This article traces the deployment of the 14th century devotional treatise, The Meditationes Vitae Christi, in late medieval and early modern England. Beginning with a discussion of Nicholas Love’s 1409 translation of the treatise, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the article examines how later editors and redactors reshape the treatise for new audiences. Not only does Love’s treatise have a lively print history after the introduction of the printing press, but the later editions by Caxton, de Worde, and Richard Pynson were faithful reproductions of Love’s translation. By the seventeenth century, however, the treatise underwent some drastic revisions under the hands of Charles Boscard and John Heigham. This article presents some much-needed attention to Heigham’s 1622 re-presentation of the text as The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In reworking this treatise for a much later audience, Heigham deftly combines material from both the Meditationes Vitae Christi and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, while also making some interesting additions of his own.

Francis Bacon’s A Letter written out of England to an English Gentleman remaining at Padua, published anonymously around February 1599, reported the alleged plot against the life of Elizabeth I contrived between Edward Squire and the Jesuit Richard Walpole. Widely understood as the official government publication on the Squire affair, it was answered by a number of exiled English Catholic writers, most notably Martin Aray and Thomas Fitzherbert, who identified its anonymous author, and launched a detailed attack on his account of the Squire affair. This article analyzes those responses to argue that Bacon’s Letter was a belated entry in the government propaganda campaign. It forwarded a streamlined and simply anti-Jesuit narrative, rather than the rather muddled version of events that had previously emerged from the interrogations, trial, and early government publications.

Reacting sharply against the whiggish thesis that religious tolerance was a heritage of the Enlightenment, revisionist scholars have pointed to the many pragmatic concessions people made to tolerate those of other faiths prior to the eighteenth century. While they have underscored the contingent relationship of tolerance with neighbourliness in many important case studies, the historiography portrays early modern London as an essentially intolerant society for the city’s Catholics and a church on the margins. Through an examination of London’s embassy chapels reflected in vicious anti-Catholic polemic, this article argues that tolerance was not lacking in Jacobean London. It additionally shows how ambassadors’ chapels sustained a vibrant and visible form of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the capital. Finally, it assesses how contemporaries connected both of these issues to tensions surrounding the ‘king’s two bodies’ and the execution of the royal prerogative. While this places London’s Catholics at the heart and centre of Jacobean religio-political tensions, the article concludes that it is ultimately the circular relationship between tolerance and intolerance that is key to understanding why a contested form of corporate Catholicism survived in the very heart of England’s Protestant kingdom.

This article analyses the cross-carrying pilgrimages to Vézelay and Walsingham, staged between 1946 and 1948. These were aimed at achieving peace, penance, and reconciliation at a time when communism was on the rise, there were fears that war would return, and the nuclear threat was real. Encompassing several contingents (or Stations), these religious post-war Catholic pilgrimages stand in contrast to the ‘secular’ pilgrimages to battlefields and cemeteries after 1918. Yet they retained a strong military element because of the substantial involvement of veterans, and their organisation, leadership and articulation. This article argues that the pilgrimages gave veteran pilgrims a chance to continue their service in the form of direct spiritual action, utilising their wartime experiences in the context of pilgrimage in order to conduct these physically challenging journeys. It will also explore the wider aims of atoning for wartime actions, and the ways in which the pilgrims were received by the communities they passed through. Whilst ultimately unsustainable due to their novelty and complexity, they laid a foundation for military-penitential pilgrimages, provided an outlet for spiritual and worldly concerns, and presented Catholics (especially in Britain) in a positive light in the years immediately after the Second World War.

This article analyses the conversion of 379 English Protestants to Catholicism in Malta between 1600 and 1798. It explores the motivations behind their recantation, the agents of their conversion and the role of dissimulation in discarding their Protestant faith. It ends with two remarks. First, people in the Mediterranean ‘knew no religious frontiers’.1 Malta, like other Mediterranean territories was a place with a mixed religious profile. Second, though English Protestants considered themselves to be the ‘elect’ and their country the new Israel, the two faiths were not mutually exclusive and could find common ground over the defence of Christendom.

Between the late-twelfth and early-sixteenth centuries, much music (both liturgical and non-liturgical) was written in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. However, in the 1530s his cult became a major target for reformers and, in 1538, Henry VIII (1491-1547) ordered the destruction of his shrine and the obliteration of all music written in his honour. This article will examine how music composed to memorialise St Thomas was treated during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It explores the process of self-censorship prompted by Henry’s proclamation on the cult of St Thomas that led to his erasure from liturgical books in England. It analyses the attempts by reformers to discredit music concerning St Thomas, particularly by radical reformer John Bale (1495-1563). Finally, it examines music that was composed by Catholics for St Thomas during the Counter-Reformation and asks what it can tell us about the state of the cult in the late sixteenth century. This approach results in an overview of St Thomas’ cult during the later sixteenth century and contributes to our understanding of changing conceptions of the saint by Catholic communities in the post-Reformation world.

Simon Bordley (1709-1799) was a Catholic priest of humble status in rural Lancashire for much of the eighteenth century. Despite his rural location and apparently humble status, he played an important part in supporting the Catholic seminaries in France and Portugal by supplying them with students, material goods and financial assistance. Bordley left behind him a lively correspondence relating to these activities which provides us with a valuable insight into the world of eighteenth-century priestly training in the English colleges. It also offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of a churchman who laboured with an impressive level of entrepreneurial skill and independence. This article argues that Bordley defies the common image of the seigneurial Catholic curate in service primarily to a family of the landed gentry in the eighteenth century. In doing so he illustrates an example of the type of energetic cleric who provided a crucial lifeline to a church that came to rely less and less on its aristocracy as the century progressed.

Hugh Hall was a highly sought-after gardener in late sixteenth century England. He worked in the Midlands, specifically in Worcestershire, Warwickshire, and Northamptonshire, and mostly for Catholic families. Hall was a Catholic priest who resigned his parish living after the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, but continued to perform clerical duties such as saying Mass and hearing confession alongside his second vocation as a gardener. Indeed, his esteem as a gardener and, later, surveyor of works was strong enough that he attracted Protestant clients like Lord Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton despite his adherence to Catholicism. Hall’s two vocations shaped his identity: his sense of self, his manhood, and how others perceived him. Hall’s written garden advice, A priestes discourse of gardeninge applied to a spirituall understandinge, which exists only in manuscript form, exemplifies the fusion of gardening and spiritual life, articulates Hall’s conceptions of manhood, and offers new perspective on how religion intersects with late Renaissance English gardens.

This article seeks to nuance our understanding of how the penal laws against Roman Catholics were interpreted in eighteenth-century England and how English Catholics of the era experienced their status as a penalised minority. Using evidence from Ushaw Library’s Vincent Eyre Mansucripts, it examines how propertied Catholics navigated proscriptions against owning and selling property. Although much scholarship has emphasised the flexibility that the statutes afforded Catholics, this article focuses not on the enforcement of these laws but on the pressure they exerted on Catholics’ daily consciousness. Vincent Eyre, a Derbyshire conveyancer, trained under Catholic conveyancers in London and worked as agent for the tenth Duke of Norfolk in Sheffield. His manuscripts, which consist principally of legal opinions and briefs on conveyancing cases, testify to the pervasive uncertainty under which Catholics laboured as they sought to assert a ‘good title’ to property, protect their faith from legal discovery, and assert their standing as subjects despite laws that disabled them from full belonging to the nation. This article builds on recent work that charts Catholics’ affective experiences in eighteenth-century Britain as their dynamic contributions in the period are increasingly recognized.

After retiring from a successful diplomatic career in 1966, Sir John Richmond (1909-90) and his wife Diana (1914-97) settled in Durham, where he had accepted a lectureship in Modern Near East History at the University’s School of Oriental Studies. Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Richmonds became increasingly concerned at the suffering of Palestinians living in the occupied territories and the strong media bias prevalent at that time. They were instrumental in founding the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) and over the next few years devoted themselves to campaigning on behalf of Palestinians. In addition to monitoring and criticising the secular newspapers, the Richmonds—who were both converts to Catholicism—took a close interest in the leading Catholic papers: The Tablet, The Catholic Herald and The Universe. They engaged in extensive correspondence with their editors—both on the newspaper pages and in private—as well as involving a wider circle of influential Catholic writers and clergy. This article, drawing heavily from the Richmond Papers held at Exeter University’s Special Collections, examines the motives and methods of the Richmonds’ campaign, and attempts to assess whether or not their efforts achieved their aim of changing attitudes.