Abstract

This article looks again at how historians have discussed Roman Catholicism in England after Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558. Some scholarly treatments of the topic have represented it as a popular but essentially introspective parish religion. Others have taken it to be an active clericalist force in early modern English national politics. This has made it difficult to define Catholicism’s place in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Of course, Catholicism in this period clearly had a range of meanings. This article tries to draw some of them together by probing a series of contemporary opinions about Catholicism, and how contemporaries thought it could be expressed and practised.

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