Catholic Literature

Abstract

Catholic literature was a diverse field in early modern England. Manuscript and printed texts were an integral part of confessional identity for English Catholics. It enabled them to establish textual communities, to participate in private meditations, practice their faith, and for women to play an active role in Catholic book and literary culture, with images and mnemonic devices in printed texts offering a way for the illiterate to participate in private meditations. Catholic literature formed part of a Europe-wide movement linked to Catholic Reform and post-Tridentine spirituality, of which English Catholic readers and authors were a part. Print and manuscript circulation of Catholic texts was aided by illicit printing presses set up across England and Europe, which reveals the growing appetite for these texts, and which were also read and responded by Protestant readers, showing the appeal of Catholic religious and spiritual texts across the confessional divide. Once perceived as of interest only to historians of “recusant” post-Reformation Catholics, Catholic writers such as Robert Southwell are now frequently included in cross-confessional general works of literary criticism, and Catholic literary culture is better recognized as an integral part of the study of early modern English literature, literary culture, print and book culture. Setting the parameters for a bibliography on this subject requires a threefold definition. We have taken “early modern” fairly broadly, covering the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, which includes some pre-Reformation as well as post-Reformation material. “Catholic” could be defined in a number of ways which would exclude or include different texts and scholarly works. We have focused on texts of Catholic authorship, generally meaning that the author identified as a member of the Catholic Church at the time of writing; we have also prioritized subject matter, so studies of texts by Catholic authors which are not distinctively Catholic in content may not appear. Finally, “literature”: once implying simply the “literary canon” in which Catholics who wrote after the Reformation rarely appeared, appreciation of the literary elements of all kinds of texts has widened the category. We have included such genres as devotional literature and martyrology, valuable in themselves for understanding early modern religious culture, and also as context for the more “canonical” literary productions of Southwell, Dryden, or Pope. We have included a section on translation, in recognition of the increasing scholarship on literary translators (especially women) and of the importance of continental European texts and spirituality in shaping English Catholicism after the Reformation. The bibliography is set out thematically, with works covering different genres of literature grouped together, but with dedicated sections on selected individual authors. Especially in the latter, the quantity of scholarly work on this field means that this bibliography must, for reasons of space, aim to be representative rather than comprehensive.