Name-calling

I'm in the middle of Charles Constantine Pise's Zenosius; Or, the Pilgrim-Convert (1845), and have stumbled across an interesting footnote:

This is the first time I've seen a 19th-c. author try to historicize the use of "Romanist" vs. "Papist," but as far as I can tell, Pise is wrong: "Romanist" appears to be a familiar term of opprobrium in English polemic by the late seventeenth century.  That's not to say, however, that "Papist" and "Romanist" don't go through cycles of popularity.  After spending years slogging through Victorian anti-Catholic polemic, my impressionistic sense is that "Romanism" and "Romanist" are moderately more common than "Popery" and "Papist," but it's not as though the former pushed out the latter (in fact, the same author or publication often used them interchangeably, sometimes in alternate paragraphs).  Ironically, a quick run through my personal library catalog reveals no books with "Romanist" or "Papist" in the title, although I do have eighteen books with "Romanism" and ten with "Popery."  I've never actually seen a history of the two terms' relative popularity, although someone armed with a lot of patience should be able to manage a quantitative survey. 

Pise's suggestion that "Romanist" is more "local" than "Papist" may be on the right track, although some hair-splitting is involved.  Here's a somewhat snarky bit of self-justification from the Bulwark:

The author, writing about six years after Pise, clearly agrees with him that "Papist" came first, but he doesn't explain when Romanist appeared.  Still, he does distinguish between the point of "Romanist" (denoting a particular sect associated with Rome) and "Papist" (denoting allegiance to a particular leader).  In practice, though, I'm not sure that anyone really thought about the difference.  (The "I don't know why Roman Catholics are so offended" bit is pretty common--scroll down to the footnote for another example.)

Comments

[Flavia]

This is similarly impressionistic, and not entirely relevant for your 19th-century purposes -- but I've never seen the terms "Romanist" or "Romanism" used in the 16th or 17th C., even though EEBO assures me they were.

"Romish" -- as in "those of the Romish persuasion" -- does appear, but that and the rest of those Rome-related terms seem vastly less popular than "Papist," "Papistry," "Popery," and the like.

My sense is that the epithets linking Catholics to the Pope aren't so much about belittling their faith as merely local -- though that's clearly a concern of lots of early Protestant polemics -- but about branding them as disloyal to their country and monarch (and unthinkingly obedient to a foreign prince).

At any rate, it makes sense to me that "Rome"-related epithets might be more popular in a later period than in oh, say, 1606, when allegiance was a more pressing concern . . . although of course I haven't done the quantitative or interpretative work here.

[Mr Punch]

Are you suggesting that Pise regards "Romanist" as a local usage? I read him as contrasting its implication with the universality of "Catholic."

[Miriam]

Mr. Punch: No--I'm agreeing with you (and Pise), that the point of "Romanist" is to empty the "Catholic" bit of any meaning (they're "Romanist," therefore "not universal").

[Anastasia]

he makes a link to puseyism, which ought to connect it with the rise of the oxford movement in terms of timing, yes?