PISANUS FRAXI
103
monastic institutions, both male and female; their useless asceticism,
puerile macerations, and their flagellations, at once absurd, cruel and
indecent; the gross oppression and horrid cruelties of the inquisition;
the terrible system of auricular confession, and the abuse which has
been made of it; the coarse, scurrilous, abusive and licentious dis–
courses . .. etc., etc., etc." This sentence is distributed across nineteen
pages of Ashbee's text; the top of each page contains one, two, or
three lines; virtually every word is superscribed with a footnote mark–
ing, and the notes themselves take up the body of the page. Their
contents are what one might expect, as are the contents of the three
hundred succeeding pages. To sum up in brief what cannot here be
entered upon at length, Ashbee's obsession with the sins of Rome is
the counterpart and analogue of his interest in pornography. What
he experiences with direct sexual pleasure in pornography he experi–
ences with the added pleasure of moral indignation in relation to
Rome. For Roman Catholicism is a pornographer's paradise, and
there is, as they say,
~vidence
to back up every change. All priests are
lechers, satyrs, and pimps, all nuns are concubines or lesbians or both.
The confessional is the locus of meeting of lubricity and piety. This
perfec t balance of outrage and envy is matched by a similar ambi–
valence of idea; the Church of Rome, like everyone's parents, is at
once ascetically denying us the gratifica tion of our impulses and
hypocritically wallowing in a wholly sexualized existence, making love
over the nasty stye. One thinks wistfully of what Newman could
have done had he access to this volume when he prepared his
Lectures
on
the Present Position
.of
Catholics in England.
In the course of this extended assault on Rome, Ashbee treats in
detail certain English works from the seventeenth and eighteenth cen–
turies. These are mostly anti-Catholic narratives, confessions, and records
of testimony given at trials; and they contain by far the best and
most interesting writing of anything within Ashbee's three volumes,
arising as they do out of the world of Bunyan and Fox and the folk–
tradition of English dissent, and retaining, even in their madness,
some of that tradition's vividness of language and feeling. But Ashbee
is
too
preoccupied with his indictment of Rome to consider that he
has come across something that looks like literature. This is worth
noting if only because one of Ashbee's explicit intentions is to apply
critical judgment to the works he treats. The character of that judgment
is easily illustrated. In the
Index
Ashbee notices a small volume of
sonnets,
Les Amies, scene d'amour sapphique,
written supposedly by
one Pablo de Herlagnez. Ashbee comments, "These sonnets, 6 in number,
are pretty, but display no great talent," and then adds, "The author's
