Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700 – serie

The debate over clerical celibacy and marriage had its origins in the early Christian centuries, and is still very much alive in the modern church. The content and form of controversy have remained remarkably consistent, but each era has selected and shaped the sources that underpin its narrative, and imbued an ancient issue with an immediacy and relevance. The basic question of whether, and why, continence should be demanded of those who serve at the altar has never gone away, but the implications of that question, and of the answers given, have changed with each generation. In this reassessment of the history of sacerdotal celibacy, Helen Parish examines the emergence and evolution of the celibate priesthood in the Latin church, and the challenges posed to this model of the ministry in the era of the Protestant Reformation. Celibacy was, and is, intensely personal, but also polemical, institutional, and historical. Clerical celibacy acquired theological, moral, and confessional meanings in the writings of its critics and defenders, and its place in the life of the church continues to be defined in relation to broader debates over Scripture, apostolic tradition, ecclesiastical history, and papal authority. Highlighting continuity and change in attitudes to priestly celibacy, Helen Parish reveals that the implications of celibacy and marriage for the priesthood reach deep into the history, traditions, and understanding of the church.

This short study offers a contribution to the flourishing debate on post-Reformation female piety. In an effort to avoid excessive polarization condemning conventual life as restrictive or hailing it as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection, it analyses the reasons which led early-modern women to found new congregations with active vocations. Were these novel communities born out of their founders' rejection of the conventual model? Through the comparative analysis of two congregations which became, in seventeenth-century France and England, the embodiment of women's efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation, this book offers a nuanced interpretation of female religious life and particularly of the relationship between cloistered tradition and aposotolic vocations. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim to revitalise the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers. This study suggests that these pioneering Catholic women, though in breach of Tridentine decrees, did not turn their backs on contemplative piety: although both the French Ursulines and the English Ladies undertook work which had hitherto been the preserve religious men, they were motivated by their desire to help the Church rather than by a wish to liberate women from what eighteenth-century writers later perceived as the shackles of conventual obedience. It is argued that the founders of new, uncloistered congregations were embracing vocations which they construed as personals sacrifices; they followed the arduous path 'mixed life' in an act of self-abnegation and chose apostolic work as their early-modern reinterpretation of medieval asceticism.

The Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) is one of the most misunderstood authors in the history of political thought. His treatise De rege et regis institutione libri tres (1599) is dedicated to Philip III of Spain. It was to present the principles of statecraft by which the young king was to abide. Yet soon after its publication, Catholic and Calvinist politiques in France started branding Mariana a regicide. De rege was said to empower the private individual to kill a legitimate king. Its 'pernicious doctrines' were blamed for the murder of Henry IV in 1610, and it was burned at the order of the parlement of Paris. Modern historians have tended to build on this interpretation and consider De rege a stepping stone towards modern pluralist and democratic thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. The notion of Mariana as an uncompromising theorist of resistance is in fact based on the distorted reading of a few select sentences from the first book of the treatise. This study offers a radical departure from the old view of Mariana as an early modern constitutionalist thinker and advocate of regicide. Thorough analysis of the text as a whole reveals him to be a shrewd and creative operator of political language as well as a champion of the church and bishops of Castile. The argument as a whole is informed by a Catholic-Augustinian view of human nature. Mariana's bleak, at times downright cynical view of man imparts focus and coherence to a text that challenges well established terminological boundaries and political discourses. In the first instance, his deeply pessimistic appraisal of human virtue justifies his disregard of positive law. He is thus able to mould diverse elements extracted from Roman and canon law, scholastic theology and humanist literature into a deliberately equivocal discourse of reason of state. Finally, this secular interpretation of the world of politics is cleverly yoked to a thoroughly clerical agenda of reform. In fact, reason of state is made to propagate an episcopal monarchy. De rege is exceptional in that it strings together a curious scholastic theory of the origins of society, a conservative ideology of absolute monarchy and a breathtakingly radical vision of theocratic renewal of Spanish government and society. Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Political Thought elucidates the differentiated nature of political debate in Habsburg Spain. It confirms the complexity of Spanish political life in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Complementing recent work on Catholic political thought, the European reception of Machiavelli, and Spanish Habsburg government, this study offers a more complete and holistic picture of early modern Spanish political culture.

Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and most highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. Her work went through many editions during her lifetime, and she was widely considered by her contemporaries to be highly skilled in the art of constructing tightly controlled and beautifully modulated Petrarchan sonnets. In addition to her literary contacts, Colonna was also deeply involved with groups of reformers in Italy before the Council of Trent, an involvement which was to have a profound effect on her literary production. In this study, Abigail Brundin examines the manner in which Colonna's poetry came to fulfil, in a groundbreaking and unprecedented way, a reformed spiritual imperative, disseminating an evangelical message to a wide audience reading vernacular literature, and providing a model of spiritual verse which was to be adopted by later poets across the peninsula. She shows how, through careful management of an appropriate literary persona, Colonna's poetry was able to harness the power of print culture to extend its appeal to a much broader audience. In so doing this book manages to provide the vital link between the two central facets of Vittoria Colonna's production: her poetic evangelism, and her careful construction of a gendered identity within the literary culture of her age. The first full length study of Vittoria Colonna in English for a century, this book will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of gender, literature, religious reform or the dynamics of cultural transmission in sixteenth-century Italy. It also provides an excellent background and contextualisation to anyone wishing to read Colonna's writings or to know more about her role as a mediator between the worlds of courtly Petrachism and religious reform.

Modern scholarship has effectively demonstrated that, far from being a knee-jerk reaction to the challenges of Protestantism, the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fuelled primarily by a desire within the Church to reform its medieval legacy and to re-enthuse its institutions with a sense of religious zeal. In many ways, both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations were inspired by the same humanist ideals and though ultimately expressed in different ways, the origins of both movements can be traced back to the patristic revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that many contemporaries, and subsequent historians, came to view the Catholic Reformation as an attempt to challenge the Protestants and to cut the ground from beneath their feet. In this new revised edition of Dr Wright's groundbreaking study of the Counter-Reformation, the wide panoply of the Catholic Reformation is spread out and analysed within the political, religious, philosophical, scientific and cultural context of late medieval and early modern Europe. In so doing, this book provides a fascinating guide to the many doctrinal and interrelated social issues involved in the wholesale restructuring of religion that took place both within Western Europe and overseas.

In the history of the attempted restoration of Roman Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor, the contribution of her husband Philip and his Spanish entourage has been largely ignored. This book highlights one of the most prominent of Philip's religious advisers, the friar Bartolomé Carranza. A leading Dominican, Carranza served the emperor Charles V, whom he represented at the earlier sessions of the Council of Trent, and then Philip II of Spain, who brought him to England. Even before Mary's death, Fray Bartolomé left for the Low Countries, and then returned to Spain, where, as archbishop of Toledo, he was arrested for 'heresy' by the Spanish Inquisition. His trial, first in Spain and then in Rome, lasted from 1559 until shortly before his death, partially rehabilitated, in Rome in 1576. The book contains papers on the activity and intellectual character of the English Church under Mary, on Carranza's eventful life, particularly his activity in England, and on his often close collaboration with his friend Cardinal Reginald Pole, set in the wider context of sixteenth-century Catholicism. Attention is also drawn both to Carranza's perhaps surprising subsequent fame and influence in the Spanish Church, and to the common ground which, despite obvious differences and subsequent divisions, did indeed exist between reformers in Spain and England.

This volume of twelve interdisciplinary essays addresses the multifaceted nature of female religious identity in early modern Europe. By dismantling the boundaries between the academic disciplines of history, art history, musicology and literary studies it offers new cross-cultural readings essential to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of female spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Utilising a wide range of archival material, encompassing art, architecture, writings and music commissioned or produced by nuns, the volume's main emphasis is on the limitations and potentials created by the boundaries of the convent. Each chapter explores how the personal and national circumstances in which the women lived affected the formation of their spirituality and the assertion of their social and political authority. Consisting of four sections each dealing with different parts of Europe and discussing issues of spiritual and social identity such as 'Femininity and Sanctity', 'Convent Theatre and Music-Making', 'Spiritual Directorship' and 'Community and Conflict', this compelling collection offers a significant addition to a thriving new field of study.

Few areas of early modern English history have roused such passions and interpretations as the rule of Mary Tudor and her efforts to return the country to Catholicism following the reigns of her father and brother. In this book, Dr Wizeman explores Catholic theology and spirituality according to the religious literature printed during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558). As part of the strategy to renew Catholic religion in England after the reformations under Henry VIII and Edward VI, Marian theologians, authors and editors produced numerous works of catechesis, religious polemic, devotion and sermons. These writings demonstrate that the Catholicism of Marian England was not a mere insular reaction to the preceding decades of religious change, nor a via media polity which eschewed important elements of traditional religion while embracing tenets of the Reformation. Rather the theology and spirituality of Mary Tudor's church, as well as many of its strategies for religious renewal, was intimately connected to - and in fact anticipated or paralleled - the theology, spirituality and strategies for reform embraced by Counter-Reformation Catholicism, especially after the promulgation of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). After considering the recent historiography of Mary Tudor's reign, the book contextualises these writings through a brief history of the Marian church and a discussion of the authors and dedicatees. It then presents an analysis of the Marian writers' and theologians' views on revelation, christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, piety and eschatology. Finally, the study compares the Catholic belief asserted in these works to that found in texts by English theologians printed before 1553, especially John Fisher, and by contemporary theologians in Europe, particularly Bartolomé Carranza, as well as the Tridentine catechism, and the decrees and official texts of the English Reformation.

The concept of heresy is deeply rooted in Christian European culture. The palpable increase in incidences of heresy in the Middle Ages may be said to directly relate to the Christianity's attempts to define orthodoxy and establish conformity at its centre, resulting in the sometimes forceful elimination of Christian sects. In the transition from medieval to early modern times, however, the perception of heresy underwent a profound transformation, ultimately leading to its decriminalization and the emergence of a pluralistic religious outlook. The essays in this volume offer readers a unique insight into this little-understood cultural shift. Half of the chapters investigate the manner in which the church and its attendant civil authorities defined and proscribed heresy, whilst the other half focus on the means by which early modern writers sought to supersede such definition and proscription. The result of these investigations is a multifaceted historical account of the construction and serial reconstruction of one of the key categories of European theological, juristic and political thought. The contributors explore the role of nationalism and linguistic identity in constructions of heresy, its analogies with treason and madness, the role of class and status in the responses to heresy. In doing so they provide fascinating insights into the roots of the historicization of heresy and the role of this historicization in the emergence of religious pluralism.

This is the first full-scale study of interactions between Italy's religious reform and English reformations, which were notoriously liable to pick up other people's ideas. The book is of fundamental importance for those whose work includes revisionist themes of ambiguity, opportunism and interdependence in sixteenth century religious change. Anne Overell adopts an inclusive approach, retaining within the group of Italian reformers those spirituali who left the church and those who remained within it, and exploring commitment to reform, whether 'humanist', 'protestant' or 'catholic'. In 1547, when the internationalist Archbishop Thomas Cranmer invited foreigners to foster a bolder reformation, the Italians Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino were the first to arrive in England. The generosity with which they were received caused comment all over Europe: handsome travel expenses, prestigious jobs, congregations which included the great and the good. This was an entry con brio, but the book also casts new light on our understanding of Marian reformation, led by Cardinal Reginald Pole, English by birth but once prominent among Italy's spirituali. When Pole arrived to take his native country back to papal allegiance, he brought with him like-minded men and Italian reform continued to be woven into English history. As the tables turned again at the accession of Elizabeth I, there was further clamour to 'bring back Italians'. Yet Elizabethans had grown cautious and the book's later chapters analyse the reasons why, offering scholars a new perspective on tensions between national and international reformations. Exploring a nexus of contacts in England and in Italy, Anne Overell presents an intriguing connection, sealed by the sufferings of exile and always tempered by political constraints. Here, for the first time, Italian reform is shown as an enduring part of the Elect Nation's literature and myth.

The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.

This is the first book-length study of the political and theological views of Thomas White (alias Blacklo) and his followers the Blackloists. It both complements and opens up new lines of inquiry in the context of the current scholarship in two main areas. On the one hand, historians of early modern England are paying a tremendous amount of attention to the English Catholic Church, stressing the importance of the Catholic perspective in order to get a more accurate picture of England's religious and political history. This study responds to these suggestions by analyzing a group of English Catholics greatly influential in a complex period of the history of England. On the other hand and more generally, the volume explores the question of the intersection between politics and religion during the 1640s and 1650s in a historiographical context in which the manifold and complex link between the language of natural law and the language of theology in the history of English Republicanism is currently being taken into a greater account by a number of scholars. In this context, White's political theory can be used as an extremely interesting case-study to show how natural law bridged the complexity of the relationship between theological and secular arguments put forward in the debate around issues such as the nature and limit of government and the relationship between subjects and governors. As well as providing a detailed study of White and his views, this book also provides a modern edition of the full text of his most important political treatise The Grounds of Obedience and Government, a distinctly Catholic version of contractualism, that appeared to offer succour to a militantly Protestant republican regime.

During his lifetime, the Jesuit priest Robert Persons (1546-1610) was arguably the leading figure fighting for the re-establishment of Catholicism in England. Whilst his colleague Edmund Campion may now be better known it was Persons's tireless efforts that kept the Jesuit mission alive during the difficult days of Elizabeth's reign. In this new study, Person's life and phenomenal literary output are analysed and put into the broader context of recent Catholic scholarship. The book bridges the gap between historical studies, on the one hand, and literary studies on the other, by concentrating on Persons's contribution as a writer to the polemical culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As well as discussing his wider achievements as leader of the English Jesuits - founding three seminaries for English priests, corresponding regularly with Catholic activists in England, writing over thirty books, holding the post of rector of the English College in Rome, and being a trusted consultant to the papacy on English affairs - this study looks in detail at what is arguably his greatest legacy, The First Booke of the Christian Exercise (more commonly known as the Book of Resolution). That book, first published in 1582, was to prove the cornerstone of Persons's missionary effort, and a popular work of Catholic devotion, running to several editions over the coming years. Although Persons was ultimately unsuccessful in his ambition to return England to the Catholic fold, the story of his life and works reveals much about the ecclesiastical struggle that gripped early modern Europe. By providing a thorough and up-to-date reassessment of Persons this study not only makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the polemical context of post-Reformation Catholicism, but also of the Jesuit notion of the 'apostolate of writing'. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici

Mary Tudor's reign is regarded as a period where, within a short space of time, an early modern European state attempted to reverse the religious policy of preceding governments. This required the use of persuasion and coercion, of propaganda and censorship, as well as the controversial decision to revive an old statute against heresy. The efforts to renew Catholic worship and to revive Catholic education and spirituality were fiercely opposed by a small but determined group of Protestants, who sought ways of thwarting the return of Catholicism. The battle between those seeking to renew Catholicism and those determined to resist it raged for the full five years of Mary's reign.This volume brings together eleven authors from different disciplines (English Literature, History, Divinity, and the History of the Book), who explore the different policies undertaken to ensure that Catholicism could flourish once more in England. The safety of the clergy and of the public at the Mass was of paramount importance, since sporadic unrest took place early on. Steps were taken to ensure that reformist worship was stopped and that the country re-embraced Catholic practices. This involved a number of short- and long-term plans to be enacted by the regime. These included purging the universities of reformist ideas and ensuring the (re)education of both the laity and the clergy. On a wider scale this was undertaken via the pulpit and the printing press. Those who opposed the return to Catholicism did so by various means. Some retreated into exile, while others chose the press to voice their objections, as this volume details. The regime's responses to the actions of individuals and to the clandestine texts produced by their opposition come under scrutiny throughout this volume.The work presented here also offers new insight into the role of King Philip and his Spanish advisers. These essays therefore present a detailed assessment of the role of the Spanish who came with to England as a result of the marriage of Philip and Mary. They also move away from the ongoing discussions of 'persecution' seeking, rather, to present a more nuanced understanding of the regime's attempts to renew and revive a nation of worshippers, and to eradicate the disease of heresy. They also look at the ways those attempts were opposed by individuals at home and abroad, thereby providing a broad-ranging but detailed assessment of both Catholic renewal and Protestant resistance during the years 1553-1558.

In this commanding study, Dr Maryks offers a detailed analysis of early modern Jesuit confessional manuals to explore the order's shifting attitudes to confession and conscience. Drawing on his census of Jesuit penitential literature published between 1554 and 1650, he traces in these works a subtly shifting theology influenced by both theology and classical humanism. In particular, the roles of 'Tutiorism' (whereby an individual follows the law rather than the instinct of their own conscience) and 'Probabilism' (which conversely gives priority to the individual's conscience) are examined. It is argued that for most of the sixteenth century, books such as Juan Alfonso de Polanco's Directory for Confessors espousing a Tutiorist line dominated the market for Jesuit confessional manuals until the seventeenth century, by which time Probabilism had become the dominating force in Jesuit theology. What caused this switch, from Tutiorism to Probablism, forms the central thesis of Dr Maryks' book. He believes that as a direct result of the Jesuits adoption of a new ministry of educating youth in the late 1540s, Jesuit schoolmasters were compelled to engage with classical culture, many aspects of which would have resonated with their own concepts of spirituality. In particular Ciceronian humanitas and civiltà, along with rhetorical principles of accommodation, influenced Jesuit thinking in the revolutionary transition from medieval Tutiorism to modern Probabilism. By integrating concepts of theology, classical humanism and publishing history, this book offers a compelling account of how diverse forces could act upon a religious order to alter the central beliefs it held and promulgated. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu'.

Between the later middle ages and the eighteenth century, religious orders were in the vanguard of reform movements within the Christian church. Recent scholarship on medieval Europe has emphasised how mendicants exercised a significant influence on the religiosity of the laity by actually shaping their spirituality and piety. In a similar way for the early modern period, religious orders have been credited with disseminating Tridentine reform, training new clergy, gaining new converts and bringing those who had strayed back into the fold. Much about this process, however, still remains unknown, particularly with regards to east central Europe. Exploring the complex relationship between western monasticism and lay society in east central Europe across a broad chronological timeframe, this collection provides a re-examination of the level and nature of interaction between members of religious orders and the communities around them. That the studies in this collection are all located in east central Europe - Transylvania, Hungary, Austria, and Bohemia- fulfils a second key aim of the volume: the examination of clerical and lay piety in a region of Europe almost entirely ignored by western scholarship. As such the volume provides an important addition to current scholarship, showcasing fresh research on a subject and region on which little has been published in English. The volume further contributes to the reintegration of eastern and western European history, expanding the existing parameters of scholarly discourse into late medieval and early modern religious practice and piety.

The sixteenth century was a period of tumultuous religious change in Italy as in Europe as a whole, a period when movements for both reform and counter-reform reflected and affected shifting religious sensibilities. Cinquecento culture was profoundly shaped by these religious currents, from the reform poetry of the 1530s and early 1540s, to the efforts of Tridentine theologians later in the century to renew Catholic orthodoxy across cultural life. This interdisciplinary volume offers a carefully balanced collection of essays by leading international scholars in the fields of Italian Renaissance literature, music, history and history of art, addressing the fertile question of the relationship between religious change and shifting cultural forms in sixteenth-century Italy. The contributors to this volume are throughout concerned to demonstrate how a full understanding of Cinquecento religious culture might be found as much in the details of the relationship between cultural and religious developments, as in any grand narrative of the period. The essays range from the art of Cosimo I's Florence, to the music of the Confraternities of Rome; from the private circulation of religious literature in manuscript form, to the public performances of musical laude in Florence and Tuscany; from the art of Titian and Tintoretto to the religious poetry of Vittoria Colonna and Torquato Tasso. The volume speaks of a Cinquecento in which religious culture was not always at ease with itself and the broader changes around it, but was nonetheless vibrant and plural. Taken together, this new and ground-breaking research makes a major contribution to the development of a more nuanced understanding of cultural responses to a crucial period of reform and counter-reform, both within Italy and beyond.

In medieval Europe baptism did not merely represent a solemn and public recognition of the 'natural' birth of a child, but was regarded as a second, 'spiritual birth', within a social group often different from the child's blood relations: a spiritual family, composed of godfathers and godmothers. By analyzing the changing theological and social nature of spiritual kinship and godparenthood between 1450 and 1650, this book explores how these medieval concepts were developed and utilised by the Catholic Church in an era of reform and challenge. It demonstrates how such ties continued to be of major social importance throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but were often used in ways not always coherent with their original religious meaning, and which could have unexpected social consequences. In particular, the book analyzes in detail the phase of transition from the traditional model of godparenthood which allowed for multiple godparents, to the new couple model (one godfather and one godmother) imposed by Tridentine law. Drawing upon a large database of archival data taken from parish books of baptisms and marriages, pastoral visitations, diocesan statutes, synods and provincial councils, it is shown how attempts were made to resist or to compromise with the Church, thus providing a better understanding of the often contested meaning given to godparenthood by early modern society. Whilst the Church was ultimately successful in imposing its will, the book concludes that this was to have unexpected results that were to eventually weaken the role of godparents. Rather than persuading parents to choose real 'spiritual tutors' to act as godparents, the choice of godparents became increasingly influenced with social status, so that godparenthood began to resemble a pure clientele system, something it had never been before. Through this long-term exploration of Catholic spiritual kinship, much is revealed, not only about godparenthood, but about the wider social and religious networks. Comparison with Protestant reactions to the same issues provides further insight into the importance of this subject to early modern European society.

The Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular uprising in the north of England against Henry VIII's religious policies, has long been recognised as a crucial point in the fortunes of the English Reformation. Historians have long debated the motives of the rebels and what effects they had on government policy. In this new study, however, Michael Bush takes a fresh approach, examining the wealth of textual evidence left by the pilgrimage of grace to reconstruct the wider social, political and religious attitudes of northern society in the early Tudor period. More than simply a reassessment of the events of October 1536, the book examines the mass of surviving evidence - the rebels' proclamations, rumour-mongering bills, oaths, manifestos, petitions, songs, prophetic rhymes, eye-witness accounts and confessions - in order to illuminate and explore the kind of grass-roots feelings that are often so hard to pin down. He concludes that the evidence points to a much more complex situation than has often been assumed, revealing much more than simply a desire for the country to return to the old religion and familiar ways. Rather, this book demonstrates how the rebels sought to use the language of custom and tradition to bolster their own political and economic positions in a rapidly changing world. It reveals a populace at once conservative and radical, able to judge innovation and change in relation to its own benefit and ultimately able to advance a coherent programme of reform. Whilst this programme was carefully couched in language supportive of the traditional orderly society, it nevertheless carried within it more radical proposals, which proved extremely challenging to the monarchy, government and church, who eventually closed ranks to bring the uprising to an end. As both an exploration of the causes and aims of the pilgrimage of grace, and the wider religious, social and political attitudes of northern England, this book has much to offer the student of the period.

The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.

Mary Tudor's reign is regarded as a period where, within a short space of time, an early modern European state attempted to reverse the religious policy of preceding governments. This required the use of persuasion and coercion, of propaganda and censorship, as well as the controversial decision to revive an old statute against heresy. The efforts to renew Catholic worship and to revive Catholic education and spirituality were fiercely opposed by a small but determined group of Protestants, who sought ways of thwarting the return of Catholicism. The battle between those seeking to renew Catholicism and those determined to resist it raged for the full five years of Mary's reign.This volume brings together eleven authors from different disciplines (English Literature, History, Divinity, and the History of the Book), who explore the different policies undertaken to ensure that Catholicism could flourish once more in England. The safety of the clergy and of the public at the Mass was of paramount importance, since sporadic unrest took place early on. Steps were taken to ensure that reformist worship was stopped and that the country re-embraced Catholic practices. This involved a number of short- and long-term plans to be enacted by the regime. These included purging the universities of reformist ideas and ensuring the (re)education of both the laity and the clergy. On a wider scale this was undertaken via the pulpit and the printing press. Those who opposed the return to Catholicism did so by various means. Some retreated into exile, while others chose the press to voice their objections, as this volume details. The regime's responses to the actions of individuals and to the clandestine texts produced by their opposition come under scrutiny throughout this volume.The work presented here also offers new insight into the role of King Philip and his Spanish advisers. These essays therefore present a detailed assessment of the role of the Spanish who came with to England as a result of the marriage of Philip and Mary. They also move away from the ongoing discussions of 'persecution' seeking, rather, to present a more nuanced understanding of the regime's attempts to renew and revive a nation of worshippers, and to eradicate the disease of heresy. They also look at the ways those attempts were opposed by individuals at home and abroad, thereby providing a broad-ranging but detailed assessment of both Catholic renewal and Protestant resistance during the years 1553-1558.

In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 enclosed convents across Flanders and France with more than 4,000 women entering them over a 200-year period. In theory they were cut off from the outside world; however, in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely, and their communal culture was sophisticated. Not only were the nuns influenced by continental intellectual culture but they in turn contributed to a developing English Catholic identity moulded by their experience in exile. During this time, these nuns and the Mary Ward sisters found outlets for female expression often unavailable to their secular counterparts, until the French Revolution and its associated violence forced the convents back to England. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the cultural importance of the English convents in exile from 1600 to 1800 and is the first collection to focus solely on the English convents.

In spite of an upsurge in interest in the social history of the Catholic community and an ever-growing body of literature on early modern 'superstition' and popular religion, the English Catholic community's response to the invisible world of the preternatural and supernatural has remained largely neglected. Addressing this oversight, this book explores Catholic responses to the supernatural world, setting the English Catholic community in the contexts of the wider Counter-Reformation and the confessional culture of early modern England. In so doing, it fulfils the need for a study of how English Catholics related to manifestations of the devil (witchcraft and possession) and the dead (ghosts) in the context of Catholic attitudes to the supernatural world as a whole (including debates on miracles). The study further provides a comprehensive examination of the ways in which English Catholics deployed exorcism, the church's ultimate response to the devil. Whilst some aspects of the Catholic response have been touched on in the course of broader studies, few scholars have gone beyond the evidence contained within anti-Catholic polemical literature to examine in detail what Catholics themselves said and thought. Given that Catholics were consistently portrayed as 'superstitious' in Protestant literature, the historian must attend to Catholic voices on the supernatural in order to avoid a disastrously unbalanced view of Catholic attitudes. This book provides the first analysis of the Catholic response to the supernatural and witchcraft and how it related to a characteristic Counter-Reformation preoccupation, the phenomenon of exorcism.

Focusing on the Dominican Order's activities in southeastern Poland from the canonisation of the Polish Dominican St Hyacinth (1594) to the outbreak of Bogdan Chmielnicki's Cossack revolt (1648-54) this book reveals the renovation and popularity of the pre-existing Mendicant culture of piety in the period following the Council of Trent (1545-64). In so doing, it questions both western and Polish scholarship regarding the role of the Society of Jesus, and the changes within Catholicism associated with it across Europe in the early modern period. By grounding the rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits in patronage, politics, preaching, and the practices of piety, the study provides a holistic explanation of the reasons for Dominican expansion, the ways in which Catholicisation proceeded in a consensual political system, and suggests a corrective to the long-standing Jesuit-centred model of religious renewal. Whilst engaging with existing research regarding the post-Reformation formation of religious denominations, the book significantly expands the debate by stressing the friars' continuity with the medieval past, and demonstrating their importance in the articulation of Catholic-noble identity. Consequently, the monograph opens up new vistas on the history of the Counter-Reformation, Polish-Lithuanian noble identity, and the nature of religious renewal in a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational state.

Juan de Valdés played a pivotal role in the febrile atmosphere of sixteenth-century Italian religious debate. Fleeing his native Spain after the publication in 1529 of a book condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, he settled in Rome as a political agent of the emperor Charles V and then in Naples, where he was at the centre of a remarkable circle of literary and spiritual men and women involved in the religious crisis of those years, including Peter Martyr Vermigli, Marcantonio Flaminio, Bernardino Ochino and Giulia Gonzaga. Although his death in 1541 marked the end of this group, Valdés’ writings were to have a decisive role in the following two decades, when they were sponsored and diffused by important cardinals such as Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone, both papal legates to the Council of Trent. The most famous book of the Italian Reformation, the Beneficio di Cristo, translated in many European languages, was based on Valdés’ thought, and the Roman Inquisition was very soon convinced that he had ’infected the whole of Italy’. In this book Massimo Firpo traces the origins of Valdés’ religious experience in Erasmian Spain and in the movement of the alumbrados, and underlines the large influence of his teachings after his death all over Italy and beyond. In so doing he reveals the originality of the Italian Reformation and its influence in the radicalism of many religious exiles in Switzerland and Eastern Europe, with their anti-Trinitarians and finally Socinian outcomes. Based upon two extended essays originally published in Italian, this book provides a full up-dated and revised English translation that outlines a new perspective of the Italian religious history in the years of the Council of Trent, from the Sack of Rome to the triumph of the Roman Inquisition, reconstructing and rethinking it not only as a failed expansion of the Protestant Reformation, but as having its own peculiar originality. As such it will be welcomed by all scholars wishin

First published in the summer of 1557 - as the protestant martyrs’ pyres blazed across England - Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other (more generally known as Tottel’s Miscellany) is widely regarded as the first anthology of English poetry responsible for introducing Italianate verse forms to England. Yet those scholars who have paid attention to the book usually dismiss its literary quality and regard its chief accomplishment as paving the way for the Golden Age of Elizabethan verse to come. As Professor Warner makes clear, however, there is much more historical significance to the Miscellany than merely being a precursor to Shakespeare and Sidney. Drawing upon a wealth of historical, textual and literary evidence, this new study recasts the Miscellany as a peculiar phenomenon of the reign of Mary I. Placing it in the context of its European counterparts and its competition in the London book market, Warner argues that at heart the Miscellany was a collaborative project between the printer, Richard Tottel and law students from the Inns of Court, and represented a timely response to the religious, political and social upheavals of the English Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Analysing from both a literary and historical perspective, this study reconnects the Miscellany with the social, cultural, literary and religious milieu in which it was created. Warner thus reveals not only the distinctiveness of the book’s design compared to other English verse works for sale in 1557, but its function as a patriotic retort to Continental collections of verse -including one that put into print a selection of satirical songs and sonnets written by the Spanish caballeros who found themselves reluctant attendants at the court of Mary I.

The debate about when the middle ages ended and the modern era began, has long been a staple of the historical literature. In order to further this debate, and illuminate the implications of a longue durée approach to the history of the Reformation, this collection offers a selection of essays that address the medieval-modern divide. Covering a broad range of topics - encompassing legal, social, cultural, theological and political history - the volume asks fundamental questions about how we regard history, and what historians can learn from colleagues working in other fields that may not at first glance appear to offer any obvious links. By focussing on the concept of the medieval-modern divide - in particular the relation between the Middle Ages and the Reformation - each essay examines how a medievalist deals with a specific topic or issue that is also attracting the attention of Reformation scholars. In so doing it underlines the fact that both medievalists and modernists are often involved in bridging the medieval-modern divide, but are inclined to construct parallel bridges that end between the two starting points but do not necessarily meet. As a result, the volume challenges assumptions about the strict periodization of history, and suggest that a more flexible approach will yield interesting historical insights.

For much of the sixteenth-century, France was wracked with religious strife, as the Wars of Religion pitted Catholic against Protestant. Whilst the conversion of Henri IV to Catholicism ended much of the conflict, the ensuing peace highlighted the fractious nature of French Catholicism and the many competing threads that ran through it. This book investigates the gradual division of the French Catholic reform movement, often associated with those known as the 'devots' during the first half of the seventeenth century. Such division, it is argued, was emerging before the publication in France (1641) of the posthumous 'Augustinus' of Jansenius, not simply as a sequel to that. Those who were already distinguishing themselves from other 'devots' before that date were thus not yet identifiable as 'Jansenists'. Rather, the initial defining sentiment was increasing French hostility towards Jesuit involvement in Catholic Reform, both at home and abroad. Drawing on sources from the Jesuit archives in Rome and on Port-Royal material in Paris, the book begins with an investigation into the development of Catholic Reform in France, showing the problems that emerged before 1629 and the degree to which these were or were not resolved. The second half of the book contrasts the fragmentation of the movement in the years beyond 1629, and the context of Richelieu's new directions in French foreign policy. Covering a crucial period in the lead up to the establishment of an absolute monarchy in France, this book provides a rich new explanation of the development of French political and ecclesiastical history. It will be of interest not only to those studying the early modern period, but to anyone wishing to understand the roots of French secular society.