Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns' writings from this time form a unique resource.

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns' writings from this time form a unique resource.

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns' writings from this time form a unique resource.

This book gathers contributions on the later Stuart queens and queen consorts. It seeks to re-insert Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, Mary of Modena, Mary II, Anne, and Maria Clementina Sobieska into the mainstream of Stuart and early Georgian studies, concentrating on the later Stuart queens from the restoration of King Charles II (who married Catherine of Braganza in 1662) until the death of Maria Clementina Sobieska in 1735, who was married to James Francis Edward Stuart, the titular King James III, otherwise known as the Old Pretender. It showcases these women’s roles as queen consorts and as ruling queens in Britain and Europe, and reveals how their positions allowed them to act as power-brokers, diplomats, patrons, and religious trendsetters during their lifetimes. It also explores their impact in early modern Britain and Europe by assessing their influence in religion, political culture, and the promotion of patronage.

The first general study of different attitudes to conformity and the political and cultural significance of the resulting consensus on what came to be regarded as orthodox. The different ways in which people expressed `conformity' or `nonconformity' to the 1559 settlement of religion in the English church have generally been treated separately by historians: Catholic recusancy and occasional conformity; Protestant ministerial subscription to the canons and articles of the Church of England; the innovations made by avant-garde conformist clerics to the early Stuart Church; and conformist support for the prayer book in the 1640s. This is the first book to look across the board at what was politically important about conformity, aiming to assess how different attitudes to conformity affected what was regarded as orthodox or true religion in the English Church: that is, the political and cultural significance of the ways in which one could obey or disobey the law governing the Church. The introduction places the articles in the context of the recent historiography of the late Tudor and early Stuart Church. PETER LAKE is Professor of History, Princeton University; MICHAEL QUESTIER is Senior Research Fellow, St Mary's Strawberry Hill. Contributors: ALEXANDRA WALSHAM, MICHAEL QUESTIER, PAULINE CROFT, KENNETH FINCHAM, THOMAS FREEMAN, PETER LAKE, ANDREW FOSTER, NICHOLAS TYACKE, DAVID COMO, JUDITH MALTBY.

New biography of a Catholic martyr exploring the complicated and controversial story of her demise. >

Catholics and Treason takes the narratives generated by the contemporary law of treason as it applied to Roman Catholics, during and after the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century, and uses them to explore the Catholic community's writing of its own history. Prosecutions of Catholics under the existing law and via new legislation produced a great deal of documentation which tells us much about contemporary politics that we could not garner from any other source. The intention here is to locate the narratives of persecution inside the context of the 'mainstream' history of the period from which, for the most part, they have been routinely excluded but out of which they partly emerged. In that respect, this is the history of the post-Reformation Church and State with the politics (of violence) put back. This volume takes as its starting point the magnum opus of Bishop Richard Challoner, his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, and it works backwards from that book into the period that Challoner describes. Historian Michael Questier seeks to reassemble as far as possible the historical jigsaw puzzle on which Challoner laboured but which he could not complete, thinking about the implications for our view of the post-Reformation and of the way in which Challoner and others described the Catholic experience of in/tolerance.

All Hail to the Archpriest revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England as the 'Archpriest controversy'. Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The published texts which form the core of the arguments involved in this debate survive, as do several caches of manuscript material generated by the dispute. Together they tell us a good deal about the aspirations of the writers and the networks that they inhabited. They also allow us to retell the progress of the dispute both as a narrative and as an instance of contemporary public argument about topics such as the increasingly imminent royal succession, late Elizabethan puritanism, and the function of episcopacy. Our contention is that, if one takes this material seriously, it is very hard to sustain standard accounts of the accession of James VI in England as part of an almost seamless continuity of royal government, contextualised by a virtually untroubled and consensus-based Protestant account of the relationship between Church and State. Nor is it possible to maintain that by the end of Elizabeth's reign the fraction of the national Church, separatist and otherwise, which regarded itself or was regarded by others as Catholic, had been driven into irrelevance.

Thoroughly updated with newly discovered archival material, this second edition of The Trials of Margaret Clitherow demonstrates that the complicated and controversial life story of Margaret Clitherow is not as unique as it was once thought. In fact, Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that her case was comparable to those of other separatist females who were in trouble with the law at the same time, in particular Anne Foster, also of York. In doing so, they shed new light on the fascinating stories of these unruly women whose fates have been excluded from Catholic and women narratives of the period. The result is a work which considers the questions of religious sainthood and martyrdom through a gender lens, providing important insights into the relationship between society, the state and the church in Britain during the 16th century. This is a major contribution to our understanding of both English Catholicism and the Protestant regime of the Elizabethan period.

Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 revisits what used to be regarded as an entirely 'mainstream' topic in the historiography of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - namely, the link between royal dynastic politics and the outcome of the process usually referred to as 'the Reformation'. As everyone knows, the principal mode of transacting so much of what constituted public political activity in the early modern period, and especially of securing something like political obedience if not exactly stability, was through the often distinctly un-modern management of the crown's dynastic rights, via the line of royal succession and in particular through matching into other royal and princely families. Dynastically, the states of Europe resembled a vast sexual chess board on which the trick was to preserve, advance, and then match (to advantage) one's own most powerful pieces. This process and practice were, obviously, not unique to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the changes in religion generated by the discontents of western Christendom in the Reformation period made dynastic politics ideologically fraught in a way which had not been the case previously, in that certain modes of religious thought were now taken to reflect on, critique, and hinder this mode of exercising monarchical authority, sometimes even to the extent of defining who had the right to be king or queen.

This volume brings together contributions from two separate editors. The first is a collection of texts edited by Peter Clarke that evidence Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's legatine powers to grant dispensations and other papal graces and his exercise of these powers during the 1520s in Henry VIII's realm; these papal favours released Henry's subjects from the rules of canon law in certain instances. The second is a text edited by Michael Questier comprising glosses on and suggested readings of the Elizabethan statute law which imposed treason penalties on Catholic clergy who exercised their office in reconciling to Rome (i.e. absolving from schism and heresy) and on those who availed themselves of this sacramental power. Both contributions illuminate the limits of the law and flexibility in interpreting and applying it and regard the role of Catholic clergy as agents of papal authority in Tudor England before and after the break with Rome.