Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment

Interest in the English Catholic Enlightenment continues to grow. Scholars such as R.W. Linker and, more recently, Joseph Chinnici and Leo Gooch have identified the contribution of the Catholic propertied elite to those strands of liberal thought which emphasised a wider freedom of debate, a moderate measure of political reform and a ‘latitudinarian’ approach to religious belief and practice. At the same time, and especially after the defeat of Jacobitism in 1746, the Catholic gentry became more fully integrated into the social life of their local communities. Now Alexander Lock’s book takes the form of a careful and thorough study of one Catholic gentleman and landowner, Sir Thomas Gascoigne of Parlington Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Dr Lock explains that he has not embarked upon a conventional biography, the disadvantages as well as the advantages of which he is well aware. Instead, he has given us an analysis of Gascoigne’s career as Catholic and subsequent apostate from his faith, as politician and as manager of an estate which contained mineral as well as agricultural resources. The result is an informative, clearly written and well-documented survey of a significant figure in what the author terms (p. 74) the ‘liberal Catholic Enlightenment’

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