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.

The pontificate of Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici) is usually regarded as amongst the most disastrous in history, and the pontiff characterized as timid, vacillating, and avaricious. It was during his years as pope (1523-34) that England broke away from the Catholic Church, and relations with the Holy Roman Emperor deteriorated to such a degree that in 1527 an Imperial army sacked Rome and imprisoned the pontiff. Given these spectacular political and military failures, it is perhaps unsurprising that Clement has often elicited the scorn of historians, rather than balanced and dispassionate analysis. This interdisciplinary volume, the first on the subject, constitutes a major step forward in our understanding of Clement VII's pontificate. Looking beyond Clement's well-known failures, and anachronistic comparisons with more 'successful' popes, it provides a fascinating insight into one of the most pivotal periods of papal and European history. Drawing on long-neglected sources, as rich as they are abundant, the contributors address a wide variety of important aspects of Clement's pontificate, re-assessing his character, familial and personal relations, political strategies, and cultural patronage, as well as exploring broader issues including the impact of the Sack of Rome, and religious renewal and reform in the pre-Tridentine period. Taken together, the essays collected here provide the most expansive and nuanced portrayal yet offered of Clement as pope, patron, and politician. In reconsidering the politics and emphasizing the cultural vitality of the period, the collection provides fresh and much-needed revision to our understanding of Clement VII's pontificate and its critical impact on the history of the papacy and Renaissance Europe.

The reign of Queen Mary is popularly remembered largely for her re-introduction of Catholicism into England, and especially for the persecution of Protestants, memorably described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Mary's brief reign has often been treated as an aberrant interruption of England's march to triumphant Protestantism, a period of political sterility, foreign influence and religious repression rightly eclipsed by the happier reign of her more sympathetic half-sister, Elizabeth. In pursuit of a more balanced assessment of Mary's religious policies, this volume explores the theology, pastoral practice and ecclesiastical administration of the Church in England during her reign. Focusing on the neglected Catholic renaissance which she ushered in, the book traces its influences and emphases, its methods and its rationales - together the role of Philip's Spanish clergy and native English Catholics - in relation to the wider influence of the continental Counter Reformation and Mary's humanist learning. Measuring these issues against the reintroduction of papal authority into England, and the balance between persuasion and coercion used by the authorities to restore Catholic worship, the volume offers a more nuanced and balanced view of Mary's religious policies. Addressing such intriguing and under-researched matters from a variety of literary, political and theological perspectives, the essays in this volume cast new light, not only on Marian Catholicism, but also on the wider European religious picture.

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 first three decades of Bourbon rule in France coincided with a period of violent fragmentation followed by rapid renewal within the French Catholic community. In the early 1590s, when Henri IV - Protestant head of the Bourbon house - acceded to the throne, French Catholics were at war with each other as Leaguer and Navarrist factions fought both militarily and ideologically for control of Catholic France. However, by 1620 a partially reconciled French church was in the process of defining a distinctive reform movement as French Catholics, encouraged by their monarchs, sought to assimilate aspects of the international Catholic reformation with Gallican traditions to renew their church. By 1650 this French Catholic church, and its distinctive reform movement forged in the decades following the collapse of the Catholic League, had become one of the most influential movements in European Catholicism. This study reconsiders the forces behind these dramatic developments within the French church through the re-examination of a classic question in French history: Why was the Society of Jesus able to integrate successfully into the French church in the opening decades of the seventeenth-century, despite being expelled from much of the kingdom in 1594 for its alleged role in the attempted assassination of the king? The expulsion, recall and subsequent integration of the Society into the French church offers a unique window into the evolution of French Catholicism between 1590 and 1620. It provides new insight into how Henri IV re-established royal authority in the French Catholic church following the collapse of the Catholic League and how this development helped to heal the rifts in French Catholicism wrought by the Leaguer movement. It also explores in unprecedented detail how Henri played an important role in channelling religious energy in his kingdom towards forms of Catholic piety -exemplified by his new allies the Jesuits - which became the foundation of

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.

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.

Though by 1520, the Lutheran revolt had transformed the long-standing problem of reforming the Church into a major crisis, there was no serious reform initiative from the papacy before 1536. The debate about what was wrong and what was to be done about it had however been under way from the early 1520s. An important contributor to it was the Dominican theologian Ambrosius Catharinus Politus, a former professor of civil law at the University of Siena, who in 1520 had been called upon to defend the Church against Luther, then at the height of his powers. He was not only the foremost Italian anti-Lutheran polemicist of his day, but also an ardent Immaculist and critic of the shortcomings of his own order. By 1541, he was participating in the debates over the divisive topics of predestination, justification and original sin. He attended the Council of Trent/Bologna 1545-48 as a papal theologian where he rapidly became the trusted adviser of Gian Maria del Monte, the future pope Julius III, with whose support he became first Bishop of Minori in 1547 and then Archbishop of Conza in 1551. He nevertheless continued his polemic against the Lutherans and the members of his own order. No major study of Catharinus has been written since Josef Schweizer's 'Ambrosius Catharinus Politus' in 1910. The time is now ripe for an up-to-date work on Catharinus based not only on original sources but also on a thorough acquaintance with modern scholarship on the first phase of the Counter-Reformation. This study concentrates on the last 12 years of Catharinus's life, when he emerged from relative insignificance to play an important part at the Council of Trent, and is a work of primary scholarship, involving detailed analysis of Catharinus's writings.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the career of Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) arguably the most powerful churchman in medieval or early modern Central Europe. Royal prince, bishop of Kraków, Polish primate, cardinal, regent and brother to the rulers of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia and Lithuania, Fryderyk was a leading dynastic politician, diplomat, ecclesiastic and cultural patron, and a pivotal figure in three Polish royal governments. Whereas Polish historians have traditionally cast Fryderyk as a miscreant and national embarrassment, this study argues that he is in fact a figure of fundamental importance for our understanding of church and monarchy in the Renaissance, who can enhance our grasp of the period in a variety of ways. Jagiellon's career constitutes an ambitious state-building programme - executed in the three spheres of government, ecclesiastical governance and cultural patronage - which reveals the multi-dimensional ways in which Renaissance monarchies might exploit the local church to their own ends. This book also offers a rare English language insight into the development of the Reformation in central Europe, and an analysis of the reigns of Kazimierz IV (1447-92), Jan Olbracht (1492-1501), Aleksander (1501-6), Poland's evolving constitution, her foreign policy, Jagiellonian dynastic strategy and, above all, the tripartite relationship between church, Crown and state.

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 book examines the Catholic elaboration on the relationship between state and Church in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Among the several factors which have contributed to the complex process of state-formation in early modern Europe, religious affiliation has certainly been one of the most important, if not the most important. Within the European context of the consolidation of both the nation-state entities and the state-Churches, Catholicism in England in the 16th and 17th centuries presents peculiar elements which are crucial to understanding the problems at stake, from both a political and a religious point of view. Catholics in early modern England were certainly a minority, but a minority of an interestingly doubled kind. On the one hand, they were a "sect" among many others. On the other hand, Catholicism was a "universal", catholic religion, in a country in which the sovereign was the head - or governor - of both political and ecclesiastical establishments. In this context, this monograph casts light on the mechanisms through which a distinctive religious minority was able to adapt itself within a singular political context. In the most general terms, this book contributes to the significant question of how different religious affiliations could (or might) be integrated within one national reality, and how political allegiance and religious belief began to be perceived as two different identities within one context. Current scholarship on the religious history of early modern England has considerably changed the way in which historians think about English Protestantism. Recent works have offered a more nuanced and accurate picture of the English Protestant Church, which is now seen not as a monolithic institution, but rather as complex and fluid. This book seeks to offer certain elements of a complementary view of the English Catholic Church as an organism within which the debate over how to combine the catholic feature of the Church of Ro

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.

This volume advances scholarly understanding of English Catholicism in the early modern period through a series of interlocking essays on single family: the Throckmortons of Coughton Court, Warwickshire, whose experience over several centuries encapsulates key themes in the history of the Catholic gentry. Despite their persistent adherence to Catholicism, in no sense did the Throckmortons inhabit a 'recusant bubble'. Family members regularly played leading roles on the national political stage, from Sir George Throckmorton's resistance to the break with Rome in the 1530s, to Sir Robert George Throckmorton's election as the first English Catholic MP in 1831. Taking a long-term approach, the volume charts the strategies employed by various members of the family to allow them to remain politically active and socially influential within a solidly Protestant nation. In so doing, it contributes to ongoing attempts to integrate the study of Catholicism into the mainstream of English social and political history, transcending its traditional status as a 'special interest' category, remote from or subordinate to the central narratives of historical change. It will be particularly welcomed by historians of the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, who increasingly recognise the importance of both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism as central themes in English cultural and political life.

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.