British Catholic History
Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the Editor, Dr Katy Gibbons, [email protected]
Notes for Contributors
The British Catholic History Editorial Board is committed to providing a unique publishing forum to support the innovative, vibrant, transnational, inter-disciplinary study of British and Irish Catholicism. We publish peer-reviewed original research articles, review articles and shorter reviews of works on all aspects of British Catholic history from the fifteenth century up to the present day. Central to our publishing policy is an emphasis on the mufti-faceted, national and international dimensions of British Catholic history which situate British Catholicism within the master narratives of history. The journal welcomes contributions on all approaches to the Catholic experience including the intellectual, political, material, cultural, theological, literary, sociological, philosophical, economic, educational, gendered, artistic, musical, educational and polemical.
Article types
British Catholic History publishes research articles of up to 12,000 words in length and short reviews of selected books of up to 1,000 words in length. The Editor welcomes submission of original work that has not been previously published and is not under consideration elsewhere. Unsolicited book reviews are not accepted but enquiries regarding book reviews for commission are welcome. In order to facilitate the review process, contributors are asked to ensure that their article manuscripts are anonymous, with any information that might directly identify the author removed to a separate covering note.
Submitting your manuscript
Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure that you carefully read and adhere to all the guidelines and instructions to authors provided below.
Articles should be submitted in Microsoft Word format or an RTF equivalent. Each figure should be provided as a separate numbered file. Tables may be submitted as XLS files. Figures should be provided in file formats conforming to the artwork guidelines outlined below.
The text should be double-spaced throughout, paginated in the top right-hand corner.
Additional guidelines for article submission
In addition to the main text, each article submission should include:
- An abstract of not more than 200 words.
- A title that should not ideally exceed 20 words.
- Up to five keywords describing the content of the article.
- Figure and table captions and place markers, positioned appropriately within the body text and indicating whether they should appear as portrait or landscape.
- Arabic numbered footnotes, also double spaced.
A separate cover sheet should be provided which should include:
- Contact details for the corresponding author, including email, postal address and telephone number. Please also provide the academic affiliations of all authors.
- Any acknowledgements, whether personal or in reference to funding, that you would wish to appear in the final published article.
Text conventions
Spelling
Please use British English spelling.
Quotations
Quotations within running text should be in single quotation marks (double for quotations within quotations). Passages of more than fifty words should be indented and without quotation marks.
Single words or short phrases in foreign languages not used as direct quotations should italicised. Extended quotations from foreign languages should be given in translation in Roman type with the originals replicated in the footnotes.
Where the original spelling of quotations is significant it should be retained, but with conventional contractions slightly expanded and with modern punctuation. Where the original spelling is not significant, it should be modernised.
Dates and numbers
Dates should be expressed as follows: 15 September 1789; the 1580s; the seventeenth century; 181418; 18889. Spell out numbers up to ninety-nine, except when attached to percentages or units.
Capitalisation
Please keep capitalisation to a minimum, within the following guidelines: a) the bishop of Salisbury visited Bishop Fisher; b) the Church teaches humility; the church was built in the eighteenth century: the church leaders arrived. Use capitals for Catholic, Protestant (etc.), Puritan, Nonconformist and for words derived from proper names such as Christian, Benedictine.
Titles
Italics should be used for titles of books, journals, newspapers, films, plays, stage directions, foreign words, phrases, songs etc. Titles of articles should be enclosed in single inverted commas.
Footnotes
Superscript Arabic numerals indicating footnotes should appear after and not before punctuation. A full bibliographic reference should be given upon first citation of a publication, followed by author surname and abbreviated title thereafter. Titles of journals, periodicals and series should appear in full when first cited, accompanied by the abbreviated form e.g. British Catholic History (hereafter BCH).
The following are provided by way of example:
John Bossy, Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14-22, 52-6.
D. H. Williams, ‘Justification by Faith: a Patristic Doctrine’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (hereafter JEH) 57 (2006): 649-67.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Changing Historical Perspectives on the English Reformation: The Last Fifty Years’, in Peter D. Clarke and Charlotte Methuen, eds. The Church on its Past, Studies in Church History 49 (2013), 282-3
Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 16211625, ed. Michael Questier, Camden Fifth Series 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2009), nos. 9, 10, 14, 17.
Muriel St. Clare Byrne, ed. The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4:243
J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘A Background to St Boniface’s Mission’, in Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes, eds. England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 35-48 at 41.
Tablet, 11 May 1861, 297
E. M. Clerke, ‘The New Crusade’, Dublin Review (January 1889), 12
Catholicae Ecclesiae, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/113slv.htm (accessed March 24, 2011)
Letters of Manning to Lady Burdett, 19 March 1885 and 22 March 1885, Box 14, Folder 5, MSS 002, Manning Collection (MAN), Pitts Theology Library (PITT), Emory University.
Subsequent citations
Bossy, Peace in the Post-Reformation, 59.
D.H. Williams, ‘Justification by Faith’, 650-52.
MacCulloch, ‘Changing Historical Perspectives’, 28691.
Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy, no. 14
Lisle Letters, 2:345
Wallace-Hadrill, ‘A Background to St Boniface’s Mission’, 43
Tablet, 11 May 1861, 298
E. M. Clerke, ‘The New Crusade’, 4
Catholicae Ecllesiae, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/113slv.htm (March 24, 2011)
Manning to Burdett, 19, 22 March, MSS 002, MAN/PITT
Ibid should be italicised and only be used to refer to the immediately preceding citation; please do not use op. cit. or loc cit.
Arabic numbers should be used for all volume numbers of printed books, journals and manuscripts.
Article Structure
Subheadings may be used to provide ‘signposts’ for readers. They should be typed flush left with only the first word and any proper names capitalised.
Please refrain from using ALL CAPS.
Additional guidelines for commissioned book review submission
Review headings should follow the format indicated in the following examples:
Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth,1558–1582, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. viii + 233, £55.00, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6588-5
Vladimir Pecherin, The First Russian Political Émigré. Notes from Beyond the Grave, or Apologia Pro Vita Mea, trans. and ed. Michael R. Katz, University College, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2008, pp. xx + 197, £42.50, ISBN: 978-1-904558-93-4
At the end of your review, please put the name of your university/institution at the left margin in italics and your name at the right margin.
The word limit is 1,000 for a single book; 1,400 for a joint review of two books.
Artwork, figures and other graphics For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format please see the Cambridge Core Artwork Guide. If, together with your accepted article, you submit usable colour figures, these figures will appear in colour online but in black and white in print. A charge applies for the reproduction of colour in print. For specifically requested colour printing, you will receive information regarding the costs from Cambridge University Press after receipt of your accepted article. Datasets and supplemental files All authors of quantitative empirical articles are encouraged to make the data available for data replication purposes. British Catholic History can host such data on the journal's website, and authors wishing to avail themselves of this facility should supply all files electronically once an article has been accepted for publication.
Other types of supplemental material including, but not limited to, images, videos, audio and slideshows can be hosted on the British Catholic History website.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers. Cambridge University Press lists a number of third-party services specialising in language editing and / or translation on the Cambridge Core Language Services page, that authors may contact as appropriate. Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge published journal.
Copyright
The policy of British Catholic History is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant the Catholic Record Society a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. For full details, see the journal's publishing agreement page.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
Permissions
Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. A copy of the paperwork granting permission will be required should your article be accepted. Any permissions fees must be paid for by the author. For an example of a permissions request form please see the Cambridge Core Artwork Guide.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.