Seminary colleges, converts and religious change in post-Reformation England, 1568–1688

Abstract

This essay will look at one of the principal functions of the seminary colleges founded by English exiles and the place they occupy in debates about what happened to Catholicism in England after the Reformation, i.e. after 1559, currently still in something of a deadlock between those who argue for a slow-decline thesis and, on the other hand, those who want to say that there was, across the British Isles, a surge in and after the 1570s of Counter-Reformation zeal. It will ask: what were those who enrolled at these colleges supposed to do once they returned to their native country and started to minister to the faithful? In particular, in the context of the powerful rhetoric of conversion which framed the founding of the seminaries at Douai and Rome, how far were ordained clergy supposed to evangelise outside the confines of the separated Catholic community? And if they did so, to what end? How seriously were they supposed to take the rhetoric of national conversion that some Catholics in this period used? We might imagine that individual conversions to Catholicism, in the sense of explicit, overt and public changes of “religion”, were rather limited in number, not least because of the development of a statutory legal code which inflicted severe penalties on those who decided to go into separation from the national Church. However, this paper will also look at what conversion means more generally in this context, in other words – not just as a transfer from one confession or Church to another but also as the understanding of the purpose of the Catholic clerical estate in the English national Church. Finally, it will attempt to do this with an eye to the conflicting approaches and interpretations in the current historiography of the post-Reformation Catholic community in England and Britain in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.