Poet of the Medieval Modern

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

Introduction

This book analyzes the interaction of religiosity, national and cultural origin, race, gender, class, and region in the varied and uneasy synthesis of Catholicism and American identity over time. American Catholic studies continues to evince comparatively little attention to region, with the weight of scholarship still focused on the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with little attention to the varied regions of the United States west of Buffalo. Yet the American Catholic experience diverged significantly among regions, with, for instance, the northeastern pattern of Irish Catholic predominance having less salience in areas of significant Catholic population such as Louisiana, the Upper Midwest, and Southern California. Immigrant Catholic cultures also have hardly been ignored in the literature, yet the lengthy significance of transnational ties for Catholic cultures in the United States has not been extensively pursued, with Americanist scholars evincing a water’s-edge approach after migration that was never actually experienced by Catholics in the United States. Clerical sexual abuse emerges at times in these pages. Like all of the American Catholic history in this book, clerical sexual abuse partakes of a dynamic interaction of particular Catholic cultures and American society and culture.

Epilogue

Themes of creative adaptation and uneven synthesis have undergirded the history of Catholicism in the Pacific Northwest but are also evident throughout the histories of transnational, regional Catholic cultures analyzed in this book. Such a tension between the Catholic tradition rooted in Rome as well as in various Catholic immigrant homelands versus the desire or need to adapt to the American environment not only drove the Americanism controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also informs ongoing aspects of the American Catholic experience. On the U.S. Supreme Court, where Catholics have composed a majority of justices since 2006, a similar uneasy tension exists between cultural Catholicism and American judicial and political ideologies that do not align easily with Catholic teaching. Catholic participation in U.S. electoral politics also continues to reflect the regionally inflected uneven synthesis evident in the making of Catholic cultures and American society analyzed in this book. Region has made and continues to make a significant difference in American Catholic history and American Catholic cultures.

La Placita and the Evolution of Catholic Religiosity in Los Angeles

In 1814 a Franciscan priest, Fray Luis Gil y Taboada, laid the cornerstone for a church at the founding plaza of Los Angeles, at the site of the original “sub-mission” chapel established by the Spanish in 1784. Originally intended to serve mixed-race settlers of the Los Angeles pueblo, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (the Church of Our Lady of Angels), nicknamed the Plaza Church or La Placita, became the focal point of Catholic culture in Los Angeles—and of the mediation of cultural relationships between Hispano-descended Catholics and the largely Protestant Americans who migrated into Southern California after American annexation in 1846. The evolving social and cultural matrix of worship at La Placita has charted many shifts amid the creative persistence of Mexican Catholic religiosity. La Placita’s history suggests both significant variation around the West in the development of Catholic cultures and the ways in which the American West diverges dramatically from a model of American Catholic history predicated on nineteenth-century European Catholic immigration and institution building.

Reconversion and Retrieval: Nonlinear Change in African Catholic Practice

Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrounding the particularities of Roman Catholicism—its privileging of materiality and practice, and of community and tradition. In the course of so doing, this article explores the overlaps between modernist thinking, Protestant ideals, and teleological trajectories; the factors behind reconversion and religious oscillation in sub-Saharan African contexts; inculturation and other continuity paradigms in Catholicism; the significance of the Renaissance for early modern Catholic missions; and the ministry of a contemporary Italian Catholic missionary serving in northern Mozambique. This article proposes that Catholic history and Catholic assumptions offer valuable resources for thinking beyond and thinking against linear models of religious conversion.

Envisioning Catholic Colonial Order

This chapter explores how American writers described the Spanish friars as imperial models. Like Jacques Marquette and Junípero Serra, the friars were cast as benevolent civilizers but were particularly lauded for what many Americans believed to be their ability to maintain social order. It describes how the Spanish friars preserved existing state of affairs by upholding orthodoxy against Philippine transformations of Roman Catholicism, religiously inspired anticolonial rebellions, and establishing the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, a nationalist Catholic church. The chapter also talks about the many Americans that embraced the idea of Americanist Catholicism, which was embodied by U.S.-trained priests, as a tool for ensuring order while promoting religious liberty. It points out the lessons American writers and officials imagined the Catholic history of the Philippines might provide for the advancement of the U.S. colonial state.

The Imperial Church

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, this book undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating U.S. settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. The book traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the U.S. colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. The book shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. The book demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of U.S. national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The book connects Catholic history and the history of U.S. empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.