Roads to Rome : The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism

'Roads to Rome is a cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America. Jenny Franchot recounts the response of native-born Protestant Americans toward the'foreign'practices of the'immigrant church'--A response characterized by both dramatic hostility and fascination.''Franchot begins by analyzing romantic Protestant historiography; she includes an extended treatment of the century's major historians of American empire, William Hickling Prescott and Francis Parkman. Their stories of America's historical development returned obsessively to the question of Catholicism, as it was carried in the minds of cultures of Mesoamerican and North American Indians and as it manifested itself among the Europeans who came to conquer and convert them.''From historical accounts of Catholicism and Indian captivity, Franchot turns to the hugely popular tales of convent incarceration, narrative exposes that spawned the mob destruction of an Ursuline convent outside Boston in 1834. Such improbable tales of Protestant'maidens'who escaped the lecherous tyranny of mother superiors and father confessors extend the tradition of the Indian captivity narrative into the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism - a development central to the captivity fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.'