‘Not we alone which professe the Gospel, but those also which have sworne unto Papistry, and counterfeite the name of Christ have now likewise their Catechismes: so needful a thing it is in al religions, as in other artes in the beginning, often to beate in the first groundes, and afterwards in method, & order to open other things.’ So wrote the puritan divine William Charke in a tract published in 1580, acknowledging the remarkable proliferation of this genre of texts on both sides of the contemporary religious divide.Footnote ¹ Fusing pedagogy with proselytism and education with indoctrination, catechising had been linked with Christianity since its infancy, but this oral practice underwent a spirited revival in the era of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, assisted, even as it was transformed by the advent of print. Seen as a key to creating congregations of self-consciously committed believers and to inculcating the Christian faith in people who had never encountered it before, it was harnessed by the clergy of these rival churches as a vehicle of evangelical zeal and as a vital arm of the ambitious project of confessionalisation in which both were engaged. This article endeavours to illuminate the nexus between these two objectives by investigating the various translations of the famous catechisms prepared by the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius which circulated in early modern Britain.

It seeks to augment the body of recent work that has begun to extricate British religious history from the enduring myths of national exceptionalism that have clustered around it and to cure it of the chronic disease of insularity by which it has long been afflicted. Diarmaid MacCulloch has urged us to put the Reformation in England back on the map of Europe as a whole,Footnote ² while Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson’s recent collection of essays on the reception of Lutheran and reformed theologies in Britain adopts a dynamic definition of the term that is alive to processes of negotiation, exchange, and cross-fertilisation. Challenging models of transmission that emphasise the passive assimilation of ideas, it demonstrates the two-way traffic of ideas and practices that inextricably linked Protestantism in the British Isles with its sister Reformations on the Continent.Footnote ³ This is a perspective that is also gradually reshaping our understanding of the movements for Catholic renewal that impeded and complicated the eventual transformation of England, Scotland and Wales into Protestant nations—movements which have themselves been the subject of a lively and vibrant, but at times inward-looking and martyrological tradition of ‘recusant’ historiography.Footnote ⁴

The findings of this enquiry are additionally presented as a contribution to the task of ‘de-centring the Catholic Reformation’ described in an important essay by Simon Ditchfield: to the task of shifting the focus of our vision away from the conventional heartlands of Tridentine Catholicism in Italy, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire towards what have long been regarded as its ‘peripheries’. Reacting against the Eurocentric assumptions that have dominated its study, Ditchfield’s particular concern is to highlight the global dimensions of the Catholic Reformation and to underline the ways in which Catholicism’s encounters with and efforts to christianise the indigenous peoples in the New World transformed its initiatives in the Old.Footnote ⁵ Here, by contrast, the aim is to draw attention to the vigour and vitality of Counter Reformation in a context of persecution and proscription and to shed some light on the role of minority and diasporic Catholicisms in its evolution. With Ditchfield, the ensuing analysis eschews the word ‘influence’ in favour of ‘a far richer palette of active verbs’ that better reflects the agency of those engaged in communicating and consuming imported systems of religious belief and ritual.Footnote ⁶ It draws inspiration from studies of the strategies of inculturation and conversion employed in Asia and the Americas and of the reciprocal interactions to which they gave rise.Footnote ⁷

Translation is a particularly apt and suitable tool for probing how cultures interact. It is best regarded not as a merely derivative activity in which the products of one society are transmitted to another, but rather as a creative process that involves accommodation, appropriation, dialogue and compromise, as well as equal ratios of loss and gain on both sides. As Peter Burke and Ronnie Hsia have argued, translation offers insight into the prejudices and priorities of the recipient culture. It involves the transfer of information across linguistic boundaries and the forging of a hybrid subjectivity in the borderland between the host and target cultures. Shaped by its ideological environment, it is never neutral or innocent. Nor is its study assisted by the anachronistic polarity and distorting hierarchical relationship between an ‘original’ authorial work and a ‘mere’ translation that now tends to prevail. Instead, we must situate ‘source’ texts and their variant versions in other languages on a continuum. Translation may be approached as a kind of ventriloquism through which the voices of individuals in one context are harnessed to convey messages to constituencies in another. In the process, they acquire a different accent and inflection.Footnote ⁸

As the sterling work of Anthony Allison and David Rogers has shown, translation played a vital role in the British Counter Reformation. Their catalogues of printed literature enable us to trace both how European texts in Latin and foreign vernaculars infiltrated and were adapted for audiences in England, Scotland and Wales and, in turn, how books written by English, Scottish and Welsh Catholics made journeys in the opposite direction.Footnote ⁹ They also testify to the degree to which the representatives and adherents of the Church of Rome in these regions embraced print as a powerful instrument of evangelical renewal and polemical ammunition. Exploding the lingering Protestant stereotype of Catholicism as a religion hostile to the technology of the mechanical press, they demonstrate the skill with which the medium of the book was harnessed by the missionary clergy and hierarchy as a kind of ‘dumb preacher’ and surrogate priesthood, to furnish spiritual food for the devout and to combat heretical falsehood.Footnote ¹⁰ Alongside classics by the church fathers and medieval monastic writers, they eagerly appropriated controversial, devotional and liturgical works by acclaimed contemporary writers from Spain, Italy, France and Germany, and translated them for British readers. They envisaged them in military terms as weapons, shields and swords and in medical ones as prophylactics and counter-poisons against Protestantism.Footnote ¹¹ Texts describing the crucifixions of Christian missionaries and Japanese converts at Nagasaki in 1597 another genre that was made accessible in the vernacular, cementing a sense of the affinity between these two island nations, connected by the afflictions they suffered for the Catholic faith.Footnote ¹² These books were expected to fall into the hands not just of committed adherents of the Church of Rome, but also of lukewarm waverers and convinced Calvinists.

Those involved in this programme of translation are often hard to identify because they frequently hide behind a cloak of anonymity, but it is clear that they included men and women in holy orders who lived in convents and religious houses on the Continent, lay and clerical exiles, and priests trained in the seminaries and colleges set up in the Low Countries, Rome, and Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century. The literary activities of the latter constituted a mission of the written word which accompanied and supplemented the physical missions they launched to their native countries, intent upon reclaiming them from heresy and restoring them to loyalty to the Church of Rome.Footnote ¹³ Masterminded by Cardinal William Allen, these began in England and Wales in 1574, and they were augmented in 1580 by the arrival of the first Jesuits, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. The production of propaganda against Protestantism, however, had preceded this by more than a decade, and its roots lay in the exodus of Oxford academics and cathedral and collegiate clergy to Louvain in the 1560s.

The discussion that follows also has a bearing on the still rumbling and unresolved debate about the origins of the post-Reformation Catholic community in England and, by extension, throughout these islands. Whereas John Bossy saw the mission of the seminary priests and Jesuits as a key turning point which marked the death of medieval Catholicism and the birth of a new and more muscular Tridentine brand of the Roman Catholic religion in England,Footnote ¹⁴ Christopher Haigh, by contrast, rejected the idea of a sharp disjuncture and emphasised the continuity of Catholicism during this period. He highlighted the role of nonconforming priests ordained under Henry VIII and Mary I and played down the impact of the new trainees. Dismissing the word ‘mission’ as a misnomer, he argued that the clergy who returned to England and Wales were not emissaries of an evangelical movement intent upon converting heretics, but rather representatives of an essentially pastoral one that concentrated upon reconciling those who had lapsed from the faith in which they had been christened.Footnote ¹⁵ However, as Michael Questier has commented, this interpretation runs the risk of setting up conversion and reconciliation, heresy and schism, in sharp opposition and of ignoring the fluid relationship between them. It overlooks the organic link between interior religious motions that manifest themselves in migrations across confessional boundaries and those that involve intensifications of piety that take place inside them.Footnote ¹⁶ Both impulses were at the heart of the Catholic Reformation and both of them helped to foster that preoccupation with deepening knowledge of the basic tenets of Christianity which finds most palpable expression in the spread of catechisms and of catechising. This reflected the perception that too many people were as ignorant of its central doctrines as the ‘heathens’ their colleagues encountered in their travels abroad: no better than atheists and infidels, they were inhabitants of the other Indies that existed within the very midst of Europe itself. In this sense, they thought of themselves as engaged in an enterprise of conversion.Footnote ¹⁷

It is worth stressing the global context in which the impulses that underpinned the drive for catechising emerged and flourished. One of its earliest pioneers, the Castilian mystic Juan de Avila, the so-called apostle of Andalucia (1500–69) had initially hoped to be sent as a missionary to Mexico, but diverted his efforts to Christianising the Moorish kingdom, using the catechism as an innovative proselytising tool.Footnote ¹⁸ Ignatius Loyola and the first Jesuits shared the same ambitions and instincts and Peter Canisius’s own efforts in Vienna and its vicinity after 1549 were shaped by an awareness of the wider struggle to redeem the souls of unbelievers in the ‘vineyards of the Lord’ overseas. He himself requested permission to go to the Far East and was keenly interested in sending missionaries to assist what Luke Clossey has described as an international soteriological project.Footnote ¹⁹ Later admirers lauded him as the second apostle of Germany after St Boniface, a comparison that highlights the link between reformation and the initial plantation of the Christian faith in the early middle ages.Footnote ²⁰ English and Welsh Jesuits were likewise conscious of their historic forebears: the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon evangelists of the pre-Conquest period and Rome’s own envoy St Augustine of Canterbury.Footnote ²¹ The priorities Canisius pursued in the course of his career thus reflect the work of apostleship that was an integral feature of the vocation of those who joined the Society of Jesus from the beginning. Its General imposed this as an obligation on all its fathers in 1599, even if this only took the form of catechising during the rural missions to the poor they conducted within their own neighbourhoods.Footnote ²² Cardinal Robert Bellarmine himself saw the teaching of Christian doctrine as integral to his vocation as Rome’s foremost controversialist, and produced two widely disseminated texts of his own. The shorter of these was widely utilised abroad, running through more than 500 editions and being translated into 56 languages, 17 of them non-European vernaculars.Footnote ²³ Such texts embodied the Jesuits’ characteristic strategy of ‘adapting’ themselves ‘to the people’s capabilities’ in the diverse territories in which they operated.Footnote ²⁴

The three highly influential catechisms Canisius prepared in the late 1550s, the large Summa doctrinae christianae (1555) for priests and teachers, the compact Catechismus minimus (1556) for children, and the medium sized Parvus catechismus catholicorum (1558) for students and adolescents, must been seen in this context.Footnote ²⁵ Written at the behest of Ferdinand of Austria to reclaim those of his subjects who had fallen into heresy and apostasy, their appearance coincided with the Peace of Augsburg, which formalised the deep religious divisions that had emerged within the Empire. They were also a direct response to Martin Luther’s own popular and widely circulated catechisms, written in the late 1520s and acknowledged by the Council of Trent as a source of harmful perversion. Trent itself issued and authorised a catechism in 1566, though this was more a manual instructing the clergy than a book intended for consumption by the laity.Footnote ²⁶ Canisius adopted St Augustine’s own ordering of Christian knowledge. Discussing faith (through the Apostles’ Creed), hope (the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary), charity (the Decalogue and the Laws of the Church), the sacraments, and finally the Christian virtues and vices, his catechisms adopted a question and answer format and, while their tone was not overtly polemical, they did display their ideological colours fairly clearly on their sleeves. They looked like neutral guides to the practice of a devout life, but they were actually ‘statements of confessional bias’.Footnote ²⁷ Although the title pages of the early German editions concealed the author’s identity, Lutherans such as Philip Melanchthon and Johann Wigand quickly revealed it, condemning Canisius as a ‘Papstesel’, ‘god of a monk’, ‘gross blockhead’, and ‘swindling trickster’. A violent piece of anti-Jesuit satire entitled Fides Jesu et Jesuitarum and published in 1573 went further, calling him the ‘foremost Rabbi’ of the Society of Jesus. Initially written in Latin, the lingua franca of the European learned, Canisius’s catechisms were translated into multiple languages and reissued in 347 editions in Austria, Bohemia, France, Slovenia, Hungrary, Spain, and Sweden, and as far afield as Ethiopia, India, China and Japan, within his own lifetime. His biographer Matthias Rader declared that he could ‘fairly be accounted the teacher of practically every nation’.Footnote ²⁸ Transcending the linguistic fragmentation and Babel of Christendom, he spoke to Catholics across the globe in their own tongues; but the cultures into which they were infiltrated in turn took possession of Canisius’s books and assimilated them.

Turning to Britain, there are seven extant editions of Canisius’s catechetical texts bearing his name, all of them dating from the period after the onset of the seminarist and Jesuit missions: English editions of 1579, 1592–6, 1633, and 1639; a Lowland Scots version dated 1588; a Welsh edition in two parts published in 1609 and 1611; and a Latin text which appeared in 1687.Footnote ²⁹ Their appearance has usually been seen as an index of the invigorating winds of change blowing in from the Continent which swept aside a more traditional and old-fashioned brand of Catholic piety from which catechesis was conspicuous by its virtual absence. But the thesis that there was a kind of ‘catechetical vacuum’ in the Middle Ages has its roots in Protestant polemic, which castigated the medieval papacy and clergy for suppressing this salutary practice of the primitive Church and nursing the laity in ignorance and superstition. It needs to be nuanced by an awareness of an indigenous tradition of religious instruction and Christian indoctrination dating back to 1281, when Archbishop John Pecham produced his Ignorantia sacerdotum, which was translated into verse by John Thoresby in the fourteenth century under the title The Lay Folk’s Catechism, a text that exists in 28 manuscripts including some adapted Wycliffite versions.Footnote ³⁰ Reanimated by Erasmian humanism, the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford’s Worke for Housholders and John Colet’s catechism for the boys of St Paul’s School further reflect the presence of catechetical impulses in pre-Reformation England.Footnote ³¹ Even more significant were Bishop Edmund Bonner’s Profitable and necessarye doctrine (1555) and An honest godly instruction and information for the tradynge, and bringing up of children (1555). The latter was an explicit response to the ‘ungodly Catechismes’ by which the youth of the realm had been ‘nouseled’ in ‘pernicious evil doctrine’ under Edward VI and which he feared they ‘wyl not forget, in as much as the new vessel long doth kepe the sent or savoure, of the firste liquore, wherewith it was seasoned’.Footnote ³² Issued during the reign of Queen Mary I, Bonner’s books anticipated a more systematic programme of catechesis ordered by Cardinal Reginald Pole’s Legatine Synod. Shaped by Erasmian and Spanish Dominican influences, according to Eamon Duffy, this programme for spiritual renewal and pastoral reform constituted a precocious and pioneering experiment in Counter Reformation. Canisius himself heralded Mary Tudor as ‘a second Judith’.Footnote ³³

It is against this backdrop that the earliest Roman Catholic catechism published after the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 should be assessed. Compiled by Laurence Vaux, a former collegiate priest in Manchester, who fled and settled in Louvain, where he kept an English school, it was written for the benefit of the ‘young Schollers’ he taught.Footnote ³⁴ Historians have described it as an ‘old fashioned’ and ‘highly conservative’ text, and found it puzzling that it makes so little reference to the straitened condition of Catholics in post-Reformation England. As T. G. Law has commented, it operates ‘as if the whole hierarchical system was in complete working order’ and ignores the perplexities of conscience that afflicted a community cut off from bishops, parish priests, sacraments and rituals. It prescribes antiquated customs and forms such as the anointing of men and women upon the back and belly respectively, ‘because concupiscence raigneth most in those partes’.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, appended to it was a text describing in minute and loving detail liturgical ceremonies which the Protestant reformers had repudiated and prohibited: sensing, processions to the cross, the light of paschal candles, fasting during Lent, the hallowing of fonts and bells, and the vestments worn by priests celebrating mass.Footnote ³⁶ Vaux’s catechism has been seen as a relic and a fossil of the traditional religion which the advent of Protestantism was rapidly consigning to oblivion and which the decrees of the Council of Trent were designed to refine and streamline. Ordained in 1542, in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII, he himself is described in contemporary documents as ‘an oulde massinge priest’.Footnote ³⁷

Yet what most English bibliographers and scholars have strangely failed to recognise is the extent to which the structure and text of Vaux’s text is indebted to Canisius’s Parvus catechismus. This is despite the direct acknowledgement of the Dutch Jesuit’s work in the preface, together with that of the Dominican confessor to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Peter de Soto.Footnote ³⁸ Small enough to secrete in a pocket, his little sextodecimo book is less a reactionary throwback to a lost era than an emblem and harbinger of a new era, bearing the imprint of Vaux’s own travels through Germany and Italy en route to Rome in 1566, where he was entrusted with the task of explaining to fellow exiles in the Low Countries the papal directive prohibiting attendance at heretical churches—a message he then carried back to Lancashire, playing a key part in stiffening lay Catholic resistance in that county. In 1580, he came out of his retirement to an Augustinian house in Louvain, to participate at the request of Gregory XIII in a renewed mission to England—a mission that paralleled and was overshadowed by the more famous one launched by Persons and Campion—but which was ill-fated because of his almost immediate arrest and imprisonment.Footnote ³⁹

Vaux is therefore best conceived as a kind of umbilical cord between the Catholic past and the Catholic future. His catechism is equally ambidextrous. If in some respects it harks back to a world in which the Church of Rome was dominant and ‘bears no trace of [its] anomalous position … in England at the time of its composition’, this may be because Vaux was confident of Catholicism’s rapid restoration to the status of the official and orthodox faith. As Lucy Underwood has commented, he sought ‘not only to perpetuate the memory of what was, but to communicate what ought to be’. At the same time it gestures forward to a society in which heretics and schismatics are ‘alienated and utterly separated’ from it as the children of the devil, and castigates the malignant congregations of Lutherans, Zwinglians and Anabaptists.Footnote ⁴⁰ If it largely steers clear of controversial doctrines such as purgatory and indulgences, it is nevertheless a text with a distinct and strident confessional edge. Among those whom it deems guilty of breaking the first commandment ‘by doubting in Faith?’, for instance, are those who ‘doe not stedfastly beleeve the blessed Sacrament of the Altar’ and who ‘will not confesse the Catholicke Faith with their mouthes, although they beleve it in their harts’, and it refers explicitly to the ‘infidelity’ of ‘heritiks, Idolaters, Turkes and Jewes’. It sharply reproves those who refuse to give due reverence to saints, relics, and images, and compares Protestants who disdain holy ceremonies with ‘the stubburne and hard harted Jewes’. Yet more tellingly it declares that princes who make laws ‘to put the holy Martirs to death: for confessing Christ and the holy Catholike faith’ are equivalent to murderers, together with those who ‘kill the soules of the people with Heresie, or wicked doctrine, or counsel, wherby [they] are brought to damnation’.Footnote ⁴¹ Buried in Vaux’s guide to Christian doctrine is thus a bold indictment of the Elizabethan settlement and royal supremacy, a startling critique of the Queen’s own complicity in the spiritual destruction of the consciences of her subjects. This is a text in which Canisius has been adapted and domesticated for an English audience and which brought both the catechetical impulse and the political agenda at the heart of the Society of Jesus into England even before the Jesuits set foot in it themselves.

Vaux’s book came to exert considerable influence in recusant circles, going through at least nine editions in small formats in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period.Footnote ⁴² It seems to have often been bound with other didactic and devotional texts. One was the Jesus Psalter. Another was Godly Contemplations for the Unlearned, a pictorial catechism that consisted of 30 tiny woodcuts of the scenes evoked in a series of biblical verses, prefaced by an alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. The title page of Godly Contemplations reads: ‘What Historie by hearsay reportes to the minde: the same the silent picture doth shew in like kinde’. This was a species of ocular instruction for the illiterate, an embodiment of the Gregorian topos of images as the books of the unlearned.Footnote ⁴³ A third was A brief forme of confession, a treatise instructing Catholics how to prepare for the sacrament of penance, the epistle dedicatory to which defended it against the ‘blindenesse’ and ‘malice’ of those who ‘without all reason raile there at with full uncomely tearmes’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Encouraging penitence for sin had been the foremost function of catechesis in the medieval church and in post-Reformation England it became closely linked with the formal ritual of reconciliation by which schismatics were reintegrated into the church and their faith was rejuvenated. Declared treason by the statue of 1581, it became a rite of passage and initiation into a self-conscious confessional identity.Footnote ⁴⁵

Seized in raids on the homes of prominent Catholics such as Lady Isabel Hampden, Elizabeth and Bridget Brome, and Sir Thomas Tresham,Footnote ⁴⁶ Vaux’s catechism came to be regarded by the authorities as one of the ‘popish treatises’ that urgently needed to be refuted by Protestant controversialists.Footnote ⁴⁷ A new edition printed on Robert Persons’ press at Rouen appeared in 1583, augmented by some of provocative ‘briefe notes of dyvers godly matters collected by the setter furth of this later edition’ (quite probably by the Jesuit himself), ‘for the further instructing of the unlearned’. These listed ‘foure stronge Reasons why a man ought to forsake all new doctrines, and constantly to cleave to the auncient Religion and doctrine, universally and openly professed in England, by all the aunciente Kinges and people of this Ilande, ever since the first receaving of Christian Religion there’. They stressed the antiquity of Catholicism and repudiated the tenets of the reformed religion ‘set up and advanced in these later dayes’ as ‘old heresies newe scowred’. Their authors (Calvin, Beza and Luther) were condemned as ‘infamous persones’ guilty of ‘horrible crimes’. Protestant doctrines depraved Christian virtue, encouraged ‘licentious and dissolute living’, and bore the marks ‘which the scripture geveth of the doctrine of Antechrist’. The ‘wicked conversation of many of the professors and favourers therof’ was ‘a special note to detect al sects & sectaries’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Reminiscent of the combative arguments set forth in Richard Bristow’s manuals of Motives and Demaundes, these additions turned Vaux’s catechism into a polemical weapon which committed Catholics could use against their heretical neighbours. They made it even more clearly into a dangerous handbook of religious and political resistance to the official Reformation, as well as a text designed to resolve the doubts of those confused and bewildered by the religious turmoil of their age.

This version of the book was clearly perceived as a powerful instrument in the struggle to reclaim in England to the Roman fold: no less than 300 copies of the 1583 edition were shipped in through a north eastern port for sale and distribution in Lancashire and Cheshire and it was reported that the Jesuits and seminary priests used it for instructing the common people.Footnote ⁴⁹ And in at least one instance, it was indeed credited with effecting an evangelical conversion. While he was a student at Cambridge, the future Jesuit John Crosse borrowed a copy of the book from William Alabaster: after reading it, he wrote, ‘I began to imbibe the light of divine grace’.Footnote ⁵⁰ John Heigham’s 1620 St Omer edition of the book was amplified in accordance with the Rituale Romanum recently set forth by Pope Paul V and dedicated to ‘Mistris Marie P.S.’, a Protestant whom he had apparently helped to win over to the Church of Rome. He presented it to her as ‘a Buckler for to defend you’ against the ‘scoffe[s] and gest[s]’ of her heretical friends and relatives and ended his epistle with the sentiment that he was ready ‘to defend this faith, with more drops of blood then I have here employed dropps or pen-fulls of inck’. Ironically, however, it also found its way into the collection of ‘godly’ chapbooks assembled by the Staffordshire gentlewoman Frances Wolfreston between 1631 and 1677, who inscribed her name on one of the blank pages of her copy (now in the Folger Shakespeare Library), where it sat alongside classic works of puritan piety in her library.Footnote ⁵¹ The ease with which Catholic catechisms crossed confessional boundaries may well explain the level of official Protestant anxiety about them: disguised as innocent summaries of Christian belief and piety they could silently infiltrate the bastion of the Protestant household and pervert its inhabitants.

It is probably no accident that a new and different edition of Canisius’s Parvus catechismus entitled Certayne necessarie principles of religion was published in London by the Catholic printer William Carter, but under a false imprint, around the time of Vaux’s, Persons’s and Campion’s arrival. This was ‘Englished’ by a certain T. I., who initially translated it to distract himself from the vicious religious wars he witnessed as he travelled between Paris and Artois, but was then persuaded to print it for the edification of ‘little ones and younglings’ who might otherwise be carried away by the ‘divers wicked and pestiferous books, which in these lamentable times flowe al the world over’. He hoped it would provide ‘holsome milke’ for ‘infants and sucking babes’ and ‘strong meate’ for those more advanced in their faith. It too was designed to provide Catholic believers with a shield by which to deflect and gird themselves against heresy. The product of the same press as Gregory Martin’s inflammatory Treatise of Schisme (1578), it may be seen as part of a programme to create a coherent and undaunted recusant community.Footnote ⁵² Another pocket-sized edition entitled An introduction to the Catholick faith that survives with the publication date of 1633 contains an epistle to the reader that is even more explicit about the dangers of adhering to the reformed faith: quoting St Augustine, it underlines the point that neither ‘faithles Hereticks’ nor ‘naughtie Catholicks’ (in other words schismatics or church papists) will inherit the kingdom of heaven, but instead be consigned to damnation.Footnote ⁵³ Here catechesis is conjoined with overt polemical defiance. Like Vaux’s, this text targeted children and youth as its primary audience, reflecting the clergy’s earnest conviction that the best hope for the spiritual revival and political restoration of Catholicism to dominance lay with the next generation.Footnote ⁵⁴

Certayne necessarie principles of religion coincided with the significant surge in the production of catechisms by godly Protestant divines which Ian Green has documented in meticulous detail. Not content with the short catechism incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer or with the longer officially commissioned and approved version produced by Alexander Nowell, from the 1570s large numbers of pastors began to devise and publish catechetical works of their own. This was itself partly a reaction to the threat posed by the Counter Reformation missionaries. Puritans like William Charke were quick to accuse Canisius and his colleagues of belatedly jumping on the bandwagon: by ‘an evil imitation of us … they woulde seeme to make a requital’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But their own endeavours must be seen as a backhanded compliment to the programme of Catholic proselytism outlined in this article, which developed in symbiosis with their own. The catechisms devised by the Protestant clergy were also a product of growing disillusionment about the degree to which the Gospel had been embraced and internalised by the populace at large. They reflected their pessimistic perception that ‘children in yeeres’ as well as ‘children in understanding’ needed to be instructed in the basic tenets of their faith.Footnote ⁵⁶ Using age as a metaphor for religious immaturity, like their Catholic counterparts struggling to evangelise the native peoples of the New World, they conceptualised Christianisation as a kind of rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. We find them circling back to the notion of catechesis that had prevailed in the early Church, when it was a prelude to the baptism of adult converts rather than a form of instruction for those born and brought up in the Christian faith.Footnote ⁵⁷ But both also regarded catechising as laying the foundations for the internal conversion and spiritual rebirth that it was the aspiration of all strands and confessional brands of the European Reformation to initiate and stimulate. They consistently conflated individuals of lukewarm faith, limited understanding and inadequate zeal living in the dark corners of England, Wales and Scotland with those who had never been exposed to the saving grace of the Gospel of Christ.Footnote ⁵⁸

An English translation of Canisius’s longer Summa Doctrinae Christianae, which he prepared primarily for the use of priests and teachers, but also for the literate and educated laity, dates from the first half of the 1590s. Although the name of the translator appears nowhere on the text, typographical evidence suggests that it was printed on the secret press set up in London by the leading Jesuit in England during this decade, Henry Garnet, later executed for his alleged complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. By contrast with the editions of Canisius’s smaller catechism already discussed, this was a hefty octavo some 680 pages in length which Garnet envisaged as ‘a torch and candell, containing in it, although in a small match, the wholl lighte of Christian Religion’, a lamp to guide his co-religionists in a time of ‘palpable darkenes’. Prefaced with a catalogue of Latin doctors and fathers, its margins were filled with references to Scripture and the Church Councils, ‘to the intent that … either being assaulted by any adversary, or thy selfe seeking to reschew out of miserable captivitie any soule’ their readers would have the requisite resources at their fingertips.Footnote ⁵⁹ Its exposition of Christian doctrine incorporated many passages in which Protestant theology was directly attacked and in which Catholic practices rejected by heretics as invented traditions were robustly defended. The casting out of holy images from sacred places by ‘sacrilegious hands’, for instance, was ‘an absurd error’ and ‘a most wicked madnes’, while those who scoffed and laughed at the ceremonies used in the celebration of the sacraments and at the mystery of transubstantiation were to be pitied for their ‘blinde judgement and mortall hatred’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Protestants might ‘barke and keepe a stirre’ in condemning Catholicism’s refusal to give the laity the Eucharistic cup, but there were no grounds for saying that they were thereby ‘defrauded’ of their spiritual right. ‘They do grievously sinne against Christ himself, who presume to abuse this most holy badge of unity, to make it a badge of Schismaticall division’.Footnote ⁶¹ The necessity of penance, the existence of purgatory, and the practice of monastic celibacy were all defiantly upheld. Sharp words were uttered against the ‘preposterous endeavours of Sectaries, in the disturbing of holie thinges and ordering of Ministers’—perhaps a sideswipe against the advocates of Presbyterian discipline and the abolition of the episcopal hierarchy. Bishops, Garnet said, ‘doe beare the roome, and possesse the place of the Apostles’.Footnote ⁶²

Garnet appended to the text a translation of Canisius’s treatise on the fall of man and justification according to the Council of Trent, which included passing assaults upon those who denied the validity of infant baptism, ‘the vaine confidence of Hereticks’, and the ‘rashe presumption of Predestination’ into which some Calvinists fell.Footnote ⁶³ He also added three discourses of his own, on the controverted questions of hallowed objects and relics, pilgrimages, and pardons and indulgences, which he envisaged as ‘certaine little kindled sizes, to lighten some secrete corners which might otherwise annoy thee’, and as a posy of flowers to repel ‘all manner of pestilent vapours, which in so unsavourie an aire thou maiest meete withall’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He perceived his book as a kind of fumigant for keeping the contagious plague of Protestantism at bay. Garnet’s treatises were replete with vehement denunciations of ‘the detestable brutishnes of heresie and infidelitie’, the ‘hypocriticall devotion’ of ‘our new Phariseys’, and the ‘barbarous rudenesse’ to which they had reduced the country, as well as vicious ad hominem attacks on those ‘first breeders’ of the false religion that was Protestantism, Wyclif, Hus and Luther, ‘three persons of eternall infamy’. Attacking the former monk for breaking his vow of chastity and living ‘a sacrilegiouse and incestouse life’, he described him sarcastically as ‘a first ADAM of this new creation’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Garnet also indulged in a cutting aside accusing his enemies of inconsistency in rejecting the miracles wrought by the saints while simultaneously celebrating the English monarch’s hereditary power to heal by the royal touch.Footnote ⁶⁶ A fourth supplementary text on the subject of services and scripture in the vulgar tongue promised in the preface was omitted, ‘by reason of the continuall warres in this countrey and the manifold difficulties which all those that live here-about doe feele’, though this was a ruse to cover the fact that the text was printed not in France or the Netherlands but clandestinely in England. The real reason may have been lack of a sufficient supply of paper.Footnote ⁶⁷

Adapted for the embattled condition of England’s Catholics, this version of Canisius’s Summa Doctrinae Christianae was less a device for indoctrinating the unlearned than an organ and ensign of religious militancy, the counterpart of Garnet’s vocal call for unwavering resistance to the Elizabethan regime’s demand for conformity, which was itself a riposte to the dissident priest Thomas Bell’s unorthodox teaching on this topic.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is perhaps indicative that the third edition of the book, published on the Jesuit press at St Omer, was retitled A summary of controversies … against the sectaries of this age, and even more clearly displayed its credentials as an anti-Protestant text, bearing on its title page the words of Titus 3: 10 ‘A man that is an Heretike, after the first admonition avoyd’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The reputation of Canisius’s Summa Doctrina as a work of confessional polemic is underlined by the presence of both Latin and vernacular versions in the houses of educated recusant gentlemen suspected of treason such as Anthony Babington and in the cells of the regime’s prisoners of conscience, including Francis Tregian.Footnote ⁷⁰

The same text had been translated into the Scots dialect in 1588 by the Paris based exile Adam King, a professor of philosophy and mathematics at the Sorbonne. This incorporated a lengthy denunciation of the revised calendar of saints prefixed to Protestant bibles, designed to reveal ‘the malice and ignorance quhairby the Calviniane ministers’ abused ‘the simple and unlerned people’ and peppered with splenetic diatribes against the Lutheran Synagogue, Zwingli and Calvin, together with various prayers for the conversion of heretics and their reunion with the holy Catholic kirk and for the reclamation of the wasted vineyard of Scotland from its devastations at the hands of the reformers.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1579 Owen Lewis had worked hard to raise funds to produce an edition ‘vir linguae Britanicae peritissimus’ printed in Milan, but this initiative fell by the wayside. Canisius’s catechism eventually appeared in Welsh thanks to the efforts of Roger Smith, who brought it out in two volumes published in Paris in 1609 and 1611 respectively. The dedicatory epistle to the French Cardinal du Perron indicates his hopes for assistance and patronage from the highest quarters in the ongoing effort to reverse the Reformation.Footnote ⁷² In Ireland, the very first Catholic book to be printed in Irish type was the Franciscan Father Bonaventura Ó h-Eodhusa (Bonaventure O’Hussey’s) Teagasg Críosdaidhe (1611): the product of the press set up specifically for the purpose of producing vernacular texts at St Antony’s College in Louvain, it too bears the influence of the model established by Peter Canisius and followed by Robert Bellarmine. The Armagh Synod of 1614 also recommended that clergy acquire a copy of one of the Dutch Jesuit’s catechisms, alongside the Tridentine version.Footnote ⁷³

As the seventeenth century progressed, the notion that it might still be possible to reconvert the three kingdoms and four nations that comprised the British Isles did not completely disappear and in this project catechesis continued to play a critical role. It is telling that a Latin version of Canisius’s Parvus Catechismus was printed in London in 1687. Apparently commissioned by James II and published by the Catholic convert Henry Hills, its appearance must have seemed to worried Protestants yet another straw in the wind of the Stuart king’s intention to reintroduce Catholicism as the country’s official religion.Footnote ⁷⁴ And it was initiatives such as these that led directly to the constitutional coup that ejected him from the throne during the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 in favour of William III and Mary II. Nevertheless, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries would prove the great age of catechising within the British Catholic communities and the period saw many inexpensive catechisms printed for pastoral use, including the so-called Douai Catechism, which went through 34 editions, four of which were edited by Richard Challoner, and ‘eye catechisms’ that took the form of illustrated broadsheets. By contrast with the Jesuit character of those produced during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, these texts were predominantly authored by secular clergy such as John Gother and intended for the practical instruction of the unlearned. They bore the marks of Jansenism’s emphasis on moral teaching and popular pedagogy and were one manifestation of the renewed aspiration of the Catholic priesthood to secure the appointment of a permanent bishop, who could oversee the systematic implementation of the Tridentine decrees at diocesan level.Footnote ⁷⁵ They reflected a situation in which, although not beneficiaries of the Act of Toleration and still theoretically subject to the penal laws, Catholics had considerable room for manoeuvre. They finally had sufficient freedom to pursue the initiatives for the education and indoctrination of children and of the rural poor that were a hallmark of the later phases of the Counter Reformation in Europe, to create the schools and fraternities of Christian doctrine that had proliferated in Catholic dominions since the sixteenth century. They had the opportunity to implement in a more systematic way a mode of pedagogy that French bishops described as ‘the science of salvation’.Footnote ⁷⁶

In conclusion, this article has used the various translations of Peter Canisius’s catechisms into English, Scots and Welsh as a prism through which to view the nature and evolution of the programme of Catholic renewal and Counter Reformation in Protestant Britain. It has shown how the histories of evangelical mission and confessionalisation are intertwined in the context of the British Isles and illuminated some of the ways in which the act of translation is always an act of appropriation, adaptation, and acculturation. The process by which Canisius was harnessed for English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers provides a lesson in the reception and assimilation of the European Counter Reformation and in how catechisms coloured and shaped the outlook of Catholics in a region under the yoke of heretical rule. They are texts in which confessional and anti-Protestant identity formation converges with the task of basic indoctrination. They help to integrate minority and diasporic Catholicism back into our picture of the global Catholic movement for outreach and renewal and highlight how catechesis operated both as a clerical tool for cultivating religious resistance and as a device for inculcating saving knowledge and redeeming piety in those young in faith as well as in years. The missionary priests tackled the task of restoring England to its traditional allegiance to Rome as if they were planting the faith in a pagan land and they utilised the same techniques and strategies as their colleagues in far flung parts of the newly discovered world.

Historians are now rightly sceptical about Jean Delumeau’s claim that the Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entailed the wholesale religious transformation of a European society that had hitherto been only superficially Christianised.Footnote ⁷⁷ That thesis arguably mistook the subjective perception of clerical professionals for historical reality. What it reflected was the manner in which Europeans’ encounters with non-Christian cultures on its edges and overseas shaped their understanding of the pastoral challenges that they confronted at home. It reflected the close connection between catechesis and conversion, education and evangelism, in contemporary minds. There is a distinct sense in which the texts discussed here continued to perform the liturgical purpose with which catechising was intimately linked in early Christianity, the act of exorcism that was integral to the neophyte’s conversion: they are designed to expel the devil of false religion and unbelief. Especially in contexts of proscription and persecution like Britain, the consequence of the Reformation was to revitalise catechesis as an instrument by which people were persuaded to cast off their former lives as schismatics and heretics and (literally and metaphorically) to embrace Christianity for the first time.