VICTOR HOULISTON. Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons's Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610.

Abstract

Victor Houliston's critical history of the career of Robert Persons makes a timely contribution to scholarship on early modern English Catholicism. Despite his central role in the English Catholic mission, Persons has not in the main received the same degree of critical attention (particularly with regard to his authorial habits or stylistic signature) as other leading figures such as Campion, Southwell, or Garnet. This is so partly because of the range of ambitions served by his writings—pastoral, political, and administrative as well as spiritual concerns—but also because of Persons's dexterity in blending topical and speculative modes of address. Houliston offers a judiciously focused survey of landmarks in Persons's writerly career, approached chronologically and with the specialist's eye trained on evolving thematic patterns that emerge over a thirty-year period of pastoral and polemical engagement. Both specialist and generalist will recognise the themes punctuating Houliston's survey, for these are the central issues faced by English Catholic communities from the onset of the Jesuit mission to England through the Stuart period: the succession question; debates over papal prerogatives vis-à-vis secular sovereignty; the political significance of recusancy; and the linguistic as well as political scandal of the theory of equivocation. To these topics Houliston brings a nuanced sense of Persons's convictions and evolving repertoire of argumentative tactics. In brief, Houliston's project participates in the recent and welcome trend in early modern religious studies which seeks to demystify the critical solvency of the radically oppositional logic found not only in the controversialist literature volleyed across the confessional divide but also in the lingering sense of logical contradiction that frustrated earlier scholarly efforts to parse the relation between the mission's (and Persons's) spiritual and political investments. Houliston's careful reconstitution of the contexts informing Persons's writings demonstrates quite clearly how the ‘polemical works’ and ‘works of spiritual devotion’ neither can nor should be sharply divided into separate categories (p. 133). In this regard, Houliston's monograph provides a useful counterpoint and complement to Michael Carrafiello's 1998 study Robert Persons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610 by focusing attention on the range of Persons's rhetorical techniques and adaptable faces of his literary persona. Arguably, Houliston's approach presents the suppler account of the evolving constellation of Persons's political, ecclesial, and pastoral concerns, particularly during the volatile period spanning the last years of Elizabeth I's reign and the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.