English Catholic Research Articles

“An Empire on which the Sorrow Never Sets”: Kenelm Vaughan’s ‘Confraternity of Expiation’ and British Catholic Modernity in Latin America, 1870–1910

“An Empire on which the Sorrow Never Sets”: Kenelm Vaughan’s ‘Confraternity of Expiation’ and British Catholic Modernity in Latin America, 1870–1910

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

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

Female preaching in the English Catholic community, 16 <sup>th</sup>–17<sup>th</sup> centuries

The article is focused on the preaching and missionary work of the English Catholic woman in the 16th — 17th cc., as it was represented in a wide range of texts: biographies of pious Catholic Englishwomen written by their secretaries, chaplains and the nuns of the English convents in the Netherlands and France, chronicles and registers of these convents, conversion stories and letters by Catholic women. A study of these sources makes the author conclude that references to female preaching appeared only in manuscript texts that existed within private space and were intended for female audience — for the nuns and their female relatives in England and abroad. The texts were linked to English Jesuits. The descriptions of the episodes of female preaching followed some general rules. The Catholic Englishwomen taught or preached to only those below them in social standing: children, relatives, or servants, but never to the men of the status, which equaled theirs, because it was thought that to convert a man a preacher or a teacher needed to produce rational arguments, and women were not considered to be capable of this. It is shown that this view reflected the gender stereotypes of the time, not the reality of female missionary work.

‘Our Three Selves:’ Radclyffe Hall and Mabel Batten’s Lived Catholicism

Abstract For British Catholic women, conversion was an empowering choice for oneself, rather than a path towards gaining institutionalized power. Lay female converts at the turn of the century were generally privileged, with a worldly understanding of the role of women in British society. Many converts drew on the spirit of female independence at the end of the 19th century to contest their place in British society. For some, their social and financial capital offered an additional position of power from which to push on notions of traditional Britishness and femininity. To have the freedom to choose conversion at all exemplifies this feeling of bodily and mental autonomy rarely exhibited by many women during the late 19th century and early 20th century. This article sheds new light on the expansiveness of the lived, lay Catholic experience in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the examples of Mabel Batten (1857–1916) and Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943).

Salvation and Sir Kenelm Digby’s philosophy of the soul

ABSTRACT The English Catholic philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) has enjoyed a recent spate of scholarly attention as a prodigious traveller, political figure, and man of diverse intellectual interests. This article contributes to this scholarship by assessing the commentary on salvation at the heart of Digby’s philosophy of the soul and the historical contexts in which it was produced. It argues that Digby’s thinking on the soul was a meditation on the worldly interactions a Catholic must undertake or avoid in order to achieve salvation. As such, our intellectual historical understanding of Digby is much improved when he is viewed as a scholar who constructed an identity as a thinker adept at advising others on the correct path to beatitude. This article also makes the broader argument for salvation as an important conceptual tool for early modern intellectual historians wishing to accurately map the complex relationship between theology, scholarly argument, and scholarly ambition in the seventeenth century.

Sexual Scandal and Catholicism in Victorian England: The Case of Monsignor Thomas John Capel

Abstract This article investigates a sexual scandal that rocked the English Catholic Church in the Victorian era. Though forgotten today, Monsignor Thomas John Capel was one of the most famous clerics in the Victorian Church. His career fell into turmoil when, in 1879, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning launched a diocesan commission to investigate charges of sexual misconduct involving three women. Drawing on a series of rich and as yet unexplored archival sources, the article charts the career of Thomas Capel and assesses the nature, aims and outcomes of the Church-run inquiry into his conduct. Through an analysis of the actions not just of Capel but of Church authorities both in Westminster and in Rome, we gain a revealing window onto sexual scandal and the Church’s response to it in the nineteenth century.

Catholics, property, and the experience of the penal laws in eighteenth-century England: Evidence from the Vincent Eyre Manuscripts

This article seeks to nuance our understanding of how the penal laws against Roman Catholics were interpreted in eighteenth-century England and how English Catholics of the era experienced their status as a penalised minority. Using evidence from Ushaw Library’s Vincent Eyre Mansucripts, it examines how propertied Catholics navigated proscriptions against owning and selling property. Although much scholarship has emphasised the flexibility that the statutes afforded Catholics, this article focuses not on the enforcement of these laws but on the pressure they exerted on Catholics’ daily consciousness. Vincent Eyre, a Derbyshire conveyancer, trained under Catholic conveyancers in London and worked as agent for the tenth Duke of Norfolk in Sheffield. His manuscripts, which consist principally of legal opinions and briefs on conveyancing cases, testify to the pervasive uncertainty under which Catholics laboured as they sought to assert a ‘good title’ to property, protect their faith from legal discovery, and assert their standing as subjects despite laws that disabled them from full belonging to the nation. This article builds on recent work that charts Catholics’ affective experiences in eighteenth-century Britain as their dynamic contributions in the period are increasingly recognized.

Prize Announcement: The British Catholic History Best Article Prize

<i>Prize Announcement: The British Catholic History Best Article Prize</i>

Why Younger Catholics Seem More Committed: Survivorship Bias and/or “Creative Minority” Effects among British Catholics

AbstractThe normative value of, and the extent of popular engagement with, different forms of commitment differ across Christian religious traditions, but studies often show women and older people exhibiting greater religiosity in their behavior and belief. Using a multidimensional approach to religious commitment, this study uses a new survey to provide an in‐depth assessment of Catholics in Britain. It finds that younger cohorts show greater involvement in some aspects of commitment and that there is very limited evidence for gender differences. Family religious socialization plays a key role in patterns of commitment relative to the weak impact of schooling. Two potential explanations for this counterintuitively positive “youth effect” seen among British Catholics are offered: “survivor bias” and a “creative minority” effect. The study provides an important contribution to understanding how Catholics in Britain engage with their faith and mediate processes of secularization.

Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez. Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II. Iberian Encounters and Exchange, 475–1755, 4. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Pp. 250. $99.95 (cloth).

Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez. Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II. Iberian Encounters and Exchange, 475–1755, 4. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Pp. 250. $99.95 (cloth). - Volume 61 Issue 2

Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II. Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez. Iberian Encounter and Exchange, 1475–1755. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. xii + 252 pp. $99.95.

Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II. Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez. Iberian Encounter and Exchange, 1475–1755. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. xii + 252 pp. $99.95.

Т.С. Элиот и чувство истории

Eliot’s deep interest in ideas about history began early and continued throughout his life. In his student days, he encountered the concepts of human pre-history put forward by early anthropologists such as Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He studied under Josiah Royce and George Santayana, was aware of the historical writing of his distant relative Henry Adams. The paper also dwells at some length on Eliot’s attitude to the “Whig historians” and the Criterion-group historians. As Eliot entered the Christian fold, his idea of history became that of the Bible and the Church. He followed St. Augustine, was deeply influenced by the British Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. As a Christian, Eliot rejected both progressive and regressive views of history as well as determinism in favor of a belief in free will, the doctrine of Original Sin and faith in Providence. Eliot’s views involve a challenge to the secular view of history, and his key terms are based on his Christian vision: the “historical sense”, in the meaning of awareness of “tradition”, which carries the truths of Revelation and the wisdom of the ages forward in time, adapting them somewhat to various times and cultures but remaining faithful to the essential truths, the “permanent things.”

Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Refor

Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Refor

A “True Chronicle Historie” of Britain: King Lear and Its Early Catholic Audiences

ABSTRACT It has been known since the 1930s that one of the two documented performances of King Lear within Shakespeare's lifetime was by a touring group of Catholic recusant actors in Yorkshire during the winter of 1609–10. Their performances (mainly at the houses of Catholic gentry) were not simply “entertainment” but were an attempt to sustain and celebrate a collective Catholic identity in the face of continual persecution. Despite all that has been written about the religious and philosophical meaning of King Lear, there has been relatively little attempt to understand what the play might have meant to an English Catholic audience in 1609–10. Why did this group of travelling players think King Lear was an appropriate play to perform before their mainly Catholic audiences? In fact, its picture of a British kingdom divided into clearly marked groups of good and evil characters, in which the good are brutally persecuted by the evil and sometimes denounced as “traitors”, offers a surprisingly close “fit” with the perspective of English Catholics both before and after the Gunpowder Plot. Irrespective of what Shakespeare himself might or might not have intended, it seems time for modern critical discussion of King Lear’s religious and political meaning to take proper account of how some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have understood the play. Since their “misreading” of it has considerable support from the text, possible explanations for this also need to be considered.

The Excommunication of Elizabeth I: Faith, Politics, and Resistance in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1603, by Aislinn Muller

Regnans in Excelsis—the 1570 papal bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I—is well known to everyone interested in her reign and also mentioned in all textbooks on the English Reformation. Yet, Aislinn Muller’s book is the first to examine in detail and depth its timing, nature and impact. The wider issues she addresses include the level of public interest in the bull, the bull’s influence on the confessionalisation of politics, and how the call for the queen’s deposition affected the thinking and conduct of the English Catholic community. Muller begins by explaining the bull’s genesis and departures from legal conventions. Inevitably much of the ground covered here is not new, but she does add her own insights, particularly in discussing the bull’s unusual features and the dilemmas its wording raised for English Catholics. In the next chapter, where she discusses the means of transmission, her research has turned up more copies than it was previously thought existed of the 1570 bull—some of them manuscript transcriptions—in the hands of Catholics. Nonetheless, despite its wide circulation in 1570 and beyond, in her view it was the 1580 republication of the bull that had the greater impact, since it was disseminated in England by Jesuit and seminary priests. Elizabeth’s excommunication then became the rationale for all kinds of subversion among English and Irish Catholics, whether by simply holding a copy of the bull or using the excommunication to justify the 1580 rebellion of James Fitzgerald in Ireland.

Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020, pp. xii + 264, $99.95, ISBN: 978-0-271-08601-9

Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020, pp. xii + 264, $99.95, ISBN: 978-0-271-08601-9 - Volume 35 Issue 4

Beyond the Douai-Reims Bible: The Changing Publishing Strategies of the Kellam Family in Seventeenth-Century Douai

Abstract The career of the Catholic Englishman Laurence Kellam is often reduced to his most impressive edition, the Old Testament of the Douay-Rheims Bible (1609–1610), an English Catholic Bible translation edited by the English College of Douai. Yet, there has been scarce attention for the remaining 190 editions, printed in English, as well as in Latin, French and Dutch, that bear a Kellam imprint. The discovery of another fifty editions that should be ascribed to the Kellam press demands a reappraisal of its activities and significance. By analysing both printed and archival sources, this article intends to fit the Bible edition of 1609–1610, and English Catholic printing on the continent more generally, into the wider perspective of three generations of publishing activities and family history, highlighting the increasingly tight connections between several generations of the Kellam family and the authors, institutions, and fellow-publishers of their host society.

C. C. Martindale (1879–1963), the History of Religions, and the Theological Imagination of David Jones (1895–1974)

Abstract Although the work of his Jesuit contemporaries Ronald Knox and Martin D’Arcy is perhaps better known today, C. C. [Cyril Charlie] Martindale’s (1879–1963) thinking about “the relationship between paganism and Christianity” in the early twentieth-century theological debates surrounding the field of “History of Religions” would have a profound effect on the unique intersection of theological thinking and artistic form in the work of the British Catholic poet and painter David Jones (1895–1974). Jones’s reading of Martindale’s short story collection The Goddess of Ghosts (1915) in 1919 would help to resolve a “religious crisis” Jones experienced in his exposure to the arguments of the skeptical scholar of “History of Religions,” James Frazer. Martindale’s presentation of his ideas in a literary form not only provided Jones with a hermeneutic (derived from the church fathers) for thinking about the relationship between paganism and Christianity, but also suggested an artistic model for exploring theological ideas with literary language.

: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>

British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714, by Giada Pizzoni

British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714, by Giada Pizzoni