The Excommunication of Elizabeth I: Faith, Politics, and Resistance in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1603, by Aislinn Muller

Abstract

Regnans in Excelsis—the 1570 papal bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I—is well known to everyone interested in her reign and also mentioned in all textbooks on the English Reformation. Yet, Aislinn Muller’s book is the first to examine in detail and depth its timing, nature and impact. The wider issues she addresses include the level of public interest in the bull, the bull’s influence on the confessionalisation of politics, and how the call for the queen’s deposition affected the thinking and conduct of the English Catholic community. Muller begins by explaining the bull’s genesis and departures from legal conventions. Inevitably much of the ground covered here is not new, but she does add her own insights, particularly in discussing the bull’s unusual features and the dilemmas its wording raised for English Catholics. In the next chapter, where she discusses the means of transmission, her research has turned up more copies than it was previously thought existed of the 1570 bull—some of them manuscript transcriptions—in the hands of Catholics. Nonetheless, despite its wide circulation in 1570 and beyond, in her view it was the 1580 republication of the bull that had the greater impact, since it was disseminated in England by Jesuit and seminary priests. Elizabeth’s excommunication then became the rationale for all kinds of subversion among English and Irish Catholics, whether by simply holding a copy of the bull or using the excommunication to justify the 1580 rebellion of James Fitzgerald in Ireland.