Catholic Record Society: Records Series – serie

Some 280 letters from a leading figure in the eighteenth-century Catholic community shed new light on a turbulent period.Edited by FRANS KORSTEN, JOSS BLOM, FRANS BLOM AND GEOFFREY SCOTT James Peter Coghlan [1731-1800] was the chief English Catholic printer, publisher and bookseller of the second half of the eighteenth century. It was mainly through him that the English Catholics were provided with an extensive polemical, catechetical, pastoral and devotional literature of their own. Coghlan was also a pivotal figure in the infrastructure and logistics of the Catholic community, acting as a middleman between the various layers and segments of that community. In the turbulent days of the Catholic Committee after 1785, he found himself uneasily in the midst of the fray. He corresponded with dozens of British Catholics, at home and abroad, and his letters, pious, shrewd, dedicated, garrulous and eminently practical, yield a fascinating insight into the day-to-day working of Catholic book production as well as the behind-the-scenes life of the English Catholic community.FRANS KORSTEN, JOSS BLOM and FRANS BLOM teach English Literature at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.GEOFFREY SCOTT is Abbot of Douai.

First published edition of documents and letters from a highly-significant incident within the nineteenth-century Catholic church.The row between Bishop Herbert Vaughan of Salford and the Jesuits became a cause celebre in the 1870s and was only settled eventually in Rome after the personal intervention of the pope. While the immediate issue was the provision of secondary education, at stake were key questions of authority that had troubled the English Catholic community for centuries; the solution played a major part in determining the relationship between the newly restored bishops and the Religious Orders.This volume brings together for the first time all the relevant English and foreign archival sources and enables the reader to take a balanced view of the whole issue. The documents and letters [including Vaughan's private diary] paint an intriguing and not always flattering picture of the principal combatants. Bishop Vaughan [later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster] was a determined champion of his own and his fellow-bishops' rights as diocesan bishops. Against him stood the leaders of the Jesuit Order, jealous of their traditional privileges and heirs to centuries of service to the English Catholic community. By the 1870s that community wasbeginning to develop a commercial and professional middle class who demanded secondary education for their children. Many of them looked to the Jesuits to provide it and they claimed the right to do so, irrespective of the wishesand rights of the bishop.The source material is accompanied by an introduction placing them into their social and historical context, and explanatory notes. It forms an important addition to an understanding of the nineteenth-century English Catholic Church.Father Martin John Broadley is a priest in the Catholic diocese of Salford; he also lectures at the University of Manchester.

Selection of correspondence from the house which was once Little Malvern priory, illuminating life at the time.In 1538 John Russell, secretary to the Council of the Welsh Marches, acquired the dissolved priory of Little Malvern, where his descendants, the Beringtons, still live. This selection from the family letters in the WorcestershireRecord Office vividly illustrates the impact on Worcestershire of the Reformation and the Civil War. Among much else, it includes correspondence with Thomas Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Audley (who was John Russell's brother-in-law); Elizabethan medical prescriptions and business letters; correspondence about evading the penal laws against Catholics; a mock-heroic Latin skit on James I; a personal letter from one of the Jesuits executed at the time of theOates Plot, and an official certificate that Little Malvern had been (unsuccessfully) searched for priests. The letters themselves are accompanied by an introduction and explanatory notes.Michael Hodgetts has written extensively on Recusant History and is an acknowledged expert on English Catholic families and their houses.

Edition of theological debates and discussions, giving an intriguing and unusual insight into the English catholic community in the seventeenth century.How did English Catholics come to terms with living in an alien state? Could they, for example, practise equivocation to avoid arrest, possible imprisonment and execution? Could they use force against their captors? What contact could they maintain with Protestants in order to survive and carry on a normal life? In such a context it is not surprising that a training in casuistry, the science of resolving difficult cases of conscience, was an important aspect of the education of English Catholic missionary priests.A number of the manuals used in that training have survived, largely in manuscript versions only. This volume, a companion to Dr Holmes' selection from Elizabethan materials (Elizabethan Casuistry, 1981), contains discussions and debates dating from the reign of Charles I. Their author was Thomas Southwell, a professor at the English Jesuit College in Liège, a respected scholar and teacher. He focuses on the problems facing Catholic priests and laymen under persecution in England, discussing, for example, attitudes to the Oath of Allegiance, the Roman Index of Prohibited Books and the Church's laws on fasting.In addition, there are cases here about witchcraft, astrology, duelling, usury, monopolies and bills of exchange. An important section contains over sixty cases dealing with betrothal and marriage, both from the point of view ofEnglish Catholics and in more general terms.The documents are accompanied by a full critical introduction, setting them in context, and elucidatory notes.Peter Holmes holds a doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, where his research focused on the political thought of the Elizabethan Catholics

Collection of letters from the Catholic Bishop Goss vividly depict contemporary ecclesiastical life.These letters, covering the years between 1850 and 1872, illustrate the complex issues facing the newly-established Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. Bishop Alexander Goss was closely involved in the struggles to assert diocesan independence from Westminster and undue interference by Rome and was a determined upholder of his episcopal rights, "strong and resolute almost to vehemence - the crozier, hook and point" as Cardinal Manning claimed. At thesame time, as leader of the diocese with the largest number of Catholics in England and Wales, he faced the problems of serving the needs of a rapidly expanding population and of integrating a huge numbers of Irish migrants, without damaging the flourishing recusant traditions that had made Lancashire so important in the survival and growth of English Roman Catholicism. Whether he was writing on ecclesiastical politics, or his reasons for opposing the definition of infallibility, or the spiritual needs of his people, he wrote "without restraint or reticence" and his letters show us both his energy and administrative ability, and something of his complex personality.They are presented here with introduction and elucidatory notes.Peter Doyle, a retired history lecturer, has written extensively on the history of the Catholic Church in England after 1850. His published work includes a historyof Westminster Cathedral, a ground-breaking history of the Catholic diocese of Liverpool from 1850-2000, and three volumes in the new Butler's Lives of the Saints, as well as a range of contributions to academic journals.

An invaluable collection of primary sources for the study of eighteenth-century convent life.Between 1728 and 1744 the Catholic lawyer Mannock Strickland (1673-1744) acted as agent for English nuns living on the Continent, including St Monica's, Louvain, the Brussels Dominicans and the Dunkirk Benedictines. Most convent archives perished at the French Revolution, but Strickland's papers survived in the archives of Mapledurham House, Oxfordshire, offering a unique insight into the workings of English convents. These extraordinary documents reveal the reality of exile for a group of formidable yet vulnerable women, "doubly dead" to English law. Two hundred letters tell stories of hardship, isolation, severe winters, war, starvation, Jacobite intrigue and international finance. They show that convent bursars became skilled at playing international exchange markets yet remained at the mercy of unscrupulous investors.The letters are presented here with full notes; a thorough introduction sets theletters, cash day books, bills of exchange and other documents in context.Richard G. Williams is Librarian and Archivist of Mapledurham House; he has also held senior posts at the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, Birkbeck College London and at Yale University.

Documents from the major convent at Bruges shed fresh and illuminating light on its life.The English Augustinian Canonesses at Bruges kept records of daily life and key events in their convent from its foundation in 1629. Living in exile, members of the convent were well-aware of their importance to the survival of English Catholicism for women. Keeping full records served to maintain a reputation which would attract influential and wealthy benefactors and well-qualified members; but the Bruges Chronicles are far more than window-dressing. They introduce the reader to members at every level, from impressive community leaders to candidates who failed to live up to expectations and were tactfully nudged out before profession. We meet Prioresses who take on major challenges in fund-raising to pay for building projects, manage disagreements over spiritual direction and adjust to new relationships with secular authorities, the impact of the Enlightenment and finally war. There are some intense personal dramas that unfold alongside nuns who followed the monastic rule to the letter and served the community faithfully over many years. Above all, the the Chronicles reflect the wide-ranging interests of the members, and show clearly that this enclosed community was well-connected with an extensive support network.The Chronicles edited in this volume, taking the story to the eighteenth century and a decision as to whether or not to return to England,are presented with introduction and full notes.Dr Caroline Bowden is a Senior Research Fellow, Queen Mary, University of London.

Philip Perry's Essay on the Life and Manners of the Venerable Robert Grosseteste presents us not only with a high standard of biographical scholarship but also a fine example of English eighteenth-century polemical writing. Grosseteste was a formidable thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln who, because of his insistence upon the primacy of Scripture and his apparent wrangling with the papacy, had long been claimed as a type of proto-Protestant in the English post-Reformation historical tradition. Perry sets out in his Essay a vivid account of Grosseteste's life and achievements to advance his cause as a worthy saint and to recover his reputation as a loyal son of the Roman Church. His frank discussion of the abuses that Grosseteste opposed and the controversies in which he engaged put his text beyond the limits of what a Catholic priest could advisably print in eighteenth-century England. The manuscript remained unpublished for fear of causing scandal, and now sees its first printed edition.