Philip Harris, who died on 21 July 2018 at the age of ninety-one, was born in Woodford, Essex, and educated at St Anthony’s School in Woodford (1932-7), St Ignatius College in London (1937-44), Birkbeck College, London, and the Institute of Historical Research. In 1953 he was awarded an M.A. for a thesis on ‘English Trade with the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late 16th Century’. From 1947 onwards he was on the staff of the British Museum (of which the Library was then part), becoming Assistant Secretary in 1959, Deputy Superintendent of the Reading Room in 1963 and Deputy Keeper in 1966. He was in charge in turn of the Acquisitions, the English and North European, and the West European Branches of the Department of Printed Books. In 1998 he published his History of the British Museum Library, the fruit of more than ten years’ research after his ‘retirement’ in 1986.1 His final project there, almost complete when he died, was on the Old Royal Library donated to the Museum by George II.2 At his funeral the first reading was read by a former head of the Chinese Department there.

Father Thomas Copley S.J. (d. 1652) was born in Madrid in 1595/6 to an exiled English Catholic family. He joined the Maryland mission in 1637 under the alias Philip Fisher. In 1645 in the midst of the English Civil War, Richard Ingle, captain of the Reformation and under the authority of a Parliamentary Letter of Marque, plundered Maryland. Ingle, who mostly pursued wealthy Catholics, brought to England under arrest the Jesuit priests Thomas Copley and Andrew White on charges related to the legislation, An Act Against Jesuits, Seminary Priests and Other Such Disobedient Persons (1585). This article examines the proceedings of the High Court of Admiralty and the High Court of Chancery that relate to Ingle’s Rebellion (1645-1646). In particular, it examines the methods employed by Fr. Copley not only to escape execution but also to pursue Richard Ingle for damages to property and person. It therefore delineates the intersections between national allegiance, civil rights, and confessional adherence in Catholic and non-Catholic imaginations in both England and her empire. Importantly, this case study illustrates how English Jesuits navigated and used an immature English imperial jurisprudence to their advantage.

Grace Kennedy’s anti-Catholic novel Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Story (1823) stands almost alone in the nineteenth century when it comes to evidence not only for its reception, but also its use and success, or lack thereof, as a proselytization and devotional tool. The novel’s form and polemical strategies exerted a powerful influence on both Catholic and Protestant writers, popularizing the controversial novel across denominations. In particular, Father Clement’s celebration of prooftexting rooted in sola scriptura as the best method of religious disputation helped end the earlier nineteenth-century “polite” novel’s emphasis on non-confrontational, genteel sociability. But as its Protestant and Catholic reception histories suggest, the novel’s ambivalent treatment of its title character, along with its overt didacticism, led to appropriations that Kennedy could not have predicted. Father Clement catalyzed resistance amongst Catholic readers and novelists, some of whom were inspired by the title character to creatively reinterpret the novel as a brief for Catholicism, others of whom turned to Biblical quotation as a means of undoing sola scriptura altogether. Thus, if the novel predictably generated Protestant imitations, it also led Catholics to new experiments in controversial rhetoric and fiction.

Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) became a Roman Catholic priest in 1847. He founded the London Oratory and was its Provost between its foundation in April 1849 and his death. This article explores Faber’s public role as spiritual director to his congregation, through an examination of his sermons concerned specifically with private spirituality and which mention spirituality within the context of a broader sermon. Faber’s major preoccupations within these sermons will be explored, and the devotions which he encouraged his parishioners to practice, both in private and in public will be highlighted.

This article analyses the motives behind the conflicting positions taken by Victorian Roman Catholics over the issue of vivisection. Catholics defended or attacked vivisection for widely varying reasons; there were less two schools of thought than a mosaic of arguments from which to choose. While there was substantial agreement over basic theological principles, the application of those principles to the vivisection debate varied depending upon the writer’s social, political, and scientific attitudes, which in turn were affected by professional occupation. The debate included laypeople as well as clerics, with some of the former affirming a more liberal and less theologically rigorous approach to animal rights.