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 Franchot's cultural, literary and religious history of Protestant attitudes to Roman Catholicism in 19th-century America. Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's 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 Lowell - writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction - further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.