Hellish enfleshment: embodying anti-Catholicism in early modern English culture

This dissertation focuses on a term that I call “hellish enfleshment”: early modern English descriptions of Catholicism that connect anti-papal sentiment to the human body. I examine this term in the work of preachers, poets, political writers, monarchs, and playwrights who not only approach anti-Catholic discourse through corporeal metaphors, but also attempt to link Catholicism with malevolence, disease, political dissension, and discordant sound. Exploring the significance of the human body in anti-papal writing, I investigate how a range of early modern texts located in differing spheres enflesh dramatists’ conceptions of the Catholic body in their immediate historical setting. The embodiment of anti-Catholic discourse, I argue, occurs within the early modern English playhouse, as it is in this locale that playwrights attempt to affect playgoers’ bodies through sensory phenomena inexorably shaped by contemporary anti-Catholic attitudes. Examining several dramas that explicitly embody anti-papal discourse, the majority of this thesis analyses texts that engage with early modern corporeality through literal and metaphoric allusions to the body: Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607), Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (1606), the anonymous Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600), and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600). These plays, I argue, engage with the human body or reflect on its role in regard to fashioning anti-Catholic sentiment. Throughout this thesis, I attempt to examine discrete moments and cultural idiosyncrasies in these playtexts, utilizing contemporary religious, medical, and political works to investigate the experiential qualities of an anti-Catholic discourse whilst contextualizing this evidence through references to early modern literature. Rather than analyse Catholicism as an international religio-political institution in early modern England, I have chosen instead to examine Catholicism as a domestic phenomenon in the imagination of English playwrights.