Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics in the Jacobite Era

Marsha Keith Schuchards Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics from Jonathan Swift to Henry Fielding is a work of erudition and amplitude. It is a huge (over 700 pages), closely printed, independently published study of the factions and rivalries within British Freemasonry that influenced and were reflected in anglophone literature from the 1680s to the 1750s. Schuchard has excavated a plenitude of printed and manuscript works in which she finds Masonic references of Whig and Tory, Hanoverian and Jacobite, rationalist and mystical complexion, and she situates them in their historical and particular polemical contexts. The book draws upon the publications of academic and Masonic historians, literary historians, and biographers. It is ambitious in scope, offering a detailed chronological account in twenty-three chapters of Masonic politics and literary texts in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the American colonies, and among the Jacobite diaspora on the Continent.