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Anti-Catholicism and Obscene Literature: The Case of Mrs. Mary Catharine Cadiere and its Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Colin Haydon*
Affiliation:
University of Winchester

Extract

As every historian knows, religious minorities and other ‘out-groups’ have repeatedly faced accusations of sexual misconduct and its consequences: seduction, the breaking of families, promiscuous fornication, participation in orgies, ‘unnatural vice’, incest, sadism and masochism. In the second or third century, Minucius Felix recorded such charges against the early Christians: they make ‘love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust, a promiscuous “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest’. The Cathars and other medieval heretics were accused of promiscuous, incestuous orgies. Across early modern Europe, witches at their sabbats, it was learnedly pronounced, copulated with the Devil himself and, indiscriminately, with unknown members of both sexes, even parents, brothers and sisters.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012

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References

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90 Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors, 2nd edn (London, 1974), 220 Google Scholar. A comparison might be made with the corrosion of respect for the eighteenth-Century French monarchy produced not only by respectable Enlightenment critiques but also by pornographic libelles: Robert Darnton.’The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France’, P&P, no. 51 (1971), 81–115; Blanning, T.C.W., The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford, 2002), 390, 4002, 41113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.