The Reformation Era · 1559-1650 · England
Recusant English Catholicism
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About This Movement
After Elizabeth I's settlement of 1559, English Catholics who would not attend their parish church were fined as recusants — refusers. And from 1585 it was treason for a priest ordained abroad even to set foot in the country. What survived was a church that had retreated into private houses. Mass said in an upstairs room, priests hidden in cavities built into chimneys and stairwells, and households in which the woman of the house, legally less exposed than her husband, effectively ran the congregation. Well over a hundred priests and lay people were executed under these laws, and the community that remained was small, anchored in gentry households, and stubborn.
Sources
- John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (trans. Caraman, 1951); William Weston's autobiography (primary) — Inside accounts of the household church, written for edification within the mission — a partisan, inside-voice genre.
- The women who ran the church: Mush's True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow; Smith's life of Lady Magdalen Montague; recusancy prosecutions of women who shielded priests (primary) — The life of Margaret Clitherow was written by her own confessor to advance her sainthood cause, so it's a hagiographic work, not a neutral biography.
- The state's record: recusant rolls, quarter-session presentments, interrogation and trial records (incl. examinations under torture) (primary) — Hostile, administrative records, some obtained under coercion — the community's shape has to be reconstructed from its persecutors' own bookkeeping.
- The devotional equipment: Rheims New Testament (1582), Douai OT, A Manual of Prayers (1583), secret-press books, Southwell's poetry and epistles (primary) — What the households actually read and prayed.
- John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (1975), with Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists (1993/1999) (secondary) — Walsham's work corrects an earlier picture of a hard line between recusants and conformists, showing a wide grey zone in between.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 15 'Persecutions and martyrdom' (Gregory) (reference) — Directly relevant to a community shaped by persecution.