The reputation of Robert Persons as a prose stylist has suffered from the repellant myth his opponents constructed around him. What if his works created a phenomenal stir at the time? A. L. Rowse, the most eloquent spokesman for the ‘common-sense’ English view of the matter, puts this down to the deceptively natural, easy prose of Persons, the smiling face of the villain. Haunted—if Rowse is to be believed—by the sound of the bells of St. Mary Magdalen, pealing backwards as if for a fire when he was expelled from Balliol in 1573, he nursed a lifelong grudge against his own nation for so dismissing his great intellectual gifts. No wonder Swift, himself a bitter, ‘conjured’ spirit, thought Persons the pick of Elizabethan prose writers. Everything he wrote, so smoothly and plausibly, was devoted to the overthrow of the State in England and the establishment of a Catholic monarchy under which Jesuits would exercise a monopoly of power. Rowse acknowledges Persons’ spirituality, notably evident in The Christian Directory, but treats it as being of his active career a thing apart.

At Yale University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library's James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection has recently acquired a fascinating manuscript of late sixteenth-century Roman Catholic devotional verse in English (Osborn Shelves a30). Following the liturgical year from Trinity Sunday to the feast of Saint Catherine on November 25th, these fifty-eight poems celebrate the solemnities, feasts, and memorials of the Roman liturgical calendar throughout the approximately twenty-six weeks comprising the major portion of ‘ordinary time’. Presumably, this collection would have had a companion volume, now lost, covering the period from Advent to Pentecost which includes the principal solemnities and great seasons of the liturgical year.

THE writings of the seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry Holden, played a small but significant part in the development of western religious thought in the centuries following his death. His most important work, Divinae fidei analysis, first printed in Latin at Paris in 1652 and afterwards translated and published in English, was several times reprinted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was later incorporated in two theological collections, J. P. Migne's Theologiae cursus completus (tom.6, 1839), and Josef Braun's Bibliotheca regularum fidei (tom.2, 1844). It influenced the thinking, in the nineteenth century, not only of avowed liberals such as Dôllinger and Acton, but also, in some degree, of moderate progressives like Newman. In recent years, specialist studies on different aspects of Holden's thought have appeared in English and in French. So far, however, no serious attempt has been made to revise his bibliography: we still have to rely, in large measure, on that published by Joseph Gillow more than a century ago. In this article I want to bring together material that has come to light since Gillow's time and to examine Holden's works afresh against the background of his life and the religious and political developments in England and France at that period. I shall devote particular attention to two themes that run through all his work. One is gallicanism, that amalgam of mediaeval theories limiting the authority of the papacy in relation to secular states and their rulers and national churches and their bishops. It will be seen that plans which Holden advanced in the 1640s for the reform of the Catholic Church in England along gallican lines are based largely on ideas developed in his Divinaefidei analysis published a few years later. The other is his analytical and critical approach to doctrine, aiming always to distinguish truths solidly based on Scripture and tradition from the mere speculations of theologians. It is an approach that had been made popular in France by the Catholic controversialist, François Véron, whose Régula fidei catholicae was first published at Paris in 1644 when Holden was probably already at work on his Divinae fidei analysis. It reveals itself in all Holden's writings and distinguishes him from many of the other Catholic apologists who were drawn into controversy with the Anglican divines of the post-Chillingworth era.

Four Jerningham Augustinian canonesses from Bruges were at Cossey, the home of Sir William Jerningham (1736–1809), in the summer of 1794, and then lived at Hengrave Hall near Bury St. Edmunds Suffolk. They were Ann, Elizabeth, Edwardina, and Frances Henrietta Jerningham, Sir William's cousins. The sixteen bound volumes of correspondence received by Lady Bedingfield 1776–1833 and now at Birmingham University, from which Egerton Castle's Jerningham Letters were taken, include three unpublished letters from Elizabeth, Sister Mary Agnes Jerningham (1727–1807) and three unpublished letters from her American niece, Frances Henrietta, Sister Mary Sales Jerningham (1745–1824). Sister Mary Sales's 1803 letter to Lady Jerningham is now at the Stafford Record Office.

In September 1831, the newly elected liberal Whig government under Earl Grey introduced an experiment of national education in Ireland aimed at uniting Catholics and Protestants in one general system. Schools were officially non-denominational but provision was made for separate religious instruction at designated times under the superintendence of the respective churches. It was a response to ten years of intensive lobbying by the Irish Catholic Church, and over twenty years of public and parliamentary debate, seeking a school system supported by State funds which would explicitly prohibit interference with the religious convictions of children.

Caroline Chisholm was a Victorian philanthropist designated by the Australian Encyclopaedia as ‘the greatest of women pioneers in the history of Australia’. She was born in Northampton in 1808, the daughter of William Jones, hog-jobber of some substance. She married Archibald Chisholm in 1830, a lieutenant in the East India Company Army, ten years her senior, on the understanding that she be allowed to undertake philanthropic works. It is assumed she converted to her husband's Roman Catholic faith either just before or after the marriage. It was in Madras, where her husband was based, that her philanthropic endeavours began and she founded a ‘school of industry for the daughters of European soldiers’. The school educated the sadly-neglected girls in general education and domestic duties.

No century previous to the nineteenth was so assiduous in its cultivation of the diary to record the minutiae of daily life. Partly because the average nineteeth century family knew that death was a frequent visitor, the diary assumed an importance that a century later was lost, along with the reverence for death. In Newman's Obituary List we have that full development of his thought concerning the dead, which began with the demise of those he had loved in his youth and ended with his remembrance of them at the altar in his room at Edgbaston, surrounded by their pictures and memorial cards. It will be helpful to trace the development of that process because it illuminates the Evangelical and Tractarian understanding of prayer for the dead and provides a useful basis for current concepts which have frequently been over-laid either with sentimentality or with a tendency to demythologise the reality of the next life altogether.