Catholic Propaganda Research Articles

Enfance, martyre et mission dans L’Histoire des martyrs du Japon de Nicolas Trigault (1624)

Abstract This article analyses a still understudied figure that is present in martyrological accounts of the Early Modern Period: the child martyr which is an intriguing and important character in Catholic propaganda during the wars of religion that shook Europe. We will see how a Jesuit missionary uses this character in his account of the Christian mission in Japan. Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), in his work L’Histoire des martyrs du Japon (The History of the Martyrs of Japan) takes up a long Christian martyrological tradition while anchoring it in a context of cultural exchanges between Europe and Japan. Using various biblical narratives (whether the Passions of Christ or the martyrdom of the Maccabees) as a point of comparison with these Japanese martyrs, Trigault places these Christians, so far removed from his target audience, in a Catholic community that extends over a long period of time and a vast geographical territory. In this use of the martyrological narrative, the death of the children proves to be a powerful argument. As exceptional figures of martyrdom, they act as witnesses to the level of faith of a community, the sacrifice of the children being the ultimate demonstration of its constancy. However, the figure of the martyred child also comes into conflict with the figure of the morally crippled child, testifying to the ambiguity that European culture and the Christian religion have with this period of life. These stories, later exported to Europe, are used to edify both the youngest children, urging them to imitate their Japanese counterparts, and the parents, presenting an ideal imagery of the Christian family.

Rebellion and Peace: The paths for conflict resolution in Huguenot and Catholic propaganda during the French Wars of Religion

The second half of the sixteenth century saw France descend into civil war, after several decades of increasing religious tensions brought about by the Reformation. It was an outcome which traditional political thought dreaded, because internal union was one of the most prized features of a healthy political body. Civil war, the line went, was much worse than any other calamity which might befall a polity and threatened it with complete dissolution. Therefore, once France found itself in such a situation from 1562 onwards, one of the main issues in French political discourse became the restoration of internal peace: all the parties involved in the conflict paid at least lip service to it, although each envisioned their own path in order to achieve this goal. For the radical Catholics, internal peace could not be divorced from religious unity, therefore, the Protestants had to be exterminated, chased out or brought back into the Catholic fold. A more moderate group of Catholics came to argue that this was not possible without doing irreparable damage to the country and that coexistence with Protestants had to be accepted at least temporarily, looking to the king to impose such a solution. Finally, the Protestants, who envisioned at the beginning of the wars the possibility of converting the whole France to the Reformation, came to embrace the second point of view, as well, under the pressure of political realities. This paper aims to analyze the discourse of peace in the propaganda issued during the French Wars of Religion, examining its main themes and how it unfolded over this period of more than thirty years.

Verosimiglianza storica vs memoria creativa in El prodigioso príncipe transilvano

"In the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age, political propaganda and the consequent need to propose heroes conforming to the prevailing political-religious ideology to the public of corrales de comedia were almost always conditioning the creative process. This is also the case of El prodigioso príncipe transilvano, a historical comedy set at the time of the long Spanish-Turkish conflict (1526-1606) and dedicated to exalting the figure of Sigismund Báthory, in truth one of the most controversial figures in the history of Romanian principalities. This contribution aims at investigating the extent and mechanisms that, in the text, regulate this intersection of historical reliability and creative reworking of a recent past for pro-Spanish and pro- catholic propaganda purposes."

From Ahab to “Vilain Herodes”: Biblical Models of Evil Kings in Catholic Anti-Royalist Propaganda during Charles IX (1560–1574) and Henry III (1574–1589)

During the French Wars of Religion, both the Huguenot and the radical Catholic factions started by stressing their devotion to the Valois monarchy, for reasons both pragmatic and ideological. Both were hoping for the support of the Crown in achieving their goals—the Huguenots to convert France to the Reformation, the radical Catholics to eradicate the Protestantism from the kingdom—and their propaganda made use of numerous Biblical references in order to urge the kings of France to pursue such policy goals. However, Biblical precedents could be a two-edged sword: once hope for royal support was replaced by disappointment and even resentment, the nature of the Biblical models and comparisons changed as well. From appeals to emulate the righteous kings from the Bible, like David, Solomon or Josiah, the propagandists moved to warnings and even threats, by presenting the kings of France with the fate of, this time, wicked rulers like Ahab or Herod, who were grievously punished by God for their transgressions. This paper aims to analyze the recurrences of such examples in the Catholic propaganda during the French Wars of Religion, until the death of Henry III in 1589, and their significance in the political discourse of that age.

Refuting Luther by Scripture Alone: Sebastian Felbaum and Catholic Propaganda in Early Reformation Germany

ABSTRACT Studies of the Catholic side of the German pamphlet war (c. 1520–1525) tend to focus on the most prolific opponents of Luther, such as Johann Eck and Johannes Cochlaeus. It can however be argued that this approach skews our picture of the Catholic effort, because most conservative pamphlet warriors wrote only one item apiece. This investigation of a singleton from 1524, by the otherwise unknown author Sebastian Felbaum, attempts to evaluate its literary and theological characteristics and to contextualise it within the Catholic controversial output of the years 1522–24. What emerges is an insight into the aims and methods of one of the controversy’s ‘also-rans’, and arguably a more representative picture of the overall campaign. In the process, new light is shed on the identity of a hitherto obscure pamphleteer.

Concept si identitate in reinterpretarea unui monument de sculptura baroca din Timisoara

This article attempts to give new impetus to the research on writing history from monuments as primary sources, especially when written sources are missing or lacking completely as an exercise of documenting a historical period. The case study we are conducting our investigation on is the monument to Trinity (the only one that has a sketch and was often considered a work of G.R. Donner) in Timişoara which is analysed through historical–documentary sources and the interpretative frameworks of the iconography and iconology as parts of the Pietas austriaca phenomenon. Reflecting various identity concepts, the visual propaganda of these types of monuments stands as highly symbolic and having a function of social coagulation through an Enlightened Catholicism. An analysis of the stylistic traits in the manner of shape, interpretation and content, highlight the idea that G.R. Donner could have authored sketches, and the monument to trinity of Timişoara, but it was a disciple of his academic circle in Vienna, that could have authored the monument raised after the plague episode of 1738–1739 in Timişoara. The article answers to why were these monuments used as a projection of Catholic propaganda in public spaces in disseminating the principles of a church that helped political power. Moreover, the discourse becomes productive framework for future exploration situating the monument within a global art historical context and a survey of doctrina imaginis advocated. A stylistic analysis of several certified works of the author highlighted a classicizing late baroque formula as the style of the Banat in the century of the Enlightenment.

Ideological and National Aspects of the Catholic Clergy Activities in Grodno and Minsk Provinces of the Russian Empire in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (on the Basis of Archival Documents)

The article analyzes various aspects of the relationship between the confessional groups in Grodno and Minsk provinces of the Russian Empire (Orthodox Christians, Catholics) in the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the context of the implementation of models of self-identification «friend or foe». The article reconstructs the main stereotypes of the Catholic clergy's perception of interfaith relations through the prism of the national factor. Particular attention is paid to the specific features of the activity of Catholic clergy and their sympathetic fanatical parishioners to incite interfaith hostility. The author The basis of the source base of the article was made up of documents from the National Historical gives factual proof of the Catholic clergy propaganda activities for Polish national benefit and analyzes the authorities’ reaction to such propaganda. The research presented in the article is based on the documents of the National Archive of Belarus and the National Historical Archive of Belarus in Grodno (reports of district police officers to the Grodno governor, correspondence of the Grodno governor with the Governor-General of Vilno, Kovno and Grodno, etc.).

Criminal Offences of Turning and Conversion to Roman Catholicism in Dušan’s Code

Dušan’s Code is the most important monument of Serbian medieval law. It contains a large number of provisions relating to Orthodoxy, the church, the clergy and monasticism. The first 38 articles are directly dedicated to the faith and the church. The Code also prescribes various criminal offences against Orthodoxy, and the most numerous are offences of Roman Catholic proselytism. The introductory part of the paper contains a brief analysis of the position of Roman Catholics in medieval Serbia, the relationship between Serbian rulers and popes, and especially emphasizes the role of Roman Catholic propaganda and the conversion of the Orthodox to Roman Catholicism, which was most prevalent during the reign of Tsar Dušan. The subject of the author’s legal-historical analysis is those provisions of Dušan’s Code that incriminate turning and conversion to Roman Catholicism. So far, it has been indisputably established in science that these are Articles 6, 7, 8, 9 and 21. In Article 6, the Code of Emperor Stefan Dušan proclaims: „And concerning the Latin heresy: Christians who have turned to the use of unleavened bread shall return to the Christian observance. If any fail to obey and do not return to Christian Orthodoxy, let them be punished as is written in the Code of the Holy Fathers.” Article 7 provides: „And the Great Church shall appoint head priests in all market towns to reclaim from the Latin heresy those Christians who have turned to the Latin faith, and to give them spiritual instructions, so that each one of them returns to Christianity.” Article 8 punishes the Latin priest: „And if a Latin priest is found to have converted a Christian to the Latin faith, let him be punished according to the Law of the Holy Fathers.” Article 9 prohibits mixed marriage: „And if a half-believer is found to be married to a Christian woman, let him be baptized into Christianity if he desires it. But if he refuses to be baptized, let his wife and children be taken from him, and let a part of his house be allotted to them, and let him be driven forth.” Finally, Article 21 prescribes: „And whoever shall sell a Christian into another and false faith, let him be crippled and his tongue cut out.” In the concluding remarks, the author points out the basic causes of prescribing these crimes, as well as certain historical data on Emperor Stefan Dušan’s anti-Catholic politics.

'So Don't You Lock up Something / That You Wanted to See Fly'. What Story for Asylum Psychiatry?

In a rather long piece which an exhibition catalog has called „catholic propaganda”(Busch & Maisak, 2013, p. 342), Guido Görres reflected on madness and art, using Kaulbach’s iconic 1835 drawing of asylum inmates (Das Narrenhaus) as pretext. Görres wrote of “this hospital of the human spirit (…), this charnel ground of the living, who like specters roam, wearing on their foreheads the faded and almost illegible traces of their former names.”1(1836, p. 9). Overdramatic prose, but unlikely to strike one as unprecedented. If anything, it has long been customary to exhibit a mix of fascination and revulsion when discussing the institutions which in the past two centuries at the same time sheltered and shattered those deemed mentally ill.

Heiliger Stuhl, Drittes Reich und Radio Vaticana

Abstract This article intends to show that the German language broadcasts of Vatican Radio influenced relations between the Holy See and the Third Reich in the period between the start of the station’s radio broadcasts and 1943. As emerges from the analysis of published and unpublished sources, Vatican Radio seems to have been used as a Catholic propaganda tool in Germany, but also as an instrument of diplomacy. Vatican radio continued to broadcast in German and to attract listeners even after Goebbels’ decree of 1 September 1939 forbidding people to listen to foreign radio stations. The Holy See, aware that its broadcasts were being monitored by the Sonderdienst Seehaus and of their importance not only for the population of Germany but also for its government, exploited them to spread specific ideas and messages depending on the circumstances and the progress of the war. The study of Vatican Radio thus represents a specific point of view from which to understand the Holy See’s attitude towards National Socialism and its actions during the Second World War.

Women’s Organizations and Antisemitism: The First Parliamentary Elections in Independent Poland

AbstractThis article explores the context of the first parliamentary elections in independent Poland in January 1919, focusing on the National Democratic Party’s (ND) election campaign addressed to Polish women and how anti-Jewish slogans were used to mobilize the participation of the female electorate. Before the First World War, ND, led by Roman Dmowski, was the most fervent opponent of women’s enfranchisement (Gawin 2015); yet, after the introduction of suffrage, and one month before the elections, the party created the National Women’s Organization (NOK), affiliated with ND, tasked with running an election campaign aimed at ethnically Polish women. The article demonstrates that ND instrumentalized female voters and their newly obtained right to win the elections and gain advantage over its largest rival, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna). It argues that members of NOK, who used antisemitic, ultra-nationalistic, and Catholic propaganda in the election campaign, became one of the major advocates of the party’s ethno-nationalist vision of Poland; consequently, they significantly contributed to the worsening of Polish-Jewish relations in the interwar period. The article also looks at the critique of the extreme nationalism and antisemitism within ND and NOK by individual female activists and groups not affiliated with Dmowski’s party.

We Faithful Few

This article focuses on the Jesuit missions into Elizabethan England and the Jesuit relationship with the Catholic gentry and why the gentry were crucial to Jesuit mission’s survival. This is done by looking at the various ways that the gentry class were involved with and supported the Jesuit’s efforts. Gentry homes were an important aspect of gentry support because of their multi-purpose functions in hiding the priests from state authorities, their ideal place for planning operations and for holding mass because of their hidden countryside location. The gentry class were also personally involved, aiding the Jesuits through their actions as escorts as well as running illegal printing presses and distributing catholic propaganda around England. They also served as a vital connection for the Jesuits to the laymen people and resulted in the development of local catholic communities structured around the gentry class which supported the Jesuit of goal of sustaining Catholic communities. While this shows how the gentry were important to the Jesuits, it also demonstrates how the Jesuit’s became increasingly reliant on the gentry class which opens up additional avenues of research into how their relationship evolved during the reign of King James I.

The Ukrainian Catholic Policymaking and Propaganda in the Postwar Western Europe (1919)

The Ukrainian Catholic Policymaking and Propaganda in the Postwar Western Europe (1919)

Maternal Pain in Miracle Scenes as a Part of Catholic Propaganda in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

This paper analyses the iconography of the scenes of pain of non-Biblical mothers for their deceased children, which was used as one of the mechanisms of Catholic propaganda in the struggle against the Schism and infidels and exercised through sermons and propagation of the faith in the power of the Eucharist. Local examples (from Split, Dubrovnik and Kotor) are examined in a broader European context. Firstly, an example from the cathedral of Split is analysed. The Miracle in the fiery furnace (better known as The Miracle of the Jewish boy of Bourges) was painted around 1635-1640 by the Venetian painter Matteo Ponzone as a part of a larger cycle composed of ten canvases, which is now placed above the main altar. It is a depiction of a medieval legend, which can be encountered in the collections of Exempla, didactic tales for use in sermons, and has thus had several literary and visual interpretations which are analysed in this paper. The second example refers to the miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrer. While preparing for canonization, Pietro Ranzano of Palermo wrote the vita of Vincent Ferrer, (in which) the centerpiece of which is occupied by two consecutive and psychologically powerful stories. The first story deals with a mother who had killed, chopped-up and cooked her own child (a version of the story of Mary of Bethezuba by Flavius Jospehus), thereby appalling the child's father upon his return from Ferrer's sermon. The topic of the second miracle is a grieving mother who is carrying her dead child in her arms and seeking help from Ferrer. In both cases the powerful Dominican preacher has restored the children to life. Their stories became instantly popular and received their iconographic expression with an explicit depiction of parental pain.

Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose by Nancy LaGreca

Reviewed by: Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose by Nancy LaGreca Kelly Comfort LaGreca, Nancy. Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2016. 179 pp. Nancy LaGreca's Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose examines what she terms the "double threat" of mysticism and eroticism. In her introduction, she posits that modernista writers "sought to win over the souls of their readers by offering a new religion of ecstatic and aesthetic pleasure" in which "erotic mysticism" functions as "an alternative means of salvation . . . unattached to systematized codes of ethics and behaviors" (16). In the selected texts—all prose works from underrepresented Latin American modernista writers—LaGreca locates a focus on the "I" introspectively, rather than egotistically, and underscores the importance of "intimate and hidden states" in the "non-theistic, sensual, ecstatic dissolution of the self" (21–22). In an effort to demonstrate how and why the two forces of mysticism and eroticism are intimately intertwined in modernista prose, LaGreca dedicates chapter one to a discussion of the two discourses against which they unite, namely positivism and Catholicism. This chapter thus serves to establish background and context for the rest of the study. LaGreca highlights positivism's interest in controlling erotic desire so as to ensure the health of the nation through government-approved reproductive practices and then notes the ways in which modernista discourse sought to expand notions of sexual instinct and erotic pleasure beyond the heteronormative. LaGreca also examines the rhetoric of Catholic propaganda that offered followers the hereafter and promised contact with the divine. She argues that the modernistas demonstrated varied preference for pagan, pre-Christian, Nietzschean, and monistic mysticism as alternatives to Catholicism and located "the key to immortality" in "ecstatic transcendence inspired by art, beauty, the lusty sensuality of nature, and earthly pleasures" (43). In chapter two, LaGreca examines the prominent theories of non-theistic mysticism in the essayistic prose of Mexico's Carlos Díaz Dufoo and Venezuela's Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, while she dedicates chapter three to the study of the popular yet critically understudied novel Resurección by the well-known Colombian statesman José María Rivas Groot. In Díaz Dufoo's essays and short stories written for the famous modernista journal Revista Azul, LaGreca discovers "seminal theoretical documents of the mystical tendency" that describe "the vague deification of sensual beauty and erotic pleasure, detached from both positivism and Christianity" (40). In her analysis of Díaz Rodríguez, LaGreca traces his mysticism back to its Greek roots and shows how he disassociated mysticism from Christianity and linked it to pagan occult rituals tied to nature as well as to Platonic ideas and a vitalistic Dionysian mysticism as outlined in Nietzsche. According to LaGreca, Díaz Rodríguez "privileges the erotic and celebrates physicality," while his "bodily approach to life and art is in fact spiritual" (75–76). Rivas Groot proposes an alternative form of "resurrection" achieved through "erotic rapture, art, and nature" in which "hopes for salvation" stem from "the beauty of nature and the arts" (97, 41, 91). Writing during the Catholic Regeneration regime in Colombia (1886-99), which made Catholicism the official state religion and promoted ultra-conservative [End Page 715] policies, Rivas Groot explores overlapping discourses such as the cult of beauty, the divinization of the arts, and a return to pre-Christian nontheistic mysticism, ideas that closely parallel those explored in chapter two, as well as a new emphasis on non-heteronormative eroticization. LaGreca characterizes Rivas Groot's erotic mysticism as "an inner ecstatic divinity" that elevates and empowers the individual "by tapping into one's inner 'god'—creativity—which leads to meaningful and beautiful works of art" (101). She also highlights the novel's sublimated homoeroticism, in which the male artists find a divine savior not just in Margot, their common muse, but also in the artistic masterpieces they make upon her death (103). Her analysis of these three authors often describes what might be more appropriately termed "Aesthetic Mysticism" or "Aesthetic Eroticism." Consider, for example, her discussion of Díaz Dufoo's emphasis on the...

АБАГАРЪТ НА ФИЛИП СТАНИСЛАВОВ: ОТ АРТЕФАК ТА КЪМ ЕЗИКОВИЯ РЕСУРС

Filip Stanislavov’s Abagar was and remains the object of various research studies in the fields of history, philology, book printing, Catholic propaganda, etc. The last 5 years have contributed to the overall studying record of this first printed book with elements of modern Bulgarian. How to promote a new rendition of the text, how to celebrate the anniversary of Abagar’s publication, how to present the existing phototypic editions, translations, digitalised version, as well as the long lasting scholarly tradition on Abagar? The article aims to offer a preliminary answer to the more general question on how the old written sources could and should become language resources.

Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I by Peter Lake

Reviewed by: Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I by Peter Lake Frank Swannack Lake, Peter, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016; hardback; pp. 512; R.R.P. £35.00; ISBN 9780198753995. Peter Lake argues that Bad Queen Bess? fills a neglected historical gap by focusing on Catholic propaganda in the Elizabethan period. Key historical moments are given renewed significance through the dialogue between Catholic dissenters and the Elizabethan government. Chapters 1 to 3 analyse the defence and condemnation of Mary Queen of Scots. Lake reveals in a narrative by John Leslie a predicted marriage between the Duke of Norfolk and Mary. When the marriage negotiations failed, the Northern Earls revolted. Lake analyses the response to the rebellion in Thomas Norton's pamphlets. Initially defending Queen Elizabeth from evil Catholics, Norton calls for the queen to act against the Duke of Norfolk and Mary. With the Ridolfi conspiracy seeking to replace Elizabeth with Mary, Lake notes how pamphlet activity increased. Although these pamphlets claim to officially represent the Catholics or Queen Elizabeth, Lake finds them nothing more than spurious gossip. Furthermore, their various authors use print to create a version of events that appealed to popular fantasies. Despite the threat to [End Page 231] Elizabeth from Mary, the Spanish and the Scots, Lake remarks that she is still queen in 1572. By then a Marian conspiracy is being spread claiming that the Queen of Scots is set on world domination. Meanwhile a Catholic treatise pushes anti-monarchical plotting within Elizabeth's government, claiming Mary's condemnation is simply part of a strategy by the queen's closest aides to stop Queen Elizabeth marrying, then replace her with a king. Chapters 4 to 6 tackle Queen Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the duke of Anjou. Catholic propaganda presented a successful marriage to Anjou, and a treaty between Mary and Elizabeth. Lake also examines John Stubbs's concern in The Gaping Gulf that if Elizabeth married Anjou she might die in childbirth with her baby. Lake comments that the marriage became 'an assassination attempt by gynaecological means' (p. 101). Furthermore, Stubbs's apparent paranoia extended to Anjou marrying Mary following Elizabeth's death. Lord Henry Howard pens the Catholic response. Lake remarks Howard uses similar arguments to Stubbs, though Howard casts suspicion on those who oppose the marriage. Lake then considers the Catholic tract Leicester's Commonwealth as exemplary political writing in a battle for truth. It reimagines the Anjou marriage as solving all of England's problems both at home and abroad. Chapters 7 to 9 investigate 'monarchical republicanism' (p. 155), a response to Catholic criticism of the Elizabethan counsellors who plotted England's future without the queen's assent or even knowledge. Lake argues persuasively that both sides endeavoured to make a distinction between religion and politics. He states that recognizing and not blurring that distinction gave the arguments for each side the greater authenticity. Lake investigates the Catholic spy Dr William Parry. His apparent plot to kill the queen allowed the government to insist that tolerating Catholics placed Elizabeth's safety at risk. Lake then examines two texts that respond to John Leslie's defence of Mary. These texts confirm Lake's argument that the Elizabethan government's actions are largely influenced by Catholic activity. Chapters 10 and 11 examine pamphlets published in 1585. Lake notes these texts begin a genre of ostensibly translated works ventriloquizing the opposition. Within these tracts, Lake identifies the new discursive strategy he terms 'the trope of the whistleblower' (p. 236). Edward Rishton's continuation of the staunch Catholic Robert Parson's historical narrative of the English Reformation is evaluated. Lake identifies that previous arguments in Catholic tracts are rehashed in response to changing contemporary circumstances. Lake deals with Mary's execution and its aftermath in Chapters 12 and 13. He shows how Elizabeth is eventually convinced to deal directly with Mary. God's judgement and her long-suffering Protestant subjects are used to bend the queen's ear. Lake also reveals in Elizabeth's first...

“An Auncient Zelous Gospeller […] Desirous to Do Any Thing to Common Good”: Edward Whitchurch and the Reformist Cause in Marian and Elizabethan England

This article examines the last years of the life of the prolific evangelical printer Edward Whitchurch (d. 1562). Although biographers have tended to paint his time under the rule of Queens Mary I and Elizabeth I as chiefly a period of quiescence and inactivity, Whitchurch in fact continued to devote himself, first cautiously under Mary and then more openly and vigorously under Elizabeth, to the evangelical cause he had so long supported. Under Mary, Whitchurch worked to thwart the production of Catholic propaganda and to aid suffering evangelicals, most notably his future wife, Archbishop Cranmer's widow. Upon Elizabeth's accession, Whitchurch zealously dedicated himself to advancing the evangelical cause, both through helping “forward” Protestants into key positions in the newly reestablished Church of England and also by assisting in several printing projects designed to bring important Reformation works before the public. The article highlights particular points of connection between Whitchurch and the evangelical Elizabethan printer Richard Harrison, arguing that Whitchurch played the key role in bringing Harrison into the print trade and sustaining him as he produced two important early Elizabethan texts, the first English translation of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and the 1562 folio Great Bible.

The “Political Thought” of the “Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I,” Discovered and Anatomized

AbstractThis paper uses two manuscript tracts to reconstruct the vision of the English polity underpinning Lord Burghley's interregnum proposals of 1584–85. These proposals famously prompted Patrick Collinson's work on “the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I,” which in turn became embroiled in subsequent attempts to recuperate distinctively “republican” strands of thought and feeling in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Written by two clients of central figures in the regime, the two texts are replies to a tract by John Leslie outlining Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne. This tract was republished in 1581 in Latin and then in 1584 in English as part of a Catholic propaganda offensive of the summer of 1584 to which, in turn, the Bond of Association and the interregnum scheme itself were responses. By comparing different versions of the two texts with one another and with Thomas Bilson's later printed tract,The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion, something like the structuring assumptions, indeed the political thought, underlying the interregnum scheme can be recovered and analyzed and the republican nature of the monarchical republic assessed in detail for the first time.

Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 by Eamon Duffy, and: Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations by Eamon Duffy

203 Book review not to explicitly situate this work in the realm of liturgical scholarship . What he did intend was to “aid the reader to discover the face of God in liturgical worship” (xvi). To this end, Fr. Chupungco has left his readers a valuable gift. Leonard J. DeLorenzo University of Notre Dame South Bend, Indiana Eamon Duffy Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011 xiv+202 pages. Paperback. $25.00. Eamon Duffy Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012 viii+311 pages. Hardbound. $29.95. Eamon Duffy has established himself as one of the foremost historians of Christianity and, especially, of the religious history of Tudor England. In The Stripping of the Altars, first published in 1992 and now in its second edition (Yale University Press, 2005), Duffy argued persuasively on behalf of the health and vitality of late medieval Christianity in England, challenging the received interpretation that a decrepit, stagnant and moribund Catholic practice laid the foundation for the rebirth of (a more authentic) Christian piety in the Reformation. Such a view believes that King Henry VIII and his successors merely gave official impetus to the yearning for reform that was latent in late medieval England . In Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition and Marking the Hours Duffy returns to this terrain and brings more evidence to show just how vibrant religious devotion was in late medieval England and how slow, complex and torturous was the eventual success of the Reformation . Both of these volumes, but especially Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition, can be seen as companion pieces to The Stripping of the Altars. Indeed, that magisterial treatment of late medieval English Christianity provides the background for many of the topics that Duffy treats in Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition. Consequently, like a 204 Antiphon 18.2 (2014) great epic poem, it seems that this volume begins in medias res, the reader’s knowledge of the argument of The Stripping of the Altars and its critical reception being presupposed. Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition is in many ways Duffy’s response to his critics. He clearly bristles at the suggestion that he is a mere “Catholic revisionist historian,” and in the first part of the book (including the Introduction and first two chapters), he provides a wonderful survey of the historiography surrounding the English Reformation to show his autonomy from confessional allegiances and defend his argument. Duffy admits , as he had already said in the Introduction to the second edition , “that The Stripping of the Altars was a self-consciously polemical work” (4). This does not mean, however, that Duffy intended it as a work of Catholic propaganda. His survey of the justifications for, and interpretations of, the success of the Reformation shows that if he is to be accused of “revisionism,” then his critics, defenders of the established and heretofore authoritative view, must acknowledge that their conception has a rather striking affinity to positions developed in the polemical debates that erupted along confessional lines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition is not a conventional narrative history—so much in vogue these days—in which Duffy attempts to re-present and re-argue the story of the English Reformation. Rather, he deepens and solidifies the argument of The Stripping of the Altars. The reader gets the sense that Duffy gathered much of the material that is included in this volume from the “cutting room floor.” The book contains eleven chapters that are arranged in four parts. Duffy characterizes these chapters as “essays,” and, although each could exist as an independent article, there is an overarching unity to the volume. His goal is to “illuminate one aspect or another of the fraught and highly confessionalized history of religion in Tudor England” (13). Once again he wants to show the vibrant place that religion held in late medieval English society. To this end he presents evidence for the importance of Catholic Christianity among both lay people and intellectual elites (e.g., Cardinals Fisher and Pole) in order to give a unified picture of religion in Tudor England. One gets the sense that in...