English Catholic Research Articles

The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century Tim Cooper

The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century Tim Cooper

The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century Tim Cooper

Received

Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (review)

Alison Shell's judicious and ground-breaking book will be especially welcome to anyone interested in English Catholicism in early modern times. The seventy pages of notes reveal how thoroughly she has sifted the previous works in this field. In the introduction Dr. Shell calls our attention to the problem of anti-Catholicism not only in the England of 1558-1660, but in our own time as well. Catholic imaginative writing from her period is virtually inaccessible nowadays except in facsimile, even though that writing was highly influential then among Protestants as well as Catholics. Coding and censorship are with us still, she notes, with early modern Catholic poets being marginalized in the canon and regarded as having a "foreign" inspiration even when they, like Crashaw, wrote their poetry while still conforming to Anglicanism. There are no camp-followers in her nation's universities for a Catholic analysis of English history, nor are Catholics included among those victimized in the early modern era, being thought to have brought their troubles on themselves by choosing an outlawed religion. While admitting she is not a Catholic, she complains of a taboo against writing openly as a Catholic, a taboo which causes historians like Duffy and Scarisbrick not to acknowledge their Catholicism in their works.

English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (review)

This book is a collaborative effort in which eight authors produced fourteen chapters on the same topic: the nature of the Catholic community in England from 1558 to 1778. Marie B. Rowlands, the editor, wrote seven of the chapters. Like all collaborative efforts this one is uneven. The Book is divided into three sections: "Catholics in Society," "Studies of Particular Places," and "Catholics on the Eve of the Relief Acts." Some of the chapters are informative and read well. Others, while informative, are difficult reading because of the nature of the evidence under review, i.e., census returns.

Ruskin’s Influence on English Catholicism

In 1849 John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and in the following year the English Catholic hierarchy was restored, involving the creation of a diocesan administration, made possible by toleration and made necessary by increasing numbers and influence. As Ruskin’s work broadened out from art and architecture to encompass the economy and society, his teaching was to have a profound and lasting effect on the thinking of leading English Catholics.

‘Incompatible with the very name of Christian’: English Catholics and Unitarians in the Age of Milner

The confessional state in England during the eighteenth century defined itself in terms of Trinitarian Protestantism. The exemption from the penal laws conferred by the Toleration Act of 1689 specifically excluded the Catholic religion and the public profession of Unitarianism. Each could lay claim to an history of martyrdom; just as Charles Butler enumerated 319 Catholic martyrs in England since the Reformation, Arians had been burned during the reign of James I and the denial of the Trinity featured prominently among the charges of blasphemy for which Thomas Aikenhead was executed at Edinburgh in 1697. While the proscriptions and penalties enacted against and sometimes inflicted upon Catholics far exceeded those for non-trinitarianism, the public excoriation of the latter was further enshrined in the Blasphemy Act of 1698. Legal toleration for Catholic worship in England was enacted in 1791, in Scotland in 1793; Unitarian worship was not legally tolerated until 1813 in Britain, until 1817 in Ireland.

‘The Popish Army of the North’: Anti-Catholicism and Parliamentarian Allegiance in Civil War Yorkshire, 1642–46

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, may educated British Protestants considered Roman Catholicism to be an anti-religion; indeed, the Cambridge divine William Fulke went so far as to equate it with devil worship. Wealthy and powerful English Catholics attracted extreme hostility in moments of political crisis throughout the early modern period, but in 1642, fear of Roman Catholicism was even used to legitimate the terrible act of rebellion. Keith Lindley has emphasized the civil war neutrality of English Catholics, while many current historians, nervous of displays of religious prejudice, have portrayed the anti-Catholic fears of parliamentarians as cynical propaganda. Michael Finlayson has condemned anti-Catholicism as ‘irrational paranoia’, to be compared with anti-Semitism, which might, had it not been for the growth of liberal traditions in nineteenth-century England, have led to some sort of ‘Final Solution’.

The Social Class of Catholics in Scotland

Summary The social status of people brought up as Catholics in Scotland, as measured by their occupational class, is analysed by using cross-sectional survey data gathered in 1997. The main finding is that Catholics have probably risen in social status to a greater extent than non-Catholics. The experience of Scottish Catholics seems to be distinctive, because no such patterns are found for England, and indeed in this respect Scottish Catholics more closely resemble members of non-Christian religions in England than they do English Catholics. The most likely explanation is the particular role which state-funded Catholic schools have played in Scotland, especially the system of comprehensive secondary schools that was set up after 1965. However, the analysis is suggestive rather than definitive and needs to be replicated on cohort data with larger sample sizes.

Towards an English Catholic Social Conscience, 1829–1920

‘All this talk of socialism is just a ruse. The people are starving and we must not play the policeman for England.’ wrote Archbishop Thomas W. Croke of Cashel in 1880. His attitude was far more intelligent and realistic than The Tablet and its reactionary supporters. Irish bishops were desperately concerned about massive Irish emigration in the late nineteenth century: the threat to the faith at home, the possible loss of souls overseas and the Church’s inability to serve her people was worrying. However zealous in its defence, the Irish bishops remained powerless to halt English popular and government support for the destruction of the Temporal Power. They saw other priorities emerging: by 1880 the recovery of the Temporal Power was a forlorn hope. They must take the high moral ground of humanity rather than property.

Marie B. Rowlands (editor): English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 [C.R.S. Monograph No 5 1999

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PRAYER, PATRONAGE, AND POLITICAL CONSPIRACY: ENGLISH NUNS AND THE RESTORATION

Restoration historiography has so far remained silent regarding the alliance between the exiled royalists and the recusant religious houses in the Low Countries. This article examines the assistance provided to the royalist cause by Abbess Mary Knatchbull of the English Benedictine cloister at Ghent. The correspondence of Charles's leading advisers, most notably Sir Edward Hyde, reveals the extent to which the conspirators relied upon the nuns' mail service to communicate with their supporters in England and abroad, and upon the abbess's ability to obtain funds from local financiers. While the nuns were not central players in the conspiracies of the late 1650s, their activities reveal the royalists' dependency upon the networks established by Catholic exiles. The article also explores Mary Knatchbull's motives for devoting so much of her community's temporal and spiritual resources to the royalist cause. The rewards she sought from the king after 1660 suggest that she had a definite religious and political agenda which aimed ultimately at Catholic toleration. Therefore the article raises several important issues about Charles II's and his ministers' links with English Catholics and, in particular, it points to the important role of women in the hitherto masculine territory of royalist conspiracy and politics.

The Jesuits and the Joint Mission to England during 1580-1581 by Malcolm H. South

BOOK REVIEWS337 Manus O'Donnell in 1537, but as early as 1535, the same pope appointed bishops to rival those appointed by Henry VIII. In primatial Armagh, the pope's appointee , Robert Wauchope, even managed to depose the king's appointment. Jesuit missionaries and reform-minded appointees also ensured the spread of Tridentine Catholicism. But Ireland persisted in its Catholicism for other reasons . It was poor, and the gentry more difficult to intimidate with fines. It was simply farther away from England, which made resistance more possible—as could also be seen in the stronger showing of Catholicism in the remote Highlands and Islands and in northern Wales. And finally the culture of Ireland, so much more tenacious than that ofWales and Scotland, found itself in increasing association with the Church of Rome. What is so surprising about Mullett's book is the extent of Catholic activity in the face of centuries of persecution: chapels being built, educational institutions appearing, confraternities maintaining their charitable causes. The eradication of indigenous cultures and languages, so important in the spread of the British Reformation, proved counter-productive in Ireland, where English harassment spurred revivals of Roman Catholic activity. The stubborn appearance of regulars as missionaries also receives the author's attention. Even after the terror of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, we find the primate Oliver Plunkett complaining in the late l600's about the high number of regulars, whom he found difficult to regulate. The first chapter contains a helpful summary of the current debate over continuity and suggests that it is not so black-and-white as either Bossy or Christopher Haigh tend to view it. There is a staccato quality of the author's approach as he chronicles the periods 1558-1640, 1640-1745, and then 1745-1829, beginning each section with England and Wales, then moving to Scotland and Ireland . The sections on Wales are lean compared to those on the other three countries. But this is a small price to pay for such a fair, measured, and valuable book. John C.Vidmar, O.P. Dominican House ofStudies Washington, D.C. Thefesuits and theJoint Mission to England during 1580-1581. By Malcolm H. South. [Renaissance Studies, Volume 4.] (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press. 1999. Pp. xvi, 172. $7995.) Richard Wilson's Christmas article "Shakespeare and the Jesuits" (Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 1977, pp. 11-13) publicized a trend in contemporary scholarship: faculties and departments of English are interested in Recusancy. Indeed, one finds more sessions devoted to English Catholic writings at literary conferences than one does at comparable gatherings of historians . Scholars such as Peter Davidson and Alison Shell in the United Kingdom, 338BOOK REVIEWS and Arthur Marotti, Dennis Flynn, and Robert Mióla in the United States, explicate literary dimensions of English Catholic culture and explore its influence on "mainstream" English Protestant works. Old issues once resolved on the basis of confessional allegiance, such as Shakespeare's Catholicism, are re-examined. Periodically I would hear literary scholars, slaving away in the archives of the British Province of the Society ofJesus, lament the lack of a good introductory historical guide to English Catholicism written for these new literary explorers. An attempt has been made to answer their prayers. Malcolm South, professor of English in East Carolina University, became interested in English Catholics as he researched Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. Their plight fascinated him. In this volume , he sought "to provide a balanced account that describes the mission of 1580-81 as the opposing sides saw it and [to] evaluate it in light of recent scholarship" (p. v). Working exclusively with easily available published primary sources, e.g., the volumes of the Catholic Record Society, and with an impressive bibliography of secondary literature, South narrates the circumstances surrounding the establishment of aJesuit mission to England to collaborate with the secular clergy already there, the arrival of Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons in 1580, and the government's reaction. His approach is strictly narrative. Nowhere does he offer an explanation why the Society of Jesus, after years of denying petitions for involvement in England, suddenly decided in its favor in late 1579. In his account I noted only...

Recusants, Church-Papists, and "Comfortable" Missionaries: Assessing the Post-Reformation English Catholic Community

One of more pronounced shifts in British historical thought in last quarter-century has been re-interpretation of English Reformation. What was once presented as swift and sure Protestant transformation that swept all of England has lately appeared as slow, controversial, and not immediately successful process. The work of A. G. Dickens and Geoffrey Elton, which portrayed speedy Reformation, has lost favor among ecclesiastical historians.1 The emphasis now, as demonstrated by Eamon Duffy's massive The Stripping of Altars, lies less on reform than on resistance.2 An even more recent revisionist effort is Christopher Haigh's English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under Tudors, which is product of two decades spent slowing down Reformation.3 Haigh has identified several Reformations as Protestantism and Catholicism, matched more evenly than previously supposed, battled fiercely until Elizabeth's accession. After 1558 Protestantism slowly consolidated its hold, aided both by enthusiastic preachers and government support. Yet old practices did not subside easily To quote Patrick Collinson, who has chronicled rise of Puritan evangelicals: It is only with 1570s that historically minded insomniac goes to sleep counting Catholics rather than Protestants, since only then did they begin to find themselves in situation.4 The debate over speed and strength of English Reformation has produced related debate over nature of English Catholicism in sixteenth century, particularly after Elizabethan Settlement. As views of Reformation have changed, so have ideas about those Catholics who were objects of reform. There is widespread agreement that, after 1559, there emerged separated, sacramental sustained largely by members of gentry within their households and reliant on services of household and roving priests.5 John Bossy's landmark work, English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (Oxford, 1976), has been foundation for such an assessment. Since 1976, however, ecclesiastical historians have divided over questions of origins and membership of such community. This review will explore and compare arguments of past twenty years on three issues central to dialogue: emphasis on in origins of post-Reformation community, and roles of two groups within this body:church-papists and various missionary movements in England. The standard study of English Catholicism had been Bishop David Mathew's, which stressed the of an English Catholic tradition... descended from More through Campion and Sir Thomas Tresham and solid Cavalier Catholics of country party.6 More had fathered this tradition, and various staunch conservatives had adhered to it in decade after 1559 until its rejuvenation by missionaries.7 For Mathew post-Reformation Catholicism was part of larger, more amorphous tradition which had survived upheavals of sixteenth century. Two works, both published in 1976, fundamentally challenged this notion. In The English Catholic Community, Bossy declared that post-Reformation Catholicism did not represent continuation of traditional English Catholicism. More, Mary, and Cardinal Pole were part of posthumous history of `medieval' Christendom in England, and only a fragmentary continuity existed between Marian, hierarchical church and missionary construction which succeeded it.8 Rather, after 1570, arriving missionary priests, including Jesuits and others trained at new Continental seminaries, had engineered creation of totally new, separated, self-defined minority sect or small nonconforming community.9 English Catholics, usually gathered in and around gentry households, effected their religious separation, with encouragement of missionaries, by concentration on sacramental life within these households (in Bossy's words: the rites of passage) and, more importantly, by practice of recusancy, willful non-attendance at established Church services. …

A Content Analysis of English Catholic Books, 1615-1714

The present state of bibliographical studies of Catholic writings in post-Reformation Britain allows us to make some generalizations about the course of Catholic literature in in the seventeenth century. The two volumes of The Contemporary Printed Literature of the CounterReformation between 1558 and 1040 by the late Antony Allison and David Rogers have been well received.' The revised edition of my own Catholic Books 1641-1700 has about 18% more items than the first edition.z the eighteenth century we have Catholic Books 1701-1800 by Dr. Jos Blom and his team.3 Our sense of the term English Catholic Book is that first devised by Allison and Rogers. For our purposes the word `English' covers the four languages of the British Isles . . . Other works written by Catholics [in other languages] are included only if they were printed-or if they claim to be printed-in England.4 We have chosen to analyze the content of books published from 1615 through 1714. Some have called 1615 the close of the real Elizabethan age. From their writings we know that most seventeenth-century Catholics did not like to look back to the days of the Armada and the Gunpowder plot. They rarely discussed this part of their history. After 1615 the number of Catholics executed for their religion decreases sharply. By 1615 most of the Catholic heroes of the Elizabethan age had passed from the scene. The year 1714 is a good place to stop because it is the end of the Stuart era. After that date there are new characteristics of Catholicism in the age of Richard Challoner, who was ordained in 1716. In order to see the trends in Catholic publishing we have divided our century in five-year periods except for the years 1685-1689 during the reign of King James II, when the number of Catholic books multiplied rapidly. During the whole century we count 1,955 Catholic books published. Of these 425 or 22% appeared in the years 1685-1689. Therefore, in order not to totally distort the charts and graphs we have divided these five years into four periods: 1685, 1686,1687, 1688- 1689. This gives us a total of twenty-three periods. The first chart [Figure 1] shows the number of books produced in each of the twenty-three periods. Note that except for the four periods mentioned in the previous paragraph all figures are for five years. If production were evenly distributed each period would have something over eighty-three books. We notice that the below-average periods are 1625-1629, 1635-1639, 1640-1644, 1645-1649,1665-1669,1675-1679,1680-1684,1685, and all five periods from 1690. The rises and dips in the pre-1640 period are consistent with other factors in the history of Catholics. There was a relatively easy period for Catholics in the years 1615-1624, when King James I was trying to make a Catholic match for his son, Prince Charles, first with Spain and then with France. In order to improve the overseas image of England the penal laws were consider-ably relaxed. During the next four years things tightened up considerably. In addition, the war with Spain, which ruled most of Flanders, where Catholic printers had established their businesses, made it difficult to get books into England. The first ten years of the Civil War (1640-1649) were difficult years too with a great deal of animosity toward the Catholic body But ultimately the civil war proved to be an occasion for considerable loosening of the government restrictions on the press. One notes a much higher production of printed items in the 1650's.5 In general, slack periods seemed to follow busy periods as far as the volume of Catholic publishing went. There were a number of other factors that led to a decline in the volume of Catholic publishing after 1635. In the first place, two of the largest printers of Catholic books in the first part of the seventeenth century went out of business. …

Tim Cooper, The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 15.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999. xvi + 236 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-85115-752-1

Tim Cooper, The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 15.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999. xvi + 236 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-85115-752-1 - Volume 53 Issue 3

Maryland's Blue and Gray: A Border State's Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps (review)

BOOK REVIEWS35 I troversy of its own. Critics took issue with its lack of a historical framework of American civil liberties in treating Vallandigham and with his failure to grapple fully with the question of the proper limits of dissent. Others believed that he tended to exonerate Copperhead extremes in opposing the war. However, Steven Rogstad reminds readers of the book's gestation period, an era with its remnants of McCarthyism and the emergent Cold War. As Klement's legacy, he notes the "new wave ofrevisionism" ofmore recent scholars in treating "Lincoln's Democratic critics" as well as the challenges to them (xxiii). As welcome as the reissue of Limits ofDissent is, the lack of its historical framework of civil liberties continues to limit its value. And Vallandigham, in tum, remains as controversial as he was in life. Richard R. Duncan Georgetown University Maryland's Blue and Gray: A Border State's Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps. By Kevin Conley Ruffner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 428. $3495) In Maryland's Blue and Gray, Kevin Conley Ruffner states that he is writing a "prosopography, or collective biography" (7) that examines the lives of the junior officers from that border state that served in the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army ofNorthern Virginia. By combing through extensive archival sources Ruffner, a historian for the Central Intelligence Agency, appears to have uncovered nearly every shred of evidence relating to the captains and lieutenants in his study. Ruffner states that he is writing ofthe men who served asjunior officers from Maryland in order to "study the background, motivations, and experiences of a particular group who fought in the nation's bloodiest war" (7). Out of nearly 60,000 Marylanders who donned Union blue and 25,000 who wore Confederate gray, Ruffner chooses a highly selective population of 365 officers in 4 Union infantry regiments and 7 Confederate units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery , all of which served in the Virginia theater of operations. Runner's work offers much that is useful and original to the point of being groundbreaking. In his first chapter, Ruffner excellently outlines the political and social geography of Maryland from its inception as a refuge for English Catholics in the New World to the onset of the Civil War. His next two chapters provide perhaps his most intriguing and original points. Adeptly using quantitative records and manuscript sources, Ruffner explicates that a large portion of the Confederate junior officers were educated young men who hailed from the Southern slaveholding aristocratic section ofthe state and sought to defend their civil liberties, rather than the institution of slavery. Conversely, while classifying the Confederate contingent as members from the "rural and urban gentry," 352CIVIL WAR HISTORY he identifies the Union officers as being young men who hailed from the westem portion of the state and were "the vanguard of the state's growing white working class" (75). However, after such a promising beginning, the work falters in places. It at times from repetitive themes, and the author often disorients the reader by dropping too many names of officers from various regiments and randomly returning to them later without preamble. In addition, Ruffner seems to lack a clear focus, as he alternates between offering a composite social portrait ofthe junior officers and providing a basic regimental history. In an inherent flaw in his thesis, Ruffner attempts to categorize the junior officers as separate from the enlisted men that they commanded, which is unfortunate . Company-grade officers had a symbiotic dynamic with the enlisted men in their units, and it is difficult to comprehend how a book-length monograph can successfully explore one without examining the other. The author fails to make a convincing case for why the Maryland junior officers deserve a book unto themselves, while a slight condensing ofthe first three chapters would have made an excellent journal article that substantially contributed to the literature on the backgrounds and motivations of Civil War soldiers. Judkin Browning North Carolina State University All the Daring ofa Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 386. $27...

‘White’s Disciple’: John Sergeant and Blackloism

‘Charges that he [John Sergeant] was a disciple of Blacklow [Thomas White] … rest on … unsatisfactory evidence.’ Godfrey Anstruther’s conclusion has not, so far as I know, been directly challenged; so this note aims belatedly to offer some evidence in support of Sergeant’s close Blackloist connections.John Sergeant (1623–1707) is now usually remembered as the leading Catholic protagonist in the ‘Rule of Faith’ debates, though he has also been presented as an informer at the time of the so-called Popish Plot, and as a far from negligible philosopher. It will be argued here that, in both theology and philosophy, he was essentially a follower of Thomas White (1593–1676), leader of the influential faction of English Catholics who derived from his best-knownaliastheir title of ‘Blackloists’; for Sergeant himself, in the words of Bishop Richard Russell quoted in the title, ‘everywhere proclaimed himself White’s disciple’.

Book review. Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580-1610. Michael L Carrafiello. A Kingdom in Two Parishes. Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 1521-1789. Malcolm Hardman

Book review. Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580-1610. Michael L Carrafiello. A Kingdom in Two Parishes. Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 1521-1789. Malcolm Hardman

Book review. Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580-1610. Michael L Carrafiello. A Kingdom in Two Parishes. Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 1521-1789. Malcolm Hardman

Book review. Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580-1610. Michael L Carrafiello. A Kingdom in Two Parishes. Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 1521-1789. Malcolm Hardman

:The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance

British and American travellers in Sicily from the 8th to the 20th century early Tudor tombs and the rise and fall of Anglo-Italian relations Quo Vadis? travel as education and the impact of in the 16th century the Grand Tour and beyond - British and American travellers in southern Italy, 1545-1960 Robert Dallington's Survey of Tuscany, 1605 - a British view of Medicean Florence documentary evidence of Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the 16th and 17 centuries Inigo Jones in Naples pilgrims to pictures - art, English Catholics and the evolution of the Grand Tour notes towards a bibliography of Sir Balthazar Gerbier English Catholic poets in mid-17th century Rome philanthropy in Italy - English observations on Italian hospitals, 1545-1789 Milton's visit to Vallombrosa - a literary tradition George Berkeley's Grand Tours - the immaterialist as connoisseur of art and architecture epilogue - Sir Harold Acton, 1904-94.