Book excerpt: James Joyce and Catholicism is the first historicist study to explore the religious cultural contexts of Joyce's final masterpiece. Drawing on letters, authorial manuscripts and other archival materials, the book works its way through a number of crucial themes; heresy, anticlericalism, Mariology, and others. Along the way, the book considers Joyce's vexed relationship with the Catholic Church he was brought up in, and the unique forms of Catholicism that blossomed in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and during the first years of the Irish Free State.