William Rogers (b c1646) was a convert Catholic who from obscure origins in the lesser gentry of Gloucestershire came to know many of the leading Catholic clergy and laymen of Restoration times, and became an enthusiastic, if unconventional, advocate of his Faith. Much that is known of him comes from the works of the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, and in particular from the letters written by Rogers which survive as part of Wood's voluminous correspondence in the Bodleian Library.

The Ransom Center's collection of Roman Catholic Recusant Literature (1558–1829) consists of close to 4,500 books and pamphlets printed in England during periods when Catholicism was proscribed. The collection includes volumes of church history, devotional works, and Bibles.

The figure of Cuthbert Wilks has intrigued me for many years. An English Benedictine and the principal clerical member of the English Catholic Cisalpine movement at the end of the eighteenth century, he was an opponent of Bishop Charles Walmesley, a monk from his own community. Cisalpinism, which demanded further religious and civil freedom for English Catholics, caused a deep cleavage within the English Catholic community.

The Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan by Francis Raphael Drane O.S.D., was published in 1869 to foster the reputation for sanctity of the foundress of the Dominican Congregation of St. Catherine of Siena. Though it remains a masterpiece of nineteenth century English hagiographical literature, upon which all later biographical notices of Margaret Hallahan are based, its treatment of her life from 1802 to 1842 is chronologically inaccurate, uncritically anecdotal and narrowly defined. Although Margaret Hallahan lived until she was sixty-six the first forty years of her life occupy scarcely fifty pages of a biography which runs to almost five hundred and forty pages. The Life rarely connects these years with any wider historical context nor does it investigate closely the background of those with whom Margaret Hallahan was personally associated. Consequently a critical examination of the Life's treatment of these first forty years and its overt comparison with the manuscript sources upon which it is based is a much needed and long overdue exercise.

In the autumn of 1851, a group of philanthropists, magistrates, and prison officials sent out a circular inviting like-minded persons to a conference on ‘the Condition and Treatment of the “Perishing and Dangerous Classes” of Children and Juvenile Offenders.’ On December 9 and 10, this conference met in Birmingham and adopted a number of resolutions advocating that destitute and criminal children be sent to reformatory institutions instead of prison. It also appointed a committee to advance the reformatory cause, and this group subsequently presented the Birmingham Conference's resolutions to the Home Secretary (Sir George Grey).

It is the intention in this article to show how the Catholic community of the Salford Diocese in general and their first Bishop, William Turner, in particular, responded to the challenge of the new reformatory legislation of 1854.

Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), preacher, journalist, editor, philosopher and controversialist, was born in Stockbridge, Vt., 16 September 1803. At the age of nineteen he became a Presbyterian, but two years later a Universalist. He married in 1827. From 1826 to 1831 Brownson preached in New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. He became a Unitarian, and was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1834. In 1836 he organized ‘The society for Christian Union and Progress’ and began to preach the ‘Church of the Future’. In the same year he became acquainted with Emerson, Alcott, Ripley and others who were labelled Transcendentalists. The latter were the dominant intellectual figures in American life until the middle of the century.

When the new English bishops met at the first Provincial Council in 1852 they decided that they should each hold a diocesan synod before 1854 to promulgate the decrees of the Council, and thereafter annually. These diocesan synods have usually been written off by historians as being of little interest, merely reaffirming and applying Provincial decrees. While this may be true of much of synodal legislation, the importance of the synods went beyond their strictly legal function: they played a part in establishing episcopal authority and in impressing on the clergy that the restoration of the hierarchy had not been merely a palace revolution. Many of the English missionary clergy had felt let down by the Restoration of 1850: they had petitioned Rome for a canonical hierarchy to replace the vicars apostolic in the hope that the new bishops would be less arbitrary in their rule and that they themselves would have their rights confirmed; in this context they were particularly keen on their supposed right to be consulted by the bishops in a range of matters. The events described in this article, which occurred in the new diocese of Liverpool, were perhaps the last organised attempt to get some of those rights recognised.

The lives of many converts in nineteenth-century England underwent quite significant, and often drastic change as a result of their decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. Social ostracism, rejection by family and friends, and acceptance of the loss of professional advancement were counted among the risks of ‘going over’ to Rome. Conversion brought with it a discontinuity with the past; yet the Catholic careers of many of those received into the Church exhibit a remarkable continuity with the subject's non-Catholic past, if not in matters of doctrine and worship, then certainly in the field of social and apostolic goals. Father George Bampfield, educator of the poor and lower middle classes, and pioneer of Catholic evangelization in Hertfordshire and North Middlesex, is one such example. His career, in both its Anglican and Catholic spheres, represents the realisation, in albeit very changed circumstances, of a vision first glimpsed and a commitment made within the bosom of the Establishment.

When the subject of German Liberal Catholicism is raised alongside Gladstone's name, one is initially directed to the Munich historian and theologian, Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890). Few biographies of Gladstone omit a description of his first meeting with the German historian on September 30, 1845. The initial contact between the two men was certainly significant in Gladstone's career, but what is often not related is the full context of that meeting. Too often the incident is framed by their later meeting and correspondence, the Vaticanism controversies, and Döllinger's own opposition to the declaration of papal infallibility. At the end of his career, Gladstone himself interpreted their relationship in light of their later association, writing: ‘Nothing ever so much made me anglican versus Roman as reading in Döllinger over forty years ago the history of the fourth century and Athanasius contra mundum.’

In the archives of Propaganda there is an evocative letter in which John Henry Newman urges the Cardinal Prefect not to grant permission for Catholic youths to attend Oxford or Cambridge. It is of significance because the views evinced are not those commonly associated with Newman in the years after 1865: