Antoinette Sutto. Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists

Antoinette Sutto’s Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630–1690 focuses on the politics of the Catholic province of Maryland within a transatlantic world using the lens of religious language found in political arguments. Primarily a traditional political treatise, this book—the author’s first—reexamines the chaotic and often violent English political environment of the seventeenth century. Revisiting the political upheavals is worth investigating since they had an enormous impact on American culture and politics. Yet Sutto cautions readers not to limit their understanding of the political developments in the seventeenth century as a prelude to modern ideas of religious toleration or as a pathway to secular modern political ideas. Instead, she is content in arguing that her work is about the religious policy of Roman Catholic proprietors as a way to understand the history of early Maryland and a small subset of the evolution of the debate on the nature of the state and the relationship between the head of state and the people in the state. Sutto claims that “[t]he Catholic proprietary regime was brought down not only by events in England, but by the slow convergence of the ever weightier demands of the empire’s administrative machinery and a politics of religion recognizably English but transformed by the American world” (7). Arguably, Sutto’s most important contribution to early modern colonial studies within a transcontinental framework is her focused analysis of the political quagmire that the proprietors navigated both in the province of Maryland and in London.

Atlantic World · Colonialism · Empire · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Toleration · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies