A study of the political, religious and mental worlds of the Catholic aristocracy from 1550 to 1640,

After the Reformation, England's Catholics were marginalised and excluded from using printed media for propagandist ends. Instead, they turned to oral media, such as ballads and stories, to plead their case and maintain contact with their community. Building on the growing interest in Catholic literature which has developed in early modern studies, Alison Shell examines the relationship between Catholicism and oral culture from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In order to recover the textual traces of this minority culture, she expands canonical boundaries, looking at anecdotes, spells and popular verse alongside more conventionally literary material. In her archival research she uncovers many important manuscript sources. This book is an important contribution to the rediscovery of the writings and culture of the Catholic community and will be of great interest to scholars of early modern literature, history and theology.

Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England.

Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence explores the lived experience of Catholic women and men in the post-Reformation century. Set against the background of the gendered dynamics of English society, this book demonstrates that English Catholics were potent forces in the shaping of English culture, religious policy, and the emerging nation-state. Drawing on kinship and social relationships rooted in the medieval period, post-Reformation English Catholic women and men used kinship, social networks, gendered strategies, political actions, and cultural activities like architecture and gardening to remain connected to patrons and to ensure the survival of their families through a period of deep social and religious change. This book contributes to recent scholarship on religious persecution and coexistence in post-Reformation Europe by demonstrating how English Catholics shaped state policy and enforcement of religious minorities and helped to define the character of early models of citizenship formation.

Modern scholars, fixated on the 'winners' in England's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious struggles, have too readily assumed the inevitability of Protestantism's historical triumph and have uncritically accepted the reformers' own rhetorical construction of themselves as embodiments of an authentic Englishness. Christopher Highley interrogates this narrative by examining how Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early seventeenth century contested and shaped discourses of national identity, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien religion, one orchestrated from Rome and sustained by Spain, English Catholics fought back by developing their own self-representations that emphasized how the Catholic faith was an ancient and integral part of true Englishness. After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance. English Catholics constructed narratives of their own religious heritage and identity, however, not only in response to Protestant polemic but also as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted Marian clergy against seminary priests, secular priests against Jesuits, and exiled English Catholics against their co-religionists from other parts of Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the reassessments of English Catholicism by John Bossy, Christopher Haigh, Alexandra Walsham, Michael Questier and others, Catholics Writing the Nation foregrounds the faultlines within and between the various Catholic communities of the Atlantic archipelago. Eschewing any confessional bias, Highley's book is an interdisciplinary cultural study of an important but neglected dimension of Early Modern English Catholicism. In charting the complex Catholic engagement with questions of cultural and national identity, he discusses a range of genres, texts, and documents both in print and manuscript, including ecclesiastical histories, polemical treatises, antiquarian tracts, and correspondence. His argument weaves together a rich historical narrative of people, events, and texts while also offering contextualized close readings of specific works by figures such as Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton, and Richard Verstegan.

How were cultural, political, and social identities formed in the early modern period? How were they maintained? What happened when they were contested? What meanings did “community” have? This path-breaking book looks at how individuals were bound into communities by religious, professional, and social networks; the importance of place--ranging from the Parish to communities of crime; and the value of rhetoric in generating community--from the King’s English to the use of “public” as a rhetorical community. The essays offer an original, comparative, and thematic approach to the many ways in which people utilized communication, space, and symbols to constitute communities in early modern England.

A study of clerical reaction to the sizeable number of Catholics who outwardly conformed to Protestantism in late 16c England. An important and satisfying monograph... Many insights emerge from this rich and original study, whichwhets the appetite for more. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW [Diarmaid MacCulloch] `Church Papist' was a nickname, a term of abuse, for those English Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholics. The more dramatic stance of recusancy has drawn historians' attention away from this sizeable, if statistically indefinable, proportion of Church of England congregations, but its existence and significance is here clearly revealed through contemporary records, challenging the sectarian model of post-Reformation Catholicism perpetuated by previous historians. Alexandra Walsham explores the aggressive reaction of counter-Reformation clergy to the compromising conduct of church papists and the threat theyposed to Catholicism's separatist image; alongside this she explains why parish priests simultaneously condoned qualified conformity. This scholarly and original study thus draws into focus contemporary clerical apprehensions andanxieties, as well as the tensions caused by the shifting theological temper ofthe late Elizabethan and early Stuart church.ALEXANDRA WALSHAM is Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.