Threats from Without, Within, and Below: Catholic Commodities and Early Modern English Anti-popery

This dissertation investigates the ideological and theological energies binding English literature, anti-Catholic polemic, and the marketplace from 1580 to 1630. During this period, the commercial chains connecting producers and consumers grew in both length and complexity, thereby multiplying the social meanings carried by commodities. Primarily focusing on drama, this project explores the resulting anxiety over novelty and luxury felt by English political and religious leaders as they struggled to solidify a new religion in an ever-expanding, increasingly commodified world. To deal with this crisis of newness, English authorities and polemicists resorted to an old enemy, "popery," to vilify products and practices spread commercially, from tobacco and cosmetics to counterfeiting and conjuring. At the same time, the association between these elements of marketplace culture and Roman Catholicism served to make Catholics visible as a threat to English identity.