Product Description: The plight of Catholics in Elizabethan England has long attracted the interest of historians and it has long been appreciated that the key to understanding their position lies partly in the voluminous polemical literature which they published...read more

A true story of plots, priest-holes and persecution and one family's battle to save Catholicism in Reformation England.      Elizabeth I criminalised Catholicism in England. For refusing to attend Anglican services her subjects faced crippling fines and imprisonment. For giving refuge to outlawed priests -- the essential conduits to God's grace -- they risked death. Almost two hundred Catholics were executed in Elizabeth's reign and hundreds more wasted away in prison. They were beleaguered on the one hand by a Papacy that branded Elizabeth a heretic and sanctioned her deposition and on the other by a government that saw itself fighting a war on terror and deployed every weapon in its arsenal, including torture, to combat the threat. With every invasion scare and attempt on Elizabeth's life, the danger for England's Catholics grew. God's Traitors explores this agonising conflict of loyalty from the perspective of one Catholic family, the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall. To follow the Vaux story -- from staunch loyalty to passive resistance to increasing activism -- is to see, in microcosm, the pressures and painful choices that confronted the Catholic community of Reformation England. Theirs in an enthralling tale of plots, priest-holes and persecution plated out in a world of shadows people by spies and agents provocateurs. They lived in a state of siege, under constant surveillance. The petty squabbles, unsuitable marriages, love and laughter of family life were punctuated by dawn raids, sudden arrests and clandestine meetings. Above all, this is a timeless and timely story of human courage and frailty, repression and reaction and the power of faith against the sternest of odds.

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Product Description: In May 1555, a broadsheet was produced in Rome depicting the torture and execution in London and York of the Carthusians of the Charterhouses of London, Axeholme, Beauvale and Sheen during the reign of Henry VIII. This single-page martyrology provides the basis for an in-depth exploration of several interconnected artistic, scientific and scholarly communities active in Rome in 1555 which are identified as having being involved in its production...read more

Product Description: English Catholic voices, once disregarded as merely confessional, are now acknowledged to provide important perspectives on Elizabethan society. Based on extensive archival research, this book builds on previous studies for the first thorough investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a critical period between the unsuccessful armadas of 1588 and 1597, a period during which the mission was threatened as much by internal Catholic conflict as it was by the crown...read more

Product Description: Although the varying attitudes toward the English crown and the order of English society were central to the differences between the loyalists and the militants, disagreements involved many questions other than political ones, including the role of the Jesuits in the English mission and the nature of church government...read more

Product Description: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible...read more

Product Description: This book brings together leading historians of Catholicism and other notable historians of early modern English society in order to pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English historiography, and to ask readers to suspend their assumptions and prejudices about the nature of Catholic history...read more

Product Description: The history of religious dissent has usually been written from the point of view of the martyr for his faith. Elliot Rose's aim in this book is to look at the religious troubles of the Elizabethan age from the point of view of those who sympathized with ardent Catholics or Puritans but were not anxious to be martyrs...read more

Product Description: The name of the Jesuit Robert Southwell has now and then been linked with Shakespeare's, but vaguely and tentatively. The name of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of Southampton, has perennially been linked with Shakespeare's, sometimes not vaguely and tentatively enough...read more

Product Description: Between 1535 and 1603, more than 200 English Catholics were executed by the State for treason. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary sources, Anne Dillon examines the ways in which these executions were transformed into acts of martyrdom...read more

This book investigates the intellectual career of Bishop John Fisher (1469-1535), the early sixteenth century bishop of Rochester and victim of Henry VIII's Reformation, whose numerous writings included one of the most influential refutations of that century of Martin Luther. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book considers the ideological development of English Catholicism in the sixteenth century, from the complementary perspectives of history, theology, and literature. The author shows that Catholicism in this period was neither a defunct tradition, nor one merely reacting to Protestantism, but a vigorous intellectual movement responding to the reformist impulse of the age...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: `Church Papist' was a nickname, a term of abuse, for those English Catholics who outwardly conformed to the established Protestant Church and yet inwardly remained Roman Catholics. The more dramatic stance of recusancy has drawn historians' attention away from this sizeable, if statistically indefinable, proportion of Church of England congregations, but its existence and significance is here clearly revealed through contemporary records, challenging the sectarian model of post-Reformation Catholicism perpetuated by previous historians...read more

Product Description: This book is an historical study of the Catholic mission to England, a joint mission that included three English Jesuits (the first Jesuits to be sent to their native land) and twelve other English Catholics. It focuses on these men and other people who became involved with them...read more

Product Description: Nearly four hundred years after his death, Robert Parsons remains one of the most enigmatic figures of late Tudor England. This political biography thus fills an important historiographical gap by surveying and analyzing Parsons's singleminded ideas and plans for restoring Catholicism in England...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The local tradition in Stratford is that Shakespeare "died a Papist," having sent for a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. It is clear from his plays that he was against the strictures of Puritanism, but in The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Professor Peter Milward argues that the whole of Shakespeare's work reveals a common thread of sympathy with the plight of the suffering persecuted Catholics under Queen Elizabeth and King James I...read more

Product Description: Offers a concise synthesis of the valuable research accomplished in recent years which has transformed our view of religious belief and practice in pre-Reformation England. The author argues that the church was neither in a state of crisis, nor were its members clamouring for change, let alone `reformation' during the early years of Henry VIII's reign...read more

Product Description: Part 1 of this book provides an annotated edition of Samuel Harsnett's famous attack on the practice of exorcism, which had a profound influence upon Shakespeare's conception and writing of King Lear. Part 2 explores the context of Shakespeare's reading of Harsnett's book.