Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834

By Sam Hirst

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1832 reassesses the relationship between contemporary theology and the Gothic. Investigating Gothic aesthetics, depictions of the supernatural and portrayals of religious organisations, it explores how the Gothic engages with contemporary theologies, both Dissenting and Anglican. Moving away from the emphasis on either a monolithic Protestantism or on the Gothic as a secular mode, it shows the ways in which the Gothic exploration of the transcendent and the obscure cannot be separated from the diverse theologies of its day. The project maps how the Gothic not only reflects but actively engages in the theological debates and controversies contemporary to its efflorescence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839981555

Book preview

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834

ANTHEM STUDIES IN GOTHIC LITERATURE

Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature incorporates a broad range of titles that undertake rigorous, multidisciplinary and original scholarship in the domain of Gothic Studies and respond, where possible, to existing classroom/module needs. The series aims to foster innovative international scholarship that interrogates established ideas in this rapidly growing field, to broaden critical and theoretical discussion among scholars and students, and to enhance the nature and availability of existing scholarly resources.

Series Editor

Carol Margaret Davison – University of Windsor, Canada

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834

Sam Hirst

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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© Sam Hirst 2023

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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2023932278

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-153-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-153-9 (Hbk)

Photograph/image of: Black and white ink illustration of a nun and other archetypal religious gothic characters, entitled: H Hirst Commission;

Cover image credit: Jenni Coutts

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. ‘Christ Is Not Divided’: Theologies of Toleration and the Depiction of the Catholic

The Context for Tolerance

Monstrous Monks and the Over-Definition of Anti-Catholicism

Monasteries, Cults and the Echo of our own Iniquities

Convents and the Possibility of Tolerance

The Inquisition, the Confessional State and the Rejection of Intolerance

A Question of Tolerance

2. ‘Serve the Lord with Fear and Rejoice with Trembling’: Gothic Theologies of the Sublime

Beyond the Burkean Sublime

A Theological History of the Sublime

Reading the Theology of Gothic Aesthetics

Theo-aesthetic Codes and Theological Debate

3. ‘For Satan Himself Is Transformed into an Angel of Light’: The Aesthetics of Demonic Depiction

Theorising the Demonic Sublime

The Perverse Sublime

The Sublime of Judgement

Racialised Demonologies

A Devil of Mysterious Appearance

4. ‘Your Sons and Your Daughters Shall Prophesie’: Gothic Dreams

The Nature and Purpose of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams

Dangerous Dreams

Secular Dreams

5. ‘Test the Spirits’: Ghosts and Apparitions of the Gothic

A History of Ghost Belief

The ‘Explained Supernatural’

The ‘Real’ Supernatural

6. ‘If Ye Live after the Flesh, Ye Shall Die’: Embodied Immortality

Immortal Wanderers

Gothic Wanderers

Dead Men Walking

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The initial research for this project was undertaken as part of my PhD studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. I am indebted to their generous studentship and the supervising support of Professor Dale Townshend for both the space and the encouragement to complete this project. I was able to complete this project thanks to my position as Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool and am indebted to them for both resource access and encouragement in the final stages.

I have been particularly lucky to receive invaluable feedback on this project from many excellent scholars and Gothic enthusiasts. I would particularly like to thank the Sheffield Gothic Reimagining team for giving me a space to both present and receive feedback on my research over the last 5 years. I am also thankful to Dr David Miller, Dr Emma Liggins, Professor Angela Wright, Dr Sonja Lawrenson, Dr Alison Milbank, and Dr Jonathan Greenaway for their feedback at various points in the project. I am also thankful to everyone who ever listened to my research in its rougher stages and asked questions or gave encouragement which pushed my project forwards.

I am particularly grateful to all the Romancing the Gothic scholars, enthusiasts and friends. You got me through the early stages of the pandemic, provided an incredibly supportive Gothic community, encouraged me to think in new ways and confront new frameworks of interrogation, and have generally been the inspiration and support for the final stages of my project. Special thanks to Lindsay Williams for xer assistance in proof-reading, Dr Jonathon O’Donnell for their feedback on my investigation of demonologies, Dr Madeline Potter for her extensive feedback on several parts of the project, Dr Melissa Julian-Jones for her support during the hardest stages, Dr Caroline Duvezin for her encouragement and Leeah Odom for cheerleading the final processes of preparation for publication.

Thanks must also go out to Dr Jenni Coutts for the artwork which graces the cover. It was inspired by a number of Gothic scenes and texts.

INTRODUCTION

At the centre of Charles Lucas’ Gothic novel The Castle of St Donats; or, The History of Jack Smith (1798), there are two enigmas: the identity of the eponymous hero and the mysterious spectre of the castle well. In typical Gothic fashion, the two mysteries are, of course, related. Jack Smith is none other than the son of a French Duke, the legitimate owner of the Castle of St Donats, who has been living at the bottom of the castle well for twenty years, pretending to be a ghost (as you do). The last thing you expect in the middle of this climactic scene is a long theological disquisition, but that is exactly what we get with the Duke declaring:

I abhor all separating names of sectaries and distinction; I am neither of Paul of Apollos or of Cephas, but of Christ. Luther or Calvin, Wesley or Priestley, Papist, Protestant, or Dissenter are nothing to me; that pure Gospel which Christ first taught, is the sole rule of my conduct. (1798, III, 148)

The clergyman Freeman, standing by, vigorously agrees with the sentiment and ‘not a little inflamed with the rapture of the subject’, cries ‘this is the pure spirit of Christianity’ before conscientiously adding:

I fear my zeal has carried me too far, and that I myself shall be liable to that censure I was about to bestow upon others. While my weak frame, my imperfect thoughts, my confused senses, all tell me I am dependant on a Superior Being, shall I pretend to determine what he ought to do, or what he can do? (149)

Shall he, in other words, institute the boundaries of God’s Church or his work in the world. It is a striking discourse, situated, as it is, at the denouement of the tale’s multiple mysteries. A discussion of the virtues of theological tolerance and theo-political toleration interrupts the revelation, tinted with a fear of arbitrary and fanatical definitions of ‘true Christianity’, mindful of usurping the place of the ineffable mysteries of Divinity through an over-reliance on human reason, and placed within a context of Divine providence and omniscience. The centrality of these discussions to the apotheosis of the novel suggests their broader centrality to the work. Lucas, an Anglican clergyman, practiced a limited form of toleration in his own religious practice – engaging with and befriending local Dissenting ministers and communities while ceaselessly campaigning against the extension of Catholic Emancipation (Moody 2011). To find theological, and particularly theo-political, concerns in the work of this Anglican minister may seem to prove little about the theological valence of the Gothic more broadly. However, the preceding example demonstrates the ability of the Gothic to both reflect and engage in contemporary theological and theo-political debates. Although not all Gothic novels address theological questions so overtly (or obtrusively), it is one of many that do.

Despite frequent claims for the Gothic as a secular mode, it is (arguably throughout its history and certainly in its early stages) a genre deeply invested in the transcendent, the supernatural, the Divine and its counterpart, the demonic. The Gothic is riddled with appeals to a sublime which reveals a ‘present God’ (Radcliffe 1795b, I, 74); prophetic and demonic dreams; wandering spirits; and miraculous manifestations of Divine ‘providence’ ranging from giant fists to the odd castle door blowing open to announce the arrival of the true heir. It would be overly simplistic to suggest a single explanation for this range of supernatural, preternatural, sublime, providential and miraculous elements in Gothic fiction. It is not the aim of this book to claim a form of reactionary religiosity, attempting to fight back against Enlightenment rationalism with the aid of awe-inspiring mountains, Divinely ordained spectral intervention and demonic scare-mongering. However, this book resists the assumption of an increasingly sterile secularity, which denies and reviles anything beyond an impoverished conception of providence and a universalised materialism. Instead, we must take theological and theologised understandings of the world as part of the context for these depictions, always bearing in mind the complexity of contemporary discourse and the rival claims of overlapping and antagonistic theologies.

The period that saw the rise and decline of the early Gothic – 1764–1834 – was one of significant religious change, in which the theological remained at the forefront of both public and private life. The continuing primacy of the Anglican (England and Wales) and Presbyterian Churches (Scotland), as well as the tense relationship of the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church in Ireland, the involvement of these churches in political affairs, and the influence of Christian belief on almost every aspect of life continued to form the backdrop of the era. The period also saw the rise and spread of Evangelical Christianity and both Enthusiastic (such as the Methodists) and rational Dissenting groups (such as the Unitarians) continued to proliferate in an atmosphere of continuous theological debate. There was a dynamic discourse on religious tolerance that came to fruition in the removal of the Tests and Corporation Acts (1828) and represented a changing relationship between church and state. The often-tense societal reaction to this growing tolerance, as manifested in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and the anti-Unitarian Birmingham Riots of 1791, suggests the continued importance of religious questions in the cultural imaginary. The impact of the anti-religious discourse of the French Revolution, creating suspicion both of theological (and political) radicalism and of deist/atheist discourse, mediated the spread of Enlightenment rationalism.

Gothic criticism has a tendency to elide the importance and diversity of this theological background. It is increasingly a critical commonplace to view the early British and Irish Gothic as either a reflection of secularisation or a part of the secularising process (Hoeveler 2010, 2; Geary 1992, 12). The Gothic is thereby rendered as a constituent part of a wider Enlightenment project in which religious experience is replaced with the ‘secular analog’ of sublime affect (Doran 2015, 12); superstitious models of religion (usually coded as Catholic) are replaced with a broadly Protestant ‘providential deism’ (Hoeveler 2010, 3); and a belief in the supernatural is gradually substituted for medicalised discourses which explain the ghostly, the prophetic and the ‘miraculous’ in natural terms. These readings depict a Gothic that mirrors, or forms a catalyst for, a larger societal change towards the secular. Religious paradigms of interpretation, critics such as Emma Clery, Robert Geary and Diane Hoeveler suggest, were gradually replaced with de-theologised explorations of the fear of death, of power, and of the unknown or supernatural, which had previously been central components of the ‘religious hypothesis’ (Rivers 2000, 239), that is, the postulation of the existence of a Divinity as an explanatory tool.

While these readings highlight important aspects of early Gothic literature – the supernatural as spectacle, the importance of providential vs. miraculous world views, the dependence on natural explanation in the terror Gothic – there are a number of issues created by this ‘secularising’ approach that this book seeks to explore and counter. First, the (theo-) historical context is largely ignored. The depiction of a rationalist progression fails to engage with the proliferation of Dissenting churches or the rise of the Evangelical Revival, which started within the Anglican Church in the 1730s, manifested in the rise of Methodism, and continued into the nineteenth century until Evangelical Christianity became the predominant mode not only in ‘the three great Evangelical movements of Congregationalism, Methodism, and the Baptists’ (Watts 1995, 3) but ultimately in the Anglican Church. The period did not witness the simple replacement of religion with secular reason. This is not to deny the growth of atheism or deism but rather to insist on the acknowledgement that Christianity, in its many different manifestations, continued to be a ‘lived religion’ (Shaw 2006, 9) for the majority. As Michael Watts asserts, ‘religion pervaded education, shaped morals, motivated philanthropy, controlled leisure, permeated literature, inspired poetry [… and…] decided political loyalties’ (1995, 1). We should not ignore the vitality and influence of theological thought in the period when addressing Gothic texts.

A second issue is the frequent rhetorical construction of a monolithic Protestantism (in opposition to Catholicism) as the de facto ‘theology’ of the Gothic. By positing the Gothic as a ‘cultural production’ (Miles 2014, 124) that repeatedly stages ‘the slaying of superstition’ (Catholic-coded) in a form of a ‘Gothic Riff’ (Hoeveler 2010, 1–6), these theories impose an interpretative framework that ignores the abundance of differing theological views in favour of a postulated dichotomy between the secular (immanent) and religious beliefs (transcendent). This partially erases the proliferation of differential denominational standpoints. In recognising this proliferation, I should note, we must take care to acknowledge that an exclusive focus on denominational theological divisions ignores the flexibility of personal belief; denominational affiliation may suggest but cannot determine an author’s theological stance. A concentration on denominational theologies may also obscure the parities, points of agreement, reciprocal discussion and connections between different denominations. I will, therefore, rarely speak of beliefs as the necessary or exclusive correlative of a specific denomination. However, an awareness of the ongoing inter- and intra-necine debates of the period is vital to recognising and engaging with the continued primacy and complexity of religious discourse in public and private life, in which immanent and transcendent understandings not only compete but become symbiotic forms as religion absorbs new conceptions of the world into its frameworks of interpretation.

The third issue is a result of the aforementioned elision of theological diversity: mis-readings and oversimplifications of the theological. A monolithic conception of Christianity (or of Protestantism) ‘risks homogenizing and caricaturing beliefs’ (Knight and Mason 2006, 3) and leads to ‘theologically reductive’ readings (Greenaway 2021, 10). The conflation, for example, of providence with a broadly deist approach partially dismisses the importance of the historically relevant and fraught distinctions between ‘providence’ (God’s providential ordering, upholding and directing of the world), ‘special providence’(God’s intervention within the remit of natural laws) and the ‘miraculous’ (Divine intervention which interrupts or ‘breaks’ natural laws) and between the preternatural (rare but ultimately within the remit of the existing order of the universe), supernatural (breaks or supersedes this ‘natural order’) and natural. This lack of distinction between relevant and contested theological stances impedes the ability to meaningfully engage with how these distinctions are navigated in texts like Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), in which, as we will see, both preternatural and supernatural readings of its prophetic dreams are possible. A framework of special providence, relying principally on what appear to be secondary causes (dreams), is depicted alongside miraculous events (self-opening doors), raising questions, as we will see, about Divine action, free will and eschatology. Secularising accounts run the risk of simplifying and distorting the texts’ theological nuance.

While Gothic criticism frequently elides the theological valence of texts, in turning my focus to the theological, I am building on the work of a consistent but minor thread in Gothic criticism. Early critics, such as Montague Summers in The Gothic Quest (1938), J. M. S. Tompkins in The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (1932) and Devandra Varma in The Gothic Flame (1957), assume an engagement with the theological: a reflection of ‘widespread beliefs’ in the supernatural, a ‘steadily intensifying interest in questions of life, death and immortality’ and the relation of the ‘human and the divine’ (Varma 1957, 26/16). However, these accounts, while assuming an underlying theological valence, do not seek to articulate it in detail.

The most frequently recurring focus of theological enquiry is the Gothic’s depiction of the Catholic. The first significant intervention in this debate was that of Mary Muriel Tarr in Catholicism in Gothic Fiction (1946). Her thesis is not the currently commonplace assumption of anti-Catholicism, but rather an enquiry into the depiction of the Catholic that notes an incipient anti-Catholicism frequently inflected by a pro-tolerance discourse and an aestheticized appreciation of the ‘Catholic’ as it appears in the Protestant imaginary. In later works, such as George Haggerty’s Queer Gothic (2006), Maria Purves’ The Gothic and Catholicism (2009) and Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology (2014), there is an emphasis on the Gothic’s relation to the Catholic as either essentially antagonistic (Hoeveler, Haggerty) or involved in a positive re-evaluation (Purves). While usefully highlighting the importance of the depiction of the Catholic to the Gothic, these studies produce a Protestant/Catholic binary that undervalues the way in which depictions of the Catholic intervene in wider theological debates about toleration and broader considerations of religious practice and doctrine: areas which this book will seek to explore.

A limited number of works focus more exclusively on a theological examination of the Gothic. Joel Porte’s ‘In the Hands of an Angry God’ (1972) discusses a range of texts by sceptical writers (William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Matthew Lewis) as a reflection of a ‘genuine expression of profound religious malaise’ (Porte 1974, 43), arguing that Gothic terror is a specifically theological terror. This emphasis on an underlying theological dread is echoed in Judith Wilt’s Ghosts of the Gothic (1980), which suggests Gothic terror is compounded of religious guilt; a conflicted relationship with theologies of judgement, salvation and damnation; a fear of the demonic and the demonic/fallen self; and the image of an angry God. While both Wilt and Porte usefully map the ways in which Gothic texts reflect an underlying set of theological assumptions with which they may be at odds, there is an obvious limitation to these accounts in their focus on theological terror. They usefully illuminate the intense theological discomfort of texts like Lewis’ The Monk (1796); however, by moving past a focus on specific manifestations of the Gothic and the imposition of ‘terror’ as the dominant theological discourse, we may broaden the field of theological enquiry.

Perhaps the most influential of the theological critics of the Gothic remains Victor Sage whose Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (1988) depicts the Gothic as a uniquely Protestant genre. Sage identifies the imagery of the ‘dark house’, anti-Catholic rhetoric, an emphasis on an internalised conscience and self-reflection (and a subsequent horror of the externalised conscience of the Catholic confessional), theories of testimony and a rationalised approach to the miraculous as ‘Protestant’ aspects of Gothic texts. My work seeks to build on this acknowledgement of the Gothic’s entrenchment in Protestant theology. However, this study moves beyond Sage’s monolithic Protestantism to an exploration of the theological plurality found in Gothic texts and the Gothic’s potential to reflect, engage with and participate in theological controversy. My work, like Mark Knight and Emma Mason’s influential work on nineteenth-century literature and theology, acknowledges ‘a divergence of belief and practice among different denominations’ (2006, 4/7). There is a growing modern corpus of theological work on the Gothic, notably by critics Alison Milbank, Jonathan Greenaway and Madeline Potter, that seeks to delve into the theological nuance of the Gothic. Milbank’s work explores the peculiarly Anglican theologies underlying several common Gothic tropes (the depiction of the Catholic, narratives of usurpation related to Protestant re-imaginings of the Reformation, providence, aesthetics of theological melancholy) and the influence of Calvinist Presbyterian theologies on the Scottish Gothic (‘Calvinist anthropologies’ in the demonic double). Greenaway engages with the possibilities of ‘imaginative approaches to theology’ (2021, 2) found in various canonical texts, such as Frankenstein (1818). Potter’s work focuses on specific theological underpinnings of nineteenth-century Gothic texts. My study, however, is the first to focus specifically on the period of the early Gothic, rather than a broader overview of the long nineteenth century. While my work, like Greenaway and Milbank’s, holds that the Gothic ‘expresses and challenges theological truths’ (Greenaway 2021, 2), my approach focuses not on imaginative theology as a critical approach but on the theological debates and divisions of the period of the early Gothic primarily as a historical context. I look at the Gothic’s potential to engage with, interrogate, critique and support various contemporary Dissenting and Anglican theologies, illuminating the importance of contemporary theological debates to an understanding of the subtexts, tropes and techniques of the early Gothic.

In order to undertake such work, it is necessary to engage with an historicised study of the relevant theological discourses of the period and the ways in which they are reflected in Gothic texts. These discourses must first be placed within the context of the theological climate of the period, for which purpose I use both secondary survey materials and contemporary sermons, pamphlets and treatises to explore Anglican and Dissenting views and history. The root of this study is a close engagement with contemporary discourses across a range of theological subjects related to key elements, strategies and tropes of the Gothic: toleration, aesthetics, the supernatural, the ghostly, dreams, immortality and the relationship of the body and soul. I have traced these debates, paradigms of interpretation and representative tropes in the Gothic case studies I have undertaken. Each chapter engages in a review of Gothic criticism, offers an overview of the historical theological context of the debate and presents close readings of relevant Gothic texts.

This study seeks to engage with a broad range of Gothic productions from Britain and Ireland. At times, it is possible to illustrate the specificity of different national trends (the theo-politics of the Irish Gothic; the Scottish Gothic’s concern with extreme Calvinism). However, overall, this book looks more broadly at the texts produced (usually by Protestant writers) and consumed in Britain and Ireland, seeking the parities which bridge national boundaries producing fundamentally interconnected traditions. In choosing my primary texts, I have not been confined by genre although the majority of the works studied are novels. However, by including poetry, plays, short stories and chapbooks, we gain an overview of Gothic production, tracing common theological concerns across generic boundaries. In order to avoid a concentration on one specific theological ‘type’ of text, there is a range of texts across the period from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) to Mary Shelley’s ‘The Mortal Immortal’ (1834), from both writers considered pivotal to the development of the genre, such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, and minor writers representing less familiar manifestations of the Gothic, such as Charles Lucas and Catherine Selden. I have deliberately sought to balance male and female writers and ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ Gothic texts in order to both map different theological trends and trace similarities. In order to avoid an emphasis on writers emerging from one specific denomination, I have chosen writers who represent a variety of denominational positions, such as T. J. Horsley Curties (High Anglican), James Hogg (Scottish Presbyterian) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Unitarian/Presbyterian).

The first chapter reviews the question of the Gothic’s depiction of the Catholic, mapping the existing debate between pro-Catholic readings, anti-Catholic readings and a view of the Gothic’s depiction of the Catholic as representing a mixed Anglican position of ‘critique and appropriation’ (Milbank 2018, 5). Using reference to a variety of Gothic texts, the chapter illustrates how these critical paradigms both illuminate underlying concerns encoded in portrayals of the Catholic and fall short of fully engaging with their complex theological and theo-political underpinnings. My own investigation of the case studies used will demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing between political and theological paradigms of interaction with the Catholic, and of focusing on the Gothic’s use of Catholic depictions to reflect contemporary concerns beyond Anglo–Catholic relations. Building on the work of Irene Bostrom and Mark Canuel, I suggest that, in order to move beyond the reductive tendencies of the anti-Catholic/pro-Catholic binary, we must engage with the Gothic through the lens of contemporary toleration debates, not simply as a political issue (as in Bostrom and Canuel) but as a fundamentally theological one.

The second chapter begins a two-part exploration of theo-aesthetics by investigating the use of the sublime. Through an overview of contemporary aesthetic discourse, I demonstrate the ways in which the sublime is part of a theo-aesthetic discussion about Divine self-revelation in the natural world. Moving past the emphasis on the influence of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), I suggest that Joseph Addison and John Dennis offer theo-aesthetic models which strongly influenced eighteenth-century Gothic writers. Building on Natasha Duquette’s claims in Veiled Intent (2016) that those marginalised from theological discourse in the period, particularly women, encoded creative theological work in their aesthetic strategies, this chapter explores how this manifests and the possibilities of theo-aesthetic analysis for the Gothic through a detailed case study of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

The third chapter engages with the theological difficulties posed by the demonic sublime in the light of the relation, outlined in Chapter 2, between the Divine and the sublime. By engaging with close readings of Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and ‘The Isle of Devils’ (1833), and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806), I suggest that two theo-aesthetic paradigms – perverse sublimity and the sublimity of judgement – offer a means of decoding the underlying theological motivations of sublime demonic depictions. No theological study of these texts would be complete without an investigation of the racialised demonologies that they reflect. This chapter uses Lewis’ ‘Isle of Devils’ as a primary case study and maps the ways in which Lewis both utilises and shows considerable unease with the theological and demonological construction of Blackness in his demonic depictions, balancing the Romantic re-reading of the Satanic alongside an inherited tradition of racialised demonology. The chapter ends by contrasting the English model of the sublime Devil and his connection to the special-case Faustian pact with the tradition in the Scottish Presbyterian Gothic of the demonic double as represented in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In doing so, it suggests that the respective traditions utilise different theo-aesthetic strategies to encode differing theological concerns, with the English sublime tradition focusing on Divine/demonic relations and questions of theodicy, free will and hierarchical relations, and the Scottish Presbyterian tradition of demonic doubles emphasising the relation of the human and the demonic, and both reflecting and critiquing conceptions of total depravity and double election.

The fourth chapter challenges the ‘secularising’ view of the Gothic as depicting a supernatural disconnected from actual belief through an investigation of the supernatural dreams of the Gothic. This chapter reviews the changing discourse around dreams in the eighteenth century and demonstrates the survival of theological frameworks of interpretation that reflect wider theological discourses concerning the immortality of the soul, the possibility of both Divine and demonic action in the world, and providence. Using examples from Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Italian (1796), Lewis’ The Monk, Dacre’s Zofloya, James Hogg’s ‘A Singular Dream’ (1811), the anonymously published ‘The Astrologer’s Prediction, or the Maniac’s Fate’ (1826) and Mary Shelley’s ‘The Dream’ (1831), I investigate how Gothic texts reflect the changing discourse around dreams, maintaining the possibility of theological valence while revealing the impact of the changing medicalised conception of dreaming.

The fifth chapter continues with an investigation of the Gothic deployment of the supernatural in the form of ghosts. It maps the ghost debates of the eighteenth century and challenges the dominant assumption that depictions of the ghostly were alienated from contemporary theological frameworks of understanding. This chapter first broaches the phenomenon of the ‘explained supernatural’ and contests the dominant critical conception of a single ‘explained supernatural’ by mapping three different forms in Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Eliza Parsons’ The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and Karl Friedrich Kahlert’s The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794). Radcliffe’s affective strategies emphasise an extra-fictional interpretative hesitation; Parsons frames the seemingly supernatural as a natural mystery to solve; and Kahlert implicates both reader and character in their own superstitious self-deception. In each case, the depictions of the ‘explained supernatural’ are underpinned by a specific theological position regarding the ghostly rather than a sceptical rejection of the supernatural. The chapter finishes by investigating examples of the real supernatural in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s Gaston de Blondeville (1826), Reeve’s The Old English Baron and Lewis’ The Monk in order to demonstrate how these texts represent different approaches to the supernatural they depict. It notes a frequent correlation between scepticism and the depiction of a spectacular ‘real’ supernatural in Lewis and Walpole but suggests that we cannot fully understand these depictions of the ghostly without reference to the specific theologies both informing and critiqued in them.

The final chapter expands the exploration of mortal immortality from ghostly survivals to an investigation of embodied immortals. Figures such as the Wandering Jew, successful alchemists, immortal wanderers and vampires were not the subject of extra-fictional belief or disbelief in the same way as the ghost. However, they were understood within a theological framework based on understandings of the nature of the human, immortality, the flesh and the spirit, original sin and total depravity. These theological frameworks are reflected in and frequently critiqued through these figures. This chapter maps the folkloric or biblical antecedents of the Gothic’s mortal immortals – Adam, Cain, Faust and the Wandering Jew – and demonstrates the ways in which these prototypes function as theologically rich intertexts through which the Gothic’s immortals are read. This chapter uses case studies from William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Mary Shelley’s ‘The Mortal Immortal’ (1831) and Frankenstein (1831) to show the ways in which mortal immortal figures in the early British and Irish Gothic inevitably serve theological or anti-theological (rather than a-theological) ends. The chapter concludes by applying these theological frameworks to the most famous of the period’s Gothic figures – the vampire – whose meaning in its specific theo-historical context cannot be separated from the underlying theological valence of the mortal immortal. In doing so, it seeks to illuminate the theologies of the queer which inform the depiction of the vampire and, thus, explore an important component of the early queer Gothic.

Chapter 1

‘CHRIST IS NOT DIVIDED’: THEOLOGIES OF TOLERATION AND THE DEPICTION OF THE CATHOLIC

Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every soul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird – Revelation 18:2

It is a critical commonplace to suggest that the Gothic is ‘a means of anti-Catholic expression’ (Purves 2009, 3), which, if it has a theology at all, has a single dominant ‘predominantly if not exclusively’ Protestant one (Sage 1988, xxi–xxii). This idea of a monolithic Protestant identity, self-defined in contrast to a feudal and barbaric Catholicism as monstrous Other, leads