English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young (review)

For centuries, English Protestants have been accustomed to assume that English Catholics have a special relationship to the supernatural. While Protestant faith was interiorized and godly (or, in later iterations, enlightened or disenchanted), Catholics still dwelt in a twilight world of ghosts and goblins, of witches and purgatorial spirits, of wonder-working relics and the “magic of the medieval church.” In English Catholics and the Supernatural, Francis Young’s resolute determination to understand the Catholic supernatural through Catholic voices provides a corrective to historiographies that, while not themselves necessarily Protestant, have internalized Protestant assumptions about unreformed Catholic superstition. Against such assumptions, Young asserts that the “self-consciously missionary Catholicism” of Counter-Reformation England defined itself against both Protestant novelty and medieval superstition. Despite the “contrary impression given in virtually all anti-Catholic literature of the period, [one finds] the sustained survival of a distinctively Catholic tradition of measured scepticism concerning supernatural phenomena across three centuries” (25). While Young inevitably pays considerable attention to such works as Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), his primary sources are works of Catholic apologetic, mission, or memoir, including Jesuit annual letters, the annals of English monks and nuns living in exile, and the writings of English theologians at Douai or Louvain. Largely missing, as Young notes but does not sufficiently lament, are the voices of ordinary English Catholic men and women.

For the purposes of this study, Young allows the term “Catholic” to encompass a wide range of confessional positions: from recusants and missionary priests, to occasional conformists or “Church Papists” to crypto-Catholics loyal at heart to the church of Rome while outwardly conforming. Despite this lability of definition, Young does make one clear distinction, between the “sub-Catholic survivalism” of popular religion and the “missionary faith of self-conscious Catholics” (12). The former, which included residual fragments of Latin liturgy in charms and spells, was “part of a vestigial pre-Reformation popular religion” shared by the less reformed members of both confessions (33). This distinction proves crucial throughout the book—most notably in Young’s claim that no English Catholics were ever charged with witchcraft. Though many accused witches, such as Agnes Waterhouse in 1564 or the Pendle Hill witches in 1612, did exemplify “sub-Catholic survivalism,” the single case turning on explicit Catholic involvement (Samlesbury 1612) devolved into accusations of Popish subornation of the young. Priestcraft and witchcraft were mutually exclusive categories—the one grounded in fakery and the other in real, terrifying supernatural power.

Young acknowledges that the supernatural realm encompassed angels, blessed visions, and miracles, but his study focuses on what he calls “the ‘night side’ of the invisible world: ghosts, witchcraft, and demonic possession” (5). The book is organized accordingly: after a historiographical introduction there are two chapters on “superstition,” one on ghosts, two on witchcraft, and a final chapter on exorcism. The book lacks a conclusion summing up its arguments or tracing the history of English Catholic supernaturalism post-1829. This is disappointing, as the moderately skeptical tradition here explored was fated to wither before the unapologetic, jubilantly supernaturalist Catholicism of the Victorian period and later.

Chapters 1 and 2 examine the contested definition of “superstition” among English Catholics from the Marian Counter-Reformation to Emancipation. Through the seventeenth-century Catholic thinkers walked a fine line, repudiating “superstition” while defending the reality of miracles and the efficacy of holy water against Protestant mockery. Two schools emerged: missionary Jesuits exulted in miracles and exorcisms as displays of God’s power, while the loose grouping of English Jansenists, Blackloists, and a silent majority of secular priests tended to downplay signs and wonders as distractions from inward, authentic piety. By the 1750s this latter group sought, through “Aristotelian mechanism,” to squeeze the supernatural from the world and reconcile Catholicism with Enlightenment: the English Sorbonne professor Luke Joseph Hooke, for example, obviated the relevance of miracles, insisting that “no one should believe in the Catholic faith...