art of subjugating all sorts of passions—the passions of the mass, and the passions of sovereigns—to the obtaining of a fixed and immutable purpose" ( The Jesuit Conspiracy , 27).

10. Horace Bushnell, A Letter to His Holiness Pope Gregory XVI , 8. Bushnell's letter is a fascinating example of the passive-aggressive rhetorical stance assumed by many genteel Protestants when discussing Roman Catholicism. The letter to the pope concludes: "If I would not have you go to lay up accusations against me, I ought as earnestly to hope that you may so discharge the responsibility laid upon you, by this letter, as not to be required to accuse yourself" (24).

11. Michael F. Holt, "The Politics of Impatience," 309-31.

12. "The Church of Rome in Her Theology," Christian Examiner 65 (1858): 2.

13. "Notices of Recent Publications," Christian Examiner 47 (1849): 322. The remark appears in a review of Isaac Taylor's Loyola; and Jesuitism in its Rudiments .

14. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men , 260. Foner concludes: "The events of the 1850s clearly demonstrated that the Republican ideology, which identified the South and slavery as the enemies of northern 'free labor' and which offered immigrants a place in the economic development of the nation, had a far broader appeal to the native-born Protestants who made up the bulk of the northern population than did anti-foreign and anti-Catholic animus." See also David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy , 102, and his classic piece: "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960-

61). The essay is reprinted in David Brion Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (Oxford University Press, 1986). For a study of abolitionist rhetoric (and its anti-Catholic bias), see Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices , parts 1 and 2.

15. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 , 251. For the view that anti-Catholicism functioned as a scapegoat, see the New Catholic Encyclopedia , s.v. "American Nativism," where the author observes that "the Know-Nothing uproar was used to distract the public from the slavery controversy." Potter points out that the rural Protestant North was "sympathetic to anti-slavery and temperance and nativism and unsympathetic to the hard drinking Irish Catholics." For an account of the Louisville riot see Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence , 314. The quotation in the text is from the anti-Know-Nothing journal the Louisville Courier , as reprinted in the New York Times , Aug. 10, 1855.

16. Ray Allen Billington observes: "In the south the ever-present fear of a slave insurrection was played upon by writers who conjured up supposed evidence of a Catholic-Negro alliance against Protestant whites." Billington notes that such southern fears were seemingly legitimized by Bishop England's establishment of his school ( The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 139 n.56).

17. Davis, analyzing antebellum fears of conspiracies emanating from the slave power, the banking power, Freemasons, Mormons, and Catholics, notes that the significant factor was "that the ultimate peril was always conceptualized as 'slavery.'" He speculates, persuasively I think, that "this may have reflected a deep-seated guilt over the expansion of Negro slavery at a time of widening freedom and opportunity for white Americans" ( The Fear of Conspiracy , 68).

18. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , 35.

19. Ned Buntline [Edward Zane Carroll Judson], The Jesuit's Daughter , 163.

20. See J. V. Ridgely, "George Lippard's The Quaker City," Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 1 (1984), for a helpful breakdown of the novel's entangled plots, which Ridgely reads as representing the "convolutions" of the "mass mind" (79). Ridgely further observes that the novel's message is one of ubiquitous enslavement: "The road of the Republic had led from Independence Hall to Monk Hall, from the liberated spirit of man proclaimed by the patriots to the enchained minds and bodies of the Monks'' (94).

21. My figures are from Ray Allen Billington, "Tentative Bibliography of Anti-Catholic Propaganda in the United States (1800-1860)," Catholic Historical Review 18 (1932-33).

22. Western Monthly Magazine 3 (June 1835), quoted in Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 346.

23. "Are We to Have Fiction?" Metropolitan 1 (1853): 294.

24. "The Priest—the Wife—the Family," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (1846): 131.

25. Calvin Colton [pseud.], Protestant Jesuitism , 30-31. Billington cites this passage as well ( The Protestant Crusade , 244).

26. David Meredith Reese, Humbugs of New-York , 225.

27. Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy , xx. Frederick Somkin, Unquiet Eagle , makes a similar point in discussing the generalized fear of America's impending doom: "In thus weaving a web of significance, the idea of the cataclysm paradoxically served the function of building a sense of security" (46). The pseudo-religion of anti-Catholicism bore evidence of the increasing heterogeneity and secularization of American society. As an accusatory structure that covertly promoted the complacency and prosperity it ostensibly attacked, anti-Catholic sentiment expressed nostalgia for the order and authority of the system it so strenuously opposed.

28. Taylor, Loyola , preface. Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion," also relates nativism to the anxieties provoked by modernization; the literature of countersubversion served a "double purpose of vicariously fulfilling repressed desires, and of releasing the tension and guilt arising from rapid social change and conflicting values" (220).

29. Beecher, A Plea for the West , 130.

30. Nicholas Murray [Kirwan, pseud.], " The Decline of Popery and Its Causes, " 6.

31. "Sacrifice," Christian Examiner 65 (1858). References to this essay are given parenthetically in the text.

32. Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States , 131-32.

33. John Adams, Letters , 1:35, quoted in Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture , 371 n.63.

34. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy , 186.

1. On the sentimentalization of antebellum Christianity, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture ; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs ; David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction , especially chap. 4. The best discussion of middle-class sentiment and its struggles with insincerity remains Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women .

2. For a nineteenth-century defense of affective religion, see Friedrich Schliermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers . See also William A. Clebsch, American Religious Thought .

3. Finney, "Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts" (1836), 8. The crucial point of Finney's "heart religion" is not (as it was for

revivalists of the Great Awakening a century earlier) to dispute rationalistic piety but rather to emphasize moral agency, the individual's voluntary powers and consequent spiritual obligation to (paradoxically enough) will the surrender of his or her will.

4. Charles Stearns, ed., Narrative of Henry "Box" Brown . An illustration of Brown and his box appears in Potter, The Impending Crisis . See also D. G. Mitchell's description of his implied reader of the 1850s best-seller Reveries of a Bachelor : "You sob over that poor dumb heart within you, which craves so madly a free and joyous utterance" (119).

5. On the early American novel's creation of sentimental communion with women readers, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word .

6. Scholars of the Indian captivity narrative have traditionally described its reorientation toward sentiment and sensationalism as a corruption of the genre and hence have tended to dismiss later examples. See, for example, Richard VanDerBeets, ed., Held Captive by Indians , introduction; James D. Hart, The Popular Book , 41.

7. On the antebellum literary marketplace, see R. Jackson Wilson, Figures of Speech ; Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace . For Hawthorne's struggles with commercial pressures, see especially Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne , chaps. 1-4.

8. R. B. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls . Stratton's tale concludes by thanking God for the blessings of civilization that normally shield us from the sufferings of Indian captivity. Gone is the structure of merciful affliction.

9. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled , notes a similar development in American drama: "What did happen in the nineteenth-century theater repeated the pattern Tocqueville constantly found in American manners generally: democracy freed drama from its literary conventions, but this liberty begot a conformity or voluntary compliance with other conventions that was at least as strict as anything imposed before" (171). For The Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, Written by Herself , see VanDerBeets (333-66). Parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition.

10. W. B. Carnochan, Confinement and Flight , notes a similar constellation of images in Crusoe's adventures: "The cave within a cave, the womb at the end of the tunnel, turns into a vaulted cathedral full of sparkle and opulence" (42).

11. David Meredith Reese, Humbugs of New-York , 238.

12. As quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 57.

13. Jules Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families , 268n.

14. John Claudius Pitrat, Paul and Julia . Pitrat's anti-Catholic tale of seduction by priests and eventual gravesite death offers an intriguing

masculine counterpart to Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple . Carol Z. Wiener, "The Beleaguered Isle," Past and Present 51 (1971), notes that "the abstract notion of man's corruptibility was confused inextricably with the concrete problem of his inability to resist the lures of the Catholic Church" (46). The phrase, "prisons of confiding girls" is from Nicholas Murray [pseud. Kirwan], Romanism at Home , 206. Murray's appeal to Chief Justice Taney's professional mastery over the problem of human corruptibility reflects a gradual nineteenth-century shift in cultural authority from the clergy to the law. Taney is Murray's object of professional appeal who, even if Roman Catholic, can be encouraged to uncover Catholic duplicity because his training has presumably overcome his religion: "Brought up to a profession which proverbially sharpens the intellect for just discrimination . . . you are as capable of separating the false from the true, the fiction from fact, the seeming from the real, as any other American citizen" (18).

15. The gender issues fueling antebellum convent agitation prefigure those at work in twentieth-century female Gothics. Tanya Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance , argues that the novelistic interiors that trap the twentieth-century Gothic heroine represent women's "most intimate fears, or, more precisely, their fears about intimacy—about the exceedingly private, even claustrophobic nature of their existence" (20). The Fourierist phalanstery, imagined by a nineteenth-century utopian like John Adolphus Etzler as offering "the greatest comforts . . . to the greatest sum of individuals in the smallest space," clearly rivaled the domestic project, as did Thoreau's ideal house, envisioned as a spartan and uncompartmentalized space that would reveal him as living life "sincerely." For a discussion of Etzler and Thoreau, see Steven Fink, "Thoreau and the American Home," Prospects 2 (1987): 330-31.

16. Samuel M. Hopkins, "John Knox and Mary, Queen of Scots," in The Christian Parlor Book , n.p.

17. Jules Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families , 164. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. Michelet and Michel Foucault ( The History of Sexuality ) agree that confession played a prime role in the sexualization of the idle bourgeois woman. But Michelet, from his paranoid vision, interpreted the phenomenon as indicating the overweening ambition of priests to rule. Foucault, applying more diffuse conspiratorial notions of "power," argues that confession (particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) was a self-reflexive event by which the bourgeoisie distinguished and affirmed itself as a class by endowing itself with a verbose sexuality. Protestant conviction that confessional discourse seduced female penitents anticipated Foucault's analysis of the "science" of confession and its influence on the developing discourse of sexuality. In Foucault's words, the rite of confession developed after the Council of Trent into "the nearly infinite task of telling—telling oneself and another, as often as possible, every-

thing that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex" (20).

18. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 19.

19. For an illuminating discussion of the precariousness of the middle-class family in nineteenth-century America, see Richard H. Brodhead, "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," Representations 21 (1988): 67-96.

20. Orestes A. Brownson, "Madness of Antichristians," in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson , 14:415.

21. Josephine M. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 25-26.

22. Murray, Romanism at Home , 167.

23. As quoted in Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America , rev. ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 180. See also T. Walter Herbert, "The Erotics of Purity," Representations 36 (1991).

24. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 77.

25. Rosamond Culbertson, Rosamond; or, a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under the Popish Priests . . ., 261. Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America , states that there is no evidence that Culbertson actually existed; hence my use of quotation marks around her name.

26. Henry M. Field, The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic Church , 25.

27. Joseph F. Berg, The Great Apostacy , 88.

28. Father Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional , 119, 125.

29. Charles W. Frothingham, The Haunted Convent , 23.

30. "Female Convents," Christian Examiner 19 (1836): 55.

31. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 34.

32. "Sulla Morale Cattolica Osservazioni di Alessandro Manzoni," Christian Examiner 25 (1839): 289.

33. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 35.

34. Field, The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic Church , 10. Rising nativist sentiment in the 1830s and 1840s submerged even these tentatively positive images of monastic life. Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition , notes that "in 1839, S. Goodrich offers a pleasant picture of life in a convent, and a story of a monk heroically offering his own great artistic talent to God. In 1853 the same author presents a violently biassed picture of the Catholic Church in which he accuses it of approaching idolatry" (52). See also Philip Gleason, "Mass and Maypole Revisited," Catholic Historical Review 57 (1971): 265.

35. My thinking on the constrictions of Protestant selfhood is indebted to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital-

ism ; John Owen King III, The Iron of Melancholy ; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages ; Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament .

36. Auguste Carlier, Marriage in the United States , 32. Carlier convincingly disputes Tocqueville's appeal to democracy as the principal explanation for the independence and virtue of American women, citing instead the influence of Anglo-Saxon culture and Protestantism. My analysis of the convent's deviation from the mobile and self-reliant ways of American women is indebted to Ewens, The Role of the Nun .

37. Foxe's Book of Martyrs , ed. G. A. Williamson. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text.

38. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims .

39. As quoted in Ewens, The Role of the Nun , 97.

40. Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families , 204.

41. For discussions of this maternal power, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood ; Katherine Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher . Gillian Brown, "The Empire of Agoraphobia," Representations 20 (1987), is a fine study of the psychic (and spatial) constraints of such affectional domesticity.

42. Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed , 150. The literature of antebellum no-popery had no conception of the priest's possible parenting skills, such as those of the missionary priest Charles Nerinckx, remembered by Archbishop Martin Spalding; in church, Spalding recalled, Nerinckx, "surrounded by the little children, who so dearly loved him, . . . knelt down, and, with his arms extended in the form of a cross,—the children raising also their little arms in the same manner—he recited prayers in honor of the five blessed wounds of our Divine Saviour" (as quoted in Ann Taves, The Household of Faith , 15).

43. In discussing the surprising popularity of Warner's novel, one reviewer explained that "papas were not very difficult to convert, for papas like to feel their eyes moisten, sometimes, with emotions more generous than those usually excited at the stock-exchange or in the counting-room" ( North American Review , n.s. 67 (1853): 113. On the "quiet" of domestic novels, see Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers , 204. For two good discussions of the novel, see Susan S. Williams, "Widening the World," American Quarterly 42 (1990); and Isabelle White, "Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity," American Studies 31 (1990).

44. Donald Grant Mitchell, Reveries of a Bachelor , 79. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

45. My argument about Ik Marvel's fantasies of destruction is indebted to the following works on the idolatrous or iconoclastic imagination: John Phillips, The Reformation of Images ; Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight ; Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane ; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism , especially chap. 3.

46. "Social Influence of Catholic Theology," Metropolitan 1 (1853): 79.

47. James Jackson Jarves, Italian Sights and Papal Principles , 334.

48. "The Artistic and Romantic View of the Church of the Middle Ages," Christian Examiner 45 (1849): 362.

49. "The Ladies of the Sacred Heart," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 17 (1858): 205-6. Subsequent page references to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

50. "Margaret—the Lay Sister," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 17 (1858): 806-13. Page references to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

51. "Discourse at the Habiting of an Ursuline Nun," in The Works of the Right Reverend John England , 4:203.

1. Trial Documents of the Convent Riot (1870), 20 (hereafter referred to as Trial Documents ).

2. For the connection between this 1833 revival and the 1834 convent burning, see Louisa G. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 18.

3. James T. Austin, " Argument" before the Supreme Judicial Court in Middlesex , 9. For a cogent, if unsuccessful, argument that the government must indemnify the Ursulines in order to guard against mob destruction of private property, see George Ticknor Curtis, The Rights of Conscience .

4. The incident is recounted in Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America , 150. See also Peter Condon, "Constitutional Freedom of Religion and the Revivals of Religious Intolerance," U.S. Catholic Historical Society Records and Studies 4, part 2 (1906).

5. Capt. Frederick Marryat, Diary , 78.

6. On the convent burning, see Documents Relating to the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown ; "Destruction of the Charlestown Convent," U.S. Catholic Historical Society Records and Studies 12 (1918) and 13 (1919); John England, "Documents Relating to the Imposture of Rebecca T. Read [ sic ], and the Burning of the Ursuline Convent, at Charlestown, Mass," The Works of the Right Reverend John England , vol. 4; "Mob Law," American Quarterly Review 17 (1835); and Ewens, The Role of the Nun . Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , also contains extensive accounts of the episode. On the ritual aspect to Catholic-Protestant violence, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France , chap. 6. A good account of why Jacksonian America suffered from so much mob violence is Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era .

7. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 106.

8. Report of the Committee Relating to the Destruction of the

Ursuline Convent, August 11, 1834 , 12. See also David Grimsted, "Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting," American Historical Review 77 (1972): 361-97.

9. James T. Austin, " Argument, " 7.

10. Trial Documents , 82.

11. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 58.

12. Ibid., 123.

13. Ibid.

14. Supplement to "Six Months in a Convent, " 128. Another student, Lucy Thaxter, remembers in her "Account" that "for some days previous to the riot we had heard rumors of an excited state of feeling among the people in consequence of a story which was going about of a nun having been buried alive at the convent" (n.p.). Thaxter escaped early during the riot.

15. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 37.

16. Trial Documents , 36; Trial of the Convent Rioters , 12.

17. Trial Documents , 27.

18. Ibid., 36.

19. Ibid., 23.

20. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 18.

21. Charles W. Frothingham, The Convent's Doom , 12.

22. From a handbill included in Trial Documents .

23. James T. Austin, " Argument, " 9.

24. Trial Documents , 43.

25. Trial of the Convent Rioters [newspaper clippings], 2.

26. Report of the Committee Relating to the Destruction of the Ursuline Convent, August 11, 1834 , 11.

27. Trial Documents , 80.

28. Trial of the Convent Rioters , 21.

29. Trial Documents , 33.

30. Trial of the Convent Rioters , 14.

31. For Reed's account of her escape, see Six Months in a Convent , 172-74. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. Sales figures are from Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 90. My account of Reed's work disputes his claim that it was important, "not because of its contents . . . but because of the controversy which it aroused" (91).

32. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 53; see also Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 71.

33. Mary Anne Ursula Moffatt [Mother Mary Edmond St. George], An Answer to Six Months in a Convent Exposing Its Falsehoods and Manifold Absurdities by the Lady Superior . Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. For another example of the interrelated themes of convent captivity, orphanhood, and morbid sensibility, see Sister Agnes; or, The Captive Nun .

34. The quoted terms are those of Reed's editor in the introduction, 31. If such popular texts as the dime novel or popular history like Reed's Six Months in a Convent can be read, in Fredric Jameson's terms, as the "dream work of the social" (an approach recently extended to antebellum popular literature by Michael Denning)—as symbolic disclosures and at least provisional resolutions of intractable social inequities and confusions—such a reading can (perhaps unwittingly) reinscribe such texts with the very coherence characteristic of middle- and upper-middle-class discourse, an imposition justified by the alleged subversiveness of popular working-class literature. It becomes plausible to ascribe coherence as long as it is adversarial. Reed's work urges us to engage more seriously with the social function of incoherence. See Denning, Mechanic Accents , especially the introduction and chaps. 3 and 5.

35. See Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 73-74. After the bishop bought the land, the Charlestown selectmen asked the legislature to authorize them to make rules regulating burials; acting on that authority, they passed regulations governing the transport and burial of bodies, which had to be done with permits; Fenwick, realizing the only effect was to discriminate against Catholics, ordered the burial of the two children and was then prosecuted. On the issue of trespass, Eve Sedgwick observes of the Gothic novel: "Thus violence seems to pertain much less to a sojourn in the depths of monastery, convent, Inquisition, castle, or hiding place than to an approach—from within or without—to the interfacing surface" ( The Coherence of Gothic Conventions , 24).

36. Report of the Committee Relating to the Destruction of the Ursuline Convent, 5 .

37. "Sacrifice," Christian Examiner 65 (1858): 318.

38. Supplement to "Six Months in a Convent, " 69.

39. Brownson, "Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism," Brownson's Quarterly Review 3 (1846): 369-99; reprinted in Works , vol. 6.

40. Theodore Dwight, Open Convents , 116.

41. James D. Hart, The Popular Book , claims that both Maria Monk's and George Lippard's novels were aimed at a working-class male audience. Leslie A. Fiedler supports this interpretation in his introduction to The Monks of Monk Hall , where he claims that demipornographic fiction was "not merely produced by men only but intended for an exclusively male audience" (xiii). The collaborative male and female authorship of several such demipornographic works, their frequent use of the persona of the sentimental heroine, and the difficulty of establishing precise reader demographics all make these claims debatable.

42. Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery , 4. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

43. William L. Stone, Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hotel Dieu , 10. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

44. Quoted in Ralph Thompson, "The Maria Monk Affair," Colophon , part 17 (1934): n.p.

45. As reprinted in John England, "Documents Relating to the . . . Burning of the Ursuline Convent," in Works , 4:418.

1. For an explication of such "dream logic" at work in dime-novel fiction, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents . The best scholarship on connections between "low," "middle," and "high" culture includes Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow . For a sustained treatment of these issues in the literary marketplace of the American Renaissance, see David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance .

2. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno , in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 . Parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum," in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe , vol. 2. Parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition.

3. Mary Rowlandson, "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God," in Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, Puritans among the Indians , 75.

4. "The Artistic and Romantic View of the Church of the Middle Ages," Christian Examiner 45 (1849): 377.

5. As reported by Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 375 n.68.

6. The History of the Inquisition of Spain . . . of D. Juan Llorente , preface.

7. For a discussion of Poe's interest in premature burial and its impact on narration, see J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing , especially chap. 2. For an analysis of Poe's "supererogatory verbosity," see Louis A. Renza, "Poe's Secret Autobiography."

8. Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks , 48.

9. Joseph F. Berg, The Confessional; or, an Exposition of the Doctrine of Auricular Confession As Taught in the Standards of the Romish Church , 75.

10. The best account of these masculine struggles remains Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament . For an account of the nativist Jane Swisshelm and her accusations of unbridled sexuality in the Church of Rome, see Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices . Swisshelm further observed: "To be a member of the Roman church was to be a friend of Southern interests." Walker links the abolitionist Moncure Conway's

diatribes against Jesuitism to ''pure naked rage, but it is a rage that has not been unequivocally focused on its real object" (73)—for Conway a "safe" attack. Swisshelm's attack on unions, slavery, and Catholicism is finally, according to Walker, a defense of the "individual workingman entrepreneur" (165) and the "competitive marketplace" (166)—a defense of sovereign selfhood against effeminizing tyrannies.

11. See Michael Zuckerman, "Holy Wars, Civil Wars," for an account of the troubled acceptance of economic pressures on the part of Americans still believing in Christian norms of moderation, communality, and moral values. For an account of the volatile gender dynamics at work in Douglass's critique of slavery, see my "Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine," in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays , ed. Eric Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

12. The Diary of George Templeton Strong , 2:140.

13. For one example of southern musings on the inner feelings behind the black "masks" of slaves, see Mary Chestnut's numerous entries in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chestnut's Civil War Diary , especially the "Witherspoon Murder Case," 209-19.

14. Gloria Horsley-Meacham, "The Monastic Slaver," New England Quarterly 56 (1983): 261.

15. Eric J. Sundquist, "Suspense and Tautology in Benito Cereno," Glyph 8 (1981): 109. See also Sundquist, " Benito Cereno and New World Slavery," in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History , 93-122. For a reading of the novella that stresses contemporary political ramifications, see Levine, Conspiracy and Romance , 165-233.

1. Rev. Cyrus Mason, A History of the Holy Catholic Inquisition Compiled from Various Authors , 14.

2. "De Maistre and Romanism," North American Review 79 (Oct. 1854): 377.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Hawthorne, December 13, 1858, in Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1841-1863 , 268.

4. Herman Melville, "The Two Temples," in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 . Parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition. James Duban, "Satiric Precedent for Melville's 'The Two Temples,' " American Transcendental Quarterly 42 (1979), describes Melville's satire as directed against "exclusive church worship, its anti-democratic tendencies, its Pelagian implications, and its affront to the myth of America's messianic identity" (138).

5. Beryl Rowland, "Melville Answers the Theologians," Mosaic 7 (1974): 4-6.

6. Ibid., 11-12.

7. "Reaction in Favor of the Roman Catholics," Christian Examiner 23 (1838): 14.

8. As quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 252.

9. Isaac Taylor, Loyola , 203.

10. See Arnold Lunn, Roman Converts , 53.

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks , 60. Hawthorne's voyeurism achieved its most memorable expression in his account of watching the practice of confession: "Yesterday morning, in the Cathedral, I watched a woman at confession, being curious to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, the growth of a week or two, perhaps. I know not how long she had been at it, when I first observed her; but I believe nearly an hour passed, before the priest came suddenly out of the confessional, looking weary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the Cathedral. The woman was left on her knees. This morning, I watched another woman, and she, too, was very long about it, and I could see the face of the Priest, behind the curtain of the Confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. . . . it cannot be often that these [commonplace iniquities] are re-deemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin" (ibid., 458).

10. See Arnold Lunn, Roman Converts , 53.

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks , 60. Hawthorne's voyeurism achieved its most memorable expression in his account of watching the practice of confession: "Yesterday morning, in the Cathedral, I watched a woman at confession, being curious to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, the growth of a week or two, perhaps. I know not how long she had been at it, when I first observed her; but I believe nearly an hour passed, before the priest came suddenly out of the confessional, looking weary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the Cathedral. The woman was left on her knees. This morning, I watched another woman, and she, too, was very long about it, and I could see the face of the Priest, behind the curtain of the Confessional, scarcely inclining his ear to the perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. . . . it cannot be often that these [commonplace iniquities] are re-deemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin" (ibid., 458).

12. As quoted by Joseph I. Dirvin, Mrs. Seton , 165.

13. Charles Eliot Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy , 211.

14. The Journals of Francis Parkman , 1:208-9.

15. As quoted by John Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America , 144.

16. Sophia Dana Ripley to Ruth Charlotte Dana, Flatbush, 1855, Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

17. As quoted in Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America , 143. Dillenberger notes: "It is interesting, if not ironic, that the reservations about Catholicism on the part of Morse and Weir is [ sic ] counterbalanced by a fascination that resulted in an exquisite painting by each of a Catholic subject" (143). Dillenberger also notes of Weir's neo-Gothic friends: "The Gothic Revival proponents had little appreciation of the place of painting and sculpture within a liturgical context" (143). The Roman Catholic painter John LaFarge was largely responsible for reintroducing religious paintings and the Christ figure to Boston and New York churches (150).

1. Orestes A. Brownson, The Convert , 161.

2. Sophia Dana Ripley to Ruth Charlotte Dana, September 12, 1856, Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

3. "The New Editor's Introductory," Metropolitan 2 (1854): 4.

4. New Catholic Encyclopedia , s.v. "Conversion." The article opposes a "situational" Protestantism to a "transformational" Catholicism.

5. Jedidiah Vincent Huntington, St. Vincent De Paul, and the Fruits of His Life , 6. Philip Schaff, German-American theologian and spokesman for the Mercersburg movement, argued that the current "growing disposition to insist on outward visible unity and historical continuity of the church, on altar-service, on the idea of sacrifice, on a more compact form of Government" did not necessarily mean conversions. On the contrary, such tendencies, Schaff argued, may "form a strong barrier against this extreme, as well as against infidelity" ( America. A Sketch of the Political, Social, and Religious Character of the United States of North America , 230).

6. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks , 136.

7. E. Rameur, "The Progress of the Church in the United States," Catholic World 1 (1865): 16.

8. Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States , 48.

9. Morse is discussed briefly in Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century . See also Oliver W. Larkin, Samuel F. B. Morse and American Democratic Art . Paul J. Staiti, "Ideology and Politics," discusses (without theorizing the connection between) the "private, continental Morse" and the "public, nativist Morse" (28).

10. Henry M. Field, The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic Church , 28.

11. Isaac Hecker to Brownson, June 24, 1844, in The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , 106.

12. C. Sparry, Papacy in the 19th Century; or, Popery—What It Is, What It Aims at, and What It Is Doing , 25.

13. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller, January 8, 1843, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 3:116.

14. Emerson, journal entry for November-December 1862, in Emerson in His Journals , 508.

15. Theodore Parker, "The Life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux," Christian Examiner 30 (1841): 24.

16. "St. Ambrose and the Church of the West," North American Review 81 (Oct. 1855): 434.

17. For the publication history of Evangeline , see Newton Arvin, Longfellow , 102-8.

18. As quoted in Manning Hawthorne and H. W. Longfellow Dana, "The Origin of Longfellow's Evangeline," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 41 (1947): 171. Although written in a spirit of

uncritical praise, this article contains a great deal of information on the genesis and writing of Evangeline .

19. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline , I,i,53-54, in The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

20. As quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, "The Origin of Longfellow's Evangeline ," 184.

21. As quoted in Poetical Works of Longfellow , ed. George Monteiro (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), introduction to Evangeline .

22. Orestes A. Brownson, "Religious Novels," 152.

23. As quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, "The Origin of Longfellow's Evangeline, " 199-200.

24. Sophia Dana Ripley to H. W. Longfellow, January 23, 1848, quoted in Henrietta Dana Raymond, "Sophia Willard Dana Ripley," 72.

25. As quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, "The Origin of Longfellow's Evangeline, " 172.

26. On Longfellow's use of Postl's volume, see Hawthorne and Dana, 188 n.40.

27. Longfellow to Hawthorne, November 29, 1847, as quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, 200.

28. Hawthorne and Dana, 178.

29. As quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, 187.

30. Levi Silliman Ives, The Trials of a Mind in Its Progress to Catholicism , 22.

31. Sophia Hawthorne to H. W. Longfellow, July 24, 1864, as quoted in Hawthorne and Dana, 200 n.68.

32. Sparry, Papacy in the Nineteenth Century , 18.

33. Channing, "Letter on Catholicism" [1836], 432. Further references to this essay are given parenthetically in the text. For Emerson's description of Channing, see Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," in The Transcendentalists , ed. Perry Miller, 500.

34. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter , Centenary Edition, 1:33. On Channing's ambivalent politics, see Delbanco, William Ellery Channing .

35. Channing, " The Church ," 14. Further references to this sermon are given parenthetically in the text.

36. For Channing's friendship with Bishop Cheverus, see Jack Men-delsohn, Channing , 192-94.

37. Daniel Barber, Catholic Worship and Piety Explained , 29.

38. Levi Silliman Ives, The Trials of a Mind , 227.

39. Ibid., 20, 160, 63.

40. "The Artistic and Romantic View of the Church of the Middle Ages," Christian Examiner 45 (1849): 371.

41. Hecker to Brownson, July 24, 1845, in The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , 130.

42. Victor Turner, "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," Worship 46 (1972), discusses the "mystical power over the fertility of the earth and of all upon it ascribed to a conquered, 'autochthonous' people" (395). A classic earlier account of such ritual power is Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger .

43. James Russell Lowell, Fireside Travels , 288.

44. Horace Bushnell, Common Schools (Hartford Press of Case Tiffany, 1853), 2. See also Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church .

45. "De Maistre and Romanism," North American Review 79 (Oct. 1854): 374.

46. Bunkley, The Testimony of an Escaped Novice , 286n. Harriet Beecher Stowe to the Duke of Sutherland, February 23, 1860, unpublished correspondence in H. B. Stowe manuscript collection, The Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut.

47. Bushnell, " Barbarism the First Danger ," 24.

48. Field, The Good and the Bad in the Roman Catholic Church , 1.

49. James Jackson Jarves, Italian Sights and Papal Principles As Seen through American Spectacles , 350.

50. Hugh Quigley, The Prophet of the Ruined Abbey , as quoted in Willard Thorp, "Catholic Novelists in Defense of Their Faith, 1829-1865," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 78 (1968): 53.

51. John D. Bryant, The Immaculate Conception of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God; a Dogma of the Catholic Church , 300-301.

52. David Meredith Reese, Humbugs of New-York , 219.

53. John Hughes, " The Decline of Protestantism and Its Cause": A Lecture Delivered in St. Patrick's Cathedral, November 10, 1850 , 15. For a contemporary reformulation of Archbishop Hughes's point, see Robert McAfee Brown and Gustave Weigel, An American Dialogue : "The center of Protestantism is not within itself but in the Catholic Church" (191).

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Minister's Black Veil," in Twice-Told Tales , 39. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

2. For a comprehensive explication of the tale's eighteenth-century historical context, see Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety , chap. 6, "The True Sight of Sin."

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, journal entry for 1842, in The American Notebooks . The entry is also quoted by Henry G. Fairbanks, The Lasting Loneliness of Nathaniel Hawthorne , 54.

4. Brownson to Hecker, November 8, 1843, in The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , 76 (hereafter referred to as Correspondence ).

5. "The Port-Royalists." Edinburgh Review (July 1841), as quoted in William Ellery Channing, " The Church ," 57.

6. Andrew Delbanco, William Ellery Channing , 73.

7. Calvin Colton [pseud.], Protestant Jesuitism , 23, 17.

8. Hecker to Brownson, July 23, 1845, in Correspondence , 127-28.

9. Hecker, Aspirations of Nature , 296.

10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Stephen E. Whicher, 162.

11. "Balmes on Civilization," Christian Examiner 52 (1852): 187.

12. "A Roland for an Oliver," Christian Examiner 7 (1830): 240.

13. "Sphere of Human Influence," Christian Examiner 45 (1848): 426.

14. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin , 218.

15. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother's Book , 4.

16. Horace Bushnell, "Unconscious Influence," The American National Preacher 20 (1846). Further references to this sermon are given parenthetically in the text.

17. For a useful exposition of Bushnell's linguistic theories, see James O. Duke, Horace Bushnell . Contrast Bushnell's insistence on the metaphoric character of scriptural language to the Catholic convert Peter H. Burnett's view of Christ: "When He used language as a medium of communication, He did not rob it of its established character" ( The Path Which Led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church , 115).

18. Hawthorne's projected image of unmediated communion in the afterlife, expressed in an early letter to Sophia ("In Heaven, I am very sure, there will be no occasion for words;—our minds will enter into each other, and silently possess themselves of their natural riches") was to Bushnell already a reality, if a slightly less benign one (Hawthorne to Sophia Hawthorne, April 6, 1840, in Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1839-1841 , 173).

19. Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture , 378.

20. Emerson, "Behavior," in The Complete Works , 6:178-79.

21. "Female Convents," Christian Examiner 19 (1836): 82. The St. Leopold Foundation was an Austro-Hungarian missionary society founded in 1829 to further the growth of the Catholic church in America. Morse's Foreign Conspiracy was directed against the alleged conspiracies of the foundation. See Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 121-23; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance .

1. "De Maistre and Romanism," North American Review 79 (1854): 400.

2. "On the Gothic Style in the Fine Arts," Putnam's Monthly 2 (Aug. 1853): 192.

3. "A Roland for an Oliver," Christian Examiner 7 (1830): 231.

4. As quoted in Jane Dillenberger and Joshua C. Taylor, The Hand and the Spirit , 48. Discussing the painting's immense popularity in America, Taylor points to its implicit doubleness of focus. "The 'Transfiguration on the Mount' was the perfect example of a moment in which the corporeal aspect of man was suddenly seen in its spiritual context" (16).

5. As quoted in Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society , 362 n.41.

6. "Narrative of Miss Emma Forbes Cary," in Georgina Pell Curtis, ed., Some Roads to Rome in America , 74.

7. Sophia Dana Ripley (hereafter SDR) to Ruth Charlotte Dana (hereafter RCD), March 1848, in Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Power," in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , vol. 6. The relationship between Emerson's notions of what constituted "power" and his interest in Catholicism is suggested by his letter to Margaret Fuller, January 8, 1843, on attending mass: "It is so dignified to come where the priest is nothing, and the people nothing, and an idea for once excludes these impertinences" ( Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Stephen E. Whicher, 217).

9. John Adam Moehler, Symbolism; or, Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants As Evidenced in Their Symbolical Writings , 534.

10. "Debates on the Roman Catholic Religion," Christian Examiner 23 (1838): 62.

11. "Fanaticism," Christian Examiner 21 (1837): 301.

12. Orville Dewey, The Old World and the New , 1:119.

13. Helen Dhu, Stanhope Burleigh , xiii.

14. William Nevins, Thoughts on Popery , 194.

15. SDR to RCD, Flatbush, 1855, Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

16. Nevins, Thoughts on Popery , 60.

17. SDR to RCD, April 1851, Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society. In her letter, Ripley underlines her phrase, "all classes of persons."

18. Orestes A. Brownson, "New England Brahminism," Brownson's Quarterly Review (1863); reprinted in Works , 4:445.

19. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks , 99.

20. Emerson in His Journals , entry dated June-July 1842, 286.

21. John Chipman Gray, "Review of La Divina Commedia ," as quoted in Giamatti, Dante in America , 21-22. Gray's review originally appeared in North American Review 8 (1819): 322-47.

22. Review of Le Prime Quattro Edizioni della Divina Commedia Letteralmente Ristampate per Cura di G. G. Warren Lord Vernon, Atlantic Monthly 5 (1860): 629.

23. Emerson, "The Poet," in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Stephen E. Whicher, 238.

24. Longfellow, "Review of A History of the Italian Language and Dialects," North American Review 35 (Oct. 1832): 41. By April 1863 Longfellow had translated all of the Commedia , publishing it privately in 1865 and then publicly in May 1867. During this time he also began the Dante Club, which initially consisted of weekly meetings with Lowell and Norton to read and critique Longfellow's translation efforts. The Italian poet compelled an extensive imaginative investment from all three of these writers, one that is discussed by T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace .

25. Lowell, "Dante," in Among My Books , 123. Further references to Lowell's essay are given parenthetically in the text.

26. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner . Further references to this work are given parenthetically in the text.

27. Holmes was well aware of the parallel between his story and Hawthorne's, claiming in his preface that he had not read The Marble Faun when composing his novel. His image of a bone-ridden "Roman-ism" was shared of course not only by Hawthorne but also by many other New England "tourists" of Catholicism.

28. O. W. Holmes to H. B. Stowe, September 13, 1860, in John T. Morse, Jr., Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes , 263.

29. O. W. Holmes to H. B. Stowe, November 17, 1867, Life and Letters , 224.

30. O. W. Holmes, "autobiographical notes," Life and Letters , 45.

31. O. W. Holmes to H. B. Stowe, May 29, 1869, Life and Letters, 226 ; O. W. Holmes to H. B. Stowe, September 25, 1871, 253.

32. O. W. Holmes to H. B. Stowe, undated letter, 252. Suggestive parallels exist between Holmes's emphasis on hereditary predisposition and the emphasis placed on apostolic succession by many Catholic converts. Bishop Ives writes: "Christ's religion is not the result of a mental process—not a thing wrought out or perfected in the laboratory of human reason—but a mysterious, superhuman fact, a thing brought down as a gift from heaven to earth, and handed on through the successive generations of earth by the power of heaven" (Levi Silliman Ives, The Trials of a Mind in Its Progress to Catholicism , 107-8). For his part, Brownson observed that Holmes's "writings and those of Mrs. Stowe

are more Catholic than they are aware of, and in fact, no one can appreciate their meaning so fully as a Catholic of New England birth, especially if he be a convert." In "New England Brahminism," 436.

33. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Agnes of Sorrento . Further references to this work are given parenthetically in the text.

34. For a useful discussion of the antebellum development of racist ethnologies and their impact on literature, see Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land . For a good illustration of contemporary attitudes toward climate and its political significance, see "Italy," North American Review 78 (Apr. 1854), where the author observes that climate explains why Protestantism is the "religion of will" and "Romanism . . . a system of acquiescence" (458).

35. "The Gardens of the Vatican," lines 12-14, in Collected Poems of Harriet Beecher Stowe , ed. John Michael Moran, 47.

36. This conflicted missionary impulse was shared by the Mercers-burg theologian Philip Schaff, who, like Stowe, understood Catholic Europe as both patient and doctor to American evangelical Protestantism: "Why may not Europe, if she should ever decay, be likewise regenerated by America? As the setting sun throws back its golden beams to the eastern horizon, as the pledge of his return in the east; so history shows likewise its reacting influences. But at all events, Europe still stands on the summit of Christian civilization, and will certainly yet long remain there . . . and long continue to furnish her youthful, vigorous daughter beyond the ocean with the richest nourishment of her spiritual life" ( America , xvii).

37. H. B. Stowe, "The Ministration of Departed Spirits," 4; as quoted in Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs , 129. John A. Coleman observes that "the Christian notion of sainthood assumes . . . a tradition built upon vital links between past, present, and future. It requires a world in which the living and dead commingle in an intercourse of mutual challenge and sustenance" ("Conclusion: After Sainthood?" in Saints and Virtues , ed. John Stratton Hawley, 207). In Agnes of Sorrento (and her other major novels), Stowe is occupied much more by the promise of sustenance than the notion of challenge.

38. "The Other World," Collected Poems of Harriet Beecher Stowe , lines 11-12.

39. Isaac Hecker, "Memorandum," as quoted in Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker , 163.

40. James Jackson Jarves, Art-Hints , 355; quoted in David Alan Brown, Raphael and America , 27. Neil Harris's discussion of Protestant clerical writings on Italian art analyzes them as renewed conversion experiences, without pondering the gender implications of such viewing experiences. Harris notes of the responses of such ministers as Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Bushnell, and C. A. Bartol that "art could pro-

pagandize, but this was only to the good, for it could produce arguments as amenable to Protestantism as to Catholicism" ( The Artist in American Society , 135). Harris's brief discussion of the European tour's lessening of the American Protestant tourist's anti-Catholicism, while usefully arguing that Protestantism's "moral declension" made it receptive to the potential conversionary powers of art (149), does not explore these appropriate dynamics in detail. For a wide-ranging historical discussion of the Virgin, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex . Warner notes of the Virgin's intercessory function precisely what troubled nineteenth-century Americans:

There is tension, nevertheless, between the theory of the Virgin's intercession and the cult practices that attempt to secure it. For the flowers arrayed before her image or her statue, the smoking candles and sanctuary lamps, the rising incense swung from censers, the implorations of the choir, the numberless paintings and churches, poems and songs made in her honor are offered to her, for her own glorious sake, because the beauty and perfection of womanhood she represents has enchanted men and women for centuries. And underneath all this undiluted flattery runs the courtier's usual ulterior motive. (289)

Warner's view, it is worth noting, is that the ideal of the Virgin is a "particular misogynist web" (337).

41. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Worship of Mary," in Works , 8:66. On the relationship between this essay and Brownson's struggle against spiritualism, see Edward Day, "Orestes Brownson and the Motherhood of Mary," American Ecclesiastical Review 129 (1953). Bonaventure Stefun, "The Mother of God in Brownson's Writings," American Ecclesiastical Review 134 (1956), notes: "The Incarnation meant for him the font of faith, and the Incarnation meant that a woman had become the mother of God. The light of the Star of Bethlehem would ever be tinted with the glorious blue of virgin motherhood'' (316). Addressing Protestant anxieties that Mary's creaturehood adulterated the purity of the Christ child, the convert John Bryant appealed to the logical necessity of her immaculate conception: "Is it credible that He who could create, at a word, pure from impure, clean from defiled,—He who is bound by no law, and can except from law whom He will,—would clothe His immaculate purity with sinful flesh?" ( The Immaculate Conception of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God; a Dogma of the Catholic Church , 57). See also James P. Walker, Book of Raphael's Madonna , as evidence for the sentimental Protestant appropriation of the Virgin.

42. O. W. Holmes to H. B. Stowe, November 17, 1867, in John T. Morse, Jr., Life and Letters , 225.

43. For this estimate of the number of antebellum church burnings, see David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 , 241-65. Discussing the connections between antislavery and anti-Catholicism, Potter observes that "in some ways, the anti-Catholic impulse seemed to have more psychological voltage than the antislavery impulse" (253). My study is in large part an attempt to answer why this should be so.

44. "Female Convents," Christian Examiner 19 (1836): 57.

45. James Freeman Clarke, "Joan of Arc," Christian Examiner 45 (1848): 26.

46. Isaac Taylor, Loyola , 29.

47. [Ellery Channing,] "Ernest the Seeker," Dial 1 (1841). References to this tale will be given parenthetically in the text.

48. See Robert N. Hudspeth, Ellery Channing .

49. The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , introduction, 14.

50. William Ellery Channing II, Conversations in Rome: Between an Artist, a Catholic, and a Critic . References to this volume are given parenthetically in the text.

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter . Citations are given parenthetically in the text.

2. Frederick Newberry, "Tradition and Disinheritance in The Scarlet Letter ," emphasizes the novel's alternations between a vestigial Anglo-Catholicism and a bleakly triumphant Puritanism. Ronald J. Gervais, "Papist among the Puritans: Icon and Logos in The Scarlet Letter ," extends Newberry's reading to argue that ''restoring a qualified and tenuous connection between the icon [Hester] and logos [Dimmesdale] is the burden of the novel" (13).

3. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance , chap. 9: "Mrs. Hawthorne's Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter ," remains the best single essay on the shifting "inquisitorial" complexities of the novel's narrative structure. Recent readings that argue for the novel's cultural engagement with the construction of (and resistance to) national identity include Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter ; Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy .

4. Hawthorne's Italian Notebook contains repeated instances of his discomfort with various canvases in which the painter's model (and often mistress) was used to represent the Madonna.

1. Lowell, Fireside Travels , 288-99. Subsequent references to "A Few Bits of Mosaic" are given parenthetically in the text. The book is a collection of magazine essays originally published during the 1850s—

hence my reference to the author's "magazine audience." Lowell's most comprehensive account of the allure of European Catholicism is his lengthy poem "The Cathedral," published in 1870, in which Chartres cathedral serves as locus for the poet's romantic struggles with nostalgia and alienation. Lowell's earlier travel sketches speak more directly, however, to the bodily anxieties involved in Protestant spectating upon (and consuming) the Catholic "whole." Hence my focus upon the sketches rather than the later poem.

2. Orville Dewey, The Old World and the New , 170.

1. A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Mar-rant, a Black, (Now Gone to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia) Born in New-York, in North-America, Taken down from his own Relation, Arranged, Corrected and Published By the Rev. Mr. Aldridge , in Richard VanDerBeets, ed., Held Captive by Indians , 183. Further page references appear parenthetically in the text.

2. See Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience , especially introduction and part 1, "Expression."

3. My use of the term marginal derives from Victor Turner's analysis of cultural liminality and marginality in his "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," Worship 46 (1972). Summarizing themes from his previous major works, Turner underscores the special burdens of the marginal figure: "Marginals like liminars are also betwixt-and-between, but unlike ritual liminars they have no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity" (395).

4. Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative , discusses conversion narratives in relation to church membership. While Caldwell sensitively analyzes much seventeenth-century American and British conversion prose, her argument that the "obliquely anguished tone" (132) of the former defines it as peculiarly American remains unpersuasive. The attempt to demonstrate the "American-ness" of Puritan conversion narratives contributes to the Protestant bias in American cultural and literary studies and leaves us unequipped to explain the different paradigm that structured antebellum Catholic convert prose. See also Christine M. Bochen, "Personal Narratives by Nineteenth-Century American Catholics," for discussion of some of the differences between the two conversion models.

5. Isaac Hecker, letter to the Hecker family, June 11, 1844, quoted in Rev. Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker , 152.

6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Agnes of Sorrento , 339.

7. For brief biographical information on these converts, see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People; Dictionary of American Religious Biography ; and the New Catholic Encyclopedia .

My selection of these four converts for study was based on their intimate connections with significant institutional or cultural developments in nineteenth-century America: Seton founded the American Sisters of Charity as well as the American parochial school system and became the first American-born woman saint; Hecker founded the Congregation of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul (C.S.P.) in 1858 as well as the widely read periodical the Catholic World in 1865; Ripley was cofounder of Brook Farm and after her conversion was instrumental in the American establishment of the Order of the Good Shepherd; and Brownson, a prolific essayist and widely known (if highly controversial) apologist for the Catholic church, published his incisive Brownson's Quarterly Review from 1843 for thirty years thereafter (with some interruption).

8. An Account of the Conversion of the Reverend Mr. John Thayer , 1.

9. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , discusses the European missionary activities of the American and Foreign Christian Union, 270-80.

10. My figures are taken from Bochen, "Personal Narratives by Nineteenth-Century American Catholics," 57ff.

11. See Clarence E. Walworth, The Oxford Movement in America; or, Glimpses of Life in an Anglican Seminary , for a Catholic convert's analysis of the impact of Tractarianism on his and his seminary colleagues' progression toward Rome. See also Vanbrugh Livingston, A Letter to the Hon. and Rev. George Spencer on the Oxford Movement in the United States , for the argument that the American Protestant Episcopal church was far less likely to go toward Rome than the Anglican church. Robert Gorman, Catholic Apologetical Literature in the United States, 1784-1858 , chap. 9, provides an informative history of American conversions during the years between 1840 and 1858. The 1846 pamphlet The Late Conversions to the Catholic Church; Being a Reply to Recent Statements Made by Bishop de Lancey , reprinted in Miscellanea Catholica America , vol. 6, asserts against Protestant accusations of conspiracy that "there is a peculiar characteristic belonging to these conversions. It is this:—in these changes, almost every individual acted singly and alone " (50). For an overview of this issue, see Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People , "Catholic Movements in American Protestantism," 615-36.

12. Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indians . . . Chiefly Taken from His Diary by Rev. Jonathan Edwards . . ., ed. Serena Edwards Dwight (New Haven, 1822), as quoted in Conversions , ed. Hugh T. Kerr and John M. Mulder, 78. Brainerd's phrase " paddling with my hand in the water" is italicized in Kerr's transcription. Oliver Wendell Holmes, autobiographical notes, as quoted in John T. Morse,

Jr., The Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes , 1:38. Joshua Huntington, Gropings after Truth , 24.

13. Bushnell's efforts to domesticate religious piety were anticipated by William Ellery Channing in his famous 1819 sermon "Likeness to God." Arguing for an even more imperceptible continuum between creature and God, Channing effectively redefined conversion from rebirth to a simple continuation of life. Piety involved the pursuit of union via identity, not communion: "This likeness [between God and creature] does not consist in extraordinary or miraculous gifts, in supernatural additions to the soul, or in any thing foreign to our original constitution." Channing's text is excerpted in Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists , 22-25.

14. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson , 4:142.

15. The Conversion of Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne: Original Narrative of Baron Theodore de Bussieres , 21.

16. An Apology for the Conversion of Stephen Cleveland Blythe, to the Faith of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church . . ., 10.

17. Huntington, Gropings after Truth , 60. Where clarity permits, further quotations from this volume appear parenthetically in the text.

18. "Notices of Recent Publications," Christian Examiner 56 (1854): 463.

19. The phrase is quoted from "Social Influence of Catholic Theology," Metropolitan 1 (1853): 79. To Hecker and Brownson, not just the nature of interior life but its very existence was at issue. "Brownson was firmly persuaded," reported Hecker to his first biographer, "and so am I, that the great fault of men generally is that they deem the life of their souls, thoughts, judgments, and convictions, yearnings, aspirations, and longings to be too subject to illusion to be worthy their attentive study and manly fidelity; that even multitudes of Catholics greatly undervalue the divine reality of their inner life, whether in the natural or supernatural order" (as quoted in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker , 122). For an intriguing discussion of the differing Catholic and Protestant models of domestic piety and spiritual sensibility, see Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 .

20. The phrase is from Joseph Story, "Character of the Puritans," in Ebenezer Bailey, The Young Ladies' Class Book (Boston, 1831), 213; as quoted in Sister Marie Leonore Fell, The Foundations of Nativism in American Textbooks, 1783-1860 , 67.

21. Isaac T. Hecker, Questions of the Soul , 236.

22. Nicholas Murray [pseud. Kirwan], Romanism at Home , 236. Murray's confident position was just as confidently dismissed by John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine:

"Whatever be the historical Christianity, it is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this" (5). Such formulations ignored the salient preoccupation of nineteenth-century Anglo-American religious culture with degrees of religious affiliation, rather than simply wholesale commitment.

23. "The Philosophy of Conversion," Catholic World 4, no. 22 (1867): 466.

24. Ibid., 467.

25. This account of Elizabeth Seton depends largely on excerpts from her writings included in the following texts: Memoir, Letters, and Journal of Elizabeth Seton, Convert to the Catholic Faith, and Sister of Charity (hereafter referred to as Memoir ); Charles I. White, Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton, Foundress and First Superior of the Sisters or Daughters of Charity (hereafter referred to as White); Joseph I. Dirvin, Mrs. Seton (hereafter referred to as Dirvin); Elizabeth Seton. Selected Writings , ed. Ellin Kelly and Annabelle Melville (hereafter referred to as ES ). The epigraph appears in ES , 67; date and addressee remain unspecified. To my knowledge little recent scholarship on Seton exists beyond the work of Kelly and Melville. Amanda Porterfield, Feminine Spirituality in America , discusses Seton as one example in the American "spectrum of feminine religious power" (110). While I agree that Seton's maternal sensibility was central to her devotional life, I do not share Porterfield's understanding of a female religious taxonomy. To put it briefly, Seton was far more Catholic than she was "female"; indeed, her Catholicism so profoundly affected her "femaleness" that to place Seton in a continuous spectrum composed of other devout women from various denominations and historical eras misleadingly implies, I think, that her faith was secondary to an essentialized category of gender.

26. On tuberculosis as a cultural symbol, see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor . One medical dictionary argued that the hereditary "predisposition" to tuberculosis received its main encouragement from an error in marriage: "There can be no question, that from errors in the contraction of this great engagement of life, much of the hereditary tendency to consumption is developed, and especially when the union is between parties nearly related by blood; doubly so if the predisposition already exists in the family." See Spencer Thomson, A Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery , 135. The connections Se-ton drew between consumption, contagion, her family, and her spiritual life were not unusual for the age. What is exceptional is the rhetorical intensity and complexity with which she formulated them. For the consumptively inclined, the two crucial coordinates were vocation and location, for these could allegedly cause and remedy the disease. Such an antebellum poem as James Gates Percival's "Consumption," in The Poetical Works , typically linked the corrosive progress of tuberculosis

to a suppressed eroticism and a "saint's desires." The poem's opening assertion, "There is a sweetness in woman's decay/When the light of beauty is fading away," forms part of the nineteenth-century literary tradition developed by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Beecher Stowe of sacramentally disposing of women. As with later authors, tuberculosis was a prime literary "carrier" for ideological assertions of female sanctity and frailty. In Percival's poem, the unnamed masculine celebrant of the female invalid testifies to the disease's aesthetic transformation of woman, first into landscape and then into saint: "And there is a blending of white and blue / Where the purple blood is melting through / The snow of her pale and tender cheek.'' The saturation of the "snow" with the "purple blood" situates this feminized pastoral in a larger erotic terrain of virginity's blushes and bloody loss. Such loss doesn't occur; indeed consumption prevents the maiden's entry into life and hence is crucial to her transition from a biological to a sacred power. Consumption figured in just such language of a stealthy preservation of purity that imitated the mysterious comings of grace. But both life and tuberculosis are finally "hectic"—a false illumination that opposes heavenly repose: "But dearer the calm and quiet day / When that heaven-sick soul is stealing away." Poets and medical men were fascinated by the disease in part because of its curious gap in representation; its presence both did and did not signify a suffering death.

27. ES , 102. Subsequent quotations follow Seton's text without editorial comment.

28. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues in her now classic article "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America" that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women enjoyed close affectional ties with one another—an intimate, supportive world generated by the separation of the sexes into their separate spheres (reprinted in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct , 53-76).

29. "A Journal of the Soul," August 19, 1807, ES , 222.

30. Seton, "Dear Remembrances," ES , 344.

31. Seton, "The Italian Journal," November 25, 1803, ES , 110.

32. Richard Bayley, An Account of the Epidemic Fever Which Prevailed in the City of New York, during Part of the Summer and Fall of 1795 , 119. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

33. Dirvin, 91.

34. Seton to Julia Scott, June 11, 1801, in Letters of Mother Seton to Mrs. Julianna Scott , 88.

35. Letter from Seton to Rebecca Seton, as quoted in Dirvin, 91.

36. I have relied here on Dirvin's description of this incident; however, he provides no substantiating evidence for the episode (96-97).

37. Dirvin, 84.

38. Letter from Seton to Rebecca Seton, October 14, 1801, as quoted in Dirvin, 100.

39. The description of Seton's response to Communion is Dirvin's, (106).

40. Letter from Seton to Rebecca Seton, October 14, 1801, as quoted in Dirvin, 87; letter from Seton to Cecilia Seton, October 1, 1803, ES , 81.

41. ES , 103-4, entry for November 19, 1803.

42. ES , 105, entry for November 19, 1803.

43. ES , 106, entry for November 20, 1803.

44. ES , 109, entry for November 23, 1803.

45. Ibid.

46. ES , 110, entry for November 25, 1803.

47. Ibid.

48. ES , 118, entry for December 12, 1803.

49. ES , 113, entry for November 30, 1803.

50. ES , 120, entry for December 13, 1803.

51. Ibid.

52. The importance of Seton's friendship with the Filicchis in dismantling her anti-Catholic prejudices is underscored by her later acknowledgment to Amabilia Filicchi: "Oh my the Worshipper of images and the Man of Sin are different enough from the beloved souls I knew in Leghorn to ease my mind in that point, since I so well knew what you worshipped my Amabilia" ("The Journal for Amabilia Filicchi," entry for August 28, 1804, ES , 160. The epigraph for this section is in ES , 131).

53. "The Italian Journal," ES , 126.

54. ES , 132. In her 1807 Journal of the Soul , written for Cecilia Seton, Elizabeth Seton recorded a dream that suggests how profoundly she had internalized the specter of Protestant disdain: "What are the workings of Fancy in sleep whose secret finger weaves the web—it was but a web—yet I sensibly pressed the Adored Host close to my heart after saving it from the hand of one who ridiculed my faith in its Divine essence" ( ES , 220). The nightmarish counterpart to Seton's bodily identification with Catholicism is recorded in an 1808 entry in "Journal for Cecilia Seton": "In the midst of my uneasy slumbers I was busily employed in extracting my large Crucifix from the back of StM —it was fastened with needles which were under the back bone—what an imagination" ( ES , 234).

55. ES , 133.

56. "The Journal for Amabilia Filicchi," ES , 161.

57. See Dirvin, 163n.

58. "Journal for Amabilia Filicchi," entry for February 27, 1805, ES , 165.

59. Ibid., 166.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 167, 227. On Jesus as her asylum, cf. Father Tisserant's advice to Seton: "You have told me that the Heart of Jesus was your refuge. . . . Retired within that asylum, what have you to fear?" (as quoted in Dirvin, 189). On the Eucharist as medicine, Seton later exclaimed: "That he [Jesus] is there . . . is as certainly true as that Bread naturally taken removes my hunger—so this Bread of Angels removes my pain, my cares, warms, cheers, sooths, contents and renews my Whole being—" ( ES , 226-27).

62. Letter from Seton to Cecilia Seton, April 3, 1808, ES , 255.

63. Seton, "Dear Remembrances," ES , 352.

64. As quoted in Dirvin, 331.

65. Dirvin, 294.

66. "Annina's Diary," unpublished ms. in Seton archives, Order of the Sisters of Charity, Emmitsburg, Maryland.

67. Ibid.

68. Seton to Antonio Filicchi, April 18, 1820, ES , 290.

1. Isaac Hecker, Questions of the Soul , 282.

2. As quoted in Katherine Burton, In No Strange Land , 39. Burton provides no source for her quotation of Ripley.

3. Letter from Orestes Brownson to Isaac Hecker, March 28, 1851, in The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , 148 (hereafter referred to as Correspondence ).

4. Orestes A. Brownson, The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience , in Works , 5:81. Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson , notes of this passage: "By almost common consent reference is here made to George Ripley" (98).

5. Letter from George Ripley to Isaac Hecker, September 18, 1843; as quoted in Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker , 91.

6. Letter from Sophia Ripley to Ruth Charlotte Dana, April 29, 1849; as quoted in Henrietta Dana Raymond, "Sophia Willard Dana Ripley," 88-89.

7. Letter from Sophia Dana Ripley (hereafter referred to as SDR) to Ruth Charlotte Dana (hereafter referred to as RCD), Brook Farm, 1846, Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society. The epigraph to this section is from a letter (SRD to RCD, November 5, 1855) in the same collection. Unless otherwise stated, subsequent quotations from letters of SDR to RCD are from the Dana Family Collection and follow the original without editorial comment.

8. SDR to RCD, September 1846. See also Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 , on Ripley's decision to convert shortly after Brook Farm's turn toward Fourierism: "Intellectually, her decision was perfectly consistent with the community's new commitment to universal unity" (196).

9. SDR to RCD, September 1846.

10. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement , 185n., briefly discusses the compensatory function of Ripley's correspondence with her cousin Charlotte. My account of Ripley's isolation is developed almost entirely from her confidential letters to Charlotte.

11. SDR to RCD, Brook Farm, September 12, 1846.

12. My account of Brook Farm's demise is drawn from Charles Crowe, George Ripley ; and Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm .

13. SDR to Ralph Waldo Emerson, July 29, 1843, as quoted in Lisette Riggs, "George and Sophia Ripley," 174.

14. Isaac Hecker, Aspirations of Nature , 17.

15. SDR to RCD, September 3, 1847.

16. According to Raymond, "Sophia Willard Dana Ripley," 62.

17. SDR to RCD, June 7, 1848.

18. SDR to RCD, September 15, 1848.

19. SDR to RCD, February 21, 1860. Ripley's revised aesthetic extended from church interiors and liturgical calendars to the deathbed scenes of Protestant friends. Recounting the death from tuberculosis of one such friend, the ex-Transcendentalist wrote, like Seton before her, of the desolating absence of ritual help in Protestant dying: "The clouds from chloroform dispersed wonderfully—but the cloud from the spirit, there was no assured hand to lift & the sun could not shine out as it set in this world, I trust to rise in glory. 'A glory to which' Aunt E truly said, 'the poor child was a stranger.' A short time before death, after an attack of suffocation, she said, 'Netta it is impossible but I must die, it is impossible but I must die'—& Netta answered Don't be afraid dear Helen & this was her last sacrament!" (SDR to RCD, June 28, 1851).

20. SDR to RCD, August 5, 1856.

21. SDR to RCD, 1855, "Dearest Daughter," Dana Family collection.

22. Caryl Coleman, "A Forgotten Convert," Catholic World 122, no. . 728 (Oct. 1925-Mar. 1926). St. Alphonsus's celebration of the Virgin repeatedly emphasized her maternal, merciful intercession for all who addressed her. Speaking of God's division of his government, Alphonsus explained: "Justice He reserved to Himself; mercy He transmitted to Mary, ordaining that all mercies which come to man should come through Mary's hands, and that these mercies should be distributed according to her choice." See Ligouri, The Glories of Mary , part 1, 14.

Like Seton before her, Ripley intensely identified with such a merciful (and powerful!) maternity.

23. SDR to RCD, September 26, 1850.

24. SDR to RCD, letter fragment [18557] beginning, "Do you know I can see."

25. SDR to RCD, undated letter from New York headed "Octave of St. John."

26. SDR to RCD, [18557] dated only "Monday Morning."

27. SDR to RCD, December 9, 1855.

28. SDR to RCD, Flatbush, [18557], "Ever dear little Mother & Sister."

29. Count de Montalembert, The Life of St. Elizabeth, of Hungary, Duchess of Thuringia , trans. Mary Hackett, 2d edition (New York: D. and G. Sadlier and Co., 1888), 91. St. Elizabeth was Sophia Ripley's favorite saint. Melville was also attracted to this saint and sent Montalembert's biography to his favorite cousin, Kate. Joseph G. Knapp, Tortured Synthesis , notes that Melville's correspondence during the 1870s revealed a "special fondness for Catholic saints" (99).

30. SDR to RCD, September 18, 1857.

31. SDR to RCD, May 1, 1848.

32. SDR to RCD, July 9, 1848.

33. "When I crossed the threshold of Our Holy Church," Ripley wrote of Brownson, "I did not expect to meet this form of evil, a Protestant Reformer, at the very outset, within those Sacred precincts. I thought I had left them forever behind. If abuses have crept into the Church, may they be reformed quietly & with all delicate consideration, by experienced & thorough Catholics but not to be trumpeted in the ears of new converts, by these rash 86 undiscriminating fanatics. There is a slumbering power in the church which should protect us & other new converts from their rude assaults for no man does us so great an injury as he who gives us a painful association with those we revere, or undermines our confidence in them. It is a cruel robbery" (SDR to RCD [Flatbush, 1855]).

34. SDR to RCD, March 1848.

35. For an intriguing analysis of Emerson's rhetorical and psychological management of the perils of emotion, see David Leverenz, "The Politics of Emerson's Man-Making Words," PLMA 101, no. 1 (1986): 38-53.

36. SDR to RCD, October 26, 1850.

37. SDR to RCD, June 28, 1851.

38. SDR to RCD, December 2, 1853.

39. SDR to RCD, September 26, 1858.

40. SDR to RCD, May 1, 1848.

41. SDR to RCD, May 17, 1848.

42. SDR to RCD, March 1848, Flatbush, Long Island.

43. SDR to RCD, June 1, 1851.

44. SDR to RCD, November 28, 1853.

45. SDR to RCD, June 28, 1851.

46. Isaac Hecker, "Tribute to Mrs. George Ripley," as quoted in Raymond, "Sophia Willard Dana Ripley," appendix.

47. SDR to RCD, Flatbush, 1855.

48. SDR to RCD, December 6, 1857.

49. SDR to RCD, July 5, 1860.

1. Isaac Hecker, diary entry, January 11, 1843, in The Diary , ed. John Farina, 89 (hereafter referred to as Diary ).

2. As quoted in Walter Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker , 344 (hereafter referred to as Elliott). The epigraph for this section is excerpted from a reminiscence by Father Hecker as quoted in Elliott, 81.

3. Hecker to Mon. T. R. Pere [Rev. Michael Heilig, C.S.S.R.], May 30, 1848; as quoted in The Brownson-Hecker Correspondence , 20 (hereafter referred to as Correspondence ).

4. Diary , 149. John Farina attempts to normalize such entries of Hecker's by suggesting that by "spiritual presence" Hecker intends his former close friends at Brook Farm. I would argue, however, that Hecker indeed means the spiritual presence of spiritual bodies since his diary and other writings frequently record an intimate sense of the presence of the supernatural as personal beings.

5. This phrase is recorded in a reminiscence of 1888 by his first biographer, Walter Elliott, 82.

6. Hecker to Brownson, December 14, 1843, in Correspondence , 79.

7. As quoted in Elliott, 32.

8. Diary , 141; see also the entry on 129.

9. Diary , 135.

10. Hecker to his family, May 2, 1844; as quoted in Elliott, 141.

11. Diary , 142.

12. Diary , May 19, 1844, 188.

13. Diary , November 1843, 147.

14. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities , 284.

15. The Reasons of John James Maximilian Oertel, Late a Lutheran Minister for Becoming a Catholic , 10. Even Catholic converts dedicated to a rational explication of their decision at times portrayed themselves as victims of unknown influences; Bishop Ives, for example, explained

his conversion experience as emanating from an anonymous persuasion: "In the outset, let me recall the fact, that for years a mysterious influence, which I could neither fully comprehend nor entirely throw off, visited my mind, unsettling its peace and filling it with yearnings for something in religion more real than I had hitherto experienced" (13).

16. As quoted in Elliott, 108.

17. Joshua Huntington, Gropings after Truth , 144.

18. Ibid., 111.

19. Hecker to Brownson, February 19, 1860, in Correspondence , 211. I have followed the editors' practice, and hence Hecker's frequent abbreviation of "Christian" to "Xtian" appears without bracketed explanation in my text, as does spelling in subsequent quotations.

20. John Milner, The End of Religious Controversy, in a Friendly Correspondence between a Religious Society of Protestants and a Roman Catholic Divine , 122-23. Completed in 1802, Milner's "letters" were a highly influential contribution to Catholic-Protestant polemics. Most of the points by Huntington, Ives, and Brownson can be found in Milner's volume. See, for example, Milner's assertion that Protestants have been inculcated from infancy in the belief that their faith is scriptural. "Hence, when they actually read the Scriptures, they fancy they see there what they have been otherwise taught to believe" (62). For Milner's influence on American converts, see Robert Gorman, Catholic Apologetical Literature in the United States, 1784-1858 , 53ff. Gorman relies on Peter Guilday, "Two Catholic Bestsellers," America 54 (1935): 177-79, for his information on Milner. Further references to Milner are given parenthetically in the text.

21. John Adam Moehler [Johann Adam Möhler], Symbolism; or, Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants , 312. Further references to Mõhler are given parenthetically in the text.

22. Diary , January 14, 1845, 289.

23. The Escaped Nun and Other Narratives , 269.

24. Isaac Hecker, Questions of the Soul , 289.

25. As quoted in Elliott, 134.

26. "Ritual," Christian Examiner , 69 (1860): 321.

27. Hecker to his family, June 11, 1844; as quoted in Elliott, 151.

28. As quoted in Elliott, 224.

29. "The Two Sides of Catholicism," Catholic World 1, no. 1 (1865): 746.

30. Diary , [Spring?] 1844, 206-7.

31. Hecker to Brownson, August 26, 1869, in Correspondence , 277. Hecker is referring to Emerson's "Speech at the Second Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Association at Tremont Temple, Friday, May 28,

1869." Brownson cites Emerson's address in his "Free Religion," Catholic World 10, no. 56 (1869).

32. Isaac Hecker, Aspirations of Nature, 3 .

33. "Christmas in Philadelphia," Harbinger 6 (Jan. 1, 1848).

34. As quoted in Elliott, 227.

35. Hecker to his family, June 1844; as quoted in Elliott, 165.

36. Hecker to Brownson, August 17, 1844, in Correspondence , 111.

37. Hecker, diary entry, August 20, 1844; as quoted in Elliott, 187.

38. Thoreau to Hecker, August 14, 1844; as quoted in Autobiography of Brook Farm , 121.

39. As quoted in Elliott, 296. Describing Hecker's success as a missionary priest, Sophia Ripley wrote to Ruth Charlotte Dana: "He instructs at 6 a.m. every day and by five the Church is so thronged by all classes of persons that it is difficult to get in" (letter dated April 1851, Dana Family Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society).

40. John Farina, An American Experience of God , 141.

41. Hecker, The Church and the Age ( 1887); as quoted in Elliott, 313.

42. As quoted in Elliott, 376.

43. As quoted in Elliott, 381.

44. As quoted in Elliott, 385.

45. For Hecker's difficulties at mass, see memorandum entry for Christmas 1885, quoted in Elliott, 413. The citation is from Elliott, 405.

1. James Freeman Clarke, "Orestes A. Brownson's Argument for the Roman Catholic Church," Christian Examiner 47 (1849): 247.

2. Orestes A. Brownson, The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience , in Works , 5:158-59. Subsequent references give pages only.

3. Brownson, The Convert , 16. The lawyer and future governor of Oregon Peter Burnett was among several converts whose vision of Catholic community clearly derived from Milner, Moehler, and Brownson. In 1859 Burnett published an eight-hundred-page treatise on the reasonableness of his new faith. For Burnett, Protestantism maintained "'its painful preeminence' . . . [only] through mighty crimination, and by wading through the moral slaughter of the Christian world" (Peter H. Burnett, The Path Which Led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church , 725). Such crimes demanded extensive countermeasures. With an attention to detail bordering on mania, Burnett expounded the analogies between Anglo-American jurisprudence and the Roman Catholic church to prove the reasonableness of the latter's structure and claims. For lawyer Burnett, the "mixed codes of jurisprudence" (12) represented by the oral and written traditions of common and statutory law operated

like tradition and Scripture in the church. With a somewhat perverse ingenuity, he argued that English law confirmed the validity of papal claims. "That tradition . . . is a safe, certain, and efficient means of transmission, is demonstrated in the case of the common law of England" (15). In Burnett's reasoning, a tribunal of last resort (like the United States Supreme Court) was necessary to construe the meaning of Christ's law; the Savior naturally provided for such a judicial body by establishing the Roman church. Because Christ, as legislator, spoke the language of precedent and legislative clarity, the scriptural passage granting Peter the keys to heaven fully justified the Roman church's literal interpretation of that passage.

Brownson correctly predicted that most readers would be offended by Burnett's conversion narrative precisely because of its insistent (and voluminous) logic. Said Brownson of American readers: "They are not accustomed to find or to expect certainty in matters of religion, and they feel it a sort of insult to their understanding when you present them a religion which demands and seems to have certainty" (Brownson, "Burnett's Path to the Church," in Works , 20:95). Bent on demonstrating that Christ intended a perfect and visible unity, Burnett consciously opposed the era's various experimental utopian communities, which based themselves on the ties of intuitive affinity between their members, with his vision of the church as "that sacred union which holds men together, not merely as constituents of a community, but as members of one mystical body; not cemented together by the sense of mutual want, or strung one unto the other by the ties of the flesh, or the interests of the world, but firmly united by the headship of One, in whom the sublimest thought reposes, as in its proper sphere, and inly communicating through the circulation of vital influences, passing from one unto the other" (59).

In striking contrast to the liberal Protestant investment in skepticism and ambivalence, Burnett's argument forcefully appealed to the validity of human testimony and mediation. Not only Christ and his apostles but one's fellow creatures were worthy of trust. In his chapter on miracles, for example, he accuses Hume and Paley of a "distrust of human veracity" (245) and seeks to defend the Church's confidence in those who witnessed the prodigies of her saints. To do otherwise was to consign oneself to a mean-spirited dimension reserved for those who chose one or another Protestant sect. "The convert from the Catholic Church seems conscious that he is embracing an inferior and lower grade of faith, and adopting a colder and more suspicious estimate of human veracity" (738).

4. The Convert , 143.

5. Ibid., 48.

6. Ibid., 4.

7. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," in Works , 4:142. See also Donald Capps, "Orestes Brownson," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7 (1968); Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson's Early Life ; Thomas R. Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson ; and John A. Coleman, An American Strategic Theology , especially chap. 4.

8. Orestes A. Brownson, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (Boston, 1836), in Works , 4:54. See also Brownson to Victor Cousin, November 15, 1836: "Your work Sir, found me sunk in vague sentimentalism, no longer a sceptic, but unable to find any scientific basis for my belief. I despaired of passing from the subjective to the objective. You have corrected and aided me; you have enabled me to find a scientific basis for my belief in Nature, in God and Immortality, and I thank you again and again for the service you have done me" (as quoted in Daniel R. Barnes, "An Edition of the Early Letters of Orestes Brownson," 135).

9. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," 155.

10. Ibid., 156.

11. Ibid., 169, 165.

12. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Elizabeth Peabody, as quoted in Ryan, Orestes A. Brownson , 112.

13. Brownson, "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus," 129.

14. Brownson, The Convert , 140.

15. "Catholic Literature in the United States," Metropolitan 2 (1854): 69.

16. Orestes A. Brownson, "Bancroft's History of the United States," in Works , 19:411. Years later, in The American Republic , Brownson would describe humanism as a Satanic conspiracy: "His [Satan's] favorite guise in modern times is that of philanthropy. He is a genuine humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism is Christianity, and that man is God" (362).

17. Orestes A. Brownson, "Archbishop Spalding," in Works , 14:513.

18. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Mission of America," Brownsoh's Quarterly Review (1856), in Works , 11:567-68.

19. Orestes A. Brownson, "The Philosophy of History," in Works , 4:419. The article originally appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review 12 (1843). See also Thomas A. Ryan, "Orestes A. Brownson and Historiography." R. G. Collingwood, in The Idea of History , aptly describes the confusion surrounding humanity's role in history and the Christian notion of Providence:

In one sense man is the agent throughout history, for everything that happens in history happens by his will; in another sense God is the sole agent, for it is only by the working of God's providence that the operation of man's will at any given moment leads to this result, and not to a different one. In one sense, again, man is the end for whose sake historical events

happen, for God's purpose is man's well-being; in another sense man exists merely as a means to the accomplishment of God's ends, for God has created him only in order to work out His purpose in terms of human life. But this new attitude to human action gained enormously, because the recognition that what happens in history need not happen through anyone's deliberately wishing it to happen is an indispensable precondition of understanding any historical process. (48)

20. Brownson, ''Bancroft's History," 386.

21. Orestes A. Brownson, The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography , preface. Further references to this volume are given parenthetically in the text.

22. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia , for Augustine "the struggle between faith and unbelief is the master theme of world history" (s.v. "Ecclesiastical Historiography"). On Brownson and Hawthorne, see Carolyn L. Karcher, "Philanthropy and the Occult," in Howard Kerr et al., eds., The Haunted Dusk , 69-97.

23. "Notices of Recent Publications," Christian Examiner 56 (1854): 449.

24. William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland Showing How That Event Has Impoverished and Degraded the Main Body of the People in Those Countries . . . (London, 1824), Letter IV.

25. Orestes A. Brownson, "Cardinal Wiseman's Essays," Brownson's Quarterly Review (1853), in Works , 10:452.

26. Cobbett, Letter IV.

27. Orestes A. Brownson, "Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism," Brownson's Quarterly Review 3 (1846): 382.

28. Ibid., 383.

29. Orestes A. Brownson, The American Republic , 423.

30. For Brownson's views on America becoming "permanently Protestant," see Thomas T. McAvoy, "Orestes A. Brownson and American History," Catholic Historical Review 40 (1954).

31. Brownson to Hecker, August 25, 1870, in Correspondence , 291.

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni . The title of the concluding chapter, "Heaps of Human Bones," is from this work (194). Further citations appear parenthetically in the text. Nathaniel Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, in Letters of Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor , 99-100. My argument diverges from that of critics who claim that the novel's partial disclosures and competing pictorial, sculptural, and verbal representations induce readerly partic-

ipation. For the best example of such an "optimistic" reading of the novel, see Jonathan Auerbach, "Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and Romance-Writing in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. " Marga C. Jones, " The Marble Faun and a Writer's Crisis,'' attributes the novel's awkwardness to Hawthorne's "uncontrolled acceptance of his material" (109). In fact, it is quite the reverse, an inability to approach it. For an excellent discussion of the biographical factors pressing against the composition of this novel, see Gloria C. Erlich, Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction . Walter Herbert develops a brilliant reading of The Marble Faun in relation to the Hawthorne family's entangled struggles with female "purity," the Roman winter, and Una's malaria during the novel's composition. See his "Erotics of Purity," Representations 36 (1991): 114-32.

2. See Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne ; Joel Pfister, The Production of Personal Life ; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance ; T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). For a reading of the novel that explores the "dilemma of American individualism" (159), see Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation , 153-84.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks , 49.

4. My analysis of the imitative relationship between antebellum Catholics and Protestants draws on the following works: René Girard, " To Double Business Bound "; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols ; Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). I am especially indebted to Burke's notion that "competition itself is but a special case of imitation" (131). The epigraph for this section is from "Modern Saints, Catholic and Heretic," North American Review 77 (July 1853): 165.

5. Elizabeth Seton' Representative Selections , ed. Kelly and Melville, 356.

6. This separatism infiltrated from Protestant sentimental writing into Catholic novels. For the adaptation of Catholic novelists to the devices of Protestant popular fiction as well as a discussion of anti-Catholic fiction, see David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction , 180-87.

7. Orestes A. Brownson, "R. W. Emerson's Poems," Brownson's Quarterly Review (1847), in Works 19:202.

8. "A Brief History of Weglij Hockwer, a Jewess of Constantinople, Who Became a Convert to the Catholic Religion, and Was Baptised during the Holy Week of 1853," Metropolitan 1 (1853): 567.

9. James Freeman Clarke, "Orestes A. Brownson's Argument for the Roman Catholic Church," Christian Examiner 48 (1849): 230.

10. "My Confession," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 10 (1855). References to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

11. "Modern Saints, Catholic and Heretic," North American Review 77 (July 1853): 158.

12. "One of the Nunns," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 19 (1859). References to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

13. "Modern Saints, Catholic and Heretic," 147. Further references to this article are given parenthetically in the text.

14. George Ripley, The Doctrines of the Trinity and Transubstantiation Compared , 3.

15. As quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , 179-80.

16. Edward Beecher, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture , 50.

17. William B. Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology with their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions , 697.

18. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind , 17, 43.

19. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Anatomist's Hymn," in Collected Works , 1:175. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from 1:176.

20. Maudsley, 162.