William-Henry Ireland, T. I. Horsley Curties, and the Anti-Catholic Gothic Novel

“Whatever Bigots Say”:

“…39 The Gothic obsession with " lecherous monks, evil or persecuted nuns, dank torture chambers in haunted ruined abbeys, and wily Jesuits" reflected, according to Hoeveler, both the long-term effects of modernization and Enlightenment secularization and more immediate political tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the late 1700s. According to Hoeveler, hundreds of Gothic novels published from the mid-1700s to the late nineteenth century contain what she terms a "gothic ideology," i.e., "an intense religious anxiety, nay a hysteria, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France."…”