This volume presents a critical edition of the immensely influential and popular first version of The Christian Directory, by the notorious Elizabethan Jesuit leader, Robert Persons. It was written during and immediately after the English Mission of 1580-1, which ended with the martyrdom of his companion Edmund Campion. Persons's work, originally entitled The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, appertayning to Resolution, attempts to persuade the reader to be resolved in the service of God. It deals with the motives and obstacles to such resolution. This edition includes a full apparatus of the alterations made to Persons's work by the Edmund Bunny, whose Protestant edition became an Elizabethan bestseller. It will be particularly useful to historians of the Catholic reformation and students of early modern English prose.

Presenting the text of a notorious Jesuit attack on Queen Elizabeth I's treatment of her Catholic subjects, this volume highlights the European context of the English Reformation and Robert Persons's role as propagandist. In De persecutione Anglicana, Robert Persons (1546–1610) graphically describes the conditions in prisons, the harassment of Catholics at home and the gruesome manner of execution for treason. The work culminates in the arrest of the famous Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, with rapidly revised versions bringing the narrative up to date after Campion's execution on 1 December 1581. Written in Latin to appeal to readers throughout Europe, it was translated into French, Italian and German, making it arguably the most important Latin martyrological work by an English Catholic of the Elizabethan period. This critical edition comprises the Latin text, English translation and commentary, and a textual history, appending additional material from the revised versions. Persons was actively involved in the drive to restore Roman Catholicism in England, as missionary strategist, controversialist and founder of English colleges abroad. He worked closely with the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva, negotiating with Philip II of Spain, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Parma and successive popes. Thanks to the growth of early modern British Catholic studies, his prolific and provocative English writings attract increasing scholarly attention, but his Latin texts have often been glossed over.

Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recently recovered or little-studied texts and by offering new paradigms for the analysis of women's religious literary activities. Contributors underscore the fact that women had complex, multi-dimensional relationships to the religio-political order, acting as activists for specific causes but also departing from confessional norms in creative ways and engaging in intra-as well as extra-confessional conflict. The volume thus includes essays that reflect on the complex dynamics of religious culture itself and that illuminate the importance of women's engagement with Catholicism throughout the period. The collection also highlights the vitality of neglected intertextual genres such as prayers, meditations, and translations, and it focuses attention on diverse forms of textual production such as literary writing, patronage, epistolary exchanges, public reading, and epitaphs. Collectively, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 offers a comprehensive treatment of the historical, literary, and methodological issues preoccupying scholars of women and religious writing.

Exile, Diplomacy and Texts offers an interdisciplinary narrative of religious, political, and diplomatic exchanges between early modern Iberia and the British Isles during a period uniquely marked by inconstant alliances and corresponding antagonisms. Such conditions notwithstanding, the essays in this volume challenge conventionally monolithic views of confrontation, providing – through fresh examination of exchanges of news, movements and interactions of people, transactions of books and texts – new evidence of trans-national and trans-cultural conversations between British and Irish communities in the Iberian Peninsula, and of Spanish and Portuguese ‘others’ travelling to Britain and Ireland. Contributors: Berta Cano-Echevarría, Rui Carvalho Homem, Mark Hutchings, Thomas O’Connor, Susana Oliveira, Tamara Pérez-Fernández, Glyn Redworth, Marta Revilla-Rivas, and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo.

Long ghettoized within British and Irish studies, Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland demonstrates that, despite many challenges and differences among them, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Catholics formed strong bonds and actively participated in the life of their nations and their Church.

This volume deals with the Federal theology of Johannes Cocceius, who lived in the seventeenth century (1603-1669). German by birth, he taught at Bremen, Franeker and Leiden, where he was Professor of Theology (1650-1669). As foremost biblical interpreter he sought to formulate a Covenant theory which described all of human history by introducing the structure of consecutive covenants or foedera. The book poses a surprising alternative to the readings of earlier scholarship on Cocceius by its careful presentation of the pneumatological components of the doctrine of covenants. Cocceius' Federal theology was of considerable importance in the theological and political history of Europe and the United States and formes the framework for much of the Reformed theology in the past three centuries.

This work exposes the eschatological timetable which propted the petition for the Antwerp Polyglot and the Christian kabbalistic motivation of the scholars who worked on the text. This tradition is then traced to the 1584 Paris edition of the Syriac New Testament.