By Alison Shell

After the Reformation, England's Catholics have been marginalised and excluded from utilizing revealed media for propagandist ends. in its place, they became to oral media, corresponding to ballads and tales, to plead their case and retain touch with their group. development at the transforming into curiosity in Catholic literature which has built in early glossy reports, Alison Shell examines the connection among Catholicism and oral tradition from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. that allows you to get well the textual lines of this minority tradition, she expands canonical obstacles, anecdotes, spells and well known verse along extra conventionally literary fabric. In her archival examine she uncovers many vital manuscript assets. This booklet is a crucial contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and tradition of the Catholic neighborhood and should be of serious curiosity to students of early sleek literature, background and theology.

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Ephraim Udall, Noli Me Tangere (1642), engraved title page. 29 30 Oral Culture and Catholicism religious houses and secul ar occupancy: sevent eent h-cent ury at t it udes The sacrilege narrative, like the more conventional ghost story, demands that its listeners engage with questions of fictionality and belief. The fact that neither kind of story was universally believed made them particularly tempting subjects for fictional treatment via individual authorship or collective anecdotal embroidery, though the term ‘fictional’ seems inadequate as a description of all possible audience reactions; paradoxically, the audience must have gained a frisson both from the suspension of disbelief, and a halfentertained fear that the stories might be true after all.

43 A dialogue is going on here between Walpole as imaginative conceiver of supernatural events – famously, The Castle of Otranto was inspired by a nightmare – and the equally imaginary but elaborately rationalistic activities of Walpole as self-styled editor and translator, distancing himself from his own invention. Abbey ruins, sacrilege narratives 35 Walpole, together with all his family, would have had particular cause to be familiar with the History of Sacrilege. 44 The first gives the history of some of England’s great families at the time of the Reformation; the second concentrates on the environs of Spelman’s own home in Norfolk.

Moreover, much Gothic writing, in the late eighteenth century and after, has no bearing on sacrilege at all, other than a standard invocation of awe at ruins. But as has been commented, ‘Gothicists seized materials wherever they found them’,48 and in the genealogy of Gothic, the sacrilege narrative must surely rank as one of its ancestors. The early twentieth-century writer John Meade Falkner, in The Nebuly Coat (1903), is one of the rare exponents of Gothic who returns to source. In this novel, the noble house of Blandamer has impropriated lands among its possessions, and the plot relates the downfall of Lord Blandamer.

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