Intestine Enemies: Catholics in Protestant America, 1605–1791 ed. by Robert Emmett Curran (review)

Robert Emmett Curran, distinguished scholar of early American Catholic history and a professor emeritus of history at Georgetown, has produced a valuable and effectively-organized single-volume documentary sourcebook on English-speaking Catholicism in the early modern Atlantic world. Intestine Enemies, drawing on the editor's comprehensive familiarity with the available primary sources, is a welcome contribution to a growing, yet still inadequately studied, field of early British-American Catholic history.

Intestine Enemies is organized into ten sections. "Beginnings, 1605–1629" focuses on Jacobean and Carolingian-era English colonies from the perspectives of English Catholic planters in Newfoundland, as well as non-Catholics fearing Catholic inroads into their territories. This section includes documents reflecting Roman Propaganda Fide fears and concerns about anti-popery and the spread of Protestantism into North America. "Peace and a New Order, 1781–1791," the final section dealing with the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, includes familiar texts such as selections from Bishop Carroll's correspondence and the "Address from the Roman Catholics of America" to President Washington, yet also includes more obscure material such as the correspondence of Joseph Mosley with his sister Helen on the subject of his conflicted feelings about the "new order" for Catholics following the American victory. The intervening sections cover the themes of the planning and settlement of Maryland, the establishment of the first instances of religious toleration in the English-speaking world, the upheavals of and effects of the Glorious Revolution upon not only Maryland's Catholic leadership but New York's as well, and debates over Catholic rights and liberties during the Revolutionary era. Of particular value are the sections including material from the British West Indies, often neglected in volumes covering early American Catholic history. The selections also include a diverse array of genres: private letters, newspapers, legal documents, internal political documents, sermons, and others. Likewise, throughout the entire collection a wide variety of authorial and thematic perspectives are included, both Catholic and Protestant, clerical and lay, theological and political, private and public, elite and popular. Admirably, in addition to its more inclusive Atlantic World scope and approach to early American Catholic history, Intestine Enemies is not conceived from the perspective of "anticipating" the eventual emergence of the U.S. republic, but approaches each period covered on its own terms, reflecting the particular contemporaneous concerns and anxieties of each generation and geographical area treated.

Intestine Enemies is obviously intended, as its editor notes, to function as a complement to his excellent recent monograph Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1571–1783 (2014). It is ideal for use in both upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses in history and religion, either along with Curran's monograph, or without. A great deal of archival material which will be largely unfamiliar to many readers—material not otherwise easily procured—is included in the volume. For its inclusion of a broader geographic and thematic scope, it is like Curran's monograph on the same subject, refreshingly notable if for nothing else. With its historically-rich commentary and contextualization, and its high production values throughout, it is difficult indeed to imagine a better version of this book.