For over two decades, Diane Long Hoeveler has been one of the most important voices in Romantic-era and, especially, Gothic literary studies. Beginning with Romantic Androgyny in 1990 and continuing with what is now a trilogy of monographs devoted to Gothic literature and culture (Gothic Feminism in 1998, Gothic Riffs in 2010, and now The Gothic Ideology), Hoeveler has consistently reshaped the field. In Gothic Riffs she argued that, far from setting itself in simple opposition to Enlightenment secularization, “The gothic secularized the uncanny by making traditional religious beliefs and values both familiar and strange, both immanent and transcendent, both minimal and powerful at the same time” (Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 [Columbus, OH, 2010], 2). Here, in The Gothic Ideology, she applies that insight to one of the most striking and persistent of Gothic concerns: its typically virulent anti-Catholicism.

In arguing for the centrality of this issue, Hoeveler challenges recent critical claims that the sense of Gothic anti-Catholicism is largely an artifact of selection bias and that the full range of Gothic texts indicates either a more pervasive support of Catholic interests than traditionally acknowledged or a rhetorical anti-Catholicism that serves primarily as an allegorical critique of English and Protestant forms of intolerance. Hoeveler contends that, with very few exceptions, across a wide sweep of Gothic novels, chapbooks, and other genres, anti-Catholic sentiment is consistent and in fact directed at specifically Catholic theologies, histories, and practices. This is what she calls “the Gothic ideology,” in the interest of which “the British Protestant imaginary sought to sooth its anxieties by battling the lingering forces of Catholicism by way of proxy, through a genre that was populated by lecherous abbesses, villainous monks, Inquisitions and disputed claims on property and inheritances, all of which were perceived as representing very real threats to the ideals of secular modernity” (30).

In support of that argument, Hoeveler has uncovered and read a vast array of texts, many of which were aimed at a lower- and middle-class readership; the book has space to describe and analyze scores of these works, but Hoeveler has also included an extremely useful appendix that lists hundreds more—primarily English-language texts but also some translated into English during the period from Continental sources—organized around the iconic images of anti-Catholic representation: the nun, the monk, the Inquisition, the ruined abbey. She has, that is, more than answered the suggestion that scholars' impression of Gothic anti-Catholicism arises from a narrow attention to the most canonical works. Much of a study of this kind is necessarily devoted to the recovery of largely (indeed, almost wholly) unread texts, but Hoeveler's plot summaries are written with an engaging verve; she makes it a real, even guilty, pleasure to read about works like George Moore's Grasville Abbey: A Romance (1797), the fabulously (if less-than-originally) titled The Monk of Udolpho (1807), and Elizabeth Guénard's The Three Monks!!! (1802). Meanwhile, more canonical novels to which she pays specific attention include William Godwin's St. Leon (1799) and Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

Throughout, Hoeveler grounds the anti-Catholicism of these Gothic texts in English cultural, political, religious, and literary history. She argues that “many Gothic texts can trace their origins to two Reformation urtexts: the Compendium compertorum (1536), a report that enabled King Henry VIII to dissolve the monasteries and appropriate their lands for his own use, and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments [1563], later titled The Book of Martyrs” (6). To these, she adds “British Reformation propaganda, erotic convent fiction, libertine polemic, and political and social satire intended for the lower classes” as well as “anti-Catholic pornographic texts” as sources of the complex discourse of the Gothic (59). She points out that the charges against Roman Catholics laid out in these works continue to resonate in explicit and implicit ways throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they become politically useful modes of response to the effects of Catholics' continued presence in England, from the arrival of thousands of French émigré priests and nuns in the early 1790s to Catholic Emancipation in 1829 to the Anatomy Act (which discouraged illegal grave robbery) in 1832. While psychological readings have provided the basis for much Gothic scholarship (including, as Hoeveler notes, her own Gothic Feminism), this study grounds its analysis firmly in the historical, arguing that the psychological frame “actually works to occlude the genre from its fullest historical contexts, thereby leading to all manner of misunderstandings” (20). The Gothic Ideology is largely consistent in this argument, although at rare points the impulse toward psychoanalytical readings nonetheless emerges, for example in its account of William Henry Ireland's The Abbess (1799), about which Hoeveler writes of one character that “Being frozen before the gaze of the phallic mother recalls Perseus paralysed before he can discover a way to sever Medusa's head” (80). In Gothic scholarship as well as in Gothic fiction, some ghosts are hard to exorcise.

Hoeveler's framing of the anti-Catholic Gothic ideology within the political and religious world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does raise another question, as she points out: why are the tropes and images of a late eighteenth-century anti-Catholicism still mainstays of Gothic aesthetics? Hoeveler notes Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code as examples, as well as television's American Horror Story: Asylum, as she observes, “What is evident is that a large discourse network that goes by the label of ‘Gothic’ has found in the Catholic a ready-made representation of the demonic in all of its shifting manifestations, and the public has continued to be mightily entertained by such tales for well over 200 years” (262–63). Perhaps that observation provides a hint toward another installment of Hoeveler's insightful series of studies. (A footnote provides the tantalizing suggestion that her material on Gothic representations of “the wily Jesuit” could itself form the basis of an entire new forthcoming book [265].) Given Hoeveler's invaluable contributions to Gothic studies and the excellence of this book in particular, I for one cannot wait.