As we approach Alabaster's sonnets’ our expectation is enhanced not by the promise of poetic greatness but by the prospect of exploring pure instances of the kind of poetry born in the convergence of rhetoric and meditation. We will focus first on a sequence of sonnets remarkable for their rhetorical techniques; then we will consider a group of sonnets each of which has meditation as its subject. In all the poems, however, it will be apparent that Alabaster as poet is simultaneously rhetor and meditator.

Lord Ripon’s reception into the Catholic Church early in September 1874 caused a minor sensation in the world of politics and a howl of no-popery protest in the non-Catholic press. Ripon’s conversion took London society and even his closest friends by surprise. Victorians had long accustomed themselves to the steady drift of ritualists and Puseyites to Rome, but were puzzled when this wealthy nobleman, evangelical Anglican, ex-Christian-Socialist friend of F. D. Maurice, and Grand Master of the English Freemasons, was received into the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin on September 8, 1874.

Literary writings had a significant, if elusive and subtle, rôle to play in securing the position of the English Catholic community in the especially vulnerable period 1829–1850. It is questionable that the Catholic press and Catholic apologists and polemicists played so large a part in calming the anti-Catholic frenzy so evident in the 1820s as the subsequent more literary products of Catholics and those non-Catholics who were intrigued by Catholicism. Holmes remarks that in this period ‘most Catholic apologists attempted the fruitless and unending task of answering specific objections and those books or pamphlets which survive are merely gathering dust on the shelves of Catholic libraries’. It took greater art to get behind the defences of John Bull's anti-Catholic fortress mentality. The rôle of literature was to affect the perceptions and sympathies of the intelligentsia rather than political conditions: at the beginning of this period people felt with Dr. Arnold that ‘the [Anglican] Church, as it now stands, no human power can save'; while at its end, people could hold the expectation ‘that Popery will in a few years become the popular religion of these realms’. This sense of the seriousness of the Catholic presence was established mostly, of course, by Catholicism's actual presence; but that was amplified and consolidated in the mind of the educated public by literature, substantially in a positive direction.

Bishop John Milner once observed, ‘a detailed history of the converts to and the apostates from the Catholic Church … would form a most interesting and useful work.” Since that time more attention has been paid to Jesuit converts than to Jesuit apostates. This article seeks to redress, if ever so slightly, the balance. A look at the underside of one portion of the Society before the Suppression reveals new aspects of her life and history.

Anne Line ran a safe-house for Catholic priests in London during the 1590s, a time when such activities were a capital offence. She worked closely with two of the most hunted priests in England, the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet and his fellow Jesuit John Gerard, and was arrested and executed in February 1601. Although seemingly little known, it has been suggested that Shakespeare alludes to her in several works implying that the impact of her life and death on her contemporaries may have been underestimated. This fresh look at the documentary evidence seeks to clarify Anne Line's identity and the circumstances of her life up to the exile of her husband in 1586. Findings include; strong support for the suggestion that Anne Line was indeed the ‘Alice Higham’ who married Roger Line in 1583, the likely location of her childhood home near Maldon in Essex, connections to recusant networks through an aunt also called ‘Anne Line’, and evidence, previously overlooked, that Anne Line was closely related to Giles Aleyn, a Puritan landowner whose demands for increased rent from James Burbage for the site of his theatre in Shoreditch led to the founding of The Globe in Southwark.

This article presents a narrative description of the state of music in the Scottish Catholic Church from the Reformation up to the publication of George Gordon’s collection of church music c.1830. For the first two hundred years after the Reformation, Scottish Catholics worshipped in virtual silence owing to the oppressive penal laws then in force. In the late eighteenth century religious toleration increased and several members of the clergy and other interested parties attempted to reintroduce singing into the worship of the Scottish Catholic Church. In this they were thwarted by the ultra-cautious attitude of the Vicar-Apostolic for the Lowland District, Bishop George Hay, who refused to allow any music in Catholic churches in case it should inflame Protestant opinion. Only after his retirement could the reintroduction take place, and the speed at which it was achieved bears witness to the enthusiasm and commitment of Scottish clergy and laity for church music. Research in this area is long overdue, and it is hoped that this article will form a basis for further investigations.

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.

John Crosse of Liverpool has been hailed by several historians (see below, p. 37) as an example of a ‘Roman Catholic actively opposing Ship Money’ in part because Catholics typically were financially stretched by the demands of compositions. Few individuals have been identified in that role, thus assuring Crosse a permanent place in history. But how justified is this assessment of a man whom recent research reveals as a more complex character than is allowed by the convenient stereotype allotted to him? Who exactly was he?

William Johnson, S. J., the writer of the two letters printed below, has hitherto escaped notice by English historians, including Foley, because he was a member of the Andalusian province of the Society of Jesus and spent all his religious life in Spain. He is not to be confused with an earlier William Johnson, also a Jesuit, who died at Malaga in 1614. Some details of the life of William Johnson II can be gleaned from the catalogues of the Andalusian province, from his official obituary, and from other archive sources. The historian of the Andalusian province, Juan de Santibañez, included Johnson in his series of brief biographies of its most distinguished sons, Varones ilustres de la Provincia de Andalucía de la Compañía de Jesús written not long after Johnson’s death in 1642. The work was never published but survives in manuscript.

As is well known, the Spanish Inquisition was originally established to investigate suspected cases of reversion to Judaism by baptised Spaniards, but in the century of the Reformation it naturally came to extend its jurisdiction over heretics of all kinds, native and foreign; and many English Protestants who landed on Spanish soil were dismayed to find themselves the objects of its attention. Most of them were sailors or merchants, visiting willingly or by accident those Spanish territories which fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition Court in the Canary Islands, some details of which have already been published. The records of this court survived the massive destruction of Inquisition archives in the early nineteenth century; so too did the records of the court at Toledo, which had jurisdiction over most of Central Spain, and which despite its inland position also found itself dealing with a number of Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans. In view of the general opinion that Calvinism represented a tougher line in the Reformation, it is interesting to see that all the Calvinists and Anglicans accepted reconciliation with the papacy, while most of the Lutherans resisted the pressures of the Inquisition and were condemned.

From 12 April 1822 when John Henry Newman was elected a Fellow until 3 October 1845 when he tendered his resignation to Provost Hawkins, Oriel College was to be the centre of Newman's life. As Newman later recorded:

Newman went on to assert that but for Oriel, he would have been nobody, entirely lacking in influence. It was through Oriel (and the pulpit of the Oriel living of St. Mary the Virgin) that he was able to exert such a dominant religious and pastoral influence on his academic generation and those that followed. It was through Oriel that he would be in a position to emerge by 1833 as the well-known leader of that great movement of religious revival in the Church of England known as the ‘Oxford Movement’ or ‘Tractarianism’ (the name being coined in consequence of the series of Tracts for the Times published by Newman and his cohorts).

Between c. 1572 and his execution in 1583, Edward Arden, a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire, was involved in a lineage dispute with Ambrose and Robert Dudley, earls of Warwick and Leicester and two of the most powerful men in early modern England, over their shared ancestral claim to a Saxon known as Turchil. This article explores the significance of this dispute from a number of perspectives, including the ancestry of Edward Arden, the history of the Warwick and Leicester earldoms and Philip Sidney’s Defense of Leicester, in order to explore lineage as central to the prevailing ideology of power. It uses the clash between Arden and the Dudleys to present an environment in which Catholics were still part of the political mainstream and in which different political discourses led to conflict as well as consensus during the 1570s and early 1580s. Moreover, the article suggests that the activities of the heralds and the pedigrees they produced had a political function during this period which merits changing our approach to an underused manuscript source.

The true identity of the fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich has been lost to history. Yet in the seventeenth century Catholic and Protestant polemicists created different ‘Julians’ to construct and contrast their own confessional positions. This article traces the different identities prescribed to Julian and argues that they allow us fresh insight into some of the most prevalent religious and political issues of Restoration England. It begins by tracing the positive reception of Julian’s theology among the Benedictine nuns of Paris and Cambrai, including the role of Augustine Baker in editing Julian’s text. It then explores how the Benedictine Serenus Cressy and the Anglican Edward Stillingfleet created different identities for Julian in their ongoing polemical battles in the Restoration period. For Cressy, Julian was proof of the strength of Catholic devotional and spiritual traditions, while Stillingfleet believed she was evidence of the religious melancholy encouraged by monasticism. By exploring these identities, this article offers new perspective on issues of Catholic loyalty, enthusiasm, sectarianism and doctrinal authority.

This article offers a reading of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology through the sacred art produced by and for women religious. The practices and devotions that the article explores, however, are not those that drew from the institutional Church but rather from the legacies of mysticism, many of which were shaped in women’s religious communities. Scholars have proposed that mysticism was stripped of its intellectual legitimacy and relegated to the margins of theology by post-Enlightenment rationalism, thereby consigning female religious experience to the politically impotent private sphere. The article suggests, however, that, although the literature of women’s mysticism entered a period of decline from the end of the Counter-Reformation, an authoritative female tradition, expressed in visual and material culture, continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. The art that emerged from convents reflected the increasing visibility of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the burgeoning of folkloric devotional practices and iconography. This article considers two paintings as evidence that, by the nineteenth century, the aporias1 of Christian theology were consciously articulated by women religious though the art that they made: works which, in turn, shaped the creed and culture of the institutional Church. In so doing, the article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of religion.