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Intestine Enemies
Catholics in Protestant America, 1605-1791: A Documentary History
Edited by Robert Emmett Curran
Imprint: Catholic University of America Press
Intestine Enemies: Catholics in Protestant America, 1605-1791, is a documentary survey of the experience of Roman Catholics in the British Atlantic world from Maryland to Barbados and Nova Scotia to Jamaica over the course of the two centuries that spanned colonization to independence. It covers the first faltering efforts of the British Catholic community to establish colonies in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; to their presence in the proprietary and royal colonies of the seventeenth century where policies of formal or practical toleration allowed Catholics some freedom for civic or religious participation; to their marginalization throughout the British Empire by the political revolution of 1688; to their transformation from aliens to citizens through their disproportionate contribution to the wars in the latter half of that century as a consequence of which half of the colonies of Britain's American Empire gained their independence.
The volume organizes representative documents from a wide array of public and private records—broadsides, newspapers, and legislative acts to correspondence, diaries, and reports—into topical chapters bridged by contextualized introductions. It affords students and readers in general the opportunity to have first-hand access to history. It serves also as a complement to Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574-1783 (The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), a narrative history of the same topic.
Robert Emmett Curran is professor emeritus at Georgetown University
"This wonderful collection of primary documents is long overdue but well worth the wait. Robert Emmett Curran's Intestine Enemies includes an impressive collection of documents that chronicle Catholic experience in early America, as well as chapter essays with astute introductory comments on each theme and time period."
~Laura M. Chmielewski, author of The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier
"Robert Emmett Curran has once again done valuable work for the field of American Catholic Studies. Not content to offer us merely a useful narrative on the colonial Catholic experience, as he did in Papist Devils, Curran has painstakingly assembled the primary source documents used to construct that narrative. He has annotated these documents and given readers a context for each of them. He has also explained how the documents relate to one another and to the overall narrative on British colonial Catholicism. The resulting volume is an effective classroom tool and an important resource for researchers."
~Maura Jane Farrelly, author of Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity