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The Catholic Community

For discussion:

1. How much continuity was there between later Elizabethan recusancy and Marian Catholicism?

2. Was Church Papistry the curse or the salvation of early modern Catholicism?

3. How ‘marginal were late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English Catholics?

Readings:

P Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (2003), ch. 7 – fills in the gaps.

M. A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland 1558-1829 (1998) – broad survey

JCH Aveling, The Handle and the Axe (1976) - good general survey of early modern English Catholicism; argues for Reformation as a decisive break in its development.

J Bossy, ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, Past and Present (1962), and in T Aston ed Crisis in Europe (1965) – seminal article arguing for central importance of gentry households in the community.

----------, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (1975) - magisterial: its contention that Catholicism disappeared and had to be reconstructed is focus of later revisionist attacks.

AD Wright, ‘Catholic History, North and South’, Northern History (1978) -critical of Bossy.

-------------, ‘Catholic History, North and South Revisited’, Northern History (1989) - critical of Haigh.

C. M. Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980) – interesting review essay.

A Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993) - important critique of Bossy.

---------, ‘“Domme Preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’ Past and Present, 168 (2000).

---------, ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation, Historical Research, vol. 7 (2005).

---------, ‘Miracles and the Counter Reformation Mission to England’, The Historical Journal, vol. 46, no. 4, (2003)

---------, ‘Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2003)

Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (2007)

M. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England 1580-1625 (1996) – good insights into the demands regime making of Catholics (esp. ch. 5)

-------------, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (2006) – introduction.

W. J. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry 1590- 1780’, Northern History, 25 (1998). Effective case study which questions Bossy’s paradigms. See also his ‘Household, Age, and Gender among Jacobean Yorkshire Recusants’, in Marie Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of Parish and Town, CRS monograph series (1999).

Marie Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560- 1640’, in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500-1800 (London, 1985).

JJ Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (1984) - ch 7 emphasizes survival after 1558.

C Haigh, ‘The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present (1981) and in Haigh ed English Reformation Revised - argues against Bossy for ‘survivalism’

-------, ‘The Fall of a Church or the Rise of a Sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism in England’ Historical Journal (1978) - critical review of Bossy.

------, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’ in Haigh ed Reign of Elizabeth I (1984) and in Marshall (ed) The Impact of the English Reformation (1997) - argues inter alia for failure of the missionary effort.

-----, ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, Trans. Royal Historical Soc. (1981) - sees Elizabethan period as lost opportunity for Catholics.

-------, English Reformations (1993) – ch. 15.

P McGrath, ‘Elizabethan Catholicism a Reconsideration’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1984) - defends missionaries against Haigh. Debate continued in JEH (1985): Haigh, ‘Revisionism, the Reformation, and the History of English Catholicism’, and McGrath, ‘Comment’.

--------- and J Rowe, ‘The Marian Priests under Elizabeth I’, Recusant History, 17 (1984-5)

Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 153 (1996).

----, ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation 1500-1800 (London, 1998).

Michael Carafiello, ‘English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580- 81’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994) – stresses ‘political’ nature of mission

Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (eds), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (2009) – case study of midlands family, esp introduction.

Peter Marshall, Faith and Identity in a Warwickshire Family: The Throckmortons and the Reformation, Dugdale Society Pamphlet (2010).

Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (London, 1996) – an important subject, and a good read.

Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: the Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur Marotti, Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999).

Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the structure of a prejudice', in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in early Stuart England (London, 1989), and in Cust and Hughes (eds), The English Civil War. – seminal analysis of centrality of anti-Catholicism