English Catholic Research Articles

Becoming Visible

While in England the memory of Thomas More had been erased from public life after his execution (6 June 1535), English Catholics exiled in the Spanish Netherlands preserved his figure and legacy. Furthermore, the inclusion of More’s engraving in 16th-century portrait books of distinguished personalities–the so-called viri illustres genre–, contributed to the promotion of the famous English humanist in continental Europe. Soon, More’s integrity and wisdom were extolled not only in works printed in Catholic countries but also in other territories that no longer accepted Rome’s authority. This paper analyses the depiction (both image and text) of the English humanist in all these works. The visual and textual rhetoric of these engravings shows their mutual dependence.

Between Jerusalem and Babylon: Catholic Discourses of Israel and National Identity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (ca. 1560–1625)

Abstract This article examines how English Catholics imagined Jerusalem and Israel in relation to themselves, their nation and their Church. While English Protestant uses of Jerusalem imagery have been well-studied, their inter-confessional context has received less attention, and yet it was crucial to shaping them. Catholic deployments of Old Testament images and typology were no less sophisticated and significant than Protestant ones; English Catholic texts show how multivalent imagery of Jerusalem and its antithesis, Babylon, could be used both to express and to attempt to resolve tensions between the officially Protestant nation and the “true” Church. Exploring Catholic conceptions of Jerusalem, England and the Church is valuable because it offers insight into the culture that formed English Catholic recusants, missionaries, exiles and politicians, but also because it is important to a properly integrated account of the religious politics of England.

‘Being strong on both sides’: Shakespearean heroines equivocations

In the sixteenth century, politico-religious persecution led English Catholics to develop a technique for dealing with Protestant inquiries while avoiding the sin of perjury. Conceived by Henry Garnet in his Treatise of Equivocation, the practice consisted of formulating sentences that were always true but had two different meanings: one easy to understand but false; the other true but complex and hidden. This article investigates how some Shakespearean heroines explore this technique to answer questions in distressing situations. As the persecuted politico-religious minority did in history these misguided heroines seek to protect themselves or those whom they love in the plays.

Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II, by Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez

Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II, by Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez

‘Its West End and Its Whitechapel’: Jack the Ripper and Gothic London in John Francis Brewer’s The Curse upon Mitre Square: A.D. 1530–1888 (1888)

This article analyses the cultural implications of the representation of Jack the Ripper in John Francis Brewer’s novel The Curse upon Mitre Square: A.D. 1530–1888 (1888). By examining how Brewer’s Ripper is positioned as a curse on London itself, this article maps the impact of the killer’s crimes on subsequent depictions of gothic London and its terrors. It further explores how the religious and national tensions surrounding the killer influenced Brewer’s depiction of Jack the Ripper as a British Catholic, contributing to a departure from both earlier portrayals of gothic villains as largely foreign and contemporary speculation that the actual Ripper was Jewish.

“We Pledge Ourselves to the Masses of Working Girls”: The Distinctive Mission of the Women's Young Christian Workers Movement in its Founding Decades in England (1940s–1960s)

“The first important point is to win the young women with whom we work,” explains an early campaign newsletter from the women's English Young Christian Workers (YCW) Movement. In a context where the Catholic community was still a defensive minority, the outward looking mission of the YCW was remarkable and unique. The Movement's praxis was particularly distinctive, focused on a demographic group, working‐class girls and young women, who held little significance in either Church or society. The YCW engaged them as apostles and activists, challenging ecclesial and social assumptions and expectations. This paper draws material from YCW archives and oral interviews to argue that what YCW offered young women in the 1940s–1960s expressed an ecclesiological vision that was ahead of its time. The YCW empowered them to be leaders in a Church where women still rarely spoke or held leadership roles. It also nudged them into a confident construction of their citizenship and agency within secular contexts. This is significant in relation to how the English Catholic Church negotiated its restored presence in a protestant state but is barely recognised in existing historical analysis. The YCW's “leaven in the dough” model of activism within workplaces and other political domains deserves greater notice.

Putting the Catholics back in: the ‘rise of Arminianism’ reconsidered

Abstract This article places the ‘rise of Arminianism’ in the context of changing state policies towards English Catholics at the European dynastic conjuncture of the early 1620s. Through an examination of theological conferences held across 1622–3, it is suggested that both Arminianism and the controversy it engendered were competitive responses from within the Church of England to counter a reversionary Catholic interest. These conferences provided the immediate context for Richard Montague’s tracts of 1624–5, the response to which is considered in terms of conflicting conceptualizations of the character of the Church of England and its relationship to the Church of Rome.

Wesley and the People Called Papists: Recusancy, Methodism, and Religious Tension in Eighteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACT Scholarly interest in Wesley’s views of Catholicism and his conceptions of catholicity has increased significantly. This article examines how British Catholics, especially Bishop Richard Challoner of London and Fr Arthur O’Leary of Cork, engaged with Methodism in late Georgian Britain. Despite the proscribed status of the Catholic Church during this period, Catholics participated to an impressive degree in the controversies surrounding Methodism by defining themselves against Wesley both theologically and politically. Their actions aroused considerable interest and controversy, thus demonstrating the vitality of the Catholic community in an age when the Anglican confessional state was under considerable pressure.

Spiritual Succor or Sacrilege? British Catholic Responses to and Interpretations of Wagner’s Parsifal

Abstract: Scholarly knowledge about the interplay of Wagnerian opera and British church history has advanced on an uneven front and has yet to reach lofty heights. Relatively little has been published about how Parsifal , Richard Wagner’s final and arguably most religious opera, was perceived in the United Kingdom. The present study begins to fill that gap by investigating how a spectrum of British Catholics diversely debated such crucial themes as the extent to which Parsifal was a Christian work, the possible mimesis of the Mass in the Holy Grail scenes, the construction of the title character as a symbolic Christ figure, and whether the staging of this work, whose spiritual content was widely acknowledged, could appropriately be performed in a secular setting like the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.

Weddings and Feuds: English Catholic Nobles in Court Conflicts of the Late 16th Century

Weddings and Feuds: English Catholic Nobles in Court Conflicts of the Late 16th Century

Edmund Arrowsmith, S.J., and the English Catholic Mission: Ministry, Martyrology, and Hagiography in His Life and Afterlife

Edmund Arrowsmith, S.J., and the English Catholic Mission: Ministry, Martyrology, and Hagiography in His Life and Afterlife

‘We are Scottish nationalist and Catholic’: Death’s Bright Shadow and Catholic literary nationalism

ABSTRACT This article contends that although the ‘golden age’ of the English Catholic novel has received (and continues to attract) ample critical attention, there is much still to be gleaned about contemporaneous Scottish Catholic literary works. In presenting George Scott-Moncrieff’s Death’s Bright Shadow (1948) as a case study, the article identifies a distinctively Scottish Catholic and nationalist imagination, which nonetheless owes much to the conventions of the French Catholic Literary Revival, as well as celebrated works by Greene and Waugh. Ultimately, the article suggests that political nationalism is a key feature of work produced by Scottish converts of the early to mid-twentieth century. It proposes that the geographical, cultural and political realities of place which inform the twentieth-century Catholic novel are a notable, if relatively under-explored, part of Scottish Catholic fiction.

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)

:Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II

:<i>Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II</i>

Prize Announcement: The British Catholic History Best Article Prize

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Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II by Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez

Reviewed by: Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II by Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez Spencer J. Weinreich Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II. By Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2020. Pp. xi, 264. $106.95. ISBN: 9780271086019). The recusants—those early modern British Catholics who kept the faith despite the best efforts of Tudor and Stuart regimes to dislodge them—are familiar figures in the study of the Reformation. But what of those who chose exile? Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez’s thoughtful study centers the experiences, ideas, and especially books of these Catholics, specifically those who operated out of Habsburg Spain. Radicals in Exile homes in on the polemical battles waged in the heady years between 1585, when the Armada began to take shape, and 1598, when Philip II died, taking English Catholicism’s most immediate hopes with him. This decade and a half constituted a period in which “the most radical efforts to re-Catholicize England seemed to match Habsburg willingness to do so” (p. 16). Part I, “History in Action,” examines the life and afterlives of Nicholas Sander’s De schismate Anglicano, a scabrous history of the English Reformation that sensationally claimed Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII’s own daughter. Domínguez closely tracks the text’s transformations through subsequent editions, as its editors used it to demonize Elizabeth I and Protestantism, and to promote Spanish military action against Elizabeth. The section concludes with the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Spanish adaptation of De schismate Anglicano, by which “an exile version of the English past [. . .] became deeply rooted in the Spanish world” (p. 92). The seamlessness with which Domínguez can integrate Spanish protagonists alongside English ones, as well as translations and adaptations in multiple languages, showcases the power of centering books, rather than authors. The second part, “The King’s Men,” further pursues the Spanish digestion of the English exiles’ polemical fare. In the wake of the Armada, English Catholic writers carved out relevance for themselves within Spain—promoting the English seminary at Valladolid, flattering and admonishing the king, linking heresy and rebellion to shore up the regime in restive Aragon—and abroad, as propagandists defending Philip II and his policies against Protestant attacks. The king himself cannily exploited this abundant literature, favoring those portions of Joseph Cresswell’s Exemplar literarum that identified the monarch with his nation, for example, [End Page 204] while deprecating the second part of Ribadeneyra’s history that dwelt upon Spanish (and royal) sins. In Part III, “(Habsburg) England and Spain Reformed,” Domínguez examines the public component of the exiles’ campaign for a second invasion attempt, through two texts by the Jesuit Robert Persons reimagining the English political and religious settlement. The Conference vindicated Habsburg claims to the English throne, while the Memorial set out a program for the re-Catholicization of the kingdom once it had been conquered. Throughout, Domínguez places these texts in a rich intellectual landscape, as the project to reclaim England adapted to shifting geopolitical realities, intra-Catholic tensions, and disparate audiences in Spain and abroad. A brief, forceful conclusion emphasizes the exiles’ success in influencing early modern Spanish thought, while arguing against the prevailing assumption “that early modern secular and spiritual matters were hopelessly intertwined” (p. 209). Quite the contrary: Domínguez interprets his authors as deeply concerned to delineate the distinct logics of state and church, of politics and piety. This is strong and persuasive stuff, fostering a greater respect for the clarity of our subjects’ thinking; it is unfortunate that it remains an “ideological undercurrent” in Radicals in Exile (p. 209), rather than an explicit claim, articulated upfront in what is otherwise a lucidly organized book. Domínguez handles the textual and political complexities of his sources with aplomb, deftly drawing out theological implications and hidden tensions. Radicals in Exile is a compelling study of texts as instruments of political action in the Reformation, of the close relationship between writing and invading. Spencer J. Weinreich Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Souls and Bodies by David Lodge

Reviewed by: Souls and Bodies by David Lodge Leslie Woodcock Tentler Souls and Bodies, by David Lodge (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1990), 256 pp. I concede at the outset that mine is an eccentric choice. Souls and Bodies—first published in Great Britain in 1980 as How Far Can You Go?—did not sell widely in the United States, where Lodge is best known for Small World and Changing Places, novels best described as acute comedic takes on academic life. Can an alleged "classic" be "forgotten" if it was not really known in the first place? Then too, Souls and Bodies is set in England, with British protagonists. What possible relevance, it is reasonable to ask, can it have for historians of American Catholicism? I do regard Souls and Bodies as meriting "classic" status, for reasons I discuss below, and will happily label it "neglected" rather than "forgotten"—a distinction that for all practical purposes is largely semantic. The novel's English setting, however, does raise certain difficulties in terms of its immediate utility for the teaching or writing of American Catholic history. The English Catholic experience, after all, has differed in significant ways from that of Catholics in the United States. The relative size of the two populations provides a point of departure. During the years covered by Lodge's novel (1952–1975), the Catholic population of England and Wales grew from roughly 7 percent of the total to just over 8 percent. In the United States in these same years, Catholic numbers swelled to 25 percent of the total population, still an all-time high. Anti-Catholicism was integral to the history and culture of both nations—American anti-Catholicism, indeed, is largely an English import—but it took a far more virulent form in the British Isles and limited Catholic civic freedom for significantly longer. Presumably as a result, English Catholicism was far less assertive both culturally and politically than Catholicism in the United States, even in the decades after 1945. No cardinal-archbishop of Westminster would ever have publicly condemned the political views of a former [End Page 56] Prime Minister's wife as New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman famously did in 1949 with reference to Eleanor Roosevelt and her opposition to public funding for Catholic schools. Not surprisingly, then, the turbulent years that came in the wake of the Second Vatican Council were a good deal quieter in England than in the United States. Perhaps for this reason, the number of priests in the English church did not begin to decline until 1971, five years later than in the United States. Like its American counterpart, the English church grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries primarily because of immigration. But while the United States received Catholic immigrants from a wide variety of locales, English Catholic immigration came almost exclusively from Ireland. (During the period of Great Britain's membership in the European Union, a significant stream of Catholics from Eastern Europe provided new and not always welcome diversity.) The English church, in consequence, has had a less fractious internal history in the past two centuries than its American counterpart. At the same time, it was arguably deprived to a significant degree of the institution-building and political energies that ethnic assertiveness often afforded. But the heavy Irish presence in English Catholicism also meant—and here we have a critical point of similarity with Catholicism in the United States—that the English church was heavily influenced by what one of Lodge's characters calls "the Irish Jansenist tradition"—the world- and flesh-denying obsessions so central to Irish Catholicism since the Famine of the 1840s. So too in the United States, where the Catholic clergy and the episcopate have historically been dominated by men of Irish descent. It is precisely this point of similarity—the "Irish Jansenist tradition"—that makes Souls and Bodies so fruitful a source for historians of American Catholicism, especially when it comes to teaching. (This is a book, I can assure you, that students will actually read.) Lodge is a wonderfully economical writer, with a keen eye for the telling detail. He evokes the collective consciousness of preconciliar Catholicism—"that...

Keeping up with the Catholics: Protestant Evangelism in the Late 17th Century

Abstract James II’s reign opened up space for Catholic mission activity within England. Priests, both foreign and English-born, set up public worship services that were open for visitors to attend. A wave of pamphlets explaining the Roman Catholic faith rolled over the country, and converts were encouraged to publish their stories of leaving Protestantism. Schools were opened, apparently attended by both Catholics and Protestants. And the important pastoral work of invigorating English Catholics, educating them and encouraging them in piety, began. Devout Protestants immediately recognized the efficacy of these missions and admired how quickly they worked. Beginning in the reign of James, they argued that they should also be doing such missional work. This paper looks at what Catholics prioritized in their work in England under James II, and how English Protestants referenced those examples in their own work after 1688.

Why it is time to embrace non-confessional RE in Catholic schools: some reflections from the English context

This article presents an analysis of why advocates of RE in English Catholic schools have managed to avoid seriously engaging with confessional Religious Education. The arguments presented here are set against the context of curriculum change in RE with the impending introduction of the Religious Education Directory in England and Wales (in September 2025). In this time of curriculum change and innovation, an argument is developed in favour of embracing a non-confessional account of RE in Catholic schools.

Avant la lettre: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary

<i>Avant la lettre</i>: Philip Perry, Reconversionist Aesthetics, and the Medieval Literary