“Amorous Intrigues”: Gender, Sexuality, and Patriarchy in Eighteenth-Century Anti-Catholicism

abstract: This article examines salacious anti-Catholic publications in the eighteenth century. It finds that self-styled “true” stories of lascivious, predatory priests sold very well in the American market. Reveling in stories of sexual misconduct, anti-Catholics used salacious storytelling to argue that the Church was not only a religious and political threat but a poison within society, one that resulted in patriarchs without authority and wives without chastity. Using language designed as much to titillate as to educate, writers relished their villains’ sexual escapades and delighted in their own superiority. Mimicking the bawdy literature of the day, they identified women as sexual and seductive, lingered on bodies and sexual details, and used the language of farce as much as that of monstrosity. Thus, even as eighteenth-century antipopery told familiar stories about popish sexual perversion, it did so by defining Catholic women and the emasculated Catholic patriarch as central problems of popery: figures to be scorned and condemned, not pitied or saved. Such positioning helped shape the distinctive tenor of eighteenth-century antipopery in the Anglophone world as intimate, popular, consumable, virulent, and, simultaneously, perversely entertaining. In doing so, this anti-Catholic literature celebrated emerging values of Protestant women’s sexual modesty at the same time that it immersed readers in a bawdy print culture.