‘Revival, Censorship, Revolutions’ identifies the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act as one of the key determining factors concerning the writing of Irish fiction in the period up until its strictures were relaxed in the 1960s. In some instances, this impact was direct, as novelists had books banned; in other cases, it was indirect, as novelists either left Ireland, or those who remained learned strategies of evasion and circumlocution. The situation for those who remained was complicated by the recognition that the legislation codified a widely held set of views on social values and rejection of anything perceived as cosmopolitan or foreign to a narrowly defined Catholic-nationalist ethos, some of whose roots lay, paradoxically, in the Irish Literary Revival. All of these forces can be seen at work in one of the most famous cases of literary censorship, that relating to Kate O’Brien’s novel The Land of Spices (1941).

‘Religion, Migration and the Irish Novel’ considers the way in which the bitter sectarian divisions that characterised Irish society in the nineteenth century were both reflected in and produced by the fiction of the period. Novels such as William Parnell’s Maurice and Berghetta: or, the Priest of Rahery (1819) were written with the clear intention of repealing the Penal Laws that restricted the rights of Irish Catholics, while Selina Bunbury’s The Abbey of Innismoyle (1828) uses Gothic tropes of abduction by malicious friars to stoke Protestant fears of Catholic conspiracies. These sectarian divisions were reinforced for Irish migrants in novels such as Mary Anne Sadlier’s New Lights (1853), a Famine novel that pits a charitable Catholic priest against a rapacious Protestant evangelical, and which was published in New York for Irish-American readers, taking its place with Irish-American novels such as Peter McCorry’s The Lost Rosary (1870).

The chapter examines Beethoven’s encounter with the Catholic Enlightenment in the lands of the Bohemian crown, where his music had been widely known as early as the 1790s. Since the eighteenth century, linguistic issues, as championed by Bohemia’s Catholic Enlightenment, were key to addressing local questions of nationality and societal progress. Central to these debates were the teachings of Bernhard Bolzano. A priest, philosopher and theologian, but also a respected mathematician and astronomer, Bolzano wanted Catholicism to be compatible with the demands of reason. Although his radical thought was dismissed by the government, his ideas remained a source of inspiration for societal reforms when Beethoven’s famous pupil and patron archduke Rudolph became prince-bishop of Olomouc/Olmütz. For Beethoven, Rudolph’s new role was an important point of connection to the Catholic Enlightenment in the region. Among the many works Beethoven dedicated to the archduke was the Missa solemnis, op. 123, where he presented the world with a musical response to philosophical questions that had occupied him for decades and that also were at the core of the Catholic Enlightenment in Bohemia.

This chapter introduces readers to two forces at the center of the book: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs, and the local protective interventions from elements in the country’s Catholic Church. It opens by narrating Duterte’s meteoric national political ascent, then contextualizing Catholic responses in the Church’s recent political history in the country. It then briefly examines academic literatures relevant to the project – in religion and democratic backsliding, populism and political violence, and human rights in tough times – to ground the contribution. A theoretical preview follows, introducing the key independent variables of capacity and commitment, tracing their operation through six mechanisms of intervention, and culmination in local protection. To close the Introduction, the book’s general research strategy is described and the varieties of data that allow the authors to empirically evaluate the theory are presented.

In 2020 James MacMillan stated: ‘The symphonic tradition, and Beethoven’s monumental impact on it, is an imposing legacy which looms like a giant ghost over the shoulder of any living composer foolhardy enough to consider adding to it. Some turn away in terror … others can’t help themselves. Perhaps not fully knowing what writing a symphony ‘means’ anymore, some of us are drawn towards it like moths flapping around a candle flame.’ MacMillan has certainly been drawn to that flame, having produced five symphonies, from the epic Symphony, Vigil, to his most recent offering for choir and orchestra, Symphony No. 5, Le grand Inconnu. This chapter examines MacMillan’s symphonic output and places these pieces in his extensive oeuvre, discussing (among other things) the composer’s move to abstraction in his recent works and how this is a departure from his most celebrated compositions of the 1990s.

‘Football is a like a religion to me’, Pelé once confessed, ‘I worship the ball and treat it like a god.’ This chapter turns the spotlight on an occasion during the Cold War when football and faith clashed head-on – and god lost. It centres on a friendly match in Dublin in 1955 between teams representing Catholic Ireland and Tito’s Yugoslavia. For most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the powerhouse of Eastern European football, renowned for exporting players to the West. Irish sports fans greeted news of the Yugoslavs’ visit with excitement, only for the Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, to spark an almighty row by trying to ban the fixture. McQuaid hated atheistic communism; Tito’s imprisonment of Catholic priests was proof of its evil. In what became a test case for the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, McQuaid suffered a rare defeat. Despite intense pressure, the Irish Football Association refused to back down and the match went ahead, with Yugoslavia’s great striker Miloš Milutinović bagging a hattrick in a 4–1 win. Ireland lost on the pitch. But through football having put a dent in Catholic authority, many people later claimed the country won off it.

Giuseppe Pelli never completed his dissertation against the death penalty, the first of its kind. He belonged to a small group of Catholics critical of their Church from within, but essentially conservative in their thinking and attitudes. Pelli’s research was heavily weighted toward the natural philosophers from Grotius on, and he exploited their knowledge of the ancient sources. Montesquieu apart, Pelli showed little interest in the Transalpine Enlightenment. He found in Montaigne a kindred spirit, a writer of conspicuous humanity who expressed his views without inhibition. As a loyal Catholic, Pelli’s basic argument against capital punishment was that it is inconsistent with Christianity. God is everywhere in Pelli’s work. Natural law is decisively God’s law, which could never have countenanced capital punishment imposed by human agencies. Pelli held back from direct attack on the powers-that-be, judicial and ecclesiastical. His diagnosis is Augustinian: the root of the problem is sin, to which the whole of humanity is susceptible. Pelli’s work is the best that devout, conservative Christianity could offer at this stage in history.

Chapter 3 examines the blood libel invented by Hyppolitus Guarinoni in 1619, Tyrol, Austria. The fictional murder of the boy, Andreas of Rinn, would have taken place in July of 1462. The accepted explanation for this unusual blood libel is a response to Protestant incursions into the Tyrol area, where Rinn is located. The chapter provides a systemic account of the blood libel, which includes complex responses to drought, plague, famine, along with the continuing influence of pagan magic. These elements created an internal dissonance within the Catholic system that Guarinoni was trying to fortify.

Contrary to the narrative of the Irish Catholic Church’s decline, there exists a range of evidence for a twenty-first-century religious revival. Some of the modern religious deviate from formal practice, engaging with Christianity away from the major churches, while other spiritual practices accord with twenty-first-century Ireland’s cultural diversity. Irish literature has challenged literature but, at times, idealised it. As the religious landscape of Ireland changes, Irish culture finds new ways to explore faith.

Building on the previous chapter, this one zooms in on the role of psychiatry in stimulating the discourse of homosexuality. Comparing developments in France to those in Belgium, it demonstrates how, in the former, a rising psychiatric profession latched onto sexual psychopathology to help establish medical control over the largely Catholic system of insane asylums in close alliance with an anticlerical state. The homosexual ‘invert’ thus served as an emblem of secularism. Belgium’s political culture, by contrast, was dominated by Catholics and laissez-faire liberals, neither of whom could support state expansion in the realm of mental health care, which the former dominated and the latter approached as a business. The country’s insane asylums would remain firmly in the hands of religious congregations and private entrepreneurs, stunting the development of an independent, confident, and militant psychiatry. Dominated by Catholics, the Belgian Society of Mental Medicine was hostile to new-fangled ideas about ‘sexual inversion.’ This is shown through the growing skepticism of its members to the work of the pioneering Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who increasingly came to see ‘contrary sexual feeling’ as an innate and morally innocent ‘condition.’

This concluding chapter draws together several strands and original dimensions of Leroi-Gourhan’s technology. Alongside his palaeontological and archaeological research, Leroi-Gourhan also addressed two seemingly contradictory dimensions of techniques: the machine and the artisan. Given his long-standing interest in machines and mechanical devices, including photography, film and also computers, Leroi-Gourhan’s quasi-cybernetic understanding of prehistoric flintknapping is less surprising. Moreover, such a broadly positive attitude towards modern techniques needs to be understood in relation to philosophical and intellectual debates emerging during the post-war years of economic and social reconstruction. While thinkers like Jacques Ellul emphasized the risks of disruption and loss of control associated with modern techniques, Leroi-Gourhan retained, on the whole, his technophile confidence in the cumulative and incremental continuity of techniques, as demonstrated (in his view) across prehistory. This approach also derived from his distinctive Catholic faith and his affinities with the thoughts of Jesuit-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It embodied his belief in the long-term redemptive capacities of techniques, as evidenced by the plenitude achieved by the artisan of all times who ‘thinks with his fingers’, a crafting Homo faber present in each and every one of us.

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

The specter of demographic decline haunted many European nations as they faced mutual competition, growing geopolitical tensions, and dwindling birth rates from the late nineteenth onwards. Amid these developments, the homosexual emerged as a loathsome incarnation of decadence, effeminacy, and infertility, but it did so in some countries more than others. This chapter compares the discourse of demographic decline in France and Belgium. It shows how alarmist declinism was much more pronounced in the former following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Belgium, by contrast, was not a major geopolitical power and far less concerned with military and demographic prowess. Moreover, when the birth rate began tapering off there too, the Catholic Church rather than nationalist voices formulated the country’s response. It did so in a vocabulary specifically calibrated to avoid naming sexuality’s supposed ‘aberrations,’ including homosexuality, so as not to let the genie out of the bottle. The latter, these Catholics argued, had been the fatal mistake of countries where a scientific discourse of ‘perversion’ had been allowed to circulate freely, and where ‘perverts’ and ‘inverts’ had now begun using that very scientific vocabulary in their own defense.

The first of the three topics that occupied censors across the regimes was ‘religion’, which predominantly meant Catholicism. This chapter traces examples of self- and bureaucratic censorship under the Ancien Régime, when the king was in power through divine right, through the Revolution, where plays criticizing the Church exploded, and onto the Empire and the Restoration, both of which had an uneasy relationship with biblical and Catholic material for the theatre, especially on secondary stages like the Vaudeville. Generally, the larger the role the Catholic Church played at the time, the more difficult the representation of religious material became. However, when such material did make it to the boards, lateral censorship meant that religion could quickly act as an ersatz vehicle to discuss the ruling regime. Religion was an even tricker subject as reactions were far from homogenous: context was key, and whilst a play might be acceptable to one audience, another could boil over into violence in its quest to promote or silence specific worldviews.

This chapter begins with reference to the veneration and obscurity that characterises Webb’s reputation. It relates the early Webb’s mentoring by Norman Lindsay and his subsequent rejection of Lindsay’s secular aesthetics and anti-Semitism. Webb’s expatriate years in Canada and then England are discussed as a search for creative independence, although England was the place of his first hospitalisation for mental illness. The chapter observes that some of Webb’s most resonant poems are responses to the East Anglia landscape. It traces Webb’s return to Australia, his continued hospitalisation, and his Catholic devotion. The chapter explores the concept of schizophrenia as a pathology of language to understand Webb’s poetic language, particularly its metaphorical aspects. Lastly, the chapter focuses on Webb’s ‘explorer’ poems, their metaphorics of journeying, and their relationship to Australia’s cultural history, or national mythology, in the late 1950s and 1960s.