The English Bible in the Early Modern World addresses the most significant book available in the English language in the centuries after the Reformation, and investigates its impact on popular religion and reading practices, and on theology, religious controversy and intellectual history between 1530 and 1700. Individual chapters discuss the responses of both clergy and laity to the sacred text, with particular emphasis on the range of settings in which the Bible was encountered and the variety of responses prompted by engagement with the Scriptures. Particular attention is given to debates around the text and interpretation of the Bible, to an emerging Protestant understanding of Scripture and to challenges it faced over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ranging from devotional poetry to confessional history, across the span of competing religious traditions, this volume addresses the lived faith of diverse communities during the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Together, they provide a textured understanding of the complexities in religious belief, practice and organization.

Catholic Europe, 1592-1648 examines the processes of Catholic renewal from a unique perspective; rather than concentrating on the much studied heartlands of Catholic Europe, it focuses primarily on a series of societies on the European periphery and examines how Catholicism adapted to very different conditions in areas such as Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, East-Central Europe, and the Balkans. In certain of these societies, such as Austria and Bohemia, the Catholic Reformation advanced alongside very rigorous processes of state coercion. In other Habsburg territories, most notably Royal Hungary, and in Poland, Catholic monarchs were forced to deploy less confrontational methods, which nevertheless enjoyed significant measures of success. On the Western fringe of the continent, Catholic renewal recorded its greatest advances in Ireland but even in the Netherlands it maintained a significant body of adherents, despite considerable state hostility. In the Balkans, O hAnnrachain examines the manner in which the papacy invested substantially more resources and diplomatic efforts in pursuing military strategies against the Ottoman Empire than in supporting missionary and educational activity. The chronological focus of the book is also unusual because on the peripheries of Europe the timing of Catholic reform occurred differently. Catholic Europe, 1592-1648 begins with the pontificate of Clement VIII and, rather than treating religious renewal in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as essentially a continuation of established patterns of reform, it argues for the need to understand the contingency of this process and its constant adaptation to contemporary events and preoccupations.

Demonstrates how, far from being peripheral, the stable communities of conventual religious in mainland Europe acted as important centres of religious and secular activity in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. This collection aims to explore new perspectives on the British and Irish conventual, mendicant and monastic movements in mainland Europe and rediscover their roles and wider impact within early modern European Catholicism. Building on recent scholarship, the book addresses a historiographical imbalance, which has led to an over-emphasis being placed on the role of the Society of Jesus in the development of British and Irish Catholicism following the Protestant Reformation. The stable communities of religious in mainland Europe also acted as important centres of religious and secular activity. This volume explores the ways in which British and Irish conventuals and monastics, both men and women, engaged with the seismic religious and philosophical developments of the early modern period, such as the Catholic Reformation and the Enlightenment in mainland Europe, as well as important political developments at 'home', exploring the connections between centres and peripheries. Building on recent movements within the field to 'decentralise' the Catholic Reformation and recognize the international nature of Catholicism, the volume aims to change the perception that the activities of British and Irish religious were 'peripheral', bringing the islands' experience in line with work on their European confreres and the broader global network of the religious orders.

The evolution of the Counter-Reformation church in Ireland is central to Irish history. The papal nuncio GianBattista Rinuccini was at the heart of the turbulent events of the 1640s, a decade which formed a prologue to the Cromwellian conquest. This book offers a scholarly reappraisal of the man and his role in shaping the religion and history of Ireland.

Ranging from devotional poetry to confessional history, across the span of competing religious traditions, this volume addresses the lived faith of diverse communities during the turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Together, they provide a textured understanding of the complexities in religious belief, practice and organization.

The period between c.1580 and c.1685 was one of momentous importance in terms of the establishment of different confessional identities in Ireland, as well as a time of significant migration and displacement of population. Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland provides an entirely new perspective on religious change in early modern Ireland by tracing the constant and ubiquitous impact of mobility on the development and maintenance of the island's competing confessional groupings. Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland examines the dialectic between migration and religious adherence, paying particular attention to the pronounced transnational dimension of clerical formation which played a vital role in shaping the competing Catholic, Church of Ireland, and non-conformist clergies. It demonstrates that the religious transformation of the island was mediated by individuals with very significant migratory experiences and the importance of religion in enabling individuals to negotiate the challenges and opportunities created by displacement and settlement in new environments. The volume investigates how more quotidian practices of mobility such as pilgrimage and inter-parochial communions helped to elaborate religious identities and analyses the extraordinary importance of migratory experience in shaping the lives and writings of the authors of key confessional identity texts. Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland demonstrates that Irish society was enormously influenced by migratory experiences and argues that a case study of the island also has important implications for understanding religious change in other areas of Europe and the rest of the world.

The theme of 'community' has proved a focus of considerable interest in recent historiography, but has been neglected in its application to Ireland. Here the question of 'community' is pursued in terms of the political, cultural, social and religious condition of Ireland, and in its European context. Contents -- Tadhg hAnnrachin (UCD) on the ideal of representative communities; Colm Lennon (NUIM) on fraternity and community in early modern Ireland; John McCafferty (UCD) on early modern interpretations of the Island of Saints and Scholars; Tim Harris (Brown U) on politics, religion and community in later Stuart Ireland; Patrick Little (History of Parliament, London) on The New English in Europe 1625-1660; Clodagh Tait (U Essex) on Catholic bequests and recusancy in Ireland; Aoife Duignan (UCD) on Shifting allegiances: the Protestant community in Connacht, 1643-5; Darren McGettigan on the political community of the lordship of Tir Chonaill and reaction to the Nine Years War; Robert Arms