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130BOOK REVIEWS households scattered across the hilly countryside, were illiterate, and were known (even today) for their distinctive falk culture. More than anything else, officials were defeated by the region's geography and demography. Poska presents her findings in six chapters. The first three chapters are based largely on the libros de visita which were maintained by each parish, supplemented by references to Ourense's synodal constitutions and modern studies by Spanish historians and anthropologists. Once every few years, the bishop's representative would conduct a whirlwind investigation of every aspect of the parish's administrative and religious life. Poska has organized the visitors' directives to cover the sacred geography of the diocese, reform of the clergy, and reform of popular religious customs. The remaining three chapters examine the customs surrounding the three life-cycle sacraments of baptism, marriage, and extreme unction. Here, parish record books and testaments are used for several studies of name-giving, seasonality of marriages and conceptions, and death rituals and pious bequests. Throughout, Poska discusses her findings in relation to findings from recent studies of the Catholic Reformation and local religious life in other Spanish dioceses and around Europe. It is not difficult to believe that the Catholic Reformation made little headway in this remote diocese. At the top, bishops came and went all too frequently, and at the bottom, parishes were too poor to attract a qualified clergy. The GaIicians ' own cultural, economic, and geographic isolation ensured that changes of any sort came slowly to the region. One wishes, however, that the author had provided more historical background, as the region is little known even inside of Spain, paid closer attention to institutional structures that could affect the outcome of reform efforts, and employed a larger variety of sources, such as trials from the Inquisitorial and episcopal courts, and local literature,which could add depth and color to her findings. SaraT. Nalle William Paterson University Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1600-1745. By Raymond D. Tumbleson. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. Lx, 254. $54.95.) This book, developed from a dissertation by an English professor at Kutztown University, examines anti-Catholic rhetoric during its heyday in England. Tumbleson had already published versions of substantial portions of this study in five essays or articles. Among his six chapters, Chapter 2, concerning Milton, Marvell, and Popery, and Chapter 4, called "The Science of Anglicanism," carry exactly, or nearly exactly, the titles of earlier publications. On this account, literary scholars familiar with them likely would not have found his useful multidisciplinary approach (Harry Dickinson of Edinburgh was among the first to BOOK REVIEWS131 employ it in the 1970's) as innovative as I did. The reading was tough-going for me, mainly because of Tumbleson's elaborately constructed prose, but nevertheless , quite rewarding. Tumbleson's theme is hardly unknown or unexpected. Every student of the period knows the degree to which English Protestants (Anglicans and Dissenters alike) wallowed in anti-Catholic sentiment and how that engine drove the nation toward mercantilism, heightened nationalism that was fed by a conviction that Catholicism was foreign and tyrannical (France, Italy, and the Papacy ), provided a justification for some reconfiguration of Anglicanism, helped to precipitate the Glorious Revolution, and led English Protestants to equate Protestantism with freedom from foreign domination and relief from autocratic , centralized government. What began essentially with the publication of the Elizabethan Foxe's Book ofMartyrs, which commanded attention for centuries and had two fundamental themes—the satanic evil of Rome and the sacredness of monarchy—was promoted by strenuous Calvinists under the early Stuarts and became a national obsession during the Restoration and Augustan ages. The likelihood, and then the reality of the Catholic James II's succession galvanized Protestants to such a degree that the doctrinal differences among them became secondary to their common hatred of Catholicism. We realize today (the late John Kenyon convinced me of its truth) that the unconstitutionality ofJames II's reign played as much a role in his deposition as fears of a Catholic dynasty and Catholic religious pre-eminence. But in their irrational promotion of anti-Catholicism it mattered nothing to the enemies of...

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