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The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. Join Claire Loughlin for an online webinar.
The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. These sessions are aimed at staff and students interested in hearing more about emerging new work within Scottish and Irish Studies. As always the series is highly interdisciplinary with papers from early career scholars in a range of Arts and Humanities disciplines.
7th November: Dr Clare Loughlin (University of Aberdeen) The Popish Masquerade: Popery and the Politics of the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland
This paper explores narratives of ‘papists in disguise’ that circulated in Scotland in the years after the revolution of 1688–90. The ‘popish masquerade’ was a longstanding anti-Catholic trope, which portrayed Catholics infiltrating Protestant communities to undermine the Reformation from within. The need to safeguard Protestantism against such attacks was felt keenly following the overthrow and exile of James VII. The Church of Scotland, re-established as Presbyterian in 1690, regarded Scotland’s small Catholic community as morally degenerate and politically seditious, anxieties heightened by the prospect of a Jacobite insurrection. Rumours of papists in disguise proliferated in the decades after the revolution, especially in the years surrounding the Hanoverian succession. Yet these rumours were driven less by Catholic or Jacobite actions than by profound insecurities about the future of Presbyterianism under the Hanoverians. Stories of papists in disguise targeted dissident Presbyterians, whose actions threatened a schism in the Church and whose loyalty was increasingly questioned. By exploring the ways in which the ‘popish masquerade’ trope was manipulated by rival factions, this paper provides new insights into how the politics of the Hanoverian succession played out in Scotland, and the significance of ‘popery’ to Scottish Protestant fragmentation.
Clare Loughlin joined the university of Aberdeen in August 2023 as lecturer in the Jacobite world. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2021, which explored anti-Catholicism within the Church of Scotland across the first half of the eighteenth century. Prior to taking up her post at Aberdeen, Clare spent two years at the university of Stirling as a postdoctoral research fellow on the project ‘The Scottish Privy Council: Government from Revolution to Union’.
- Speaker
- Dr Clare Loughlin
- Contact
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Seminars are entirely online and can be accessed via Microsoft Teams. If you'd like to receive a link to the event and are not a member of research staff or a research postgraduate student in the schools of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture or Divinity, History, Philosophy, and Art History please contact Dr Sarah Sharp (sarah.sharp@abdn.ac.uk).