English Recusant Research Articles

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

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

Encounters with Music in Rudolf II's Prague

AbstractThis article uses three well-known members of Rudolf II's imperial court—the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the composer Philippe de Monte, and the adventurer Kryštof Harant—to delineate some ways music helped Europeans understand identity and difference in the early modern period. For Kepler, the unfamiliar intervals of a Muslim prayer he heard during the visit of an Ottoman delegation offered empirical support for his larger arguments about the harmonious properties of Christian song and its resonances in a divinely ordered universe. For Harant, listening and singing were a means of sounding out commonalities and differences with the Christians and Muslims he encountered on his travels through the Holy Land. Monte sent his music across Europe to the English recusant William Byrd, initiating a compositional exchange that imagined beleaguered Bohemian and English Catholics as Israelites in exile, yearning for Jerusalem. Collectively, these three case studies suggest that musical thinking in Rudolfine Prague did not revolve around or descend from the court or sovereign; rather, Rudolf II's most erudite subjects listened, sang, and composed to understand themselves in relation to others.

The Many Lives of Raleigh’s Ghost: Reframing Atheism and the Afterlife in Early Stuart Britain

overt admission that the name and fame of Sir Walter Raleigh are being used as an editorial foil to attract readers and sell copy will be my leading thread here. The key to understanding this strikingly English reframing of Lessius’s treatise ... is thus to situate it as part of the Jesuit activities of production and clandestine dissemination of translations for the spiritual “profit” of English recusants, and also in regards to other instances of exploitation of Raleigh’s enduring fame in contemporary translations and other “feigned apparitions.” In so doing, I shall explore the various “time-warps,” intertextual loops, visual tricks, and other manipulative devices that enable the translation of this famous ghost, through the circles of heaven or hell, and across material forms, ideological divides, and language barriers (real or imaginary), to seventeenth-century English readers.

Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature. Hannah Crawforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii+218.

<i>Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature</i>. Hannah Crawforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii+218.

Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England ed. by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England ed. by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith Nicholas D. Brodie Eckhardt, Joshua, and Daniel Starza Smith, eds, Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Material Readings in Early Modern Culture), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 270; 13 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9781472420275. Like many a miscellany, this volume contains a fascinating selection of texts. In the Introduction, the editors, Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, chart [End Page 288] the history of the term ‘miscellany’ and the phenomenon of miscellanies, and address some of the main scholarly uses of manuscript miscellanies. In short, miscellanies have been used for literary, historiographical, and palaeographical studies of individual texts and authors, but more recently a shift has occurred to examining miscellanies as whole volumes, exploring their varied meanings for authors, compilers, multiple owners, and varied readers. The volume largely builds on this approach of studying miscellanies in the whole, oftentimes in tandem with other texts. Smith’s essay sets straight to this task, studying how its constituent parts become incorporated into a miscellany volume, focusing on textual materiality before, during, and after compilation. He examines manuscripts, folds, handwriting, and the like to reconstruct a potential original manuscript of John Donne’s Satyrs. Smith poses thoughtful questions about whether and when miscellany texts were the termination of a circulating text. Continuing the focus on Donne, Piers Brown explores the term ‘Rhapsody’, and unsettles too-confident definitions of what constituted a miscellany, as opposed to other definable textual collections like anthology. This also provides a means of looking for order within the apparent disorder of a miscellany, and the treatment of contemporary quotation habits in this essay is particularly interesting. James Daybell’s contribution unpacks notions of letter-writing and model letters. He posits that such letters were not necessarily for simple copying, but were often intended to be politically constructive and personally informative, and to provide moral formation and some basic education. Noah Millstone’s study of prophetic texts highlights the problems of reading such prophecies, both for scholars and for contemporaries. Demonstrating contemporary cynicism and fascination interacting with such texts, Millstone offers some bold conclusions. Helen Hackett’s study of Huntington Library, MS MH 904 offers a convincing attribution of the ‘Hand B Scribe’, and will be of interest to scholars of English recusants. Hackett also provides a detailed survey of how one volume changed over time, with a formerly quite domestic text reconfigured by the deliberate filling of blank pages. Complementing Hackett’s contribution, Cedric C. Brown examines three manuscript miscellanies to map out connections relating to recusant networks and the activities of the Jesuit missioner William Smith, vere Southerne, and extend earlier work about Catholic networks. Lara M. Crowley takes an intriguing approach to the issue of writers’ canons, noting that manuscript miscellanies often contain apocryphal and non-canonical works, and uses this fact to develop a wider view of the possibilities offered to explore contemporary readings. Crowley thus moves from staid scholarly assumptions about scribal idiocy or incompetency, and [End Page 289] copying chains that replicate mistakes, to being more open to the possibilities that dubious attributions may be authentic and, more importantly, were seen that way by contemporaries. Following the theme of scribal copying, Joel Swann challenges simplistic interpretations of the relationship between text and scribe, to explore issues of intent and varied reading patterns and habits. Continuing the scribal focus, Eckhardt explores one scribe’s discernible oscillation between serious and satirical material, highlighting the need to be sensitive to the literary aesthetics and abilities of scribes. Finally, Victoria E. Burke concludes with a focus on the aesthetic tastes of one particular compiler. In this case study, Donne’s popularity, the theme of moderation, classical excerpts, and the compiler’s personal interest in sounds, all provide insights into the changing tastes of one individual reader, firmly concluding the volume with an illustration of the benefits to be had from studying medieval miscellanies in the whole. Overall, this volume contains a delightful selection of essays. It will be of interest to scholars with particular interests like Donne or English recusants, who might choose the pages related to...

Philip Perry’s Schools Manuscript and the Invention of the Recusant Middle Ages

The interest in medieval English literature and its history dates back to the eighteenth century, when antiquarians and literary critics started to recover, edit and comment - and sometimes forge - texts that either revived or documented the past. By the time Thomas Warton published his History of English Poetry (1774-1791), Thomas Hearne had already edited a large amount of medieval historical texts and sources. Warton, however, historicized not only the Middle Ages but continued up to the eighteenth century. The object of our essay is an unedited manuscript that puts together a history of medieval - and only medieval - British literary authors, and which shows its author independently at work at the same time Warton was writing his History. Our study extends from a codicological analysis of the manuscript to an examination of all the aspects involved in its composition - authorship, purpose, sources - as well as the consideration of its historiographical approach. We hope to establish both the relevance of this manuscript as an early history of medieval English literature and introduce its author, the English recusant Catholic Philip M. Perry, about whom virtually nothing has been written.

The Cardinals: Thirteen Centuries of the Men behind the Papal Throne (review)

Reviewed by: The Cardinals: Thirteen Centuries of the Men behind the Papal Throne Aidan Bellenger O.S.B. The Cardinals: Thirteen Centuries of the Men behind the Papal Throne. By Michael Walsh. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2010. Pp. vi, 250. $23.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-802-82941-2.) Michael Walsh has over many years been much engaged in the writing and compilation of ecclesiastical biography, not least in his editing of the revised Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford, 2006). It is not surprising, therefore, that he has published this general study of cardinals, a companion piece to his Westminster Cardinals (New York, 2008) and his study of the conclave. It begins with a useful introduction on the development of the cardinalitial office and continues with some sixty pithy character sketches, which take their inspiration from the brief-lives formula adopted by Trevor Beeson, the former dean of Winchester, in his series of informative and sometimes sardonic vignettes of leaders of the Church of England. The cardinals lack the comfortable provincialism of the Anglican clergy but still form an inner elite, an intimate circle, in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is manageable enough in scale; only some 4000 men have received the title, and there have been generally fewer than 100 at any one time to make them eminently accessible. The origins of the cardinalitial dignity are obscure (despite there being little doubt about the etymology of the word, taken from cardo, a hinge) but by the high Middle Ages, like much else in the Western Church, the cardinalate had received definition and focus. By the end of the twelfth century they formed a college, met with the pope regularly in consistories, and conducted papal elections in conclaves. By the end of the thirteenth century they had acquired a very distinctive hat. What makes the cardinals historically important is their role in the election of the pope—“the men behind the papal throne”—and whatever else they do or are is secondary. Their corporate identity outside the conclaves remained unclear; they never quite constituted a senate in the Church and were not a separate order. Their individual contributions—whether as curial officials, politicos and diplomats, scholars, crown cardinals of high birth, or [End Page 69] leading bishops in their local church—have been diffuse. Walsh provides an excellent overview of the variety of “the princes of the Church” over a wide chronological span. He delights in the quirks and singularities of the saints and sinners who have made up the Sacred College. Most of the biographies are of Europeans, as most cardinals have been from that continent and within Europe mainly Italians. He looks at “nearly men”—those who came close to receiving the papal crown. None came closer than the Englishman Reginald Pole. Among the saintly figures he features is one with strong North American ties: Breton-born Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus (1768–1836), who was an exile in England as a young priest, spent twenty years in Boston, became the Boston Archdiocese’s first bishop, became notable for his work among Native Americans, and died as cardinal archbishop of Bordeaux. Walsh also presents an affectionate portrait of Thomas Weld (1773–1837), a widower from an English recusant Catholic family who was ordained as a priest in 1821 and appointed five years later as a bishop in Upper Canada—a place he never visited. In 1830 he became a cardinal in Rome and became celebrated as the cardinal who was accompanied openly in the city by his (legitimate) grandchildren. This book makes interesting and sometimes amusing reading and is an insightful and well-informed introduction to the subject. It would have benefited from a concluding section, balancing the opening part of the book, which might have provided some unifying themes to the book. It also could have allowed the author to show how the internationalization of the Sacred College beyond Europe to the developing world has been so significant a feature of the office over the last century, a mirror (as so often with the cardinals) of the wider Church. The Catholicity of the Church is now firmly wedded to its Mediterranean roots...

&lt;i&gt;The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology Anna Battigelli Gabriel Glickman. The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009. Pp. ix + 306. $99. Mr. Glickman has mined archives to expose the paradoxes and complexities of English Catholic self-definition, demonstrating how it was shaped by both domestic and foreign influences following the Revolution of 1688. The result is a fresh look at a portion of English Catholicism from the inside out: he demonstrates how Jacobite English Catholics, steeped in Gallican ideas, tried to align their religious and political allegiances. The dispersal of Catholics after the Revolution of 1688 was both physical and ideological. Where earlier anti-Catholic flashpoints affected clergy, the Revolution affected the Catholic laity. Divisions within the Catholic community resulted from both dismay at the militancy of James’s Catholic advisors and wariness of Louis XIV’s increasing absolutism. When James was ousted, the same loyalism that for a century led Catholics to defend their monarch at great personal and financial cost now led some of them to work against the post-Revolution settlement. And yet “an idea of irenic patriotism became the dominant position within English Catholic thought over the course of the century.” Because most of the evidence comes from correspondence of the gentry [End Page 134] and clergy, we do not get a vertical study of Catholicism in all its complexity and variety, but Mr. Glickman’s meticulous scholarship reveals many of the contradictions experienced by English Catholics. Far from withdrawing into an enfeebled opposition culture, the English recusant gentry rebuilt itself as a prosperous and well-connected society engaged with its culture, even as it cultivated an outlawed inner piety shadowed by Jacobitism. Catholics drew on friendships with Anglicans to protect their estates, forge strategic family alliances, and engage in both shrewd estate management and commercial activity to sustain a patrician sociability and hospitality. Spirituality focused on the cult of the family and was informed by a Salesian merging of the worldly and the otherworldly. The existence of the Jacobite Court lent recusant society a cosmopolitan culture supported by convents, monasteries, and colleges. One of this study’s strengths is its demonstration of how “tutors and soldiers, merchants and musicians, and wives” enlarged English Catholic social networks. The imagined communities that resulted from these cosmopolitan networks provided English Catholics with “an alternative conception of the English nation.” Yet the exiled Court remained divided by those who held revanchist views of kingship as absolute and those who insisted on conciliation. Within England, Catholic politics split over competing efforts to articulate an oath of allegiance that Catholics could sign. Members of the Catholic Jacobite diaspora viewed Rome as a spiritual authority, but their correspondence reveals “hostility toward the Catholic world order” that had turned its back on England. By the middle of the century, “the institutions of the diaspora continued to protect ‘rebellious’ forms of the faith, even as they intoned ideals of Catholic unity.” Torn “between the universalist outlook of the Catholic Church and the traditions of a community conscious of their unusual minority status in their native kingdom,” they experienced a contradictory identity. Their clergy were similarly divided between those who worked to relieve fears that Catholics had potentially treasonous plans and those who worked to keep Jacobite hopes alive. That we wish for more information and a broader canvas testifies to Mr. Glickman’s success at demonstrating the perplexity and richness of post-Revolution English Catholicism. Appendices include a list of English Catholics at the Court of St. Germain, Commissions to English Catholics given by the exiled court, a list of Vicars Apostolic, and genealogies of the Howards of Norfolk and the Carylls of West Harting. Anna Battigelli SUNY Plattsburgh Copyright © 2012 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo

English Recusant Networks and the Early Defense of Cartesian Philosophy

English Recusant Networks and the Early Defense of Cartesian Philosophy

Spanish Diplomacy and English Recusancy in Early Elizabethan England

Reformation governments devoted considerable assets toward monitoring the activities of their wayward subjects who went into exile. Monarchs also provided resources for exiles seeking their support; the "Elizabethan Exiles" who sought refuge at the court of Philip II, and urged the king to undertake a conquest of England on behalf of the faith, are merely among the most famous. However, an even greater task was to provide spiritual, financial and even martial support for those who sought to go into exile, or else could not or would not go into exile. This task largely fell on the shoulders of the diplomatic representatives maintained at foreign courts. For English would-be exiles and recusants, their most likely source of support lay in the form of the Spanish ambassador; all of Philip's representatives offered money and moral encouragement to their coreligionists to varying degrees. There were many instances, especially in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, in which the Spanish ambassadors networked with these recusants and monitored the activities of would-be exiles. The 1562 case of Arthur Pole, an English Catholic, would-be exile, and aspirant to the crown, serves as a powerful reminder that the Spanish could, and did, support early efforts against Elizabeth's government.

Bringing the house down: religion and the household in Marlowe's Jew of Malta

Christopher Marlowe's depictions of religious conflict engage with major political and national issues, but they also acknowledge the domestic implications of such conflict. In sixteenth‐century England, theological dissent split households as well as nations, and Marlowe introduces his audiences to characters who cite religious precedents to justify domestic treason: committed in the name of religion, their actions fracture families, and turn servants against masters. Marlowe's interest in households devastated by religious difference is most evident in The Jew of Malta. As this article argues, Malta's households are destroyed by characters who use religious rhetoric to rationalise self‐interested and anti‐social agendas: the anti‐Semitic Ferneze, seizing Barabas' property; Barabas, killing a daughter who varies from him in religion; and Ithimore the Turk, betraying his Jewish master. This article suggests that Marlowe's play responds to contemporary experiences of religious persecution, in particular the Protestant state's campaign to eradicate the English recusant household, and concludes that Marlowe is, within a domestic setting, exposing the hypocritical appropriation of religious rhetoric by characters selfinterestedly pursuing purely secular advantage.

Thomas Gage and the English Colonial Encounter with Chocolate

This essay explores the early English encounter with chocolate, a beverage associated with New World and Spanish tastes, and popular among English recusants returned from Spanish service. In particular, it follows the career of Thomas Gage a Dominican priest who had spent considerable time in the Spanish New World before returning to England, where his account of travels in Spanish America helped ease his repatriation and religious reintegration. Gage's attention to New World food, especially the confection and consumption of the Indian drink chocolate, provided English readers with valuable information on the cultures of colonial Spanish America in the early seventeenth century. The Spanish lore transmitted to England by reconciled recusants became an abiding cultural concern of colonial promoters upon England's acquisition of cacao-producing Jamaica later in the century.

Fr. Augustine Baker, OSB: Five Treatises; The Life and Death of Dame Margaret Gascoigne; Treatise of Confession. Edited by JOHN CLARK.

John Clark’s work of editing ‘opera selecta’ by Dom Augustine Baker, OSB continues with the present contribution. The Five Treatises, short compositions, were written by Baker for the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai, concerning the practical aspects of the monastic life, covering topics such as ‘against being solicitous of the honour of the house of the order’, ‘concerning the election of worthy and fit counsellors within this house’, and a ‘treatise concerning scandals’. The Life and Death of Dame Gascoigne concerns the premature death of the youngest sister of Dame Catharine Gascoigne, who belonged to a noted English recusant family. The Treatise on Confession was designed to encourage the nuns to avoid scrupulosity concerning venial sins, and to approach the sacrament as an aid to the interior life. A description of the manuscripts utilized in this edition is provided (pp. vii–xiii).

Between the Sacraments and Treason: Aspects of the Politicgal Thought of the English Recusants in the First Decade of Elizabeth I's Reign

AbstractThis essay treats how English Roman Catholics, deprived of place and standing in their native church, addressed the two essential elements underlying the Protestant political economy of the Elizabethan Settlement. After a brief précis of how other studies have looked at political thought, the Protestant axioms of a lay supremacy and a unilateral national prerogative in the government of the church shall be delineated. The two main sections shall then treat the Catholic critique of the English national church and its lay supremacy respectively. The conclusion shall address the dilemma of conscience that these principles inflicted on Roman Catholics in Elizabethan England. Having been both summarily deprived of ecclesiastical standing and alienated from their native polity by their refusal to acknowledge the demands of the Elizabethan Settlement, England's Catholics found themselves justifying their actions and assailing the new ecclesio-political arrangements. Specifically the Recusants took aim at the notion of the laity exercising authority over the church whether from the throne or in parliament, and at the concept that England apart from the rest of the Church at all times and in all places could order its rites, liturgies, sacraments, and creed. This second item became more pronounced in that the Oath of Supremacy specifically mentioned the renunciation of all bishops unless they were English. For the Recusants these two elements created an insurmountable barrier for any sincere Catholic conscience.

Shakespeare's Edward III : A Consolation for English Recusants

Shakespeare's EdwardIII: A Consolation for English Recusants J. P. CONLAN With the publication of three new editions in the past five years, The Raign ofKing Edward the Third has reemerged as a prominent candidate for inclusion in the Shakespeare canon.1 Nonetheless, the play still continues to be received with suspicion. Critics recognize it is written in a genre, the chronicle history, that Shakespeare dominated in his day and admit the play has the same variety of imagery, a similar texture ofvocabulary, and verbal parallels to Shakespeare's other dramas.2 Notwithstanding, few scholars are willing to embrace the play wholeheartedly as Shakespeare's own. The problem, they claim, is the play lacks dramatic unity. As they see it, the play appears to be divided into two poorly integrated halves. The first two acts focus on the king's campaign to seduce the Countess of Salisbury; then, the theater of operations shifts abruptly to France and the Hundred Years' War to detail the English conquests at Sluys, Crecy, Calais, and Poitiers. This largely unexplained bifurcation within the play between love and war, shame and honor, England and France, has cast the play and its playwright into disrepute for centuries, and it is upon this legacy ofcensure that skepticism about Shakespeare's authorship of the play has its most secure foundation.3 Among those who see Shakespeare's hand in the play, this perceived lack ofdramatic unity has generated a wide range ofspecial pleading. To explain this singular fact, A. F. Hopkinson has told us that Shakespeare's "sublimegeniusspurnedatarbitraryrulesandrestraints,"4thatthetwoplots in themselves must be considered as separate plays, and as the dramatic unity in each is perfect, the play as a whole is therefore in Shakespeare's manner.5 Kenneth Muir has told us that Shakespeare collaborated with 177 178Comparative Drama anotherplaywright, asyet undiscovered.6Melchiori and others havetold us that Shakespeare contributed the king and countess scenes to a play alreadywritten.7 J. J. M. Tobin has told us that EdwardIIIstages an education of princes, its two episodes tied together by a concern for selfmastery .8And Eric Sams, to support his contention that past complaints about EdwardTITs lack ofdramatic unity are overstated, has argued that "each [subplot] is adroitly aligned as a separate aspect ofone single unifyingtopic , namelythe rights and wrongs ofvows and promises,"9 in the process conflating unity oftheme with unity of plot. Such descriptions of"Shakespeare's"craftsmanship,however,leavethisplayabroken thing. In neglecting the rationale that necessitates the sequence of action, the play's defenders inadvertently confirm the century-old hypothesis that "[t]hough there may indeed exist a sort of interior connexion between the episode and the principal plot, yet it appears more than doubtful whether the linkjoining the two parts was easily, ifat all, discoverable by the play-going public ofthe age."10 In actuality, this century-oldhypothesis is unfounded. In sustaining it, critics do not merely consign this play to ignominy. Edward III is most cohesive as a brilliantly incisive critique of the official propaganda sustaining the persecution of English recusants after the Invincible Armada's defeat. Denying the unity of the play and thus Shakespeare's authorship perpetuates the myth ofShakespeare as a Tudor apologist unconcerned with the course ofthe English Reformation. Allusions to the Armada's defeat within Edward III have been used to date the play, but critics remarking on them have tended to assume that the play was originally written to exploit swelling patriotic feeling.11 But this reading ofthe play is entirely too naive. Certainly to Elizabeth, as to other members of Shakespeare's audience who were educated in medieval history and who had seen in Mary's last year on the throne the loss ofCalais, Edward'svictoryinFrance wasbut a temporaryhighpoint, a peak in the long and tumultuous Hundred Years' War. Just as educated viewers would have known that the Black Prince would break his health in later years while pursuing the claim to France, finally dying in 1376, so too they would have been aware that Edward III finally succumbed to his lust, wallowing in the shocking affair with Alice Perrers, /. P. Conlan179 misconduct which encouraged the Good Parliament to impeach the King's lack ofrestraint and introduce...

John Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and the Oath of Allegiance Controversy

John Donne's Pseudo-Martyr (1610) makes an important contribution to the defense of King James's Oath of Allegiance through its author's careful positioning between extremists on both the Catholic and Protestant sides of the debate. Where William Barlow insists that Catholic devotion and deference to James's civil authority are incompatible, and Robert Persons argues that Catholic faith is grossly compromised by swearing James's Oath, Donne asks English recusants to pledge their loyalty to James without insisting that they change their church denomination. This delineation between public declaration and private religious belief not only distinguishes Pseudo-Martyr as an Oath of Allegiance tract, it also more closely mirrors James's attitudes toward religious controversy, as they are demonstrated in his own Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1607, 1609) and in the other policies he supported with regard to Scottish Presbyterians and Catholics both before and after his ascension to the English throne. In response to this controversy's fixation on scholarly accuracy, Donne proposes his own, highly innovative use of italics. This and other innovations further substantiate his claims for scholarly objectivity because they distance Pseudo-Martyr from the fixation on quotational and citational accuracy that typified printed European religious debate throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Fitzherbert's attack on Pseudo-Martyr in 1613 wholly ignores Donne's larger argument in support of the Oath, and his experiment with scholarly method, focusing instead on an ostensible error—if not willful deception—pertaining to Donne's quotation of the last canon from the third Lateran Council (1179). Thus, Donne does not succeed in changing the tenor of either Protestant or Catholic polemic. What he does demonstrate, however, both in Pseudo-Martyr and in his subsequent decision to pursue a career as a Protestant preacher—a decision supported, and rewarded, handsomely by James—is that his English king is more invested in securing his subjects' obedience than he is in shaping their consciences. The strategies pursued by both Donne and King James during this crisis severely problematize subsequent interpretations of their politics as 'absolutist'. Rather, both men pursue civil aims pragmatically, while recognizing a space for private religious devotion. Donne does so—fittingly—with striking ingenuity, and clear awareness of his king's preference for compromise.

John Donne on Royal Mercy and Pardon

One of the arguments that John Donne develops in his first published work Pseudo-Martyr of 1610 is that the English Monarchy and the papacy can resolve their conflict by the mutual exercise of royal mercy and pardon. Pseudo-Martyr, in which Donne attempts principally to convince English Recusant Catholics that they can take the Oath of Allegiance to James I without betraying their religious loyalty to Rome, cites a number of examples of popes from past and contemporary history tempering the absoluteness of their power and making concessions to secular rulers. Donne argues that the exercise of royal mercy and pardon is a virtue of the absolute ruler, both secular and religious, and that, if used by Pope Paul V and James I toward each other, it can take the political pressure off English Catholics.

Recusant Confessions and the (En) Gendering of Disclosure

Recusant confessional texts were discursively produced by and productive of secret spaces the confessional itself and the torture chamber. They were sites of private, intimate probing that enabled disclosures of truth, which, to the English recusant community of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had a particular resonance. The confessional was a site of Catholic reconciliation, but to the state it was a signifier of Catholic treason. The state used the torture of recusants, particularly priests, to reveal the truth, but here the 'truth', ostensibly a list of people, places and actions that can be discovered in the body of the victim, was opposed to the recusant's 'truth' as internal belief. But despite these opposing concepts of the location and nature of truth, the discourses of its revelation are similar. Torture binds together the perpetrator and victim through the secrets the participants strive to reveal or conceal. In the confessional too, the confessor and the confessant are bound together by what is hidden. As Michel de Certeau points out:

Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580-1603

Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580-1603

The English Recusants: Some Mediaeval Literary Links

[This article by the late David Rogers was written in 1982. He later read it as a paper at the English Benedictine Congregation History Symposium at Worth Abbey in 1990 and it was subsequently reproduced in typescript as part of the proceedings. The article demands a wider audience and permission to publish it in ‘Recusant History’ has been kindly granted by Dom Gregory Scott O.S.B. and by the Friends of the Bodleian, who hold the copyright in David Rogers's work. A section of the article was elaborated and published as ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’ in G.A.M. Janssens &amp; F.G.A.M. Aarts (eds.): ‘Studies in Seventeenth Century English Literature, History and Bibliography’, Amsterdam, 1984]: