Crisis, Religion and Turn-of-the-Century British and American Travel Writing on Spain

Abstract: This article focuses on the awareness of Spanish crisis and its relation to religion as found in under-examined British and American travel writings on Spain. The turn-of-the-century brought renewed interest in the country, this time less in her past and more in her conflict-ridden present, though the past, or at least a particular slant on the past, continued to inform the perspectives of British and American travel writers. The enduring presence of anti-Catholicism throughout the nineteenth century, still drawing on the image of Spain as a land of persecution and intolerance, found common ground in the later anti-religious, anticlerical strain of thought at the end of this period. Both the belief system of individual writers and the complicated, mutually persecutory dynamic between nineteenth-century Protestants and Catholics (often attached to anti-Protestantism), need to be examined. What these writers share, whether Protestant, Catholic or anticlericalists, is a sense of investment in a particular vision of modern Spain as flawed and yet stubbornly pertinent to the world, a peculiar reembodiment of the missionary spirit to convert and reform having left its religious and political trace in these writings. © 2015 Bulletin of Spanish Studies.