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‘Virgo Becomes Virago’: Women in the Accounts of Seventeenth-Century English Catholic Missionaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2015

Laurence Lux-Sterritt
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Abstract

In the account of his missionary work, the Jesuit John Gerard (1564–1637) famously explained how, after a few years of penury in ‘Mass equipment’, Catholic houses had become so well equipped that priests were able to set about their work immediately upon their arrival. He recalled that in the last two years of his work (1604–06), he no longer needed to lodge in taverns but always found friendly dwellings to shelter him on his way. Most of these were run by women, whose prominence in the activity of harbouring was pointed out in many documents, including the minutes of the confession given to the Privy Council by the appellant priest Anthony Sherlock, who turned informer after his capture in 1606:

[Sherlock] grew into acquaintance with Lady Stonor near Henley-on-Thames and stayed with her three or four years, often saying mass in her house. Next he moved to Warwicks. and at Brailes and Welsford was with a widow named Margaret Bishop for two or three years. Then to Worcs., where he said Mass once or twice in the house of Lady Windsor and also at Mrs. Heath’s at Alchurch, at Hawkesley with Mr. Middlemore and at Tamworth in Warwicks. with Richard Dolphin two or three years. Then he was with widow Knowles at Ridware, with Mrs. Comberford at Wednesbury, with Mrs. Stanford at Parkington …

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 537 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 2011

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References

Notes

1 Caraman, Philip, John Gerard. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar (1st ed. London, 1951), 40: ‘In nearly every house I visited later I would find vestments and everything else laid out ready for me.’

2 Godfrey, Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, a Recusant family (Newport, 1953), pp. 309–10;Google Scholar this is his summary of SP 14/18 n° 51.

3 Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570—1850 (London, 1976), p. 158.Google Scholar

4 Walsham, Alexandra, Church papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 78–81.Google Scholar

5 Connelly, Roland, Women of the Catholic Resistance: in England 1540—1680 (Durham, 1997);Google Scholar Peters, Christine, Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2009);Google Scholar Rowlands, Marie, ‘Recusant women 1560–1640’, in Prior Mary, (ed.) Women in English Society 1500—1800 (London, 1985), pp. 149–80;Google Scholar Seguin, Colleen Marie, ‘”Addicted unto piety”: Catholic women in England, 1590–1690’, unpublished PhD dissertation (Duke University, 1997)Google Scholar; Walker, Claire, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2003);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Warnicke, Retha, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport, Conn., 1983);Google Scholar Willen, Diane, ‘Women and Religion in Early Modern England’, in Marshall, Sherrin (ed.) Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe (Bloomington, 1989), pp. 140–66.Google Scholar

6 McClain, Lisa, Lest We be Damned. Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559—1642 (New York and London, 2004), p. 9.Google Scholar See also her ‘Without Church, Cathedral or Shrine: the Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559–1625’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 33.2 (2020), pp. 381–99.

7 The fields both of historical and literary research have recently produced revealing studies unveiling the uses of gender in works of anti-Catholic propaganda and in the Protestant cultural imagination. See for instance Marotti, Arthur, ‘Alienating Catholics. Recusant Women, Jesuits, and Ideological Fantasies’, in his Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005), pp. 32–65 Google Scholar and Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999); Walker, Claire and Lemmings, David (eds.) Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basing-stoke, 2009);Google Scholar Dolan, Frances, Whores of Babylon. Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth Century Print Culture (Ithaca, 1999);Google Scholar Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 158—1660 (Cambridge, 2006);Google Scholar Tumbleson, Raymond, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination. Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1600—1745 (Cambridge, 1998).Google Scholar

8 The first English translation of Gerard's autobiography can be found in Morris, John (trans), The Life of Father John Gerard of the Society of Jesus (London, 1881);Google Scholar this essay uses the more modern translation by Caraman, John Gerard.

9 See Anstruther, Vaux and Caraman, Philip, Henry Garnet, 1555—1603, and the Gunpowder Plot (London, 1964).Google Scholar

10 The lengthier version would only see its ways into print much later, when it was finally edited by Nicholson, William as the Life and Death of Mrs Margaret Clitherow (London, 1849).Google Scholar This essay refers to the most widely used version, ‘A true report of the life and martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow’, in Morris, John, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers (London, 1877), p. iii.Google Scholar

11 This essay uses the version edited by Southern, A.C., An Elizabethan recusant house, comprising the life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538—1608). Translated into English from the original Latin of Dr. Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, by Cuthbert Fursdon, O.S.B., in the year 1627 (London, 1954).Google Scholar

12 This essay uses the version edited by Richardson, G.B., The life of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson, of St.Anthony's near Newcastle-upon-Tyne (London, 1855).Google Scholar

13 For Protestant studies, see Lake, Peter, ‘Feminine piety and personal potency: the “emancipation” of Mrs. Jane Ratcliffe,’ Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987), pp. 143–65;Google Scholar Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, Cal., 1992);Google Scholar Matchinske, Megan, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge, 1998);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Debra, L. Parish, ‘The Power of Female Pietism: Women as Spiritual Authorities and Religious Role Models in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Religious History, 17.1 (1992), pp. 33–46;Google Scholar or Roper, Lyndal, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar

14 Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, pp. 53–4.

15 Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael, ‘Margaret Clitherow, Catholic Nonconformity, Martyrology and the Politics of Religious Change in Elizabethan England’, Past and Present, 185 (2004), pp. 43–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Seguin, Colleen M., ‘“Ambiguous Liaisons”; Catholic Women's Relationships with their Confessors in Early Modern England’; Archive for Reformation History, 95 (2004), pp. 156–85.Google Scholar

17 Bossy, The English Catholic Community, pp. 110–12.

18 Ibid., p. 158.

19 Walsham, Church Papists, pp. 78–81.

20 Ibid., p. 190.

21 Palmes, The life of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson, p. 45, my italics.

22 Dorothy Lawson acquired the status of a living saint, whose presence reassured mothers in labour and was held by her neighbours as a token of protection. See Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission in England’, The Historical Journal, 46.4 (2003), pp. 779–815,CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially pp. 808–9.

23 Palmes, The life of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson, p. 26.

24 Letter dated September 1597, quoted in Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 218.

25 Southern, An Elizabethan Recusant House, p. 39.

26 Ibid., p. 43.

27 Anstruther, Vaux, p. 244.

28 Ibid., p. 460.

29 State Papers Domestic, Charles I, vol. 294, item 74, July 1635, p. 303.

30 Letter to Sir John Cocke, dated 17 November 1625. Cox, J.C, Three Centuries of Derbyshire Annals, p. 286,Google Scholar as quoted in Anstruther, Vaux, p. 461.

31 Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 209.

32 Southern, An Elizabethan Recusant House, p. 44.

33 Ibid., p. 52.

34 Ibid., p. 54.

35 Caraman, John Gerard, p. 197.

36 Foley, Henry, Records of the English Province (London, 1877–83), pp. iv, 110.Google Scholar

37 For a revealing analysis of female pragmatic stylistic, see Weber, Alison, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar and ‘Little Women: Counter-Reformation Misogyny’, in Luebke, David (ed.) The Counter-Reformation. The Essential Readings (Oxford, 1999), pp. 143–62.Google Scholar

38 Report from Henry Garnet, Superior of the English Province, to Claudio Aquaviva, Superior General, Stonyhurst, Anglia, 1, p. 73, as translated in Anstruther, Vaux, pp. 186–91.

39 Ibid., p. 188.

40 Bilinkoff, Jodi, Related Lives. Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–170 (Ithaca and New York, 2005), p. 6.Google Scholar

41 Dolan, Frances, ‘Reading, Work, and Catholic Women's Biographies’, English Literary Renaissance, 3 (2003), pp. 328–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Garnet to Jesuit General Aquaviva, 1593, as translated in Anstruther, Vaux, p. 189.

43 Anstruther, I, p. 190.

44 Caraman, Henry Garnet, p. 423.

45 Ibid., p. 368, H. G. to Anne Vaux before 5 March 1603. S.P.D. James I, Gunpowder Plot Book 2, no. 245.

46 Caraman, John Gerard, p. 148.

47 Garnet to Aquaviva, 11 March 1606, Archives of the Society of Jesus, Rome, Anglia, 2, p. 172, quoted in Caraman, Henry Garnet, p. 278.

48 Caraman, Henry Garnet, p. 281.

49 See McCLain, Lest We Be Damned, p. 5.

50 Southern, Vaux, p. xiv.

51 Cross, Claire, ‘An Elizabethan Martyrologist and his Martyr; John Mush and Margaret Clith-erow’, in Wood, Diana (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, Studies in Church History 30 (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar

52 Morris, 385. For similar comments, see pp. 382, 386 or 398 also.

53 Dillon, Anne, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535—1603 (Aldershot, 2002), especially pp. 289–92.Google Scholar

54 Southern, Vaux, pp. 41–2.

55 Ibid., p. 45.

56 Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, p. 281.

57 Ibid.

58 Dolan, Frances, ‘Reading, Work and Catholic Women's Biographies’, p. 356.Google Scholar

59 See Macek, Ellen, ‘“Ghostly Fathers” and their “Virtuous Daughters”: the Role of Spiritual Direction in the Lives of Three Early Modern Women’, The Catholic Historical Review, 90.2 (2004), pp. 213–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom. (2004)

60 Seguin, ‘Ambiguous liaisons’ and Dolan, ‘Reading, Work, and Catholic Women's Biographies’.

61 Of the thirty people who were executed as harbourers and helpers of priests under the 1585 Act, only three were women: Margaret Clitherow (1586), Margaret Ward (1588) and Anne Line (1601). For an in-depth analysis of the gendering of Catholic martyrdom, see Monta, Susannah Brietz, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005).Google Scholar

62 Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 104.