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The 1958 Conference In Context*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
Extract
The session before dinner was entitled ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning this one. What I want to say is also about ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning the first one, in 1958. When Timothy McCann and I were asked to mark the opening of the fiftieth Conference, we agreed that he would say something about people and I would say something about the questions which they discussed. But, rather than attempt in half an hour a survey of more than three hundred papers, not all of which I have heard or can remember, I want to focus on that first Conference, at Oxford in 1958, of which I am the only survivor here tonight. I was then still an undergraduate, and therefore short of cash. But I was already passionately interested in recusancy and reading manuscripts in Duke Humphrey when I ought to have been writing my next essay. So I did a deal with the Conference secretary, Anne See, that I could come for nothing if I would run the bar. That was obviously a vital contribution but on that occasion it was my only one: I was much too shy of the great experts around me to venture any opinions in discussion. All the same, I listened and learned, and there were three issues in that first conference which were to shape much of what was to come.
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References
Notes
1 Kenny, Anthony, A Path from Rome (1985), p. 158.Google Scholar
2 Finberg, H. P. R., ‘The Catholic Historian and his Theme’, Downside Review 249 (1959), pp. 254–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The phrase quoted is on p. 257.
3 Ibidem, p. 263.
4 Birrell, T. A. ed., A Newsletter for Students of Recusant History 8 (1966), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar
5 Dominic Aidan Bellenger, ‘Dom Bede Camm (1864–1942): Monastic Martyrologist’, in Wood, Diana ed., Martyrs and Martyrologies, Studies in Church History 30 (Blackwell, 1993), p. 375.Google Scholar
6 Belloc, Hilaire, ‘The Character of an Historical Novel’, in Cahill, Patrick ed., One Thing and Another (Hollis & Carter, 1955), p. 21.Google Scholar
7 Finberg, H. P. R., ‘The Local Historian and his Theme’ (University College of Leicester, 1952: Dept. of English Local History, Occasional Publications 1), p. 9.Google Scholar
8 Birrell, Newsletter 8 (1966), pp. 9–10.
9 Ibidem, pp. 17–18.
10 Ibidem, p. 13.
11 ‘Ten Years of Recusant History’, Recusant History 6 (1961–62), p. 10.
12 For a particularly bizarre expression of it see the Schweppes advertisement in the Coronation issue of Country Life (113 (January-June 1953), p. 1650). It took the form of an extract from a school history-book purporting to have been written in 2003 and including a quotation from the Romanes Lecture of 1983 (sic).
13 See more recently Doolan, Brian, Richard Challoner (Archdiocese of Birmingham Historical Commission 2007).Google Scholar
14 C.R.S. 22, pp. 304–50; Recusant History 13 (1975–76), pp. 103–122. Although by 1906 Mrs Wright-Biddulph was no longer living at the Park but in a house near by (Holt, p. 114), Belloc must have heard much from her about its recusant associations.
15 Despite his insistence elsewhere on ‘the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event’: ‘Onthe Method of History’, in Morton, J. B. ed., Hilaire Belloc: Selected Essays (Penguin, 1958), p. 135.Google Scholar
16 Samuel Schoenbaum, A Documentary Life of Shakespeare (1975), does not mention the recusant activities at the Blackfriars Gatehouse, which Shakespeare bought in 1613; he puts Park Hall, where the Ardens harboured Persons, in the parish of Aston Cantlow, when it was in fact in the parish of Aston-juxta-Birmingham, twenty miles further north; and he asserts that as a boy Shakespeare must have gone to church and received Communion three times a year, because ‘the law of the realm compelled church-going and infractions were punishable by fine’ (pp. 15–16, 47).