Several books of Catholic origin enjoyed wide circulation among Protestant readers in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such works were commonly subjected to editorial revision to suit Protestant sensibilities; a famous instance is Edmund Bunny's adaptation of Robert Persons’ The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, apperfeyning to resolution (1582). An instance less known but no less interesting is the Protestantized version of Robert Southwell's Short Rule of Good Life issued in 1620 by the London publisher William Barrett.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has reinvigorated the debate over the nature of late mediaeval religious practice and belief, examining the ‘richness and complexity of the religious system by which men and women structured their experiences of the world, and their hopes and aspirations within and beyond it.’ Duffy questions the assumption that there was in that period a wide gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion. In so doing he has not only illuminated the religious practices and beliefs of late mediaeval England but he has stimulated discussion about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion in other periods. Duffy eschews the use of the term ‘popular religion’, which he argues carries questionable assumptions about the nature of ‘non-popular’ religion and about the gap between the two. He prefers ‘traditional religion’, on the grounds that it does greater justice to ‘the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people…’ ‘Traditional religion’ while being rooted in inherited and shared beliefs was, nevertheless, capable of great flexibility and variety.

This article re-considers Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline (1555–1622) in his cultural context, particularly in the light of the recently-discovered inventory of his private library. This sophisticated collection of continental books, with strong holdings in art, architecture and Catholic apologetics, offers new information on the intense private Catholicism of a statesman who conformed outwardly to Protestantism. The inventory casts light also on his work of building and decoration at Pinkie House, Musselburgh. The article concludes by raising the possibility of some kind of continuance at Pluscarden Priory in Moray after the reformation and under Seton’s protection, and that Seton’s daughter Sophia may have built a freestanding Catholic chapel on her marriage to David Lindsay, first Lord Balcarres.

In an Apostolic Constitution, dated 8 May 1881, Pope Leo XIII sought to regulate the relationship between diocesan bishops and religious orders. In the words of Herbert Vaughan the Papal pronouncement ‘sums up and ends a recent controversy on matters of discipline affecting the working of the Church in Great Britain’. Romanos Pontifices represented a personal triumph for Vaughan. He had assiduously campaigned at Rome to have the freedom of religious orders restricted, and their operations subject to the supervision of the local bishop. The Pope’s document directs that members of religious orders may not open a house in any diocese without the explicit permission of the bishop. Nor, in future, would it be possible for a religious congregation to convert existing institutions to other use without the consent of the episcopal authorities. The ruling of the document was an adjudication affecting all religious orders, and demanded complete obedience to all its details. The only religious order mentioned by name was the Society of Jesus. It, too, was to be subject to this ordinance in spite of its claims to be exempt from such interference in the running of its affairs.

This article is concerned with one aspect of movement between religions in England at the end of the Jacobean period, namely the polemical use which could be made of the convert to Protestantism. The increasing likelihood of a successful conclusion of the Spanish Match negotiations had for some time been threatening the Protestant Establishment. In this climate, prominent changes of religion were of great interest to polemicists of both sides. As in Elizabeth’s reign, Protestants could attack the Church of Rome by focusing on the apostates from it. The point of reference from which this polemical use of conversion will be analysed is the best-selling vitriolic anti-Catholic tract written by the wavering Protestant minister John Gee, entitled The Foot out of the Snare. Gee is familiar to modern historians as a source on Roman Catholic priests in the 1620s but he is important also for the way in which he was employed as an anti-Catholic writer. His tract originated with the clerical group which gathered around Archbishop Abbot, clerics distinguished by their violent opposition to encroaching Roman Catholicism, evident in the likely success of the Spanish Marriage project and the conversions which had started to occur as the political climate changed. Gee’s tract may be used as a starting point to explore some of the politics and literature of conversion at this time.

For some Roman Catholic clergymen, the nineteenth century was an exciting age. On its very eve, Cardinal Ruffo led a pious bandit band in a crusade of slaughter through the southern Italian Parthenopean republic. In 1810, another priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, began the revolution in Mexico. Luigi Menichini led the 1830 insurrection in Naples. Father Piotr Sćiegienny’s revolutionary activities in Poland earned him a quarter of a century’s exile in Siberia. Father Patrick Lavelle founded an Irish society which was a front for the revolutionary Fenians. The secular or ecclesiastical politician has a job to do, and in some places, the priesthood was forced into political roles, as in nineteenth-century Italy, Mexico, Poland and Ireland. But in spite of the international conflict between Catholicism and anticlericalism in Europe and South America, the ordinary Catholic priest was not primarily a political animal. Unless he served in the Curia or was a martyr-missionary in the South Seas or Central Africa, the priest’s life was the old hidden life of caring for the souls of the people of his parish and of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. Amid the tumult of the nations, this inner work continued on its quiet path, and in riches and poverty, and beside the allurements and excitements and man-made manipulations of secular and ecclesiastical politics, the priesthood was concerned with the essential tasks of the comfort of the stricken and the salvation of sinners, laid upon them by their Lord and Master.

It was to be expected that at the court of a Catholic king and queen there would be from the beginning of the exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye a royal chapel and an establishment of Catholic chaplains and that this would last as long as the court remained there. It continued in fact after the departure of James Edward to Lorraine in 1712 and Avignon in 1716 and for a while after the death of Queen Mary Beatrice in 1718. The priests of the English Jesuit Province—the subjects of this article—remained in office until 1720 or perhaps a year or two later. It may be presumed that they stayed on, after the court had ceased to be, to care for the Jacobite exiles who over the years had gathered round it.

What a change has taken place in the general opinion in this Country with regard to Catholics, especially Priests, since the arrival of the emigrant Clergy! Their Conduct has been so exemplary—people who had been taught to consider them as the worst of characters begin now to be persuaded they are good Christians, and many own they had been much imposed on by their teachers with respect to the morals of Catholics—I doubt not many conversions will be wrought in consequence—at a little town we have many of these unfortunate people, if I may so style them, who suffer in so good a cause, whose sole defence is on providence—yet are in want of nothing so abundant as the charities they receive in all parts—in which I cannot but admire the goodness of God who abandons not those who quit all for his sake.

In the reign of Elizabeth I we find Christopher Maire of the family of Maire or Meire in Cheshire married to a Moresby of Cumberland and living in the city of Durham. In 1572 he bought the manor of Hutton in the parish of Monkhesledon of William Wyvell of Patrick Brompton in Yorkshire; some years later he made the further purchase, from Robert Aske, of Hardwick-by-the-Sea, in the same parish.

In any study of the pamphlet literature of the later years of the reign of James VI & I it becomes impossible to distinguish between the dislike felt by his subjects for the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar (1617), and disgust at any proposed alignment between England and Spain. It is clear that hatred for Spain was so deeply ingrained in the English psyche that it could be revived at any time and, if proof of this is needed, one only has to examine the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda literature which flourished around the time of the proposed ‘Spanish Match’. In the first instance this paper will discuss the genre in general and this will be followed by a more detailed examination of the work of Thomas Scott and Thomas Middleton.

This paper is a sequel to ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, which was published in Recusant History in April 1974. There they only had room to discuss in detail the century between the purchase of Chaddesley Corbett and Harvington by Sir John Pakington in 1529 and the death in 1631 of his great-nephew Humphrey III, who had built the Elizabethan Hall with its remarkable priest-holes and wall-paintings. In continuing the story I have had invaluable help from the Websters’ genealogical and legal notes, which Veronica passed on to me in the summer of 1991, the year before her death; but their references have been checked, a great deal has been added, and the structure, the inferences and any errors are mine. The paper therefore appears under my name with these acknowledgements, rather than as a joint publication. I hope that in due course the trilogy can be completed by another paper on The Throckmortons of Harvington, 1696–1923’.

The register of the Hill Chapel, Goosnargh, Lancashire, from 1777 to 1856 was published in C.R.S. 31, with historical notes by the Rev. R. L. Smith. Amongst the Hill Chapel papers deposited at the Lancashire Record Office in May 1956 by the Rev. A. Richardson are two foolscap sheets recording baptisms between 1770 (when the chapel was founded) and 1777.

Henry Hawkins deserves to be remembered if only because he lived to be an old man. After more than twenty-five years of active but unostentatious service as a Jesuit priest in the London area, he died on 14 August 1646 at the House of the English Tertian Fathers in Ghent, aged about seventy years. But apart from the achievement of keeping his body intact and relatively free for a quarter of a century on the English Mission, Hawkins should be known, too, for his literary works—two original and six substantial translations from Latin, French and Italian. From the earliest days of the English Catholic struggle for survival, the particular need of the isolated English ‘Papists’ for spiritual reading in order to sustain faith, had been recognized and many attempts were made to meet it. For Catholics at home, largely deprived of sacraments, worship and instruction through homily, it was one of the only ways of keeping in touch with the Church's devotional life and one of the few channels of encouragement. Hawkins's work is not apologetical; he does not try to supply the need for doctrinal instruction nor does he in any way enter the dogmatic or political conflict.

This article compares and contrasts the 1580 texts A briefe discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church by Robert Persons, and Gwssanaeth y Gwŷr Newydd by Robert Gwyn. Both books deal with church papism, and were written whilst the authors were in Rome together. Despite the simi-larity of theme, and the fact that the two most likely consulted each other about the work, many significant differences remain between the two texts. This article seeks to discuss these differences, and to assess what conclusions can be inferred from them as to the relative conditions of English and Welsh Catholicism, and the effect that this had on the authors’ work.

Very little attention has been given to the bibliography of the English Franciscans in penal times though their literary output was considerable in relation to their numbers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, as far as the English Province is concerned, Franciscan bibliography begins and ends with Luke Wadding in the seventeenth century. The elementary processes of collecting and sifting evidence have not been carried out, since Wadding’s time, and in the few later works of reference which mention individual Franciscan writings there is a great deal of confusion. I shall try, in the present study, to record what evidence there is concerning English books by members of the order between 1559 and 1640 and I shall add some notes on other books which have Franciscan associations. A number of English versions of Franciscan works in other languages were made during this period by Englishmen who were not themselves Franciscans. Some of them present bibliographical prob1ems which I cannot profess to answer, but it seems desirable that whatever evidence exists concerning them should he published.

Searching for a phrase to describe the Spirit of the Age, the mid-Victorian writer might choose the ‘Age of Education’, or perhaps the ‘Age of Transition’; but Wilkie Collins preferred ‘The Age of the Periodical’. The high–status periodical, and education itself, could be seen as motive forces, determining, shaping, announcing and ushering in the ‘Age of Transition’. For the Liberal Catholics ofThe Rambler, the ‘Age of Transition’ could be an ‘Age of Opportunity’, witnessing the start of the reconversion of England; or it could be an ‘Age of Danger’, witnessing the slide of England into overt infidelity. Of the two motive forces, even the most complacent and self-satisfied review writer would admit the greater to be Education.