The conclusion of this book moves through the various layers of intervention that it has advanced, situating these arguments in the context of present-day discussions about sex, Catholicism and history. The material in the book suggests there was indeed a rupture in the relationship between sex and Christianity in the post-war decades, but rather than being simply about an emancipation from the confines of ‘traditional’ religious subjugation, a deeper, conceptual separation between the religious and the sexual opened up in decades after the war. This chapter considers how the changes described in the book relate to contemporary issues about sex and Catholicism within the Church and beyond. It reflects on the emergence of the child abuse scandals, and how this has been placed in a trajectory with the prohibitions of Humanae Vitae. It ultimately outlines the significance of the book for historians of sex, religion and social change.

This chapter explores the sexual experiences of Catholic women during ‘later marriage’ – broadly defined as the years of sexual activity that came after the daily demands of childrearing had diminished. The parameters of this life-cycle stage varied from person to person, but generally ran from the interviewees’ mid-thirties to sixties for those married in the immediate post-war years, beginning a little later for those married after the 1960s. It explores how and why ‘liberal’ Catholic women rejected the Pope’s prohibition of the pill, uniing how these decisions were underpinned by a re-categorisation of the religious and the sexual. The memories of Catholic women indicate that that it was often not until the busyness of early marriage had diminished that they had the time and space to consider these decisions. The chapter also examines ‘orthodox’ Catholic women’s critique of the concept of ‘female emancipation’. The chapter moves on to explore Catholic women’s changing views of the Church’s moral authority in matters of sex.

Early marriage is defined as the years between marital engagement and the end of childrearing. The interviewees’ memories of early marriage were defined by a tension between the physical desires of sexuality and the transcendent codes of religious beliefs. The most pointed example of this was in attempting to grapple with Natural Family Planning (NFP) – the only form of birth regulation endorsed by the Church. The second section of this chapter uses the interviewees’ testimony alongside contemporaneous letters sent from newly married Catholics to doctors and Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (CMAC) counsellors to reconstruct Catholic women’s everyday experience of using NFP. It offers an insight into the range of creative tactics that Catholic women used when trying to abstain from intercourse, including masturbation, oral and anal sex, prayer and positioning large teddy bears as bedtime barriers. The chapter also addresses the understanding of female sexuality that was constructed by the CMAC.

Early life is treated as both a life-cycle stage which Catholic women lived through as well as a subject which has been debated, defined and understood by different individuals and institutions. The chapter begins with a discussion of the sexual education that was available to Catholic women in the post-war decades. The second section looks at the way ideas of gender shaped Catholic women’s experience of courtship and sexuality. It explores the way they made sense of their early sexual desires – how expectations of ‘pious femininity’ affected their thoughts and actions. The final section moves on to consider the how psychoanalytical interpretations of childhood and religion affected the interviewees’ approach to parenting. It deconstructs the infantilism hypothesis which has gained currency in the post-war decades – the idea that religious belief is merely a product of childhood indoctrination.

This chapter introduces the central arguments that the book presents in relation to sex, religion and memory. It opens with an extract from an interview: an emotional account of a Catholic women explaining how ‘the sexual revolution let the cork out of the bottle’ on her beliefs about sex and contraception. This quotation is used as a springboard from which to introduce the overarching themes and issues of the study – the link between sexual and religious change in personal and collective life stories, the role of the interview in providing a space for these stories to be told and the implications these changing stories held for the way individuals made sense of their existence. The chapter traces the development of debates about sex, gender and body within the Catholic community during the twentieth century. It shows how the sex lives of Catholic women, as well as the histories of both sex and religion more broadly, have generally been interpreted through the lens of ‘power’. The interviewees’ testimonies encourage historians to look beyond traditional, top down narratives of shifting power relations. The chapter argues that sex and religion became re-categorised along material lines in the post-war decades. The final subsection of the chapter outlines how and why the book is structured as it is, with chapters reversing the chronology of the Catholic women’s lives.

This chapter explores the Spanish Inquisition’s interest in and attempts at censorship of printed texts with an eye to the steps and nuances of that process. It might appear as if the Spanish Inquisition was a formidable and relentless means of ideological control. Yet inquisitors’ implementation of censorship mandates was inevitably piecemeal because the institution’s personnel and authority were limited. Despite inquisitorial efforts, prohibited texts circulated through the Spanish empire, and bans did not apply equally to all the residents of Spanish territories. Some readers were licensed to consume prohibited texts; some banned texts escaped the libraries of those authorized to own them and circulated among the general reading public; the degree to which Spaniards were affected by the Inquisition’s textual regulations depended on their status. Scholars do not agree on the effects of inquisitorial censorship on Spanish intellectual and cultural life, and it remains a fruitful topic for investigation.

This essay examines the remarkable phenomenon of “life stories,” which the Spanish Inquisition required of its defendants after 1561. The narratives offered by defendants fit into a wider cultural context in two ways. First, they match a rise in autobiographical consciousness which was increasingly present in all sorts of Spanish literature in the sixteenth century. Second, the life stories demanded by Spanish inquisitors also.

Abstract: This chapter argues that the state of nature brings into focus colonial imaginaries of land and identity. It also contends that these colonial imaginaries have come to shape the modern West more broadly.

This essay explores the Inquisition’s persistent interest in converts, and descendants of converts, from Judaism to Catholicism. Spanish inquisitors believed those converts, called conversos, were prone to the heresy of Judaizing, which was continuing to follow Mosaic Law despite Christian baptism. The essay addresses the ambiguity of defining who exactly was a converso, and examines the kinds of accusations made against Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in the first four decades of the Spanish Inquisition’s activity, from approximately 1484 to 1525. It considers the gendered nature of those accusations as well as the potential motivations of accusers. After weighing the veracity of inquisition records about Judaizing, the essay moves to a comparison of trials from earlier and later periods of inquisition history, from the mid sixteenth century onward. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish empire and around the world.

This chapter considers Christian converts from Islam who were converted forcibly in the early sixteenth century and known as moriscos. Once Catholic, the moriscos came under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition. For more than a century, Spanish authorities worried about Moriscos adhering to their former religion and being Christian in name only; Spanish inquisitors investigated and prosecuted them for practicing Islam. The number of trials reached a high point in the second half of the sixteenth century, and only dropped when the monarchy expelled the Moriscos from the Spanish kingdoms between 1609 and 1614. This essay examines how the Spanish Inquisition constructed a model of Islamic heresy that encompassed Morisco cultural traditions. It surveys the rise in inquisitorial prosecution of this population across multiple Spanish regions. It also considers Morisco responses to the Inquisition, including strategies of petitioning and financial negotiation. This chapter assesses what Inquisition records can reveal about Morisco histories, as well as methods for reading beyond inquisitorial perspectives.

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians contains instruction for women to veil their heads when praying or prophesying in the assembly (ekklēsia). In this chapter, I argue that, like other women in the first-century Mediterranean world, Corinthian women most likely veiled and unveiled for a variety of reasons having to do with beauty, comfort, status, virtue, and piety, not solely for theological, exegetical, or liberative purposes.

The third-century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria used the image of the veil to describe the relation between the “letter” of the biblical text and its hidden, spiritual meaning. Origen constructed an allegorical theory of biblical interpretation that relied on the imagery of the veil to illustrate the hiddenness of truth. His biblical interpretations consistently privileged the unveiled Christian “spirit” of the text over what he called the Jewish “letter” – the veiled “flesh” of the text.