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The first volume of
The Oxford History of British & Irish Catholicism explores the period 1530-1640, from Henry VIII's break with Rome to the outbreak of the civil wars in Britain and Ireland, telling the story of the formation of a distinct Catholic identity.
List of contents
- 1: Peter Marshall: The Break with Rome and the Early Reformation
- 2: John Edwards: Marian Counter-Reformation
- 3: Katy Gibbons: Elizabethan England, Wales, and Ireland
- 4: R. Scott Spurlock: Catholicism in Scotland to 1603
- 5: Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin: The Early Stuarts
- 6: Thomas M. McCoog, SJ: Mission or Church, 1570-1640?
- 7: Michael Questier: Catholicism and Separatism, Conformity and the State
- 8: Clodagh Tait: Martyrdom
- 9: Alexandra Walsham: Material Culture
- 10: William Sheils: Catholics and their Protestant Neighbours
- 11: Thomas O'Connor: Exile Movement: Male Institutions, 1568-1640
- 12: Caroline Bowden and Bronagh McShane: English and Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad, c.1530-c.1640
- 13: Andrew Cichy: Music
- 14: Susannah Brietz Monta and Salvador Ryan: Catholic Written Cultures
- 15: Jaime Goodrich: Printed Translations and Catholic Reformation
- 16: Peter Lake and Michael Questier / Alan Ford: Popery and Anti-Popery in Britain and Ireland
About the author
James E. Kelly is Sweeting Associate Professor in the History of Catholicism at Durham University, where he leads the History of Catholicism research strand within the university's Centre for Catholic Studies. He was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, 'Monks in Motion', and was a member of the AHRC-funded 'Who Were the Nuns?' project, acting as Project Manager of its follow-on initiative. He has written widely on the history of Catholicism and his publications include English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600-1800 (2020). He is founding co-editor of Durham University IMEMS Press' 'Catholicisms, c.1450-c.1800' book series.
Educated in University College Dublin and at the University of Cambridge, John McCafferty is a historian of both Catholicism and Protestantism in early modern Ireland and Britain. He is Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission since 2017 and has worked over several decades in collaboration with the Franciscans (OFM) and others on the preservation of religious archives. He is an honorary Professor of the History of Catholicism in the Theology Department at Durham University.
Summary
The first volume of The Oxford History of British & Irish Catholicism explores the period 1530-1640, from Henry VIII's break with Rome to the outbreak of the civil wars in Britain and Ireland. It analyses the efforts to create Catholic communities after the officially implemented change in religion, as well as the start of initiatives that would set the course of British and Irish Catholicism, including the beginning of the missionary enterprise and the formation of a network of exile religious institutions such as colleges and convents.
This work explores every aspect of life for Catholics in both islands as they came to grips with the constant changes in religious policies that characterised this 110-year period. Accordingly, there are chapters on music, on literature in the vernaculars, on violence and martyrdom, and on the specifics of the female experience. Anxiety and the challenges of living in religiously mixed societies gave rise to new forms of creativity in religious life which made the Catholic experience much more than either plain continuity or endless endurance. Antipopery, or the extent to which Catholics became a symbolic antitype for Protestants, became in many respects a kind of philosophy about which political life in England, Scotland, and colonised Ireland began to revolve. At the same time the legal frameworks across both Britain and Ireland which sought to restrict, fine, or exclude Catholics from public life are given close attention throughout, as they were the daily exigencies which shaped identity just as much as devotions, liturgy, and directives emanating from the Catholic Reformation then ongoing in continental Europe.
