Early Modern English Catholicism Research Articles

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation ed. by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (review)

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation ed. by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal (review)

England and the Catholic Reformation: The Peripheries Strike Back

Abstract Although the Protestant Reformation has traditionally been the focus of research on early modern England, the last two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in scholarship on the experience of the country’s Catholics. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Catholic Reformation in England have been central since the topic’s inception as a subject of academic interest, and the field has more recently captured the attention of, amongst others, literary scholars, musicologists and those working on visual and material culture. This article is a position paper that argues early modern English Catholicism, though not doing away with all continuities from before the country’s definitive break with Rome, was fully engaged with the global Catholic Reformation, both being influenced by it, but also impacting its progression. Whether through reading and writing, or more physical expressions of mission and reform, English Catholicism was a vital part of the wider Catholic Reformation.

Early Modern English Catholicism. Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, edited by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

Early Modern English Catholicism. Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, edited by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

Early modern English Catholicism. Identity, memory and Counter-Reformation. Edited by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal. (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.) Pp. xiv + 260 incl. 3 figs. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2017. €125. 978 90 04 32566 1

Early modern English Catholicism. Identity, memory and Counter-Reformation. Edited by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal. (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.) Pp. xiv + 260 incl. 3 figs. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2017. €125. 978 90 04 32566 1 - Volume 70 Issue 1

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, ed. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

This book is the outcome of the first international bi-annual symposium on early modern Catholicism that was jointly run by the University of Durham and the University of Notre Dame in 2013. The two editors, James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, state in the introduction that the purpose of the collection is to establish that early modern English Catholicism can be defined through three key themes—identity, memory and counter-reformation—and this aim is generally achieved throughout the volume. The first part of the book deals with how English Catholics sought to preserve their religious and national identity. Brad Gregory’s essay on situating early modern English Catholicism asserts that English Catholic identity was affected by chronology, geography and the sociological and theological aspects of Catholicism in the early decades after the Reformation, affirming that ‘English Catholicism’ included Welsh, Irish and Scottish Catholics. Gregory’s central claim is that English Catholicism can only be understood by seeing it as a part of European history, and he disputes John Bossy’s hypothesis that post-Reformation English Catholicism did not exist until 1570. Gabriel Glickman’s chapter examines how Catholics explored the concept of British identity in the long eighteenth century. Glickman convincingly demonstrates that, despite the complex relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland which pre-dated the Reformation, mutual cultural relations between these countries allowed networks, commerce and devotional ideas to be exchanged domestically and internationally. The other two chapters scrutinise the ways in which religious orders constructed English Catholic identity. James E. Kelly’s chapter describes English convents in Europe offering an avenue for nuns to preserve their English Catholic identity by acting as receptacles for the growing demand in relic collecting; he provides numerous examples of nuns rescuing relics from destruction, which they then used as aids to memorialise the Catholic Church’s history. Thomas M. McCoog’s chapter on the Society of Jesus and the vicars apostolic contends that the English secular clergy exploited the suppression of the Jesuits in Liège and St Omers for the benefit of their own seminaries, which showed how these fractious relationships had an impact on English Catholic identity.

Objects, Emotions and an Early Modern Bed-sheet

This article offers a methodological framework for a purposeful interrogation of ‘emotional objects’ – material objects that fostered, shaped and sustained an assortment of emotional practices that, in turn, had dramatic historical consequences. It examines the production, use and meanings of an ordinary household object: a single English bed-sheet dating to the early eighteenth century. The locations, hands and regimes of value through which the sheet travelled are a core focus, alongside the practical and emotional dimensions of the sheet’s creation in the early eighteenth century; its perception and use as a politicized holy relic; its commercialization among nineteenth-century antiquarians; and its adoption as a commemorative political object in a twenty-first-century museum collection. The bed-sheet’s history uncovers a hidden chapter of Jacobite resistance and reveals the vital activism of women and household objects in sustaining the political and religious sensibilities of early modern English Catholicism.

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, eds. Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xiv + 260 pp. $150.

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, eds. Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xiv + 260 pp. $150. - Volume 71 Issue 2

Early Modern English Catholicism. Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, edited by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

Early Modern English Catholicism. Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, edited by James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, edited by Lowell Gallagher

Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, edited by Lowell Gallagher

Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds., Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. xiv + 282 pages. Lowell Gallagher, ed., Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism. Toronto: Toronto University Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the

Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson, eds., <i>Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage</i>. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. xiv + 282 pages. Lowell Gallagher, ed., <i>Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism</i>. Toronto: Toronto University Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the

Lowell Gallagher, editor, Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth – and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2012, pp. x + 342, £48.00, ISBN: 978-1-4426-4312-3

Lowell Gallagher, editor, Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth – and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2012, pp. x + 342, £48.00, ISBN: 978-1-4426-4312-3 - Volume 31 Issue 4

Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ed. by Lowell Gallagher Christopher Haigh Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism. Edited by Lowell Gallagher. [Clark Memorial Library Series.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. 2012. Pp. x, 342. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4312-3.) This reviewer groaned as he began to read the barely comprehensible editorial introduction to this volume: more pretentious, jargon-ridden, English-lit. theorizing seemed in prospect, with little that is useful to historians of religion. It is striking how much of the work on early-modern English Catholicism is now being done in English departments in the United States, probably because so many of the easily available sources are literary texts of one sort or another, and archival resources of the kind historians often use are limited (and on the other side of the Atlantic). For all its achievements, this scholarly effort has unbalanced our understanding of post-Reformation Catholicism, with its concentration on poetry, hagiography, heroic piety, priests, and the nobility and gentry—at the expense of conventional practice, social relations, and the lower social orders. But this groaning reviewer fretted too much—although ten of the twelve contributors to this collection work in English departments, most of them can, unusually, write comprehensible English, and some make serious contributions to historical understanding. Eleven essays are organized in three sections: three in “Signposts” (on “signature topics”), four in “Poetics” (on Catholic poetry) and four in “Communities” (on confessional identity). Arthur Marotti looks carefully at Catholic responses to Protestant attacks on Catholic worship as idolatry, but finds there is more to say about John Donne and John Milton than Nicholas Sander and Thomas Harding. It looks as if Catholics gave up trying. Frances Dolan cleverly analyzes a ponderous official text exposing the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and a murder pamphlet from 1681, although it is not clear that they go together in any helpful way. Holly Crawford Pickett tells the stories of three “serial converts” (William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth) and suggests that they were irenic and ecumenical rather than hypocrites or shallow time-servers: in these three cases, it looks as [End Page 363] if she is right, although others are more problematical. Alison Shell sensitively examines Alabaster’s poetry and prose of conversion in more detail, and Richard Rambuss defends Richard Crashaw’s style as devotional, intellectual, and both Anglican and Catholic. Gary Kuchar convincingly characterizes St. Robert Southwell’s poem on St. Peter’s repentance as an alchemical allegory of transmutation, and Jennifer Rust presents a canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96) as a response to Southwell’s Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares (1591).The “Communities” section is more obviously historical. Phebe Jensen shows neatly how traditional and Counter-Reformation Catholicism interacted in Catholic celebrations of Christmas, using manuscript collections of carols. Susannah Monta offers a thoughtful assessment of Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and other Catholic texts on holy living, as patterns of domestic piety that fostered communal identity and were copied by Protestants. Anne Dillon reconstructs in meticulous detail the piety and practice of the Confraternity of the Rosary that flourished at Cardigan House in London between c.1650 and 1678, and Stefania Tutino emphasizes the Catholic elements of Thomas White’s The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655). The editor’s introduction is probably best ignored, but the eleven other essays all have something useful to say and those by Pickett, Jensen, and Dillon in particular have real significance for historians of English Catholicism. It is, therefore, a worthwhile collection. But how can we convince editors in search of a title that “Remapping” and “Redrawing the Map” have been done to death? Christopher Haigh The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press

Lowell Gallagher, ed. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. ix + 342 pp. $75. ISBN: 978–1–4426–4312–3.

Lowell Gallagher, ed. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. ix + 342 pp. $75. ISBN: 978–1–4426–4312–3.

Early Modern English Catholicism and the Rewriting of Literary History

AbstractThis article considers the implications of the reinvigorated scholarly interest in early modern English Catholicism and its implications for early modern literary history. Surveying contemporary scholarship as well as little‐known or understudied early modern printed and manuscript texts, the article suggests ways in which the study of English Catholicism is reshaping our conceptions of early modern religious, political, and literary cultures.

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

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.

Paternalism and Roman Catholicism: The English Catholic Elite in the Long Eighteenth Century

There is a general acceptance amongst historians of English Catholicism in the Early Modern period that Catholic landlords were paternalistic towards their tenants, that they were generally in turns charitable and controing, their behaviour invasive yet motivated by a desire for religious and social harmony within the manor. Early modern English Catholicism was certainly seigneurial, with a requirement by the landlord, as suggested by John Bossy, to pay attention to the tenants’ well-being and ‘also to their faith and morals’.’ Michael Mullett echoes these sentiments with regard to late eighteenth-century Catholics who relied ‘on the kind hearts of those who wore the coronets’. The idea of Catholic paternalism is also endorsed by several social and economic historians, such as James M. Rosenheim, who wrote with regard to Lancashire, ‘[the] Roman Catholic gentry sustained closer connections with local communities than did aristocrats elsewhere’. This paper will examine the issue of paternalism on Catholic estates and in the local community to show that the Catholic elite, like their non-Catholic counterparts, gave money to the poor and established schools and almshouses. The focus of this philanthropy, however, was on other Catholics. The Catholic elite were also able to help their tenants, who were usually Catholic, and tie them more closely to the estate by not rack-renting their property and by not hiding behind estate stewards. There were two main reasons for the Catholic elite to focus their efforts on their poorer brethren: without the help of the Catholic elite in providing chapels and relief, Catholicism in England would have floundered; the Catholic elite were also