English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young Michael C. Questier English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829. By Francis Young. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xii, 308. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-5565-3.) The author has a very valid premise for this volume, which is that it is odd how little is written on Catholic attitudes to witchcraft and related phenomena in the period of the long post-Reformation. The question, then, is this: once one has reassembled all the evidence as to how far Catholics in England were implicated in contemporary beliefs about the supernatural, what does that tell us about them? There is no formal conclusion to this volume. But what we might take as its principal [End Page 321] finding is that there is embedded in the modern historiography of the topic an assumption that the style of Catholic religion in post-Reformation England was essentially a popular one. Also, it was likely that it would diverge from the rest of the national Church after the power of the Tudor State had been used to reform religion. In other words, these sensibilities would express themselves through popular forms, and those forms would resist the attempts of Protestant Reformers and of Catholic Counter-Reformers to change them. The claim has been that the new/Counter-Reformation clergy, imbued with the ideals of the Council of Trent, met with resistance to their way of understanding the Church and the world and were forced in the end to compromise with popular sensibilities and beliefs. This is compatible, of course, with the line in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971)—that is, that the Reformation purported to take away the means that the Church provided to deal with unwelcome and apparently supernatural phenomena and contributed temporarily to the rise of magical forms. The point that comes across here quite strongly is that there is a rather wide spectrum of Catholic opinions on these questions, as much skepticism and simple endorsement of, for example, how far demonic possession is actually possible. The author brings out well enough how the politics of debate about these issues generated skepticism as well as assent. The other line pursued here is that Catholic attitudes to these issues were not all that important in wider society and also Catholics’ opinions about these things were essentially the same as everyone else’s (pp. 121, 162). Historiographically this is of some significance and is demonstrably true as far as, for example, witchcraft beliefs are concerned. It is true also that Catholic attempts at spiritual healing were undertaken partly in competition with Protestant—or rather, Puritan—exorcists. On the other hand, from time to time, it was precisely these questions about supernatural power and how far the Church could exercise authority over the supernatural that led to overtly confessional disputes, something that came out into the open with the conduct of exorcisms, as the book’s sixth chapter shows very clearly. The signs are here, as John Bossy argued as long ago as 1975, that all this was somewhere near the center of post-Reformation Catholicism and certainly figures in the ministry of Catholic seminary clergy. This comes out in, for example, cases such as the “Boy of Bilson” in 1620. Here we have evidence of how a Catholic attempt to seize the moment created by (as it turned out) a fraudulent demoniac caused a series of ruptures in local society in which the presence of separatist Catholicism was very much an issue. In instances such as these—so seldom recorded but, one suspects, actually rather frequent—we have real evidence of how the continuities of Catholicism in and after the Protestant Reformation could have an impact despite the claims made by so many historians of the period that Counter-Reformation Catholicism retreated to the safety and relative invisibility of the interiors of gentry households. [End Page 322] Michael C. Questier Queen Mary, University of London Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press