Polemic, Memory and Emotion: John Gerard and the Writing of the Counter-Reformation in England

Abstract

This essay looks principally at the well-known autobiographical account of his missionary work in England in the later Elizabethan period and in James I’s early years up to the time of the Gunpowder Plot written by the Jesuit John Gerard (1564–1637). We try to locate that account in the context of the so-called Archpriest Controversy, out of which, we suggest, it came. Here, we wish to argue, some of the current historical platitudes about post-Reformation Catholicism in England, and about the function of the seminary clergy and those who trained in the novitiates of the religious orders, look decidedly unsafe. However, we focus on the reputation of this famous Jesuit primarily in order to see how his construction of the recent past, written (despite its, in places, timeless evocation of the power of grace and the necessity of conversion) for very specific contemporary purposes, serves as a guide to the rise in England of a form of Catholic observance which was sharply at odds with the supposedly conformist culture of the national Church.