Roads to Rome

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the foreign practices of the immigrant church is the focus of Jenny Franchots cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about Americas origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant maidens and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowellwriters who sympathized with Romanism and used its imaginative properties in their fictionfurther demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.This title is part of UC Presss Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Presss mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.