The decades between unification and World War I saw opera in Italy absorb multiple literary and musical influences from beyond the Alps, including exoticism and naturalism and, successively, the operas of Meyerbeer and Wagner. For the generation of the giovane scuola this was often characterised as a crisis of national musical style and identity, strongly linked to the post-Risorgimento imperative to create a compelling civic and political culture for the new nation. The religious question, and the battle between the Church and state, posed a further set of questions in developing this national identity, which can be traced through opera's engagement with foreign influences. Examining new Italian operas ranging from Franchetti's Asrael to Puccini's Tosca, this chapter will suggest that librettists and composers approaching religious themes were keenly aware of the need to create a vocabulary of religious images and sounds which the predominantly Catholic audiences across Italy could recognise, even when adopting ideas from French or German literary and musical models. Ultimately, this period was crowned with the arrival of Parsifal on Italian stages, when Catholic readings of Wagner's symbology and echoes of Palestrina promoted a particularly Italian interpretation of the opera’s meaning and musical language.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and “the novel” by focusing on a cross-section of religious questions having to do with belonging (domestic, national, global) and identity. It begins with a consideration the Evangelical Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), moves to a cluster of novels that contemplated domestic religious differences in the form of Catholics and Jews, and concludes with a shift outside the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom and Ireland to examine early novelistic responses to overseas missionary movements, which raised challenging questions about empire, race, and religious community.

Chapter 1 examines the process of suppression in the 1530s, using memory as a tool for rethinking our approach to this episode. With sensitivity to the language employed by the Henrician government, it characterises the dissolution as a long and uncertain process that can be separated into two main phases: the ‘reformation of the monasteries’ and the ‘surrender of the monasteries’. It pays particular attention to the emergence of narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression because, it argues, these are the themes that modern scholarship has inherited from its largely Henrician source base. It is the success and longevity of this triumphalist narrative that the remainder of the book sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. This chapter also notes the emergence of early critiques of the dissolution – Catholic, conservative, and evangelical – which are traced alongside the narratives propagated and perpetuated by Tudor governments with a view to highlighting the complexity and diversity of the early modern memory of the dissolution. Crucially, the chapter highlights the prevalence and persistence of the idea that the monasteries were irredeemably corrupt across different confessional perspectives, as well as across time and space.

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

Chapter Four explores the rear-brain faculty of memory, and considers both its increasingly ethical function and depictions of adolescent girls’ brains as key negotiators of this work. In Hamlet and Shakespeare and George Wilkins’ Pericles, Ophelia and Marina remember and testify to narratives of the past that are intimately connected to questions of moral leadership and to the preservation of suppressed communities and individuals. Analysis of Pericles begins with Wilkins’ contemporaneous prose account of the play in which he graphically describes the rape of Antiochus’ daughter by her “unkingly” father — an act that the play excludes. The chapter argues that Wilkins’ account is a suppressed history of tyrannical misgovernment that emerges in the play-text through its stagings of paternal violence and the recuperative memory-work of fourteen-year-old Marina. Next, the chapter explores Ophelia’s role in preserving and distributing the memory of regicide in Denmark’s recent history as well as the shared and suppressed histories of Catholics living in Shakespeare’s England. The chapter also argues that Ophelia evokes the exiled Catholic girls, training to commit themselves to God, who were no longer a part of English people’s authorized day-to-day spiritual lives and practices.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has long had a reputation for obliquity, and in approaching her work we will often find she withholds as much as she discloses. Ní Chuilleanáin’s frequent ekphrastic poems and recourse to metaphors of framing are also ways of rephrasing the central question of what a poem is, and how to approach lyric form afresh. Her focus on art works frequently transports the reader to a pre-Renaissance world, which Ní Chuilleanáin finds temperamentally conducive in her warm visions of Mediterranean Catholicism, and in the stress in her critical writings as well as her poetry on questions of embodiment and revealed truth. Music and architecture are frequent reference points, sometimes via the metaphysical poets, before Ní Chuilleanáin puts her distinctive and personal stamp on these themes. Hers is a complex art, but one whose façade of secrecy provides the necessary theatrical backdrop while Ní Chuilleanáin probes and reinvents received ideas of the woman poet in the Irish tradition.

Women have paid a historically high price under the patriarchal Irish Catholic church. The wrongs of the church do not detract, however, from the rich vein of poems written by Irish women informed by Catholic spirituality. Traditionally, women have been scapegoats for the fallout from patriarchal theocracy, and any resistance has begun with acts of bodily reclamation. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill reaches into Celtic tradition for paradigms of female empowerment that overturn more recent misogynistic palimpsests, and Medbh McGuckian filters an anti-colonial poetics through an engagement with her radical and ecstatic strain of Catholic spirituality, re-envisioning the leaders of the 1798 rebellion as ‘feminine Christs’. Earlier women poets engaging with religious material have fallen into neglect – Katharine Tynan’s Catholicism is often cited in evidence against her – and large bodies of work now pass unnoticed, such as the heavily female contributions to the Jesuit-edited The Irish Monthly. Restoring their work to visibility, and that of more recent writers such as Eithne Strong and Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, helps us read the work of Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian in a more informed and spiritually literate context.

If the eighteenth century was dominated by a French Enlightenment idea of Europe, following the French Revolution and then the Napoleon Wars, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of a German Romantic idea of Europe, dominated by strains of cultural nationalism. On the one hand, German Romantics such as Novalis looked back nostalgically to medieval Christendom for the model of a united Europe; on the other hand, thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Schlegel brothers dreamed of a Europe dominated by German culture. The roots of the shift from universalism to nationalism lay in the work of writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who challenged French Enlightenment universalism with an insistence upon cultural differences. While Herder also challenged the prevailing Eurocentrism and Euro-universalism, the post-Napoleonic era saw both a growing nationalism across Europe and an intensifying European imperialism that would culminate in the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3 explores the complex relation between the idea of Europe and that of nationalism in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the ways in which the ostensibly antithetical ideas of the universal and the national were integrated into the idea of Europe.

A shared biblical past has long imbued the Holy Land with special authority as well as a mythic character that has made the region not only a revered spiritual home for Muslims, Christians, and Jews but also a source of a living sacred history that continues to inform present-day realities and religious identities. This book explores the Early Modern Holy Land (1517–1700) as a critical place in which many early modern Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound and disruptive change. The Ottoman conquest of the region, the division of the Western Church, Catholic reform, the integration of the Mediterranean into global trading networks, and the emergence of new imperial rivalries transformed the Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terrae Sanctae), the venerable Catholic institution that had overseen Western pilgrimage since 1342, into a site of intense intra-Christian conflict by 1517. This contestation thrusts into relief the Holy Land’s importance both a frontier and sacred center of an embattled Catholic tradition, and in consequence, as a critical site of Catholic renewal and reinvention.

The interplay between Christianity and international law … The terms “Christianity” and “international law,” as well as their relationship to each other, are not easy to understand – at least where there might be consensus. The aim here is to diagnose the elusiveness of these phenomena, to explain why this is important to understand, and to set the stage for further investigations.

So why is it that we cannot come to a consensus about this issue of “Christianity and international law”? If you are inclined, pause a moment with this text and build a list of possible reasons … Some contrarians might answer that we actually do have a relative consensus, that most reasonable people, at least with the opportunity to learn, find common agreement over most things and whatever differences simply reflect the diversity, the spice, the irreducible uniqueness of individual personalities and cultures.

A dominant theme running throughout Heaney’s writing was the tension between art and political commitment, between personal vision and the demands of the community. The relationship between his writing and his politics is complex but insistent. Raised in a Catholic family in County Derry with a broadly 'anti-Partitionist stance', he was always alert to social, political and sectarian difference. He claimed his family background was nationalist, with little emphasis on the Republican tradition. His first overtly political journalism appeared during the Civil Rights period. He later found “emblems of adversity” in poetic images of bog bodies which he described in mythic method poems, but he wrote many historical, allegorical and parable poems which were infused with a political undercurrent. Generally he was wary of becoming co-opted by political dogma, but his deepest impulses were compassionate and allied with personal and artistic liberty, human dignity, political freedom, and civil rights.

This chapter traces the arc of Heaney’s progression from faithful and engaged Catholic in the 1940s, 191950s and even 60s to a more sceptical stance in the years following Vatican Council II. It sees Station Island (1984) as the axial moment where disbelief is fully acknowledged. Still, the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland make a cultural departure from Roman Catholicism moot, while the poet’s respect for a believing Czesław Miłosz and others cautions against total rejection. Heaney’s tortured conflict with Philip Larkin’s 'Aubade' points to the attraction of the latter’s post-religious stance even as the narrowness of its focus is achingly condemned. A consciously unorthodox Heaney exits with most of the rites of a more liberal but declining Irish Catholic Church that celebrates his passing without rigorously scrutinizing his creedal beliefs.

In the early seventeenth century, an English Catholic priest whose identity remains obscure penned a remarkable sequence of forty-four sonnets based on the Marian titles of the Litany of Loreto. The sequence relies heavily upon tradition for its content (the author goes so far as to annotate his sonnets with sources for his claims about Mary) and upon repetition for its themes and verbal texture. In these sonnets, the poet seeks to reanimate Marian devotion in order to combat what he sees as the disruptions and discontinuities of the Reformation. His poems studiously avoid offering new ideas, for novelty is, in his view, the project of the Protestant Reformation. Instead, his sequence proposes that litany prayer and devout repetition constitute a form of sacred memory, one modelled on a liturgical understanding of memory and re-presenting, that may ensure the continuity of tradition despite the Reformation's threats.

This chapter explores the post-Reformation afterlives of two rock crystal reliquaries. It examines the biographies of these material artefacts ejected from churches and monasteries in tandem with liturgical items manufactured for following the advent of Protestantism. It investigates how these reliquaries navigated the upheavals of the sixteenth century and were repurposed for the clandestine Catholic community. Such containers for sacred relics were converted into table salts for secular domestic use and continued to be cherished as antiquities long after the Dissolution. Some of these objects were later recycled again as vessels for preserving holy relics, bequeathed in memory of the deceased or presented to mark a life event such as birth, baptism or marriage. This further phase of reuse was enhanced by awareness of their previous purpose and proximity to relics. Some were later given by recusants to religious houses overseas in an effort to preserve the patrimony of the Catholic faith. Such sacred objects reflect the way in which symbolic and spiritual meaning was endorsed by the imaginative memory accrued by subsequent generations within Catholic families and institutions.