Catholic Culture In Early Modern England

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

This collection of essays explores the survival of Catholic culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England--a time of Protestant domination and sometimes persecution. Contributors examine not only devotional, political, autobiographical, and other written texts, but also material objects such as church vestments, architecture, and symbolic spaces. Among the topics discussed in this volume are the influence of Latin culture on Catholic women, Marian devotion, the activities of Catholics in continental seminaries and convents, the international context of English Catholicism, and the influential role of women as maintainers of Catholic culture in a hostile religious and political environment. Catholic Culture in Early Modern England makes an important contribution to the ongoing project of historians and literary scholars to rewrite the cultural history of post-Reformation English Catholicism. "This collection contains cutting-edge research on a topic that has, until recently, been shockingly unrecognized and under-studied in the academic mainstream. This is a timely publication and one bound to prove a key point of reference in the future. "--Alison Shell, University of Durham "In recent years, English Catholicism has emerged as one of the most richly provocative and productive veins of scholarship and critical inquiry in Early Modern studies. Catholic Culture in Early Modern England shows why this is so. The editors have assembled a well-balanced and wide-ranging collection of essays that impressively demonstrates how the question of what counts as English Catholic experience opens up fresh perspectives on the nature and scope of confessional and political identity and, more broadly, on the meaning of culture itself in relation to the diaspora that left its mark not only on early modern religious and social space but also on gender roles, aesthetic practice, and the uses of symbolic forms."--Lowell Gallagher, UCLA "Catholic Culture in Early Modern England is a well-considered contribution to the ongoing re-evaluation of post-Reformation English Catholicism and early modern history. The judicious introduction appropriately locates the essays in the wider context of contemporary scholarship and places them in relation to each other. The essays themselves shed light on familiar figures (Queen Henrietta Maria, William Alabaster, John Gerard, William Allen, and Robert Persons) as well as on unfamiliar ones (Helena Wintour and Barbara Constable). Some illuminate Catholic institutions, cultural practices, and individual works. All in all, this is a timely, thoughtful, and valuable collection."--Robert S. Miola, Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor, Loyola College "English Catholics lived among their Protestant neighbors, but they had cultural practices that identified them as Catholics, gave them a sense of community, and quietly asserted their values. These articles do a fine job of opening up the mental and physical worlds they created and represented in their gardens, houses, needlework, conversion narratives and high literature. Tied to international Catholicism, English Catholics lived within a sophisticated culture made more complex by secrecy."--Norman Jones, Utah State University

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

Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.

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

Representations of Catholic women appear with surprising frequency in the literature of post-Reformation England. Playwrights and poets from William Shakespeare to Andrew Marvell invoke the figure of the nun to powerful and often perplexing effect, and works that never directly address female Catholicism, such as Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, share a discourse with contemporary debates regarding the status of recusant women. Catholic Englishwomen, whether living in convents on the European continent or as recusants in their own country, contributed to these debates, but even as their writings addressed the central religious and political issues of their time, their contributions were effaced and now are largely forgotten. Exploring the writings of Catholic women in conversation with those of Shakespeare, Marvell, Marlowe, Donne, and other canonical authors, Beyond the Cloister shows that nuns and recusants were centrally important to the development of English literature. The defining narratives of early modern England cast nuns as the relics of an unenlightened past and equated Catholic femininity with the dangerous charms of the Whore of Babylon. With careful attention to literary figurations of Catholic femininity and to the vibrant manuscript culture in the English convents, Jenna Lay reveals a far more complex reality. Through their use of tropes, figures, generic patterns, and literary allusions, Catholic women produced politically incendiary and rhetorically powerful lyrics, prayers, polemics, and hagiographies. Drawing on the insights of religious studies, historical formalism, and feminist criticism, Beyond the Cloister offers a reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history.

This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.

Publisher description: Arthur F. Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England. Marotti focuses on the period between the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries in England in 1580 and the climax of ongoing religious conflict in the Restoration-era "Popish Plot" and the 1688 "Glorious Revolution." He covers such issues as the relationship of print culture to the residual Catholic culture in Elizabethan England; recusant women, Jesuits, and the cultural "othering" of Catholics; martyrdom accounts; polemically charged Catholic and Protestant narratives of conversion; and the depiction of Catholic plots or outrages and providential Protestant deliverances.

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

After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance."--BOOK JACKET.