It is now fifty-six years since I wrote my first piece for Recusant History, and I am happy to have survived to welcome its reincarnation. Since its foundation in 1951 as an addendum to Gillow’s Biographical Dictionary of English Catholics it has had an honourable career, getting into print a number of essential contributions to the history of Catholics in England, mainly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It has been a companion to the distinguished bibliographical work of Anthony Allison, David Rogers and Tom Birrell. It was a creation of laymen, which is to say that it was an attempt to transcend the efforts of a period when this history had been largely a monopoly of the clergy, and ran the risk of degenerating into feuds between rival sections of that body. This lay input was much strengthened by the effect of the 1944 Education Act, which produced numbers of students keen to make a mark in the field. In view of their education, they did not necessarily alter the terms in which questions were put, and when the modest journal was launched a degree of hegemony in the Catholic Record Society was being exercised by the Jesuit side, which ought to have but failed to put out the letters and papers of Robert Persons. It had an invitation to wider thoughts in the philo-Jesuit lectures on the Counter-Reformation of the Cambridge academic Outram Evennett, delivered also in 1951.1 As these were not published until 1968 the invitation was muffled, but something of it was in the atmosphere.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey has seldom been associated with the University of Cambridge. But in a little-known episode, he was invited to follow John Fisher as chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1514. Although Wolsey declined, his willingness to protect Cambridge’s evangelicals, even after he burned Martin Luther’s books in 1521, has been an overlooked phase in the history of the university and in the Reformation in England.

This article examines the vernacular translations of the famous catechisms prepared by the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius which circulated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. The various editions and adaptations of Canisius produced for English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers are texts in which anti-Protestant identity formation converges with the task of basic indoctrination. These include Laurence Vaux’s popular catechism of 1567, the traditionalist character of which is reassessed. Shedding light on the reception and domestication of the literature of the European Counter Reformation, these books illustrate how catechesis was revived and harnessed as a clerical tool for cultivating polemical resistance and as a device for inculcating saving knowledge and redeeming piety in those young in faith as well as in years. Recusant clergy, seminary priests and Jesuits tackled the task of restoring England to its traditional allegiance to Rome as if they were planting the faith in a pagan land and they utilised the same techniques and strategies as their colleagues in the newly discovered world. A study of Canisius’s catechisms highlights the fluid boundary between conversion and reconciliation in contemporary minds; illuminates the intertwining of the histories of evangelical mission and confessionalisation in the context of the British Isles; and helps to reintegrate minority Catholic communities back into our picture of the global movement for religious outreach and renewal.

This article re-considers Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline (1555–1622) in his cultural context, particularly in the light of the recently-discovered inventory of his private library. This sophisticated collection of continental books, with strong holdings in art, architecture and Catholic apologetics, offers new information on the intense private Catholicism of a statesman who conformed outwardly to Protestantism. The inventory casts light also on his work of building and decoration at Pinkie House, Musselburgh. The article concludes by raising the possibility of some kind of continuance at Pluscarden Priory in Moray after the reformation and under Seton’s protection, and that Seton’s daughter Sophia may have built a freestanding Catholic chapel on her marriage to David Lindsay, first Lord Balcarres.

The foundation of new English convents in exile placed demands on the early leaders regarding the furnishing of appropriate texts for the religious life for women at a time of limited resources and strict controls over printing Catholic texts in English. This article examines challenges facing the convents and external influences on the choice of titles, ranging from women’s reading experiences in their families to authors whose works appeared in libraries owned by both pious Catholic and Protestant lay women. It then considers how communities assembled collections of books in the first half of the exile period, concluding with an appendix giving some examples of surviving key texts found in convent libraries dating from the seventeenth century.