Epistemology of the Cloister: Victorian England’s Queer Catholicism

The cultural construction of Roman Catholicism in England shifted in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from being constituted as a series of acts to being understood as a subjectivity experienced as authentic interiority. Even as various British Victorian figures, for example John Henry Newman, engaged in particular ways with both nonmajoritarian religious and sexual identities, Catholicism thus prefigures the admittedly uneven consolidations of sexuality that Michel Foucault has identified in the last third of the century. Thus an understanding of religious history is central to a history of sexuality.